Happy Friday, beautiful souls! It’s time for some solar eclipse astrology.
Unfortunately, we north-of-the-equator folk won’t see this eclipse, but it will still be reflecting our own inner processes in one way or another. And for those of you in Antarctica, and the southernmost regions of Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, and South Africa, enjoy the show!
Anyone been feeling a bit topsy-turvy the past few weeks? I sure have! That’s to be expected during eclipse season. The early morning lunar eclipse on November 19th opened up this eclipse season and set the stage for some endings in preparation for some new beginnings. That means the past few weeks may have felt a bit bittersweet, as we have all been letting go of something familiar, maybe even something precious. Emotions may have run high, and most of us are uncomfortable with change!
Now, we get to see why it was good to let go. Space had to be created for something new. And not just any old “something new” but something new that represents a personal and collective evolutionary expansion. Existence is infinite, and there is always more: more to perceive, more to learn, more to understand, and more to love. This is the message of this new moon solar eclipse in Sagittarius. It is time to see and understand more, to be shocked and surprised by a larger truth.
What I thought I knew no longer appears to be true!
One of the most difficult truths of life is that we have these constructs called “egos” that love to be right. Ego loves to be right! But life is continuously inviting us to be wrong. Life is continuously asking us to admit the truth that we don’t know everything. We might know a little, but there’s always much more that remains unknown. What a humbling experience, this thing called life! Ego is actually terrified of how little it knows. That is why it must defend its ideas at all costs. I know it’s not all bad. We need our egos in order to get up in the morning and have any degree of sanity in how we approach this Great Mystery called life. Ego is a necessity. So how do we resolve this conundrum of needing to be right when life is always revealing that we’re wrong?
A big piece of the truth puzzle lies in keeping an open mind and remaining curious about what the truth actually is. We are all conditioned by lies. That’s our human condition at this moment in our evolution. We were programmed at an early age to believe lies about ourselves, each other, the world, and life itself. For example, one of these lies is that the only way we can live together is through exploiting each other, so we set up the world in such a way that we compete with each other and create “winners” and “losers”. But do we actually have to compete with each other in this way? Is it inevitable that we emphasize self-interest and exclusion over sharing and inclusion? Is this a universal truth that we must live this way, or is this a human lie?
The power of “I don’t know”
If I’m going to be completely honest with myself, I have to admit that I don’t know the answer to that question. In my heart of hearts, I feel that we don’t have to live the way we currently live. I believe that it is our choice to live this way. My heart tells me that if we actually experimented with creating a paradigm of giving, sharing, and inclusion, that we would find that the fears we had were simply not true. In other words, the sky wouldn’t actually fall down around us. We wouldn’t descend into chaos and depravity. However, I can honestly say that I don’t know this for sure. Since I don’t’ have the certainty, I choose to be open to learning what the truth is, to experimenting and testing my theory, and seeing what the results are.
The world around us is teeming with messages, signs, and omens about the larger truths of our existence. If ego holds on too tightly to what it thinks it knows, then these messages and communications are completely missed or dismissed. Then we walk around stuck in our own narrow perceptions of the world, believing lies and suffering because of it. Maybe there is joy in being wrong. Maybe being wrong is the pathway to freedom and so called “enlightenment”.
Love is the highest truth
Since the beginning of time, all of the spiritual traditions of the world have been telling us that love is the underlying reality of our existence. Is it true? Ego’s truth is separation, fear, and survival. To ego, love is just a poetic idea, something to make us feel better and distract us, momentarily, from the harsher “truth” of existing as specks of dirt in a vast universe that doesn’t even know or care that we exist. But might there be another part of us, beyond ego, that knows a different truth? My heart tells me that this is true, and maybe, just maybe, we do live in a meaningful universe that loves us.
At the heart of the sign of Sagittarius is the archetype of the seeker. Sagittarius reflects the part of us that asks these big questions and the part of us that is compelled to go on a quest to discover the answers. This new moon solar eclipse on the late eve of Friday, December 3rd (Pacfic Time), is stirring up the seeker in all of us. Something about our lives has become boring, predictable, too narrow, and too routine. On some level, we’re just going through the motions because we have unquestioned assumptions and beliefs about ourselves and life. It’s time to open our minds, expand our horizons, and tell the truth that there is something we don’t know, something we’re missing. It may be time to let go of a lie we’ve been telling ourselves and time to open up to a larger, more compassionate truth.
Life is trying to communicate with us. Are we listening?
Mercury, “messenger of the gods,” is playing a part in this eclipse. This means that if we are open and curious, we can learn something new through engaging the world around us. In this case, the truth, the answers, are not inside. They are outside, and we have to go beyond our egos and what we think we know in order to discover them.
As we go out into the world, the best way to hear the messages is to ask questions and listen for the answers. We have to be curious and listen more than we talk. And we must trust our experiences. Experience is our best education. Once we think we have the truth and the answer, we have to experiment with it in our actual lives and see for ourselves what the results are. And of course, we are invited to embrace being wrong and having life show up differently than we expected.
The adventure continues!
Well, whether we’re holding on or letting go, the adventure continues, doesn’t it?! Is this not the most amazing experience ever-this thing called existence? Enjoy the ride! It’s ok to be a little frightened of what we don’t know, but I am comforted by the truth that there is always more to perceive, more to learn, more to understand, and more to love. And maybe, just maybe, the ultimate truth is that we are loved by this Great Mystery and therefore, it is actually safe and good to love each other.