A Quarter Moon of Tough Furthering

Thursday morning's First Quarter Moon is a somewhat strenuous one. The square aspect between the Sun and Moon normally presages great difficulties in furthering our idealized conception from the time of the recent New Moon; in this instance even more so due to the heightened presence of Saturn, representing the Senex archetype — strict taskmaster and stern supplier of life lessons, yet also full of hard-won wisdom. We find Saturn coming into close sextile with Pluto, while Mars remains square, and Venus hovers nearby in the early degrees of Scorpio, approaching conjunction with Saturn. This implies some very tough sledding, as we attempt to make our idealized vision more concretely available to us and to others around us, in the working out of our actual lives as we live them.

Saturn with Mars implies that if anything gets done at all, it gets done slowly and painfully, and with long-lasting implications for greater future awareness. Witness the difficult road that President Obama seemingly faces right now in getting his plan approved to bomb yet another mid-east country. The national debate is raging, with no clear path toward unanimity of action. What we could find emerging from all this is a better understanding of the responsibilities as well as the prerogatives of military power. Saturn with Pluto, as the Uranus-Pluto square also looms, carries the meaning that the very structure of our lives must radically transform, along with the patterns of behavior that, while they have taken us this far, might need to be adjusted in some way for the more perfected functioning of the individual as well as of the collective.

The Moon in Sagittarius in the natural ninth sector of higher mind, and of foreign travel, also reminds us that understanding and the ability to adopt at least momentarily the perspective of others can be invaluable to being able to move beyond the constrictions of a locked-in framework, the filters or the blinders that we wear on our own eyes that often prevents the bigger picture from getting through to us. Paradoxically we also need these blinders; like the paradigms of scientific investigation they enable logical analysis and eventually clearer insight. But we also need to know a way to move beyond them when they threaten to strangle empathic connection with others around us, symbolically reflected in the notion of other cultures and ways of seeing the world with which we must ultimately deal. By understanding others we begin, finally, to understand ourselves.

The Sabian Symbols of the Sun and Moon are interesting in this regard. For the Sun, in the 21st degree of Virgo, the symbol reads: "A girls' basketball team," which we can understand as a different kind of group activity than the normal societal approach would dictate; perhaps with a larger feminine presence, for which we could read compassionate component. For the Moon in the same degree of Sagittarius, we have: "A child with a dog wearing borrowed eyeglasses." This is a comical image that relates to imported preconceptions as a way of seeing the world. Since this is a Sagittarius degree symbol the idea of beliefs and Weltanschauung, or world-view, forms the basis. Like the dog in the image, if we can remove the borrowed eyeglasses through which we gaze we might find that we have a more natural appearance and can actually see the world around us in a different and perhaps more inclusive way.

The road to greater self-realization is a difficult one but it is well worth our effort. Only by a change of inner consciousness on the part of each individual will the world around us become transformed.