Neptune in Gate 22

Update: this post was written prior to Covid. Go here to read about the role of Neptune in the pandemic.

Neptune shifts into Gate 22

One of the most powerful driving forces for humanity is the desire to escape the isolation and limitations of mortality, to merge with something greater.

So when Neptune, planet of redemption, moves gates as it does this week, our escape route shifts, and so do our dreams.

On 29th January, Neptune will complete its sojourn in the Head Centre in Gate 63, where it has been since February 2017, and shift into the Solar Plexus Centre in Gate 22.

Gate 63 is the Gate of Completion.

In Gate 63, Neptune’s shadow was trying to keep old patterns of living, particularly the old power hierarchies of money and religion, alive. The positive energy was all about recognising the completion of one cycle of human evolution and imagining where to from here. But as always with Neptune, looking forward is an exercise in uncertainty, as we peer through the veil of unimagined possibilities in an effort to find our own reflection looking back.

A new Neptunian cycle

Neptune works in 164 year cycles.

1692 – mechanising humanity

Back in 1692, when Neptune was in Gate 63, we lost our deep connections with nature through repression of feminine wisdom in the Salem Witch Trials. Just previously, in 1687, Isaac Newtown published his book laying the foundations for classical mechanics –  Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy). The mechanisation of humanity had begun!

1854 – slavery and democracy

1854, when Neptune was again in Gate 63, triggered the beginning of modern international trade and communication. Steam trains, the telegraph, shipping lines and mainstream media all have their genesis within the cycle that is completing this week. That year also saw the first convention of the US Republican Party dedicated to social reform and the end of slavery. In Australia the Eureka Stockade Rebellion brought the birth of egalitarian democracy to what had previously been an autocratic British controlled nation.

Neptune is a cultural innovator

These are not usually considered Neptunian themes, but this planet is often misunderstood as being vague, spiritual and ineffective when, truly, it has deep roots in the lived reality of our cultural evolution.

Through its relationships with Venus and Saturn, Neptune activates our imaginative capacity for something higher, something better, and brings the partnerships we need to fulfill our Utopian visions in practical ways.

It also triggers regression, a desire to go back to some imagined purity in the past. But if we stay lost in the past we lose our chance here.

Repeating Neptunian Themes

There are clearly themes repeating here. The #metoo movement, regressive policies on abortion, loss of access to natural health therapies, the current chaos of the Republican Party in the US, and a crisis of democracy. Communication is changing rapidly, with activists using social media to ensure transparency from leaders, and a rapid decline in print media.

The underlying theme is recovery from our loss of the connection between our bodies and our spirituality.

Like the commons in England, our bodies were ‘enclosed’ and made productive for the economy (fuelled by the illusion of ‘trickle up), and made obedient for religion (fuelled by the illusion of headship). Without this connection we could be persuaded, against our own wellbeing, to sacrifice ourselves to the power madness of a few.

Neptune asks us to imagine new and better ways to come together as humans. Where will the next 164 year Neptune cycle take us?

Uranus and Neptune at play

Neptune has an orbit of 164 years, Uranus almost exactly half that at 84 years. This means that each time Neptune moves around the entire Human Design chart, Uranus has been around twice. It also means that the last 3 times Neptune has been in Gate 63 (the Gate of Completion), Uranus has been in Gate 24. (In 1692, 1854 and 2020).

Read: Uranus in The Gate of Returning (24)

In 2020, Uranus will shift into Gate 24 on 15 May. In previous cycles, Uranus has been an important influence. This year, when Uranus pops into Gate 24, it will be meeting up with the immense power of Pluto, Saturn and Jupiter in Gate 61. This is extraordinary, and will change the course of human evolution forever.

We are looking at a breakdown in old economic and religious hierarchies and the stripping away of the illusion of the need for both control and constant growth. If you and I live more sustainable lives, if we stop asking permission to live and start informing, if we stop leaking power and truth to the hungry ghosts of the 1%, then the world will be changed forever. More here.

Neptune in the Solar Plexus Centre

Neptune will be in Gate 22, in the Solar Plexus Centre from 29th January 2020 till 7 March 2022.

This is the Piscean part of his journey. Neptune did the Aquarian part of the Solar Plexus journey from 1999 to 2014. (Gates 41, 19, 49, 30, Gate 55). (You can also read about Neptune in Gate 37 here) While Pluto was going through Capricorn shaking up the establishment, Uranus and Neptune were crafting a special kind of kinship. Spiritually aware, universally connected, this was the time when Facebook changed our lives forever.

You’re not designed to fit in

Back in the Solar Plexus Centre again, Neptune is telling us the time of fitting in, dumbing down, sacrificing ourselves to the dominant paradigm is over. We are preparing for a new golden age. On 27th January 2026, Neptune will shift into Aries in Gate 25 via the Channel of Initiation. We need to develop a lot of emotional awareness between now and then!

One of the most potent ways we have been persuaded to dumb down and fit in was to ignore our bodies. While we have been looking elsewhere capitalism has remolded human nature, and the earth itself, under the guise of ‘productivity’, waged war against simple pleasures, made us economically dependent on money and jobs. In effect, made us slaves to the memes of the mechanical age of industrial revolution.

