5 Radical Ideas Pluto in Aquarius Might Have Us Thinking About

Hey everyone, this is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology. Happy Friday, everybody. Today, we are looking at Pluto's entrance into the sign of Aquarius, and we are going to talk about five radical ideas that Pluto in Aquarius might have us thinking about.

Now, these are ideas that I thought to toss out because I believe they are the kinds of ideas we might see or get to know while Pluto is in Aquarius. But more these are predictions of the specific types of ideas that we will see with Pluto and Aquarius over the next two decades. These are really the kinds of ideas I want. I want this to be an exercise in creative thinking about Pluto and Aquarius, so I picked ideas that I think are radical enough to fit the bill.

But that does not mean that I am literally predicting that these ideas will come about well; Pluto is in Aquarius. They could I wouldn't be surprised, given the nature of Pluto and Aquarius, but more importantly, I want us to think about the large paradigm-shattering or shifting ideas that could come about while Pluto is in the sign of Aquarius.

So that's going to be our exercise for today. I think you guys will enjoy this as a thought experiment. I am not, by the way, trying to sell you on any of these radical ideas. They are not even my own beliefs. They are just ideas that I find compelling and interesting to think about. So, anyway, that is our goal for today; as Pluto is entering Aquarius, we're going to do some thought experiments.

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Okay, well, let's put up the real-time clock and take a look. So here we are. On Friday, the 19th, you can see that Sun-Pluto conjunction coming through. So, it's a good day for provocative thoughts and statements. We'll see January 20. On Saturday, Pluto will enter the sign of Aquarius joining the sun, and so we have this as the transit of the weekend.

Now, this lasts Pluto and Aquarius all the way until September, at which point it Retrogrades into late Capricorn again 29th degree all the way until November. Later on in November, Pluto enters Aquarius again to stay for the next roughly two decades. So, this is the year of Pluto's ingress into the sign of Aquarius. We've been looking at it this week. We did some horoscopes yesterday.

Today, we're going to consider Pluto in Aquarius from the standpoint of the kinds of ideas or paradigm-shifting thoughts that may become fascinating to us, and that may actually take hold in the collective somehow.

Now again, I want to issue some qualifiers; one, you do not need to believe in any of these ideas as true. I am presenting this as a thought exercise and archetypal thought exercise, which means these are the kinds of ideas that you might see coming about with Pluto and Aquarius because they are so significantly different than the way we currently think about things.

That's what I'm getting at more so than believing this idea or this is exactly what's going to happen over the next 20 years. This is a thought exercise that gets us into the realm of Pluto and Aquarius, which changes thought structures. Why does it change thought structures? This is a fixed or solid Air sign.

The Element of Air is related to the mind and to the social currents of our ideas and the way that they impact our lives and relationships as a human species. None of the air signs represent the collective more than Aquarius and the way in which collective ideas change institutions, paradigms, trends, the zeitgeist, or whatever you want to call it. There is a prevailing attitude of an era that is so connected to Aquarius.

Because this is a fixed Air sign, it's also the rulership of Saturn, and Saturn has to do with what is established versus what is outside of the establishment and the relationship between the two. Saturn is like the gatekeeper between the established, the known, and the unknown, or what might appear to be progressive, revolutionary, or even heretical.

So that is one of the things that comes up with Pluto and Aquarius; we have tension existing between known thought patterns that shape or move the collective narrative along and those that are unknown or disruptive or that stand outside the status quo and challenge established patterns, right, so there's an interaction between the two. Not every new idea is a good one; that's a problem with Aquarius, sometimes, and not every old idea is a good one either.

So sometimes the the tension exists between things that are known or unknown, and also things that are new versus things that are old, and we have to be careful because sometimes the new cloaks itself in the word better, and the old will sometimes cloak itself in words like, you know, reliable or wise or something.

So, these tensions will be a part of the Pluto and Aquarius experience, and there's not just one direction it can go in, so just because I'm presenting some ideas that are new doesn't mean that anything new is better; I want to make that clear.

However, one of the very common things that will happen when Pluto is in Aquarius is that it will unleash the creative force of new ideas that challenge old ideas and old structures of thought that dominate the human narrative.

Anyway, these are five radical ideas of the sort; you might see, well, Pluto is in Aquarius, and have fun with this, right? I don't know if any of these are true; I'm just saying,

Okay, number one, real paradigms create real patterns. Let me give you an example. Let's say that you are in a therapeutic paradigm that holds the belief that our childhood experiences determine the shape or course of our life.

The result of such a belief very reasonably would be that if you have a lot of trauma in your childhood, let's say you have an abusive parent, that abuse will shape and form the experience of your adult life, the patterns, habits, and behaviors that establish themselves and your adult relationships and so forth. I'm not saying anything that probably everyone should be familiar with this particular model, this particular way of looking at youth and adulthood as a causal continuum and what happens when you're a kid causes how you turn out as an adult and stuff like that.

Okay, so in that paradigm, which is a real paradigm, right, it's a real paradigm, there will be real patterns that come from that very real paradigm. In other words, if you take the axiomatic starting point of that paradigm that your childhood determines your future, then therapy will be effective insofar as it can go back into the past and heal old traumas and somehow re-wire the early programming, right? And how many of you have ever participated in such a paradigm and found it to be indeed effective? And has a kind of truth value? Right? Yeah, totally. But there are other paradigms that actually require different axiomatic starting points in the world of therapy.

For example, James Hillman famously proposed a different idea in his book The Souls Code, which I've been rereading recently, and I thought, well, this is interesting, and I could use this as part of this talk. So in The Souls Code, he proposes a different idea rooted in ancient mystical philosophy, by the way, much of which was associated very clearly with the earliest astrological viewpoints.

