A Lunar Eclipse in Virgo — Why Do Eclipses Exist at All? What Purpose Do They Serve?

Hey everyone. This is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology [https://nightlightastrology.com/].

Hey, everyone. This is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology.

Today, we have a lunar eclipse taking place in the sign of Virgo. Last week, we took a look at this from an evolutionary perspective. Yesterday, we did horoscopes. Today, I want to dive even deeper and ask, Why do eclipses exist at all? Like, what purpose or role do they serve? Why do they play a part in astrology in the first place?

A question like this might seem, I don't know, a little bit like weighty, philosophical, dense, but it's actually really important, because aside from whatever may happen, it's really helpful to understand why it has to happen at all. And that's something, if you're like me, that I get really curious about.

So what I want to try to present today is why eclipses are thought to exist or occur cyclically, as they do, in the framework of ancient philosophy and astrology, so that we can understand not just what's happening, but why it happens, and why we're going to get more eclipses, why they keep coming in rhythmic circles and cycles.

With that understanding, I really do believe, at least for me, having this understanding and teaching it, I see nothing but benefit. It's helpful to understand things like this. We should not be people who just want to know "what's going to happen to me." If we're students of astrology and we're really sincere spiritual seekers on a path of astrological learning, I think it's really good to want to say, well, not just what's going to happen, but why. So that's what we're going to look at today, and I hope you'll find it useful.

Before we get into it, as always, remember to like and subscribe. If you watch this channel regularly, you know we have content 365 days a year. The only way we can grow and keep sustaining and thriving with what we do as a business is for people who watch who are not yet subscribed to click subscribe. Give us that little thumbs up. It helps us tremendously. You can find transcripts of any of these daily talks, as always, on the website NightlightAstrology.com.

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And you know what? We have over almost 140 people we had at last one. So it's been incredible to see the turnout. On the events page, you'll also find live talks. I have a talk coming up in March here on the 12th on the first house. This is going to be an excellent talk if you want to understand the ancient, historical and philosophical meaning of the house, its connection with the word dharma. It is not just a house of persona that says so much about us. This was the only house that was talked about as the place of the spirit soul. So a lot of what we need to know about a chart is not in your sun sign, it's not even in your moon sign, it's in your first house. Why? So we're going to talk about that. If you can't attend the webinar live, you get the recording afterward.

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I'm going to put the real time clock up. Let's just remind ourselves today, Tuesday, March 3, the lunar eclipse is taking place in the sign of Virgo, hosted by that Mercury Retrograde. We have done a lot of horoscopic coverage on those dynamics, the Mercury Retrograde dynamics. They're all recently on the channel. You can check those out if you haven't seen them yet. Last week, I did a whole talk on the evolutionary signature of the sign of Virgo, and hence, South Node, or eclipses in Virgo. What do they mean from the evolutionary perspective?

Today, I want to zoom out a little bit on the day of the eclipse and ask this question: What does it mean? Like, why? Why do eclipses exist at all? What purpose do they serve? How were they thought of as a part of a metaphysical system or philosophy that ancient astrologers had? They weren't just saying, well, the eclipse is coming, so it means this. These were very thoughtful mystics and philosophers who asked questions like, Why are eclipses in the sky at all? Why are they here? Why did the gods bring them? Why do they keep recurring at all?

There isn't just one answer to this question, but there are consistent things said by the main philosophical progenitors of horoscopic astrology, those that we know were the most likely to have been either creating the system, early developers and carriers of the tradition, both in the east and the west. Now I want to encourage you to keep an open mind, because we're not living, you know, 2000 years ago, to actually ask some of these philosophers. So this is my best understanding, being a student of astrological history. But keep that in mind, because this is a humble attempt to get at what might be behind these eclipses. Like, why? Why do they exist? What purpose do they serve?

