The Sun and Darkness - Destroying Identity

Identity is a limit we wear as a shroud. When we are younger, identity is indispensable; it is how we understand ourselves in relation to our parents, how we fill the empty spaces. It is the road by which we develop and seek the fruition of our strengths, and it protects. Identity is built upon many things—these strengths we perceive in ourselves, the weaknesses we have sniffed out, our natural passions and aversions, the relationship to our parents and earliest influences. These are all real, and the Sun, is there anything more real than that glowing disk? Is there anything more evident? How the Sun’s nearness quickens the pulse of the seasons, activating the life cycles of the living plants, and the animals, when it is time to wake or sleep, depending upon a proclivity for the daytime or night—this is all dependance and definition that is in response to the Sun. So what is the use of deciphering what the Sun means, or even questioning it? But humankind possesses awareness of something more than just what we see and feel here during our diurnal cycles, from morning to night. We are part of something vaster, and much darker, an invisible that holds us like a net, and yet is so fathomless that we can freefall through it—the darkness of unconsciousness and the nature of time.

To see beyond, or deeper than the cycles of our Sun and Moon, and our astrological charts, to see deeper than the yearnings of our bodies, the ages we reach, and what the ascetics call this prison of being born and dying, is to recognize that there is something amorphous surrounding our identities in the indefinable, beyond all cycles, in which time is looped, or united. Out of that soup we pick up what can be breathed over with the word, ‘holy,’—the sustenance of enlightenment. There occurs an airing out of what protected us but brought us loss and gain, attachments and severances, what initiates as the power of the Sun in the horoscope. That whole realm, that specific shard which cuts into us hard as diamond, clearly we were meant to be that—of course we were, just as we were meant to hang it up to dry and see yourself truly, as if outside the self, while the Sun is on the other side of the world, to see deeper into that night.

This life is sacred, is it not? I don’t know how many of you have imagined what it means to eventually die. As a child, I didn’t believe in death. I believed in things which I knew I could not name to anyone—that there was no death was one of them. The other was that I had no need of a job or financial security, I would not need my family structure or history, I would live free of it, because I was a gifted writer and would fulfill the strange course of an artist. But instead I found myself deeply entangled in everything I was afraid of, and contradictorily, just as I had predicated for myself as a child, that strange course was also mine. My love of life, my conviction of myself, were unaffected by the tides of material society. I felt my power even in poverty, in single motherhood, at the low ebb of heartbreak, and of course, at higher times, when I was in love, when I would finish a novel, when I had completed something finite that I had wanted to express. Yet, I inwardly suffered much, always, and I could not understand that my child-self, what had brought me conviction and protection while growing beneath a nervous, plaintive, very conforming mother and an easily angered alcoholic father, could have led me into the trenches of such sorrow and strife, such poverty and anonymity that was my actual reality as an artist. But it did. I had no language for what a toxic environment does to the unconscious mind, as we have now—(my son who is eleven understands this concept, as do his friends, but it didn’t enter my language till I was about thirty.) Yet even with the helpfulness of that, we still go through the process of unconscious identity forming, what ignites the tragic arc, and teaches everything—for definitions create oppositions. My fate was written, emblazoned into my chart—squares, or contradictions, glowered at me from this chart which I threw myself upon in desperation at the age of twenty to try and understand how my consciousness always led me so astray—or rather how my unconsciousness had intentions beneath my consciousness. Rather than a conquering of the material world, what I had wanted, I found myself, as a product of toxicity and an expressionist, in the mire of what the Kabbalists call the Qliphoth—a hell on earth, the reflection of the Tree of Life deep in the waters, what opposes everything that is progressive, enlightened, conscious, but it opposes also the illusory nature of the material world.

