by Robert Wilkinson
In the past few years we’ve had some very powerful eclipses which have accompanied the loss of many elements in our lives. Some transformed our nation, like the “Super Solar Eclipse” of August 2017 which cut the United States from the northwest to the southeast. We just had yet another Solar eclipse which also cut the US from Texas to Oregon. And we have a third one coming in April 2024 which will cross the US from Texas to Maine. Taken together, it’s as though we have fault lines running through parts of the US which will be triggered by future transits!
Eclipses are “cosmic recyclers,” removing the old over a period of time and creating the “space” for new experiences, both in our individual lives and the life of our nation. There are places called “points of greatest eclipse” which is where the intensity is supposedly focused.
Eclipses Accompany Radical Changes
In the Super eclipse of 2017, that point was the area where Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Kentucky all meet which is the epicenter of the New Madrid seismic zone. Also, the April 2024 eclipse path also moves right across the epicenter of the New Madrid seismic zone. As that fault is many decades overdue for a major earthquake, it would seem these are portents of activity in that seismic zone in the future. The last time major earthquakes happened in that zone in late 1811 and early 1812 it literally rang the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, over 1000 miles from there!
The 2017 Leo eclipse has accompanied a major fracturing of American society along the fault lines of politics, culture, society and spirituality. We now know that we have divided into a popular mindset which values either “the United States” or “the ununited states.” Civility has been replaced by in your face hostility, and efforts at compromise or reasoned dialog also seems to bring threats of violence. When people are threatening violence toward those who hold different political, social, and spiritual beliefs, it makes moving forward as one nation virtually impossible.
Many of us have experienced an intensified grief since the 2017 eclipse, which seemed as intense in its effects as the 1999 Leo Solar eclipse which accompanied “the end of the world as we knew it” as we soon found ourselves in a useless misdirected war shattering what peace there was in two major world regions. America is certainly not the same as it was in 1999, nor does it resemble the world before 2017. As I gave you a while back, it was as though one world ended in 1999 and the years after, and another world began to end in 2017 which continued through December 2022.
The recent Solar eclipse at 22 Libra will affect Oregon down to Texas and everywhere in between, and we’ll all see endings where we have 22 Libra. The April 2024 Solar eclipse at 20 Aries conjunct Mercury retrograde will no doubt bring “echoes of memories” and somehow finish some “unfinished business” related to past retrogrades as well as past eclipses, whether near the eclipse path across the New Madrid up the Ohio River to the Great Lakes or any celestial event near 20 Aries. Even as the 2017 eclipse effects have ended, we have these two heavyweight eclipses also cutting through the US which will show effects for years to come!
Finding Power In Releasing the Old
As losses accompany eclipses for the months and years which follow, our main spiritual task is to learn how to let go with grace, aware of the fact that we cannot lose what is ours to hold. That means we must release and enter the flow of knowing that as we create the space, new experiences will arise to fill our lives. We can only lose what we cannot hold, and in terms of life’s ebb and flow, like our breath we must release the old when it’s time to breathe in the new.
Isn’t this what life’s about? As we learn to let go of what we can no longer hold on to, we are free to face the future and welcome the potential which presents itself. As we enter into the flow of give and take, we become more fluid in how we deal with the feelings and memories of what has ended.
As past and present eclipses are always in play for years after they happen, whether we know it or not, we’re always letting go of something. As time is a one way street, “slippin’, slippin’, slippin’ into the future,” it’s important to take time to achieve closure on what’s left our lives.
Most of us would rather leap into the future than process what’s already gone and in some cases very painful. Still, we must get closure with our past experiences so that the unresolved material doesn’t lurk in our subconscious mind as something being incomplete. That’s why it’s important to honor the moments when things are passing so that we may claim the wisdom and understanding that experience gave us.
As we grow and evolve, we have to let go of things and behaviors we once thought were “good” or “bad.” Sometimes we hope that what we embrace or lose will lead us to pleasant experiences, and become stressed when they don’t turn out the way we hoped. Still, because all forms pass away in our impermanent reality, we perpetually confront the need to manage our feelings when we must say goodbye whether we want to or planned to or not.
We All Have A Shadow – Are You Aware of Yours?
I’ve found that when we begin examining what we’re attached to and why, much of it leads us directly to our human shadow, created by all the attachments and aversions of our subconscious mind with its assumptions, expectations, and illusions. Going into our shadow is not easy work. If it was easy it wouldn’t be “shadow work.” Shadow work takes us into the depths of our fears so that we can learn detachment and courage to the bottom of our Being rather than these being random acts of necessity.
