We have just celebrated the bonfires of fertility with Beltane and May Day, honoring the re-unification of Persephone, released from the underworld, and her mother, our earth mother, Ceres, an asteroid related to the nurturing principles of abundance. What are we fertilizing this spring? What do we seek to nourish this summer?
Mercury retrograde begins yet again Wednesday May 7th at 1 degree Gemini and ends at 22 degrees of Taurus Sunday May 31st with Mr. shapeshifter techno-traveler trixter asking us to question our value system, what we're really willing to invest in and become responsible for. In some ways, this cycle will mirror our recent Venus retrograde cycle thru Aries in March and April, where our relationships and creative projects underwent serious scrutiny. What crop do we wish to tend and what social and interpersonal soil will help our gifts bloom in the physical, sensual garden of manifestation?
As we ask these questions, we must consider the most potent transit of the year, reaching peak effect mid-late May and July, but active all summer. The evolutionary forces of Jupiter, Neptune, and Chiron unite in the last degrees of the humanitarian idealist, the galactic visionary, the cosmic kindred, the paradigm-shifting harbinger of the new age, Aquarius.
Neptune is the planet of our mythical origins. Jupiter expands the Neptunian urge to return to our source, opening a mystical window to perceive into the vast cosmological framework of multidimensional spiritual awareness. This month and throughout this summer we are asked to deeply investigate our identity as true Spirit, miraculously embodied.
It is an ideal time to probe the nature of our mythical selves. The works of archetypal psychologists, mythologists, poets, and astrologers such as Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Edward Edinger, James Hillman, Liz Greene, Dane Rudhyar, Mircea Eliade, and Khalil Gibran can be highly instructive in guiding us into our storied resonance, our poetically scripted archetypal portraits.
Beside our mythical selves, this triple conjunction allows a mystical conduit to flow between ourselves and the angelic realm, as well as our soul-clusters, our spiritual guides, and transcendent, visionary frequencies translated thru music and art. As we return to our origins, Chiron forces us to also engage the source of our deepest woundings, so that the creations which flow through us are intended to heal.
The Chiron myth is similar to the Christ myth, where suffering must be transmuted into a higher octave of one's service to the planet. As centaur, Chiron represents the bridge between the animal intuitive self, and the human intellectual self. Chiron processes can have a primal, reactive quality to them, evoking our raw animal nature. Our transcendence of this reactivity is the ability to access the Absolute Witness and allow our intuitive selves to serve and mentor others into their own wholeness. This is exemplified by the myth of Chiron, the great teacher, healer, astrologer, herbalist- the pre-eminent shaman of mythology. Chiron is ironically wounded by an arrow by his own student, the hero Heracles. As an immortal, Chiron is doomed to suffer eternally. Instead, because of his love and service for humanity, he confronts his death-urge and sacrifices the limited ego-self of suffering separation. He saves the chained Prometheus, who is then freed to continue feeding the fire of the gods to humanity. In his death, Chiron is immortalized in the sky as the wise philosopher Sagitarrius.
Practices such as Deep Memory Process Past Life regression therapy and Rebirthing breathwork, which i have studied in the last year, provide a structure in which to engage the fractured self and help to deliver one into the remembrance of Wholeness, healing the ego's claim of separation. As the Course in Miracles states, "Wholeness is the perceptual content of miracles. They thus correct, or atone for, the faulty perception of lack."
With Chiron in conjunction to Jupiter and Neptune, there is a sense of the repeating wound, the 'lack', that seems to unfairly rear its ugly head over and over in our lifetimes, hinting at what Freud called "repetition compulsion," the need in the psyche to repeat its patterns, through lifetimes, from past lives to birth trauma, into our family constellation and the relationships in our lives. So the search this summer is for what we call our Core Wounding in regression therapy, or our Personal Lie in rebirthing. This is the key to unlocking the Death urge, the separatist strategy of the ego.
Since this triple conjunction occurs directly on the U.S. Moon at 27 Aquarius, the country and all its citizens are going through a massive spiritual crisis, which is also an opportunity to replace our materialist values with the unitary principles of local community gardens, neighborhood economies, and sustainable village ethics even amidst vast city-scapes.