The other thing I want to remind you is that eclipses, not only are they cyclical, and they happen in sets twice a year as the nodes of the moon travel retrograde through the Zodiac, they form eclipses in new signs about every year and a half, roughly. As they do, that means we get new eclipses in pairs of houses. So they come in pairs and dyads. We also have to look carefully at what's happening around an eclipse. For example, at the time of this eclipse, the eclipse is almost perfectly sextile an exalted Jupiter, but is also hosted by a Mercury that's in the opposite sign, debilitated, but there's also an exalted Venus in the opposite sign. So it's like all these little nuances can create a very specific kind of eclipse experience. And that's what we've tried to cover from the predictive standpoint, right? Like, here's all the things to consider, here's the topics of the house activated in your chart.

And these eclipses are process oriented, which means that you get, you know, at least two, three, four moon cycles where the effects are playing out. They are very important qualifying remarks from the gods that happen in our lives and end up usually playing out for most of us over many months to come. We're getting close to the end of the Virgo-Pisces cycle. So we're starting to tilt into Aquarius and Leo. Our next eclipse, you know, in August, we're going to see the nodes of the moon change signs. We're going to get an eclipse in Leo, a solar eclipse in Leo. So the orientation we're in the process of the nodes shifting right now, that's important to mention.

So all of those things aside, though, I want to talk today about what these eclipses say about reality, and what do they say about the reality of the soul whose life, karma, fate, destiny we can see some of the outlines of in a birth chart.

Well, let's start with a few basic things, and this is from Hellenistic and Medieval and Renaissance Indian forms of horoscopic astrology that basically say that the universe is similar in these ways: it's ordered. Ordered doesn't mean that it doesn't have spontaneity. It means that it's intelligibly arranged. So if the word order bothers you, you know, think about it like that. It's hierarchical, but not in just one way. There are many, many different kinds of hierarchies. And when it's thought of as hierarchical, it's not the way you and I think of hierarchies in terms of, like, the problems of, you know, institutions and governments with their hierarchies of power and dominance.

Let me give you a simple example. The hierarchy of the planets moving from the moon out to Saturn has a kind of structure that's taking us from the most worldly space to the most other-worldly space. And that hierarchy, it's not really a value comparison from the top to the bottom of the hierarchy. It's more like a gradient from material to ethereal, or something like that. So these hierarchies are like, they're like these beautiful cascading arrangements of, you know, worldly to the elemental spheres, to the realms of the gods, to the realms of the kind of more abstract, platonic spaces that are transcendent and not as embodied. So the point is, though, is that there's intelligible order.

For example, one other way that things are hierarchical is that there are things that are sort of most important and those that are of secondary importance. For example, truth would be at the top of the order of importance in terms of what humans are here to learn. We're here to learn truth. We're here to learn about a lot of other things, but we are also here to learn about sort of truth with a capital T, or spiritual evolution. Like, what does that mean? It means, in a sense, that although there are lots of things we do, the all-encompassing thing that we're doing is growing into God realization.

So there's like umbrellas, right, in the ancient philosophy, where everything is taking place under the big, broad umbrella of the number one most important thing, which is the evolution of the spirit soul toward God realization, enlightenment, etc. And almost all of these traditions say that. So of somewhat lesser importance, for example, is going to be exactly what happens in the result of the Super Bowl that I have a real vested interest in, emotionally and psychologically. It's not that that isn't important, in a real way, but it's sort of cased within a larger sphere of importance that's guiding a soul through many lifetimes, of which the investment that I have in the Super Bowl is like one very tiny little thing.

So in that way, there are sort of orders of what's happening and what's important in reality. There are like multiple dimensions of reality and processes that are playing out, and that's sort of generally accepted across the board in ancient philosophy. Now, in reality, so reality is sort of ordered, but there's like multiple dimensions of reality where many different kinds of things are playing out. And there are some processes that are thought of as more real or absolute or sort of final, like the soul's spiritual evolution, as opposed to, you know, some of the particular things I'm enmeshed in in this lifetime. Again, the Super Bowl being an example.

