posted December 30, 2006 11:02 AM            

You wanted to know about Pluto/Sun/Asc – Whoa, what a life-altering experience you’ll be enjoying over the next few years!!

This table here http://www.astrologyweekly.com/astrological-information/planetary-stations.php shows that Pluto probably won’t be out of your Asc neighborhood until late 2009 – looks like you’ll have 5 hits, as I will endure 5 to my Moon at 26Pis22…..

Pluto Retrograde 29 Mar 2006 26°Sg45'
Pluto Direct 5 Sep 2006 24°Sg05'
Pluto Retrograde 1 Apr 2007 28°Sg58'
Pluto Direct 8 Sep 2007 26°Sg18'
Pluto Retrograde 2 Apr 2008 01°Cp09'
Pluto Direct 9 Sep 2008 28°Sg30'

Here’s the Pluto/Angles chapter from Steven Forrest: http://www.linda-goodman.com/ubb/Forum1/HTML/008083.html
"If you have Pluto on the Ascendant, go back to Chapter Seven, read about Pluto in the first house and add some exclamation points! All that we might say about a first house Pluto is expressed in an exaggerated, intensified form when Pluto is actually conjunct the Ascendant."

I’ll be putting up Pluto in the Houses soon…..

posted December 30, 2006 12:12 PM            

You'll be 37 or 38, hon -- with many years of Life yet to be lived WITHOUT tPluto in hard aspect!! Hang in there....

posted December 30, 2006 12:16 PM            

quote:

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PLUTO IN THE FIRST HOUSE

THE FIRST HOUSE ARENA: Leadership, Personal Impact, Style
THE FIRST HOUSE PITS: Mere Egoism and Power-Tripping

IN THE TRADITION….
….the first house is often called the “House of the Personality.” What’s actually at stake here can be expressed more precisely: the first house represents that part of the Self which we make obvious to the world through our habitual styles of action, behavior, and self-presentation. Think of it as the interface between two parts of your humanness: all the complexities and ambiguities of your deep psyche, and the fundamental requirement of material life that we make visible, behavioral choices.
Someone offends you. Inwardly, you experience dozens of emotions and reactions. Anger. Hurt. Understanding. Contempt. Shame. Transcendent Indifference. Fear. They’re all real. Which inner state will you express? Or more precisely, which state will you express FIRST, as a reflex? The answer is reflected in the natures of any planets in your first house, as well as with the cusp of that house, which we call the Ascendent.

Pluto in the First? Let’s have a look:

OUR HIGH DESTINY
You’ve probably had the misfortune of serving on committees in which the healthy principles of democracy and consensus exhibited their shadowy sides: endless inaction, lengthy obsession with trivial concerns, deadlock. This downward trajectory is often characterized in its early stages by mutual displays of courtesy, respect, and attentiveness. By the end of the process, we typically observe backbiting, scapegoating, and childish vindictiveness reminiscent of a medieval court. And still nothing is accomplished. At such a time, one often longs for real leadership to appear, the sort of leadership that can quickly cut through layers of verbiage and get to the heart of the matter.
Your high destiny involves providing that kind of incisive direction. Such leadership doesn’t need to be cruel or autocratic, but it is not typically much concerned with being liked. Human society needs its truth-sayers, and if they do well in popularity contests it’s generally posthumously. In times of crisis, society needs men and women of action, self-confidence, and steady nerves…..people, such as yourself, who can make painful decisions in ambivalent circumstances quickly and without looking back.

Such sharpness of impact is not simply about galvanizing groups into focused action; it can just as easily be about punching the energizing, challenging truth through to individuals: telling people what they don’t want to hear, in other words. And it does not need to function in face-to-face mode; it can operate less directly, if the rest of the chart favors such an approach. Examples of that latter possibility might exist in journalism, for one possibility.

YOUR DISTORTING WOUND
The first house is a very sensitive area. A planet there is said to be strong in the birth chart. While we all have Pluto in our charts, it would be fair to single you out as a markedly "Plutonian" person, even from very early in life.

Now, a Plutonian person will tend to see the world through Pluto-colored glasses, and that means that you have always been good at seeing the sorts of realities that make people uncomfortable. We live in a world that's full of threatening realities, some serious, some more trivial, but all taboo. I can imagine you as young child at a family reunion. You've overheard some hushed conversations at home, learned some things that no one intended you to know. "Uncle Jack," I hear you exclaiming before the assembled relatives. "What's a bimbo and why are you in love with one?"

Your taboo-sensitive Plutonian radar picked up a certain mishmash of tension and fascination in your parents' voices as they discussed Jack's romantic proclivities. You were not out to hurt anybody. You had no idea that you had stepped into dangerous territory. But, with Pluto in the first house, your natural instinct for action lay in the direction of exploring emotionally charged realities.

Nobody is born knowing what's taboo; we have to learn it. As a Plutonian person, you had a natural hunger to get at that deeper, less comfortable layer of life. But inevitably you were naive.

How does Uncle Jack respond to your query? Unless he himself was a Plutonian type, there's an excellent chance that he punished you for your question. That punishment may have been a sharp, angry word. More likely it was simply a very awkward moment: a pained, clueless look on Uncle Jack's face, then mom or dad to the rescue somehow.....them looking at least as pained as Jack. You never intended it, but you hurt everyone in that tableau. And that itself was your punishment.

You began to learn that there was something about your nature that people found upsetting, unsettling, or plain reprehensible. You were too young to grasp that certain truths are kind only in certain seasons, and sometimes never. You began to carry your Wound: a secretiveness, an inward intensity not to be shared, a caution about expressing yourself spontaneously.

Carrying the Wound angered you. Sometimes that anger leaked out half-intentionally... you knew how to hurt people, and sometimes you'd do it just to release some venom. Perhaps you stayed on that hurtful road; more likely, if you're the sort of person who'd be reading this book in the first place, you overcame that kind of compulsive angry self-presentation. You just held all that fiery truth inside. But it's still a Wound: a dark, bitter self-contained edge in your character. Maybe you show it, maybe not. To some extent, that depends on the "politeness quotient" in the rest of your chart. But it's there.

In a nutshell: the idea that truth-carrying and truth-embodying should be a source of shame does not occur to a child. You walked into that trap, and were scarred by it.

There's more. Anything in the first house tends to radiate visibly and obviously from the personality. With you sending out such Plutonian vibrations, people around you often let you symbolize that part of life for them. And when they are not at ease with Plutonian realities — a fair bet most of the time — they'll have a tendency to project their discomfort onto you, naming you the "bad" one: you're "too intense," "too psychological," "too sexual," "too morbid," whatever. This scapegoating pattern has likely made itself felt at some point in your life, and it too is part of the Wound you carry.

YOUR NAVIGATIONAL ERROR
Like the beer can (with steel in it) sitting by the compass in our earlier parable, your truth-carrier's scar or your scapegoat's wound can distort your course through life. Essentially, you can hold back too much, or express yourself vigorously and passionately but in pointless ways that have little to do with who you really are and what you really feel.

Until the necessary inner work is done, you are vulnerable to finding yourself in situations where you "know too much" but feel incapable of acting on that knowledge. You may, for example, find yourself working for a company that's cutting corners in terms of environmental regulations. Depending on other aspects of your character, you may deal with that reality by becoming cynical, or by rationalizing, or by justifying your choice to work there and keep silence as a prerequisite to feeding your kids or paying your bills.....as though no other jobs existed.

In all those dark expressions, we see the basic mark of Pluto: in each, you are bound to the truth-suppressing self-containment that is characteristic of the unprocessed first house Pluto Wound. Further, those accumulated inner toxins would then add an unpleasant edge to your off-the-job character. The natural, healthy urge to express the truth thus becomes vulnerable to being charged with anger and then misexpressing itself. A classic misexpression of such energy lies in appointing oneself psychologist to "safe" people in one's life. Without intending it, you might act in ways that are too pushy, especially in terms of other people's sensitive zones. Illustration: you might tell your best friend that the reason she's having trouble losing weight is that her excess pounds are really just armor against facing her discomforts around sexuality. And that might very well be the truth. But is she ready to hear it? And will it help her? And why are you really saying it?

If your nature is less psychologically-oriented, we might see inappropriate assumptions of practical authority over others — the "too much advice" syndrome. We can also observe manipulative behavior — and such behavior is usually successful because of your instinctual knowledge of other people's woundedness and hence of where their vulnerabilities lie.

Underlying it all, there would arise a dark, brooding "existentialist" mood — the inevitable mark of low Plutonian energy.

Let's add that the first house has much to do with our ability to act and to make choices. When you are in balance in that department, you naturally choose to function in Plutonian ways — as someone who is inclined to delve, to penetrate, to ferret out truth... and often to lead or inspire others in that regard. But if the Navigational Error dominates, then you become directionless, and slip into a kind of existential attitude of coping reactively with a meaningless universe.

We must emphasize repeatedly that, when talking about Wounds and Navigational Errors, we are never speaking of immutable character defects; we are looking at psychological twists that can be untwisted, thereby freeing energy for vastly more helpful and interesting behaviors.

THE HEALING METHOD
Going beyond first house Plutonian traps is not polite business. To succeed, you have to take two steps: you must face the dark and you must express what you learn to at least one other human being.

Facing the dark can take many forms. Sometimes — but only sometimes — that means doing deep psychological work on oneself. Anyone who has been through the process of real psycho-therapy, including its bleak terrains, has done it.

Other possibilities exist. I am imagining a person volunteering to work in a hospice. Perhaps she approaches the work with idealism but some naivete, expecting lots of "cosmic" experiences around death. If she sticks with it, she'll have some of those high experiences too — but she'll also see a lot of petty, frightened, dispiriting behaviors on the parts of people who are dying exactly the way they lived.

What will come up in our volunteer as she faces these people? All the dimensions of her Plutonian Wound. She'll face some taboo truths in the hospice to be sure; death is the ultimate taboo subject. But she'll also face cynicism, coldness, and anger in herself, and those are the marks of her own wound: the burden of her own silence.

A young man might undertake a Vision Quest in the Native American style. He goes alone into the wilderness, perhaps with armed with crystals, shamanistic fantasies, and naivete. By the second day of his fast, he is terribly hungry, frightened, empty and vulnerable. He feels his death close by, and it's not very inspiring. His Wound rises up — but perhaps something else rises up in him as well. Perhaps he finds something in himself that is strong enough to face all his primal fears, to name them, and to integrate them.

The point is that, with Pluto in the first house, you were born with a capacity to function decisively in the presence of fierce truths. Since even acknowledging those truths is not common practice, you were shamed and punished for having that capacity. The healing process for you lies in placing yourself in situations where that ability to look darkness in the eye and act consciously anyway is necessary and useful. The hospice image illustrates the idea of undertaking the healing process in a public context; therapy or Vision Quest illustrate its more private face. Either method works.

But both methods only begin the process. We must recognize that the first house is quite social. That is, it pertains to our social presentation of ourselves. To complete the healing process, a first house Pluto person must integrate the experience of the dark with his or her outward, social self — and that's where expressing what we learn to another human being comes into the picture.

In the hospice there's an old man dying of cancer. He's pretending he'll be fine. He's cursing his doctors, his nurses, his family. Nothing is good enough. He's obsessed with money, fears he's being robbed. How do you really feel about him? Well, sadness and maybe even compassion for him might figure in your answer. But anyone who sits with such a curmudgeon on a daily basis is going to have saltier emotions to express as well. The first house Pluto person must find somewhere to express all those thoughts and attitudes, and thereby to integrate that earthy, dark-facing energy into the Self.

THE ENERGIZING VISION
Human culture needs its beads read sometimes. We need people such as yourself who are born with the rare ability to face their own radical fury and their own bleak desolation. We need them, after that personal "descent into Hell," to emerge and help us face the dark in our own lives. You can do it, and you were born for it. You will thrive in an environment where people are up against their most basic issues and fears, willing to face them, but perhaps uncertain of how to do so. When people are ready for the truth, you can step in. You'll help them, of course, but that's only part of the point. The rest of it is that you'll feel alive and energized there.

Something extraordinary happens in you when real human drama unfolds, when people are stripped of their pretenses and posturings and stand naked. Then, they are like dynamite waiting for a match — and the match is a sense of what to do, where to aim all that fire and willingness. The match could be called leadership, and you can provide it. That leadership can unfold in obvious collective ways, such as in a business or a civic group you might influence, or it can be expressed in private, a mind-triggering word uttered to one individual. It might put you in the public eye as a kind of role model, or it might develop more quietly. Those kinds of distinctions can be made astrologically, but only through knowledge of your entire birth chart. Either way, you are at your best in situations of naked honesty, immediacy, and directness. And conversely, you are least comfortable in circumstances where truths are being avoided, hidden behind theatrical veils of form and propriety.

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posted December 30, 2006 12:17 PM            

quote:

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PLUTO IN THE SECOND HOUSE
THE SECOND HOUSE ARENA: Building a Basis for Self-Confidence
THE SECOND HOUSE PITS: Underextension due to Self-Doubt

IN THE TRADITION...
...the second house is often called the "House of Money." In practice, that's a valid association, provided we keep the idea in perspective. Here, as in many other areas of astrological interest, I find it helpful to recall that astrology is far older than human culture. I'm not speaking of the knowledge of astrology, but rather of the astrological mechanism itself. Primitive hominids nuzzling around the Olduvai Gorge a couple of million years ago had birth charts and responded to astrological stimuli. They didn't know it, of course, anymore than does a modern Senator or physics professor.

What did "money" mean to that hominid, ages before the first VISA card? The best answer is probably food, rocks to throw, perhaps a warm animal hide to wear on a cold night.

And how did that hominid feel if he had those resources in abundance? Probably pretty good. Confident. And if he lacked them? Insecure.

That's the core logic of the second house. To feel self-assured we must feel that we are prepared and equipped to face the requirements of life. We need resources, both materially and in terms of skills, connections, and knowledge. Money is certainly one such resource, but far from the only one.

With any planet in the second house, the skills, connections, and knowledge most naturally associated with that planet are at the heart of the matter for us when it comes to maintaining a pleasant feeling of legitimacy, self-respect and capability.

Pluto in the second house? Let's have a look...

YOUR HIGH DESTINY
Every Age has its folk wisdom. Some of it is truly eternal and precious; some is hooked uniquely to the transitory blind spots of time and culture. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" — that, I think, is in the former category: eternal and precious. "A woman's place is in the home." "Boys don't cry." Those nostrums seem less compelling today than they did a couple of generations ago.

Here's another nostrum: "You're good enough just the way you are." We hear a lot of sentiments along those lines nowadays. How eternal are they? That's hard to say. Certainly exhortations toward loving self-acceptance can serve useful, healing purposes. But they don't help us understand the logic of the second house. Here, we face the human need not so much to accept oneself as to prove oneself. How? Each planet has its own story, but with Pluto in the second house, you must prove yourself to yourself in distinctly Plutonian ways. And Pluto, as we have seen, thrives on extremity and intensity. With Pluto in this position, the realization of your high destiny involves going to your emotional limits. It might literally mean facing the risk of physical death — as for example when a person attains self-respect and self-realization through climbing a mountain or fighting back against a violent attack or virulent disease. Very often, there is a Plutonian Rite of Passage in which some powerful taboo must be broken — a man or woman, for example, marries across a race line or "comes out" as a gay person in conservative society. And thereby attains dignity.

Earlier in the book, quoting Robert Bly, we spoke of a "witch" who guards the gate to higher states of energy, keeping out "wimps" with all her treachery and ferocity. If you have Pluto in the second house, in realizing your own high destiny that metaphor has particular relevance to you. Often, for people such as yourself, there is one critical fear-facing, taboo-breaking test that arises, often unexpectedly, like a crossroads in your biography. A friend says, "Let's quit our stinking jobs and move to Europe." If you do, you've crossed the Rubicon. A month later you're making ends meet by serving pizza in Zurich. Everyone you know back at the Insurance Agency thinks you're crazy. Some days you do too. But in that dramatic, taboo-breaking action you've proven something to yourself: that you have inside you the basic resources of survival, that your life did not depend on your job, and that you are far more autonomous than you ever imagined.

YOUR DISTORTING WOUND
Zen Buddhists say that being born is like setting to sea in a leaky boat. Unless you're either very young or your Pluto is very weakly placed, you probably don't need me to explain that proverb to you.

Life is full of perils, and sooner or later we die. None of that makes anybody very comfortable, and so there is an unspoken collective agreement not to emphasize such Plutonian perspectives in normal conversation. We designate a priestly class to handle those realities for us. We dress them in black, encourage them to wear long faces, and generally don't invite them to our parties.

Ever since you were small, you've had an instinctual sense of the fragility of our circumstances. Second house energy is concerned with arming ourselves against threats, and Pluto is particularly skilled at recognizing even the most dreadful of those threats. The linkage of planet and house is very natural here; they reinforce each other. Thus, Pluto in the second house often represents a cautious quality. Caution is a virtue in many ways, but taken to extremes it can cripple a person. And if it is taken to extremes unconsciously, its effects can be devastating.

