Pluto into Capricorn: With Open Eyes

As uncomfortable as it may be, you may soon begin to experience certain aspects of reality that you’ve seen fit to edit and omit from your consciousness.

At some point, a recognition of reality apart from our selective visions is to be faced. I seem to think this is what happens on the deathbed, and with certain tragedies and traumas that can serve to wake us up, when we find ourselves working from within a new and clear paradigm of spotless vision. And yet it seems to be in the air at the moment - at least in my circles and of what I’m hearing of people’s experiences these days.

Capricorn is the sign of slow development and maturation that comes from hard work. And yet as the sign concerned with status and reputation, it’s also the sign of the veneer of slow maturation that comes from hard work. What I’ve been writing about Pluto entering Capricorn has been based in my understanding that Capricorn operates according to a lot of shoulds, and there could be some hollow structures that hold our lives and societies together. Whatever they may be, Pluto entering this sign is the surest (if not the quickest and least painful) route to begin to see how we might be running on a lot of shoulds that aren’t based in reality or contributing usefully to it.

Last week I moved to a new place, and a few days ago met one of my neighbors, an artist and writer named Alex Forman. She told me about a photography & writing project she’s done, and it struck me as wonderfully illustrative of the energy of Pluto in Capricorn.

She photographed 2″ high figurines of the American presidents from Washington to Nixon, and each is accompanied by text reflecting research of various sorts of records - letters, medical records, biographies, etc. - which let us in on what are perhaps little-known aspects of the presidents’ lives. The result is what would make my 1st grade teacher believe she was near an apopleptic fit: A look at these men as the humans they were, with human concerns, desires, challenges, weaknesses and urges. As men with personal & intimate lives not ending with what the office of the presidency (I suppose that’s to be capitalized?) is supposed to be about. Each was made to be as much a symbol of the “should” life of the country itself as possible, and I have to believe it’s only a matter of time before stories based in reality come out.

The truth is that the vast majority of us constantly create a veneer of self-image based on shoulds (in what ways have you responded to media versions of how people should look? - that’s big enough for another post!). And it takes a lot of energy to keep out of consciousness the other, left out aspects of reality that fill reality out. Think about what it is that you don’t want to know about, don’t want to hear. Think about why you spend as much energy as you do keeping certain things out of your consciousness. Alex offers an example of this on a large social and historical scale with information about the real lives, the sometimes messy and gritty lives, of the presidents represented in her project.

Take a look at her site (Tall, Slim & Erect) and understand that this sort of revelation of truth, being faced with the unglamorous bits and pieces of reality that in actuality make us up, is the kind of thing we’re all in for with Pluto’s Capricornian ingress - the kind of thing we all have the opportunity to experience if, that is, we’re at all tired of keeping the messier, unglamorous and perhaps shameful-seeming corners of our realities out of consciousness and ready to try something new.

And this, as all things do, comes down to the challenge of self-love: Can you accept the parts of yourself that you don’t want to be part of you? Can you choose to be more whole by admitting a broader scope of yourself, as shown by an honest look at the reality of you?

Tom is available for karmic astrology & intuitive consultations. See his website for more information and to contact him.

January 11, 2008 By Tom Jacobs

Pluto into Capricorn: The Will to Authority, part I

There isn’t a person alive who hasn’t been shaped by authority structures related to Saturn/Capricorn. This energy is that of the normalization of groups and the coherence of all systems: filial, social, educational, governmental. And anyone alive who’s paying attention to the energy of the present moment will notice with the ingress, if they haven’t already with the hinting at major Capricornian shifts that Jupiter’s recent ingress offered, that something important is happening.

An evolutionary astrology e-mail list I’m on received a note today from a member asking about source referrals for understanding the collective impact that Pluto’s ingress into Capricorn will have. She ends the e-mail by saying that it feels like quite a shift and she’s drawn to do some research.

Of course she’s drawn to do some research! The energy of Capricorn is that of authority - gaining, becoming and holding authority.

Natally, Saturn for anyone represents the urge to develop and be an authority, for mastery in order to, in the long run, develop security. Along the way, we adopt other people’s ideas of what authority is until those ideas clearly don’t work for us. Even without a natal retrograde Saturn, there comes a time for most people when they must develop their own ideas of what authority, discipline, sacrifice and hard work mean.

The first Saturn return (around age 29 1/2) is the pre-wired opportunity, the most convenient time for this. Earlier than that there isn’t sufficient experience to tackle this maturation (Saturn hasn’t made a full circuit around the birth chart until around 29 1/2, and so hasn’t made all possible aspects to natal bodies and points), and much later than that we lose the Saturnian understanding that the return offers the opportunity to capitalize on (though following through on the lessons made apparent by the return can take a few years and/or be ongoing).

