By briefly examining the luminaries — the Sun and Moon — you can gain a clearer perspective on the solar system’s natural cycle of evoking a sense of purpose and wholeness through archetypes — “universal principles or forces that affect — impel, structure, permeate— the human psyche and human behavior on many levels” (1).
In short, astrology is a study of your soul’s intention to embody and evolve through particular archetypes in order for spiritual growth. You’re not just a human who can have spiritual experiences. You are a spiritual being having human experiences.
By learning the “curriculum” of your life path and karma that you’re working out to this end, you can live more empowered by your human circumstances, seeing each experience as an opportunity for growth instead of something that happened to you.
Eventually, you may feel what happens in your life as energy flowing through you and even as you since everything “outside” of your experience is ultimately another form of you. Life can either be a process of awakening to greater truth and connectedness or a process of further alienation/separation. And nothing in astrological study determines anything absolutely. This field is about empowerment and expansive thinking. It's certainly not about limitations.
The larger perspective of seeing your parents, the events in your life, and even your socio-cultural context as chosen paths to your spiritual evolution is incredibly empowering. So is connecting to a greater mythos and human narrative unfolding cosmically. So let’s dive in.
As a primary note, the Sun and Moon’s influence is determined by knowing what archetypal sign it currently resides in. To understand your soul’s evolution relative to that influence can be determined by knowing what sign either one (or a planet) was in at the exact time of your birth, tracing its evolutionary progression, and correlating respective planetary influences.
Astrologically, the planets and luminaries symbolically represent the raw energy or frequency that rules over an aspect of your being — and is connected to you mostly unconsciously, intelligently steering your evolutionary compass. Before you begin tracing what lens/filter (sign) that the energy expresses through or the stage/context (house) that the energy tends to play out, it’s important to clarify the differences between relating these characteristics to either the ego or a process of greater awakening.
This article will do just that, specifically for the two primary “planets” (luminaries) in our solar system. We’ll take a dive into a powerful way of waking to the sun, relating to the moon, and integrating your experiences for personal, collective, and transpersonal empowerment.
Astrology of the Sun
Symbolically, the Sun typically has a circle with a dot in the middle, which symbolizes wholeness (true aim) in life. In other words, a greater transcendent awareness exudes from a place of centeredness and wholeness; As you follow your true aim/inspiration in life, wholeness ensues.
At a basic level, the sun is your “big” self, radiating light and heat unconditionally and is representative of awareness (light) and presence (heat) to connect with creative inspiration. The sun is invested in awakening from the illusion of separation and the limitations of ego (unhealthy Moon) and is symbolic of unity consciousness (4).
The Sun emits an enormous amount of energy, illustrating the importance of awareness and presence of Oneness. It emanates constantly, indicating a constant reminder to wake up to the immense energy of spirit flowing through us.
The word quintessence sums up the Sun. Aether is the element which creates fire and is pertinent here. The great expanse of aether gives rise to fire just as a great expanse of space gives rise to your source of inspiration. The Sun connects you to the causal aspect of who you are — the space in which you are created, create, or will co-create.
Thereby, I see the Sun as closely representing our spiritual Self. It gives off light that stores information for the blueprint of who we are to become, how we tend to radiate. Today, scientists are exploring the hidden intelligence guiding the universe, even theorizing that the creation of DNA strands (life) is related to a transference of photonic packages by the Sun or other stars.
Many people use only the Sun sign as a guide to understanding Astrology because of its central prominence in our solar system. As the Sun shows your potential for awakening to the most enlivened self you can live, it can also be a projection board for the ego (and this nudges at issues with astrology finding a proper foothold in western culture today).
However, if you look more deeply, the ego actually expresses through the body (Moon) and has a great influence on wisdom traditions in the west due to its influence of Cartesian dualism on allopathic medicine, economic and political systems, and social imperatives today — a residual effect of a patriarchial inertia of dominance theorized as part of a greater cycle of the fall and rise of consciousness (Yuga Cycle) as described in The Great Year, narrated by James Earl Jones. Hindu and Vedic scholars spoke of the Yuga Cycle as a great circular progression of ages. I digress. Back to the Sun.
The Sun relates to the heart, eyes, & spine. So just as desire can be a lower operative from ego (unhealthy Moon) if clouded by our unconscious patterns, so too can desire (Sun) open the heart and activate our subtle energy body. Spirit is the word here, the undying aspect to you — the type of frequency that animates your life and your choices.
Chinese Medicine indicates that the emperor (Sun) is located in the heart — Anahata. In Sanskrit, Anahata means “unhurt, unstruck, and unbeaten,” referring to its pure unfiltered quality, uncontaminated by the ego. The sun points to the energy of the heart chakra in many ways, the fourth primary chakra, according to Hindu Yogic, Shakta and Buddhist Tantric traditions.
Archetypally, the Sun is the epitome of who we are. It’s a star at the center of our solar system. By knowing what sign the Sun was in at your birth, you can feel into the way you act like a star, or what ways in which you tend to be a rockstar yourself.