I suppose my motivation was to enact punishment on myself, or damn myself, but I didn’t know why I was doing that, and the answers lay in the underneath sand of this place, the Qliphoth, where the origin of my parents’ toxicity and what they had inherited from their parents and their parents’ parents lay. Not every child who is the product of such an environment goes this way. It is very dangerous, creating deep eruptions in the psyche. In astrological terms this is called the Plutonic nature. And though I went into the Qliphoth of my psyche unconsciously, a level of me was conscious, the part of me that carried the conviction of being a writer. Because I had that tool or the light of writing to go with me into the darkness, like the light in the sockets of the skull that leads Vasilisa home through the woods, I was able to go beneath with a tool that protected me. Where one lives in the unconscious motivations and acts them out without having any idea where they will lead, so as to see. There one acts badly and witnesses the result—and I wrote about it all. Writing about it is how I kept a grain of my pure heart alive. I sought out people for selfish reasons and betrayed them, or rather, showed them their error of ways in trusting me, and I was arrogant and emotionally unhinged because I knew I was an artist, though I had taken on this penance of poverty or abstaining from integration with the material world, which is part of the Tree of Life, the bottommost part, Assiah. Really, while I lived in the Qliphoth I experienced perpetual torment. I never felt well, I was bitten by constant anxiety, and guilt, and supported my practice of remaining underneath by ritualistic practices of self-harm. I lived always on a rollercoaster of projection, gain, eruption, deep loss, and death. We are all on this, but mine was especially poignant for in this alt-realm light can only seep down as trickles of contrition. What is most profound about living there, in that realm of the psyche, what the kabbalists might refer to as a holy hell, is that I still received blessings. I received them always. It is this occurrence of blessings, even if they become lost in the fray, that eventually ignites the option for Redemption, the only way out. Really, I was always in the realm of the sacred and the holy, for even in the deep dark there is a little light, and in the deepest of darks, just the possibility of light must count. I came to understand that what I conceived as a child was through a material lens, through the only language I knew, but as I grew I adopted arsenals of deeper languages and, eventually, through expanding knowledge, my identity broke, and I climbed out of it all. Though I carry scars on my face from those times, which I don’t think will ever disappear. I was a writer but my disinterest in being at all involved in society was less a trait of the writer and more that of something like a seer, an interpreter of symbolic language and psyche, the teachings of which begin in the dark beyond the edge of the Sun, in the underneath of the unconscious. I had long read evidence of this—what my world felt like—in symbols—as if in permanent ink—in my chart—how my Moon was diamond-edged by a hard cut from Pluto, lord of this world beyond the Sun, captured as Persephone was captured, how I wrestled with so many shades of night and caught feelings, and had trouble in these waterways holding onto any joy. How Mars was bristling up against my Moon and keeping me from knowing peace of mind or easy compassion. I had deep triggers, easily distributed heat or anger to deal with, and intense passions to manage which I followed unconsciously, for those byways were the only times I ever felt remotely close to what one could call joyous. But it would always spectacularly blaze out. How my Sun was cut by a square from my Moon, perhaps the most profound of aspects. So that whenever I found my way, my ‘Sun’ path, what my identity whispered would define me happily, my Moon undercut in pain and horror, injecting sorrow and rejection even into my happiest moments. This aspect has made me most aware that there is always an outside, that the courses of identity and ‘time’ bring a limited kind of happiness, one of cause and effect, and my deserts from that relationship were always very drastic and inconstant. There is something greater that exists, surrounding these infantile swings between happiness and sorrow; let’s call it contentment, or the holiness of spirit. How I found that and what a terrifying transformation that was, occurring at the very bottom of my primordial sea where I had only the detritus of my life floating down to grasp at, as the dead particles float down to the huge ancient sharks of the darkest waters, was at a dead end. Strangely, there, I became conscious of myself as part of a human continuum, as connected to everyone and everything, in a way I had never felt before. I had always felt very separate, either elite or extremely low, but never really in alignment with anyone. Every pain became pronounced and entire to me—and in my high times I felt I was a goddess, sometimes a cruel one. In secrecy to myself I existed as an anomaly, where even cycles are interrupted—aging, dying. Maybe this is normal, just a component of being very young and feeling the enormity of that power of youth. But a principle reason must be from not identifying where my trauma began, and living exiled from my family. Ironically, though, I think it was that gulf of distance and my mother’s death which broke my last wall. For in that dark, combing over memories, really and finally abandoned, I began to trace my origins. Afterwards, I was aware I had a right to live in the light. Suddenly, even immediately, I felt capable of participating with love and awareness with others, and embracing my blessings. I deserved them. I began to disentangle myself from an isolating identity which I had used as an excuse to participate in projection, rage, and rejection of my loved ones. From then on, I’ve been able to handle being close to people. Even my strongest emotions now don’t breech the reef of self-protection I’ve built around myself, hard as coral; something stops me from going overboard, from ruining everything for myself. A consciousness perhaps of the natural rise and fall of the tides, and I find my power now in reining in the waters. Since then I’ve been swimming up.

Every decision you make which you think is your own and will bring you a certain return shall burn a pathway into your life, and down that pathway you will encounter the opposite of your intention, the shadow. Instead of fulfilling your notion and successfully aggrandizing your ego, again and again, the shadow schools you in humility and brandishes you with an understanding that is beyond anything you can call for yourself. This is always necessary, we need these paths—they are, how we say, the roads of fate, the roads to enlightenment. The Sun, the signs, our lessons, our definitions—they are our individual roads to illumination. We need definition, to begin. The Scorpio’s path becomes carved specifically, usually negatively, so it might beckon transformation, and that sign can feel down to its cells what redemption is. The Gemini will need to fathom the duality its lack of discernment creates, the Capricorn what becomes lost of the inner child in seeking badges of honor, and Aquarius in what conditioning must be destroyed so that new world orders can arise. These are generalizations but identities are usually rife with them, and so the Sun sign can be generalized, but it has an opposite too, and that is the absence of light, when the identity shows its transparency. It’s not quite the Moon. The Moon is not giant enough to oppose the Sun, but slips out, demure, at most a daughter of that darkness. Can it be called death, or the end of things? Is it where we become lost, lose control, where our reason for being here falls apart? No—I feel our reason for being here is in that dark. To make a decision gives birth to its opposite, or perhaps it is not so linear as to deserve the title of opposite, but rather any decision gives birth to a counterpoint, and around this counterpoint exists the possibility of a new awareness. It is that awareness, that unknown factor, born of our decisions, which makes life the most worth living. This quantum physics element, the wildness beyond our decisions, unpredictable, the darkness that exists outside of our own little lights, a whisper that if the mold exists, the mold is also broken by the pressure of a greater universe, both of these things—at once. 