How much fear was in the air in your family home? What was the nature of that fear? These are critical questions. Because your natural awareness of life's fragility was like a vacuum into which your mother's fear and your father's fear rushed. Unprocessed and left unconscious, that fear can profoundly affect your view of life, leaving you hesitant to extend yourself toward your most interesting potentials.

In the state of grace, a child with Pluto in the second house wants experiences of the "edge." He or she wants to climb high in a tree, wants to see the scary movie — wants to forge a basis for self-confidence, in other words. But all children are busily forming a view of world based in large part upon parental and communal descriptions of "what's out there." The more the child perceives parents motivated by fear, the more he or she internalizes a sense of being inadequate and powerless. "If they are scared, I guess I should be too."

Complicating this dynamic, we also observe a tendency for any form of abuse, deception or betrayal to immediately lodge as a kind of poison in your second house circuitry — that is, in your self-confidence. Earlier in the book, we raised the question of "where we carry the Wound," observing that not everyone who suffers the same hurt will bleed from the same place. For you, your self-esteem is the Plutonian lightning rod. The psychological wiring diagram looks something like this: "There must have been something bad about me or I wouldn't have been hit, lied to, dismissed, ignored, abandoned, and so forth."

YOUR NAVIGATIONAL ERROR
The "beer can" near your existential compass can manifest as a systematic underestimation of your ability to deal with whatever life hurls at you, leading you toward an unnecessary emphasis upon safety, guarantees, and certainty as you navigate through life.

In our culture, money is generally heralded as the ultimate guarantee. Certainly having money does solve a lot of problems — it would be naive to pretend otherwise. But one point is sure: people who make weak responses to their second house Plutos tend to give money too much power in their thinking. They pay too much for money. They squander their lives in safe work that bores them. They fear trading the money they've earned for joy, experience, and adventure. They imagine that a lack of money prevents them from doing what, in their hearts, they hunger to do. Money becomes a substitute for the inner security that this Plutonian configuration ideally signifies.

Often a person going down that money-road will acquire a lot of financial clout. But will they ever feel secure? Probably not. Furthermore, tawdry circumstances often surround money bought at that price and for that reason: the hint of crime, or shame, or of something that couldn't stand the light of day.

Money is only part of the picture. Think of the vast array of factors that help you feel safer in the world. There's a good chance that none of them are inherently "bad" things, and blindly dumping all life's safety nets is certainly not the ideal path for many people.

Maybe you come from a traditional extended family, and living near all your relatives gives you a sense of well-being and security. If so, those people are part of your second house net. Since you have Pluto there, you need to consider whether you are leaning too heavily on that family solidarity. How can you tell? Ask yourself what your dependency on those people is costing you in terms of intensity and fulfillment. Have you avoided looking for work in other states? Are you thinking too much about what the relatives will think when you choose friends, hobbies, belief-systems, clothing? These questions are not always easy to sort out, but there's one sure test: if your Pluto is unhealthy, no matter what house it's in, you'll feel a kind of dull, passionless emptiness in your daily life. If you do, and you have Pluto in the second, you're paying too much for safety somewhere in your life. And it may have nothing to do with money.

THE HEALING METHOD
Pluto in the second house must prove itself to itself in extreme, intense circumstances. It demands a Rite of Passage. Earlier, we used the colorful example of a person quitting a boring job and moving to Europe: a scary experience, but she comes back home with a sense of being able to do anything, anywhere.

Pluto laughs at nickel and dime bets. It wants to see big bills on the table. It wants winning to be life-transforming... and the price is that losses are potentially catastrophic. To realize the best that's in your second house Pluto, you need to hurl yourself into frightening tests. Many times those tests involve facing your greatest fears. A young man might tell his domineering, shaming father to go to hell …..and risk a beating or disinheritance. A woman might confront her boss about his sexual innuendoes, and risk losing her job. These two examples involve the classic Plutonian strategy of speaking the hard truth, eyeball to eyeball, with a person who might not want to hear it.

A man with severely limited eyesight might swallow his fear and travel abroad for an experimental corrective operation. He faces grave risks, but the potential reward is the inestimable resource of sight.

A fifty-year-old woman might take her life savings and use the money to finance going back to school to become a computer programmer. She's scared, and "voices of reason" are telling her to hang onto that money as a hedge against Whatever in her old age. Instead, she invests in herself now.….and her old age promises to be vastly happier and more interesting, and probably more prosperous as well. She trades the resource of money for the greater resources of marketable skills and the kind of self-confidence that comes from challenges accepted, met, and conquered.

THE ENERGIZING VISION
Security is an inner state, not an outward one. That's one of those genuinely ultimate truths, so easily lost in a web of lesser truths. Certainly having money in the bank, a good job, credit, and so forth contribute materially toward feelings of security. Such supports are not to be despised, and you'll not read anything here about holy poverty. Poverty is merely an outward state, and as such is not inherently holier than any other visible condition. But true security is a confident attitude one has toward one's capacity for survival in this universe: an attitude that, come what may, there's an excellent chance I'll be able to land on my feet.

Some of that security derives from practical sources: knowing that we possess an array of skills that make us valuable to others or knowing that we are linked to supportive human networks. Some of it comes from our own history: remembering that we have often managed to improvise methods of survival in dicey circumstances. Some of it comes from possessing the right tools and the knowledge of how to use them. Some small part of this confidence derives from money.

But the lion's share is an internal sense that we are wise enough, cunning enough, worthy enough, fierce enough, creative enough, to deal with whatever comes along. And that confidence can only be forged in a spirit of Plutonian venture and risk.

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posted December 30, 2006 12:18 PM            

From Steven Forrest’s “The Book of Pluto”:

quote:

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PLUTO IN THE THIRD HOUSE
THE THIRD HOUSE ARENA: Perception; Communication
THE THIRD HOUSE PITS: Chaos; Verbal Viciousness

THE TRADITION...
...the third house is associated with speaking and listening. That notion is typically extended to include writing and reading. In the modern world, we take it a step further and include broadcasting, computer networking, satellite uplinks and downlinks, radio, video, desktop publishing, you name it. The human urge to gather data and express it: that's the third house.

But there's another third house process, one that underlies all those avenues of communication, at least ideally: thinking. This is the house that seems best to reflect all the microcircuitry of the mind itself: our habitual underlying paradigms of thought, such as "thesis+antithesis=synthesis" or "every truth has two sides." Planets and signs connected with your third house will provide sharp insight into those tectonic structures that are the foundation upon which all your insights rest.
Let's go one step deeper: before thought, there must be perception. It is difficult to conceive of a mind with absolutely nothing to perceive and digest. Even the embryo in the womb is flooded with external sensations — light, sound, mother's moody biochemistry. Could thoughts even form in an eternally silent, isolated mind? Admittedly, that's a serious philosophical question, but the basic logic of the third house suggests that perception, thought, and finally communication are a kind of triadic psychic package. If you want one, you've got to accept the other two.

YOUR HIGH DESTINY
Most astrologers have had the thoroughly delightful experience of astounding a skeptic. Astrology works; but almost universally nowadays people are "educated" into believing that it does not. "So, 1981 was quite a year for you in the relationship department, huh?" And the skeptic's jaw drops.

How quick we humans are to construct models of the truth, believe them, and then blithely ignore our own real experiences. Individuals do it. Cultures do it. Astrology's foes do it — and so do astrologers.

Your high destiny is that of the paradigm-buster. You were born to shake people out of their comfortable certainties and render them naked and open to the raw truth that's pouring in through their senses, denied and unobserved.

Your destiny in this regard is inextricably bound up with communication. Generally that means language, whether it's spoken in private whispers, broadcast over the airwaves, printed, rhymed or reasoned. Sometimes people with Pluto in the third house do their communicating in other ways, using photography or video or cartooning to get the images across. Whatever form it takes, it's all communication.

And for you it must be distinctly Plutonian communication: which is to say that the teachings destined to pass through you into the larger community are often initially shocking in nature. They bother people, unsettle them. But it doesn't end there. It ends with the listeners — the ones who are willing to hang in there open-mindedly — being energized and inspired.

Meanwhile, the ones who do not hang in there may begin plotting your crucifixion. Part of the paradigm you are living out is the perilous tale of the bearer of true tidings. The world will resist your voice. Upon that we can count.

YOUR DISTORTING WOUND
Any third house planet functions as a perceptual bias. The same could be said for any sign connected to your third house, especially the sign on the cusp of the house. Thus, we all inevitably observe our surroundings through a system of filters. A suspicious person is more likely to observe dark, secret motives in someone's behavior than is a trusting person. On the other hand, a trusting soul will be quicker to see all the angels standing in line in the grocery store.

With Pluto in your third house, you have an innate perceptual bias in the Plutonian direction — which is to say that ever since you were born, you've been skilled at picking up unspoken, taboo or denied energies in any situation. I'd like to start with a trivial illustration. I picture you as a small child sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner with the family. Granny burps. And nobody misses a beat. Politely, they act as if nothing has happened. And you were dumbfounded. Not that the burp was any great offense; what held your attention was the perfection of the collective denial of the event.

Burps are only the beginning. Far darker realities exist, realities to which you are perceptually attuned by instinct. Daddy is drinking more and more lately. Sister is sullen and distant. You take it all in. Are others denying these realities or simply not seeing them? Often it's the latter. "Reality" is largely a mythic belief system, and part of the human heritage is an extraordinary ability to enter the shared myth of family or community and not see anything else. That's true of most of us, but not you. Psychologically, you have the eye of a private detective: penetrating, calculating and suspicious.

When a person knows very well what he or she is seeing but no one else agrees, a predictable series of wounding events unfolds. Here's your story: First, in innocence, you spoke out and got clobbered for it. The clobbering may have been literal, or it may have taken the form of everyone looking at you pityingly as though you were out of your mind. Then you clammed up...and concentrated silently on the negative perception.

That's the critical point; the more others denied that dark piece of the truth, the more you felt compelled to study it, claim it and inwardly insist on its reality. Thus, a distortion entered your perceptual system: a bias toward emphasizing the Plutonian content of any complex reality.

YOUR NAVIGATIONAL ERROR
Raw Plutonian realities, by their nature, tend to make us feel either angry or sad. Or both. Your distorting wound, if not addressed and healed, turns your mind in a suspicious, doubting, negative direction. All perceptions must pass initially though this house and be filtered there. Since one of Pluto's qualities is an attunement to frightening, uncomfortable truths, your mind could become dominated by those perspectives.

Since anything in the third house is wired directly to your tongue, you will then tend toward bitterness and harshness in your speech, angrily and unconsciously using psychological insight to hurt people. Misunderstanding and miscommunication will abound in your life, and your own mind will be filled with paranoid, leery constructions of reality while people around you complain incomprehensibly about your "tone of voice" or your "attitude." That ...or if the rest of your astrological nature is very fierce, they may simply fear you and nervously watch their p's and q's whenever you're around.

Your "paranoid, leery" interpretations of events may at times be 100% valid. The point here is not so much that there is a proneness on your part toward ungrounded horror-fantastical perspectives; it is far more linked to a distorting emphasis upon the Plutonian — an emphasis which can be traced directly back to your early solitude in facing life's darker dynamics. You were isolated by what you saw; you could cling to the truth of what was pouring in through your senses, or you could lose your mind. That was your choice. Both possibilities were very real. The better of the two choices lay in clinging to the truth of what you were seeing ...but even that choice hurt you. How? By biasing your mind in the Plutonian direction. You could spend your life seeing the blood and missing the flowers.

THE HEALING METHOD
As always, in considering the dark side of the Plutonian equations, we must underscore that these bleak possibilities are in no way your fate. Through the Plutonian process of remembering the truth of what actually happened to you, they can be unraveled and higher energies come into play. That is pure Pluto, no matter what house it's in: we liberate ourselves by making the unconscious conscious.

For you, that process is utterly bound to speech. The third house sacrament at the heart of your healing method is conversation.

There is an eternal dance in the process of building real intimacy. One person takes a little risk and shares something a bit more revealing than normal party talk. The other person responds in a way that unmistakably acknowledges both the information and the risk. Then it's the second person's turn, and maybe the pair move a little deeper together ...and move a little further into each others' confidence. With Pluto in the third house, in this conversational process, you heal. Specifically, the very aspects of your character which were driven into silence and isolation by the unsettling, taboo power of what you perceived are now welcomed back from the cold.

In a nutshell, your healing method lies in putting the more intense aspects of your inner life into words. That process can occur in profound, conversation-intensive friendship. It can occur in a deep psychotherapeutic context... although here we must make cautionary reference to that breed of "therapist" so wedded to forcing you into his or her "positive" or "negative" belief system that the simple, healing act of telling one's own story spontaneously and uninhibitedly is stymied.

Writing is another healing method, since writing is also a kind of conversation. People with Pluto in the third house often recover their true natures through journalizing or soulful correspondence. If the rest of the chart supports it, we might even find healing here through poetry, story-telling, film-making, or novel-writing.

All the methods come down to one technique: tell your story.

THE ENERGIZING VISION
You are a Truth-sayer. Or a Teacher, in the best sense of the word ...which is to say that you are one who shocks us into thinking for ourselves. That is the destiny with which you were born. Circumstance may have done its best to beat that quality out of you, but that's still what you are.

Snatch that power back from the forces that have tried to rob you of it and you'll find yourself full of fire and energy. Nothing in this world will better fill you with the heat of life than a chance to punch through the veil of comforting phoniness and superficial politeness that threatens to turn us all into stick figures.

There is an element of confrontation inherent in what you are born to say, but not meanness or pointless destruction. Still, not everyone will be ready to hear your message: accept that. But you have been given three extraordinary gifts: a penetrating eye, a nose for sniffing out denial and collusion, and a hypnotic way with a tale. Use them!

In the end, it comes down to this: with Pluto in the third house, you must reclaim your voice. And you must hold onto it, even in the face of the forces that would have you silent.

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posted December 30, 2006 12:53 PM            

From Steven Forrest’s “The Book of Pluto”:

quote:

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PLUTO IN THE FOURTH HOUSE
THE FOURTH HOUSE ARENA: Hearth, Clan, Bonded Relationships,The Psychological Self.
THE FOURTH HOUSE PITS: "Homelessness," the "Near-Life" Experience.

IN THE TRADITION...
...the fourth house is the "House of the Home." In most modern astrological texts, it is interpreted in more psychological terms, as the house of the inner self, the feelings, one's deepest archetypal roots.

Both perspectives are valid, and certainly "home" and "psychology" are intimately related notions. Ask any psychclogist what he or she spends the day discussing. Generally, the answer will reflect the eternal concern with one's early family dynamics, their bearing on one's present home life in its horrors, rewards, or in its absence.

Sleep with someone in a spirit of love and revelation for ten years and you might really begin to get to know the person — which is to say, to penetrate his or her fourth house. We all have a profound inwardness, shrouded in secrecy and mystery. The obscurity of the fourth house is not necessarily intentional. Rather, it is built into the fundamental realities of human nature.

Here's an image guaranteed to make any adult smile: a teenage boy rapturously describing the profundity of his relationship with his girlfriend of six weeks. "We know everything about each other," he exclaims. "I mean, there are absolutely no secrets."

We humans open slowly to each other, like flowers. And the innermost petals are the shy ones, revealing themselves only over years ...if at all.

Revealing those innermost petals requires levels of interpersonal trust that simply cannot be forced... or plausibly guaranteed in the heat of passion. A relationship must feel proven, solid, and radically safe before we take such a risk. The heart of the matter here is not so much psychological intensity as it is a simple vow, perhaps unspoken, that we are in it together, forever. That's the true meaning of Hearth and Home — a mythic fourth house paradigm almost lost in this age of transitory, disposable relation-ships.

Pluto in your fourth house? Let's delve into it...

YOUR HIGH DESTINY
The human story is a long one, but as individuals we are like gnats watching the shoreline erode. Our lives are too brief for us to have much intuitive sense of the big picture. Fortunately, we all have two kinds of memory. The first, the gnat's memory, is short and filled with the details of biography and education. The second is the archetypal memory: the entire human legacy as it breathes inside you. There, your recollections go back a lot further.

With Pluto in the fourth, you were born remembering something most of us forget: clan, hearth, family. Bonded, unbreakable relationships.

Collectively, we could use a little reminding in those departments. Every human who has ever lived possesses a fourth house. Translated, we all to some degree have a need for "family" — a word we must use broadly to mean a set of unquestionably secure social relationships. Loyalty and lifetime commitment are the critical notions here, not blood kinship. Depth, often unspoken depth, may possibly develop in these bonds, but it is less central. Roots, a safe haven, a place to let one's hair down — these are the crucial concepts.

One of the great unarticulated sorrows of our present age is our collective loss of recognition of the psychological necessity of such roots. Families break up. People leave their friends and communities to take jobs in distant states. Your high destiny, while it can manifest in many different directions, involves an expression of your wisdom, experience, and instincts regarding this most basic and intimate human drive. You have sight here, where most of us are blind.

