by DK Brainard
"Where there is no vision, the people perish." - Proverbs 29:18
I have been looking forward to tonight's total solar eclipse for quite a while now. Not because I'm an eclipse enthusiast, but because this eclipse has the power to light up the world in ways that might seem almost unimaginable from our current viewpoint.
As an empath, I'd just as soon sit out eclipse season. Eclipses function as portals or gates that allow a blast of cosmic information/energy to penetrate into the Earth realm. This higher vibrational energy seeks to transmute old, heavy emotions and psychological patterns, enabling us to realign with our soul's purpose and move forward in more meaningful and fulfilling ways. (1)
To the extent we are unwilling to cooperate (or just clueless as to what is being asked of us) eclipses can provoke anxiety, fear, frustration, or despair. In a society that trains us to numb out, consume more, or work harder rather than honoring our difficult feelings or unexpected challenges as opportunities for soul growth, many people are even more disconnected from their bodies and emotions than usual during eclipse season.
The practical effect for empaths and highly sensitive persons is that we often feel pummeled by large amounts of stray emotional energy and random psychic vibes from the people around us during these periods. (This is why we always preach about the importance of remembering to ground and get back into your body during eclipse season.)
The Omega symbol for the degree of tonight's eclipse (12 Sag 27', 11:43 pm PST, Dec. 3, 2021) is "Sitting for her portrait, Mona Lisa feels as if millions of people are watching her." John Sandbach writes: "This degree senses the numberless hidden connections between itself and the world around it, as well as the worlds of the past and future. All currents we carry are automatically sent out and received by a countless number of different consciousnesses."
The Omega symbol concludes with a quintessentially Sagittarian thought: "And so one of the greatest magical acts we can perform is to shine the radiance of a smile through all time and space to our countless fellow travelers."
Sagittarius, the sign of universal Fire (spirit), seeks to know the truth because it knows the truth will set us free. Then, because it knows the truth will set us free and because it is an inherently optimistic, forward-looking sign, Sagittarius sets about trying to inspire everyone else to see the truth.
Sagittarius' optimism about the future often functions as a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is the Jupiterian principle at work: generosity of spirit is what creates good fortune and abundance.
No matter how bad things look right now, Sagittarius says, we've seen the truth! And we're all going to align with it. And then we're all going to be free! And once we're all free, nothing can stop us. We will go boldly where no man has gone before! We will blow open the doors of perception! The future is going to be awesome!
OK, you might be thinking, but Sagittarians are also know-it-all blowhards who can't keep their mouths shut. Maybe they'll be fine, but what about the rest of the world? It's just one eclipse - how much impact could it possibly have?
5 New South and Reasons for Optimism
Good questions. I'm not a Sag, but let me tell you why I have been looking forward to this eclipse since early 2020. In The Eagle and the Lark, Bernadette Brady writes:
"Astrologers have traditionally tended to view eclipses as wild cards whose occurrence can be predicted in timing but whose results vary dramatically from one eclipse to another. Yet, each eclipse does belong to a larger pattern. Each eclipse is a member of a family and each family has characteristics."
l confess: I was one of those astrologers. I would often search online for information on the Saros meaning of a given eclipse, but I didn't really understand the depth of this framework until I bought Brady's book.
Without going into a lot of technical detail, the powerful astrology takeaway of the Saros framework is that every solar eclipse belongs to a Saros cycle family of eclipses. And every Saros cycle has a birth chart - the chart for the initial eclipse in the cycle. The signature of this initial eclipse, then, will affect all of the eclipses in the family, even those with a radically different astrological signature.
Tonight's eclipse belongs to the Saros Series 5 New South. Brady says about this series, “This is a very joyful, happy family of eclipses. There is a sense of good news, falling in love, a peak experience that is joyful in some way. The benefits that appear in the individual’s life under this eclipse Series can be expected to continue well after the eclipse has passed.”
By contrast, the solar eclipse at 4 Capricorn on Dec, 26, 2019 that ushered in the Covid era belonged to SS 3 South, which carries "a large emotional component and sense of traumatic transformation.”
The solar eclipse in Cancer on summer solstice in 2020 belongs to SS 4 North, a series that tends to block us from taking meaningful action. “Restriction, inhibition, restraint, separation and illusions are the trademarks of this family," Brady says. There is a sense of futility or impossibility of changing difficult circumstances to 4 North eclipses that was reflected in social conditions last summer as "15 Days to Slow the Spread" slowly morphed into the destruction of the global economy and booster shots every six months for life.
