#the intellect

The planet Mercury is representative of the mind, specifically the mental functions that are associated with conventional intelligence. People with a Mercury dominance or prominence of Gemini and Virgo in their chart are usually analytical and methodical. They usually have great intellectual abilities used to make smart choices that facilitate progress for themselves and other people. Gemini possesses the skill of communication, interacting with other people and saying the right things to get ahead in life. Virgo has the great ability of perfecting their skills and putting them to practical use in order to provide meaningful services to other people. Both signs can attain rewards for these assets, whether it’d be money, status or pleasant living situation. Mercury is the god of financial gain after all, because the intellect is able to generate seeming solutions to problems – and in this world there seems to be a perpetual influx of problems to be tackled.

This sounds all well and good, except that it doesn’t make much sense. The intellect functions as a mechanism to uphold polarity – to define, differentiate, to judge and conceptualize. Intelligence is praised because of the results and the seeming progression that it has facilitated for the human race. Through the ability to break down components and find order in chaos, things seem to get better for humanity. Strenuous work is no longer necessary to the same extent, never the less polarity is still kept intact and the wholeness that is sought remains out of reach. Most people experience pleasure to be temporary and it usually contains a certain amount of pain. Sacrifice is commonly required to enjoy a little bit of the sweet nectar of life. In a polarized mind, pleasure and pain are the same because they depend on each other. Similarly, problems that are solved by the intellect creates further complications. To truly solve something is to realize perfection, yet, in our effort to overcome our problems they change character – they don’t disappear.

The mind is playing a double game, pretending to be on our side while concealing the fact that it serves to uphold the concept of problems. It usually dissociates from it’s role in setting up obstacles and keeps it’s overcoming separate from it’s limitations. By doing this, it has tried to prevent realization of the meaninglessness inherent in the dynamic. What is worth striving for when the very striving itself is a setup that leads to no ultimate satisfaction or completion? This insight is avoided because it shatters the illusory pillars of meaning that the world seems to rest on. 

The split mind is like a hateful picture set in a frame. The frame can be exchanged from shabby to fancy, but the picture is still the same – skewed and distorted. Improvements to the frame doesn’t change the look of the painting even though it might take the emphasis off of it’s ugliness for a while. The ornaments and additives to our lives are like a decorated frame – it doesn’t make life better in it’s essence but it certainly presents an illusion of beauty. It’s like hanging jewelry on a corpse, painting it’s lips red and stating ”this is happiness”. It sounds ridiculous, which is exactly what the mind is in it’s split condition. To make use of the mind, one would do well to not confirm or invest in pretty illusions. Dare to face the hidden secret that the mind is so desperate to keep intact, dare to look at the painting and not the distracting frame and you will see the insanity of the dynamic. Do this for the sake of pursuing truth and free the mind from it’s detrimental confusion.

Insanity is not to be feared because it’s not an ultimate reality. It’s a misunderstanding and a misjudgement. There’s no point in solving problems because there are none. The mind’s unwillingness and inability to accept this constitutes the real obstacle to truth. Why does the mind compulsively invent issues for the personality to be burdened with? Very few seem to ask this question because they’re so convinced of the reality of their complaints. Doubt is a curious mechanism because it usually serves the purpose of keeping mental illusions intact. By doubting freedom, the mind is imprisoning itself, protecting itself from the very thing it claims to strive to actualize. It’s less common for people to doubt their limitations as to actualize freedom, yet this is what needs to happen. Instead of making a corpse look nice, one should doubt the reality of the corpse and find pure beauty through denying the split between life and death, which is actually just death.

It is through the unity of the mind that we free ourselves but it’s through the split of the mind that we are imprisoned. Mercury really is a trickster figure because it’s easy to get entangled and enmeshed in the thought system of separation that seem to lead to unity. The sign of Gemini is the sign of duality - it’s double sided. The mind offers up thoughts designed to cause suffering whether we like it or not. Some people claim to have been able to quiet the mind but even this attempt is dualistic. Who is the person that has wielded it’s power over the thinking faculty? Isn’t the personal will a product of the mind, cleverly pitted against the stream of thought that is also a product of the mind? Thinking or not thinking is not really a problem and is therefore not worth trying to solve. Through relinquishing judgement of what the mind is doing or not doing one can begin to find peace. What is important is to not want to keep any thoughts that cause distress. This is easy in theory but difficult in practice, most people are passionately invested in their troubles while trying to overcome them.

The Intellect

Justin Empire

"Ey!"