Rewind: Scorpio and the Horror of True Love

Hey everyone, this is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology Happy Friday everybody. Today in light of the eclipse that we experienced this week in the sign of Scorpio, I want to pause and give you a rewind episode. This is one of my favorite episodes ever. I made this episode around 2019 as a way of exploring the archetype of Scorpio, especially as I think the Sun was entering into the sign of Scorpio when I made this; I think it's one of the most popular replayed videos like I always get comments years later, I still get comments from people who are watching this again or finding it for the first time. It's called Scorpio, the Horror of True Love. And I think that you'll I think you'll find it a useful and good like exploration of the sign of Scorpio as we've just had Venus in the Sun enter an Eclipse; it feels like a good time to just take a little extra deep dive into the sign.

So that's what we're going to do today. I hope that you will enjoy this rewind episode. I was just at the time getting into bhakti yoga. So I referenced bhakti yoga a lot in the video. I still feel like a lot of; I would say a lot of the same things in exactly the same way. Although I'm not formally a part of the same bhakti community any longer. I still stand by the essence of what this video and what this particular talk that I gave was all about. So I hope that you'll really enjoy it. Although it's a bit of a blast from the past. It's funny to go back and hear myself saying my name Adam prior to taking initiation, and then all these videos where I was calling myself Acyuta, now back to Adam. So it's been funny to look back at some of the episodes and just watch that transformation. Anyway, I hope you guys will enjoy this today.

Before we get into it, don't forget to like and subscribe and share a comment in the comment section if you enjoy this. I'd love to hear from you. If you don't enjoy it, then don't talk no. I'm just playing transcripts of any of my daily talks can be found on my website nightlightastrology.com. I also want to point you over to the Bhakti wise website, where two of my friends and mentors in the bhakti community, Loka and Vidarbha, will be leading the 12-week class on the Gita. It is by donation. It starts on November 5; it's a great way to learn about the Bhagavad Gita highly recommended; I studied with them for a long time, even though I'm not formally a part of the bhakti world any longer in a formal sense. I still, you know, Bhakti will live with me for the rest of my life as a deeply valuable spiritual practice.

And I think the Bhagavad Gita is one of the most important texts, you know, spiritual texts that anyone could read; it'll do nothing but enlighten you to get to know the text. You don't have to be like, oh, I want to go commit to the path of yoga to take this class; I think you'll really enjoy it. So check it out. In the meantime, I'm also starting on November 12, and my class, Ancient Astrology for the Modern Mystic, begins. We are coming down the homestretch of registration. Now, I want to take you over to the website. Guys have been hearing me promote this for a while; most of you are probably already familiar with it.

You can learn all about the class on the website. It starts on November 12 and meets on Saturdays for about two to three hours at a time. Thirty times on the year, everything is recorded so you can attend live or you can follow along with the class remotely; you can take advantage of a tutoring staff that I have both in a classroom forum discussion and in designated tutoring sessions. You can email me throughout the course; there's tons of bonus material and optional quizzes, and optional reading outside of class; you can currently go as deeply as you want to. It's ideal for people who are either wanting to take their love and hobby interest in astrology to the next level, getting more serious about developing that tool for yourself and your family and friends, or people who want to develop a serious practice and actually read for others. So serves both purposes. And you can kind of go as seriously and as deeply with the program as you want outside of the core classroom experience.

There is an early bird payment saves you $500 off, and there is a 12-month payment plan which you can use, you know to split the tuition up a little bit if that helps you. And then we also have need-based tuition assistance; we have about 100 of those left. So they are starting to dwindle. At the time of making this, there's probably even a little bit less than that left. But take advantage of that while it's there. We're trying to also promote these and get those spots filled because they take a little bit of extra time to process, and we want to get you enrolled in the class and get you all set up. So don't wait until the last minute to use the need-based tuition. Don't feel bad using it either. We are one of my core values and missions is to make sure that astrology is financially accessible for people, which is why next year, our big goal for the Kickstarter this year you'll hear me talking about that later on in the year is to set up a donation-based reading clinic so that we have a staff of people that can take people and give readings for really affordable rates. So you know, there's more around our core values that we're in the process of building out, and so really, truly, if it helps you if you are on a tight budget, use the need-based tuition. We'd love to have you all right. Well, that being said, It is Scorpio season; it is upon us Halloween is around the corner. And now, I give you one of my favorite talks ever on the season of Scorpio, and I hope you will enjoy it. Take it easy, everyone. Bye, everybody.