However, all of our experiences in the world are also playing out in ways that are very rhythmic. They work in all of our experiences, as well as the overall direction and evolution of the spirit soul moving through rhythms. So there's cycles and patterns that move like rhythms, like time signatures in a piece of music, and they're all very intelligent, very meaningful, very patterned rhythms that are informing whether it's my grand spiritual evolution of the soul, or it's my experience of the Super Bowl, you know.

So in that way, there's this cohesive intelligence that's orchestrating and arranging everything from things that are super mundane, like, what are we going to do today? Let's go to the beach and go swimming, to, I am learning to become a bodhisattva, you know. But there's a rhythm and an intelligence that's guiding all of it and interconnecting all of it on all these different levels of reality simultaneously.

Broadly speaking, in the Indian tradition, this is part of how karma works. Karma is sort of a way of talking about the intelligence of how events that we experience in our human life here are unfolding with a kind of rhyme or reason, but astrology is helping us to see how those things are connected to this larger arc of spiritual evolution. So most of the ancient philosophies tell us this in one way or another.

Now, within the rhythm, so what is astrology, then, from this standpoint? Astrology is a way of being able to map and mirror both basic levels of reality and this kind of higher spiritual arc of the soul through many lifetimes toward a state of enlightenment. And there's also a way that we use astrology. So we can use astrology to sort of see that arc and stay consciously aware of it. And that's so profound. It's like astrology is meant to keep us in the sacred awareness of the fact that we are spirit souls, transmigrating across lifetimes, learning spiritual lessons. And astrology keeps us aware of that, like all the time.

On the other hand, it also keeps us aware of the archetypes, the patterns, the gods, the spiritual intelligence that's present in like your marriage or your child rearing, or the moment that you get pregnant, or the difficulty in getting pregnant, or whatever it is. And that's really profound, that it can sort of zoom in or zoom out. Now within so astrology is a language that has the capacity, in other words, to speak to these two levels of reality at once: the sort of ultimate real and then the sort of local real, you could say.

Anyway, within this language of astrology, the sun is typically representing that broad sense of purpose and ambition that is about the enlightenment of the soul. This is why the sun rejoiced, was found to be in its place of joy in the ninth house, the place of higher Dharma, higher truth, a place that was associated with the truths of, you know, yoga philosophy or Buddhism or Christianity at its peak, Judaism, you know, whatever it is that's pointing us home, the highest truths of all of our traditions, the indigenous people that point us home in their own ways, all over the planet, right? The ninth house is pointing to that sense that there is this overarching oneness or truth or divinity that we're all part of, and we're all helping, as Ram Dass said, like we're all helping walk each other home. And the sun was broadly representative of that higher truth in this lifetime.

Interestingly, the sun distilled into the mundane sphere will have to do with the ambitions and sense of purpose that direct a local lifetime in sort of local space-time. Like, what is your ambition for a lifetime? Well, that ambition is an evolutionary little piece of experience that's going to teach us on the path of that broader ambition, that broader spiritual sense of purpose that our guides are bringing us along through.

So the moon, on the other hand, this is important, because we're talking about eclipses, we have to build this up, right? The moon represents the material world. In many ways, the moon is the local sphere. If the sun is that higher sense of divine purpose across eons and lifetimes of evolutionary experience and learning, then the moon is the local. It's your body. It's this lifetime. It's your family. It's my little purple bedroom, you know. It's the things that I love and like. It's my psychology and temperament. It is the imminent realm. It is the sacredness of this lifetime, right, where there's nothing better, sweeter, more important than what's right in front of us: the body I'm inhabiting, the life I'm living, the experiences I'm having, the relationships I'm having, the desires I'm exploring, the shadows I'm working through.