But regardless of your age (where you are in your Saturn cycle) at this point, if you’re paying attention to how things in the air feel, Pluto into Capricorn will stimulate your own urge to develop authority. You’re going to want to do some homework and answer some questions for yourself. But it’s not just that you might start to get all Saturn on yourself. It’s that getting more Saturnian will likely feel of great import - we’re talking about Pluto here, after all.

(To be continued.)

Tom is available for private consultations. See his website for more information and contact details.

January 7, 2008 By Tom Jacobs

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

From Sagittarius to Capricorn, re Pluto’s Upcoming Shift

I’ve been thinking this morning about Pluto being the “bottom line”: What, in the end, is the most important thing. What underlies everything else.

In the paradigm of evolutionary astrology, Pluto for any person (natally) represents the deepest desires & intentions of the soul, as well as the soul’s deepest wounding. Transiting Pluto for all of us indicates pathways to manifest desires and intentions, while offering doorways into healing any wounds we collectively share.

This morning I’ve been thinking about the shift from Sagittarius to Capricorn as one from Mutable to Cardinal, and from Fire to Earth.

Mutable to Cardinal: From flexible and preparatory to direction-based. From openness to the exigencies of external circumstance to the motivation to travel over or plough through them. From an awareness of multiple existing realities to the instinct to create new ones.

Fire to Earth: From the spark of inspiration to the need to manifest physical structure and order. From the flash of intuitive knowing to the necessity of manufacturing and sensing physical security. From the feeling of possibility to the reality of matter.

One way I see this manifesting in my circle is the emergent desire to ground the spiritual knowledge gained during the long transit of Pluto through Sagittarius. Among some folks in my circles, the realization that practical, concrete skills and sturctures need to be applied to the insights recently gained.

In some people, this shift could manifest as the calm knowing that things need to slow down, a natural pitstop on the way to figuring out how to ground and stablize, as Capricorn requires. The intuitive feeling of Sagittarius gives way to the physicalizing of Capricorn.

But, again, this is all bottom-line stuff. Though for anyone interested in healing and making real their deep desires, this shift from Sag-Cap will be noticeable. Those people are the ones focusing on the bottom-line issues of their lives, of life in general.

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

January 2, 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

Near the Jupiter return in Cap/3rd

I was about to get back on my little 250 cc motorcycle this AM outside the grocery and an older dude came out and we talked about bikes, his was next to mine. He offered to sell me his 1200 cc BMW, almost new and very low mileage, for half the price he payed last year. It’s much too big for me (I’m headed next for a 750 cc at most), and more than i want to spend, but I had to laugh - it’s Jupiter in Capricorn in the 3rd - an 87 yr old guy offering me this great, great deal on a vehicle upgrade.

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

December 23, 2007 By Tom Jacobs

The Transiting Lunar Nodes Shift to Leo-Aquarius

Building on my very first blog post, on the transiting lunar nodes entering Virgo-Pisces, here are some thoughts on the imminent shift to Leo-Aquarius (December 18th).

Where Virgo-Pisces focus on service, Leo-Aquarius focus on creativity and expression. What’s the right place and form of expression? Should it be aimed at, inspired by, the personal or the collective? Is it for the present moment or is it to look ahead to a desired future? Should it be sparked and driven by the passions or the intellect?

With the transiting South Node in Virgo we’ve been facing our issues with the desire to serve by bringing in our analytical, hands-on and control- and precision-oriented faculties. The growth opportunities have been in opening to Piscean opportunities to trust, to learn to go with the flow and see the perfection in the whole as it is, and to work with the Universe instead of trying to control it.

As the nodes shift to Leo-Aquarius, the focus moves to confronting our issues with our personal here-and-now, our desire for recognition of our particular contribution (tr. South Node in Leo) with the growth opportunities involving gaining perspective, learning objectivity, and thinking ahead to what we want our particular contribution actually to manifest as and achieve down the road (tr. North Node in Aquarius).

The Sun and Uranus, the planets ruling this axis, are nothing if not creative. Their inspiration and methods differ considerably, but the emphasis with these two is definitely on creativity. Notice over the next few weeks any issues you see arising in yourself about the right kind of creativity your energies seem best suited to. And if you find yourself wanting to check out of or cut ties with groups you’re associated with because of personal differences (Leo), check yourself before making any decisions. Not that you shouldn’t make changes, but be aware of why you’re making them.

