Journey to the golden city: The Shadow That Lurks Within

Journey to the golden city: The Shadow That Lurks Within: Never before has the need for us to face our shadow been so great. Never before has our shadow been so present, as if it’s lookin...

The Shadow That Lurks Within

Never before has the need for us to face our shadow been so great. Never before has our shadow been so present, as if it’s looking at us full in the face challenging us to return the gaze. Whether we choose to engage with it or look away, the choice is ours.

I feel like we are poised on the precipice of saving ourselves or plummeting over the edge. But, I am an optimist and I know that we have everything in our capacity to work the magic needed, make the necessary changes and create a new way to shape our future. However, this is not going to come easy, we will have to make difficult choices and perhaps be forced to make huge sacrifices. This comes with the birth of every new age and we have been here before and each time we, or at least some of us, have survived.

I have been watching how, over the last few years, everything has become split apart. It is explicit and implicit, in all aspects of life. The place this most evident is in our Parliamentary system. As the two main parties are breaking into two, the hostility is both in-house and cross party. However, this rancour is appearing everywhere. 

Although it feels very frightening I am holding my faith in the process, whether it is Newton’s Law of motion: to every action there is always opposed an equal reaction, or the concept of yin and yang and how everything is in perfect balance to create harmony. I know that when we see the darkness growing in our society, then the light must also be present in equal measure. The idea being that when everything is in equal balance, we can then choose to make the necessary breakthrough to rise like the phoenix.

As we are stepping into winter, in astrology, we have come through the learning experience of spring and summer, representing childhood. Virgo prepares us for adulthood, as summer comes to an end, and Libra teaches us, as we step into autumn, that as we learn to live we are also learning to die. To do this properly Pluto, God of the Underworld takes Persephone down into his domain and initiates her, ready for womanhood. This is a vital journey, however, scary it may seem. Pluto, ruler of this archetype, offers the initiation process necessary to become true adults, and discover our inner power, however fearful the journey is.

Unfortunately over the millennia, our culture, has become smaller and smaller in its outlook, so that now we ignore anything beyond the physical world. Our fear of what lies there has led us to lose all the necessary wisdom from our ancient mythology, and in doing so remove important aspects of our development. This has prevented us from growing up in any sense other than our physical growth, the only aspect of life we endorse nowadays. 

So we enter into adulthood as emotional and spiritual children, trying to ignore anything we are too frightened to look at and constantly attempting to prove the non-existence of anything we believe belongs to the ‘Dark Ages’.

The centuries of witch burnings has stopped us from valuing our holistic wisdom and kept us judging each other if we choose to venture into that world. Scientific know-how has enabled this view to hold its place till now. This dark history has been left largely ignored and remains festering in our psyches as we are too scared to own it. 

Now, a hundred years after Einstein opened the door to the quantum world, we are still trying to disown what we have found there, desperately trying to close the door on it. But our efforts have weakened us and we are tiring. The truth will out and if you are still refusing to acknowledge it you will soon become out fo date, like flat Earthers. 

The inter-connectedness of everything will soon be scientific law understood by all. We have, over the centuries, been teaching how we can find the truth by breaking things down to their individual states. Slowly that illusion is being shown for what it is. A truth is being unveiled, that the more we look into the world of the tiny, the more it opens up to the whole and nothing is indivisible. Those that choose to look inwards and see only the separation of all things will soon be standing alone will hopefully want to come in from the cold. 

The discovery that everything is held together by love is quickly now gaining ground. Stepping into love whole-heartedly is sadly much harder than we realise. Generations of learned, conditional love means we judge first and forgive later. Loving each other, however bad we seem to behave is not something we have been taught how to do. Sadly, we only have a few role models, Jesus, Gandhi and Martin Luther King to name a few obvious ones. But the more we see people reacting out of fear and hate, the easier it is choose another way. Accepting without judging those who are not ready to change is vital and if we can’t accept, and still judge others,  then we are still coming from a place of fear. 

We are living in one the most important ages of humanity’s time here on Earth, learning to understand itself and so choosing to evolve. We can only truly grow if we examine every aspect of ourselves, not just the parts we like.

This winter, as the decade draws to a close, I invite you to spend more time looking at your world, how it looks within and so how it looks without. It is important to hold up our hands and admit our mistakes as well as our successes; awareness is the key for change. As the saying reminds us, we are the ones we have been waiting for. Its up to us to rise.