And the moon becomes representative of this local, intimate, relational, living, bio-matrix of life, without which what would we be doing? It would just be an abstract project of transcendent dissociation, you know. So we need this local sphere. The moon was representative of the fluctuating world of materiality, not as, I mean, some traditions, of course, sort of degrade the material world, but the material world is the place we're learning and living and growing.

So now the moon is not self-luminous. She shines by participatory reflection. She circumambulates the earth and receives the light of the sun. And her face is always changing. Her latitude is always varying. She has like a serpentine path that she weaves around the ecliptic, which is the line of the sun. And that's really important because, in other words, this world and our experiences are weaving us around a thread that's pulling us along. So if we have a spiritual thread of evolution that's pulling us through many lifetimes, then our experiences, our bodies, our lives, are like material that's threaded around that central spiritual through-line, if that makes sense.

Transcendent and imminent, above and below, the one and the many. There's so many different ways that these two things have been talked about, but that's the basic role they play in ancient astrology. So this brings us to what is a lunar eclipse?

Well, this occurs in a physical sense. Let's just talk about the physical phenomenon as we see it. It's the earth blocking the sun's light from reaching the moon, and so the moon has a shadow that's being cast over it, so to speak. So symbolically, what would that mean? It would mean that materiality, the physical material world, is temporarily interrupting the guiding light or path of becoming, of spiritual direction or evolution. That's not a mistake, by the way. That's a part of the rhythm.

So what's happening philosophically, in other words, is the moon is deprived of its orienting light and becomes completely cast over by the darkness of matter missing spirit, you could say. In other words, we can lose clarity. We can lose a sense of direction. Things can feel like they're falling apart because some sense of a path that was pulling us along has dissolved. That can quite literally mean that something that you've been doing, that you've been feeling guided to do, and a lot of things we're guided to do, are not necessarily easy. And they involve shadow work, but there's a path that we're on, and there's something that's been pulling us through. But you get to a lunar eclipse and the light or intelligence of that path reaches its expiration date. It's like, no, this material, embodied path you've been following, because there's been a thread of light pulling you through experiences, it's done. That's over.

So lunar eclipses often bring things to a place of closure, because the light of spirit that's been present in some material arena or space of experience, some path that we've been on, is temporarily occluded, and that means that the light of guidance along this path is done. So there's a sense of resolution or completion or closure and finishing things that's quite common.

The reason that this exists is because the spirit leads us in life, not just in one path, but many, many, many different paths that are in our life, with different relationships, different spheres of life, our relationship with ourselves and our body, our relationship with partners, our relationship with our kids, our work. I mean, think of all the different little paths that you're on in life. Looking at the whole sign house is really helpful, because then we can get a sense of what sphere of life a certain path is closing or concluding or reaching a point of the direction being obscured temporarily, usually because an expiration or conclusion is present.

The reason that this has to happen, though, is that paths change, right? We're on a path until it has delivered its insight. South Node eclipses, in particular, lunar eclipses, tend to be about a concluding insight, a kind of final remark from the universe, saying, This is what you've learned. This is what's crystallized. This is what's come of a path that you've been on. And if you've been following the light, often that comes in the crystallized sense of wisdom and understanding. If you haven't been, it can feel like you're just being stripped of something. It's being taken away. But if you take the time to reflect on the difficulty of the ending or closure, often, you'll get the same thing. You'll get a crystallized sense of wisdom and insight. It's designed to do that. All of these paths are designed to deliver. When they fail and die, you know, and then a new path begins.

And this is the same cycles of light and dark that are present in a solar year. Winter teaches us all about the things that we're ready to let go of, you know, from the light side of the year, we let go of those things, and a new path emerges in the spring. And that's a metaphor, obviously, but eclipses are very powerful because they highlight specific points, lunar eclipses, specific points at which a path that we've been on dies, fades, its direction or clarity is obscured, and usually there's a sense of an alignment that's no longer purposeful or appropriate somehow. And then, in the wake of that, slowly, gradually, having let go of something that's been leading or guiding us through a path of experience, we come to reorient ourselves. And that takes place, usually, with recurring solar eclipses and lunar eclipses happening in different signs.

