Opening the Eye of awareness:
For millennia Taurus has been associated with the full moon of the Buddha. The significance of his breakthrough achieved under the bodhi tree in ancient India continues to reverberate, even to take on increasing relevance for humanity today. The Buddha’s great achievement was his identification of the cause of human suffering: the craving for the fulfillment of the separated self through the satisfaction of desire—the fires and cravings of egotism which drive us to self-affirmation and feed the three fires of greed, hatred, and delusion. As the writer Huston Smith put it, “Coddling our individual identities, we lock ourselves inside ‘our skin-encapsulated egos’” (quoting Alan Watts’s well known expression). From life to life, our karma is depicted by the quality of our desires and the thrust of our wills. Until the fevers that sustain these desires are extinguished, they remain as embers ready to rekindle with each return to earthly life.
We can identify the Taurean force of desire behind the “stiffening” of human wills in the separative, wrong idealisms which today have created a seemingly unbridgeable polarization between human beings. That is not an entirely discouraging recognition, for we need the will to mobilize and accomplish our intentions. The key is to transform the personal, self-oriented will into the will-to-good which is dedicated to the Whole, for this adjusts the individual perspective to assume its position within the larger whole.
Towards this goal the Buddha dedicated his life and teaching, which is summed up beautifully in the keynote of Taurus: I see and when the Eye is opened, all is light. Progress towards the release of the separated self was outlined by the Buddha in his Eightfold Path, which begins with Right Values. What we desire, what we view as most important and urgently needed, is expressed in our values, for they determine the direction of our lives. We may think that our vision is clear and our perspective is reasonable, but the Buddha recognized that the perceptions created by ignorance of reality foster cravings and attachments that shroud us in darkness. Unconscious wishes, longings, and expectations masquerade as beliefs and truths which then form the foundation on which we structure our lives…until, in Taurus, Alice Bailey wrote, the seeker “comes to the point wherein the real goal or the true vision appears”. The power of desire generates circumstances which enable the seeker to struggle towards a higher, more comprehensive vision by transforming the personal will into the will-to-good—an energy which produces cohesion, a drawing together and a tendency to fusion and union.
So potent is the will-to-good that esoteric teaching affirms it is animating the entire evolutionary process, and that goodwill, its counterpart on the human level, is the practical expression of the willingness to sacrifice for the greater good. Can we not see a living demonstration of this being enacted on a daily, global basis by countless medical workers and support staff, as well as all those who continue to meet the daily needs of their fellow human beings even at great personal risk, and the acquiescence of citizens throughout the world to follow their governments’ guidelines for the good of society? Times of crisis, such as now, place humanity in extremis, leading to a mental development motivated by the urge to understand the forces which are causing the crisis to emerge into prominence. The suffering, deprivation, anxiety and distress caused by the effort to comprehend a crisis can lead to a reversal of humanity’s orientation, the writings of Alice Bailey tell us, producing a truer sense of values.
Towards that end, let us work in meditation to invoke the open Eye and the light of Reality: I see and when the Eye is opened, all is light.