This is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology. It is Thursday, October 24. And I'm sitting down today to talk about the entrance of the Sun in the sign of Scorpio. So, one of the things that you hear people talk about when it comes to the sign of Scorpio when it comes to all signs, is a set of psychological stereotypes. Scorpios are intense, possessive, jealous, dark, and moody, right? Maybe loyal, deep, penetrating, right? These kinds of things. Rarely, if ever, do you? Does anyone, Do you ever really understand why that's the case? People will be like, Well, it's because it's the dark of autumn. It's not, maybe if you live in the Northeast of the United States. Do you know what I mean? Like it's not this, the association of the psychology of each of the signs is mostly related to conflations that people have made with the planet. So, for example, most of the qualities that we talk about when we refer to the sign of Scorpio are Mars qualities.

But they're a specific kind of Mars. They are a watery, or Yin, feminine, kind of Mars. And solid. That's what I'm missing. Watery, feminine Yin, solid kind of Mars. Mars in Aries is hot and dry, fiery, tropical, or Cardinal. Right and masculine, young, very different. We're talking now about solid or fixed. We're talking about something that there's there for deep and sometimes resilient and stubborn. We're talking about something that's more feminine, receptive, playful, and relational, even though it's also the God of War. And we're talking about a feminine god of war.

So, you know, understanding Scorpio begins by having to spend time meditating on and getting to know the feminine incarnation of Mars. People always jump by the way to these intense exaggerated characteristics, you know, with Scorpio, especially, if you say it's the feminine Mars-like, oh, yeah, like Kali, like, some destructive goddess who's got you know, he's just like, dripping blood out of her mouth and, you know, smashed all the men to pieces and like, well, that's a little intense, you know? I mean, like, yeah, and there, maybe it's not that intense all the time.

So I want to tell you a little bit of a story about Scorpio today that hopefully will help us to validate some of the intense stereotypes that we hear about Scorpio while also honoring, I think, the more complex, subtle, and sophisticated spiritual nature of the sign. When we're living a spiritual life, any archetype in Astrology can be experienced as divine, even the things that seem dark or crazy or wild or whatever. There is a tendency in astrology, and I've talked about this in many of my videos for people to blame things on the planets. Well, I am this way because of my Mars, or I am this way because of my Sun, or the Sun is causing me to have this kind of day, or Mercury Retrograde is really messing with me, or whatever like that.

In this respect, we're forgetting that the planets are indicators. They're just telling us what, how the karmic reality is flowing. They're literally like, Hey, look at me, and I'll give you a symbolic understanding of how one particular field of karma is interacting with another one by an aspect or something like that. So the language of ancient astrology is the language of indicators, omens, and signs. Scorpio doesn't make you intense. Scorpio tells us that you are intense, right? Scorpio doesn't make you obsessed, paranoid, jealous, or deeper broody doesn't make you a destroyer goddess. It tells us that that's how you are or that's what's happening. Right? The existence of the gods of the archetypes precede the existence of the planets. And they will come after the planets are dead and gone because the planets are indicators of eternal patterns of eternal shapes that inform the unfolding of cosmic reality. I'm saying this specifically because one of the signs that we love to blame for anything ranging from intensity, darkness, conflicted emotions, or feelings. Something that we get obsessive, obsessive, or fixated on emotionally is Scorpio. We say, Oh, well, it's Scorpio. Why do we do that? In particular, with Scorpio, I think it's because we don't believe that there is a place in us or that there is a place in creation for those things that we find most complicated or conflicted, emotionally, especially emotionally.

