«Let the water settle; you will see the moon and stars mirrored in your being.”
Rumi
Rohini Nakshatra is known for its exceptional creative power and remarkable ability to bring about earthly abundance. She is the Moon’s favorite wife due to her shakti of fertility and capacity to generate abundant offspring. Rohini is the most materialistic of all the Nakshatras, yet it is also the most beautiful, charming, passionate, and sensual. It is referred to as the Moon’s “blushing bride” and is appreciated for its deep love and connection with the rhythms and cycles of the natural world.
THE MOON has always been a source of mystery and fascination for humans. Its dreamy allure has captivated our imaginations for centuries as it travels across the sky, waxing, waning, and shining moonlight down on us. The Moon reflects light from the Sun, moving from its dark new moon phase to maximum light at the full moon before it wanes again. This dance of light and dark on the Earth is reflected in our human consciousness. The beautiful dance of light you see in the heavens above also happens within you. While the Sun represents the pure consciousness from which everything originates–Source, God, universal intelligence, or whatever name you prefer–the Moon represents the unique consciousness that waxes and wanes within you.
According to Vedic astrology, the Moon represents your subjective consciousness and symbolizes the sensory mind you use to filter your experiences while living on Earth. The moon’s light and shadows reflect the conscious and subconscious fields expressed through your mind, emotions, and the information that filters through your five senses and nervous system. They create an illusion of separation and reflect the mental idea of being a limited self. The shadows of the Moon reflect the shadows in your mind—your wounds, traumas, and subconscious thoughts. By learning to dance with the light, ebb and flow like the Moon, we understand how to cycle naturally with life experiences, wax and wane with consciousness, and live more harmoniously with life. Like the Moon collects the sunlight as it travels through the heavens, we can increase our light by releasing shadows in our subjective consciousness.
The Moon is an excellent teacher, teaching us how to navigate life more easily. It shows us the importance of living in the present moment and accepting both pleasure and pain as natural parts of life on Earth. The Moon encourages us to appreciate the good times and bear the bad ones without becoming attached to them as every moment eventually passes. By accepting this, we learn to live within the changing tides. Additionally, the Moon reminds us that we can only experience the present moment, as the past is gone, and the future is yet to come. Therefore, everything that has ever happened has happened in the now.
IN THE GRIP OF THE MOON
The Moon has a powerful influence on us from the moment we are born. As we grow and develop, our senses, emotions, and thoughts are shaped by our experiences. Our consciousness is like the Moon, which waxes and wanes based on the sensory input we receive from our surroundings. What we see, smell, taste, hear, and feel captivate our awareness and influence our emotions and thoughts. Our experiences inform our thinking and shape how we perceive the world. That’s why childhood and early life are crucial to our habits and personalities. Our experiences during this time lay the foundation for our nervous system and shape our view of the world. As adults, we experience the ripples of the events that occurred in our childhoods, which have a lasting impact on our consciousness.
As we go through life, we collect information about the world around us, creating a mental framework that is our default way of evaluating everything. We form attachments to certain things, people, desires, fears, ideas, and beliefs while rejecting others, often adopting habits without realizing them. Some of these habits become so deeply rooted that they are stored in our subconscious mind and continue influencing our reality even when we are unaware. All the content in our subjective consciousness – both the conscious and the subconscious mind – shapes our filter for perceiving the world. However, this filter is an illusion, like the Moon, because it does not reflect the complete truth of reality, only our interpretation of it. Hence, our perception of life becomes a projection of our subjective consciousness, like looking in a mirror. We don’t see it as it is. Instead, we see it as we are.
Imagine yourself in complete darkness, holding a flashlight in your hand. The only area you can see is the small portion where your flashlight is pointing. This is similar to how your subjective consciousness works. Your perception is limited to what you can see in the flashlight’s beam. Anything outside of that beam is entirely dark and unknown to you. Now imagine the sun rising and its rays illuminating everything around you. The darkness disappears, and you can see everything. This illustrates the difference between your subjective consciousness, which is restricted to your beliefs, actions, and experiences, and pure consciousness, which encompasses everything. Your reality is shaped by where you focus your attention, but there is still a whole world beyond your awareness. This emphasizes the limitations of subjective consciousness and how it can restrict what we believe, do, and experience.