The Sun can either energize and inspire you and others by its light (as seen in the eyes of an awakened being) or can overshadow the brilliance that we all share by ego identification. Furthermore, the brilliant potential of awakened consciousness can be darkened/diminished by bondage — attachments — and conditioning (unhealthy Moon).
Unhealthy processes of the Sun include claiming the beautiful radiance of the Sun as just your own, rooting in selfishness, and identifying separately, ultimately leaving you feeling at the center, but isolated.
The healthy processes include awakening to a connection to spirit and Oneness and include cultivating awareness through practices such as yoga, meditation, or vision quests, and reconnecting to your source of spirit, ultimately leaving you feeling whole.
Astrology of the Moon
The Moon’s symbol is a crescent, which is derived etymologically from the Latin verb crescere “to grow”. Life is full of changes — growth and decay. As you learn to become a master of your unique subjective experience, it’s possible to widen your perceptive sense of identity to include more transcendent qualities such as the cosmos itself.
At a basic level, the Moon is your “small” self and is representative of the subconscious tendencies and habits that have been cultivated over time to meet survival needs. It’s invested in survival and can include much of your ingrained egoic subconscious patterns.
The Moon rotates around the Earth (closest to home/self/body), illustrating how the past is perpetually surrounding us and affecting our instinctual behaviors. It’s only partially illuminated most of the time, indicating various degrees of unconsciousness present and varying through time.
All of your direct experiences from life (Sun) need to be processed, similar to how a meal needs to be digested, for you to be healthy. Whether it’s anger, fear, jealousy, sadness, shame, guilt, joy, etc., each emotion needs to be felt and released or it becomes buried in your unconscious, hardened as your Moon.
Archetypally, the Moon is your emotional body, the soma — the body of an organism. This body of yours is connected to all things — through the threads of an invisible but dynamic web of the cosmos. In actuality, there is no separation from the perceived barrier of your skin and its congruency with the environment.
And the connection you make to the interconnected web of the world is influenced by your thoughts, feelings, emotions, and intention. Thus, the Moon indicates the way in which you can manipulate this fabric through your subjective lens.
The Moon is the most subjective filter in your life and filters your thoughts, emotions, and experiences. Thus, the clearer this filter is, the more clearly you can see your experiences with certainty and allow your true emperor (your heart) to reign unfettered by lower frequencies, such as fear.
Therefore, fate and free will are at play here because you and only you determine how clear this filter is. If it’s “unclear”, call it fate (victimhood). If it’s “clear”, of course, it’s free will (false bravado). (wink wink). Not really. But often we can confine ourselves and rule out the fact that choice is actually a thing or convince ourselves that we’re clear when we’re not.
Rule of thumb: just don’t fool yourself. Seeing subconscious patterns is difficult and they don’t always reveal themselves. Feelings can arise and we don’t always no where they came from or what to do with them.
Perhaps the willingness you have to clear yourself of false perceptions, realities, emotions, etc. (empowerment) creates your fate. Maybe. Really, fate is an unbefitting term here because it can imply a complete lack of control and determinism, thus a lack of free will, accountability, and moral responsibility. The point is to highlight the way the mind plays tricks and can create a spiritual bypass. I digress, so back to more on the Moon!
In some magic sub-stratum of your experience, there are memories. Where do these exist? Well, much points to the mind, but your “mind” doesn’t just live in your brain. Joseph Chilton Pierce (Biology of Transcendence) spoke of the profundity of neural tissue outside of the brain, living in all organs, including the heart, which he states is comprised of 80% neural cellular tissue. Memories live in the body and reside in your tissue.
Every sensation you’ve ever experienced, each impression or samskara (in Indian and yogic philosophy) that’s been psychologically imprinted lies below the level of normal consciousness and is said to be the root of all impulses, as well as your innate dispositions. Your thoughts, emotional processes, actions and intentions make up the “soul” of your being. “Baby’s got soul!” Yeah — the Moon is what gives you that soul.
Your bank of stored memories condition you to be how you are and constitute the habit-forming influence in your life. Life experiences (Sun) need processing time. Naturally, we all reflect on what has happened and what is happening.
So naturally, the perception we form around the happening is paramount. This perception — or manas — is your perceiving mind. Some say, including me, perception is everything. Whether a person is identified with ego consciousness or cosmic consciousness, his or her perceptions of the world are mediated through manas. That’s why as the Moon is commonly referred to as ego-structure, it largely depends if that defines a person’s Moon, or somatic structure.
Astronomically, from the perspective on Earth, we can only see the dark side of the moon at brief moments in time, specifically during a solar eclipse. Just as you can’t see half of the moon most of the time, you also do not necessarily see or care to share the memories you have that are filled with lower frequency emotions like shame and guilt that sculpt the ego structure.
But the ego is actually something you need. It’s something you can make friends with. To think you should get rid of the ego is not the point. Let’s say someone asked you that they could eliminate all of your stored memories and wipe your “slate” clean. Would you do it?
If you didn’t have memories of what happened, if there were no samskaras, if there was no emotional body that allows you to have subjective experiences, then you couldn’t evolve through them. So as a key point, it’s important to see the moon as a structure or storehouse of experiences to evolve through. And it’s all there for this reason.