Reclaiming Our Awareness

There are two body-based awareness centres in the Human Design chart. The Spleen Centre and the Solar Plexus Centre.

The Solar Plexus Centre is the most potent area of personal transformation right now. It’s helping us understand that our emotions are not just annoying distractions from the real world, but our most personal connection with truth.

Our emotions are THE pathway to the next level of human evolution.

Read: Emotions in Human Design – the nature of us

While the internet and media are awash with fake news, it is our body that sees the emperor has no clothes, our emotions that tell us – through anger, sadness – when are confronted with a lack of truth. And through joy when we are connected with nature – our own and environmental.

Neptune will be in a gate that creates an Emotional Manifestor channel. This is potentially chaotic. Within the emotional wave we truly believe we have clarity and long to act spontaneously. The next 2 years require both patience and awareness as we all take some deep breaths and wait out any chaos.

Neptune and Chaos

While Neptune is in Gate 22, the minor planet Chaos is in Gate 12.

Chaos will bring old world disruption as some attempt to keep humanity blocked in a mechanistic world-view. However Chaos also holds incredible potential to shift us out of ideas of inevitable decay and the need for constant growth to stave off death. Instead, Chaos holds the key to a shift back to sustainable living systems, with humans as individual consciousness hubs rather than widgets feeding their energy into the machine.

Over the next two years we can all experiment with the difference between asking for permission for what we want, and informing others of our plans. Let’s see what we can draw from our deeper connection with the quantum field of possibilities (Chaos) as we gain emotional clarity and mature in our potential for manifesting.

The Gate of Grace

Gate 22 is the Gate of Grace. It signals a time for the imaginative exploration of the ways of beauty, pleasure and inner truth. It is the gate through which the inner truth of each individual meets the other in social interaction.

The Gate of Grace teaches us that beauty is impermanent. Leaves bud and fall. Sunsets fade. Waves wash away.

Everywhere in nature, beauty is born, fades, and returns again to begat beauty in a continuous, creative unfoldment. We create many problems for ourselves by wanting to demystify beauty and possess it, to make it permanent. We become stuck in a contrivance.

There is a word created by an Australian environmental philosopher – solastagia – the feeling of nostalgia and sadness we feel when faced with the loss of our natural environment through development and climate change. By trying to grasp and hold on to beauty we have succeeded only in destroying it. This climate emergency is designed to alert us to the next stage in our evolution, which is to appreciate the aesthetic of life and our part in it.

Contemplate the changing states of beauty, see the beautiful essence of everything, and allow it to infuse your life: you will be beautified by it, and an aesthetic sense will naturally arise in you. There is a higher consciousness in this aesthetic sensibility, which aligns with the frequency of nature and connects us to a galactic experience rather than a global one.

Gate 22 – The Gate of Grace – is not about outcomes so much as experiences of beauty for its own sake. We’ve just come through 4 years of Pluto and Saturn moving through Gate 54 in the channel of ambition. We are riding a very different program now, recovering pleasure, connection and the power to mutate the collective through individual emotional clarity.

Emotional Awareness

How do we navigate 2 years of potential emotional chaos?

Defined Solar Plexus – you take responsibility for your own emotions and don’t go hurling them about at others, projecting and basically outsourcing your emotional growth.

Undefined Solar Plexus – you recognise you are amplifying the emotional field and choose which emotions, which people, you are designed to amplify and otherwise just get out of dodge, its not your stuff.

The Channel of Openness

I’ll finish with a few comments on the Channel of Openness, which is made up of Gates 22 and 12.

This is an individual channel, so it is all about expressing something unique in you. But that uniqueness will only come if you have emotional clarity. You love to influence others, but again, that influence is only satisfying when you honour your moods. A great question for this channel is – am I in the mood for this?

Gate 22 is the gate of the left ear, which hears in the moment. You hear frequency but, if you are not emotionally clear, that frequency is yours, not that of the speaker. So if you hear anger, don’t react immediately. It may be something you need to process in your own emotional wave.

This is a channel that takes us into a deep individual melancholy when we feel best if left alone. But then, voila, our mood shifts and we want to be social, out there sharing our newfound essence with the world. The most important guiding tool here is our mood.

This transit could also bring up feelings of isolation and loneliness. Old wounds and victim patterning can sit in this circuit, no possibility to contribute to the collective because, well just too weird! The protective psychological layer is vanity – I’m too good for them anyway! You’ve now got 2 years of support for healing this emotional coding. Gate 55 feeds in one solution only spend time with your own people and trust to your own inner light. Gate 12 is also a guide – go about your day being the most YOU possible and things will shift at the correct time.

Now of course a transiting Neptune in Gate 22 does not make us all emotional manifestors, but these themes of emotional clarity will be worth experimenting with, particularly for those with emotional definition.

From 6 August to 2 October 2020 the North Node will be in Gate 12, creating a channel by transit. This will be a powerful time for all the themes I’ve written about here.