The New Moon in Cardinal Air
28th September 2019 at 19:26 BST, Dublin, Ireland
Image Credit – Stephanie Pui-Mun Law
Massively open, your consciousness is hungry for vision and meaning. Yearning to live the dream, you need to consciously mould and shape this incredible expansive energetic state as your dreams dance freely through your imagination, guiding your awareness and leading you down avenues that open you to possibility and adventure or unrealistic fantasy and escapism. Your lower mind caught within the rationalisation that you are deluded, along with quickened whisper of an agitating impatience, you waver in disbelief that you can be the dream. Yet again and again your higher mind sets before you the clarity and conviction that the dream is possible, you can walk freely, generating a fulfilling and sustainable life, filled with jOy and purpose. Will you cede to those doubters and let the Muggles be victorious, or will you keep your eye open and follow your star? Easy to choose on paper; less easy in a world filled with Muggles…
Over the past month the primordial search for the fine and delicate fulcrum between instinct and analysis, fear and confidence, speaking out or remaining silent, patience or action has been a dynamically active and pressing concern.
Should you exercise your voice, stand up for what you truly belief and speak out against the evil that grips the Earth? Should you speak forth your seldom articulated true thoughts (due to the fear of rejection)? Should you express those thoughts that dominate your unlived life – that life lived within your head? Should you stop letting fate carry you along by seeing through the demons in your head so that you can veer back onto the path of authentic living?
The search for the answers to those questions may have left your mind reeling as you have toyed with those seemingly paradoxical twins – clarity and confusion. You know that you are not supposed to have an attachment to clarity, nor an aversion to confusion. Both, after all, are one and the same (in essence)! “But”, I hear you say!
Yes, I know you live in the ‘real’ world and you are dealing with ‘real’ issues and a decision HAS to be made. Yes, yes, there is a process. Yes, there is much to be gained by having no attachment to the outcome of a decision. Yes, the journey is more important than the destination. But, everything within our current system of being points to the preference of clarity and conviction and the denial of the highly creative and at times humbling process of embracing the swirling mists of confusion.
Can you really be sure that clarity is the right path? That pleasure is preferable to pain? That clinging to life and cheating death is the way forward? That the day is better than night? A path walked exclusive of the other means that you will eventually attract an event, a person and circumstance into your life so that you embrace the dualism of any of your choices. Peace and joy is found in the middle ground, a lesson that is the quintessential expression of the zodiacal sign of Cardinal Air, or Libra.
Beneath the veneer of the ever present Duchene smile, the diplomacy, the royal “We” and the professional peace maker, one of the deeper messages underlying the sign Libra is to choose the way that leads between the two great lines of force – matter and spirit. This is where the correlation of balance with Libra arises. When mentioning the concept of balance, I am not referring to a juggling act, one in which simultaneously I keep all my projects going and all my relationships healthy, achieved through organisation, prioritisation and willpower. For me, the spiritual significance of balance has more to do with Temperance and serenity of spirit.
The Spanish knight, hermit and theologian, St. Ignatius, spoke of people being ruled by desire rather than being free to make conscious choices. When you are feeling pushed, desperate, reactive or highly emotionally charged, without having engaged in deep contemplation to prepare your soul for the path/ choices ahead, you are likely to make decisions that enslave you to those vanities and enemies of your Mind and Soul that trap you and bind you to your ego. When you are able to observe those emotions but breathe consciously when standing at the crossroads, without being enflamed by desire, fear or expectation, then temperance flows through your veins and you have experienced the deeper dimension of the Cardinal Air archetype.
To be temperate means that you honour and acknowledge your desires and passions but you do not constantly rearrange your life according to the ongoing flux of those highly charged states! Temperance does not restrain; it guides us to be peaceful with what is, to discern what we are called to improve or to overlook, to have serenity of spirit no matter what feelings are invoked about the situation we find ourselves in. It calls us to contemplation and then to action. Not action based on expectations of others, not perfect action as we see it, but doing what we can do, at the moment and in the circumstances.
Image Credit – Rose Allgood
To develop and sustain a spiritual focus in our lives, while living in our ever increasingly busy society, this is the challenge as busyness is forced upon us. But you are the one who decides how the expectations of the outside world manifest in your life. You are the one that can choose to centre yourself in the calm space between possibility and manifestation; between rest and action; between process and results.
Sri Kaleshwar says that you can find that place since “all human activity is a search for a balance between survival and happiness. This is the same as saying that all human activity is a search for a balance between the logical mind and the soul. To live in balance, to both survive and be happy, you must have both logic and soul. The problems is that it seems you can have only one but not both. The world tells us to reject the soul. Spirituality tells us to reject the mind. We condemn the world for ignoring the soul, but conventional spirituality is equally guilty when it tells us to ignore the logical world. When you do this you are cut off from your world of daily life. The dirty secret of conventional spirituality is that if an ”enlightened” person wants to live in the ordinary world they must first undertake a completely new journey to merge with the logical mind they left behind in their search for the soul. They need to find some way for the logical mind to co-exist with the intuitive soul that now runs their lives. Until they achieve this integration they are paralysed and isolated from the totality of what makes them human. Such a handicap is why the spiritual path has been confined to renunciants who do not have to integrate with the world. It is why the saints have not changed the world”. In other words once you go within and find gOd and bring it back into the world with you, you can consciously infuse gOd like awareness into your daily life.
Balance, therefore, is a combination of both action and the ability to remain poised as you act dynamically. When inspiration and expression, spirit and matter, creative and scientific thinking, idealism and practicality are balanced within you, the Cardinal Air energy is doing its work within your nature.
Image Credit – Bata Reykin
Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.
~ Albert Einstein
As the Lights of our Solar System unite on Saturday the 28th September in the tropical sign of Cardinal Air, or Libra, in quincunx to Uranus, you are given the opportunity to observe how deeply authentic your choices have been of late. The existence of Cardinal Air within you means that you have the ability to speak forth and to breathe your mind into the world. Within this dimension of your experience of life you can temper your choices, considering the well-being and perspective of those you are dealing with, yet at the same time sticking to your truth and ideals. This New Moon pushes forth the hunger to speak forth your truth, even if you feel uncomfortable. So I would offer the following question as a meditation in the days leading up to the re-birth of the Cardinal Air consciousness within you – Have you taken the time to rediscover temperance and fully embrace serenity?
All rights reserved – Andrew Smith. Written at 08:19 BST, 22nd September 2019.
