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.