So let's try to tell some stories and try to get into Scorpio. So when I was a kid, I've told the story in a different version before, but I had a pirate birthday. It was a pirate-themed birthday party because I was really I had gone to Disney World. Everything has been downhill from there. I went to Disney World when I was a kid. My parents took me around Disney World, right? And it was for me, it was like, imaginative orgasm, and especially the Pirates of the Caribbean. If you've been to Disney World before, you know what I'm talking about. The movies that were actually based on this ride at Disney World, from what I understand. So anyway, I went on this ride. Well, before Johnny Depp was, you know, Jack Sparrow, and I was stoked. And for my birthday, that pirate-themed birthday party I got, everyone had to dress up like pirates. There were lots of bandanas. There were lots of skulls and crossbones painted on people's faces. You know, my birthdays when I was really young we're pretty cool because my dad was the pastor. So like, everyone had to attend. Everyone was afraid of hell. I'm just kidding. But there was more of a community around me in that sense. And I always had a sense that I had a bigger family in a way which is nice. People dressed up like pirates. And we had all sorts of crazy games, like there was a sunken treasure in a plastic pool. You know, there are, so there was, and it was like this. And, you know, it seemed to me really epic at the time, like, but you know, it is probably like, what was it? I think it was probably my fifth birthday or my sixth birthday.The whole thing probably lasted about 15 minutes. I look at my kids now. They get together for these outings and stuff. And it's like yeah, okay. This shits gonna go down in, like, 10 minutes. It's all over. But back then, I remember it seemed like it was the whole day, you know? So maybe who knows how long it actually was. But it was this pirate birthday party. That was a lot of fun and was very imaginative. And I remember thinking, this is such a funny little detail. But I remember thinking afterward, after everybody was gone and I was sitting there by myself. The cake is destroyed, and the pizzas gone. The birthday presents are over like, What a crock.

What this is, this was so disappointing. Mom and Dad, did you have a nice birthday? Yeah. What's wrong? And I think at the time, I thought, well, you know, everyone's gone. My friends are gone. And my parents were probably just like, oh, well, don't worry, you know, we had a good time. They'll you'll see them again soon at school or church or whatever. But it wasn't that. I remember specifically reflecting. This is actually a memory. It's actually come up for me in Ayahuasca ceremonies. Here's what I was disappointed about. I was disappointed that something more serious didn't happen. Because I believed that pirates were a serious business, isn't that weird? Like, but that's because that's what my imaginary like, that's what my playscape of pirates was like, you know, I had the Playmobile pirate ship. And I had gotten some pirate paraphernalia from the ride at Disney World. I was pirate obsessed, basically. Right. And I believed that pirates were dangerous. Pirates were renegades. You know, a pirate was a rebel, a pirate played by their own rules. A pirate wasn't bad, but they might be bad. A lot of pirates are bad, but some pirates are pirates. Do you know what I mean? Some pirates are like Robin Hood. They're like outlaws. And there's something really attractive about outlaws.

Maybe this is because my dad was also obsessed with spaghetti westerns. If you know what that phrase means. What's his name? Sergio Leone, I think that's his name and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and it was actually back then it was A Fistful of Dollars. Clint Eastwood movies and I think they were filmed in Italy, which is why they ended up getting called spaghetti western. But at any rate, these westerns similarly featured Clint Eastwood as the renegade, the rebel, and the outlaw, but he could be a hero. The outlaw could be something cherished. Sometimes the fool is the wise person, in fact, often in fairy tales. It's the dumling; it's the idiot. It's the fool. It's the stupid one who can't do the task. Who can't accomplish the errand whose brothers are bigger or whose sisters are prettier like Cinderella, whatever, the one who's not as privileged, the one who can't run the race, whatever says some broken piece, and they end up becoming the one who finds the gold, rides the dragon, gets the prince, gets the magic, right.

Similarly, pirates, tricksters, and people who could steal something from you might be heroes. Think about Gollum from the Lord of the Rings. Right? I had a similar fascination with Boba Fett, who, if any of you know, Star Wars, and I'm sorry to get really nerdy for a second, but I loved Star Wars. But not the new first three that came out after the original three; those sucked, but the rest of them I've enjoyed. Anyway, Boba Fett was a bounty hunter. And he also seemed to have a kind of neutral status; he was just in it for himself. Who else was like that? Who is his counterpart? Who is his natural counterpart, archetypically Han Solo? Solo was also, and their fates are entwined in Star Wars. Han Solo is a renegade smuggler. Who gets chased down by a neutral bounty hunter. So bounty hunters and outlaws have a lot in common. They always entail one another in the movies. I felt similarly about pirates, even though I could never have articulated it at an early age. I felt that pirates were a complicated figure. That a pirate was a complicated figure, he might be good; he might be bad. Something about that, to me, was very important. I didn't know when I was born that the Sun in my chart was in an almost perfect trine by the degree to the planet Uranus in the sign of Scorpio. Right? There's some degree of that in me. And many of us identify with similarly very complex archetypal figures.

