Moon in Vishakha — The Star of Purpose
The moon entered its last quarter phase today, the dark of the moon cycle where the light on our mind and emotions fades as the luminary of night recharges. For many, this is a period of dreams, the mind freed from the spotlight of the most prominent watcher of sleep opening its deep rooms and allowing the denizens of the unconscious to roam.
This is a fearful experience for many, both children and adults, but like everything in life it contains the seed of an opportunity. Carl Jung wrote that for many of us, life is ruled by desires that we seek to fulfill by acts of will. This is the exercise of the Ego Consciousness and is particularly strong in our century as the dominance of science, reasoning, and technology have banished pure imagination, fantasy, and spiritual thinking to the realms of occultism, metaphysics, and pseudoscience, practices that are “entertaining” but otherwise disdainful for practical living.
Only when the lights go out, when we are caught in unavoidable darkness, as in the midst of a wildfire outbreak, tidal wave, tornado, terrorist attack, outbreak of war, or other natural or man made disaster do we sincerely turn to that hidden wisdom that often begins with prayer. I know this is not true for everyone, but as faith and dogma have become commercialized, commodified, and politicized in the service of power, it is more fashionable to be almost anything other than the unconditional lover of all things, labeling nothing as good or evil, but as equal in the eyes of whatever word suits your taste for the invisible, eternal force that enables energy and matter to form a universe and fill it with light.
This failure to acknowledge our hidden nature and to study and use it as well as we do our willpower diminishes us as individual travelers through life. Absent creative imagination and faith in the power of unity and love to bring us out of the darkness, our individuality too often vanishes as we surrender our critical, discerning minds to dogma, advertising, hype, and fabrication cloaked in a flag or other symbol of power. We get swept up in mass movements that like a roaring avalanche sweeps aside or crushes everything in its path running headlong toward the furthest point it can see. All the while, it has no idea what it will do when it arrives, only that it is strongest and first.
Vishakha has the shakti of Vyapana, the ability to “make manifest and achieve many fruits of life.” Will alone will not manifest anything. Will can only manipulate what already exists, and that only in a limited way. To make manifest in this case is to bring to the senses through understanding, to know through perception and thought. Thought that leads to knowing and understanding begins in the archetypes of the unconscious, the primeval lights of evolutionary consciousness, the forces of instinctive behavior brought to the surface and integrated under our control.
Control becomes important with these inherent powers. They are not from our senses but from our cellular memories and can be quite wild, even animalistic. Here is where Ego boldly claims to have power to help, but in truth, it has no experience with anything outside of the senses. Control of the unconscious comes from the unconscious and beyond. Every dark shade lingering in our sleeping depths has a compensatory light. This light transforms fear to acceptance, anger to forgiveness, and selfishness to service. In the grip of negativity the experience of reversal is not an act of will but of a power that arises from beyond our awareness, through us. The experience is so sudden and the reversal so dramatic that it can seem as if a light has literally come on within us.
This is Vishakha’s power, and the desire it fills is to become like God, not some abstract dictator shouting thou shalt and thou shalt not, but the force of love, pure and without any condition except that we invite it into our lives. To live as Buddha, Christ, Gandhi and other rare individuals have, so sure of the truth within that no external desire can shake us from who we truly are.
These are things to think about and dream on as we move into the dark of the moon.
American Vedic Astrology 