Into the Mystic

Van Morrison wrote Into the Mystic from a place of absolute surrender, from that territory in the soul where the longing for the divine and the longing for the beloved become indistinguishable from each other, where the personal dissolves into something oceanic and vast that has been moving toward you since before you were born. The song carries the quality of a soul that has stopped straining toward what it loves and has instead allowed itself to be carried by it, borne on a current older and deeper than any desire the personal self could generate, and it is precisely this quality of yielding, of allowing the mystic to arrive rather than pursuing it, that resonates so deeply with what the week of the 30th of May is holding open.

Do you recall, six months ago, when Antares seeded something in the deepest chamber of your heart, when the western fire began its patient and purifying work in you, loosening the grip of what you had long held as your own? That seeding has been quietly gestating through the months between, and now, as the Sun arrives at the Eye of the Bull this week, having moved through the grief and storm of the Hyades, what was planted in the dark is pressing upward into light, asking to be perceived not as personal triumph but as something far older and vaster than the life you have been living, a purpose your soul has been carrying since before this incarnation gave it a name.

Meister Eckhart taught that the soul must become empty of itself, released from its own will, its own accumulated knowing, its own cherished sense of what it is, before the divine knowing can pour through it unimpeded. He called this Gelassenheit, a releasement so total that even the desire to receive is surrendered, and it is into exactly this quality of earned emptiness that Aldebaran irradiates its vast and arcane light, that star-seeded wisdom drawn from beyond the parameters of the personal life, carrying the kind of perception that has moved through Nelson Mandela and Gandhi as well as JFK, souls who are vessels for something that vastly exceeded their own biography and offering outwardly what streamed through them without counting the cost.

Into this solar irradiation, Jupiter moves into conjunction with both Pollux and then Procyon. Both are threshold stars, liminal guardians whose wisdom opens only to those who have genuinely undergone the transformative ordeal the crossing demands. Having spent the past nine months in union with both beings, his expansiveness has been upgraded to understand more from the unmanifest and the ‘framework’ that scaffolds the multiverse, opening us up to a deeper understanding of the bonds that connect us. Teilhard de Chardin spent his life feeling into this territory, this movement of consciousness toward what he named the Omega Point, that threshold at which awareness becomes capable of receiving a perception of itself that no individual soul could sustain alone, and what Jupiter has been opened to carries that same quality, generous and demanding in equal measure, a teaching pressing through toward the collective, asking that the one through whom it moves be genuinely transformed by what they receive rather than merely enlarged by it.

And then there is the Ceres conjunction to Uranus. Ceres outlines the cycles of loss and return at their most primal, the grain descending into the dark before it rises, the love that releases what it holds most closely so that it may return more fully itself. Her alignment with Uranus opens the deep and often invisible assumptions about what sustains you, the patterns of nourishment unconsciously inherited and habitually perpetuated through a former understanding of what you are and what you truly need. Thomas Berry, whose life’s work was the recovery of the felt sense of belonging to a living cosmos, wrote that the universe is a communion of subjects, each carrying its own interiority, its own form of consciousness, its own sacred dimension. I believe that what Uranus opens in Ceres this week is the possibility of a far more reciprocal knowing, the felt sense of being held by a communion with the living world that has been sustaining you all along, beneath every layer of what you thought you needed.

Remember that a threshold is a quality of consciousness you learn to inhabit and therefore your soul is already at home in the larger life of things, for me that is what the week of the 30th of May asks - are you yet quiet enough to know?

Finally, I’d like to offer the following as a hope this week -

May the storm you have moved through leave you emptied and open, and may that openness be the very quality through which the light of the eastern fire finds its way into your waking life this week.

May you soften your grip upon what you thought you needed, and find yourself instead within the field of what you are.

And may you come to know, in your body and in your breath, that the purpose your soul is carrying is older than your longing and more patient than your fear, waiting only for the stillness in which it can finally, and fully, be heard.