In the heroic sunny overworld, we think, well, Han Solo was a neutral smuggler, and then he got redeemed. Right? So we love it when the bad guy or when the renegade trickster thief. We love it when they find redemption. That's the sunny part that we all go; oh, good. There's Zeus. There's the Sun. There's Apollo. There are the gods I'm familiar with that make me feel muscular, strong, and good about life, moral universe I live in. It's great, if you know what I mean.

We have a really, really hard time trying to find the deeper meaning, beauty, and order of a universe that includes bad guys. We like to pit them against each other, and the way that we begin to reconcile the divinity, the divine play, of dark, of evil of Jabba the Hutt, or of all of the things that come out during Scorpio season. Right, Freddy, Jason, Chucky. Notice how they're all Freddy, Jason, Chucky, their names of like little boys who have some problem. One feeds on children in their dreams. One is a little doll gone mad; one is a boy who was traumatized, right? Jason, Chucky, Freddy, these dark figures we have a hard time with. We want to polarize them against the light figure. We want to escape from them. And yet we're sucked in. We're drawn into them.

This is why, for example, have you ever seen I don't remember what it is. There's a commercial. And I've seen it a few times where there's a group of people running from a chainsaw murderer. And they have a choice between a car sitting there running and have like a shed filled with chainsaws all hanging. And one of them. One of the guys is like, let's just get in the car and go. We can go, and they're like, Oh, that seems like a really bad idea. Let's go hide behind the chainsaws. And you're like, No, we horror movies suck us in just like the characters that can't help but hide behind the chainsaws rather than get in the car. Dark figures suck us in. For the same reason we grapple, we need to grapple with the reality of darkness. We need some way in which we can contextualize, celebrate and give place to darkness, even evil. Not that we condone it, not that we do it, but we are. Our soul is a part of God. And God is the ultimate Yes; in a sense, God says yes to everything, including No. And so, similarly, our souls are made of the same thing. And we need to say yes to everything; we need to find a place for everything. If we can't find a place for everything, we can't find the kingdom of heaven. Kingdom of heaven, Jesus said, was like a little mustard seed. And it has to find the right ground to fall on in order to grow. Similarly, we start building heaven; we start building spiritual contentment and spiritual happiness in life by finding a place for everything.

And it starts with really, really small things, the right place to put our thoughts, the right place to put our impulses, the right way to speak to use our tongues, the right way to use our ears, to use our eyes, in little small moments. And when we find the impulses to do things that we know are destructive, we find we don't chastise them because then they hide in the basement or they become a creature that eventually we're running from, and eventually, we have to face, and it will kill us and tear us apart. That's a metaphor because we haven't made peace with it yet. We haven't found a gentle way of understanding what it is, where it's coming from, and bringing it in.

That's the real meaning of redemption. It's not to annihilate monsters. It's to transform them, to make a place for them, to find a connection with them. To understand, empathize, to bring into the heart. So we have a reason we need to do that. We need to bring the darkness into it; that's part of what we do to feel soulful and real, and true about life. This is why most people get upset when they hear astrologers, like myself and other spiritual people, talking about spiritual life and the difficulty of resisting all of the temporary, transient, fleeting temptations of materialism. They say no, I'm this is sacred. I'm here for a reason, right? And they get fired up like that. And that's good. The impulse is correct because we're trying to find a place for everything. We're not creatures of renunciation; we're creatures of love.

In bhakti yoga, we have a way of dealing with this, and I'm going to talk about it in a minute. The science of bhakti yoga is directly in connection to how to deal with how to include how to say yes to how to love everything, especially our human experiences, especially those flaws and faults, Freddy's, Chucky's, Jason's, especially the pirates, and especially the smugglers, right? The reality of, of in my life when I was a kid of the pirate, and the smuggler and these other figures that I was transfixed by. I understand now that these were figures that were already taking me on a very subconscious level into the desire for soul-making. That's the phrase that was given by the famous archetypal psychologist James Hillman who was a great student of Carl Jung. He said that we need to be better at soul-making and stop being so obsessive about trying to heal, fix and redeem everything, which is just a hero-villain, you know, Horror Story movie where the good guy and good girl run away and don't get hacked to pieces the rest do, but there's a couple that lives, and that's not the moral of the story here on life.

