Let me start by asking you to look back to the eclipse in July of 2018. As a cycle closes here, what have you learned from your experiences and the themes explored since then? If this blog was part of it, you can revisit here, to jog your memory, then remember; the non-dual wholeness of all life is not a memory. It is an experience now and now and now. But you are building upon experience. You are bridging past and future so that those who come after you have the torch of loving awareness to see them through the dark places we all must walk. Onward, steadily onward, beloved.
I am not an astrologer. I am not religious. I contemplate and I write. I breathe and move, contemplate and write. I share the summary of my contemplation when I feel moved to. This is art and research and reminder for me; I am not fighting to sustain my personal position. This is confirmation for joy. And anyway, my friend Ray likes it. I wish I had more time to pursue my creative expression . . .
bell hooks says, “the real power of love is to transform us”. At this moment, when we are facing the largest scale change ever seen on this planet (which, btw, is what is always happening, just variant at scale) I agree. This existence is not about finding a steady supply of love and then securing it until the crack of doom. That kind of control is what is currently being destroyed by the stellium in tropical Capricorn/Vedic/Sidereal Sagittarius.
I guess love is about beginning with nothing, growing something beautiful and true and then setting it free to diminish. Destruction and creation are the cycle, fractal and variant at scale. If you don’t write death into your worldview, your worldview will be corrected with red permanent marker (or the blood of millions–you choose). If love is not part of death then you get the kind of problems we have now. The “logic” of “permanence” needs to be composted. More on this after the “new year”. (Hang on to those resolutions till the 22nd of January . . .)
I guess love is less about ownership and more about the good of the beloved. I think love is about growing the capacity be open and loving even when what you love leaves you. Speaking as one who is ridiculously, madly in love with wilderness, this comes from from my experience, from learning that I am not big enough or powerful enough to stop the sale and destruction of this jewel of a planet.
Still, I have learned, by watching the trash-can fire that is America in 2019, that the love and grandeur and wildness I adore lives in me. I can access it and make more of it and give it to others. I can bend my body and mind to the rhythm of the cosmos. I can return again and again to my inner wilderness and in the depths of Soul, return to what is divine in me (which I just project out into the wilderness anyway). I write this to remind myself.
Recidivism can be a real problem for those of us who want a world that holds love as a central principle for action, institution and system. “The power of the world is a circle. Everything tries to be round.” ~Black Elk. This is the shape of mind when it considers love, which is all things, not excluding anything. Break the shackles of limitation here in Mula nakshatra and move toward the highest personal ideal of inclusion you can. Whale on the capacity developing exercises. Love bigger, love more.
Because identity and world are both/and, they seem to be always in conflict until we circle long enough to appreciate the continuum. It’s easy to forget that we are the wholeness, the compassion and the resolution of opposition. We resolve the Forever War. When I think that’s who we are, that it’s who I am, love swells in my heart and there’s TONS of it to share.
Without getting too far into it here, let’s just say that I have a relationship with an archetypal Vedic goddess. She has shown me on two occasions, visions of helpless animals being abused by humans. What is interesting is that the scenes were not shown to make me pity the animal. They were shown to help me understand how the goddess of enlightenment was all 3 things in the scene: the animal, the human AND the moment of abuse.
I cannot express how profoundly this insight has awakened me. With this insight the whole world became god to me. Love must rise against oppression EVERY TIME. The oppressed cannot buy the lie of abuse, they must stand against it even unto death. The abuse is the only way for love to prove it prevails; it could be lost, but it never is. Love always wins. Your existence, that there is life of any kind at all is proof. This planet used to be molten lava. Look at what lives here now. THAT is love’s power. This is not a metaphor, it’s not hyperbole.
I feel that knowing this is the beginning of love moving against the colonialism in my mind and bringing me into contact with the world mind. I don’t yet understand soul or it’s workings AT ALL, but I am getting the hang of love. It’s not at all what I thought it was, it’s not at all what is being sold or institutionalized culturally, it’s bigger than both and exists within them half- formed, half-realized. Unborn. Undying. It’s the substratum of all there is.
That stellium is the enantiodromia that forces us to choose like Arjuna: we must mature out of our colonial toddlerhood or we will all either perish or make life unlivable. The Uranian trine, coupled with the conjunction of sun and moon to Mercury and Jupiter look bacon-saving to me. There is a lot of positive potential for group awareness and social conscience no matter how dark “reality” (whatever that is) appears in the moment. May I mature and become. May I use my sacred choice anew to benefit all life.
May I learn to be truly present for the current state of love and it’s unfolding now and now and now. For I have lived with you too long in the sunlight of the world’s bounty only admitting what pleased me. Since this always invokes shadow I pray my love is strong enough to last the night. There is no protection for my sensitivity in what approaches: the only relief I will have is in my ability to reconnect with the source of joy and love each time I lose it.
I have found that my fear is roughly proportionate to the size of my ego. I pray that I can be small and limited and free of that burden. Because I do fear. I fear not being a strong enough vessel to hold the great and terrible love of god as it comes to earth. I fear not having fully let go of the things I thought were love. I fear true love is to big for me. I know that I am not the extent of power in the universe. Hell, I am not even a local ordinance, but I hope to heaven I can own my finitude in confidence tempered by my fear and the practice of returning to love over and over again when I fall out of it.
