We’ve turned a corner.  Before our eyes, the Cosmos is dissolving an old reality and creating the conditions for a new one. The great cycles of time aren’t just ending–and beginning—all around us. Before they ever happen around us, these epic endings and beginnings occur within us.

Let’s recall some of what we’ve already experienced, and the ways our lives have begun to change:

• Neptune the Cosmic Dreamer entered his own sign of Pisces, taking on a potency he hasn’t had since the last time he was here, more than a century and a half ago.  Are you feeling more empathetic and intuitive in your approach to life?
• Venus, the Cosmic Feminine, passed across the Sun.  Have important issues in your relationships begun to resolve, one way or another?
• A solar eclipse just two weeks before Venus’ passage released the energy of the most magical part of the sky, the Pleiades, onto the Earth.  Have you begun, somewhere in your life, to transform sorrow into bliss?
• A lunar eclipse days before Venus’ passage ignited the irresistible, mysterious power of the Great Attractor.  Can you sense the possibilities of the future pulling your life forward?
• The world-changing vibrations of Uranus the Cosmic Awakener and Pluto the Cosmic Regenerator collided not once, but twice.  Are you sensing there’s a much bigger picture that your life is a part of?
• Venus entered Virgo, the ancient sign of the Goddess, illuminated for the first time in history by the presence there of the storied royal star, Regulus.  Are you beginning to sense your connection with the Universe in the day-to-day ways you nurture your own life?
• Saturn, Lord of Karma and Angel of the Present, journeyed through the portion of the fabled Via Combusta where he is exalted and gives the power to redraw reality’s boundaries.  Are you redefining the way you relate to long-standing patterns of relating to life?

Our Shamanic Memory of the Oneness

Over and over, we’re all getting direct and first-hand access to the great stream of life that runs through everything—and it’s changing us. More and more of us are feeling its presence and power, deep within us. Since the beginning of time, the first peoples of the world have tapped this cosmic force. The practices that have allowed them to do so are captured by a single word, drenched in mystery and power–shamanic.  Anthropologist Robinette Kennedy (www.robinettekennedy.com), one of the leading-edge investigators of shamanic practice alive today, tells us that the ecstatic awareness of shamanic states is whole-brain consciousness. The state we know as ordinary reality is actually a shrunken form of awareness.

Kennedy’s research has probed deeply into ancient shamanic practices on the Greek island of Crete, home of the fabled Minoan culture.  The stunning implications of her work have yet to be fully recognized: at the earliest roots of Western culture are the expanded states of awareness that  cross boundaries of time, space, and dimensionality.  Wherever our cultural origins lie—whether in the West or the East–the memory of the Oneness lives within us all.  It’s waiting there now, in our Deep Memory.  What it connects us to is our true, cosmic home.  In 2012, home is calling us.  It’s when we tap the power of this Oneness that things can really begin to flow in our lives.

Last week a friend and I had the wonderful experience of touring an exhibition of shamanic visionary art, “For I Am the Black Jaguar,” with Robinette Kennedy.  As we gazed upon clay jaguar masks and crocodile vessels at the Michael C. Carlos Museum here in Atlanta, Robinette talked about the nature of shamanic practices.  They allow us to experience, first-hand and unmediated, the great secret our culture tries to keep from us:  the cosmos is one organism, and we are part of it.  In the most fundamental sense, we are knitted into the Oneness.  And it is woven into us as well, in every cell of our being.

As we wandered through the galleries, I was struck as never before by the energetic connections between the cosmic reality experienced in shamanic states and the cosmic reality described by astrology.  The objects of visionary art we were looking at were created for sacred ceremonies.  Everywhere we turned there were vessels and masks. There in the museum galleries I realized what the ancient wisdom was telling us.  We too are vessels.  We are vessels for cosmic energy.  In every choice we make and ever action we take, we’re containing, and expressing, that energy. 

The Shamanic Nature of Cosmic Reality

Today, we step through another gateway.   Saturn and Mercury, arm in arm,  will enter the deep transformative waters of Scorpio. The work of reshaping reality is about to become very serious.  This reshaping starts where everything does—inside of each of us.

We don’t normally think of Saturn as a shamanic energy.  We think of him as the ruler of structures, boundaries, and effort. He’s also the ruler of the world of form.  In truth, nothing is more shamanic—more shape-shifting and infused with intention and energy—than matter.  When Saturn is in Scorpio, we begin to understand the tremendous energy and life-changing power of our deepest desires.

To sweeten the pot, Saturn steps into a very potent relationship with Pluto when he enters Scorpio. Called “mutual reception” by astrologers (meaning that Saturn is in the sign ruled by Pluto and Pluto is in the sign ruled by Capricorn), it enhances the powers of both. At the Winter Solstice, Pluto and Saturn will be creating extraordinary opportunities for transformation with an exact sextile to each other. This energy of opportunity will remain “live” throughout almost all of 2013.

For You are the Cosmic Shape-Shifter

The world’s shamans have long known what Western scientists have only recently discovered: we’re woven into the fabric of  cosmic reality. We’re in no way separate from it.  At this moment, unparalleled in human history, the Cosmos is inviting you, and me, and all of us, to dive into reality’s shamanic depths and take up the great work of shape-shifting reality.

How do we do that?  We’re smart to remember the advice the centaur Chiron gave to Hercules in the ancient myth.  As he set off to slay the monster, the young hero was counseled, “We rise by kneeling, we conquer by surrendering, we gain by letting go.”

The monsters we face now are different, but no less dangerous. To know ourselves as inseparable from the entire Cosmos and to allow this awareness to take root within our own lives, we’ll need to take Chiron’s advice.  We’ll need to release all around us and within us that does not serve the life force.  We’ll need to eliminate what is unnecessary to our heart’s deepest desires.  We’ll need to honor Life.  Minute by minute, we’ll need to invoke the Mystery.