Transit Lab: Sun conjunct IC

Tonight I’ve packed up my stuff, prepping for my move to a new place tomorrow. I’ve been renting a room from a friend while helping her renovate her property & house. She told me when she offered the room that I’d be moving into a construction zone, and my hyper-Sagittarian self decided that a little adventure was welcome.

And then I moved. The house did turn into a construction zone, and I remembered that while my Moon is in Sagittarius in the 3rd, my South Node of the Moon is in Cancer. What’s happened is, in short, a fairly animated (and sometimes gruesome) conflict between the desire for adventure and change and the need for stability and security. It’s the conversation between the 3rd and 4th houses, Mercury/Gemini and Moon/Cancer, but also that between Moon (what we need to do to make ourselves happy) and the South Node of the Moon (our habits and comfort zone - all based in our emotional memories).

As I type this, I’m getting a handle on those dialogues: I seem to enjoy adventure as long as I have a firm home base, and I’ve had something less than I’m used to here. If there’s no stable home base, I’ll marginally tolerate the notion of adventure, but try to avoid it. Interesting.

I think I was coping well until the kitchen sink went away and we started eating on and with disposable things. There’s something about that that sets my emotional innards to rotting. I was fine with postponing sprouting and juicing until I moved, but the entrance of disposable things made me feel a bit like I’d begun punishing myself.

And I didn’t mind taking showers outside while the bathroom was being redone. And I haven’t once minded the toilet being outside - See?, I want to ask, haven’t I just been a trooper?

So, as the Sun hits my IC (the beginning of the 4th house) at 13 Capricorn 59 tomorrow, I’ll be hauling boxes into an adorable little guest house in LA. It’s Capricorn, though, so you can probably guess that I’m pretty sparse at home. And my North Node is not far from it. I see in this that, for one thing, doing the 4th house home/roots/stability thing has not been on my list of priorities in the past and I’ve set myself the challenge of figuring out how to, as well as if I’m willing to do that new thing that the North Node symbolizes for any of us. (And as the Sun hits my NN in a few days, I expect I’ll be confronted with just how much I don’t know about setting up a comfortable, suitable home space.)

Not only do I not have much stuff to move, but virtually none of it is homey. The IC ruler Saturn is retrograde in Gemini in the 9th house. Guessed yet what most of my stuff is? You got it: books, notebooks, pens, papers and paper items (including arty things I always hope might defray the lopsidedness of the ratio…).

Tonight I remembered that I need to turn on the electric and gas, and went to the LA Department of Water and Power website to initiate a service order to get electricity going. The first thing to comment on is that electricity is called “Power” - I’ll be paying them for power, as it turns out. I’m not sure I’ve ever paid anyone for power. I wonder how my Scorpio Sun and Venus-Pluto life will change once that starts up.

But what you have to do is fill out the online form called ”Residential Turn On Service Form,” which, I’m pretty sure, is going to turn out to be quite a letdown when it’s all said and done.

They really need to come up with a better name.

Tom is available for soul-centered astrology consultations. See his website for more info and contact details.

January 3, 2008 By Tom Jacobs

Jupiter in Capricorn - and Pluto on its Heels

Headline: The High-flying Optimism (and Perhaps Over-extended Wishfulness) of Sagittarius Gives Way to the Sobering View of Reality of Capricorn!

Whether this is seen or experienced as a plus or minus depends on one’s willingness to adjust meaningfully and maturely to Saturnian, get-the-job-done energy.

Undoubtedly, it’s time to work. With Jupiter into Capricorn, the intuitive mind begins to whiff that there are opportunities to ground some of the insights afforded by the previous year of Jupiter in Sagittarius.

It might be time to go to school or class of some kind to put into actual practice (manifestation) some of the rad theoretical stuff that we’ve been collecting. It might be time to slow down anything and everything in order to be sure that we can get and stay real about how things are actually working - Capricorn being the sign of adjusting to and responding to reality.