That's what Hillman said. He was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for writing a book called Revisioning Psychology which I highly recommend you check out, which was all about the need to incorporate to make soul out of life. Soul is the meeting ground for archetypes that seem opposing energies that seem opposite, that can find not some kind of perfect Oneness but some kind of place, a name. Everything in creation, from Hillman's perspective, was very similar to what we think about in bhakti yoga is the divine play, the divine Leela, everything has its place, and if we're not doing that, we're in trouble. So I realized that when I was a kid and I was looking at the pirate and looking at The smuggler that that was what I was looking for, something real, something serious, something edgy. I don't just want the fake mustaches. And I don't just want the bandanas tied around the hat and the plastic swords and the fishing for crap in the swimming pool. And as everyone had left and I was sitting there, I remember specifically was in the garage, and the garage had leftover pizza and cake sitting around. And I remember sitting there going; nothing serious happened. Nothing actually like the pirates happened. And I thought that if we all got together and played pirate that it would be the way that I thought it would. It's interesting to contemplate this on a birthday of all days.

Really, we're all born into the same dilemma. We're born thinking this life; there is something at stake. I have to smuggle something out of the world as it is. Or steal something out of the world as it is because it's not giving me the goods. It's not giving me the real thing. I'm not satisfied. I think a lot of people feel this way. I think that one of the reasons pirates are so appealing that putting on costumes is so appealing. That the dark, you know, messed up, Chucky Jason. What's the other one? The girl? I can't remember Stephen King. You know, I'm talking about the girl who goes completely bonkers. I think she gets her period. And then she, like, goes crazy and kills everyone. At school, Carrie, is that it? Okay. The same thing, though, right? We're looking for something real? Where is it? I'm there sure there's an innocent little child in me who needs, you know, a simple, overarching unified world in which to move about and do things that are good and just and true. Fine. But I'm also looking for the Berzerker. Right? I'm also there is something else here. And it's lurking. And I want to know what it is because this other thing is a little placid. What's the horror movie Lake Placid? I think it's a horror movie. I want to know because I don't buy it, that it's just supposed to work like this. And that's supposed to make me happy. And then I die someday.

I'm not looking for some cake and pizza here. I want to slit someone's throat and steal some real gold. Do you know what I mean? Like, come on. And maybe you know, it's a false king's gold that I want to steal, or I want a complicated plot. And I want it to be true and real and complex. I need shades of light and dark. We feel this way all the time. And we try to make room for it all the time. Sometimes, unfortunately, the only way in which we know how to make room for it is through gross characterizations. Well, there's the lone shooter. There's the horror movie, you know, there are so we don't know how to make space for the dark, to the extent that it shows up in the most hideous, grossly exaggerated things in media in the news, blah, blah, blah. And then we go, I just can't believe the world. I just can't believe that this, this would exist, this horrible thing would exist. And it's like, well, but do we make room for it every day? Are we real about the crazy thoughts running through our head? Are we real about our fears? Are we real about our hopes or expectations and our desires? Most of the time, when people have complex, difficult, or, you know, challenging thoughts and desires, we just skip past them. We dismiss, we chastise, we say no, you know, whatever. And then we can't figure out why we're obsessed with serial killer movies or serial killer Netflix episodes or whatever. Do you know what I mean? Not saying that. I've got it figured out, either. I just noticed this about myself. And I've noticed it about people that I work with. And I think it's real.

So after that party was done, and I was sitting there, nothing really happened. Nothing. You know, there was something that's not what the pirates are about. You know, it's interesting. From that moment forward, I stopped liking pirates and playing with them. I consider that to be like an initiation looking backward. We don't have a lot of initiations in our world any longer. Initiations are important because initiations help you help us to develop. For example, in certain cultures in this world, if you've ever read Mircea Eliades's great book on shamanism, kind of historical, anthropological, and spiritual look at global expressions of shamanism.

