The full moon is always in context to the new moon. It is the culmination, the illumination of what the new moon cycle is essentially about. With every new moon, the moon and sun are conjunct in the same sign. This highlights a new evolutionary sequence or cycle within the domain indicated by the zodiacal sign. In this case we have been reviewing scorpio themes of change, transformation, soul and shadow. This is the domain of life’s evolutionary desire to transcend and integrate limitations for the liberation of potential into the future. In scorpio we are invited into the domain of actuality, what is really going on under the surface, what have we been repressing, ignoring or escaping from for fear of what may be if we were to fully claim our wildest selfs. It is here that we are being invited to find the meaning, significance and purpose of all that is generally rejected, suppressed and denied within the self. It is here if we accept the invitation to dive deep within the nature of our reality and our desires that we can enter the domain of soul.
Soul is here represented as the evolutionary desire of the self, the force that moves the self to continue to grow, evolve, expand, and liberate. Soul as represented within the scorpio framework has 2 basal or primary evolutionary desires, to separate and to return, to express and to experience, to give and to receive, to grow and to dissolve. It is the desire of the soul which compels us to strive to create to express oneself in the world, once that expression has served its function, namely the evolution of the soul to know itself as a creator, the desire to surrender to dissolve back into source replaces it. This is the process of change and evolutional, to surrender to the desires that invite us deeper into co-participation with life. The creations birthed by the soul through a desire to separate from source must eventually be let go of surrendered back to the whole as an expression of the whole thus the desire to return to source emerges. Thus life and death are equally valued for one creation dissolved back into the whole gives rise to another. Death is just as desirable as life for both are an essential part of the whole. Here in the domain of scorpio life and death are permitted once again to dance together, to make love together with wild abandon.
Where there is perception there is also change, thus we are being invited to bring perception to what is underneath for the change and evolution of the soul towards the birth of new potentialities and deeper alignment with the generalized principles of universe (sagittarius). Liberation cannot come unless one gazes with clear sober eyes upon the shackles of one’s own confinement. This confinement is an emergent result of the inherent constraints of the collective cultural conditions of limitation and the choices we make as individuals to bind ourselves out of fear, naivety and ignorance. Thus this full moon highlights the way through, the key to our liberation which is found through the synthesis of opposites. Thus the full moon is the sign of taurus, which highlights the self resourcing functions of all individual expressions of universe. All that comes into being must also be able to sustain itself and care for itself through the refinement of resource acquisition. A tree must be resourced in order to grow and to be resourced must move at a speed and pace that is reasonable to its own organization. Thus taurus invites us to look into the daily and moment by moment choices that constellate into formation of self. What does self need to root itself deeply into the life that is being offered.
The change represented by scorpio is intense, powerful, terrifying and liberating, the stability offered by taurus is grounding, solidifying, consistent and practical. Here the desire of the soul for transformation brings us into contact with the humbling reality that the rapid change and transformation we desire comes about through taking full responsibility for our own lives and making moment by moment choices to align with the deepest desires of the soul. It is through the Taurian path of moment to moment contemplation for the sake of liberation (scorpio) that we come into contact with our addictions, attachments, projections, expectations and desires that have been chosen and conditioned in order to create a sense of security/control within the experience of life. Here as the buddha has famously articulated is the root of all suffering; attachment to that which is other than self for a sense of security/control. It was however desire itself that moved the buddha along the path towards “enlightenment”, the desire of the soul to return to source, to strip away all false identities (attachment, securities) in order to dissolve into the source of all and arise anew in each moment as emergent property of the whole.
It was desire itself that seemed to produce the suffering that the Budha had been gracefully observing along the path towards liberation. The desire of the soul to grow and evolve confronted the attachments, identities, and limitations of body and mind. Thus pain was ever present in the waking experience of embodied consciousness. The longing to to be free of the pain created the suffering, for an eternal battle was being waged inside the human organism. One could not shut off the desire of the soul for continued evolution and one could not escape the limitation inherently manifest in embodied form without destroying the foundation of experience itself. Non-existance, and non-experience, cannot be the goal of enlightenment, for non-experience is eternal darkness that is an eternal dreamless sleep without the possibility of awakening. Enlightenment is the fullness of experience, the full of illumination (acceptance) of the totality of experience. Thus the buddha discovered in the depth of his mediation that the desire to be free from suffering was the generating function of the suffering. This has often been misinterpreted as the freedom from desire itself, which is an impossibility for any facet of universe or else universe/experience could not exist. Universe is always in a state of change (evolution) and it is the change in that which is perceived that generates experience and consciousness. All change is generated by the desire of life and consciousness to expand (grow) and continue. Thus inherent within the essence of soul, psyche, body, mind, which is manifest out of a living cosmos is the desire to be or else beingness would not be. Thus it was the desire to be free of desire, the desire to be free of suffering, that generated the suffering. For both Taurus (The need for stability and consistency) and scorpio (the need for change and growth) both eternally exist and ultimately give meaning/existence to the other. Thus the Buddha found that the middle path, the slow, steady, consistent path of contemplation, was the path that satisfied the desire of the soul to change, grow and transform anew, free in each moment as an emergent property of the moment.
Thus the story of the Budha as an archtypal story is a helpful reminder that holds a particular kind of relavent medicine for the moment. Like the Budha we are being asked to go deeper. If we stay on the surface of both scorpio and taurus, we get stuck in repeated patterns of isolation and codependency, of pleasure seeking for one’s own masturbatory reasons or for the need to feel powerful in context with another. We become a victim to our un-integrated and conditioned desires, addicted to that which is outside in order to feel a sense of connection or security. The longer we stay on the surface seeking that which is outside the self for the fulfillment of that which is inside the more suffering will be apart of our experience and the greater the emotional intensity required to change the underlying patterns. This results in crisis, conflict, unexpected emotional outburst in service to the dissolving of previous attachments through the conscious encounters with our unitegrated selfs. If we take the middle path through integrating the change that is desired in scorpio through the vehicle of our bodies and our moment to moment presence a way emerges that leads us beyond ourselves rooting us further into life while lifting us higher into the heavens.