All right, so there's basically several reasons, philosophically, why this has to happen like this, these cyclical moments with lunar eclipses, of a path of purpose expiring, and the light, it's like the flashlight battery dies, and the path that you're on is no longer being illuminated by spirit. Well, if you keep going down that path, at that point, it becomes progressively more and more destructive, because the guiding intelligence is not there supporting that path, and that's where things can get really lost. And lunar eclipses can become signs of descending deeper into darkness or obscurity or lack of clarity or direction or insight, and can be about deepening ignorance. So this is what our tradition has told us about the kind of variations on lunar eclipses that have been provided for us philosophically.

Now one thing, but why? Why do they exist in general? First of all, Neoplatonic cosmology, which has its roots, obviously, in prior Platonic cosmology, so they're very similar, but all lower things, and this is that hierarchy. By lower, we don't mean less than, just remember, we just mean like earthly, as opposed to celestial, above and below. All the lower worldly things in the embodied material world participate in higher truth and higher light that is guiding, shaping, directing. It's the nous or the gnosis. It's the light of Divine Wisdom that is driving creation itself. All lower things in this world are participating in that, whether they know it or not. And the path of spiritual realization in all these traditions is, very basically, becoming aware that you are participating in that, that it's part of who you are, and it's a part of what's guiding everything, and to align yourself more closely with it is to consciously wake up.

Okay, so, because all lower things participate in this higher light, eclipses are happening all the time as ways of trying to make us more aware of this light. And they move in cycles and circles, so that we can have moments where, you know, you're moving along a path, but it's easy when you're on a path and you're so deeply identified with a set of experiences that are just unfolding in your life, they're just happening. You forget that this is not happening because you're making it happen. It's happening because fate, destiny, the divine are pulling threads. That's that light that's pulling everything along.

But then when that light gets eclipsed and everything starts to fall apart, or the intelligence pulling it along seems to retreat or vanish, that's a time at which we are being provided a natural opportunity to become more aware of the guiding light of our spirit soul, of divinity that's present in these experiences that is seeking awakening. So these cyclical recurrences happen as a way of letting us have experience and getting really deeply and necessarily unconsciously immersed in it. And then they sort of pull you out of it a little bit and make you go, like, oh yeah, I'm a spirit soul having these choose-your-own-adventures, and I'm aware of it again, right? Because the light gets pulled out, and you go, something's different, and then you come to see it, you reconnect with it.

For perceptive people who are sort of on a path of spiritual awakening, these are inflection points. And for many people, when the light gets pulled out, the rug gets pulled out in a lunar eclipse, they become moments where you may hit a spiritual emergency or spiritual crisis and go like, Oh, there's something bigger going on here. I have to trust something bigger, because I'm not in control of everything. Often, when people hit rock bottom and go to 12-step programs, there it is, that there's a higher power. I have to surrender to the higher power and let it flow through me one day at a time. Eclipses are like that. At their very worst, they're talked about as malefic, but they're malefic specifically because they have the power to kind of smack us out of some unconscious sleep, if that makes sense. And you see, oh, something bigger is pulling it along. And when that thing gets occluded, I feel disrupted, but I only feel disrupted because I've been unconsciously moving with it, right?

When you're consciously moving with it, you'll notice, and most traditions talk about this, that they don't knock you off your center as much. And it's true. I can promise you, if you meditate regularly in your life, you have a spiritual practice that's regular. Try to center yourself. Stay aware as much as you can regularly. You will see the threads changing, and you will not experience them in the same way that somebody does who, and not to be judgmental, but they just have no interest in conscious awareness or awakening. They tend to get a lot more knocked off. And again, I'm not saying anything that hasn't been said for literally 1000s of years.