With Pluto’s ingress to Capricorn, we’re looking at the opportunity to deepen our relationship with the reality of authority. Who’s in charge, and why? How did they get there? What do they have that we think we don’t? What do we have in common that we may not have seen? Anything in there we can learn to ground and stabilize to develop and manifest our authority in new, better, healthier ways?

Pluto presents us with the tools to dig below the surface, and invites us to turn over the soil in a recognition that change is inevitable. If you’ve followed Pluto transits in your own life, you can correlate its level of difficulty with your willingness to change…wait a minute! - no one told you that’s the secret of prospering and growing during Pluto transits? Well, it’s time you got the memo.

Pluto in Capricorn will present us with many reflections of our conditioning, and you’ll treat yourself well if you choose to be willing to see how you’ve adapted to the suggestions, requirements and edicts of external models of authority. Who do you think is in charge of your life? Who gets to direct things in your consciousness? How are you doing at learning to be in charge of yourself? Whose idea of reality is currently the ultimate one?

Capricorn is the sign of normalization, of leveling to a common demominator that’s based on the order necessary for the greater good. Capricorn aims to fit everyone into the bell curve, an impossible attempt not at homogenization but at a decomplication to allow a given amount of work to positively serve the greatest number of people.

Let Pluto’s ingress show you what’s really happening in your life related to that necessary order and that greater good. See where you can ground. See what you can do to get more real about what’s happening and what needs to be done. And above all, keep your eyes, minds and hearts open.

Tom is available for spirit-guided, soul-centered astrology consultations. Contact him via his website.

December 29, 2007 By Tom Jacobs

A Thought on Conditioning

After being related a story by a friend just back from a rather intense family Thanksgiving visit, I loaned her a favorite book of mine, What Do You Say After You Say Hello?, by Eric Berne, MD. If you’ve ever wondered why people do the things they do, check out this book. It’s a pretty easy read, given it’s a text for psychoanalysts.

So, what is it that you say after you say hello? It depends on what you’re trying to get from any given interaction. Berne outlines the scripts people live, and shows how we’re conditioned by our early home environments to perform certain roles.

SO, then, again: conditioning. The roles we play aren’t indicative of our true natures. An astrological birth chart is a map of possibilities, and two major factors determine which sets of realities we create from those possibilities: conditioning and free will.

Our free will is often, by our beliefs of what’s possible, shaped by that conditioning. Okay, so I’m really saying that it’s often not even two factors that determine what reality we’ll create; there are times when it’s all about conditioning.

Last week I gave a talk on a new view of spirituality in the birth chart. When dealing with any issue, including spirituality, key is a client’s conditioning. Regarding matters of spirit, we have to look not only at Neptune/Pisces/12th house, but also Jupiter/Sagittarius/9th house to understand the conditioning surrounding belief. We have to look at the asteroid Lucifer (1930) to understand the conditioning around a person’s relationship with the idea of and the reality of the existence of a higher power. We have to look at the asteriod Arjunsuri (20300) to understand the person’s relationship with his or her own conscience (whose voice/authority is considered the ultimate authority?). The picture is pretty complex when you get deeply into any individual chart, but it all comes down to conditioning.

As long as we’re on the subject, I’ll note that every interaction you have with your family and those with whom you’ve been close for a long time, offer the opportunity to see your conditioning. If you’re someone who has difficulty dealing on some level dealing with family/where you came from and yet are going back for upcoming holiday festivities of some sort or other, see if you can catch yourself in however you want to react to any stressful situations and hold up a second. Wait a minute, and instead of reacting how you perhaps always have, make a different choice. That’s how you start breaking conditioning!

Brought to you by the “Down With Outmoded Conditioning” Committee, with additional support from the “Pluto in Libra ‘Can’t We All Get Along?’” Cabal.

Tom is available for spirit-guided karmic astrology readings. Contact him via his website.

November 25, 2007 By Tom Jacobs