In a search for books on 2012 on Amazon, you can find a plethora that have appeared in the last two years. As we approach that fated date, messianic prophets will multiply, especially regarding end-times. We have to realize that consciousness shift is a state of presence, not an event in the future or in some ahistorical past. In the months ahead, though collective sound healings, prayer and dream circles, medicine ceremonies, and integral festivals of music, art, dance, healing, and evolutionary education, we can access the state of ecstatic bliss of Divine Presence.
On the other hand, airborne influenzas, biochemical agents, chemtrails, and EMF electromagnetic energy pollution, are all Aquarian etheric or air-related sources for collective trauma, already present in the Swine flu. We will be tested to embrace our urge for total health by protecting all of our body sheaths, including the etheric and subtle bodies from this energy pollution, including verbal or written sources of negativity.
It is important for us under this transit to probe into the appropriate or misappropriate use of the technological matrix we have all plugged into. Remembering that the human body is exposed to 1 million times the electromagnetic radiation of 100 years ago, we have to ask ourselves how our health is being compromised by the cellular and emotional stresses placed on us by always being "online" or surrounded by EMFsy. Just to put this into perspective, on my recent trip to Peru, I took an ironic picture of a woman furtively yammering on her cell phone, followed by a man on his headset, at Macchu Picchu, one of the most glorious, mystical locations on planet Earth, not the first place you'd think to reach out and touch someone. Weeks later in the Amazon jungle, during a medicinal ceremony with the sacred plant Ayahuasca, our shaman called his brother, another shaman, with his cell phone and casually talked for about 10 minutes. Yes, at the midpoint of the ceremony, in the Amazon jungle, a cell phone in the hand of the shaman.
Was it an exoticizating of the shamanic archetype in me or do we agree that shamans in the Amazon should be able to telepathically tap in to their family members while infused with a plant medicine which was originally named "Telepathogen" by early ethnobotanists?
These experiences and others in Peru really confirmed for me our deplorable seduction and dependence on our techno-gadgetry. I saw first-hand the depreciation of spiritual healing and power places. The extreme exteriorization of our consciousness into the material seems to hint at a fear of our Internal Knowing, especially as we rapidly approach appeals for more virtual and convenient living via more intrusive microchipping.
This is the shadow side of the Jupiter/Neptune/Chiron conjunction — massive spiritual disillusionment. All of us in western culture, raised with the subconscious suffering mythos of Christianity, were taught to place our faith in a savior out there, even if in America this was through a commercialized product. The mainstream also projects our salvation onto movie, music, and television stars. And many of us around the world have projected the savior onto Barack Obama, called The Chosen One by some newspapers when he was elected. The world can become quite fascist or totalitarian under that kind of projection, and spiritual charlatans can run amok. Even those of us in so-called New Age circles continue to project the savior onto "indigenous" shamans, bestselling self-help gurus, or Indian sadhus or "holy" people. In this regard, we need to question our intention.
We must be careful with this summer's transit to not "overmedicate" ourselves, numb ourselves into dependence on the guru out there or escape into technological fantasies instead of doing the hard work of accessing the avatar within. We are being called into an initiatory process of Ascension. It is time to look to the great Immortalist masters, such as Babaji, the great Tibetan masters who choose an astrologically appropriate time to leave their body, the Melchizedeks and other elders of the Bible who lived 700, 800, 900 years, as examples of the Immortal traveling in physical form. Remembering the Chiron myth, our immortal nature emerges from our conscious re-identifcation with the Wholeness of our source, not the ego, wounded by its own attachment to false separation.
When we think about an intense shift in consciousness in 2012, what can be more vital than conquering our Death Urge and recognizing our immortal nature, able to ascend into other forms and bodies willingly, with full intention? In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus states, "Physician, heal thyself." Luke, a name referring to Light, lux, was in fact a physician. As we honor the surging solar lights of springtime and Beltane bonfires, we are all invited this May and summer to channel our luminous selves, our true identity as the Tibetan Dharmata, the Mother Luminosity….
Image by Dallas1200am, courtesy of Creative Commons license.