So a lunar eclipse is like this ontological reminder: this world of becoming is contingent. It all rests upon something that is pulling it along, some creative, divine intelligence, essence. So you know, some very basic examples would be like, imagine that a leader or a ruler forgets that any authority they have actually comes from divinity, actually comes from some higher plane of authority. It's not their authority. They're a servant. If they forget that, and occasionally, something happens to sort of jolt them awake to the fact that they're not the authority. And everyone talks about this. This is why everyone's so pissed off at our leaders. When are they going to get a wake-up call? People wonder, you know, like that.

Well, there's been some interesting, I think there's been some interesting wake-up calls, collectively for us to see behind the scenes of what's happening with leaders during eclipse season, while Saturn and Neptune conjoin in Aries. Saturn and Neptune in Aries are playing in the dignity realm of light and dark, because the explanation that's given as to why Saturn is in its fall in Aries has to do with the contrast between the spring equinox, where the sun is exalted, and the fall equinox, where Saturn is exalted. So that's the same logic as an eclipse. When Saturn is in Aries, we become much more aware of the potential corruption of solar figures that would be like leaders or the ruling class or whatever. Think about the Epstein files, right? Think of what that's exposing. Now I don't want to get into all of those. They're very vivid examples during a big collective outer planetary year that are the same basic logic of eclipses, which is that light and dark move in cycles as a part of facilitating awakening.

Or imagine that a system that is running on solar power thinks it's running on itself. It just forgets that it's actually the sun that's powering it. So imagine that it gets really, really cloudy, and the solar power is gone. The first thing they're going to do is try to figure out, well, what's wrong with us? What's wrong with me? Because I'm the source of the power, and it's gone. And you're going to throw up your arms and you're going to get upset. You're going to think you failed somehow, or you're going to blame it on someone else, because I couldn't fail, you know, whatever it is. And then the clouds part, and the light comes back, and you go, Oh, I actually think it's the sun powering this house or something, right? So an eclipse is like the withdrawal of something that's meant to point us back to an awareness of the thing that was withdrawn from a process, and that awareness is very fundamentally about light and dark.

Periodic interruptions also prevent us, in ancient philosophy, that's very clear, in yoga philosophy, from becoming distorted. In other words, when things keep going along in the same exact way and reality is infinitely diverse and novel, we have a way of getting stuck in a set of assumptions or perceptions about truth and reality, and so disruption is necessary to keep us in the living vibration of truth, which is multi-dimensional, multifaceted. You know what I mean.

So think about it, the moon, by its nature, is here to create rhythms, and we need it for life to feel safe, fertility, growth, seasons in nature, you know, your moods, the fluctuations of environment, your hormones, your body, your hunger, your sleep cycles. We have regulation everyone's talking about emotional, or physical, mental, bodily regulation, but that's the moon's territory. And the thing is, is that we don't, I remember hearing a herbalist teacher of my wife say that people think that regulation means some kind of perfect line of balance. But every system in the body moves through wave patterns. It's a living ecosystem, the night and the day, the moisture and the dryness, the heat and the cold. We live in a system whose regulation is found through movement and change.

So regulation through movement and change is something that is a constant part of our experience of life being an embodied living being. A spirit soul in a body, in other words, has to live and find a sense of home through constant fluctuation, change and movement. But part of how we stay in a flow, a flow of wisdom, a flow of truth, a flow of love, a flow of evolutionary enlightenment, is that any pattern that's created stability, but that is now blocking growth spiritually, has to be interrupted. And this is essentially what lunar eclipses do. They tend to interrupt systems and patterns that have served a role. Maybe they served a good purpose. Maybe they kept us safe, maybe they helped us learn for a while. There doesn't have to be anything morally wrong with them, or they don't have to be ignorant or evil to be disrupted. But the disruption comes because if the system doesn't adapt and change, then evolution can't keep flowing along. That's another basic reason that we get from, you know, yoga philosophy.

