Credit: Susan Stolovy (SSC/Caltech) et al., JPL-Caltech, NASA

We’re just weeks away now from the 2012 Winter Solstice.  The Sun’s approaching alignmenment with the powerful and mysterious Galactic Center opens a profound gateway for humanity, on the energetic level where mythos and kairos intersect and new worlds are created.  

This is the creative level from which cause and effect arise like signals.  Mythos  refers to the stories that carry life’s truth and meaning for us. The ancient Greek word kairos describes a special quality of time—not the ticking of the hours on the clock, but the arrival of the opportune moment, the right time to shift our awareness, our actions, and our lives.

Astrologers disagree about the significance of any one date in the epochal shift that is underway as we make the transition from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius. Another index of the scale of this shift is the movement of the great star Regulus from Leo to Virgo. These events unfold on timelines so vast that a day, or even a year, are hardly noticeable.

One fact is inarguable, however.  The shift of ages is underway—within us and all around us.  On the deepest levels we sense that and feel an ancient need to ritualize the great transformation that is underway.  We need to mark the moment and call it sacred.

Indeed, the long-heralded moment that is coming towards us arises from within us, at the level of mythos and kairos.  In a very real sense, the whole of 2012 and its mighty shifts is such a moment—from the entrance of Neptune into his own sign of Pisces and of Uranus the Awakener into the zodiac’s first sign, Aries, early in the year, to Venus’ transit across the Sun in June, the first two of the seven world-changing squares of Uranus and Pluto in June and September, and two pairs sof extraordinary eclipses in May and June and then in November.  In ways that we cannot yet fully comprehend, the worlds within us and around us have been forever altered.

Now, as we make the final approach to the 2012 Solstice, the stage is already being set for the next act.  A key player, from last week’s lunar eclipse to the Solstice itself, is Jupiter the Blessing Giver. His energy of expansion, faith, and abundance, will have been unleashed not once but twice in a powerful yod with life-changing power.   Known as the Finger of God, this yod also carries great challenge, in precisely the degree necessary to unlock its extraordinary potential. Expand your consciousness, the Blessing Giver is telling us, so that you can expand your life.

Star Power to the Blessing Giver:  The Sun and Jupiter

Auroras are the visible residues of powerful electromagnetic encounters between the Sun and the Earth. Image Courtesy of Joseph Bradley.

The Sun play a singular role in the cosmos that surrounds us and also in the energetic version of the sky that we carry within us.  As the star at the center,  providing Earth with light and warmth,  the Sun is the giver of life and purpose.   It’s the largest body by far in our solar system—and in the top 10% of all the stars in the great Multiverse beyond.  Astrologically, the Sun represents the divine spark at our center.  It reveals our conscious purpose, our creativity, authority, and capacity for joy.

The Sun’s return to its birth position in the sky, which happens once each year, is a cosmic event.  This meeting, which can occur either on our actual birthday or on the day before or after it, is known as the solar return.  It is the moment each year that our inner spark is renewed and strengthened. And it creates an energy pattern that forecasts the energetic trends for an entire year, until the Sun next visit its home location in the inner cosmos.

Oppositions:  Intimate Encounters of the Second Kind

Our star’s meetings with the other energies in our natal cosmos, and in the dynamic, constantly moving universe around us, are also profoundly renewing and regeneration.  Two moments in are especially powerful in our evolving consciousness:

•  The conjunction occurs when the Sun meets another planet in the same degree of the sky, flooding its energy with stellar radiance.
• The opposition takes place at the moment when the Sun confronts each planet from directly across the sky.

In our culture, the term “opposition” is a loaded one.  It implies antagonism and conflict. That’s always a possibility, of course, just as it is when any two people confront each other.  Yet something much more creative and vital is also possible at the moment of opposition.  This is when truly conscious relationship becomes possible.  When two planets sit across the sky from each other, they have full awareness of who the other is–and of the fact that the other is not them.  This is the whole point of relationship—not to absorb another person into our identity, or to be absorbed by them, but to know and love them for who they truly are.

The Secret of the Happy Relationship: Loving the Distance Between Us

The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke put this beautifully:  “A merging of two people is an impossibility,” he wrote in Letters to a Young Poet, “and where it seem to exist, it is a hemming-ina mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development.  But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exists, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always  seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky”  (italics and boldface mine).

The month of December brings star power to two of our solar system’s great powers.  On the last day of 2012, the Sun will conjunct Pluto, infusing the Transformer with its radiant light.  And today and tomorrow, the Sun encounters Jupiter the Blessing Giver from exactly across the sky. Although this meeting happens each year in whatever sign Jupiter is moving through, it is never more potent than when Jupiter is either in Sagittarius, the sign that it rules, or in Gemini, the reality-creating polarity of Sagittarius. 

This encounter releases energy.  We feel it  in our shared reality and we feel it in the inner energetic pattern that is uniquely ours.  Wherever the Jupiter-Sun opposition falls in our inner skies, we’re likely to feel a surge of exuberance.  This is where our inner universe will be infused with the Jupiter-Sagittarian generosity, optimism, and faith in what the Buddhists call life’s “basic goodness.”  All we have to do is allow it.

This surge of good feeling make over-doing a distinct possibility.  That’s really the only downside of a close encounter with the Blessing Giver.  Depending on where we experience the opposition, we can over-spend, over-commit, over-eat.  Imbued with a deep sense a deep sense of what the Buddhists call life’s ‘basic goodness,’ it’s possible to be overwhelmed for a moment by life’s possibilities.  It’s also possible to be transformed.

Towards the Solstice and the Shift

Jupiter’s 2012 meeting with the Sun takes place in two degrees of extraordinary power.  The Sun occupies a degree saturated with the ability to bring our noblest ideals to life through the power of our spiritual—not our egoic–will.   For his part, the Blessing Giver is still in the powerful degree he occupied at last week’s lunar eclipse, carrying the ability to expand our lives by liberating ourselves from the ghosts of the past.  As we turn the corner to the moment when mythos intersects with kairos, the Universe is pushing and prodding each one of us.  “Leave the past behind,” we are being told, each one of us.  “Focus your will and bring your ideals to life. Know yourself as a world-creator. The time is now.”