YOUR DISTORTING WOUND
The notion of the "dysfunctional family" has become a cliche in the past decade. For a while, Jodie and I kept a cartoon on our refrigerator. It showed an auditorium with three or four widely scattered, smiling faces, all under a banner proclaiming them "Adult Children of Normal Families." After a while, we took the cartoon down. The joke hadn't just worn out; it had become a little too obvious even to be funny anymore.

The family itself is dysfunctional nowadays. A (mis)fortuneteller might look at your Pluto in the house of the home and assume that you had been beaten, sexually abused, or subjected to poisonous religious training in your family of origin. Given the sad realities of the modern world, such assumptions are often accurate regardless of the placement of one's natal Pluto. In my experience, the probabilities of such wounding experiences are in fact higher among those with Pluto in the Fourth. But we learn even more by observing that families themselves are often victims of the antihearth energies of our present culture, and that damage done to the parents might trickle down to the kids even without any parental incompetence or malice.

In order to grasp your wound, we may in other words need to cast our nets more widely than merely entertaining dark thoughts about your mother and father. At the top of the list, despite my cautionary remarks, I do put a consideration of direct, malicious hurt on the part of one or both parents: abandonment, abuse, neglect, and so forth. Maybe that's as far as you have to go. If that perspective doesn't yield insight, I encourage you to reflect on a few images of a different sort and see if you can find yourself in them:

An image of a couple "staying together for the sake of the kids." No fights, no horrors, no obvious dysfunction. But what are the kids feeling in the air? What are they learning to assume about relationships?

An image of two parents working long hours at dispiriting j obs, struggling to make ends meet. They do it in part out of love for the children, but what does their exhaustion, flatness and absence cost the child?

An image of serious illness in the home. Again, there's no villain. But what costs to the child?

An image of a stressfully large family due to demonic "religious" restrictions on family planning. The resulting poverty or attenuation of attention for each child — at what cost?

Frequent geographical moves, a demanding grandparent moving into the home, loss of a job, dangerous neighborhoods, criminal impacts — there's much that can hurt a family without either parent showing the slightest sign of cloven hooves.

YOUR NAVIGATIONAL ERROR
Peel away the layers of someone's onion and we come to the fourth house: who you are at the deepest, most internal level. And with Pluto there you are fundamentally a Plutonian character, capable of looking at a lot of hard psychological truth and enduring it.

That inner strength is a virtue — but it can also be a burden. When you were small, you learned to survive. That's the good news. The bad news is that you also learned a kind of grim, internalized solitude. I must emphasize that this observation, while I stand by it, is more than ordinarily subject to modification by other chart factors. You may or may not, in other words, look as though you learned that grim, internalized solitude. To know someone's fourth house, as we've seen, we must know the person intimately. The social self is another issue, shaped by other astrological factors.

To form clan and hearth with other human beings is the ultimate act of trust. Due to your wound, you may turn away from it, taking refuge in your own self-sufficiency. Down that road we find people choosing to live solitary lives... and married people with six smiling kids and a sheep dog: dutiful, generous, but emotionally invisible to the individuals with whom they are sharing their lives.

"If I really opened up, they'd be too shocked to handle it" — that's often the belief at the roots of this particular navigational error. Even more fundamentally: "There's something horrible and dirty inside me."

And that's exactly the way the child feels when his instinctual need for a safe nest is thwarted by whatever array of dark images assailed him. The kid feels rejected... and deserving of rejection. The result of this Plutonian fourth house navigational glitch is that too much of one's real life remains hidden and unexpressed.

Many of us are familiar with the phenomenon of "near-death experience" in which a person's heart stops temporarily on the operating table, and he or she later returns to consciousness with tales of angelic presences. I have a client who survived a markedly Plutonian childhood, but who had manifested throughout her adult life many of the symptoms I'm describing. She jokingly referred to her pre-therapeutic biography as a "near-life" experience. When she made the remark, we both giggled. Then we both got very quiet — in that image she had encapsulated the cost of bearing a serious unprocessed Plutonian wound.

Your navigational error, if you succumb to it, would be to live the life of a ghost, with your fire, intensity, and vision removed from your biographical life while you went through the motions of existence. And, regardless of outward appearances, at the psychological level you would live the life of hearthless, homeless person.

THE HEALING METHOD
With Pluto in the fourth house, you heal yourself by becoming conscious of your woundedness. That's a one-size-fits-all truth for Pluto, of course. But for you it starts with realizing the extent to which your ability to find, recognize and claim "your people" has been distorted.

This issue is enormously complicated by the fact that we are currently living through an epochal paradigm shift regarding what we might mean by "your people." The "nuclear family" often promoted as "normal" in conservative circles is in fact sort of a fluke, historically. Throughout most of the human story, mom, dad, and the kids were inextricably embedded in a larger social network of grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and so forth. No one really thought of clan relations as narrowly as the extollers of' "family values" do today. Taken in isolation, "mom, dad, and the kids" would have been like thinking of a solitary raindrop falling out of a blue sky.

A little further back in the human story, family blurs into the notion of the tribe — and that's a fourth house idea if ever there was one.

Most tribes, ours included, recognize marriage as an entrance into the communion of the tribe. But they also typically recognize the need for other methods of claiming an outsider. Most of us, for example, are familiar with the Native American ritual of becoming "blood brothers." Thus, among the aboriginal people of our continent, dear friends (a seventh house reality) could be transformed into clans-people (a fourth house reality.)

Your healing method lies in tapping into your extraordinary and precious instincts regarding all this. It expands into your finding or creating your own hearth or tribe — and composing it in whatever way suits you, with or without marriage, with or without children, with or without blood bonds. To accomplish that, you must set aside your unnatural attachment to your self-sufficiency and invisibility, and pass through the fires of your own hearth-wound. How do you know if you've succeeded? Two sure signs. One of them is that you'll have a few people in your life upon whom you count absolutely and unquestioningly: your "blood brothers" and "blood sisters." They will be there for you. Always. And that commitment is not contingent on anything at all — except that you reciprocate it.

The second sign revolves around one of the most fundamental attributes of the clan: that it is a place of nurturing. Children are the archetype here, but what is certain is only that in the true hearth, an irresistible impulse to nurture something arises. It may actually be kids. But it can as easily be a garden. Or other adults who need a hand. Or maybe an extravagantly fortunate stray cat.

THE ENERGIZING VISION
One of the keys to grasping the inner logic of the fourth house lies in realizing that, of all the houses, it is the one furthest removed from reality in the conventional, Monday-morning sense of the word. The fourth house "reality" is purely internal and psychological, except where it interfaces with people whom we trust absolutely. And even there, the clearest image is not that of the intense psychological conversation; it is the quiet evening by the fire, with its nurturing web of familiarity and unspoken sharing.

Thus, because of the inherent subjectivity and inwardness of this configuration, when a fourth house Pluto grows healthy and strong and begins to fill the psyche with Plutonian fire, it's tough to predict where that energy will flow in outward terms. Truth is, it becomes so broadly based in the person who's done the heroic work of claiming it, that anything can happen. The fire can be directed into any enterprise, depending only upon the predilections of the individual as reflected in the rest of his or her birth chart.

In the purest, simplest expression of fourth house Plutonian juice, however, the energizing vision generally flows down one of two possible pipelines.

The first energizing pipeline lies in the area of offering deep psychological counsel. If the rest of your chart supports it, you could excel in that area and be energized by it. You've earned a depth of wisdom and understanding regarding the interior world of emotions. You have a knack for unraveling dreams and other psychological symbols. You might, for example, have a lot of skill in reading astrological charts and relating them deeply to human realities. Perhaps you're off to Zurich to become a Jungian analyst... or off to the Amazon to study with that other kind of depth psychologist, the shaman.

The second pipeline lies in the simple, revolutionary act of re-inventing hearth and home for this lonely, dysfunctional world. We're all so homeless in the world nowadays. Collectively, we have a terrible pain, and we've forgotten where it's coming from. You remember, and you are one of the people on the planet charged with the destiny of re-creating that which we've lost: the simple joy of lasting, unquestioning love.

There are those who say history repeats itself. They make a good case for it, but I find the attitude depressing and narrow. Certainly we can also say that history is endlessly new and unprecedented. What will hearth, committed marriage, and family look like in a hundred years? No one knows. If we had an answer, I don't think the typical televangelist would be very comfortable with it. Right now, all we have is hurt and chaos — and some people such as yourself beginning to remember some ancient truths, beginning to meld them magically with some new ideas...

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posted December 30, 2006 12:54 PM            

quote:

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PLUTO IN THE FIFTH HOUSE
THE FIFTH HOUSE ARENA: Creativity; Self-Expression; Renewal through Joy
THE FIFTH HOUSE PITS: Dissipation... or "Uptightness."

IN THE TRADITION...
...the fifth house is often named "The House of Children" and taken literally and narrowly as astrology's way of referring to kids. That notion is not so much wrong as it is limited. Certainly people with the fifth house strong in their charts commonly find themselves much involved with children. Maybe they have kids of their own. Maybe they're grammar school teachers or toy designers or social workers helping children who've been abused or abandoned. But fifth house emphasis also appears commonly in the charts of people involved with creative work — musicians, actors, painters. Or very active, engaged hobbyists. Or simply in the charts of people whom we might view as particularly colorful or entertaining.

The common denominator is not children in the outward, concrete sense. It is the "inner child” — that playful, expressive, self-indulgent, often self-centered part of every human being regardless of his or her age. Something inside us all is noisy, innocent, and hungry for attention. It wants to have a peak experience and to have it immediately. And if we try to ignore it too utterly, we grow either dispiritingly flat or dangerously explosive.

Traditionally, the fifth house has a cautionary side as well. It's recognized as a House of Debauchery. The human need to have pleasure and emotional release is like a mighty river that can overflood its banks, leading to obsession and addiction. The old astrologers recognized the pattern: people with powerful fifth house emphasis in their charts were over represented among the compulsive gamblers, the drunkards and the gluttons. Needless to say, the wilder aspects of human sexual expression were evident here too.

So, we all need to have some fun...but what's so much fun about Pluto? Let's unravel it...

YOUR HIGH DESTINY
What makes humans different from the rest of the animals? Not a heck of a lot. Fundamentalists like to put "Man" in another category entirely, but increasingly we see both science and ecoconscious popular culture moving towards a realization that the gulf between ourselves and the rest of life isn't as wide as our ancestors imagined. We used to say, "Humans use tools" — but more and more we are recognizing tool use among other creatures. And language: but chimps are learning sign language at an alarming rate, and anyone with a cat or dog can tell you they've got large and expressive vocabularies. What about a shared culture transmitted down the generations? Check out the tribal "songs" of the whale cultures. A cynic might play a trump card: we humans are unique in that we are the only species that has ever threatened to wipe out life entirely. Compelling — but wrong again. About a billion years ago, green plants began pumping huge volumes of a grossly toxic chemical into earth's atmosphere, destroying almost all existing life on the planet. The "chemical" was oxygen.

Are humans truly distinct in any way at all? Maybe not, but if I had to defend our uniqueness in a debate, I'd forget all the old claims and rest my argument on art. We are creative creatures. And even those of us who are not actively creative still respond to art ...and make "creative" choices regarding what color shirt to wear, what sofa to buy, which automobile most pleases our eye.

Art, as I am using the term here, is very broad. Essentially, it is any attempt to represent experience, and through that representation, to interpret it. Thus, a woman telling a joke at a party is in the same boat with Georgia O'Keefe: she's expressing herself creatively.

Virtually everyone enjoys art in some form. Ninety-two percent of us spend a lot of our lives in front of the television, for example. Most of us listen to music or go to the movies sometimes. And the enjoyment itself renews us. Some art is legitimately there simply to make us laugh — and wouldn't life be hard without any laughter? Even "silly” art serves a serious purpose. And of course there is "serious” art — films and novels, for example, that deal with complex, emotionally volatile topics. Could we be fully human without them? Without the artists who represent these aspects of life to us, we would all be terribly alone — as alone as the mourning dove staring blankly at the body of her mate.

With Pluto in the fifth house, your high destiny involves developing your capacity for dramatization, representation, and self-expression. It is "creative" in the broadest sense.....but I want to emphasize that creativity isn't always "artistic” in the narrow, obvious way. It boils down to a vigorous, striking exhibition of some inner state or heart-held value. Your high destiny entails channeling ego-energy colorfully and unselfconsciously in a way that encourages others to forget themselves momentarily and lose themselves in an identification with you. One way or another, it puts you on center stage.

And what is your message? We cannot know precisely because above all it is highly individual — that's really the point with creative self-expression. But we do know that the message is Plutonian: your destiny lies in symbolizing the dark for us, and ideally, representing for us a path through the dark.

YOUR DISTORTING WOUND
Grandpa is dying of cancer. He's emaciated. Chemotherapy has stripped him of all his hair. He's pale as blotchy snow. Little Billy is brought to the hospital to say good-bye to his dying grandfather. It's a very dramatic moment for the child. Everyone is gentle with Billy, and in a few minutes he's allowed to leave the room. A few days later, grandpa exits the flesh.

A month later, there happens to be a family get-together. Life is back to normal and the adults are in the living room talking, drinking, and laughing.

In walks Billy. He's got a stocking pulled over his head, reproducing his grandfather's pale, hairless visage. He's applied powder and lurid rouge to his face. His cheeks are sucked in.

Zombie-like, he walks into the living room and speaks his grandfather's name.

And you can imagine the reviews his performance receives.

Billy is following the deepest impulse of his fifth house Pluto: the impulse to represent the dark. But people have mixed feelings about that kind of performance. In this case, Billy in his innocence hit everyone a little too hard and a little too unexpectedly. Mom rushes him out of the living room, leaving his relatives shocked and stunned.….until nervous giggles release the tension.

This story is dramatic; yours may not be so extreme. But in your youth you had a fascination with what the world would call the “morbid" or the ”macabre" — in fact it was simply a fascination with those aspects of life which make us all uncomfortable or embarrassed. You were very likely punished for it either directly, or through the withholding of love or approval. You were told to keep a lid on it. And that hurt you. It hurt your inner child — specifically it hurt your childlike spontaneity, your guileless urge to share yourself. And less directly that repression impacted your innocent, wanton desire for fun.

YOUR NAVIGATIONAL ERROR
.….can take a lot of different forms, depending in part upon the nature of the rest of your birth chart. But they break down into two clear categories. The first is an inappropriate expression of the human drive for creative pleasure. The second is an unnatural suppression of that drive.

In the first category we recognize forms of "fun" that prove destructive either to yourself or to other people. In all the examples that follow, we observe one common denominator: the unconscious urge to represent, in one's own bodily life, the dark. Down that road we may see a person who consistently gets herself or himself involved in hurtful, unseemly, or empty sexual affairs. We may see the addict or the drunk. We may observe a person who is morbidly obese. Or one in constant, self-created financial dilemmas. The point is that all these behaviors become part of the individual's public "act;" unwittingly, he or she is symbolizing the darker, more taboo aspects of life for the community: the natural human hunger for pleasure run amuck. Such a person may feel out of control and ashamed by these circumstances, or may take an arrogant "in your face" attitude. Either way, we notice the same critical features marking the behavior as unconscious. The pleasure-seeking behavior doesn't work very well: such a person is not actually having much fun. There is an apparent drive, owned or unowned, to make the dysfunction visible to the community. And the individual may inevitably be cited as "a bad example” by others.

All this is the shadow expression of the high destiny, which would turn the Plutonian juice into art in some form, to be shared with the community in a vastly more healing — and more pleasurable — way.

The second Plutonian fifth house navigational error lies in an unnatural suppression or "demonizing" of the same creative, pleasure-seeking drives. There is a wildness in all pleasurable activity, a shadow dimension in everything that fills us with fire and life. A person might become so inordinately and unnecessarily frightened of that loss of self-control, that he or she withers into a judgmental wet blanket. Then, quite unconsciously, there arises a simultaneous compulsion to limit the pleasure and self-expression in the lives of everyone else. He or she delights in the words, "Thou Shalt Not," and applies them liberally and equally to self and others.

And in the cellar, down in the ashes, behind both that repressive behavior and the wild, injurious behavior we explored earlier, is a sad child who heard the word "No" too many times.

THE HEALING METHOD
Many years ago I attended a concert given by the virtuoso jazz guitarist, Mahavishnu John McLaughlin. I had good seats and my eyes were bugging out. I play some guitar myself and while my skills are not within a hundred light-years of McLaughlin's, I knew enough to know that I was in the presence of extraordinary talent. One image remains impressed on my memory: His face contorted in extreme concentration, McLaughlin dazzled me with the fastest guitar lick I'd ever heard. Then his face relaxed; he looked heavenward with an expression of transcendent bliss — and played the same lick twice as fast.

Creativity has an ecstatic component. While one must certainly make substantial effort to master the techniques, tools, and crafts connected with one's chosen form, there is a place where magic enters the equations. John McLaughlin demonstrated it in his concert that night. The skater who transcends herself and delivers a sublime performance does it too. Or the actor who utterly loses himself and becomes the role he's playing.