Where Do We Go From Here?
I was looking in the mirror the other night while I was brushing my teeth and I had this thought, "Man, you look so much older than you did two years ago." I thought about people I've seen lately and how I could say the same thing about almost all of them.
The pressure and stress of the last two years has been incredible. We really are living through a war. Thankfully, most of us haven't had to worry about having our legs blown off or our village bombed or being killed by a sniper on the way home from the store. But people are dying. The excess mortality numbers in Great Britain and other countries with high vaccination rates are stunning. We are seeing increases in hospitalizations and deaths in heavily-vaccinated states like Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire with high percentages of 'fully vaccinated' people and we haven't even entered peak winter cold season yet.
And the numbers of people who have already died from untreated addiction, suicide, and the other collateral costs of the global lockdown are certain to pale in comparison to any final tally once this sad chapter finally ends.
We are under attack by a new kind of spiritual, energetic, and information warfare. It has been difficult to respond to this situation, partly because of all of the resources devoted to mass mind control and fear programming, and partly because most of us never saw it coming.
Seeing Through
But we are waking up now. We know that a global techno-fascist prison state where our survival depends on having enough social credit to get food and that life-saving booster shot every six months is not the reality we want for ourselves and for our children and for our children's children.
The juxtaposition of emphasis on seeing and being seen and on past and future in the Omega symbol for the eclipse is interesting. Mona Lisa feels like a million people are watching her. Yet, if we look at the painting, it seems she is also watching us. In da Vinci's masterpiece the past and future are meeting, eternally, in the present moment.
Eternity is not a very, very long stretch of linear time. It is a unifying experience of timelessness, or of "all-time" that arises when we experience present moment awareness. These moments can occur spontaneously, such as when we find ourselves in the presence of breathtaking beauty, or in a life-threatening situation, or while engaging in extremely vigorous exercise or as the result of sudden physiological changes. They can also be consciously developed in meditation, trance work, and through immersion into a creative practice.
In these moments, we find ourselves free of the burden of the rational (self-dividing) mind. We can transition fluidly between past memories and imagined future scenes while maintaining an awareness of the body in the present moment. This transcendence of our habitual programmed mindset often brings forth solutions to obstacles that previously seemed beyond our capacity to overcome.
These solutions are not the products of the rational, problem-solving mind. Solutions that arise in states of unity consciousness always involve a change in perception: a seeing-through of the stories we've been told and have told ourselves about this limitation or obstacle.
This seeing-through enables us to experience the problem not as an emotionally distressing (and probably shameful) issue to be stuck with, but rather as a puzzle evoking a sense of curiosity and playful imagination. In my time at Trance Camp, I remember Steve Gilligan saying that one of two things will happen if you take a problem deep enough into a conscious trance: either the problem will be solved or you'll still have the problem but you'll no longer care.
This is the promise I see unfolding from the Sagittarius Solar Eclipse. Although the underlying problems in society have been around since long before any of us were born, we seem to have entered a culminating phase of the Controllers' plan to exert total control over the world's population and resources.
Those of us who have learned that the inner creates the outer, that thoughts become things, that we must heal the trauma we've held in the body in order to be truly free, and who have spent much of our lives working to heal our hearts, minds, and bodies...
We know how to save the world.
We know what to do. We don't know all of the details, perhaps, but we know what needs to happen. Now, in the darkest night of the New Moon, when most of the people we counted as family, friends, and fellow travelers have run and off and joined a global suicide cult and won't stop haranguing us and shaming us and recruiting us to join the cult, now is the time when we must find the courage to stand up and fight for truth and beauty. Knowing that we are fighting for not only ourselves but for the millions of ancestors who are rooting us on from the other side of the veil, and for the children and the animals and the plants and the trees and the insects and the flowers and for everything that makes this realm so beautiful.
The energy of this eclipse can help us to align with the truth of who we are and inspire us to take meaningful action in our lives, to believe that no matter how fucked things look from our current perspective, we do have the tools and the heart - and the support of millions of ancestors, Nature spirits, animal spirits and our other allies in the invisible realms - to step up and save the world.
Notes
1 - Not all eclipses are created equal. Total solar or lunar eclipses tend to impact us harder than partial eclipses. And eclipses that form a conjunction, square or opposition to your Sun, Moon, Ascendant or another key point in your chart will be much more noticeable than those that don't.
Cynthia! Aloha to you and to Cosmic off-world frens!
Don't forget those off world beings waiting in the wings!