As we do our shadow work while learning to flow and not cling to unhelpful feelings and responses, we can find compassion for ourselves and all others who are having difficult human experiences. And from one point of view, after many years of therapy, I realized we all have to go through hell at least once in our lives, and so as we embrace the journey to the underworld and back, we’ll see that our troubles are variations on universal issues for all of us. That allows us to release old attitudes as we enter into a vaster compassion.
This is where various types of therapy can help us on our journey. Therapy allows us to examine and reflect on why we feel what we feel, why we respond the way we respond to various triggers or aversions, and helps us observe what moves us to negative or unhelpful behavior. Through the objectivity of evaluating our responses from a place of compassion, we can replace unhealthy responses and attitudes with positive and productive responses by choosing to bring forth the healthiest response we can in each moment.
By replacing unhelpful response patterns with healthy response patterns as we learn to flow through life, fully present and aware of our choices in each moment, we eventually realize we’ve “broken through to the other side” and are no longer trapped by unconscious responses and negative behavior. This relates to the concept of “breakdown, break through, and breakaway” from unnecessary fears, limitations, rules, and other attitudes which hinder our evolution.
As we let go of unhelpful patterns which exist in both our conscious mind and our subconscious mind, we transmute negative habits into positive responses. Both of my books, Saturn: Spiritual Master, Spiritual Friend and The Magic of Venus: Friendships, Soul Mates, and Twin Flames, deal with ways to change our inner orientation and responses from negative to positive from various angles, personal, interactive, and spiritually. In both these works we examine how we came to various dark thoughts and feelings when we were younger and knew nothing outside our family and cultural matrix, and explore skills allowing us to choose brighter and lighter thoughts and responses, healthy emotional expression, and the power to create our destiny fully aware of our divinity and our human-ness.
We Share This Life and Its Lessons With Countless Others
All of us have to learn how to let go and say goodbye to people, places, things, attitudes, and many other things we attach to. We want to avoid the bad and see only the good. We move through life with a somewhat untrained mind, and so wind up unsure about the many illusions and delusions which pervade our reality. And given that our minds can never truly “know” anything (as only the heart truly knows) then it’s also a universal that the human mind is fundamentally pessimistic because of its duality.
We can overcome our tendency to get attached, our tendency to avoid what we don’t want to acknowledge, our tendency to drift into illusions, and any habit of pessimism by cultivating detachment, dispassion, compassion, discernment, and positivity. Our attachment to difficult memories and bad attitudes is easily cured through detachment from going where we shouldn’t go. We have to detach from negative expectations, from negative attitudes about what we believe we know or don’t know, and even detach from worrying about what might be, what never was or seemed to be, or anything else the mind’s negativity wants to generate.
Learning to face what we need to face with courage, detachment, dispassion, and compassion allows us to move through life’s difficult experiences with an awareness of our common humanity. Nothing we go through is new or unique; all of us go through some variation, directly or indirectly, of every painful thing humanity has ever suffered. That allows us to understand we are not alone in our pain, and that the pain we feel is the pain of the world. As we are wounded, we learn skills and insights which help us to help others so they may heal their wounds.
The fact that we are all wounded should provide some comfort that we are not alone in our own woundedness. All of us are entrusted with the task to turn our suffering into an ability to become our Highest Self, serving a greater good. While each of us has our own path to tread with lessons we must learn, we are never separate from our Wisdom, our Way (Dharma/Tao), and our Community of Friends, Spiritual Brothers and Sisters who also are sustained by us. As I’ve offered before, we are all wiser, more capable, and more aware together than we are separately.
So as you navigate the constant changes, the loss of the old and the arrival of the new, remember to flow easy, dancing in the moment between the inner and outer spaces. As you become clearer and eliminate all which would obstruct your ability to express your Higher Self, you’ll come to a wider understanding of what a better life and relationships will look like and will be able to navigate the endings and beginning with grace, wisdom, and love for yourself and others.
By learning to live in the here and now, we can reflect on all that has left our lives with an understanding of how our losses have helped us become loving and wise. As we embrace the dance of our journey through space and time, coming out of ignorance and finding skills related to our higher purpose, we see it’s all leading us to the love, wisdom, and understanding of our Higher Self watching the weird scenes inside the gold mine at the intersection of Fate Street and Freewill Street on a dimly lit section of Eternity Boulevard.
© Copyright 2023 Robert Wilkinson
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