Your Healing Method lies in tapping into your latent capacity for that kind of Dionysian creative ecstasy. Maybe you join a drumming circle and find yourself in communion with your pagan ancestors, lost in rhythm-trance. Or maybe you quietly take up watercolors and stay up until four in the morning painting a flower arrangement. The shape of the creativity doesn't matter. What matters is that you lose yourself in it, surrender to it, go willingly and intentionally toward that edge beyond which lies madness.

Something in you must abandon inhibition and self-consciousness, and learn to roar.

THE ENERGIZING VISION
In the old Welsh culture there was a proverb: "Three equals: a poet, a harper, and a king." This seems to me a splendid attitude, and one that is also sound psychologically. Human culture needs inspired leadership — "kings" — but just as fundamentally we need our ”poets" and our “harpers": our artists. They uplift us and inspire us. They comfort us in our pain and grief, and sometimes they temper our laughter with wisdom.

You are a Plutonian bard; your message may not always be easy for us to hear, but we need to hear it anyway. So convey it to us skillfully and gracefully, with beauty, craft, and patience. And if lightness and laughter enter the message, there's much good to be said about that too. Your art need not be "heavy" all the time; many times we hear the truth more clearly from a comedian than from a minister.

But what if you don't feel like a creative person? In writing these words I am confident that there are readers with fifth house Plutos who will find these ideas foreign. If you're one of them, I have two things to say to you:

First, remember that Plutonian creative self-expression must be defined as broadly as possible. Sometimes it comes down to volunteering personal anecdotes that start conversations about sensitive topics: a "performance" in every sense. Reveal enough of yourself in the tale, and others are encouraged to do the same ...even if they do so only inwardly. That's high creativity and healing theater, just as much as anything that might be more readily identified as "art."

Second, if you don't feel creative, remember the nature of your Plutonian wound. Earlier experiences of the Big No may have damaged your capacity to abandon yourself fully to your creative energies. You may, in other words, be a lot more creative than you think. If you uncover that creative force in yourself, you'll reap the classic Plutonian benefit: a wealth of wanton, profligate, vital Energy. And you can do with it as you please.

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posted December 30, 2006 12:54 PM            

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PLUTO IN THE SIXTH HOUSE
THE SIXTH HOUSE ARENA: Skill; Competence; Responsibility; "Discipleship"
THE SIXTH HOUSE PITS: Humiliation; Boredom; Shame

IN THE TRADITION...
...the sixth house was often called "The House of Servants." The label is appropriate enough if we understand it symbolically. Relatively few of us employ butlers and chambermaids any longer, or aspire to play such roles ourselves. Our democratic culture inclines us to be uncomfortable with the notion of having "inferiors" — and to be positively phobic about anyone viewing us in such terms.

How can we relate the old sixth house to modern reality as it is actually experienced? The twin notions of subordination and humility are the key. To what do you subordinate yourself? And try to answer without bringing in any overtly religious or spiritual perspectives. What do you make greater than yourself, so that you freely sacrifice independence, impulse, and personal pleasure? Before what do you humble yourself?

Here's a hint: what are your plans for Monday morning? Ah yes: work. Most of us go meekly to work, maybe without burning enthusiasm, but voluntarily. And of course "going to work" may not involve employment in the simple sense, it may mean getting the kids off to school, the shopping done, and the meals prepared. Responsibility is the key idea — and the heart of the sixth house.

The human psyche has many needs that must be met if it is going to maintain its health and well-being. One of them is the need to experience a feeling of competence and effectiveness: the need to be good at something that others value. That achievement almost always requires some degree of self-discipline and self-sacrifice, qualities basic to the sixth house.

There's another layer to the symbolism, a little closer to the old notion of "Servants." Part of the reality of life is that we sometimes meet people who are "better" than us in significant ways. If you are a flutist, you might seek out a teacher to help you improve your playing... and that teacher must possess skills that you lack or the relationship is pointless. To hear such a teacher play is an ambivalent experience: both inspiring and humbling. Yet on the road to competence, such meetings are precious.

There is a circuit board in the human mind that allows us to process and receive such relationships. In fact, we need them in order fully to realize our own potentials. In the modern world, we call such people "role models." In the old days, they were "mentors" or "heroes." And if the superiority of the mentor extends so widely and broadly that it goes beyond the transmission of skill into the transmission of something more fundamental, we call the mentor a "spiritual master" or "guru" – hence, the classical association of the sixth house with "discipleship."
YOUR HIGH DESTINY
Whenever the sixth house is ignited in a birth chart, we know that we are looking at a person whose high destiny involves some kind of world service. I say that confidently, yet I hesitate at the grandiosity of the term "world service." It conjures up images of starving masses and beatific saints doling out wisdom and fishes; but sixth house realities are always less glamorous. Inevitably, there is a certain "roll up your sleeves and dive in" feeling to this dimension of life.

With Pluto there, the service into which you are asked to dive is Plutonian, which is to say, it involves the mucky trench wars created by the dark side of life. Who are the wounded in those wars? Who are the needy? Who among us, in other words, has been hurt by lies, by sadism, by insensitivity?

Basically everybody. And in realizing your high destiny, you will touch a lot of people very directly. You want to do that; you have been blessed or cursed with a strong conscience. Inherent in your being is the desire to help ease the pain and hopelessness of other creatures.

How to do it? Here we enter delicate territory. Pluto, as we have seen, is not an inherently gentle planet. And yet all my words so far might suggest images of long-suffering social workers, of volunteers in homeless shelters, of kind-hearted charity workers. And God bless them, one and all... many of them show Pluto in this natal position. But Pluto demands more. It hungers to tell fiercer, less comfortable truths. To name devils.

In realizing your high destiny, you may offer comfort, but you go beyond that. There are other battles, fought on two fronts. On the first front, we see the nurse who instead of attending wounded soldiers protests the war that is wounding them in the first place. We see, in other words, a Plutonian willingness to break taboo and go directly to the source of the pain, naming it, rooting it out if possible.

The second front is even more taboo, even more frightening. Here the high destiny lies in challenging people who have passively submitted to the victim's role. Confronting them. Naming their self-imposed weakness and their own comfortable lie, daring them to rise out of their passivity and claim their own fire.

YOUR DISTORTING WOUND
Childhood is instinctual; adulthood something we learn. Possibly. Anybody who manages keep the heart pumping will, of course, grow older and pass a visual inspection for adulthood. But true adulthood means more than reaching the legal drinking age...it implies the development of skills, the taking on of particular responsibilities, learning a craft, making and keeping a set of promises. It implies the psychological possibility of competent parenthood. Not everyone will chose to become a parent, nor will the experience be available always even to those who would choose it. The point is only that for true adulthood to be achieved, basic life skills must be learned, and the psychological capacity to subordinate one's own needs to the needs of another be mastered.

None of that happens automatically the way sexuality- or power-drives turn themselves on. These surrendering skills must learned. And they must be learned from someone, ideally while we're still young.

The same can be said for the knotty problem of sorting out our rights from our responsibilities. So far, we've emphasized adult responsibility — the ability to put off the gratification of one's immediate personal needs and appetites for the sake of moral or ethical considerations, or one's long-term purposes. In the same breath we must also recognize that no one who gives up all his or her own needs will remain healthy for long. There is a balance between the two extremes, and it's not always easy to find. Ask any tired mother or father.

That balance, too, must be learned from someone.

Something went wrong with that mentoring process in your life. That is your Distorting Wound. What was it? Who failed you? No astrologer can know. But here are some possibilities. At the most obvious level, we can speculate about gross irresponsibility on the part of one or both of your parents. Abandonment. Neglect. Active abuse. Or we can raise questions about the competence of the parents. Here we may be looking at innocent intentions: the seventeen-year-old mother doing her level best, for example. Going further, we can imagine parents who were quite competent and responsible, but who so resented the burden that the gift was poisoned. Or parents who were overprotective, or overly directive, or "encouraged" a child through shaming, guilt-inducing behavior. Or who failed to provide necessary instruction about money, sexuality, whatever.

And we can go beyond the orbit of parenting. Certainly mom and dad were never intended to be our only mentors. Many traditional cultures place very serious emphasis on the roles of uncles and aunts. This makes a lot of psychological sense. Young people can often speak more freely with an open-hearted uncle or aunt than they can with their parents; in the natural form of that relationship there is always a hint of naughtiness, special secrets, and conspiracy. The growing young person must begin to pull away from the gravity of the home, but he or she still needs adult role models.

I speak of "aunts" and "uncles," but in our society these people many times are not actually kindred, typically they are friends of the family, or trusted teachers.

Where were your aunts and uncles? Were there "sins of omission or commission" in that part of your life? Who showed you how to be an independent adult, with healthy life-affirming attitudes toward authority, toward food and alcohol, toward sexuality?

One final note: I want to emphasize that the absence of effective role-modeling, while less obvious, is every bit as destructive here as the presence of truly poisonous adults in the young person's life.

YOUR NAVIGATIONAL ERROR
Earlier we spoke of the delicate balance between responsibility toward others and responsibility toward oneself. Some of life's knottiest dilemmas lie in finding that equilibrium. Human instincts run toward selfishness; doubts about that statement can be readily dispelled by watching preschoolers at play. “I-me-mine" is the recurrent theme.

But human civilization depends in part upon a willingness to compromise, to give, and to wait in patience for one's turn. And that is learned behavior.

The navigational error which tempts you lies in going off course in either direction: taking too much or too little responsibility. The behaviors associated with each error are very different; we might not intuitively recognize the family resemblance between them. Let's investigate both.

Too little responsibility: depending in part upon the nature of the wounding experiences in your life, that error may manifest as simple irresponsibility. A difficulty keeping jobs. A pattern of damaging your relationships, friendships, even children through neglect or selfishness. Failure to take minimal care of your own body. Never changing the oil in your car, forgetting to pay bills on time, not filing your tax returns...

It may take another form: under achievement. You might find yourself "caught" in a dispiriting, boring job. Why? Because, deep down and half-unconsciously, you were afraid to really go to your own limits. Maybe no one gave you the gift of simply believing in you when you were younger and needed that faith for normal development. Often, by the way, when a person goes down that road, he or she will draw a distinctly Plutonian boss: imagine Ghengis Khan in a new incarnation, stopping by your desk with a few suggestions regarding your efficiency.

What about errors of "too much responsibility?" Here we find people whose duties turn into a kind of voracious black hole, never satisfied. Fourteen hours in the office, and still a sense of imminent failure. Devoted, caring parenting... but still a guilty sense that you're failing your kids. Such people give so much without replenishing their own batteries that they sooner or later reach that depressed, flat state commonly called "burnout."

THE HEALING METHOD
Straightening out this particular kind of Plutonian snarl is a lot easier with help than without it. You are never too old to seek out a mentor, and that in a nutshell is your healing method.

Our culture is a very empowering one in many ways, but not here. As adults we are expected to take responsibility for ourselves and not to depend too much on others to fix things for us. This is especially true for men, although it certainly impacts women as well. For an adult to humble himself or herself before another person and ask for advice violates an unspoken taboo.

Another complication lies in the fact that once we even whisper that we could use some help, we may be besieged. People love to give advice, however misguided. And there is no shortage of psychotherapists, channelers, psychics, gurus and evangelists of every stripe and coloration.

Two qualities contribute to your healing: humility and discrimination. It takes the former to empower you to ask for help, and it takes the latter in full measure to sort out the real help from the misguided, phony, or venal pretenders.

How can you recognize your real mentors? Here's an excellent rule of thumb. Since the sixth house is so deeply linked to work and duty, there's a more than even chance that your true helpers will be people whom you naturally encounter in those areas: Co-workers, or people ahead of you in your profession to whom you can apprentice yourself, either formally or informally. A variation on that idea: your mentors may be in fields to which you are drawn, even if you are not yet actively involved in those fields.

Another clue: your mentors are Plutonian. They tend to be intense people, with a willingness to face unsettling ideas and realities. They are not "nice" — at least that word would never be used to summarize their characters, even though they may be quite capable of gentility and kindness.

And a third clue: your mentors will be people who have found work or patterns of responsibility which they find compellingly satisfying, to which they commit themselves with great fire — and from which they can walk away come Friday afternoon.

THE ENERGIZING VISION
When the day is done, what kind of work offers the deepest and most lasting satisfactions? Certainly there is no single answer that fits everyone. We might imagine a saintly individual holding forth about the virtues of work that "makes a difference in the world." Feeding the hungry, protecting the earth. We might with equal ease imagine a motivational speaker telling us about the joys of realizing your own creative vision, and prospering from it. Then, if we were looking for some entertainment, we might introduce the saint and motivational speaker and let them have at each other. The saint might call the speaker, "selfish" or even "greedy." The motivational speaker might return fire with words like "martyrdom" or "guilty do-goodism."

For you, the energizing vision lies in courting the motivational speaker and winding up with the saint. Earlier, in discussing your high destiny, we looked at the notion that you have something significant to do for your community by way of service. Then we emphasized that it might well involve some confrontational behavior on your part — that it wasn't simply "soup kitchen" work. Always, when Pluto is healthy, there is a great buzz of fiery ego energy connected with it...you are hot to do something, so hot you can't sleep. In you, the energizing vision revolves around work or skills that make you feel that way. You believe in what you're doing, but you also plain love it. And it happens that in following that passion, you will — almost without intending it — wind up doing something truly helpful for your community. It may be as simple as starting a business that provides work for people who might otherwise be unemployed... and then demanding the best of them, which helps them even more.

Such action is certainly not the style of an irresponsible person or an under-achiever. Equally, it is not the style of the hardworking, plow-pulling slave either. Something happened to you that may tug you like a terrible gravity toward those traps. To break its hold, you need first to sit with someone who knows a better way, let something flow from his or her eyes and bones and cells into yours. Let that humble, surrendering magic happen, and the rest takes on the feeling of inevitability. Before you know it, and certainly without ever intending it, you find yourself surrounded by younger people, quietly playing the role of mentor, passing on the eternal torch.

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posted December 30, 2006 01:09 PM            

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Sun in Libra
Moon in Cancer
Jupiter in Cancer
Venus in Virgo
Mars in Cancer
Ascendant in Cancer

posted December 30, 2006 01:33 PM            

From Steven Forrest’s “The Book of Pluto”:

quote:

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PLUTO IN THE SEVENTH HOUSE
THE SEVENTH HOUSE ARENA: Intimacy; Trust; Partnership
THE SEVENTH HOUSE PITS: Emotional Isolation; Constant Interpersonal Drama
IN THE TRADITION...
...the seventh house is "the House of Marriage." And that's a pretty good metaphor, but what's at stake here is vaster than matrimony. What we explore in the seventh house is nothing less than our capacity to interact intimately with other human beings. It represents the basic "I-Thou" circuit in the human psyche.

“Significant Others" — that's one of those painfully correct, painfully sociological, terms that mark the course of the English language in the last couple of decades. Built into it is the notion that the world is populated by another class of "others," characterized primarily by their insignificance. And it's true, in a way: not everyone we meet in our lives really gets to us. Not everyone is a "soul mate" — and that's the term I like to use here. But I don't define it in a narrowly romantic way, or even in a narrowly happy way. A soul mate, as I use the term, is basically someone who messes with your soul, whose contact with you leaves you fundamentally different than you were before. And the seventh house could fairly be called the House of Soul Mates.

Fall in love. If it goes beyond the courtship stage to a point where you are really beginning to see each other clearly, seeing the shadows as well as the light, then you're definitely in the inner circles of seventh house experience. But anytime you throw in your lot with another person, you're doing it too. Start a business with a partner, burning your bridges behind you: that's the seventh house. Make the bond of deep, committed friendship with all its unspoken promises: the seventh house again. Erotic or romantic interchanges, for all their delights, are by no means the heart of this house.

But what does it mean to have Pluto here?

OUR HIGH DESTINY
Intimacy is a word that gets thrown around a lot nowadays, but what does it really signify? Perhaps we can get at it more clearly by the process of elimination than by a direct approach. Intimacy is not the same as sexuality, although many people agree that the two get along as well as peanut butter and jelly. It is not the same as spending time together, or living together. We have all observed the phenomenon of two people sharing a roof for decades and still displaying little evidence of real intimacy. It is not the same as "magic," "chemistry," or "electricity" — those words we invent to describe the enormous psychic impact of a soul mate upon us. Such experiences may lead to intimacy, but they are not the same thing.

The passage of time alone won't make intimacy. Sudden tell-all, reveal-all flashes don't create it either, at least not immediately. So what is it? Some combination of all the factors: flashes of scary self-revelation on the part of both people combined with a history of hanging in there together. There is a simple word for this happy, unfolding state. The word is trust.

The realization of your high destiny involves trusting someone else. You cannot do it alone. On the road to self-realization, you pass through unnerving situations in which you must allow another person to be in a position where he or she could choose to hurt you very badly. Let's emphasize here that actually getting hurt isn't the point. It's not obligatory, and only happens of necessity on the unconscious road. What is necessary is placing yourself undefendedly in the hands of another person, and letting that person have an impact on you.

