The star of expansion, Arcturus, is risen: it’s Christmas!
In every moment ‘I’ am a culture seething with sensations, visions and insights, habitual reactions, instincts and humours, wafts of conversation, snatches of song, smells of bowel. ‘I’ am saturated by others, including myself, and playing conscious and unconscious part in various social transformations, even sharing them, but this is all theoretical. The ground of my being is imaginal and aesthetic.
The Full Moon, back again, is drawn forward time and again to its immolation in sunlight. This is human artifice. Many hundreds of thousands of such renewals have played out in the psyche of imaginative Homo Sapiens, but only there. There are no phases on the Moon.
The human psyche is imaginal, and each human imagination is aesthetic. This fiction it creates, that the Moon exists in anguish: “This proto-feminine principle, the Sun, life itself to me, the source of all energy, light and time, all competition, necessity and utility, if she has a soul at all, does not nurture me in it. ‘We’ have a one-sided relationship. She bathes me in heat, but gratuitously. She barely feels my gravity. She tolerates me, exists without me, finds no essential beauty in me. Where lies the beauty of my reflection, in me? I don’t find it in her.”
This is not a campfire story. This is the confection of a solitary shepherd, a boy known to others, who presents himself to others, but with a self in orbit of the soul. The clock of the constellations chimes in the heart ravished by importance. And the Moon? Let him cleave to the human heart, for his orbit was the key our imagination used to unlock the neighbourhood of all stars in our ‘eternal’ emptiness of quantum nonlocality (or words to that effect–insert your own). The Sun of the seasons is a poor thing without him.
“…[Dream,] the most subjective and mystical of all mental phenomena, and a phenomenon more inclusive than the dreamer himself, because it allows him both to observe himself and to be at one with the universe.” Otto Rank, Psychology and the Soul.
In his arcane costume of skins and feathers he goes to sleep on a rock in a crag which offers some protection from predators. The stars are so bright they prick the skin. He dreams he is a great rock in space, hurtling around an unimaginably large ball inhabited by teeming millions of strange beings who worship him. He feels the caress of their eyes. Their hearts beat under his ribs. But a great power is vested in him by their perspective, the power not only of geometry, of phases and latitudes and azimuths, but as he soars up over their horizons he feels the power of calculus, the integrals and differentials of falling ever onwards, through ages of ice and ages of sand, now fast and close, now slow and far, in life and in death, but always falling, and always Now, forever.
A goat bleats in the dark, announcing the pulse of new life, and another Tomorrow.
This was the Astrologer’s dream—he who made the Sky—in Gemini one night, at Christmas, in the two thousand and sixteenth year of our Lord.
Personally, I reject a spiritual path that begins with the experience of suffering, or the compassion which arises from a perception of suffering as the ground of human existence. Cut to the chase, I reckon. If the path out of suffering leads through a direct realisation of emptiness, and that is immediately accessible as soon as you step outside your tent under a dark sky, as it was for the mystics who found the Everything and Nothing God of the religions of The Book, then that is where to begin, with the immensity of the universe in your tiny, virtual, infinite consciousness.
The expression, ‘Everything is connected to everything else’, is an analytical tool and a form of non-violent protest used to promote anything from vegetarianism and environmental sustainability to multiculturalism and the Middle Way.
Like everything it has three meanings. It means, ‘The material world of independent individuals is an illusion.’ It means, ‘Everything exists in a web of dependent origination, and every action and inaction, including thoughts, has an affect.’ And it means, ‘Everything is subject to fundamental laws which can be understood and used to transform things into more desirable things.’
“Believers in emptiness
Are incurable.”
Nagarjuna.
A parting gift: hesitate before you dismiss southern hemisphere astrology in favour of what ‘works’ according to other people, lest you languish in the inherited, non-imaginal prison of confirmation bias.
Have a good one!
Francis of Breamlea Station.
