Cosmic Liberator
by
Sarah Varcas
Uranus stations retrograde in Aries at 10:33 p.m. GMT on 21st July. I mentioned its connection with the direct station of Saturn yesterday, as the two are inextricably linked. While Saturn approaches the completion of its journey through the landscape of shadows and fear, Uranus begins its role of liberator, picking up the gauntlet and leading the way through our inner world pointing out where we keep ourselves bound when we could simply be free.
Janis Joplin told us, back in the day, that ‘freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose’, which, on the face of it, sounds somewhat negative: you’re only free once you’ve suffered every possible loss you can imagine. In some ways perhaps that’s true. As Leonard Cohen once said ‘Only one thing made him happy. Once that was gone everything made him happy’. It is certainly true that once we lose the objects of our desire in which we have invested our happiness we may find a greater freedom in allowing happiness to arise from unbidden and overlooked sources. If we choose to be happy again, that is…! But there is also another side to this issue, and Uranus wants us to get this now because it’s deeply relevant to what comes next in our process of conscious evolution: freedom IS just another word for nothing left to lose, not because we have to lose everything to experience it, but because we can’t lose anything, ever, and once we know this in every fibre of our being we are truly free.
Being human, however, tends to mitigate against us grasping this aspect of reality. We identify with having and holding, we invest our ego in things, people, relationships, possessions, identities and the prospect of losing them causes us to cling on more tightly out of fear. Those things and people have become a part of ourselves and to lose them means to lose us. And losing oneself: now that’s scary, especially to the ego which deals in the language of ‘I, me & mine’. No matter how much we may read or be told that ‘we are all one’, ‘there is no other’, ‘you are another myself’ our everyday experience seems to prove the theory wrong! If I shut my thumb in the door it’s me with the bruise, not you. And if your lover walks out on you I may ‘feel your pain’, but it’s not me that’s ultimately suffering. When I look in the mirror I see my face not yours.
So how do we step from the everyday human experience of separation and egoic identity into an experience – not just an intellectual knowing – of oneness, in which there is nothing to lose because we are everything already and loss implies separation which can never happen? Well… not by thinking about it, that’s for sure! The vibration which flows through me and you and everyone else, through all things on this planet, in it and around it and out into space and beyond, is not something we can grasp with our mind. We have to experience it, give ourselves up to it, be prepared to embrace it no matter what doing so means for all the ideas, thoughts and feelings we’ve had about life to date. It requires an act of radical trust that says ‘okay, I’ll place everything I’ve got, everything I identify with, everything I believe myself to be on the sacrificial altar if that’s what it’ll take to be free’. For only when we can do that do we discover just how impossible it becomes to lose anything of true value. Even those we have loved and lost can be found within us, speaking their love into our life in their own unique way, no matter how desperately difficult it can be to recognise this when in the depths of grief and consumed with the despair which so often accompanies radical loss.
We must stop thinking, wake up to presence, to feeling, to being alive in this one moment we have now, not numbed out with boredom, anxiety, depression, fear. We must be prepared to engage and resonate with oneness in order to experience it. And we can’t do that from a place of ‘I’ ness. You and I cannot know oneness whilst being you and I. Only when we offer ourselves up as the expression of nature we essentially are, can we know the truth of our existence and the lies which have been painted atop it. Which is why this turnabout of Uranus is timely and powerful: as its final retrograde passage in its on-going and lengthy square to Pluto, this is our chance to fully taste the wonder of true liberation, not the egoic liberation of everything going my way and being able to get life to do what I want, but the liberation of inner wisdom and enlightenment. Liberation which allows us to see through the trappings of the egoic world, perceiving it for what it is, whilst enabling us to step right back into it, this time with our eyes and hearts wide open, knowing the truth about what we find there.
Sarah Varcas