The point is that in realizing your fullest capacities as a human being, you require the catalytic impact of certain Plutonian individuals. And to receive it, you must make the choice to be open to them, revealing your innermost vulnerabilities and trusting the process to develop in ways that are ultimately healing for you.

YOUR DISTORTING WOUND
Truth is a strong medicine and like anything powerful, dosage is critical. Not enough truth, and intimacy founders. We are left with the form of love, but none of the content. Too much truth — that's a more difficult notion, but a valid one. Truth can be told cruelly, or in a crude, untimely way, or with manipulative hidden agendas. Then it becomes at least as damaging as outright lies.

Some experience in one of those categories hurt your ability to trust other people. The paradigms of psychology point our noses toward your “formative" years, leading us to wonder about falsehoods and betrayals in your early familial relationships. Or about the darker uses of truth there. And those suspicions may well represent valid lines of inquiry. But as we explored in earlier chapters, we must not rule out damaging experiences from later in your life, or from previous lifetimes if reincarnation is an idea that works for you.

Somebody lied to you and damaged your capacity to trust. Or somebody used loveless, limited, partial truths as bludgeons on you. Or someone in a position of trust simply failed to say the words that needed to be said. And you cannot heal that wound alone. The effect of this distortion is to isolate you, to hurt your ability to judge the characters of others.

A mother sits with a pubescent daughter, trying to find the words to explain menstruation. She gives up, gives the girl a pamphlet. A father never mentions the "birds and the bees" to his son. In either case, we may feel compassion for the awkward, self-conscious parent. Still, there were truths that needed to be said. And they were left unspoken. That is a betrayal, and the child is hurt by it.

Dad hates mom, but stays with her for the good of the children. There is a Big Silence in the house; the kids know it's there, but not what it is or what it means.

Billy is sixteen. Uncle Harry asks him if he's "getting any" lately. Harry may be intending to create some kind of male-bonding ritual in his remark, but Billy is a shy, sensitive kid. He is shamed by the question. And he likes his Uncle Harry and senses instinctively that something special is supposed to pass between an uncle and a nephew — and that delicate instinct provides the wires over which the Wound is transmitted.

YOUR NAVIGATIONAL ERROR
If the rest of your birth chart suggests a high degree of independence and self-sufficiency, then we would expect this distorting wound to manifest as an exaggeration of those autonomous qualities. That phenomenon might appear wearing a mask of breezy friendliness or a hermit's cold attitude; again, the rest of the birth chart will provide the clues.

If your nature is more naturally interactive and interdependent, then we would expect the wound to express a more subtle pattern: there would be the appearance of intimacy in your life, but close scrutiny would reveal that while you know a lot of emotionally sensitive facts about the people around you, their knowledge of you is limited to material that does not empower them to hurt you. Of course much of their power to help you goes down the same drain.

With an unconscious, unhealed Pluto in the seventh house, there are basically three distinct dark roads available. They look rather different from each other, but they all hold as a common denominator a dysfunction in the trust department.

The first is pure isolation. Here we find the individual who takes a cavalier attitude toward tenderness. Typically he or she speaks a language of cynicism regarding love and sexuality, and may very well use or exploit other people. That exploitation may be conscious, or it may be denied: no matter. The effect is the same: a trail of anger and broken hearts. On that same road we may find a person who simply withdraws completely from any kind of "entanglements," perhaps not hurting anyone but existing in an emotional vacuum.

The second dark road involves simple shallowness. The afflicted person may lead a busy social life, but he or she systematically avoids any possibility of charged psychological reality making itself felt between people. The paradox is that such a person still has Pluto in the seventh house and will continue to draw Plutonian people into his or her life, perhaps challenging the person to open up, or more likely, simply representing some of the bleaker aspects of Plutonian behavior. So here we may observe the "harmless person" afflicted by a long line of traitors, liars, philanderers, and emotional vagabonds.

The third dark road takes the form of endless drama. Here we find the individual who "is simply unlucky in love." A person on this road may very well talk an excellent game when it comes to intimacy and its complexities. He or she seems wise, grounded psychologically, and seemingly conversant with most of the paperback books published on the subject of love since 1938. But love never actually stabilizes in his or her life. Why? Basically either he or she sabotages every relationship, or more likely pre-sabotages them by choosing impossible, unconscious, wounded partners.

In every one of these paths we observe the phenomenon of self-shielding, one way or another. Trust does not develop; it is not allowed to. The mysterious alchemy of lasting love never takes hold. There is no transformation, only pain and the avoidance of pain.

THE HEALING METHOD
Instinctively, we humans are cautious about the prospect of falling from a great height. A person raised to adulthood in flatland would feel the nervous edge the first time he or she peered over the railing of the Empire State Building, even if no one suggested feeling that way. Instinctively, we are sexual creatures. A girl-child and a boy-child raised past puberty in complete isolation, then placed together on a tropical island: What are their prospects for chastity a year later? Pretty dim, is my guess. They may be a little clumsy at first, but they would figure things out. Instinct exists in all creatures, ourselves included. It can be thwarted, controlled, misdirected, twisted.....but it cannot be utterly rooted out.

Abandonment and child abuse are realities, but on a more fundamental level there is a sweet instinct of nurturing and trusting in our genes. An infant depends absolutely on its mother for survival. There is a tender instinct in both mother and child, an instinct that leads to the formation of a bond of profound trust on the part of the newborn.

That instinct is what you must recover. Your healing method lies in first finding someone trustworthy, and then trusting him or her as an act of sheer will.

Clearly, making good choices about whom to trust is critical here. Your natural soul mates are Plutonian people, which is to say they are intense and self-revealing. Early in your relationships with them you will experience a kind of rite of passage in which they bring up serious, unsettling questions. Frank talk about death, for example. Or about sex or aging or fear. Not the sort of material that flies easily at a typical cocktail party. Such soul mates will generally make rather penetrating eye contact with you — that in fact is one of the simplest ways to pick out Plutonian people.

But be wary of their wayward cousins: the power-trippers, the self-appointed gurus and psychologists, the self-involved Walking Wounded who want to thrust their own pain onto you. Telling the two species of Plutonians apart is not hard. High Plutonians will always be willing to listen to you, to share their own uncertainties with you, and to learn from you. Furthermore, they typically have something energizing going in their own lives, something that fills them with intensity and fire. Their lower cousins betray themselves in their inability to receive insight openly. As to their passions, they may have enthusiasms and hungers in their lives, but they tend revolve more around generating appearances than true interest in the intrinsic subject.

Can't find the right people? One possibility is to enter psychotherapy with a well-recommended shrink. Another is to get involved with some public Plutonian activity on your own, and see who you meet there. Volunteer in some front-line capacity: environmentalism, idealistic political causes, shelters for the wounded in whatever form. Plutonian people flock to those venues. Once you've found the right ones, you begin the delicate. scary, time-consuming task of gradually discovering the happy meaning of the words trust and intimacy.
Slowness and patience must be emphasized here. The sudden peak experience of mutual revelation is a glorious part of life's journey, but it is not to be confused with seventh house intimacy. For that to develop, both people must reveal their boring sides, their crazy sides, their foibles.....the whole palette of their humanity. Laughing together is a big part of it. Being miserable and clueless together sometimes is another part. Probably getting through a stupid fight or misunderstanding is another piece. Touch is a huge element. Intimacy is never simply about sharing the best of what we are.....it is about sharing wholeness.

THE ENERGIZING VISION
You were born with an extraordinary capacity for connecting deeply with other people. All those loving, trusting instincts we described in the previous section are actually extra-powerful in you. But something went haywire and they were damaged.….that at least is a way to say it. But there is a deeper truth. In your ascent out of darkness, you return to the bright world of day with more than you had at birth. Your naivete has been tempered; you now have a perception of love far deeper than Adam's or Eve's — or anyone else whose else whose journey has been smoother than yours.

You know how love can go wrong, how we can lie to ourselves and tie our lives in lonely knots. You understand what is at stake when people trust each other.

You know about the presence of the frightened child in all of us, and how that child can sometimes make our decisions for us.

You understand the centrality of our human capacity to be trustworthy ourselves, and you know that it means more than doing what we say we're going to do. It also means listening openheartedly to the howl of banshee in the beloved sometimes.

Intimacy exists between two human wholenesses. And the Shadow is part of the package. When you've done your healing, you understand that notion profoundly and you therefore carry the Mark of the Counselor. You'll be drawn into complex situations as a mediator, bringing people together who might otherwise do terrible damage to each other. You are quite capable of getting paid for that work, although that's far from the heart of the matter. You may mediate in a business context, or among friends, or between lovers. There, you are a truth-seer and a truth-teller, and when people are ready to hear their demons named, they'll be drawn to you.

There is a rightness in that path for you. It will fill you with a sense of meaning, purpose, and fiery enthusiasm. And it is part of your destiny as long as you’re calling Earth your address.

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posted December 30, 2006 01:34 PM            

quote:

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PLUTO IN THE EIGHTH HOUSE
THE EIGHTH HOUSE ARENA: Sexual bonding; Healing; Dealing with the Dark
THE EIGHTH HOUSE PITS: Brooding; Despair; Isolation

IN THE TRADITION...
...the eighth house had a rather ominous title: "The House of Death." Astrologers of long ago would use it along with a host of other factors to determine the timing and nature of a person's departure from this world. Both ethically and practically, this is a touchy area. Predicting someone's death can be upsetting business. On top of it, the techniques are not very reliable in my experience.

Still, thinking about death is a good trigger for eighth house insights. Death makes us nervous; so does everything else about this part of the birth chart. The emotions released around an intimate death are strong ones: both mystical ecstasy and wailing desolation may arise. It is the same with all the other eighth house terrains: sex, our woundedness, primal fears and phobias. Here, we deal with everything vigorous, passionate, and unsettling about human life.

Going to your edges emotionally is the heart of the matter: death and love may push you there. So may a long, hard talk with yourself. Or friendship so deep that it goes beyond politeness and an exaggerated "respect for boundaries" — the kind of relationship that must of necessity exist between long-time lovers. Anytime we are dealing in an honest and straightforward manner with the hurt or scared places inside us, we are in this domain.

As you might imagine from the foregoing language, Pluto has a special affinity with the eighth house. The Lord of the Underworld is attuned to these kinds of overwhelming energies. In the old hierarchical language of the astrological tradition, we say "Pluto rules the eighth house." What that means is that when Pluto is here, it is very strong. Simply having the planet in this house qualifies you as a Plutonian type: deep, intense, and inclined toward psychological thought.

YOUR HIGH DESTINY
A million years ago, we circled the campfire gazing into the comforting flames, our backs to the night. Stories were told, food shared. And behind us, in the vast dark, twigs cracked. A glance over the shoulder might reveal a pair of feral, yellow eyes. We took solace in community, and hoped for the best. Every now and then, something would lunge out of the dark, grab an unfortunate aunt or uncle, and rush back into the encircling night. And we would shiver, and sing more loudly.

The scenario is mythic, not to be taken literally. Like any myth, it invents facts to point at truths. And one truth is that being alive is a precarious, terrifying business. Things do lunge out of the dark and grab us. Terrible disease strikes without clear warning. Drive-by shooters strike without any warning at all. Lovers depart. Kids find the needle or the gun.

These are unpleasant subjects. Like our mythical forebears, we tend to gaze at the comforting fire with our backs to them. Let me hasten to say that love is real, joy is real, tenderness, beauty, and peace are real. But so are these darker elements.

You know that. You've always known it. To say that you are "comfortable" with life's terrifying side would be silly; who could be? But you are more at ease with it than most of us. You were born with a rare kind of emotional fortitude, an ability to sit with strong emotion in yourself or others, and override the common tendency to deny the dark. When life pushes us to the edge, as it does for everyone sooner or later, we need wisdom and a steadying hand. We need someone with whom to talk it out, someone who'll listen, someone who won't be too quick to box all our feelings up in a neat philosophical or "spiritual" package. We need someone who can sit with life's ambiguity, mystery, and enormity, and not take refuge in "answers" that simply drive the feelings back down into the dark. We need a "priest" or "priestess" in the true, archetypal sense. Your High Destiny lies in claiming the full expression of that power.

YOUR DISTORTING WOUND
A woman corners you at a party. Earnestly, dead seriously, and without stinting on any details, she outlines a surgical procedure she is contemplating. All the while, a spider is crawling slowly up her lapel.

You try to appear interested in her soliloquy. You do your best not to succumb to the spider's fascination. Perhaps after a bemused minute, you mention the bug. A year later, what do you remember? Her story? Her name? Probably not. You remember the spider.

The mind is like that. We notice the unexpected. We have a fascination with the macabre, the inappropriate, the taboo. When we see a truth clearly, especially one that others are ignoring or denying, we tend to centralize it in our awarenesses. It looms large, like the spider.

With your eighth house Pluto, you have always possessed a highly developed nose for the darker, more psychological undercurrents in any situation. Since those undercurrents are often denied, you tended to focus on them all the more intently. This enchantment with the ragged edges of human emotion and the nightside of human experience is both your great strength and your distorting wound.

A plain reality in most human affairs is that these unspoken atmospheres of hunger, anger, or fear have a sexual component. For most people between the ages of twelve and ninety, sexuality is in practice the heart of the eighth house. We all have repressed desires, jealousies, guilty memories, "naughty" thoughts and fantasies: highly charged eighth house material that hangs like a hungry ghost just behind our party eyes.

Even when you were small and had no words or concepts for what you were feeling, you sensed these undercurrents in the world around you. Hungers and fears everywhere. This fact in itself is part of your distorting wound: because others generally did not acknowledge these problematic realities, you balanced that by focusing on them. This created an overemphasis in that area: an overemphasis on truths denied, on unspoken energies and drives. You see the dark clearly, but it may loom larger in your perceptions than is warranted. And the dark is scary.

Merely seeing the frightening side of life could be called a wounding experience, but the point here is more precise: it is that seeing the dark alone, without help and support, is the wound.….the more so if others actively denied the reality of what you were perceiving, or were simply incapable of enduring the sight of it.

To all this we must add a synchronistic principle. This inward focus on the more problematic and unsettling truths of life often coincides with a heightened density of painful biographical experiences: early experiences with intimate deaths or diseases, encounters with violence or outright evil, sexual secrets or chronic frustrations tainting the air of the family home. And these experiences themselves wounded you further.

YOUR NAVIGATIONAL ERROR
...can take a lot of different forms, depending in part upon the nature of the rest of your birth chart. We can unravel them all with a single meditation: what are the uses of Innocence? Because if there are any uses for it, you are potentially in some difficulty. Your innocence disappeared early, if you ever had it. You are simply not by nature an "innocent" type.

(This notion, by the way, should not be construed as a declaration of your guilt! Here we use the word innocence to signify something closer to the "innocence" of children — naivete, inexperience, a guilelessly trusting quality.)

Innocence allows us to rush headlong into life's experiences. It allows us to board the roller coaster without a second thought. A first marriage, for example, is typically undertaken in a spirit of considerable innocence: who can understand the enormity of that challenge without having tasted it? Children often come into our lives when we're not far out of childhood ourselves: again, we typically possess only the vaguest of notions of what we are getting ourselves into.

Is all that really so bad? Maybe not. Perhaps, from the evolutionary perspective, there is something positive to be said for leaping headlong into life, naively trusting that everything will work out. Maybe without that inborn innocence we would be paralyzed, afraid to move. Certainly anyone whose eyes are wide open and who still trusts life without misgivings enjoys a more than normal portion of sheer faith.

Your navigational error is, of course, optional. But if you succumb to it, you'll become guarded and hesitant, and gradually evolve into a moody, brooding person. Your attitudes may be governed by fear and worry, or crippled by extreme caution. You may find yourself emotionally isolated, with no one in your life with whom you can talk on a natural, open level. This syndrome can manifest in a variety of areas, but the single one that looms above the rest is the potential twisting of your capacity for sexual bonding.

In "innocent" sexual bonding, we reveal extraordinarily intimate details about our lives and thoughts without hesitation…..long before we have been faced with the darker dimensions of our lover's character. The Universe seemed to arrange our minds that way, and maybe for good purpose: we find ourselves deeply connected with a lover before we have much chance really to consider what we are doing. And then we are in it, and must deal with the relationship, and maybe grow a lot more than a person who saw the dangers more clearly at the early stages.....and wisely ran away.

You might fall into the trap of being that paradoxical creature: the natural relationship counselor who cannot make his or her own intimate life work. (And by "relationship counselor" I don't necessarily mean somebody getting paid for it. You have skills in that area, and they'll be recognized and employed even if you're the dispatcher for a trucking company.) You might accomplish that dubious aim by systematically choosing partners who are "safe" — which is to say, people whom you can easily outsmart or out-analyze, or who don't have enough intensity to match you, or who are weakened by their own woundedness. And then you may suffer the frustrations inherent in those kinds of limited relationships.