Aquarius is the sign of the collective, and many of us might be soon invited to re-evaluate the basis on which entered into any sort of group associations that involve creativity. How do we get where we’re going? Is it under our own steam or by working with others? This can even manifest as whether or not we share our creative ideas with others: Can we risk opening up to others’ input, when, while it might expand our perspective redically, it might also result in dilution of the purity of our personal voice?

Often we hear that Aquarius is the sign of friends, hopes and wishes. What’s behind this archetype as relating to friends  is that we need to ally with others of like mind in order to create the kind of future we want. It’s the archetype of creating the kind of future we want to see realized. And we can’t do this by ourselves.

This is inherent in the progression of Sagittarius to Capricorn to Aquarius: In Sagittarius, we intuitively put our finger on and go with what we think is probably the most true. In Capricorn, we endeavor to take it into the world and manifest it. In Aquarius, we understand that creating a future as we wish it to be requires working with other people.

Keep an eye out for any shifts around creativity and groups. The growth opportunity for the next approximately year and a half is in learning to balance these two energies in our lives, which requires healing outstanding Leo/Sun and Uranus/Aquarius issues we may be holding on to. And with Jupiter and Pluto headed for Capricorn, the issue of who’s really in charge is about to become front and center. Given that Aquarius follows Capricorn in the natural zodiac, let whatever comes up for you about authority inform and feed what you’re experiencing about where to put your creative energies.

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

December 13, 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

Lilith’s Reality

From an e-mail written today about Lilith, to an individual very much living her themes:

to her, we’re not brains that exist to make money so we can make more brains so they can make more money to make more brains - we’re animals with souls, and desires to express the experience of that intersection in visceral ways that affect us and others viscerally. for her, reality is visceral and visceral is real.

November 14, 2007 By Tom Jacobs

The Call to Spirit II

Continuing the thread of my previous post on the call to Spirit, I’d like to offer some ideas about ways to work with anything relevant from that post that you might be working with.

When Mercury stations (appears to stand still as it readies to appear to change direction), the energy of the planet works differently than usual. It can feel like you’re at a cocktail party, amid the normal movement such places offer, yet there’s one person, in this case Mercury, standing across the room staring at you, immobile. There’s a focus the energy takes on because, in contrast to the normal bustle of everything that’s happening, it’s not moving. This can lend what feels like a strength to the energy, that I like to think of as a focused concentration.

In times when our mental energy works differently, or at a different speed than normal, there exists the opportunity to see things differently. In terms of the combo of Chiron and Neptune recently turning direct in Aquarius with this recent Mercury business in Libra, individuals have had the opportunity to grasp in a more-clear way the ahas and opportunities that have been coming through regarding the call to Spirit.

If these posts speak to you at all, you’ve learned something new about, if not how you fit into the fabric of the reality around you, that there is a fabric of reality around you.

Each of the three bodies I mention here, Neptune, Chiron and Mercury, have something to offer about the existence of multiple layers of what we call reality. Neptune is our personal doorway to other realms, Chiron adds a psychological and emotional sensitivity layer onto our normal processing methods, and Mercury is the messenger - the only one in our inherited myths who can travel between the worlds. He’s the messenger, and all versions of Mercury (in various traditions) see him bearing messages between the worlds.

Many of us may not understand what’s happening when the lines between the worlds begin to blur. When approached in a way that allows the symbols to manifest on multiple levels, in multiple dimensions, astrology is a fabulous tool to help put into words and context the sorts of things that happen at these times. I’m talking when dreams are premonitions, when strangers or random newspaper headlines deliver urgent messages designed especially for you, when you begin having flashes of intuition of an unprecedented kind - when things start to get more serious because the sources of information seem not from this world.

But first things first: You have to understand that you’re not nuts. You’re simply having your view stretched or, if you prefer, your operating system upgraded. Making sense of what’s happening is not the first thing to do - grounding and rooting is. Get in your body, and learn to understand what your body is telling you in any given moment. If we’re living in our heads, it can be easy to forget that our bodies are the real-world tools of our living. If we’re out of sync with our bodies, we’re missing something critical about being alive. Get in your body, feel what’s going on there and you’re connecting mind and body. You’ll need both on the same page before you can begin to make sense of things.

Understanding and making the kinds of changes that can be called for when reality’s parameters seem to shift doesn’t happen overnight, and so I’m planning to give some blog space in the coming months to fleshing out different areas of what I seem to be calling the call to Spirit.

Tom is available for consultations and lessons. See http://tdjacobs.com for more information and to book a consultation.

By Tom Jacobs