The birth chart is very precise. It’s amazing how there are these strong personalities even in infants, penchants, proclivities, temperaments, for so much of that was shaped in utero and earlier than that, brought from the place between worlds where our souls travel between death and life, and then this is kneaded like dough to include the branches of family, the teachings and temperaments of our mothers, our fathers, which breed in us responses and further definitions. The path of the birth chart involves feeling these definitions hard, and then gradually easing them, gradually understanding beyond our own selves, to light up, in time, the entirety of the mandala, the anomaly beyond the fixity of the Sun—for the Sun is fixed, we are the ones buoyed helplessly around it, from winter through summer, solstice to solstice, equinox to equinox, but the very inertia of the swing gives way to its expansion and eventually an increased capacity to it, this ride of life. But our minds always have this capacity to travel beyond, into in fact every sphere of existence. Tibetan monks in their meditation sometimes choose to unravel the cord that binds the heart to the body. Unravel it totally and the spirit is let loose—you die—but unravel it a little and you can astral travel, and zip beyond the limits of the self, the limit of time. But this is very dangerous, very advanced. I read of it in the Book of the Dead. There are easier methods, for those not of that practice, and one of them is just—becoming aware that the identity by its very nature creates focus and limitation. If you feel stuck, or unhappy, bothered or angered, triggered, in a rage, helpless with sorrow, or more mild even, just irritated or unsettled, anything like that—it is a sign that the clothes you are wearing are too tight. The identity needs to give. These feelings are usually an indication an awakening is nigh, or at least—possible. Not all of us choose awakenings. The planets’ positionings and the epileptic swing of the Moon between the Nodes can be helpful in mapping out exactly when these phenomenons in the personal and outer worlds may occur, and astrologers can pinpoint when the birth chart is being triggered. Something I find very curious is that the most spiritual people on earth have the haziest, least defined charts; it is as if they were born in the infinitesimal second while the planets were moving between connections, when there was separation and chaos. Their birth charts are hard to explain and even appear ‘weak,’ as they lack the hard roads, the tragic arcs that bind us, cycle by cycle, year by year, age by age, into the process of definition and needing to break a thousand glass ceilings in order to expand this limit, a life of running through a shower of glass. You think you’ve gotten beyond yourself, beyond what’s caused your hurt or sorrow before, beyond what your mother left you that was her own trauma, beyond your toxicity, and then there is more. More limits to break through, more chains on our ankles never noticed before, more that chafes the skin and interrupts the flow of love, more that causes us pain—because living is a slow and agonizing experience of triggering memories up and down the living spine, and freeing them. 

The astrological chart is powerful because the themes advance, they grow beyond their binds. Both the cycles of trauma and the breakings of ceilings are connected through opposition. Succumbing to another cycle in which the same triggers, the same passions and roads and downfalls exist, keeps us at the same altitude, whereas breaking through our ceilings brings us to a higher life, or altitude—but we are still on the same mountain. Some people do not climb very high distances in their lives—it might take multiple lifetimes to climb. This is what I’ve witnessed that’s astounded me. My mother for example, what I realized about her young, what I begged her to look at and understand, she died without understanding. Yet, that was my lesson. She was on some other altitude than I am, almost as if we breathed different air. I am one of those who continuously breaks down barriers of psyche only to find that I am in another one… and I believe that my generation and those who came after me, our children, now at this extremely ripe time can almost call this normalcy, it is becoming normal to climb, to deconstruct identity. Even the old stories and movies fail to satisfy in the same way, this way of clinging to character and plot. It begins to fall away—I begin to understand that perhaps my writing is not of this time. Yet I have many years to go, and I still don’t know. But thank God, my loved ones are on this journey with me and the Sun calls me to wake up, makes my skin tan, nourishes in me this thirst for diving into cold water in the summer. It’s worth it all, this entanglement, what the kabbalists call the Tree of Life, the Tibetan Buddhists the Wheel of Life, and astrologers the stamp of the birth chart. Enlightenment exists at the same time, outside of everything, the Sun, the Moon, and the stars, outside of time, as the possibility of understanding the point, breaking a cycle, as the possibility or the posit of an awakening, as the theoretical quantum side, there, the mysterious element, that which whispers despite how mundane, repetitive, tragic, or comfortable life gets—this will all end, there is change, enjoy it, digest it true, with as few walls as you can manage to put up, because you cannot stay here, no one can, you have to move… we can never quite hold any of it the same way again except on the underneath, dark shores of memory.