Why would you do such a thing to yourself? Out of fear. Out of a lack of innocence. And those two ideas are the same: it is the height of innocence not to fear human love.

As I write those words, I am aware of an urge to modify or delete them. But I won't. As negative as they sound, saying that human love is to be feared conveys a truth about life. Love uplifts us and gives meaning to our existences, but it also hurts us very badly sometimes. Everyone has a dark, dangerous side — a wounded side — and in deep intimacy, that edgy, caustic energy will certainly make itself felt. Saying we have no fear of that eventuality is as "innocent" as saying we don't fear the rabid dog or the wild-eyed terrorist.

In a nutshell, what you have instinctively perceived regarding life's scary side can potentially put a wall around your soul. Nothing can get in to hurt you — but nothing can get out either.

THE HEALING METHOD
The pain-driven, fear-driven, powers of destruction in this world can chill the stoutest hearts. If you doubt it even for an instant, think of the latest atrocities in whatever war is unfolding as you read these words. The human capacity for generating horror seems unlimited and insatiable.

But there are other forces. In every shadow, we see evidence of light. Human beings continue to love, to hope, to dream. We continue to care for each other. Simple-minded folk create an image of "good people" undoing the evil wrought by "bad people." The wise are quicker to see the two in one flesh. Most of us make our contributions to the sum of pain in the world — and to the sum of forgiveness, healing, and love. Both are formidable powers, and it is blindness to ignore either one.

A child is raised in an abusive, crack-ridden ghetto. Finally he is removed, and placed in a foster home. Getting through his shell won't be an easy task. It's going to take more than a good attitude. It's going to require something more akin to magic.....a quality of eye-contact, a shell-bashing intensity of love. There are not many effective words for these particular human potentials, there is a quality of insistence, of "ooomph," that we can put into our love, a quality that magnifies the healing power of that love. Not everyone could understand what I am talking about here, but with your Pluto in the eighth house, I believe that you do understand.

Your Healing Method is twofold. First, you must open yourself up and receive that kind of searing, loving intensity from someone. Secondly, you must offer it back. It is in that unguarded, wide-open sharing of sheer life-force that your truth-seeing, penetrating nature is affirmed and validated. The heart of the matter is that you must experience not merely your ability to love, but your angel-powered, witch-powered, ability to see into another's soul. And the paradox is that you can't open that window without the other person looking right back into you.

This transaction might occur in a profound therapeutic context. It could happen in an extraordinary friendship. But it most easily and naturally occurs in an eighth house framework: in sacred sexuality, or in the face of death or terrible loss, or in any other human situation where the emotional energy runs so high you can't help but shake.

THE ENERGIZING VISION
Tibetans name their teachers "Rimpoche," which means "Precious One." The term has specific implications among Buddhists, and it definitely goes beyond suggesting that someone is simply kind and insightful. Still, you were born with the capacity to be one of the "Precious Ones" in your community, one of the people who is there with the right words, right touch, right silence, in times of dire need.

You have profound instincts in the face of crisis and loss. You may well have healing gifts, or divinatory powers that emerge when they are needed. You thrive when life becomes intensely real, and can help others thrive then too. You carry in you the archetype of the shaman, the healer, the magus, the good witch, the priest, priestess, minister.….pick your title. They are all different ways of referring to people who have the ability to be "there" when the chips are down, when life is extreme and we are pushed toward our limits — or beyond them.

Down that road lies a vast reservoir of sheer life-force. There lies your heat, your hunger for life, your eagerness for existence. In that intense realm, you find the energizing vision that ennobles you and gives meaning and direction to your worldly story.

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posted December 30, 2006 01:35 PM            

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PLUTO IN THE NINTH HOUSE
THE NINTH HOUSE ARENA: The Quest for Truth
THE NINTH HOUSE PITS: Fanaticism; Nihilism

IN THE TRADITION...
…..the ninth house bore a rather romantic name. It was the "House of Long Journeys.” The implication was that of a mythic Quest, a journey into strange and perilous places, a journey from which one would return, if at all, a changed person.

The ninth house was also associated with religion.….and that is not as much of a leap from journeys as it might at first seem. Religion is a human attempt to impart meaning to life, or to discover life's meaning. And we learn about life by living it — by fully accepting and undertaking the "journey." It is this "religious" dimension of the ninth house that is really the heart of the matter, as we will see.

Furthermore, nothing will so challenge and focus our own beliefs as an encounter with their passionately held alternatives. Generally throughout human history, such encounters have been hard to come by. "Multiculturalism" has been a rare phenomenon; cultures have tended to be monolithic, with a particular set of commonly held values, morals, and mythologies binding them into unity. To experience the full-blown reality of alternative perspectives, one didn't have a long list of options. And travel was high on the list. Just leaving town. Going among the foreigners, the "heathens," the "infidels." It would provide an "education" unavailable elsewhere.….

…..At least until "education" became widely available — and that is yet another traditional meaning of the ninth house: universities, learning, scholarship. Closely linked to those notions was the idea of the dissemination of knowledge. Hence, the association of the ninth house with the publishing industry..…and who hasn't ever been taken on a "Long Journey" by a book? But it all comes back to the endless search for meaning, pattern and significance in our lives: our "religious" needs.

What does it mean when Pluto lies here?

YOUR HIGH DESTINY
Life hardly feels meaningful automatically. Much of the time we are merely struggling with our responsibilities and wrestling with our circumstances. What honest, reflective person has not occasionally been plagued by that eternal question, Why Bother? Jodie and I saw a cartoon once in which the Almighty appeared to a harried fellow in a vision. His message was, "The Universe exists to annoy you!" I don't think that cartoon made it onto our refrigerator. I guess it cut a little too close to the bone.

In the face of the seeming meaninglessness of life, we turn naturally to religion — and by that word, I don't simply mean Catholicism or Islam. I mean any of the Things To Believe In that humanity has devised. Science serves the purpose for some of us. Art does it for others. Humanitarianism may fit the bill for one person, while making a million dollars may do it for another. And every one of these "religions” has not only its adherents, but also its spokespeople. Call them Teachers, Exemplars, Preachers.….whatever. We humans instinctively seek them out. We want a man or a woman to embody the ideal for us, to speak to us authoritatively and confidently about the moral or metaphysical framework of life.

Your High Destiny is to be such a figure. The responsibility here is enormous. Whenever you speak of Right or Wrong, or the Meaning of Life, people will naturally listen to you. It is as though something radiates from you, a kind of message from God saying, "Take what this person says seriously." And if you put out the notion that life is a hopeless mess unfolding in a random universe, people will be mightily influenced by that viewpoint.

You can do a lot better than that, but first you must face...

YOUR DISTORTING WOUND
We humans are pretty brilliant as monkeys go. I suspect that perspective is not terribly far from the way the angels look at us. We are inventive, cunning, and creative, but our knowledge of this vast, multidimensional universe is exceedingly limited. When the preacher ascends the pulpit on Sunday morning and begins fulminating about the nature and purpose of life in the cosmos, I imagine the angels have a good laugh. Even if the preacher's heart is in the right place, his head is still stuck in the three-dimensional, time-bound world.

But preaching is his job, and he prides himself in it. And when he was a young seminarian, he was deeply inspired by a teacher no older or wiser than he himself is now. What doubts he had in his inherited belief-system were dispelled by that teacher.

On top of that, the congregation isn't paying him for his doubts; they want certainty, clarity, and confidence — "faith," they call it.

It's a commonplace observation that religion has caused more bloodshed and unfeeling, self-righteous sadism in this world than money, sex, and the territorial imperative combined. People will do things for "faith" that they couldn't stomach for any other reason. And their "preachers" egg them on with "messages from God."

With Pluto in the ninth house, you instinctively see all that. You have a skeptic's capacity to ask the right, embarrassing questions. Reflexively, you question the assumptions underlying whatever metaphysical card-castle with which you are presented. You have an especially wary eye when it comes to observing the "preachers," sniffing out the subtle traps their own egos lay for them, and places where their Shadows leak out into behavior.

When you were young, you were presented with a religion and strongly encouraged to accept it. This religion may not have been a conventional one — it could have been liberal or conservative politics, education, money, almost anything. And you smelled something rotten, and doubted…..or believed deeply at first, and thereby set yourself up for a harder fall.

Synchronistic principles here often suggest early contact with especially virulent examples of religious or moral hypocrisy, or other similarly disillusioning experiences. The pedophile priest. The philandering guru. If we add such outward biographical events to the stew, your Plutonian education in religion's dark side was that much more intense.

However we read the story, your Distorting Wound is a learned response of doubt, cynicism, and hesitancy to believe.

YOUR NAVIGATIONAL ERROR
Those of us raised in the Christian tradition know the story of Christ's encounter with the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate. The gospel accounts give an impression of Pilate not so much as a bad man but as a weak one. He seems motivated to afford Jesus a way out of the crucifixion, if only Jesus would plea-bargain a little. But of course Jesus won't. Near the end of their dialogue, Pilate despairingly asks, "What is Truth?" In Sunday school we are encouraged to view this an example of Pilate's perfidious character, but in fact it's a pretty good question.

What is truth? The world is full of people, nefarious or merely gullible, making large sums out of claiming to provide the answer. You figured that out before you were very far into your adulthood, and such parasites make your blood boil.

In your compulsion not to get fooled again yourself and to roust out the tricksters in the bargain, you might make any of several fundamental navigational errors.

The first error lies in adopting doubt and cynicism as your "religion," and doing so without realizing that they are as narrow and limited as any other doctrine. And not nearly as uplifting, we might add. A person under the spell of that dogma will live a life full of fear, hesitant to reap the real joys of love, charity, and fellowship. He or she might withdraw from real sources of inspiration, and recoil from the pleasures and advantages of simple faith.

The second error involves reacting unconsciously to the "religion" of one's childhood — and moving fanatically into another doctrine as far removed from the birth-religion as one can find: a classic "out of the frying pan, into the fire" move. Daddy was a right-wing entrepreneurial capitalist; daughter is a left-wing Marxist saboteur. Joe was raised Pentecostal, but then he found Zoroastrianism. Wherever we wind up, if we are in the grips of this error, one eventuality is sure: the preachers of the new religion will prove just as fallible or morally culpable as the preachers with whom we grew up.

A third possible error lies in becoming an Inquisitor regarding either all religions or the religion of one's childhood. Down this road, one zealously, fanatically seeks to discredit belief at every opportunity. The attacks may very well be cogent; our concerns about them lie more in a consideration of their motivations and their benefits to the attacker. Typically, there is a big element of unconscious anger in such attacks, and they accomplish little that enhances anyone's life.

A fourth error is an attempt to escape the whole issue, and in fact to shirk one's high destiny. It can be made to sound pretty good, though: "Everybody has to figure it out for themselves. Who am I to judge? We should all just trust our inner guidance." These are certainly laudable ideas in many ways. But they miss something. We all wear shoes, but not everyone is cut out to be shoemaker. Most of us drive a car, but only a few of us can rebuild the brakes or the ignition system. Similarly, not everyone is wired to distill the chaos of daily life down to a few reliable moral principles. That's as much an inborn, unique skill as the shoemaker's or the mechanic's. And not everyone possesses it.

You are mentally wired to be a philosopher. You carry those instincts and reflexes. And you are not the only one who knows that — anyone sizing you up is going to come to the same conclusion. That's how it works with Pluto. Like it or not, you're set up for that kind of destiny and people are going to see you through that kind of filter. They'll take moral cues from you no matter what you do.

THE HEALING METHOD
The first part of your healing method is simple to say, but absolutely essential to the recovery of your high destiny. You must physically leave the land of your birth.

This leaving is not necessarily permanent, although it often is. Nor does it necessitate crossing international boundaries; cultural lines count for more here than political ones. If you're a native Californian, moving to New Hampshire might do it.

The point is that there is something liberating and refreshing for you about culture shock. Your ninth house wounds are tied up with the "religion of your people" — your church or temple in youth, or the collective attitude of your ethnic group, your neighborhood, or your extended family.....or any combination plate of such factors you might assemble. Just getting away from that environment clears the air. And in that clear air, you will naturally begin to think more freshly. A second part of your healing depends utterly upon your committing yourself to an educational journey. This may very well involve matriculating in a formal degree program, complete with the diploma to hang on your wall. It may just as easily take a less official form, as, for example, when a person sets out to master the practice of astrology and commits zealously to the formidable intellectual exercise that entails. Again, what is at stake here is a stretching of the boundaries, an extension of consciousness beyond the narrow framework of one's early life.

Synchronistic principles declare that in the course of traveling far from home and acquiring an education, you will encounter a religion that works for you. That is part of the shape of your destiny. The third step in the healing lies in accepting it. By "religion" we refer to a world view or a moral perspective; a set of values to live by. It may or may not be a religion in the customary sense.

The religion that works best foryou will be Plutonian, of course — that's what suits your nature. How do we recognize such a belief system? For starters, a Plutonian religion is one that isn't quick to view doubt as a sin, it will encourage questioning, scrutiny, and testing. It is a religion that makes some satisfactory account of the problem of evil in the world; no greeting-card philosophies will work. It is a religion that encourages and supports introspective psychological self-analysis, and ties it inextricably to the notion of the spiritual quest. Typically, it will deal energetically and at length with the realities of death and the dying process, and be willing to embrace positive views on the spiritual potentials inherent in consciously directed sexuality.

All these notions are simply Plutonian; a Plutonian religion, which is natural to you, will embrace them all to some degree.

THE ENERGIZING VISION
What are we if we believe nothing? What would life be if everything came down to meaninglessness? What would be left? Only appetite.….

"Man shall not live by bread alone," Jesus said. And it is a simple truth. We need more than mere appetite. We need purpose and meaning. But if, as some tired modern intellectual theologians say, purpose and meaning are purely human creations, it all rings a little hollow. Why bother?

Here's the essence: in your guts, you know that life has purpose.

You were born with that certainty. Some early experiences of disillusionment nearly knocked that faith out of you, but it only went underground. Employ your healing methods and the faith is resurrected. And it radiates from you. And that faith is given an integrity and a legitimacy by your own fierce commitment to doubt.

How strange that phrase sounds from a conventional religious perspective! But your willingness to question yourself and everyone else, always to go deeper, always to let the truth be more than what you already know, those qualities lift you out of the morass that so often captures the evangelist and amateur guru.

You are called upon to speak as one of the moral voices of your community. And as long as you are willing to stay in communion with your own Plutonian shadow, you'll not slip into mere moralizing. Need renewal? Then go questing again! Journeys will punctuate the conscious life for you, and each one will stretch your spiritual frontiers a little wider.

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posted December 30, 2006 01:35 PM            

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PLUTO IN THE TENTH HOUSE
THE TENTH HOUSE ARENA: Status; Career; Destiny; Leadership
THE TENTH HOUSE PITS: Hypocrisy; Failure; Mere Glitz; Tyranny

IN THE TRADITION...
...the tenth house is often named "The House of Honor." An astrologer of five hundred years ago might receive an inquiry, "Am I in good odor with the Duke of Burgundy?" That medieval astrologer would then rightly consult the condition of the client's tenth house and provide an answer: "Nay, he aims to behead ye, and your firstborn besides."

The specifics of the foregoing dialogue are marked indelibly with the spirit of a bygone culture, but let's translate it into modern terms. At a cocktail party, two people meet and begin the eternal process of sizing each other up. Here's one question almost guaranteed to appear: "By the way, what do you do for a living?" Read: what is your status? Translate back into the medieval lexicon: are you in good odor with the Duke? Translate again: where are you in the tribal hierarchy?

We humans are intensely social creatures. And society is always structured and hierarchical to some degree. From the "ruling elite" down to the "cool kids at school," we observe the tendency of our species to establish pecking orders. There is much that is emotionally and philosophically difficult about this reality, and my purpose here is not to condemn or defend it, merely to say that concern with status is part of the human picture and that astrology describes it through tenth house symbolism.

But astrology goes further. While status and reputation are inextricably bound to the tenth house, and "career" is one of the central ways in which we establish those valuations for ourselves, much more is at stake here. Doing something for the human community, publicly representing some principle or ideal, are also tenth house concerns. Navigated consciously, this house provides a sense of mission or destiny in one's life. Personally, I encode the tenth house as one's "Cosmic Job Description" - your “job" as the Great Spirit would define it. If the IRS agrees, so much the better. Then you've accomplished one of the great coups of conscious tenth house work: you've figured how to get paid for doing your spiritual work.

What if you were born with Pluto here?

YOUR HIGH DESTINY
Truth hurts: the reality of that notion is hard to escape. Certainly, we human beings are fond of rationalization and denial. But there's another observation to sit next to the first one: avoiding the truth hurts even worse. That pair of ideas summarizes much of what we need to understand about Pluto in general.

Truth-avoidance is a popular sport not only on the level of individual psychology. Communities and nations practice it blithely as well. In cynical moments I sometimes think our electoral process boils down to a talent contest in that regard. We might say the same for what often happens in churches.