So there's a point in a lunar eclipse of something being disrupted in the realm of material rhythms. And then finally, I think this is just important, which is that the eclipses happen at crossing points, the crossing of the moon's path with the ecliptic. So this crossing suggests an intersection of different planes of reality. If reality has layers that we've been talking about, this ultimate, big truth kind of layer and this more local, mundane experience layer, embodied layer, then their intersection, sometimes it's more pronounced than at other times. So the experience of their intersection is not really good or bad. It's a point of intersection between spirit and matter that draws our attention to the fact that they coexist, that they somehow need each other at where we're at in our evolutionary experience. But they're also not the same.

It's very clear that if you don't think of your material experiences as facilitating your spiritual evolution, you will get lost in ignorance and avidya, which means darkness, you're not going to be seeing clearly. But if you also, preemptively, before your soul is actually ready for maybe an ashram or a monastery in some lifetime, if you preemptively try to skip past the embodied, living experience, you will also experience avidya, ignorance covering. It'll be a kind of spiritual delusion. And so these two intersections between spirit and matter, that's what eclipses are about. They're drawing our attention to that interaction. So I hope that makes sense now.

I mean, there's, let's see here, I'm going through my notes. What else do I want to say? Yeah, there's nothing in the material plane that can last forever. I mean, it's just, lunar eclipses are a very basic reminder that things in the material world change all the time. Especially with the South Node, there's a feeling of having reached, I don't know, like, almost like a take it to the recycling bin point. A lunar eclipse with the South Node is very much about crystallized insights from the end of a cycle where the light is being withdrawn from a path, from some sequencing of karmic events, which can feel very relieving. It really does feel like you're done with something, but sometimes being done with something is painful.

If we meditate on this deeper level of the existence of eclipses, do you see how much more meaningful it is? It's so much more meaningful than just saying, Well, what's going to happen? Oh, shit, they're fucking with me again. You know, we're so self-centered and impatient, is the point. It's okay to have investment in our lives. But it's not okay, spiritually speaking, from the ground of our tradition, to lose track of the fact that we are here to learn and grow and love and deepen our heart and soul connection to ourselves, to each other, to the universe. We don't do that by taking some shallow perspective on this heavenly language, you know. Not trying to sound like a gatekeeper, but also trying to be clear that it's worth defending the spiritual integrity of a tradition that, at its roots, was meant to help facilitate our spiritual evolution as souls.

So I feel like occasionally we have to do things like this, because we need to get back to the roots of why these things happen. Not just, oh shit, it's really intense right now. Why is it intense? And when you can understand that, it's like a celebration, because nothing is ultimately at stake, and nothing is happening that isn't actually good for you in the scope of your eternal journey. To me, even if I still have to live a life and it's difficult, this perspective deepens my sense of trust. I'm here for this, you know. Let's be here for it.

All right. Now, in case you don't believe me, I want to provide you with some actual texts from some of the traditions that were budding and popular in the world at the time that horoscopic astrology was dawning in both the East and the West. Remember, Buddhism comes right out of the Vedic tradition. The Buddha is basically a kind of reformer within the Vedic tradition, in a way you could think of them a bit like that, not that one's right or wrong, either. To me, I think they're all very beautiful.

But from the Dhammapada: "All conditioned things are impermanent. When one sees this with wisdom, one turns away from suffering." That's a lunar eclipse. The moon is a conditioned thing. Its light is borrowed. Impermanence in this world is not tragedy. It is a part of the structure of reality that, if we reflect upon, becomes the very pathway of wisdom.

From the Samyutta Nikaya: "Whatever is subject to arising is subject to cessation." A lunar eclipse is nothing more than cessation built into the process of arising. Fullness will always contain its own undoing. Anything full is emptied.

