what’s with the moon?

This is the last episode in this series for beginners, What’s it all about? To bring this little series to a close, I want to talk about the moon.

The moon is very symbolic, in spirituality. Symbols in general, metaphors and analogies, parables, play a significant role in spiritual teachings. This is because spirituality is about a mystical aspect of life, an aspect that can’t quite be captured directly by words but can only be hinted at in a poetic way, rather indirectly, relying more on feelings and intuitions than rational understandings.

The moon is significant in many respects. To balance the masculine aspect of the sun, the moon has been used to represent the feminine. This masculine-feminine duality, the yang and the yin, is seen throughout the manifest world. The lunar aspect represents the feminine, it is rather mysterious, it waxes and wanes, it has moods. For those sensitive to energy, the phases of the moon are often very significant, with strong energies being felt around the time of the full moon and the new moon.

This may sound like nonsense if you are a rational being but think of this, the tides every day, all that ocean water shifting, moving, just as the earth spins underneath the influence, the gravitational pull of the moon. It is a huge energy at play there. If that does not seem mysterious enough to you, consider also that many women’s menstrual cycles, if left to their own natural course, become synchronised with the phase of the moon.

Perhaps for these reasons the moon is of great significance in the pagan tradition. But it has also been used as the basis for many calendars to mark the passing of time, and to this day religious ceremonies around the world are often timed to coincide with a full moon or a new moon.

Perhaps the most symbolic use of the moon has been in the Zen tradition. In Zen the aim is to live life directly, to be life, and not do anything indirectly, not to accept secondhand things. When a teacher in Zen is teaching, he is said to be a finger pointing at the moon. If you just gaze at the finger you will never see the moon. All spiritual teachings are like this. If we get stuck on the teaching we miss that which is being pointed at. So the full moon represents truth, our essence, the fundamental nature of who we are and of all that is. This is the moon, but don’t just listen to me talking about it, see the moon for yourself, become the moon.