Certain tribes would cut open a young boy's thigh to give him a womb and then put him in a womb under the earth for a little bit and make him kind of cook there. That's dark. Right? And when I went through my first Ayahuasca ceremonies in the middle of the jungle, like, it was stern, and it was fierce, and it was completely terrifying, and it was dark. That's not all it was. But it was that, right? It wasn't what I was raised with. And I'm gonna be a little critical of this, even though I'm not an education expert or anything, but when I was raised, like, everyone got an award for everything, just everything. You came in 12th place out of 12, you got the most special kid in the universe award like, and I remember how shocking it was when I went through the ceremonies for me anyway. And I realized, like, you're not special. You're alive. Be thankful that you're alive. Because, you know, you're actually living in a tooth-and-nail reality. And I'm like, No, it's not tooth and nail. It's beautiful. It's good. It's blah blah blah. But no, these ceremonies were relentless. In showing me my own inner Chucky, you know what I mean? And it was, it was scary. But the work of those ceremonies was to give it a place. That's what initiations do. How can we not? How can we experience initiation of heart and soul emotion? If we don't have things set up to do it in a healthy way, instead, we have initiation by your high school getting shot up, right? Instead, we have initiation by, you know, terrible incidents with opiate addiction in our country where people have to write my own walk to Ayahuasca in my early 20s, which I wrote a book about, was perpetuated because I got addicted to opiates and ended up looking for a kind of irregular or untrue, nontraditional way of getting myself some healing for addiction.

People are struggling with so much these days, and we say oh, it's because of the moral failings of the leadership. Oh, it's because of this. No, it's really simple. It's because we don't have meaningful spiritual, religious community ways of moving into and through darkness. What happens in Star Wars in The Empire Strikes Back, arguably the scorpionic of the three episodes from the original Star Wars series, Luke Skywalker, has to go into the cave of darkness. And Yoda says leave your weapon behind. You won't need it. He takes it in any way. And what does he see? Darth Vader; cuts off Darth Vader's head, the mask falls open, and he sees his own face. There.

In order to see ourselves as spirit souls, we have to see darkness, and we have to see ourselves in it. We have to be implicated in it, not just conquer it, fix it, and heal it. There are so many redemption stories. There are so many remedies; there are so many fixes. There are so many heals; everyone's an expert. And the bad thing about this and material or the material culture that we're in is as soon as you have any kind of initiation with darkness. We then think Well, that's it; you had an initiation with darkness. And that's, that's good. Now you can have a career. Now you can be famous; now you can write a book. Here's what I did right away. I look back on it. And I think to myself, well, of course, one of the first things that I was told by culture around me and by myself by my own ego was, oh, you had an encounter with darkness that was a real initiation, then you should be an expert about it. Or go write a book about it and try to get famous about it. Go get your yoga teacher training certification, be an astrologer show everyone that your trauma led you to be a healer. I look at this in having time and experience, and I just realized that I'm very lucky and fortunate that I kept getting some sense knocked into me because all too often in our world, because of your initiation experience with darkness. If you are lucky enough to have one, that's not traumatizing.

Our initiation experience with darkness is not a permission slip to go and turn it into a business. Most of the time, it's evidence that we're ready to start thinking seriously about who we are and what our gifts might be, and very seldomly does that mean that you're necessarily a healer. You might be a healer by virtue of having seen darkness and being able to help other people find themselves in dark times. Right? But it doesn't mean that you have the skill to go and be something like that. So we have; we both avoid darkness, or we try to capitalize on it after we've had an experience with it. Instead of just being like that was an initiation. Think about how common initiation is in other cultures and at other times in the world. It's not something that you then set up a shop in the marketplace about; it's something that everybody goes through. Now I'm being a little idealistic. There have always been problems throughout millennia of people who are robbed or stripped of the ability to have an initiation.

