The One Astrological Aspect That We All Share

The One Astrological Aspect That We All Share

Planets are constantly shifting in their geometrical relationships to one another. That means that each person’s aspect-set is as unique and unrepeatable as a fingerprint – with one very weird exception. A Neptune-Pluto sextile appears in the birthchart of almost everyone alive today. The only exceptions are people who are well into their eighties. Soon we will come to a time when literally everyone alive on the planet will have the same aspect in their charts.

• Inescapably, we must recognize that this obscure astrological reality is the key to understanding our present epoch of human history.

Let’s start with . . .

SCIENCE CLASS

Both Neptune and Pluto move very slowly. Around the middle of the Second World War, they formed that sixty degree angle and they’ve been more-or-less that way ever since. The reason has to do with Kepler’s laws of planetary motion – planets the same distance from the Sun move at the same speed. We think of Pluto as lying “beyond” Neptune, and that’s usually true, but not always. Pluto’s orbit is very elliptical and for about twenty years of its 248-year orbit, it’s actually closer to the Sun than Neptune. That was the case between 1979 and 1999.

For our purposes, we need to frame that more broadly. Long before 1979, Pluto was nearly closer to us than Neptune and since 1999, it’s been barely further away. That means they’ve been moving at more-or-less the same speed for a very long time now.

This phenomenon has happened countless times in the long history of the solar system. Two things make the present situation unique:

• First, this time when their speeds locked, Neptune happened to be about sixty degrees ahead of Pluto – so not only did their speeds lock, but so did that sextile aspect.

• Second, this is the first time both planets have, in a sense, been activated in the human collective consciousness – Neptune was only discovered in 1848 and Pluto in 1930.

That last point is a slippery area of astrological theory. Certainly we see evidence of people responding to the transits of Neptune and Pluto before they were discovered. It’s just like people catching viruses before anyone knew viruses existed. But the discovery of a planet – our becoming conscious of it – does seem to correspond with a kind of collective awakening to what it represents. This is a big subject, but briefly consider how there was a major spiritual awakening in the mid-19th century coinciding with the discovery of Neptune. Spiritualism arose, but more importantly people began to realize that they didn’t necessarily need an intervening priesthood in order to connect with the Divine. We’re all, at least potentially, mystics. Then in 1930 with the discovery of Pluto we have the collective discovery of psychology and the unconscious mind.

In the current cycle, the first exact sextile between these two “invisible” planets occurred on January 22, 1950, with Neptune in Libra and Pluto in Leo. But astrological experience has taught us that aspects don’t need to be exact in order to be felt – they have orbs, in other words. If we allow a modest six-degree orb for this sextile, the first one happened in 1942 and the final one will happen in 2039. That’s almost a century! If I counted right, there are a total of forty-nine exact Neptune/Pluto sextiles between the first one in 1950 and the last one on February 28, 2032. Given practical astrological experience with orbs – we know that aspects don’t need to be exact in order to be felt – we can say that this sextile has been in effect since around 1942 and will be felt until around 2039.

Even then, children born before 2039 will carry this signature forward in their characters beyond the end of the present century.

Naturally some astrologers will quibble about the orb of the sextile getting too wide to count a few times during this period, especially during times of sign transitions. Bean counters! All I’d say by way of a rejoinder is that astrological orbs aren’t rocket science. When exactly does a puppy become a dog? When exactly did you attain maturity?

WHAT IT MEANS

The implications of this universal event are huge, but what does the fish know of the sea? If it’s something that everybody shares, then who can stand outside it and describe it to us? That’s where the craft of astrology enters the equations.

• The heart of the Neptune-Pluto matter, in terms of the evolution of human culture, is the blending of two previously unrelated notions: our spiritual journeys and our psychological work on ourselves. The first is Neptunian, the second is Plutonian.

• Meanwhile, a sextile aspect suggests mutual benefit, stimulus, and excitation between the two – spirituality is good for psychology and psychology is good for spirituality, in other words.

In short, we are looking at an emerging global paradigm that involves the synthesis of Plutonian psychology and Neptunian spirituality. I suspect we may come to a time when the two words become synonymous – or disappear entirely, only to be replaced by some new word that refers to them both at once.

Because of the strange universality of this Pluto-Neptune sextile, essentially everyone on the planet is part of this evolutionary process. That statement covers a wide range of humans, of course – and a wide range of human responses to the possibilities this sextile represents, from the lowest to the highest. For now, let’s concentrate on understanding the higher ground – what is the collective purpose of this endless sextile? Later, to keep ourselves honest, we’ll take a peek in a darker direction.

FOR EXAMPLE . . .

Concretely, the emergence of evolutionary astrology in popular culture itself is one good, if small, illustration of the higher potentials inherent in this combination. Evolutionary astrology can be understood as a three-way synthesis of astrology with ancient metaphysics and modern psychology. Evolutionary astrology embraces past lives, psychic phenomena, energy healing, contacts with the spirit world – the whole nine yards of subject matter that would get you thrown out of a modern existentialist/materialist university psychology department. At that level, evolutionary astrology is purely Neptunian – it involves pure unadulterated human mysticism. But evolutionary astrology is also very hard-hitting psychologically. Nobody gets away with taking a “flight into Light.”

Here’s an example. Let’s say you have transiting Pluto squaring your fourth house Saturn. Maybe that means that it’s time to deal with your underlying anger at your father. Is it time to forgive him for abusing you? Not so fast – before you can forgive him, you’ve got to get in touch with the part of you that wants to murder him.

