Freedom from the great heresy of separateness
Through the transition from Aries (I come forth and from the plane of mind, I rule) to Taurus—I see and when the eye is opened, all is light—we gain an understanding of the power but also of the limitations posed by the mind in treading the Lighted Way to pure vision. As the ancient Teacher Patanjali said, “The seer is pure Knowledge (gnosis). Though pure, he looks upon the presented idea through the medium of the mind.” So, how do we know that we are seeing correctly? How do we know when the eye is opened? These questions pose the fundamental challenge presented by Taurus.
Modern neuroscience recognizes the fact that the eye/brain mechanism isn’t a faithful camera—that visual information must travel through the brain to reach the visual cortex. Michael Talbot wrote in The Holographic Universe that “Some studies suggest that less than fifty percent of what we ‘see’ is actually based on information entering our eyes. The remaining fifty percent plus is pieced together out of our expectations of what the world should look like….” Physicist Nick Herbert has said that “humans can never experience the true texture of quantum reality because everything we touch turns to matter”. In other words, we mold perceptions into the pre-established forms created by the limitations of our minds. Our expectations, our assumptions of what life is or should be, qualify what we see; or, as the Talmud put it, “We don’t see things as they are. We see them as we are.”
The Buddha, who was born in Taurus, achieved enlightenment in Taurus, and died in Taurus, gave us an important insight into perception when he said “all composite things decay”. That is not nihilism; quite the contrary. The key word is “composite”. The quantum physicist David Bohm said that relativity and quantum theory both imply the need to look on the world as “an undivided whole”. This implies that each relatively autonomous and stable structure is to be understood not as something independent and permanently existent, but rather as a product that has been formed in what Bohm called the whole flowing movement of the universe, and which will ultimately dissolve back into this movement. “Mind and matter are not separate substances”, Bohm said. “Rather, they are different aspects of one whole and unbroken movement. In this way, we are able to look on all aspects of existence as not divided from each other, and thus we can bring to an end the fragmentation…which leads us to divide everything from everything…”, he wrote in Wholeness and the Implicate Order.
The writings of Alice Bailey confirm this: “What must be grasped is that all that IS is ever present. What we are concerned with is the constant awakening to that which eternally IS, and to what is ever present in the environment but of which the subject is unaware, owing to short-sightedness.” Release from this limited worldview comes when we shift our focus from the foreground of outer, material life to the subjective realm. The opening of the eye of the soul comes only through struggle, and thus the bull is a fitting symbol for Taurus, for the powerful, driving will is needed to penetrate into realms unknown though always present. When the mind can serve as a searchlight to penetrate into new (to us) realms of awareness and recognition, “whole vision” is the result—the completed point of view that is perfect harmlessness—freedom from the great heresy of separateness. When the searcher has penetrated into this realm of wholeness, he has created an unclogged channel for the inflow of pure love. Towards that goal the energies released at the Taurus full moon each year contribute. Let us work in meditation.
