“All the gods, all the heavens, all the worlds, are within us. They are magnified dreams, and dreams are manifestations in image form of the energies of the body in conflict with each other.” ~ Joseph Campbell

Isn’t it ironic?

Ganesha, the lord who removes obstacles, was born out of obstacles.

The first one involved a conflict between his mother, Parvati, and his father, Shiva. It’s the same fight many married couples have: She wants kids. He wants to wait. He avoids the discussion. She gets angry, cries and refuses his advances—but then gets crafty by fashioning a living son out of the rubbings of her skin.

Ganesha’s second obstacle arose when Shiva encounters him guarding the entrance to Parvati’s private chambers. With a sweep of his three-pronged trishula Shiva knocks the boy’s head off without realizing he’s decapitated his own son. To prevent his wife’s freak-out from escalating beyond repair, he sends his ganas (“gangs”) out to snatch the head of the first animal they encounter. Turns it out, it was an elephant. The rest is history or…mythology.

From the Vedic astrological perspective, the themes recorded in myths play out again and again in the sky above us as planets and stars conjoin and oppose each other.

On April 21, 2012 as the Sun and Moon merge with two stars in Aries—Hamal and Sheraton—the story of Ganesha, his obstacles and how he overcame them repeats itself. (The Sun represents Shiva as the father, the Moon as Parvati, his mother. And Jupiter, which also sits in Aries, is the baby Ganesha). 

In discerning the relationship between the “god” and the “planet,” it’s important to understand the way myth works in the Vedic traditions. The stories of gods and goddesses tell us how the transits of the planets in relationship to the stars affect us so we can best align with them.

Conscious cooperation of human civilization with the planets and stars is the supreme yoga, one of the most important contributions India has made to the world.

More specifically, the Vedas understood that the planets and stars emit energy as gravity and sound-light respectively. The gravitational force of the planet captures the light and sound emitted from the stars and transfers that to its earthly receptors. As a result, your body, emotions, and mind all respond to what’s being communicated to your nervous system via the planetary array.

The ancient Indian civilization used the knowledge coded in myth to make important adjustments in thought, intention and action on the collective level that best matched the planetary arrangement in the sky. So from the Vedic perspective, if you’re living against the grain of what’s happening energetically, you’ll suffer.  Conversely, if you consciously align your thought, speech, and action with the planets, you’ll enjoy success.

Conscious alignment is dharma. Suffering from being out of alignment is karma. The constant readjustment between dharma and karma is why we practice yoga.

So what energy is Ganesha communicating to you on this upcoming New Moon? And how can you best align?

Since November 15, 2011, Saturn has been transiting the Chitra constellation. In Vedic myth, Chitra is the abode of Vishvakarman, the celestial architect, as well as Maya, the goddess of illusion. What’s happening in the world right now is a breakdown of an old world view. It’s been happening over and over again in 29-year cycles throughout history whenever liberation movements occur, when civil rights movements crop up, when revolutions suddenly erupt and people arise as a collective force against elitism. It’s also a transit that has historically instigated certain breakthroughs in science, technology, business and economics that benefit everyone on the planet equally.

Saturn, like Shiva, is a force of destruction and transformation. True to the effect of Saturn transiting Chitra (where all our shared ideas about reality are stored) we’re now seeing radical shifts in what we collectively agree upon as “truth.”

Ganesha represents the human race as the product of spirit (Shiva) and matter (Parvati). As the Sun and Moon transit Aries on Saturday, the supreme parents of the world present their child, humanity, to the chopping block for the removal of the head—the realm of our ideas. It’s a necessary decapitation. Just like the ram wants to summit the mountain, humanity wants to advance. And in our thirst for greater elephantine expansion, we surmount all obstacles to progress.

But just like the native people of America could not see the ships as the Portuguese arrived to subjugate them (because they had not been cultured to see such things), we need an educated vision to avoid similar obstacles to progress from arising. We require an elephant’s head. Wise. With a flexible and curved trunk to keep from getting too rigid.

And only one tusk so that we stay unified.

~

 Editor: Kate Bartolotta & Lynn Hasselberger