How about from the Heart Sutra, one of the most famous Buddhist texts: "Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form." It's interesting that the form of the full moon becomes empty. Shadow emptiness is revealed. We're reminded of emptiness of the material world, not that it's bad, but occasionally we need to be reminded that the material world is empty compared to the luminous consciousness that has a relationship with it. The relationship is everything. It's not unreal or bad, the material world. But we have to remember that it's empty. And that's actually what's beautiful about it, that emptiness is a form. Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form. If you sit with that, there's barely anything to be afraid of anymore.

How about from the Upanishads? From one of the Upanishads: "As a lump of salt thrown into water dissolves, so the individual dissolves into the self." An eclipse is a temporary dissolution of form, and it comes back, right? A reminder that reflected light is not ultimate. Our body is going to die someday. And any chance we get to remember that is a chance we have to really feel the holiness and sacredness of the body, paradoxically, of the material world.

Another Upanishad: "All this is Brahman." If all of this is Brahman, then both the emptiness and the fullness belong. So you can get things that feel like you're losing something during an eclipse, but what you're losing, the thing that is gone, what remains in its goneness, is a treasure, and sometimes it takes a second to recognize that, you know. But that's what reflection and a spiritual path are always showing us, over and over and over again.

So from the Puranas talking about Rahu: "He seizes the moon yet cannot hold it. Thus it is swallowed and released." The eclipse isn't a permanent thing. It's a shadow that temporarily consumes but also cannot sustain possession. "He seizes the moon yet cannot hold it. Thus it is swallowed and released." So the darkness, the obscuring of light, the loss, the diminishment, the emptying out that the lunar eclipse of the South Node suggests, is also something that itself will just keep moving and changing. It becomes, therefore, a profound moment for reflection and growth.

Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: "Yoga is the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind or consciousness." So the moon governs fluctuation. A lunar eclipse is a pretty radical moment of fluctuation that, paradoxically, can draw our attention to the point that with everything always fluctuating, it's helpful to have a state of consciousness that's not fluctuating, not because one is good or bad, but because relationship, rather than conflation, is where the heart is. We find our heart in relationship, not conflation.

The Hermetica, Corpus Hermeticum: "All things are subject to generation and corruption. Nothing in the cosmos is at rest." Also the Hermetica says: "The cosmos is a second God, a living being, always changing," a different kind of divinity, right? So an eclipse is not just disorder and chaos and malefic bad things happening. It is a necessary undoing in a process of constant regeneration. It's as simple as a lunar eclipse is kind of as simple as winter.

Anyway, from the Tao Te Ching: "Better to stop pouring than to fill to the brim. When the blade is over-sharpened, it will not last long. When gold and jade fill the hall, no one can protect them." See, anything that is full carries danger, and eclipses are reminders of that. You think something may have gotten a little too full. Better to stop pouring than fill to the brim. When the blade is over-sharpened, it won't last long. When gold and jade fill the hall, no one can protect them. Things go on and they have to stop. At some point they have to be emptied. "Return is the movement of the Tao." So we go advance, culmination, withdrawal, renewal, like that, in a cycle with the Tao. Eclipse is return. Saying, Okay, we're going to empty something out so we can return, start over, start new. But the emptying out can't be skipped over.

As you know, when we say death and rebirth, we're just pointing to the fact that they always follow each other cyclically. But a lunar eclipse should really be honored as a moment of emptying more than rebirth. What arises has to cease. Whatever is full has to be empty. What reflects, we need reminding at times, is not the source. So shadow, in this sense, is not like an error. It's a part of the natural cycle that is meant to draw our attention to what is real.

So that's what I've got for today. I hope that this was, yeah, just, you know, like I said, for me, I go to these places myself and sit with them, especially in my meditation. Eclipses are coming through. When I sit on my couch in the morning with some of you guys who've been coming, that's where I go. I go to thinking about, what is this moment providing me on a deep level? Not just what's going to happen, but what is the opportunity within the event, so I can empty the event of its literalness. Lunar eclipses are great for that.

All right. Well, I hope again you're having a great one. We'll see you again tomorrow. Bye, everyone. Bye.