Lies catch up with us sooner or later, whether we're individuals or countries. And then we go down in flames reading inspirational literature, or we deal bravely with what is actually real. For a community or a nation to follow the higher road, it requires leadership. It requires a courageous man or woman to speak out clearly about popular lies and their costs — and to define a better way. Such a person may or may not be "charismatic;" he or she may or may not radiate self-confidence and authority. The message matters more than the messenger at such times. And the community that person addresses may be a town or a nation, or more commonly a segment of the population. Basically, the tenth house terrain begins where your personal relationships end, and extends from there out toward the horizons of the global village: it may or may not, in other words, involve what we commonly call "fame." But it always involves touching the lives of people whom we do not really know on a personal level.

And for you, your high destiny involves touching that larger community in a Plutonian way: representing some fierce truth, and fighting the trench wars for its communal realization.

YOUR DISTORTING WOUND
Since you were small, you have felt (correctly!) that you were born "to do something big and important." Pluto, at its best, is concerned only with those activities which are capable of imparting a palpable sense of meaning and purpose to life, and which fill us with fiery intensity. Anything less is boring and empty. It is this pattern of motive and ideal that shapes your healthiest perspective on career.

How well-supported was ambition at that scale when you were small? Your wound lies in this region. As always, life's dark side can touch us a multitude of ways, and not everyone with the same configuration will have the same story — or at least the symmetry will not always be immediately apparent. Let's consider some wounding scenarios.

Maybe one or both of your parents suffered deadening kinds of work, and could not imagine any alternatives. Their attitudes conveyed to you, unconsciously or overtly, an image of the "Big World" as a jungle in which mere survival was the best for which one could hope. A variation: maybe parents or other significant role models in your youth were truly limited in their ability to find rewarding, spirit-charging careers due to social prejudice, political dislocations, or economic troubles. Still, the same attitude of limitation and impossibility would be transmitted to you.

Perhaps you were born female in a culture displaying a distinct shortage of imagination regarding "a woman's place." Built into that reality is an unconscious, systematic disempowering of a girl-child's self-confidence regarding career. After a generation of feminist activism, these are familiar thoughts, but they still sometimes wield considerable potency in shaping women's images of their place in the big world.

Perhaps you were born male in a culture displaying a distinct shortage of imagination regarding "a man's place." This is discussed less than the feminists' perspective, but it's every bit as powerful — and limiting — a force. The pressure on men blindly to achieve conventional status is enormous. We are taught to experience pride or shame in proportion to our accrual of power and/or money. To what extent could such concerns have robbed you of space for the fuller expression of individuality and creativity in terms of your work?

Underlying all these wounding scenarios is a dark Plutonian image of the Community as an inhospitable place, resistant to the expression of anything truly exciting or individual, and affording at best a struggle to remain alive.

Let's carry our analysis of the Wound a step further. Kids in general don't know much about the realities of the world. When we ask children what they want to be when they grow up, we take their answers with a grain of salt. What child would say, "An insurance salesman"? (But the real world has more than a few contented insurance salespeople, I suspect). While there are sometimes fascinating exceptions, a pretty good rule of thumb is that a child's answer will at best provide a kind of veiled metaphor — the little boy, for example, who will become an aeronautical engineer may say "Astronaut!" His nose is pointing in the right direction, and his soul guides him by offering grandiose exaggerations of the life he will actually create. It's a delicate mechanism, even a sacred one.

With your Plutonian tenth house, you truly do have a high destiny... and in youth the unconscious mind would tend produce exaggerated metaphors of even that. Thus: "When I grow up I will be a famous movie star." Or even: "When I grow up I will save the world."

Loving adults may have felt that they needed to "help" you adjust to the real world by "grounding" you. Unwittingly they sabotaged the grand mechanism by which your deep Self was preparing foundations in your imagination for the realization of what you were actually born to do. What is at stake here is simple to say: for the realization of certain adult destinies, a degree of ungrounded grandiosity in youth is a psychological prerequisite.

YOUR NAVIGATIONAL ERROR
Would you stroll across a sunlit meadow for a million dollars? Not to put thoughts in your head, but I feel a high degree of confidence in my ability to predict your answer.

What if the meadow contained nine deadly buried land mines? Now your answer enters more distinctly into the realm of individuality. My guess is that some of you would abruptly change your minds about the stroll, while others would start balancing the joyful prospect of the cash against the probabilities of more cataclysmic eventualities.

Let's add a third condition: there is a hungry Tyrannosaurus Rex pursuing you. Across the meadow lies your only escape. Suddenly taking your chances with those land mines has more appeal.

Before we add a fourth condition, let's sit with the image for a moment. There you are, nervously light-footing it across the sunny grass, torn between scrutiny of each footfall and jittery over-the-shoulder considerations of our Jurassic friend. Are you appreciating the sheer beauty of the meadow? Are you mentally designing the dream-home you might build there with the million bucks? (Do you even remember the million bucks?) Probably not. Under that kind of pressure, more aesthetic, creative interests recede into the background.

Our fourth condition: the dinosaur is a fake, one of Spielberg's clever illusions. There are no buried land mines; it was a lie. Your behavior in the meadow makes sense, but only on the basis of the information you believe. If we stopped you and said, "You know, when you get that money, I'm seeing a Frank Lloyd Wright design up there on that rise —" you'd look at us as though we were utterly mad. You would be perfectly convinced that you were behaving in the only possible way, given the threatening realities.

The illusory realities.

Your Navigational Error lies in imagining too many land mines and hungry dinosaurs. You could fear the world too much, and thereby rob yourself — and the community — of the fruits of your destiny. For the community, those fruits mean some kind of healing, leadership, or inspiration. And for you, they mean Plutonian heat, intensity, and vision in your life.

The human world is inherently dangerous and negative in many ways; what you might leave out of the equations is the full realization of your own power to cope with those obstacles. And that distorts your sense of the scope of your possibilities here. If you succumb, you may find yourself in a career or social position you find shamefully out-of-kilter with your own values. The bleaker Plutonian possibility here lies in still finding yourself wielding the social power we associate with this planet, but swept along in a current of events that leave you working for the "bad guys," perhaps in a glitzy role. If you are brave enough to admit that to yourself, you feel cynicism, shame, and helplessness. If you're not brave enough to admit it, you'll become a tyrant in that role as you unconsciously attempt to justify your own poor choice with the sheer volume of your voice.

THE HEALING METHOD
You're a kid learning to ride a bike. You're still dependent on your training wheels. One day, dad or mom says it's time to get rid of those crutches. Off they come, whether you like it or not. You're positioned on the bike and asked if you're ready. Nervously you nod. You're given a little push; if you start pedaling, you'll probably be fine. If caution freezes you, down you crash.

That's a piece of life; sometimes there are strides people must take fully or not at all. The proverb, "no one crosses a chasm in two steps," summarizes it. Healing a tenth house Pluto is like that. Half measures will not succeed.

Imagine you've just died. You stand before God, who is saying, "By the way, what did you do for a living?" What is the answer you'd like to give? And don't try to be too "good" — honesty counts for a lot more in this exercise than a virtuous posture. (Remember: if it doesn't get you hot, it's not Pluto!)

Chances are, your answer will have two components. One of them will reflect a big dollop of your own creative individuality and fundamental beliefs. The other, which may be less apparent at first glance, is that in following your own dream you will incidentally provide some real service for the world, even if it's "only" by serving as an example of someone who had the valor and pluck to follow a dream and make it real.

Once you've seen that vision, your Healing Method lies in taking the plunge and setting it into motion. Again, half measures are futile. Here we find the person who leaves a safe but dull career in mid-life to pursue a degree in anthropology, or who joins the Peace Corps, or who starts a business building environmentally sensitive homes. Maybe it's the woman who leaves the corporation to start a private practice as an investment counselor. Or a writer. Or an astrologer. Perhaps it's the young person entering a university who opts to major in something "impractical" simply because he or she feels that's the right spiritual course.

Always, the strictures with Pluto in the tenth house are that no one will do it for you, that you must seize your own destiny, and that while a fearful view of the world can interact in a crippling fashion with wounded self-confidence, no one needs to remain stuck there. Fear itself is the obstacle.

THE ENERGIZING VISION
You were born to be a force in this world, and to stand for something which excites you. Follow the fire in yourself and you'll find the shape of that destiny. And since it is literally a destiny we're talking about, you need to believe that more is at work here than your own will or desire. You are the trigger, but the universe itself favors the expression of your Plutonian mission. Once you start believing in it, trusting it, and moving with it, synchronistic "coincidences" begin to unfold, charging your path with power, connections, and what we're taught to call "luck."

What is the nature of that destiny? Traditionally, one often lists a series of professions connected with each planet or sign as it interacts with the tenth house. There is real value in that approach, and we'll investigate it in a moment. But the modern view of astrology is less deterministic, more centered on motivational or psychospiritual factors. And what is really at stake here is your capacity for intense — and intensely meaningful — engagement with life. Any profession that fits that bill can be a healthy, legitimate expression of tenth house Plutonian energy.

Still, with this configuration, often one is drawn into classically "Plutonian" kinds of work: anything involving direct contact with life's more serious side. Deep psychotherapeutic work. Medicine. Disaster-related professions. Sometimes the work involves crossing a line of social taboo: sexual therapies, gay-related work, funeral direction or hospice jobs. Or something which excites deep passions: environmental crusades, political concerns, the wilder faces of art or performance. Pluto has a taste for mystery-solving and deep investigation. Thus: research in all its forms, police work, private detection. And it is often present where real power is wielded — thus the association of Pluto-in-the-tenth with, among other things, the control of big money.

The list is long, and the best purpose it might serve would only be to prime the pump of your own creative, visionary imagination. Whatever your course, know that you were not born to make everyone happy with you. Truth-sayers never do. And know that much in the unfolding story of the human family is riding on you; you were born with a mighty responsibility — the responsibility to make a difference in this world.

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posted December 30, 2006 01:36 PM            

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PLUTO IN THE ELEVENTH HOUSE
THE ELEVENTH HOUSE ARENA: Networking; Group Identification; Setting Priorities
THE ELEVENTH HOUSE PITS: Social Overextension; Wasting Time with the "Wrong Crowd"

IN THE TRADITION...
...the eleventh house is "The House of Friends." This title, in my opinion, is a misleading linguistic carryover from long ago, one that can still vex and confuse modern astrologers. "Friendship," in the true eleventh house sense, bears little resemblance to what contemporary people mean by the word. To us, a friend is someone with whom we experience a sense of connection and rapport, someone with whom we share our feelings, fears, and dreams. Friendship, in essence, implies love.

Not so to the astrologers of long ago. What was at stake in the eleventh house was not love at all, but rather a sense of "common cause." Our "friends" were those with whom we chose to cooperate in order to attain certain mutual aims. If we happened to like those people, that was only a pleasant footnote.

Such "friendship" is an inescapable aspect of civilized life, even today. Perhaps, for example, you join a church. Presumably, you wish the church prosperity and well-being. Unless you've recently won a large contest, you're probably not in a position to guarantee that prosperity single-handedly. No problem. Others in the community share your aim; together you can make the church cook without placing undue strain on any one person.

You are experiencing an eleventh house "Friendship" with the other church members, even though we can assume that there are many among them with whom it would not occur to you to have dinner. Human nature being what it is, we can probably go a step further and say that among these "Friends" there are a few who set your teeth on edge. Thus, a sense of one's own aims and priorities has primacy in our understanding of the eleventh house... especially those aims and priorities which we would be hard-pressed to achieve on our own. If our values and direction are clear, we are in a position to choose our group associations wisely; if they are unclear, a life-blurring note of randomness enters into that part of life, and we become overextended socially and rendered shallow by it.

What if you were born with Pluto in the eleventh house?

YOUR HIGH DESTINY
There is inherent in life some tension between achieving results and being a nice person. This is a delicate insight, and can easily be used as a shelter for scoundrels. Our aim here is certainly not to justify cruelty and insensitivity; only to recognize that no one in a position of active leadership could conceivably avoid frustrating and annoying some of the group members some of the time. A CEO might have to lay off workers in order that a company remain viable; if he or she does that in a cavalier way, it's fiendish ruthlessness. But if he or she fails to have the courage to make such a decision and as a result the whole company goes down a year later, the calamity is magnified.

What truly energized, creative person has never been accused of selfishness? Ask the novelist who ignores friends sometimes in order to have time to write. Ask the rock band what the neighbors think of the noise. As the proverb has it, you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs.

The realization of your High Destiny depends upon getting comfortable with this kind of moral relativism. For a person with a conscience, it's no easy task. One immediate comfort: eleventh house structures tend to "bloom late." That is, they tend not come into full biographical expression until mid-life. But one point is certain: your destiny involves group action — you cannot do it all alone. And in those groups, while you may not be the overt leader, you will be asked to be the one who "names the demons" when leaving them unnamed would destroy the group's effectiveness.

That the realization of your own goals involves this kind of thinking is only part of the point. To get to the heart of the matter, we must go further.

There are human enterprises that call for the joined efforts of many creative, feisty, independent people — Plutonian types. Naturally, the ego-wars that can arise when such personalities attempt to cooperate can be spectacular. Your high destiny lies in helping that particular kind of team endeavor. As your story unfolds, increasingly you find yourself in such politically sensitive positions — and politics, as we use the word here, are what inevitably unfold whenever two or three strong, independent personalities are joined together for very long. You are asked, covertly or overtly, to be the "psychologist" who foresees and averts explosive interpersonal friction, or who sorts it out once it has erupted. Diplomacy has a role here, but not so great as the role played by your own Plutonian capacity to confront people, to challenge them, to compel them to honesty, and to reconcile them with the realities of networked effort.

YOUR DISTORTING WOUND
Being the one who tells the assembled tribe the hard truth is not always consistent with good health. People like lies; just look at history. And they have been known to punish anyone who dares challenge the lie.

We can go further. We all get chills looking at newsreels of Hitler stirring up the crowds in Berlin in 1939. Or thinking of the latest urban riots. Crowds have an insanity that transcends the insanity of individuals. A hundred thousand people chanting a slogan — even one with which I agree — is a sight that terrifies me…..in part because it stirs up a part of my deep genetic self that knows how to go ballistic with the tribe, to stampede, to go berserk, to charge the cannons, to forget individuality, moral values, subtle paradoxes, tolerance.

In many ways, the world is a hell-hole. But the people in it are generally not so bad. It's an eternal paradox. We're better individually than we are as groups. What proportion of the human family is actually personally guilty of murder? Rape? The violent abuse of the innocent? How many have even come seriously close to that kind of step?

God knows, the whole point of this book is that it is dangerous to be naive, but I still feel that we are looking at a distinct minority of individuals who've actually committed such crimes. Nations don't fare so well. I can't name a single one that doesn't have the blood of history on its hands. There's a sort of moral food-chain here, with nations at the bottom and individuals at the top. In between, in ascending order, we observe communities, cliques or sub-groups, extended "families" of friends or relatives, literal families, and deep friendships. The order may well vary in given situations, but the point is simple enough: the larger the group, the more pronounced the tendency of that entity to run amuck.

Your Distorting Wound? You've tasted the bitter, demonic side of group-consciousness, and it terrified you. As is usually the case, we must explore many possibilities here. At first glance they bear little resemblance to each other, but upon scrutiny the common Plutonian themes emerge.

Maybe you were born into a group that had gone mad with some form of hatred, darkness, powerlessness, or addiction. Or maybe, in your naivete, you fell into such a group voluntarily. Intense racism of any flavor would provide a good illustration. So would extreme class-hatred or gender-hatred. In one wounding scenario, you simply soaked up a lot of poison there. In another, something in your spirit internalized a profound suspicion of group-consciousness.

In still another scenario, you saw through the horror quickly enough, but saw no ready exit from the group identification. So you learned to isolate yourself, to become something of the lone “steppenwolf.”

Perhaps you were actually the victim of a group's unconsciousness or madness — and again, "group” here basically means any combination of three or more people focused on some common aim, even if it's only survival. We could be talking about a scapegoating family system as easily as a group of mean kids persecuting you in junior high school. Not to mention a nation dressing you in a uniform, filling your head with glorious lies, and sending you off somewhere to blow the brains out of strangers.

YOUR NAVIGATIONAL ERROR
Knowing the dark and potentially vicious side of group-consciousness does not make it any easier to wave a red flag in front of the group. All through history, truth-sayers have been victims. Something inside you understands that idea viscerally. Even in "spiritual" groups, how many times have individuals kept their mouths shut in the face of the “guru's" sexual or financial predations? Or opened them — and been ostracized? How many "prisoners of conscience" are rotting in jails today?

Naming the group-shadow is perilous business. "Maybe we're being too hard on black people/white people, men/women, the rich/the poor. Maybe we should look at the parts of ourselves that need some scrutiny and healing." It's a good formula for crucifixion.

