Periodically I get myself into intensely passionate arguments over things I don’t really care about or know very little about. Other times I get overwhelmed and depressed by these same kinds of things.  It’s like being taken for a ride at an amusement park without the amusing part.  At those times, if I happen to look at the planets, usually some particularly difficult transit is happening, and get I think, oh, no wonder, and remind myself step off the ferris wheel and get back on the ground. It’s the closest feeling to freedom I’ve yet to experience.

I thought this interview shows the difference between YOU, a free and conscious thing, and the planet energies really well:

Nick Campion: Let’s go back to your example of the Saturn-Pluto opposition. If somebody with that transit can choose either to be a victim or to pursue a very structured path, like taking a university degree, then what is the nature of that choosing? Is the ability to make a choice itself linked to another astrological pattern in the chart?

Liz Greene: No. There is something that operates within resonances which psychology calls consciousness. I certainly don’t have a definition of what that is, except that it is Mercurial. Consciousness is like the Mercurial figure in alchemy. It isn’t limited by or bound by astrological patterns. Consciousness inhabits and expresses through those patterns, yet it can operate outside and within and around them, and it is what allows us to make choices. I think that it’s what transforms our way of responding to these patterns. Either we simply are the pattern and we enact it blindly, which is what happens in all the animal kingdoms, or we bring that element of consciousness to bear. The pattern doesn’t then go away, but it gets more notes in its chord.

Nick Campion: Are you saying that consciousness is somehow something extra to astrology, something beyond astrology?

Liz Greene: Yes, I think it is.

Nick Campion: That sounds like what the Neo-platonic philosophers would have called Soul. They would have said the Soul is above the body, above the stars, even. But if consciousness is beyond astrology, what about the so-called conscious planets in the horoscope, like Mercury, Venus, and Mars, as opposed to the outer, unconscious planets?

Liz Greene: No planet is guaranteed to be conscious. The planets should be seen as representing patterns. If an individual is aware of the pattern within them, the planet is being expressed consciously, but, just because it is an inner planet, that doesn’t necessarily make the pattern conscious. Experience has taught me that. People may wander around totally unconscious of what the Moon means in them or what Venus means in them. Whatever pattern of motivation the planets represent is part of human nature, but we can be totally oblivious of it. We project it, we are at its mercy, we are buffeted by it, we become it, we identify with it, we’re run dry by it, but we are utterly unaware that it is us. It looks like it is “out there” or it is happening to us, but it is in us – it is us. The fact that it is inner, though, is no guarantee of its being in any way connected with consciousness.

Nick Campion: But how do we know when we are actually being conscious of something?

Liz Greene: Hard to explain, that one. It has something to do with a sense of standing in a still centre and being aware – not just on an intellectual level but all the way through – of something that you know as your self, but at the same time you are not identified with it. There’s some kind of space between you and it. So, if I am having a Mars transit today, and you say the wrong thing and I get really angry, then if I am unconscious of that anger, I just become angry. I don’t even know I am angry. Out come the abusive words, or I take a swipe at you, or I pour my water over you. There’s nobody home in the sense of a conscious individual. I have no idea of what I am about to do, what I am about to say, what I feel. I just act and then I say: “Oh, I am terribly sorry, I just lost my temper, I didn’t mean to.” However, if I am aware, then I hear what you said, and I know I am angry, and at that moment I may even know why I am angry. I may feel the anger, but I am not the anger, which means that I can say to myself: “Did he really mean that? What has he triggered in me?” I can then work on it; if I am still angry by the time I have finished working on it, I can then say calmly: “Are you aware of what you have just said? It was very offensive.” Or I can just keep my mouth shut, because I realise that my anger has nothing to do with you: It is my problem.

Read the whole interview here