these forms has a powerful effect on our own life experience, and also affects collective consciousness.

the icon of Goddess Lakshmi shows her with hands that drip gold coins, signifying her power to bestow abundance. In the physical world, she shows up as money and precious metals, but also as every form of fertility and abundance. You might recognize her energy in a blossoming fruit tree, in a golden bracelet, a Vogue fashion spread, or in the glow

Rumi wrote, “God too desires us.”7 But God’s desire is for us to become God, to realize our identity with the divine. For this, transformative practice is required.

Awareness allows the feminine to see herself and gives both containment and direction to her energy.

In a sense, the Goddess too turned sideways into the light. She immolated herself like Sati—surviving demurely in India as a consort of male deities. She was exiled like the Shekinah, the feminine divine of Judaism. In our time, the Goddess has come roaring out of her hiding places—for it is also the nature of the feminine to roar—and we are

world. She is also the force that inescapably nudges us toward the evolution of our consciousness, with which we must align when we seek conscious transformation.

They knew how contemplating an enlightened quality (like compassion) or a divine archetype (like the Sacred Heart, the Tree of Life, or Krishna with his flute) will eventually bring what you’re contemplating alive in you.

When demonic forces are unleashed in the world, the forces of evolution become highly accessible, and not just in human minds and hearts.

TRANSFORMATIVE SYMBOLS We’ve known since Jung’s time that myths and symbols have a lock-and-key relationship to energies in our personal consciousness, as well as in the collective. The ancient spiritual traditions understood very well the power of the imaginal realm. They knew how contemplating an enlightened quality (like compassion) or a divine