This episode of Living Myth considers how a total solar eclipse can have the effect of reinforcing the now common idea that we are each but a mere speck on a small planet orbiting a relatively unimportant star within a random and meaningless universe. Or it can be a revelation that reassures our souls that we are secretly connected to the whole living cosmos.
A total solar eclipse has the paradoxical quality of hiding the sun, while also revealing aspects of its true nature. At totality, the sun appears as it truly is, a star amongst the other stars. At totality, it looks more like a living, breathing thing, rather than a bright, solid orb.
Despite the increase of cynicism, and the rise of nihilism, our souls have an inborn expectation to have profound experiences of luminosity and the hidden unity of life. The numinous appears as something uncanny and mysterious that gives us a sense of the presence of the Divine and awakens a deeply felt intuition of the rightness of a situation or an event. Within such a moment, the habitual distinction that we make between inner and outer, between subjective and objective, between dream and reality breaks down to reveal the living cosmos and our own lives under one eclipsed light.
For a moment of indefinite duration, our attention is pulled away from the increasingly divided and polarized state in which we live, and the world suddenly makes sense. On one level, we barely matter. On another level, what matters most to us turns out to matter to the world as well.
Epiphanies are occasions of unexpected benediction and blessing during which meaning can flood us with a felt sense of the wholeness and the holiness of life. As wise people used to say, the whole world reveals itself to be a form of living truth. An eclipse of the sun can be seen as a gift, as a collective moment of eternity waiting and wanting to be seen by the inner eyes trying to open from within each and all of our souls.
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Episode 345 - Your Calling Keeps Calling
Episode 344 - The Thread of Life
Episode 343 - The Right Trouble
Episode 342 - A Climate of Overwhelm
Episode 341 - A True Path in Life
Episode 340 - When Men Are Lost
Episode 339 - On Not Being Perfect
Episode 338 - Waves of Change
Episode 337 - Original Mind
Episode 336 - A Divine Wake-Up Call
Episode 335 - A Clash of Worldviews
Premium Episode 116 Excerpt - The Subtle Ground of Imagination
Episode 334 - Living in the Shadow of Doubt
Episode 333 - The Forgotten Language of Myth
Episode 332 - The Deep Self Within
Episode 331 - The Depths of Renewal
Episode 330 - Surviving Catastrophe
Episode 329 - What We Love is the Cure
Episode 328 - Fear of Change
Episode 327 - The Song of the Earth
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