Scorpio season is about the need that we have to initiate contact with darkness. But it's the initiation; the contact with darkness is something that we need to wrestle with. It's something that we need to stick with. It's something that we need to be with, hence the fixed nature of the sign. It's something that we need to let in, hence the receptive nature of the sign. So when we talk about Scorpio as obsessive, paranoid, jealous, etc. We're talking about very superficial levels of response to what Scorpio season requires of us. It requires I go deep; I'm afraid I'm paranoid. It requires that we look at the potential for darkness. I'm jealous, I'm worried. It requires that we, you know, go deep; I hate anything that's superficial. Those are superficial responses to what Scorpio season is really inviting us to do, and that should not be what defines Scorpio. Right? What defines Scorpio is not obsessiveness, betrayal, paranoia, jealousy, purposely being vindictive or destructive, intense and brooding. No, those are things that happen if you are not finding meaningful ways to initiate contact with darkness, if you're not finding the actual pirate party that you want to be at if it's just a costume ball.

So one of the ways that we also try to initiate contact with darkness, legitimately, is through art, through costume, through Masquerade. Right? So there's, it can actually be very playful. It doesn't have to be like, you know, we have to go out and, you know, stab yourself in the leg or so die bleed, you know, pound potions in the jungle and scream our brains out at the bats. Don't it doesn't have to be that intense. It can be playful; the experience of darkness can be playful. I'm not opposed to people watching a scary movie, right? It's not what I'm saying. But what we need to understand is that so much of what we say about Scorpio is superficial in comparison to what Scorpio season means spiritually to what the God of war in the feminine water sign is actually all about.

The element of water in Indian astrology has a lot to do with moksha, which is liberation; that's the spiritual impulse to leave behind the trappings of the material world. People mistake that impulse all the time for saying no to dark things. It's not a judgment upon the material world to need, transcend or connect to spirit. Spirit is the consciousness by means of which both the dark and the light find their place resolved in consciousness in soul. So it's not about saying spirit; the impulse to spirit to be free from the material world is not the impulse to reject it. It's the impulse to say yes to it but to say yes to all of it. And in order to do that, in order to really do that, it requires a lot? Because we can say that it's nice, like yeah, like I say yes to the darkness. But it's a lot harder to do when you have to say yes to it in your family. And you have to say yes to it in abuse and suffering. No, no, no. Once that comes up, then we're heroes, then we're conquering over evil, then we're rising above darkness. And that keeps us entangled in the material world just as much as anyone who's out there being destructive and evil. We don't think about it that way because we're not thinking regularly about the reality of the soul. This deep, rich, fertile soil that wants the plant of everything to take root. It doesn't.

To do this, some people think oh, you're just going to glorify the darkness; it's not about glorifying the darkness either. That would be to get lost in the cycles of samsara again. So it's finding a place for it. How do you Give it a reality, how do you give it shape? We need archetypes during this time of year. That helped us into the complexity of divinity, the labyrinth of divinity, the dimly lit catacombs of divinity, into the matrix of how everything that appears evil, dark, heavy, distrustful that we're watching, that we're guarded against, that we're afraid will get us. It requires us to move into an understanding of how yes, that is God too. Not easy.

That's why people tend to stick to the surface when they talk about Scorpio, paranoid, jealous, intense, emotionally confrontational, and deep. Moksha, the water sign, means that this time of year is contemplative. We need to contemplate things that are sophisticated and deep, and subtle all at once. Like, for example, what is wine? Why is wine and the God of wine and beer festivals and Renaissance festivals? Why are they popular this time of year? It's Dyonesian, right? The God of wine and drunkenness and things like that. We need to contemplate dismemberment, destruction decay because there's sweetness in there as well. That's how wine is made. Jesus didn't turn water into water; Jesus turned water into wine. This is important and then was dismembered. There are Dionysian archetypal elements, even in the story of Christ. Again, oftentimes, I don't like to recognize them because I'm focused on Calvary baby, getting into the Sun, you know. But so much of the story of Jesus is about betrayal. It's about jealousy on behalf of other religious people, religious and spiritual people. It's about being torn apart, dismembered, and torture, and it's about saying yes to it. That's what's really beautiful about the story of Jesus; if you asked me.

