A benevolent lord sits on his throne and bestows graces upon his people. He assigns them tasks, in accordance with their skills, and instructs them to report back to him on their progress. The lord's kingdom is repaired and expanded, and the knowledge contained in its libraries and stewarded by its illuminati reaches its peak. The kingdom has arrived at an intellectual renaissance, with due care taken to apply objective rigor to the acquisition of facts and data. The kingdom's sciences and academia flourish, its pride in its reason and rationality impenetrable. The lord smiles equally on himself as on his subjects for their jobs well done.

Then enters the lord's jester, barking crazily about the death of mental reasoning, crying in grief for the loss of scholarliness and truth. "What is this strange comedy, dear jester?" asks the bemused lord. "Are you mocking our great achievements in advancing the minds of our people?"

"Oh my lord, I would not dream of it!" cries the jester. "But, my most gracious high lord, the news is terrible! I just spoke with the old hermit in the mountain. He told me all about the world, the places we haven't explored, even truths about magic, physics and mythical creatures. Oh, all our knowledge, all that research...". The jester begins to weep.

The lord gives him a moment, then asks impatiently: "And?!"

"We've got it all wrong!"

The jester's joke is that knowledge is not permanent. Just when we think we've got the world figured out, neatly packaged and classified in our minds, something comes along and weakens the very foundation of our knowledge, forcing us to question everything we've learned. General Relativity blows away Newtonian physics, along with Quantum Mechanics that does the same to Einstein. Astrology sees this dynamic at work all the time — is there a 13th sign, is the zodiac fixed relative to Earth or do the signs lay fixed in the constellations, what house system is right, and on and on. Yet whichever system we apply, whether in physics, astrology or any other science, so long as it is based in intellectual honesty, integrity and rigor, we will get workable results, no matter the disparity between the system we use and that used by our colleagues. How can this be? What is going on here?

The answer, or as close as we can come to it, lies in the dynamics of the Gemini/Sagittarius opposition. These two signs are directly opposing each other on the zodiac, and for good reason. Gemini refers to the gathering of facts and data, while Sagittarius is seeking essential truths that are explained by that data. Sometimes the data guides us to the truth, and sometimes the truth guides us to find the data. In either case, we find that, despite our need to cling to them as unchanging, facts are mutable. They only become fixed when placed in the context of some underlying truth. It's a fact that what we call gravity causes planets to orbit, and brings apples to the ground. But is that because matter exerts a gravitational force, or because spacetime is warped, or because of the mediation effect of graviton particles? This depends on your orientation on the truth, or which discipline of physics you are engaged with at the moment.

Jupiter, the very essence of benevolence, promises abundant rewards if we are willing to humble our minds and take in the perspectives of others.

The relevance of this oppositional dynamic is the turning direct today of Jupiter in Gemini, after having been in retrograde since October. Jupiter rules the sign of Sagittarius, and so embodies many of its qualities. What we have, then, is the Lord of Truth (Jupiter) transiting the sign of fact finding. The essential question is — what truths can we discern from the data we gather? Based on the evidence before us, can we unite our personal sense of what is true with what can be said to be cosmologically true, or do we need to gather more data? Moreover, are we ignoring our intuition in favor of mental reasoning, or perhaps giving too much credibility to our intuitive feelings and missing the facts that help us truly know reality?

Look at your own life since June 2012. Have you noticed an increase of general activity? Of being pulled in many directions at once, having your mind scattered by too many facts pouring in and too many grabs for your attention? Are you feeling uncentered as you flit from place to place, either physically or mentally, trying to hold down a bit more than you can handle?

At its lowest level, Gemini is simply about busyness. The mind quickly wanders about, caught up in its own stories, forgetting that it needs a body to ground itself. Chatter fills the mind and attention is lost. In those moments, life has to deliver a shock to bring us back to reality.

At its highest level, Gemini is the sign of the trickster, our dear jester above, that sees beyond duality and takes on the role of contrarian, to break up the rigid mental patterns that have run their course. Gemini is excellent at thinking, talking, and putting reality into neat mental boxes, but it must also be willing to break down those boxes in order to build new ones that fit the dynamically changing nature of life. In other words, when unattached to mental constructs, Gemini is free to continually recreate the world of the mind while utterly getting the cosmic joke that lies at the core of our every tragedy.

While Jupiter was retrograde we were getting the experiences we needed to see where we are too mentally rigid, along with the opportunities to adjust. With Jupiter now direct, we have hopefully integrated those lessons and learned to more freely flex our minds, allowing us to get back to the work of our personal projects, moving them forward wherever they were previously stagnating. Whatever business, writing, speaking, or academic work you are hoping to launch, now is the time to get back to it and see it rise in accordance with the life lessons you've learned. Our souls are still on trial (Saturn in Scorpio) but now we can prove ourselves in the fields of our minds, communicating our truths while reveling in the contradictions inherent in the truths of others.

What is true for you? Are your truths flexible enough that you can bend them, seeing around and beyond them to grasp other points of view? Jupiter, the very essence of benevolence, promises abundant rewards if we are willing to humble our minds and take in the perspectives of others. The jester is our guide — be willing to laugh at the seriousness of your mind, and the inherent joke that you will never know it all.

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