Trouble is, your High Destiny lies down that road. Not crucifixion! But truth-saying and group-healing. Your Navigational Error is that early experiences, wounding you unconsciously, could lead you to shy away from such an active, confrontive involvement in society. You could make a high virtue out of self-sufficiency, focusing everything on the achievement of independence. You could attempt to be content just "taking what you need" from the group (corporation; church; organization; crowd of friends), and "keeping your mouth shut when it wouldn't do any good to open it."

There's dullness and emptiness down that road — always those are the results of unrealized Plutonian force. But worse: even when left unconscious, Pluto in the eleventh house will still make itself felt biographically. Here we find the person who unwittingly winds up in a morally-compromised position: the "team-player" secretary shredding incriminating documents, the "team-player" prison guard who turns his back on violence then denies that it occurred to keep himself free of reproof, the police officer who knows about bribes but keeps her mouth shut out of respect for the "Code."

Anything in the eleventh house gains power as we mature. With Pluto there and with navigational errors compounded and uncorrected, you wind up feeling weak, ashamed, and bitter. Thank God there's a better way...

YOUR HEALING METHOD
The world is full of things in which we can believe. Many of them are charged with high passion: issues of justice, of environmental sustainment, of politics. Spirituality: who could live fully without it? We might say the same for Art and for the Pursuit of Knowledge. You can't get involved with all of them, at least not in the consuming way that Pluto demands; there's not enough time. But you can choose the ones that fill you with the deepest fervor. Down that committed road lies your healing method.

Find what you believe in. Find others who are devoted to the same cause or principles. Join with them, and together begin to advance the precepts or values you share. Natural alliances arise; friendships in every sense make themselves felt. Projects present themselves.

And that's where the healing really begins.

Even among your natural allies, there are differences. No human being exists without a Shadow-side. In any group, there will sooner or later emerge tensions, competitions, scapegoating, and sabotage. And they can destroy the worthy aims that brought the group together. This is where your natural skills and instincts can really shine.

If you've chosen the group wisely and consciously... it will still be a political mess! But you'll deal with it effectively. Why? Because you'll speak with the force of moral authority. Your whole being will be behind the words. When the issue is one that rattles and engages your soul, when you simply cannot experience dissociation and distance, there's fire in your eyes and in your words that makes you impossible to ignore.

Feeling that moral force in yourself — and watching its impact upon others — is the heart of what heals this part of your life. You can do it; the question is, will you do it?

THE ENERGIZING VISION
We live in a society that has made much of individual initiative, at least in principle. Culturally, we are taught to value the solitary, courageous person who bravely seizes an opportunity. As Myths go, it's a good one I suppose. But the larger truth is that we are highly social creatures. Much of what humankind can point to in pride has been accomplished only because of our capacity for complex social organization. If Michelangelo had needed to build the Sistine Chapel single-handedly before he painted it, he might not have lived long enough to chisel David out of the marble as well But there was something special about Michelangelo himself; deconstructing him simply as an "expression of his times" leaves out a quality of uniqueness and vision that was his alone.

Paradox: We humans may be “creatures of the hive,” but we are not just that. Individual genius and initiative interacts with social structure; civilization results. Each piece of the paradox needs the other — and the marriage isn't an easy one! Along with human genius comes human uncooperativeness and pigheadedness; we're social, but we're also rather hard to get along with.

It's that volatile combination that makes us human. Ants may have a more stable, harmonious society, but they had no Michelangelo and no Renaissance. They didn't go from Kitty Hawk to the Moon in sixty-six years.

For humans to function culturally as they do, they need people such as yourself— truth-seers, group psychoanalysts, mediators, arbiters — the ones who deal directly with the friction, tension, and confusion that arise when such "cussed monkeys" as ourselves attempt to put together a pyramid — or a newsletter. We need you to keep us more-or-less honest, more-or-less civil with each other, more-or-less on track with our common goals. You represent about eight percent of the population; but without you, culture stops. Sometimes you're the grease in the gears; other times you're the hammer — or the swift kick. Sometimes you'll be called the saint; other times, the heavy. But always, without you, the team goes unconscious, and the ancient maggot begins to chew…..

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posted December 30, 2006 01:37 PM            

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PLUTO IN THE TWELFTH HOUSE

THE TWELFTH HOUSE ARENA: Spiritual Consciousness; Compassion; Self-Transcendence
THE TWELFTH HOUSE PITS: Suffering; Nihilism; Spiritual Emptiness or Shallowness

IN THE TRADITION...
...the twelfth house is "The House of Troubles." Any planet there would be seen as a source of misfortune — and doubly so if the planet were an inherently "unlucky" one, such as Pluto!

Take heart. We'll present a more uplifting and encouraging perspective on this configuration, but before we do, we must consider an unsettling idea: philosophically, there is an age-old association between spirituality and suffering.

Much illusion must be cleared out of the way before this idea has any relevance to our purposes, but it does contain a kernel of truth. Many of us have observed the phenomenon of a person blossoming into glowing spirituality while battling cancer. That single image provides us with the clue we need: loss, endured consciously and with faith, can be a powerful teacher.

Do we need loss and suffering in order to grow spiritually? That's a delicate question, but one sure insight leaps to awareness: certainly we humans are capable of experiencing spirituality in other, more immediately attractive ways. We might, for example, feel very close to the Great Spirit while opening our hearts to a magnificent landscape, or a transcendentally beautiful piece of music — or to each other, for that matter. Safely we can say that suffering is far from the only path to higher faith.

Still, terrible loss strips us down to spiritual realities faster than anything else. And if Pluto, the planet of much that is frightening in life, lies in your twelfth house, what might that imply?

YOUR HIGH DESTINY
Is it your destiny to suffer more than most of us? If so, than no matter how much spiritual sugar we put on it, you'll probably wind up wishing that you had somebody else's birth chart. Fortunately I can honestly report that I've not observed a particular correlation between this Plutonian configuration and a pattern of catastrophe in the biography.

The best way I know to come to terms with the highest potentials of twelfth house planets in general is to think of them as our "master teachers" — inward spiritual giants that guide us, like kind gurus, into transcendent states of consciousness. Each planetary master teacher promotes in you a certain class of experience or perception which is customized to trigger evolutionary leaps. If you had Venus there, for example, experiences of human love or aesthetic rapture might be the ticket.

But what about Pluto? Here's the planet of Evil and Catastrophe. Does your inner teacher want you to suffer? Or, even more incomprehensibly, to become a nasty person? Not at all. Your inner teacher's goal is far simpler to say: the teacher wants you to deepen your compassion.

Your High Destiny lies in becoming one of those beings on the earth whose mere existence is reminder to the rest of us that, when the day is done, compassion is the purest, noblest spiritual attainment available to any human being.

And how do we learn compassion? By opening our hearts to suffering. Whose suffering? Does it have to be our own? From the human perspective, that question is pressing one. But our urgency in asking it would probably make the angels smile. And their answer, I believe, would be that it doesn't matter whose suffering you're considering. Whether it's yours or that of another being, either way compassion is the highest response that might be invoked.

YOUR DISTORTING WOUND
Imagine you've got a friend who carries a lot of political intensity in her character. She wants you to see a film with her tonight; it's about the gruesome use of torture by the corrupt regime in Wazoowazooland. The situation there is real; forces of sadism and destruction are rampaging, and you really do feel compassion for the people. But the film is heavy-handed. Close-ups of mutilation are punctuated only by close-ups of teary faces. And it goes on and on. For the first fifteen minutes, you are dumbstruck with a mixture of horror and righteous indignation: the very emotions the film-maker set out to invoke. But after a while, you're simply wishing it would be over. Forty-five minutes into the film, you find yourself surreptitiously stealing a glance at your watch. When finally the credits roll, you have been emotionally bludgeoned. You feel numbness, and little else except a profound aversion to hearing ever again of Wazoowazooland or its hapless inhabitants.

The next day at work, someone approaches you with a look of naughty mirth. "Did you hear the one about ...' It's a bad joke, a sick joke, about torture. And you laugh until tears run down your cheeks.

You needed the relief. Subliminally, the film was still with you. It is a psychological commonplace that humor is mostly about dealing with the unthinkable. Most jokes are humanity's way of coping with the darker realities of existence: death, old age, illness, infidelity, sexual problems, catastrophe, accident. And there is no shortage of any of those sources of pain in this world; they abound. Life can sometimes be a little too much like that film about Wazoowazooland.

With Pluto in the twelfth house, you were born with a unique psychic attunement to suffering. Were the world a softer, more gentle place, in your youth, you might have sat beneath the Bodhi Tree, so to speak, and simply entered into a kind of compassionate meditation. But instead what happened was that you were flooded, overwhelmed with the psychic shrieking, whimpering, and wailing of embodied life-forms. And you shut down, at least partly. You had to.

This Plutonian configuration is distinct from the others in that the Wound connected with it can arise in the psyche independent of any particular "wounding event" in the youthful or karmic biography. Nobody had to hurt you personally, in other words, in order for you to be hurt by the synchronous howling of all the loneliness, sorrow, and pain on the planet.

Still, wounding biographical events do have some relevance here. We may find stories of direct exposure to intimate catastrophe in the early life: grandma lives in the family home and endures a long, stretched-out cancer death. What does that atmosphere mean to the child developing in it? Perhaps there is the loss of parent to death, to madness or via abandonment. Maybe a sibling is seriously ill. Perhaps violence touches the home, or the early life.

Whatever the outward story, the real Wound arises not so much from the direct reality of the painful event — as we've seen you're psychically wired to deal with that dimension of life quite satisfactorily — but rather from the impact of other people's adaptations to the difficulty. The child who, for example, sees mom grow hard, unreachable, and steely in the face of sister's leukemia ...he or she internalizes that model. The boy whose dad is full of bitter, black-humorous jokes as a defense against his own tears ...what does that boy learn about manhood?

It would be dishonest to leave this territory without making reference to our numbed-out, violence-mad culture. A child with Pluto in the twelfth house will be seated in front of the TV with the rest of his or her peers, learning to laugh and cheer at bludgeoning, maiming, and murder. We have grown appallingly anaesthetized to the suffering of others; this is the opposite of compassion, and thus, to the extent that you internalized it, this attitude itself is part of your wound.

YOUR NAVIGATIONAL ERROR
Little could be more natural or more instinctual than the avoidance of suffering. We approach pleasure; we retreat from pain. You, me, and a paramecium wiggling on a microscope slide: we all hold that pair of reflexes in common.

And compassion is pain. It may be more than pain; it has subtlety, even nuances of bliss in it. But primarily, overwhelmingly, it hurts to let ourselves feel the hurt of another. To open ourselves to the ache of grief or the ragged edge of fear in another creature is to welcome that energy into ourselves. To make it our own.

Let's be sure that we are speaking the same language here: I am not talking about abstract concern for "world hunger" or "abused children," as laudable as those sentiments may be. What I am talking about is the look in the eye of the panhandler who stops you on the street wanting your spare change. He's human, and he hurts. He presumably hates his situation, whatever his own responsibility for it may be. He likely hates you too, for that matter. Maybe you give him a few coins. But can you give him a moment of eye-contact? A little empathy? Can you stand it?

I don't mean to sound preachy here. And let me hasten to add that most days I can't live up to the standard I'm describing. But what I am depicting is real compassion, and it's an extremely difficult attitude to maintain.

Your Navigational Error lies in slipping too far away from that compassion. The point is that, while you're naturally inclined to feel it, the sheer unpleasantness of the emotion might incline you to shut it down. Maybe you do that by taking refuge in normalcy: give the bum a couple of dimes maybe, then get away fast before he says anything. Maybe you hide in cynicism or nihilism — a real trap with Pluto in the twelfth house. Perhaps humor is your refuge, a kind of black humor that thrives on jokes about grievous loss.

Down that road lurks disaster — and not only because of the evolutionary opportunity which is lost. When Pluto is forced out of consciousness, it tends to express itself biographically. If Pluto's effects are not about your consciousness, they'll manifest in your story, in other words. The point here is a fierce one: if you are hesitant to open up to compassion regarding other people, you increase the probability that you'll sooner or later have ample inspiration to feel compassion toward yourself.

THE HEALING METHOD
Of all houses, the twelfth is the most transcendent — which is to say that of all of them, it has the least direct connection to the visible world. Extraordinary events can take place in that part of being and produce not even a ripple in your outward life. The point is that your healing method here is not so much something that you must do as it is something you must become.

Meditation is the heart of the matter. But meditation is a word that is easily misunderstood. Astrology, if it is anything at all, is a celebration of human individuality. Were I to espouse any particular religious or philosophical position here, I'd be doing a disservice to you, to myself, and to the spirit of what's best in astrology. If my word "meditation" translates best for you as "prayer" or even as "concentration," that's fine.

What I am speaking of is the highly focused and sustained visualization of an image in the mind. The more three-dimensionally "real" the object of the meditation becomes, the more powerful is the healing experience. And for our purposes we must add two more layers: the emotions must be engaged with the image; it must be felt as much as seen. And the image must be one that fills the heart with compassion.

Christians may image Jesus on the cross. Buddhists may see Gautama vowing to serve the world until all beings are liberated. Anyone might image a child, a fawn, a kitten.....young things in their innocence and defenselessness often fill us with compassion. We might visualize a friend who is going through something painful, and let his or her psychic reality into our hearts. And if you want your Pluto-in-the-twelfth-house PhD., maybe you should try visualizing a someone you find antagonistic or unpleasant in that same compassionate light.

The inner work is the real work in the twelfth house; everything else is less important, and tends to follow naturally. Once you have recovered your native capacity to feel compassion, there often arises a strong desire to address suffering in the outer world. In practical astrology, it is not unusual to find people with Pluto in the twelfth house working in hospitals, or prisons, or shelters, or asylums — places where human suffering is at a crescendo. But to frame such work, however noble, as the Healing Method, would be misleading. It is not the healing method; it is only a typical side-effect of the deeper opening of the heart.

THE ENERGIZING VISION
Rightfully we revere our scientists, the artists who make our hearts soar, the comedians who give us laughter, the healers who bind our wounds. But we always reserve a special place for the ones we call "saints" — the compassionate ones who love us wholly and utterly. Sometimes those saints undertake extraordinary feats of service and incidentally garner a lot of attention; Mother Theresa leaps to mind. Others live more quietly, and attract less notice. But even without much prospect for film bios and pilgrimages after they're dead, these saints are precious nonetheless. I believe I've seen such beings once or twice in toll booths on highways, recognized them in a split second of eye contact, and was a quarter-mile down the road before I even knew what had happened.

"Saint" may not be the word you'd naturally use here; somehow "Good Person" just isn't strong enough verbal medicine though, so I'm going to stick with saint. My only regret in using the word is that the churches of every stripe have told a terrible lie over the centuries; they've made saints seem much rarer than they really are, so I seem to be invoking something very exotic when in fact I am not. We've all known a saint or two; life just seems to be set up that way. Caring and support radiate from such people; we turn to them naturally when our burdens are heavy, when we need someone to affirm our basic worth and goodness, despite our guilt, our confusion, our frustration. They don't pity us; that emotion is far colder and more distant than what they radiate. Whatever we may feel inside ourselves, they have felt it too — however dark or abased it may be.

Thus, we expose another lie the churches tell: these saints are utterly human, and utterly accepting of their humanness. What distinguishes them is only the extent to which they have opened to their own humanity. And that openness empowers them to open equally to your humanity or to mine.

To say that with your twelfth house Pluto, you have the chart of a saint — even in the milder, broader definition of the word I am advocating here — would be misleading. There is really no such thing as the "chart of a saint." The cockroach born under the manger had Christ's chart. Sainthood refers to an attainment; a chart refers only to potentials, and read accurately, it describes dark potentials as well as bright ones.

It is more accurate to say that in this lifetime you have the opportunity to attain that level of compassionate engagement which I am characterizing as "sainthood," and to touch people's lives in that intimate, inspiring way. That is your High Destiny, and reaching it is in no way automatic. As we have seen, there are other roads you could go down.

But this high solitary road, maybe the highest road of all, is now open to you, if you choose to travel it.

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posted December 30, 2006 01:55 PM            

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Which is more problematic for a person in relationships(a person having this natally) Sun conjunction Pluto or Sun Square Pluto? Oh and is Pluto to the ascendant just as powerful as having Pluto in 1st house?

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My personal first reaction to Question 1 was that the square would be more of a challenge. Conjunctions blend energies, they combine and often strengthen each other. Squares are friction; hurdles; challenges to either grow from or avoid (thus) stagnate; possibly the imbalance of a dissimilar element (Water to Fire); tension in search of harmony and balance/equalization of energies. Squares drive us forward towards resolution/reconciliation of the issue(s).

As for Pluto to (do you mean conjunct or another aspect?) the Asc – my opinion is Yes. I think Pluto in any of the Angular houses is especially strong. I have Pluto in XII conjunct my Asc, and the Pluto in the 1st description also resonates with me somewhat. However, my 12th house Pluto conj Asc energies (from my subjective perspective) seem a LOT different to me than the energies of another person with 1st house Pluto conj Asc, even if their Pluto is only a few degrees away from mine.....