As many of you know, I'm a big fan of John Sandbach's Omega/Chandra symbols for the zodiacal degrees. Sandbach's writing about these symbols often helps me open to a slightly different perspective on the current astrology.
I wanted to share a gem from the degree symbol for today's eclipse Sun and Moon. (Total solar eclipse at 23 Sag 08' on December 14, 2020.) The Omega symbol for the 24th degree of Sag is:
A man in his imagination inventing flowers, the seeds of which magically appear.
This degree has a deep and vivid sense of what is possible. It it can just faithfully continue to focus on the immediate tasks at hand with patience and hope, all the beauty and wonder it has always envisioned with its mind’s eye will eventually manifest. It needs to accept the current moment of darkness as simply a step in the process of the coming light.
Imagination is our superpower
I love the sense of hope inherent in this image, and in the Chandra symbol: "A statue of Isis covered by a transparent veil."
It's a lot easier to bear the uncertainty, exhaustion, and disconnect so many of us have been feeling in this crazy year if we can actually accept that the current moment of darkness is, inevitably, leading to a new light.
How do we do this? The Omega symbol gives us the formula. We do it by actively engaging our imagination. We do it by imagining ourselves experiencing what we desire to create (or to do more or have more of).
Maybe this is world peace. Maybe it's feeling healthy, confident, and strong. Maybe it's having enough money or being held by someone who loves us or feeling free to be out in Nature with friends, playing, singing, and laughing.
The man in the symbol isn't thinking. He isn't thinking about what that person said on social media earlier today or formulating an argument to justify his position on the pandemic or politics. He is imagining. More than that, he is engaging in focused (and presumably quite detailed) imagination. Carl Jung called this active imagination.
Active imagination takes us out of the Beta brainwave frequencies associated with heightened alertness, increased stress and worry, and the use of language and concepts and into the Theta brainwave level. This level of brainwave frequencies creates a sense of pleasant relaxation in the body. Much like in dreams, in the Theta level of mind we can see vivid internal images. We can transcend psychological or linear time and travel freely to the past or the future. This level of brain function has been observed in Buddhist monks meditating and produces feelings of serenity and pleasure in the mind and body.
I remember in my time at Trance Camp, the great hypnotherapist Stephen Gilligan said that the rational mind is incapable of creating anything new. It can only analyze, order and comment on what is created in what Gilligan calls the generative unconscious mind.
The French psychologist and pioneer of "conscious autosuggestion," Emil Coué, said: "When the will and the imagination are opposed to one another, the imagination always wins."
What Coué meant by this is that our subconscious mental pictures exert a much stronger influence than our "conscious" (rational or egoic mind) thoughts.
I believe there is a concerted war on imagination by the entities or control structures that profit on human misery. We are swimming in a sea of narratives, perhaps this year more than ever before. Whenever we're checking social media on our phones, reading the news, or watching the umpteenth episode of the new Netflix series, we are filling our minds with other people's stories and imagery.
Media companies (including social media) and the advertisers who pay them have become adept at churning out programming designed to trigger a fear response in the users of their platforms and consumers of their content. This kind of story exerts an exponential effect on our imagination. Not only do we give up our own freedom of imagination while we're consuming this content, we are also locked out of our own imagination as long as we continue ruminating on the assertions or images we ingested as part of that content.
One of the most universally recognized strategies of the advertising industry is to hook our attention and create desire for a product or service with images and phrases that trigger a feeling of fear or lack. Good marketers know how to craft these messages so they slip beneath the surface of consciousness and penetrate straight into the subconscious or unconscious mind.
Unless you grew up in the woods and just recently wandered into civilization, you've ingested hundreds of thousands of these fear messages. Like a virus invades the cells in the body, these foreign images invade the Self, infecting our creative imagination and eroding our self-esteem.
One need look no further than the "learned helplessness" of the masses in the face of the global Covid psy-op for evidence our society is suffering from a massive deficit of self-esteem and loss of personal power.
In the six months until the next eclipse season, this degree symbol could serve to remind us of the godlike power of imagination that is our birthright. We can create the world we desire, but we must reclaim our power from those who invade our minds in order to control us.