Winter Solstice Arrives

Indonesia, Bali, Ubud, Puri Lukisan museum,close-up on local painting by Ketut Budiana ("Kala Rau") depicting lunar eclipse.

Today is the full moon and first day of winter, marked by the Winter Solstice, (or Yule) the year's shortest day. The winter solstice this year coincides with a total lunar eclipse, the first time the two events have overlapped in 372 years. The full moon will be darkened by Earth's shadow as our planet passes between it and the sun.More about this event here.

In The Risen, August briefly relates about coming upon a full lunar eclipse that coincides with the ending of his task to help manifest the book:

"In childish awe I watched as the Moon, the Night Mother, masked herself with the face of the Sun, the Father of Day. For a few transitory moments she assumed a persona whose origins were of a very different world, transmuted into something shockingly new and seemingly real. The mystery was revealed upon her unmasking, and order was quickly restored to the heavens." (p. 301) 

At first, this erroneously sounds as if the sun is literally passing between the earth and moon. Yet here we have an attempt to put into words August's mystical experience about the greater mysteries of Light as manifested in the human experience within the Universe, as suggested by the lunar eclipse. We know that mystic language is not one of words. With some spirit-guided help, we will try to expand upon this in a bit more detail here.

"The face of the Sun" symbolizes the inner realization of the ever-present, all consciousness of Creator Source. The Moon is a symbol of ego-mind - in this case, an ego-mind that has yet to "see the Light," the truth about Reality. This Truth, which is that the human reality experience is immortalized potential – symbolized by the Earth – is still hidden (denied) by the ego-mind.

"Mother of Night" tells us that the ego-mind has ''given birth" to the denial'. This false creative act (or simulation) supports the ego-mind's belief in death, and that it has power to assert over life and death in some way. Its denial to accept that it is not immortal is the shadow it casts upon its own face, thus obscuring or blinding itself to the True Light of Creator Source, and appropriating the immortal human's existence (the earth) to keep between itself and the Light. Thus the appearance of a shadow  – the illusion, or what a child would see as seemingly real, but a mystery.  The child here is the unconscious Authentic Self, who, blinded by the ego-mind, becomes mesmerized by "childish awe." When the mask falls away and the moon is seen for what it is, order is quickly restored to the heavens – or the true world as ruled by Authentic Self.

Here are a few quotes by some mystics that might bring more light to our endeavor here – one by Boris Pasternak, one of August's Risen guides and colleagues, and another by Victor Hugo - little known medium and mystic, who wrote a book about his seances, and who is also an ancestor of August's.

"In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer."
Albert Camus

"It snowed and snowed, the whole world over, Snow swept the world from end to end. A candle burned on the table; A candle burned."
Boris Pasternak

"Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart."
“Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.” (August once received this in a fortune cookie after a long conversation about Victor Hugo.)
Victor Hugo

"Sometimes our fate resembles a fruit tree in winter. Who would think that those branches would turn green again and blossom, but we hope it, we know it."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(Goethe also said: “We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.”)

“The moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed, there is no winter and no night; all tragedies, all ennui, vanish, - all duties even.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson