posted July 02, 2005 02:35 PM            

Since you have tPluto(r) almost exactly conjunct your nNeptune (about 20' from a direct hit) I thought I'd put this one up.

From Steven Forrest's "The Book of Pluto"

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PLUTO AND NEPTUNE
Here's a useful fiction to which most of us subscribe in order to deal with the world: I am my personality. But the central mystery of our humanness is that all of us are capable of entering other frameworks of selfhood: sleep, and the dream-self. Meditation, and the spirit-self. Imagination, and the fantasy-self.
To enter those worlds, there is a door through which we must pass. Astrologers name it Neptune.

NEPTUNE ITSELF
Consciousness. The blank slate. Mind without thought, without an object of focus or concentration. The smooth wide open sea of pure awareness. The still pool of being. The language sounds mystical and exotic, but the experience is universal.
Each night as you slip from waking to sleep, you pass through that territory. Mostly, the passage unfolds unmarked and we are soon in slumber. But from time to time, unaccountably, we are startled by it. We jolt back to wakefulness, having "caught ourselves falling asleep." Mystics and shamans enter that border-land intentionally, and inherit traditions full of techniques for invoking it: fasting, prayer, mantra, vigil, vision quest, the ritual ingestion of hallucinogens. Artists enter it as well, using their own rituals.
Why does anyone bother? It's hard to answer the question, and perhaps ridiculous to try. A ten year old upon first learning of the mechanics of sexual intercourse might ask the same question: why bother? And we all smile. These higher states of consciousness offer their own ineffable rewards. Words pall, but we might speak of inspiration, a sense of the presence of God, spiritual renewal, bliss.
Anything so strange and powerful must possess a baleful shadow. That is certainly the case here. Neptunian realities can seduce us away from this atoms-and-molecules world of real people and real responsibilities. They can, paradoxically, trick us away from the scene of most of our actual spiritual work. Here we find escapism in all its multitudinous, ever-mutating forms: drug or alcohol problems, television problems, glamour, glitz, or money problems, the ten thousand faces of addiction.
Thus, the twin Neptunian archetypes: the Mystic and the Drunk. And sometimes, distinguishing one from the other is a perplexing exercise.

PLUTO-NEPTUNE ASPECTS IN THE NATAL CHART
If either you or your mom can sing all the words to a Beatles' song, you've got a Pluto-Neptune aspect in your birth chart and it's a sextile.
The two planets move very slowly. Around the middle of the Second World War, they formed that sixty-degree angle with each other and they've been more-or-less that way ever since. The aspect won't last forever— they'll form their last true sextile in this cycle on February 26, 2032 at 9:42 in the morning, EST, and drift gradually out of orb over the following few years. But since World War Two and until then, everyone born on Earth shares that same basic feature in his or her birth chart.
Imagine a world in which suddenly one day everyone woke up with a craving for the color chartreuse. At first the change would come as shock, but gradually it would be taken for granted, as though that predilection were a self-evident dimension of human nature. After a generation or two, no one would have any notion of how odd the circumstances were in comparison to human norms over the millennia.
That's our situation. As I write these words, for everyone under about fifty years of age nothing could be more natural than the easy blending and mutual enhancement (sextile) of Pluto and Neptune. The meaning of that statement is complex and multidimensional, and not everyone brings it to focus in the same way. But for one and all, there is a linkage of Neptunian mystical transcendence and our encounter with the Plutonian dark.
In this section, we'll be using a slightly different format than in the previous ones. Since the Neptune-Pluto sextile is so universal, we'll explore it in detail. And since there is almost no one alive born under any other aspect between the two planets, those energies will get short shrift. (The only other aspect represented among living humans — the conjunction —occurred in the spring of 1892.)
The heart of the Neptune-Pluto matter, in terms of the evolution of human culture, is the blending of two previously unrelated notions: our spiritual journey and our psychological work on ourselves. The first is Neptunian, the second is Plutonian.
Formal Jungian psychology may or may not have a long future in the world, but it captures very well the spirit of our age in this regard. No one can immerse himself or herself in Jungian writing or analysis for very long without encountering a sense of spiritual vastness and transcendent possibilities. But neither could such a person avoid an uncomfortable, humbling contemplation of his or her personal demonology. Furthermore, a failure squarely to face the latter would be recognized as an insurmountable block to the flowering of the former. This basic attitude or value is the essence of the Neptune-Pluto sextile in its conscious manifestation.
In understanding your own experience of the aspect, the key is to accept that your direct experience of your own spirituality is enhanced or blocked according to how effectively you are responding to the challenges afforded by your natal Pluto. Negatively, your inner cosmos will be populated by false gods, some frightening, others seductive, and those gods will tie you in knots whenever you attempt to explore the Infinite. Positively, the sheer energy released into the psyche by intentional Plutonian work can empower unimaginable leaps in consciousness.
What about these "false gods" that can entrap us, preventing our spiritual growth? Here's an example: A boy never gets anything real from his father. Dad is always at work or in front of the television. His son never enjoys any teaching, any shared play, any sense of specialness. In modern nouveau-psychological language, the son never experiences any male "initiation" or "bonding."
This child grows to physical manhood, his wounds never explored or acknowledged. His Plutonian energies, in this case twisted, interact vigorously with his spiritual perspective through the Neptune-Pluto sextile. What kind of God does he then imagine? Various answers are possible. Perhaps the man sees a universe that is a direct reproduction of his paternal drama: an indifferent or nonexistent deity rules over a cosmos in which a mere bug such as himself is perfectly inconsequential. Such a metaphysical perspective would be especially likely to arise if the rest of our protagonist's birth chart suggests any degree of passivity.
If his birth chart suggests more susceptibility to anger, then perhaps his unprocessed fury at his father for failing him would shape his Neptunian spirituality. "God" would be an antagonist, bent on creating misfortune and loneliness. Or maybe we would observe a hellfire-and-brimstone Fundamentalist, spreading damnation hither and yon in a gaudy externalization of his own unconscious guilt, shame, and "unworthiness."
There is another Neptunian "soul-cage" we must avoid: this is the planet of glamour. The word has a modern ring to it; we think of "glamour" magazines, for example. Ask a high school class today if they think they'd appreciate living a "glamorous lifestyle" or being viewed as "glamorous" by their peers, and I suspect most of the young people would express some degree of enthusiasm.
Funny — and revealing — how the meaning of words evolves over time. Glamour is actually an old Scots term that referred to a demonic power of deception, typically used to create an aura of beauty or value around something intrinsically worthless, tawdry, or evil.
Pure, high Neptunian energy is that door of perception through which we experience our spiritual natures. One message brought to us by such perceptions is that we are all so much more than we seem to be. How "glamorous" to be an ancient being of light and energy! But that well-founded feeling of spiritual upliftment can be turned easily into a bleaker, Celtic kind of glamour. We begin to slip into dark-glamorous imaginings about ourselves, or into the worship of dark-glamorous gods of illusion.
Examples? Under our long-running Neptune-Pluto sextile, any unprocessed inner feelings of worthlessness can immediately translate, through glamour, into reactive grandiose "spiritual" imaginings — "ah yes, I remember it well ...in a previous lifetime, I was a great yogi in Benares." The fantasy feels good and compensates psychologically for low self-esteem, but does it help anyone grow? Probably not. More likely, it blinds us to the realities of our own actual karmic predicament.
Similarly, unprocessed Plutonian feelings of powerlessness can manifest as "spiritual" power-trips. How many poor souls do you know who imagine themselves, against all evidence, to be "gifted with healing powers," or to be "psychic?" How many confused people imagine themselves to be "shamans?" How many are "channeling?"
An abandoned or abused child often longs to be dead ...or radically, permanently numb, which is essentially a mask for the death-wish. Should such a Plutonian psychic wound go unresurrected and unexplored, how will it link into one's Neptunian transcendence-circuitry? The answer is sad, and visible everywhere today: the hunger for sheer oblivion. Drugs or alcohol, misused, can create such a state. A person starting a slide down that familiar road may at first sincerely mistake numbness for spirituality.….it feels exactly like the "god" for which he or she longed so piteously as a child.
These are delicate matters. I am not advocating cynicism and knee-jerk disbelief in everyone's spiritual story, nor I am advocating Puritanism. But under the near-universal Neptune-Pluto sextile, we are experiencing a collective plague of such psychological distortions. Any fears, insecurities, or deeper psychological damages that have not been honestly explored will immediately, automatically begin to interact with one's faculties for spiritual perception and image-formation. And a sextile is a soft aspect, so the tendency is toward laziness and uncritical, simple postures. Furthermore, the sextile itself has a giddy, exciting quality, which can sometimes resemble the spirit of an enthusiastic teenager, drunk for the first time, and suddenly possessed of a "fantastic idea."
The effects of the trine are similar, but without quite the same giddiness and extremity. The next trine between Neptune and Pluto will occur between 2087 and 2091— back burner material, unless you're really into organic vegetables.
Neptune and Pluto will move into a square aspect a little sooner, between 2061 and 2065. The last time they formed that aspect was early in the nineteenth century, between 1816 and 1820. Here the psychological and the spiritual are again linked, but the quality of tension between them is emphasized. Spirit vs. flesh themes arise, with a corresponding deification of "otherworldly, "transcendent" expressions.
Note that the current sextile is distinct from these other Neptune-Pluto events in that it embraces fully eight decades rather than the more typical period of a few years. The reason for this huge disparity is fairly simple to understand. Pluto's orbit is quite elliptical. When it swings closest to the sun, it is moving relatively fast — fast enough to match pace with Neptune, which normally is the quicker of the two. When Pluto happens to reach that fast part of its orbit, Neptune could be anywhere. This time around, however, it turned out that when Pluto got synchronized with Neptune, it was about sixty degrees behind in its orbit — thus, the incredibly long-running sextile, which astrologically is perhaps the single most unique feature of our historical age.

PLUTO-NEPTUNE EVENTS
When Pluto and Neptune interact through transits or solar arcs, one cardinal principle dominates: don't do anything! The idea is exaggerated of course, but not as negative or even as simple-minded as it sounds. Here is the deeper logic behind it: Neptune is fundamentally a planet that refers to our capacity to navigate inner space. As such, when it is stimulated, our awareness of subtle intuitions is heightened. Neptunian events coincide with an intensification of our capacity to visualize and imagine, and an extension of our faculty of concentration on those interior landscapes. In other words, Neptune excels at helping us improve a wide range of skills that are extraordinarily useful when it comes to mapping our inner topography and receiving inspiration and insight.
Such inner developments have profound indirect relevance to decision-making and action. But when they are the focus of attention, our intelligence is not directed toward the outer, material world, nor should it be. We are adjusted optimally for the navigational requirements of another world entirely — the inner one.
Which means that we are prone to dumb moves in the outer realm of events. Hence, the dictum: don't do anything.
With Pluto in the picture, Neptunian visualizations and realizations may take on the tonality of any psychic woundedness we have not yet integrated. No matter what the aspect, this is a powerful time for intuitive self-discovery in those uncomfortable areas. Methods involving symbols are particularly productive then: Tarot cards, dream work, and astrology, for example.
As we advance, the higher, happier dimensions of Pluto come into focus: images pop into the mind regarding inspiring new directions and possibilities in one's life, promising deeper degrees of emotional engagement and authenticity. Again, the triggering agent for these liberating images may well be symbolism of some sort. But even there, we must be cautious. These Neptunian inspirations are probably not ready to be enacted as they are visualized. They come into consciousness packaged as metaphors and archetypes — Neptune stuff. Invariably, they require grounding, horse-sensical scrutiny, and compromise.

THE MOVING CONJUNCTION
With Neptune and Pluto fused together by transit or solar arc, an extraordinary opportunity exists ...but one which may fill you with ambivalence. A cloaked figure appears at your door on a lightning-slashed night, the Full Moon over his shoulder. "I have a secret," he says, and you're immediately solid goose bumps from head to toe. "Ask, and I will tell you…..but only if you ask."
So what are you going to do? In your bones, you have the feeling that learning the cloaked man's secret is going to have some unforeseeable implications.….
Maybe you should leave it well enough alone. But on the other hand there's a gravity to the situation, a sense of destiny. Could you ever sleep well again if you send the man away?
The "cloaked man" in our parable can manifest in a variety of ways. Many times, they have an “occult" sense. You're given a chance to have a reading with a well-recommended psychic. You're tempted to buy some Tarot cards or take up astrology. You are presented with an opportunity to do some manner of deep inner work: a vision quest, a sweat lodge, profound psycho-therapy. A hypnotist specializing in past-life regressions is coming to town, and exerting a strong pull on your imagination. Perhaps some kind of body-centered or breath-centered therapy enters your field of possibility, promising to bring to the surface some long-buried.....what?
All these are faces of the Neptunian-Plutonian cloaked man. All promise the delivery of secrets. None offer any guarantees of comfort, safety, or even success. Sometimes the spiritual journey reaches such crossroads. Then the fierce face of God and the Goddess emerges, the one that guards the higher secrets and the deeper knowledge, challenging rather than encouraging, menac-
ing rather than comforting, cooler and more indifferent than the benign Santa Claus they sell in churches on bright Sunday mornings.
This is the Season of Initiation.

THE MOVING HARD ASPECTS
Spiritually, you are tripping over yourself, that is the warning of the moving square or opposition between Neptune and Pluto. Your Neptunian intuition is attempting to deliver a message, but a wound in your spirit is blocking reception. To receive the message, you must heal the wound.
Is your inner image of the universe twisted? Maybe mom smoked cigarettes while you were in her womb. Maybe the amniotic fluid was rendered toxic by the nicotine — and that simple fact built a paradigm into your deepest psychological stratum, a paradigm of a toxic universe. How might that manifest in adult life? All-pervasive fear, mistrust, and foreboding. Under a moving hard aspect here, the time has come to make that unconscious attitude conscious. Why? Because otherwise a message of hope and possibility cannot break through into your awareness — your "God" won't let it.
If something beat you down when you were young, then under this moving hard aspect you may find yourself unable to move forward into your true spiritual inheritance because of an unnatural, unnecessary shame-faced humility. If, on the other hand, something hurt you by inflating your ego when you were young — you were a "spoiled" child, for example — then this aspect suggests that arrogance or pride may be blinding you.
As always, squares and oppositions suggest strong evolutionary pressures and the need for committed effort. Handled consciously, they suggest a breakthrough.
In an unconscious scenario, hard aspects between Pluto and Neptune imply that we'll get our "karmuppance," to use Ram Dass's delightful phrase — our "stuff” catches up with us, and we find ourselves in painful or embarrassing circumstance of our own creation.
This is the Season of Rectification.

THE MOVING SOFT ASPECTS
With moving trines or sextiles linking Pluto and Neptune, a gentle hand reaches across the abyss. Below, white water boils over jagged rocks. Do you grasp the hand? Do you leap? Well, that would be the smart move. But you are understandably scared. And the place you're standing isn't so bad…..a little boring, a little limited in possibilities maybe. That's better than being dashed to pieces on those jagged rocks.….
Nothing will make you jump. That's not the way of the soft aspects. They only offer the opportunity and the assistance.
There are inner secrets, probably some inner wounds, you would benefit from exploring. It won't be easy. Such work is never easy. But it won't be hell either. You're ready. Help is available. Your circumstances in terms of doing what you need to do are as optimal as they are ever going to be. The fears you feel are, in this case, inflated. Once the work is done, you'll look back on them with the same attitude you feel toward your childish horror of the "man in the closet" and the "monster under the bed."
And the continuing vibrancy of your spiritual life is at stake.

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posted July 02, 2005 08:55 PM              

Neptune Sextile Pluto is a generational aspect...right?...so I would imagine alot of people should have this. These are the parts that stood out for me in this first reading...

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Examples? Under our long-running Neptune-Pluto sextile, any unprocessed inner feelings of worthlessness can immediately translate, through glamour, into reactive grandiose "spiritual" imaginings — "ah yes, I remember it well ...in a previous lifetime, I was a great yogi in Benares." The fantasy feels good and compensates psychologically for low self-esteem, but does it help anyone grow? Probably not. More likely, it blinds us to the realities of our own actual karmic predicament.

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I know a few people with this problem!

And this is a nice summary for what those with Neptune sextile Pluto have to watch out for..

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But under the near-universal Neptune-Pluto sextile, we are experiencing a collective plague of such psychological distortions. Any fears, insecurities, or deeper psychological damages that have not been honestly explored will immediately, automatically begin to interact with one's faculties for spiritual perception and image-formation. And a sextile is a soft aspect, so the tendency is toward laziness and uncritical, simple postures. Furthermore, the sextile itself has a giddy, exciting quality, which can sometimes resemble the spirit of an enthusiastic teenager, drunk for the first time, and suddenly possessed of a "fantastic idea."

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Just finishing up a Pluto transit Neptune Event too!!

Thanks Zala

Neptune...