I owe my fear a great deal. It has taught me that I don’t know how to bestow life or even to release it (does anybody know how dying is actually done?) but it has shown me many times that I am a part of life. When I am a conscious part of it I am a valuable part, too. When I release my so called “secure” platforms of witless control, I feel the fear of being a warrior in the arena of sacred choice. As Acyuta-bhava Das said, “We can’t be free unless we are who we really are within what is really real.” Fear haunts the really real like dove grey.
He also expressed that security is deeply rooted in the close shaves that quiet us and save us from our own judgement. It’s a big deal to have god individuating in us, to have god self reflecting in us, but WE are not the big deal. The big deal is as common as grass (literally) on this planet and I miss it every day on my way to work and running to stand still for the profit of psychopaths. Pouring consciousness into matter is a delicate, nuanced miracle. That I take it for granted is a grave error. This I must own. Saturn and Pluto will see to that. I must tend to the light in my heart, so I can find my way home through the really real.
False power only satisfies the ego. What would it mean if our current struggle was all over just by defeating a certain set of someones? It would mean what all the previous successful revolutions meant: meet the new boss, same as the old boss. The sidereal chart above is showing us something different, the stellium here is in Sagittarius which is the archetype of the ideal, the archer, the one who aims high. To defeat one man’s grandiosity would be beneath Sag. I hope with the Uranus trine the luminaries will show us a way to see the world as a living divinity in which each chipmunk, waterfall and whale is sacred and sovereign, reclaimed from man’s colonialism and placed into the care of humankind. Sagittarius inspires. Capricorn will require work to fulfill the hope.
A revolution befitting Sagittarius would be to divorce the whole idea of ownership and as the stellium then moves into Capricorn we can learn to be connected without attachment. We can learn to realize the intrinsic self-organizing dynamic of the planetary mind. We can let what is natural BE. We can let life live. The world IS god, if we see it that way. It does not progress linearly, but it does accrue what came before. We can learn. We can break through. Love got us this far. It will get us home.
There is separation and there is return. There is also maya. That which is nearest and most accessible appears farthest away and impossible. This is the power of maya. It is possible to observe the play of maya and return to the experience of love and to do that over and over until you can tell that shit from the glorious shinola. But it is a PRACTICE. It requires DEVOTION. Mastery means it must be done in the presence of the wholly other. Love in the presence of hate. Gotta have some capacity for that, yo.
It’s an inclusive, both/and world. Anything I exclude is a part of myself that I cannot own. I cannot remain open and loving if I am excluding parts of myself from myself. Therefore I project them upon the maya outside me until I learn to take them in. Right now I am projecting half a world of displaced people without a home on the planet where they were born. You bet your ass I am going to practice love. You bet I am devoted. I am begging god to reunite me with the parts of myself I have abandoned.
I doubt very highly that this body was meant for personhood and identity. I guess that it was meant for the purification of consciousness. This show of maya is my test. Where there is hatred I am to respond with love. Maybe one has to reach the truth defeated, depleted and empty. Maybe that’s the only way to release the trauma of the separation, the violence of becoming a person and the horror of identity. Maybe being empty is the only way to admit love.
Humanity has now reached the level of population that dominates the biosphere: an emergent planetary mind. What will it take to use that power for wholeness? What will it take to return to the sanity of inclusion and cast off the deathist ideal of separation? Destruction is not the only force in the universe. Despite impossible odds life survives and endures. If the sundering separation that created the cosmos and it’s ensuing expansion had occurred at ANY OTHER rate, life could not exist here. I must release my need for control and let the self organizing dynamic that is driving this bus have the wheel back. I must practice this devotedly because I SUCK at it.
Also, it is becoming more and more difficult to return to the now and here where I am, where god is, where truth is. Have you noticed (maybe it’s not true for you–I pray it’s not) the mundane world seems bent on keeping us away from love? We are all encouraged to believe we need something or to improve something or save something first, in order to be with what is already here. You are here. God is here. Love is here. Truth is here. And none of those things are having loud commercials, financing or limited time offers about it, either.
Concepts will not satisfy. Mind will always try to move me away from acceptance (unity) and into self-image (separation). Mind offers only resistance to what is. It gives me a belief in personal identity which yields a psychological identity that then suffers from its own judgement. This paradox is holding the whole world hostage in suffering. But when I close my eyes I am open and I am silent emptiness. When I allow grace I can bear my own truth without happening, victory or war. When I close my eyes my body is not mind. In silent emptiness I am not my walls, my boundaries, my limitation or concept of self.
God can only play an empty instrument.
I take back my time from the temporary and the ephemeral and return it to the eternal and effulgent.
I soften. I empty. I open. I practice. I forget. I remember. I soften. I empty. I open. I practice. . .
What ultimately effects the healing of any situation, what finally brings the two sides of self together and ends the Forever war is vision. When I practice I repeat and replay the knowledge that all of the disparate 10,000 things in the cosmos are really one thing: this is a language. This is a conversation. This is a relationship and I have to do whatever I must to make it a loving one. Even if that means starting a new dialogue in a new place in time because I cannot make a loving vision of the raw materials I have.
Jupiter conjunct the sun. Asked to sum up his life’s message Ram Dass said, “I help people as a way to work on myself, and I work on myself to help people… to me, that’s what the emerging game is all about.” May you be more powerful on the other side than you were in life, Guru. May we hear you on the wind, may we see you in each other and remember each one of us is god in drag.
Don’t miss this post by Samuel Reynolds of Unlock Astrology. I think it is brilliant. Unity, Convergence. Yes. Consistent sources of hope. Find them. Share them. Keep going.
Mind your heart,
~L
dogmoonyoga 