Up until a certain moment in life, patterns are hidden. Ways are blocked. Situations feel stagnant. There’s a park near me here that is constantly in construction. There’s a big pond, and it’s full of turtles. You aren’t allowed to swim in this pond. It’s probably dangerous, not only due to the quality of the water, but also because of all the trash and rusty old dangerous things dumped in it. Imagine going in; you might cut your foot on an old beer bottle discarded on some wild night. This is a picture for Scorpio in Venus, and the retrograde cycle drags up buried ghosts to be put to rest. But there’s another image here. The turtles. They swim about kind of oblivious to the darkness, the dirtiness; quite happily semi-floating around. The danger is that in life we simply go round in circles, relatively comfortable in old ponds.
However used to them we are, surprises of destiny and karma come to shake us out of our shells. Through decades, cycles of time, years and life phases, we often have no idea what was going on karmically until we get new keys of consciousness, and for those to be given, we have to wait on two things, one passive, one active; divine timing is an outer restraint, but inner reflection is always present to the degree we engage with it. For the spiritual student, it’s just not like normal life: we are crisis-prone.
It is a big step to realize that every personal life crisis is not at all cause for dismay, but a chance to open up spiritually.
Worn-out Consciousness
Painting at the end of the nineteenth century was like that. As if it didn’t know what it was anymore: because the human being didn’t know who he or she was anymore. The human being was on the road to becoming fake. And masks were all that would be left. The last cry of humanity before its descent into deeper darkness was reflected in a late 1800s painting in which spiritual scenes were like caricatures. To be a painter was to be a decorator of the Victorian lounge of the mind, a thoroughly bourgeois connection to the spiritual world. Like now but with seances and smoke-filled salons. Back then, paintings like Gustave Moreau’s of King David and the angel are symptomatic of pretend spirituality. King David fawns to the angel with a rose.
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