THE POWER OF THE PRESENT
The Moon symbolizes the importance of being mindful and staying in the present moment. In the present moment, we have the power to make things happen, where consciousness interacts with reality. While Nature is always in sync with the present moment, modern humans have been conditioned to go against the natural flow. We have been taught to focus on our thoughts, categorize, analyze, and scrutinize everything, which causes us to be preoccupied with our minds. Our minds are often consumed by thoughts of the past or the future, making it challenging to stay present in the moment. Our memories anchor us in the past, and our concerns about the future keep us trapped in our minds. As a result, we tend to neglect our hearts and give more importance to our cognitive processes, which leads to a disconnection from the present moment. Ironically, the past and the future are mental concepts that only exist in our minds, while the present moment is the only point in time that has ever existed.
Living in the moment means accepting the natural cycles of growth, decay, and life’s ups and downs. It means understanding that life fluctuates between opposite experiences like pleasure and pain, joy and sadness, day and night. By experiencing the stark contrasts between these opposites, we become more familiar with them and appreciate their differences. Pain teaches us more about pleasure, and sadness makes us appreciate joy even more. The cold night shows us what happens when the light is lost, and we enjoy the radiance and warmth of the day even more. Nothing teaches us compassion more effectively than experiencing suffering. Accepting positive and negative experiences is essential to living harmoniously with nature.
We often interpret unfavorable events as signs that something has gone wrong and that our lives have gone off course, whether because we failed to achieve our goals, fell ill, or lost something precious. However, these “decay” periods are a natural part of life on Earth—things rise and fall, experiences come and go, and there are good times and bad. When we resist or deny the reality of what’s happening in our lives, whether it’s heartbreak, loss, or grief, we disrupt the natural flow of life. Unfortunately, we often suffer even more when we resist these painful experiences and refuse to accept things that do not align with our wants and wishes. We can’t avoid difficult experiences, but refusing to accept them only worsens our suffering. Humans also tend to hold onto the pain long after it happened, even incorporating it into their personalities and dragging it into the future, constantly reliving it in their minds. Through radical acceptance, we can shorten the cycle of pain and prevent it from affecting our present and future. By resisting less, we suffer less. Pain is an inevitable part of life, but prolonged suffering is optional.
ACCEPTING THE GOOD AND THE BAD
At times, we tend to reject the present moment or refuse to accept the ups and downs of life. This creates a sense of fear that can be so overwhelming that we avoid doing anything altogether. We start avoiding things that may cause us pain, even if it’s just mental fear that has nothing to do with reality. We might experience anxiety due to painful things we have encountered in the past or the scary stories we create in our minds. When we lose control of our thoughts, fear can take over. We might fear that things will not go as planned or that we might fail at something, and this can cause us to feel even worse. As a result, we choose to do nothing, but this often puts our lives on hold, making life pass us by. We must remember that when we refuse the bad, we don’t get the good, as reality is dualistic. The experience of the bad makes the good that much better!
Sometimes, we turn to various things like food, alcohol, shopping, or drugs to cope with fear and pain. We use these things to avoid our thoughts, numb our emotions, and avoid discomfort while seeking pleasure and comfort. However, the Moon teaches us to accept the natural flow of life’s cycles, even if they involve loss, decay, and discomfort. The moon always moves forward and never stops or goes backward. It does not stay in a particular phase for too long but willingly lets go of the light when it’s time to move on to the next phase. This allows for new cycles and growth to begin.
If the Moon suddenly stopped moving and refused to transition into its dark phase, it would significantly impact both the Moon and Earth due to their gravitational effect on each other. The change would immediately affect the Earth, with the ocean tides stopping and the rotation of the Earth being disturbed. This could lead to unpredictable sea-level changes, including tsunamis, flooding, erosion, and other potential hazards. The Moon’s stabilizing effect on the Earth’s rotation would also cease, leading to a shift in the Earth’s axis, which could cause destructive weather changes. The Moon could be pulled towards the Earth by its gravity, causing a catastrophic collision or slowly drifting away from us. If such an event were to occur, it would significantly impact our ecosystems, making it challenging for us to survive. Furthermore, it would disrupt the Earth’s magnetic field, rendering us more vulnerable to solar radiation.
The movement of the Moon serves as an excellent example from which we can learn. It continues to move regardless of the amount of light and darkness it holds, in endless cycles of growing light and then letting it go. This beautiful illustration demonstrates how we should approach every moment and how life evolves on Earth. By being willing to change with every moment and accepting reality as it is presented to us, both the good and the bad, we can flow harmoniously with life.
This is the wisdom of the Moon.