Today’s New Moon is in Leo, the sign of our Star, and of the Cosmic Heart that beats within us all.

Here’s the truest indicator that we’ve reached a watershed in the global initiation process that began a little over a year ago:   we already know it. No one needs to tell us. Unless we are choosing not to feel (and it’s clear that there are those who are choosing just that), we know it.

That’s what over a year of some of the most extraordinary astrology in the history of the world will do to a receptive awareness.  And nothing is slowing down any time soon. We’re now just eight days past the extraordinary sacred geometry known to some as the Merkaba or the Star Tetrahedron, and to others as the Star of David.  We’re also at the “cross-quarter” point exactly between two of the great energetic hinges of the cosmic year, the Summer Solstice and the Autumnal Equinox.  And on this day, the ancient festival of the harvest’s first fruits, new energy is being created in the sign of our Star.

Wherever the middle of the sign of Leo falls in your inner sky, a miracle is taking place today, in the dark far beneath the surface of your life.  At 5:51 p.m. EDT, when the Sun and Moon move into the same degree of Leo, the seed energy of a new beginning will come to life in the sign of the heart.

The astrological meaning of the heart is an ancient one that has more to do with an intimate, participatory perception of the world than with emotions.

We’ve come to think of the heart as the realm of the emotions.  Astrology, however,shows us something different. The emotions are the domain of the Sun’s polar complement, the Moon.  The heart is ruled by the Sun and its role is an ancient one. It’s the heart that  perceives the the cosmic order and it meaning.  

The Heart and Its Eye

In a beautiful essay entitled “The Eye of the Heart,” cultural ecologist Beth Carruthers explains this understanding:  “In the ancient world, the organ of perception was the heart and it is beauty that opens the heart, and so this forms a circle of being.  So the opening of the heart, the imaginative heart, is how we are open to the world, to the heart of the world.”

In fact, Carruthers explains, the Greek word for perception was aisthesis— “[which] means at root a breathing in, or taking in, of the world, the gasp, “aha”, the “uh’ of the breath in wonder, shock, amazement, anaesthetic response.” 

This moment of wonderment, she continues, “might also be thought of as . . . the moment when we become simply present – when everything else falls away, when we fall off the edge of our map and into the world. Our preconceptions fall away for that moment and the world can shine forth in its own being.”

When this moment of Presence occurs, Carruthers notes, we “meet and return the radiant gaze of the world.”   In such a moment, the world becomes re-enchanted. Something intimate and deeply participatory takes place.  “It is through the eye of the heart  … we come to know in the most intimate way.”   

When that happens, we experience love as the Jewish mystic Martin Buber defined it–not a feeling, but a cosmic force. It is this cosmic force — Love — that’s behind all healing, transformation, and evolution.

It’s Love then, that is, just as the Beatles sang, “all we need.”  Without Love, our intelligence is sterile. The Zen Buddhist monk, teacher, author, poet, and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh puts it this way: “we are intelligent enough, but we are not loving enough.” “Information will not get us where we need to go, Carruthers concurs, “only this deep knowing.” 

The New Moon and the Merkaba: Fulfilling the Sacred Intention

This “deep knowing” is exactly the energetic intention of last week’s Star Tetrahedron / Merkaba / Star of David.  Although we received the imprint, integrating it is the work ahead of us. This work will not happen through our minds. It will happen through the heart.

The ground within us and around us has been broken during the first three of the seven titanic squares of Uranus the Awakener and Pluto the Transformer, between June 2012 and May 2013.  These cosmic shock waves have opened us so that we can receive the Merkaba’s evolutionary imprint.  What we make of it depends on the choices made by our hearts.

Jupiter Confronts Pluto: Power Confronts Grace

The New Moon comes as the mighty Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, triggers both Pluto and Uranus and the conflict between them that is shaking – and remaking — our world down to its very core.

Immediately after the New Moon, the Jupiter-Pluto opposition becomes exact. For the next two weeks, these two will magnify and intensify issues of power, creativity and nurturing that have been stirring at our depths.  The questions that the Cosmos is asking each of us can only be explored by the heart:

• How do we claim our deepest, most authentic power — our creative, evolutionary star power?  How do we avoid the temptation to corrupt our star power with manipulation or control?

• How do we begin to feel and to heal what is wounded in the web of life – starting within us — without being reactive or escapist?  How do we respond with our hearts to pain in ourselves and in our world?

We are entering more deeply into an energy field that is transformative beyond anything we have ever experienced.  The transformation begins with us.  It begins in our hearts.

“Recognising our part in the intertwined Being of the world is to welcome uncertainty, relinquishing illusions of absolute control,“ Beth Carruthers reminds us.  “In the words of James Hillman: ‘Let the heart be stirred!’”