dark night of the soul

art by Wendy Andrews

There is no doubt that we are going through a critical time in human history under this pandemic, and indeed history tells us that pandemics have a tendency to reshape the course of history.  But this one is occurring as we transition between the Age of Pisces and the Aquarian Age, a tremendous shift of energies that occurs only once every 2150 years.

From an astrological perspective, we look at transits of the planet Pluto as reaching into the depths of the soul to evoke occasionally cataclysmic events in our personal life, after which we are transformed in new and beautiful ways. We call this the Dark Night of the Soul, and nobody writes about this more eloquently than Andrew Harvey.  I offer today a portion of his article The Great Event: Dark Night and Rebirth which I feel puts our current situation into a spiritual context from which we can gain greater clarity and comfort, and hope. ☀️

For thirty years now, I have believed three related truths; that the exploding global crisis we are obviously in is, in essence, an evolutionary crisis, on whose outcome depends the future of the human race and a great deal of the natural world; that this evolutionary crisis is a mystical crisis with two phases, that of the dark night process and the potential Birth that it makes possible of an embodied divine humanity; that the birthing force of this new humanity is Sacred Activism, the marriage of profound and universal spiritual stamina, faith, passion, compassion, and urgent inspired wise action in every realm of Earth life.

For thirty years too I have known that I and everyone else would be plunged into the burning core of […]

Art by Melissa Vincent

You may be blind to the very thing that will make your life feel worth living. You may be gullible, taking in the world’s insidious lessons in superficial satisfaction.  Therefore, you have to dig deeper.  Discover who you are and who you want to be.  Don’t be dissuaded from that objective by the illusory promises of commercial life.  Instead, be yourself.

That is the point of the night sea journey—to be born into yourself. There, you are in the amniotic fluid, in an alchemical substance once again. You are journeying toward your own life. You are preparing for your fate. The promise is exhilarating, but the dangers are extreme. You have to avoid being just one of the crowd and instead take the chance of being born an individual.

–Thomas Moore, The Dark Night of the Soul