Neptune and Triton three days after Voyager's flyby; photo
by NASA/JPL.

Full Moon @ 11 Sagittarius 49'

June 2, 2015

12:19 PM Eastern

9:19 PM Pacific

I was never taught that the world was a magical place. That sounds like some sappy new age rhetoric, but I think that it’s fundamentally true. Life can be magical. I was never told that synchronicity underpinned reality or that it happened every day. I wasn’t aware that some completely unconscious aspect of me, my psyche, was actually making all of my decisions. I learned to objectify nature, myself, and my body—to perceive the natural world as a product to be exploited for financial gain. I was molded by a mundane shell, a perceptual prison constructed out of banality.

But I didn’t always see things that way. There was a time, pre-social conditioning, when I saw the world as magical and the future filled with endless possibilities. But somehow I forgot. That promising vista of magical wonder faded like a naive childhood dream, recollected only as some vague and distant memory. Our cultural worldview is tainted by what astrologer and historian Richard Tarnas calls cosmological disenchantment. It’s quite a pandemic, and something most of us raised in a western industrialized nation have been conditioned by.

We have to make the effort to regain that magical wonder of the world around us. Most of the time it takes “divine” intervention or a hefty psychedelic trip to restore the original vision that is every human’s birthright. If it doesn’t happen before or at our Saturn return, we may never recapture it. Reality beats us down. As we grow older, we realize that life, while inherently magical and serendipitous, has its limitations.

Sometimes those limitations suffocate us until we give in to the mundane and become slaves to the illusion of time. This month’s Full Moon culminates in the tropical sign of Sagittarius just after the midpoint of Mercury’s current retrograde cycle in Gemini. If you’ve made it this far, you’re in a period of restoration, recovery and perhaps regaining trust that while bad things sometimes happen, there’s often a reason for it.

Sagittarius is a sign we associate with widening perception, seeking a larger, encompassing cosmology or ideological perception that gives us the ability to see the deeper meaning behind the mundane reality before us. As our cosmology changes, so does the everyday world around us. This is the interplay of Sagittarius and Gemini. Our wider cosmological perceptions affect the world of everyday objects. As our understanding expands, so does our prosaic experience.

I used to think that telling people bad things happen for a reason was like dishing out some kind of empty, meaningless platitude to keep people from feeling empathy. Sometimes that’s probebly true. But my experience of Mercury retrograde cycles, and life itself has shown me that there’s some truth to it. Sometimes negative experiences or accidents offer us an opportunity to glimpse another reality if only for a moment. Bad things happen for a reason because, perhaps, the whole point of our existence is to gain consciousness and awareness.

Sometimes the universe needs to slap us upside the head, as if to say, “Hey, idiot! Wake up!” If you read my blog consistently, chances are that you’re one of those souls that intend to acquire more awareness this lifetime compared to other people. That doesn’t make you better or special, but maybe wiser; maybe you’ve been around the block a few more times. And then again, maybe not, who really knows.

Neptune makes a square to this Full Moon axis while the Sun finds itself pitted between Mercury retrograde and Mars in Gemini. This Full Moon challenges you to wake up to the magic of your everyday experience, not through delusion, denial, drugs or escapism, but through a conscious collaboration with reality the way that it actually is. What you may have forgotten, is that life is magical. Reality is governed by the laws of synchronicity. What your teachers and those pundits of scientism never told you about is abundantly clear if you’re receptive enough to notice it.

And conversely, reality has its limitations. There are rules that we must follow. Too much immersion in a magical world can render us the peur or puella aeternus—the eternal boy or girl who never grows up. If that’s where you stand, this Full Moon may shed light on the fact that you need to come back to the world and become a part of all that is visually apparent and obvious. You may need to realize that magic can be found in the mundane because even the mundane can be magical.

And so what’s happening right in front you, your life, whether you like it or not, it’s what you need right now. Perhaps, it’s what you’ve chosen to experience, and there’s a pretty good reason for it. Don’t try to avoid it, even if it’s painful, even if it’s a little unsavory. And if it’s great, there’s no sense in idealizing that it will last forever. Life is always a beautiful balance of pain and ecstasy. We can’t always avoid the pain, but we can consciously choose more ecstasy if we’re willing to let go of our attachment to suffering.

And both experiences, the good and the bad, break us open. They serve to tear little holes in the mundane shell that was ambitiously constructed around us. Allow this Full Moon to chisel away some of that shell. Can you trust that some part of you that you are not consciously aware of is guiding you toward wholeness? Can you take the risk of trusting that pain has a purpose? Only you can decide. And that is your ultimate existential plight. Choose expansion with this lunation, but choose wisely and soberly. Where there is risk there is both opportunity and tragedy.

For personal readings and consultation, please e-mail me directly at kosmicmind@gmail.com