Sun Sign, Moon Sign: Discover the personality secrets of the 144 sun-moon combinations. Charles Harvey

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СКАЧАТЬ back, ‘pull yourself together’ and briskly ‘go about your business’, back into your Sun level again. For most people such shifts of consciousness occur repeatedly throughout the day. With a bit of deliberate self-awareness you can catch yourself shifting between these levels.

      We most obviously experience this shift when we wake in the morning from the lunar world of dreams. We gradually become conscious that it is time to get up and that there are things that have to be done. The more important the things are that have to be done, the more quickly we are likely to wake up and get going. (Indeed when there is a ‘big day’ ahead some people find it very difficult to surrender to the Moon level and her healing sleep.) This shift of consciousness represented by waking up is, for most people, normally around dawn as the Sun is beginning to rise in the sky. With sunrise, our own consciousness begins to rise, and we gradually leave the world of lunar unconsciousness behind.

      Each of these cases illustrates the very normal process of moving our centre of consciousness from a responsive, reactive Moon mode to a purposeful, decision-making Sun mode, or vice versa. Each level serves an important purpose in our natures; each has its own strengths and weaknesses, its own desires and aspirations, and each will tend to pursue its own interests irrespective of the other. This is why so many people find that they are in conflict with themselves. One side pulls us one way, the other side pulls another. When this happens, we feel inclined to ask ‘Which is the real me?’

      The answer, of course, is both. Ideally we need to be more aware of both, and to be more adept at recognizing when one is dominating to the detriment of the other. Indeed, as we shall see, the more we can accept, understand, and work with both these Sun and Moon levels, the more we will move towards that ‘inner marriage’ of the lord and lady within us, of which the great alchemists and philosophers have always spoken. We are this inner marriage all the time; there is no hard and fast separation of these modes in the way we actually live our lives. But is it a good marriage, or does one side feel like divorcing the other all too often?

      You will find some of the ideas associated with Sun and Moon listed on the next page.

      Some Ideas Associated with the Sun and Moon

SUN	MOON
Day	Night
Male	Female
Yang	Yin
Dry	Moist
Gold	Silver
Illumination	Reflection
Father	Mother
King	Queen
Prince	Princess
Mind	Heart
Thinking	Feeling
Science	Art
Left Brain	Right Brain
Right Hand	Left Hand
Logic and Structure	Imagination
Clear facts	Symbols
Focuses attention	Reflects the moment
Interested in things	Interested in people
Guided by reason	Guided by experience
Purposeful, goal-oriented	Responds to needs
Takes action	Receptive
Makes decisions	Feels what is needed
Present and Future	Past and Present
Progress	Tradition and Habit

      Table 1. The Sun and Moon can be seen to correspond to two very different ways of relating to the world. We each use both. When either is overemphasized, there is an imbalance. When both are used together (see Table 2), we can become increasingly vital and creative.

      GETTING IT TOGETHER – THE KEY TO CREATIVITY

      When our conscious, masculine side is at war with our feeling, feminine side, our life can become an endless struggle between what we feel we need to do and what we think we ought to do – like a child living with constantly arguing parents. This can lead to a perplexing sort of self-sabotage which trips us up at the crucial moment. Indeed, we say of some people that ‘their left hand does not know what their right hand is doing’. As we have seen above, this is just another way of saying that our left-brain, conscious, Sun side does not know what our right-brain, unconscious, Moon side is on about.

      But experience shows that the more these two sides can be brought into contact with each other to form an inner dialogue, the more whole, fulfilled and creative our life becomes. In fact, there are times when these two aspects of ourselves do come together. As we wake we may remember a dream we have had. Dreams speak from our lunar side. By training our solar side deliberately to remember our dreams, we can learn to listen consciously to our unconscious. Working with dreams in this way gradually brings the conscious and unconscious mind first into a recognition of, and eventually into a dialogue with, each other.

      FALLING IN LOVE – WITH YOURSELF

      The experience of falling in love is a good metaphor for what happens when the masculine and feminine, the Sun and the Moon, begin to work more harmoniously within us. As anyone who has ever been in love will know, when we are in love everything seems possible. The world is beautiful and life is good. The bliss of being released to life’s magic through falling in love can even become addictive. It makes us feel alive and, even more important, it makes us feel creative.

      It is a notable fact that, even in puritanical periods of history, the affairs and infidelities of the creative artist tend to be accepted. In some way, we admit that strongly creative people, be they artists, musicians, poets, politicians, entrepreneurs, indeed philosophers, are in the business of finding their inner wholeness. As such, it is recognized by society, albeit unconsciously, that deep emotional experience and experimentation is for such people the essence of their life.

      Everyone loves a lover. This is because their love reawakens our own capacity for love, and we are reminded that we, too, are alive and potentially creative. A loving relationship can be an immensely powerful outer trigger to our own inner creativity. This is because falling in love connects us with both our Sun and Moon energies and, at least temporarily, СКАЧАТЬ