I hope you’re laughing. That line makes me laugh too. Forgiveness is pure Neptunian spirituality, and it’s obviously a beautiful, liberating thing. But how do we actually get to forgiveness? The route will probably take us through some emotional minefields – and that’s Pluto’s domain. If we are not brave enough to risk threading an honest path through them, we’ll never attan authentic forgiveness. Instead we’ll settle for some virtue-signaling posture with little basis in authentic psychological reality.

• Making such passages down through the honest dark and only then upward into the higher light is what we mean by synthesizing Neptunian spirituality and Plutonian psychology.

Evolutionary astrology has emerged right on synchronistic schedule with the ongoing sextile of Neptune and Pluto. It has flowered under that stimulus – but it’s really just one small reflection of a far vaster impulse that rose like a tide in the collective awareness. Under this sextile we have also seen the emergence of transpersonal and archetypal psychology, integrative medicine, energy-healing, research into reincarnation and near death experiences, and parapsychology as legitimate fields of study.

The roots of all of those disciplines are far older – ancient, really. But the popularity and widespread relevance of the practices are part of the present cultural wave.

INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES

All of us have this sextile in our charts, but some of us have it placed very prominently – that naturally ties such people to the cutting edge of this unfolding process. More specifically, some of us were born between late 1983 and early 1995, with Pluto in its own sign, Scorpio. When a planet is in the sign it rules, it hits everyone harder. If you have that Pluto-in-Scorpio signature you are simply carrying more of the juju of the psychological side of this revolution. You are helping to establish a new human relationship with the unconscious mind – and, really, a new relationship with many things we humans have been so scared of for so long that we have demonized them: sexuality in all its forms, extreme altered states of consciousness, and a new relationship with the ideas, values, and practices associated with death, for just a few examples.

If you were born between 1983 and 1995, you’re sitting down to dinner with those demons – and I just want to thank you for doing that. You are an essential part of this wider evolutionary process. Some of you will be casualties of it. Some of you will be the wisest and psychologically bravest humans who have ever lived.

There are young people on Earth now, born after Neptune entered its own sign, Pisces, in 2011 and 2012, who will be the planet’s new mystics. I suspect they will be defining spirituality in an emerging post-secular religious age, whatever that will mean. I don’t claim to know exactly what it means myself – but I believe that, in their bones, this emerging generation does. There are true saints among them. And that remarkable cohort of souls has of course just begun to show up for earthly roll call.

THE DARK SIDE

Everything we’ve looked at so far can be understood as the higher ground – what this ongoing Neptune-Pluto sextile is supposed to mean for the human race. But fundamental to evolutionary astrology is the understanding that free will plays a pivotal role in how things actually manifest here on earth. The planets point us to the path that leads us to where we need to be, but they can’t carry us there. We have to cooperate. And if we don’t, that planetary energy does not go away – instead it shows up in darker forms.

• Pluto deals with all the manifestations of the unconscious mind, including the most nightmarish ones. Meanwhile, Neptune, when we respond poorly to it, correlates with madness, escapism, and delusion.

Speaking of nightmares, just think of what happens when the dark side of religion gets in bed with unresolved human rage, human fear, and human projection. These two potential devils have been stimulating and exciting each other since World War II – in fact, just look at World War II and you’ll see some excellent illustrations of that very point: the nightmare of Nazism and the Holocaust, the nightmare of Hiroshima . . . take it forward through the sheer madness of the Cold War – what an example of simple psychological projection that perilous debacle was! The West feared the old Soviet Union and they feared us, so we each projected our own shadow onto the other one. And of course, subsequent history suggests there never was a serious intent on either side to actually start a nuclear war; it was all in our heads. Collectively, we had not done our Pluto work.

Take it right up to the present with religiously-inspired terrorists on all sides – it’s all Pluto and Neptune “exciting” each other in ways that illustrate the dark side of the combination. How many souls are now addicted to all that madness? Christian Nationalism, Islamic extremism, and so forth – they’re all clearly cut from the same dark Neptune-Pluto cloth.

BACK TO THE HIGHER GROUND

Confronted with the grim headlines, it’s notoriously easy to lose hope. It might seem too glib to complain that “the media never covers the good news” – the horrors are real and it would be radically contrary to the true spirit of Pluto to deny their existence. But let’s not deny Neptune either. Tune into your intuition and give the following encouraging ideas a reality check.

• How many of us on the planet today have done a ton of honest psychological work on ourselves? Compare that with the level of genuine, fierce introspection before World War Two before the tools and mindset of psychology were widely understood. We’ve entered a psychological age.

• How many of us are now deeply spiritual in our orientations – but without the baggage of sectarian, divisive religious beliefs?

• How many of us have wrestled with our psychological projections in the forms of racism, sexism, homophobia, and so on?

• How many of us now recognize that animals are conscious and have souls just like we do?

• How many of us now understand that death is a portal into another realm – and the simple knowledge that these other realms actually exist?

• And finally, how many of us now understand that we’ve collectively come to an age in which you can no longer call yourself sane unless you have a spiritual life – and you can no longer call yourself spiritual unless you’ve done your psychological work.

That last line is the heart of the matter – it is the core realization that has been trying to dawn on the human race since the early 1940s. A sea-change is happening in our species. Even though none of the happier points we just looked at ever make the daily headlines, in the big picture, they are what is really happening on Earth now.

Each person who creates that synthesis of Neptunian spirituality and Plutonian psychological honesty in themselves has created one more ripple in the collective. Get enough of those ripples happening all at once and they turn into a tsunami of unimaginable, unstoppable power – one we can ride into an emerging human future that is actually worth living.

Here’s a quick visual aid for some further reflections on the synthesis of these two planets. You can take it from there into realms of understanding that I’ve not yet imagined myself.