So the relationship you take to your Moon can either bring you further into the pain and attachment to how you’ve perceived things to have happened or can steer you closer to your center — to your heart (Sun).
Granted, you will suffer because you are attached to your body. You have to be in your body. There’s nowhere else to be when you’re here on Earth, and your body inherently goes through pain. Life truly does include some suffering, and what you experience as pain will be expressed through your Moon. The 4 Noble Truths of Buddhism express this explicitly, as briefed here:
- Suffering, pain, and misery exist in life
- Suffering arises from attachment to desires
- Suffering ceases when attachment to desire ceases
- Freedom from suffering is possible
In sum, whether you reflect on your attachments as a means of ceasing your attachment to them or creating more attachment to them is the determining factor of how free you feel. So, it is up to you. One of the most helpful concepts to guide you on freeing up attachments is the law of impermanence.
The person you are today is definitely not who you were yesterday. However so subtle this can feel, it’s true. You go through micro changes each day, evolving through your relationship to the energy that’s in motion — emotion.
In fact…
“Every breath we take contains a quadrillion atoms that have been breathed in by other human beings in just the past few weeks and at least a million atoms that have been breathed by every human being on the planet. We are constantly exchanging atoms with other creatures and with the earth itself.… In just five years, the entire physical body is replaced …In a physical sense, we are borrowed [from] and are as indebted to the biosphere as the goods and products we fashion from nature. The idea that we are somehow independent and autonomous forces, separate from nature, is pure fiction” (3).
So you can shift the energy in motion through all kinds of activities. I heard dancing was a pretty awesome one ;) Sing it into motion if you want. Sleep it away if you want.
Just don’t ignore or repress it, or just smoke or drink it away. Unhealthy habits that have become so ingrained become addictive because they actually alter your biochemistry. At that point, it’s a tougher game, so better to process things as they come up.
Anything ignored can become a type of dark seed that has the power to transform into a kind of monster. You may begin to feel like you need to run from this “thing”, which is essentially a feeling or feelings that have taken an exaggerated shape. Really, it’s not as scary as you think to face the monsters that have formed already. They just want to be felt, to be confronted, to be seen, to be something. Just ask it to begin releasing it.
Unhealthy Moon processes include latching onto the past through stories, repressing emotions, and solidifying attachments to beliefs about your experience, ultimately leaving you feeling stuck.
Healthy Moon processes include relating authentically to your feelings, expressing feelings, balancing lopsided perceptions, centering to gratitude, and working with emotions that just want to be known, felt, spoken through, shared, etc. ultimately leaving you feeling free.
All in all, to align to a greater sense of wholeness and begin to unearth the deep desires of your soul, you must heal the past (Moon) by becoming conscious (Sun) of it. The Moon needs attention, presence, and love, not abandonment. The key is present awareness, relating to the past consciously, and connecting to the transpersonal nature of reality.
Really, this discussion makes a nice lead to an idea of transcendence — “the ability to rise and go beyond” [attachments, the past, the perceived illusion of an identity limited to memory], a force that constitutes our nature and fires our spirit (2).
If you are willing to feel your repressed emotions, you can begin to heal, to become whole and dynamically present, and go beyond what you know, but you must go into what you know first. Gradually, the regressive pull to the past transforms into a powerful radiance of presence and connection with spirit. As you cease to identify with the hardened energy, it becomes liberated, and your old patterns break.
“When consciousness frees itself from its identification with physical and mental forms, it becomes what we may call pure or enlightened consciousness, or presence.” — Eckhart Tolle
When energy is freed, you are more able to connect with others and life. The very emotions that seem so troublesome are potentially gifts for your empowerment. The experiences to come can be embraced full-heartedly. Fear and other dense emotions melt into pure uninhibited present awareness. A pure shine emanates. Reality warms up. You feel bright again.
Resources:
- An Introduction to Archetypal Astrological Analysis —Tarnas, R., Ph. D.
2. Great Mystery — Pearce, J. C.
3. Biosphere Politics. Rifkkin, J. (1991).
4. The Astrology of Awakening — Meyers, E., Ma.
About your Astrologer
Kinan had his first Astrological reading in 2012 in Koh Phangan, Thailand while living with an eclectic community of multinational professionals cross-pollinating disciplines, sharing resources, and educating the public. Among the group — an acupuncturist, massage therapists, yoga teachers, a Reiki practitioner, a past-life regression therapist, a craniosacral therapist, a comedian, tantric practitioners, and holographic breathwork practitioners — an astrologer’s lasting impact reverberates to this day in his life.
Reading his natal chart for the first time was like looking at a map written in a foreign language, and this map wasn’t geographical, it was…well, astrological — like a graph of light in cycles over time. At first, Kinan was skeptical of Astrology’s “claims” and basis for truth. However, the impact of how these “truths” resonated was helpful beyond his imagination.
The clarity, direction, and alignment Kinan continually developed and felt through astrological studies since 2012 has inspired him to create a life’s work connected to further developing the field and guiding others authentically to evolutionary cycles of the soul.
Visit cosmicroots.co for more information about his offerings.