It's saying, Yeah, this to when and when he dies; it's finished, it's complete, it's complete. So Scorpio is not messing around in terms of what it really requires of us. But there are simple things that we can do to honor this, and actually, this season can be very, very sweet. In Bhakti, in the study of Bhakti, the spiritual science of bhakti yoga, it is the science of how to love God; it is the yoga of loving God; how do you do that? In Bhakti, there are many methods that you do to develop and grow attachment, love, and affection for God, who, as you know, most traditions tell us, is in everything. Part of that requires studying the way in which love are any feature of human relationships that can be understood in terms of the divine relationship between God and the other, which would be in this case in Krishna, Bhakti, Radha, and Krishna, or you or I and divinity, you or I and our higher self and the source of our higher self. We have to have a relationship with our own souls as egos in a temporary framework. Our souls have to try to wake up and cultivate a relationship with their source. And then, in Bhakti, we study all the different kinds of Leela's plays, like Shakespeare, where different kinds of connections to divinity play out in all human emotions, all of them. And in all kinds of happenings in human relationships, all of them are put into the context of divinity.

So, for example, one of my favorite stories at this time of year we celebrate Kartik in the bhakti tradition, which is a month that's dedicated to the little childhood stages of the stories of Krishna. And one of the things is that Krishna is a thief. Krishna is a butter thief. He steals butter, and he's mischievous. He is a mischievous little rebel, renegade, and smuggler thief. And one of the simplest things that we can overlook with all of the, you know, so many times, right, because once you get it, you're like, oh, wow, Scorpio season demands so much.

One of the things to do is to recognize that it demands as much of us whether we are little little children, whether we are teenagers, or whether we're adults, or whether we're very old elders. The requirement doesn't change the depth and intensity of trying to hold space, for darkness is something that takes place at all stages of life. In all valences, it's my daughter getting used to a nightlight; it's my daughter turning off the nightlight for the first time. It's my daughter asking about monsters in the closet. It's my daughter enjoying fairy tales that, frankly, are sometimes really dark, but she really enjoys them. And she's almost four. So similarly, one of the interesting things that we see in Krishna bhakti is that one of the best ways to celebrate autumn is to look into the trickster, the thief, and the complicated, rebellious, mischievous child of Krishna. And that shows up in the autumn, as the dark is growing.

There's no better way to reconcile with darkness than to trust that when something comes to take us away from the light, like often in Plutonian stories, like with Persephone and Demeter and like this. The young, innocent girl is stolen, abducted down into the underground, and down into the underworld. And this is a natural way that life has of teaching us initiation into the darkness into the underworld. It robs us of our youth that pulls us down.

How does that look? And how does that feel? How does that change? When we are in the practice of regularly softening our hearts, when we are regularly in the practice of turning to God with love, however, we do that and connecting, just talking, being present, being like you're with me all the time. I know you're always with me. That divine presence, and it's personal, right? When we develop, we cultivate that in a personal. How does that impact when darkness comes? When darkness comes and takes us away? Suddenly from something? Instead of us seeing a looming overlord that's pulling us down into something? We see a butter thief, we see a charming, mischievous child, and we say I'm curious, just like a child is curious as to why something is stealing something from me right now. Why has this thing leaped up and taken me away? Pulled me out, pulled something away from me. Why has it gone? Why is this darkness suddenly appearing? We can get curious about it when we learn to reframe the appearance of that darkness in terms of archetypes that create bridges, like smugglers, thieves, pirates, rogues, and things that come in guides like Mercury Hermes, who is often accompanied in stories about Hades.

So it's very interesting to me that one of the celebrations in the Krishna bhakti tradition that happens at this time of year is the mischievous thief renegade, smuggler little boy Krishna. Because I think that if we want to open our hearts to darkness, we will keep re-traumatizing ourselves. If we think of, you know, the darkness as a good but necessary evil, something like that. Can we get curious about it? Can we imagine? that there is a trickster? Can we imagine that? Like Trick or treat? Can we imagine that there is a mischievous child? It doesn't have to be Chucky. Do you know what I mean? That brings us and initiates us into darkness. Until we learn to see the sweetness, the innocence, the love that's present in the thing that tries to pull us to reconcile with darkness, we will continue to ascribe to its faces in the Zodiac, especially Scorpio things like paranoid, jealous, possessive, obsessive, etc. That's what will happen.

So I hope that this talk on the nature of Scorpio has been interesting for you, and I hope it's given you some good things to think about if you're a Scorpio; I hope this feels validating to you. Scorpio is not who you are. Scorpio is something that is describing the field of karma that's very real to you; remember that too. Okay, I hope you guys have a great day and a good weekend to come. Take care, everyone. Bye.