This comes from hermeticism, Platonism, Neo-Platonism, Pythagoras, monism, Egyptian mysticism, and so forth. But the idea would be that it is the acorn theory that he presents in the book, and the acorn theory goes like this. Your future destined self, right? Let's call it the oak tree. It is the necessity of the oak tree that's contained within the acorn that actually, in a sense, causes the acorn to go through its initial stages.

This would be a way of saying that because my future is established by my daimon and my soul. Maybe prior to coming into a body, I'm going to be an astrologer someday. Actually, it's that future that chooses and sets up the circumstances of childhood, the traumas, and the difficulties because they would be a necessary part of the future image of Adam, the astrologer.

In that sense, Hillman says one of the things that we have to do is we actually have to kind of deprogram ourselves from the ideas that our early traumas are like accidents and misfortunes that we have to somehow correct or erase or heal, that actually what really needs to be healed is the paradigm itself that we have, which is a paradigm that doesn't acknowledge that our childhood is shaped by the future destiny that we're here to fulfill.

Now, I'm not saying you have to believe that, but that is a radically different idea about what the reason for or purpose of challenging events in childhood are. As soon as people hear that, right, I mean, this is the point where I get to where I'm like saying, don't, I'm not trying to convert you to this idea.

But the reason that I chose this idea is because some people, as soon as they hear that, are going to get angry, are going to get upset, are going to Whoa, I don't know, I do not like that. It almost seems like it's saying that your childhood traumas weren't traumas they were a part of your destiny and for some people, that's something about that feels a little, like a little like you're trying to bypass something. But it's interesting because, in The Souls Code, Hillman does not suggest that those traumas aren't real, painful, difficult, excruciating, etc. He says they are.

However, in one therapeutic model, you go in and try to heal them so that you can be okay as an adult. In the other model, you go in and try to understand them as a part of the soul image, that is your destiny, and there's a difference, there's a difference between trying to heal them as though they were random, unfortunate things that should not have happened and going in and trying to understand them, which is also a kind of healing, as excruciating, painful aspects that were a necessary part of your destiny. Very different, right? Subtly different.

Now, I'm not telling you which one to think about, and I'm not even actually saying that there's one that's true and one that's false. Instead, consider this. What if different paradigms create different patterns? What if different paradigms require different kinds of work and different kinds of thinking about why we're here? And what if these paradigms are not true or false? They're just paradigms, and what if a paradigm Think about it like this is like if you think about a paradigm like the paradigm of healing childhood wounds so you can be okay as an adult, whereas the childhood wounds not addressed may mess you up as an adult?

Think about that as a mandala: that mandala and all of its patterns and the way that healing works within that paradigm are not true or false. It's just a paradigm that has this real power to create real patterns and real ways of addressing those real patterns. The radical idea here is not that Hellman's proposal about childhood events being somehow a necessary part of destiny, and that actually, the future self is what causes the childhood self, rather than the childhood self causing the adult self. It's not that that that that paradigm was true in the other one false it's that it's a different paradigm that has a it's a different mandala, and it has a different way of creating interaction and meaning and value. It has a different way of describing what therapy is and does.

So the profound shift in thinking would be to recognize that rather than battling between paradigms, we live in something like a psychedelic reality, in which different paradigms can be interacted with, and they create real meaning and with real patterns and real values and real approaches and real strategies and real reasons for being here and so on and so forth. Can you imagine a world in which we started to understand paradigms as like tapestries or matrixes, that we enter into that affirm and cohere to the assumptions?

We make it seem as though the assumptions we make create the mandala that we interact with a kind of participatory relativism that doesn't lack anything in the realm of being absolute or fixed or reliable or sturdy. It's just that the paradigms themselves are choices, and there is rather than there being a true and a false choice, there are just options that in and of itself represents a major way of we have, we would have to shift our whole thinking about paradigms and what their power is, and rather than running around trying to use scientific data to affirm one paradigm and deny another, we can start to recognize what I think most of us intuit, which is that data is always being used relatively to bolster a paradigm that's already being assumed and like, there's really nothing wrong with that as long as we recognize that life is so much about the choices in worlds that we live in.

One of the other things that could happen while Pluto is in Aquarius is we could stop being so threatened by the fact that some people choose one paradigm; I'm going to heal my childhood because it's affected my adulthood, versus people choosing another paradigm, which is my childhood was not a mistake, it was a necessary part of the my future destiny itself called forth this kind of childhood, and I need to find the meaning in it and see how it's connected to that future.

So they're just different choices, different paradigms that have different patterns that we participate in. That, to me, is a completely radical shift in thinking, and I'm not saying Pluto and Aquarius will do that. I'm just saying, isn't it? This is the kind of thing that I can imagine Pluto and Aquarius, having us challenging us to think about in the next, say, 20 years.

Number two is causality and a causality both exist. To me, this is another radical idea that I don't think. I don't know; I don't think we've spent enough time thinking about it. I'm fascinated by it. I don't have the answer. I just think that the whole conversation is interesting. What is a causal philosophy? The theory posits a causal realm or a continuum as the source of energy that animates living beings, that this energy differs from the energy observed by science such as physics and chemistry, and that all currently known living beings are next eons are regions, where the theorized a causal, intersects with is connected to or intrudes into the observed physical causal universe known and described by science such as physics.

So this would be a way of saying that life itself, when you look at when you describe the universe as a series of causal properties, interaction, like a clock, like a mechanism, that there's a sense in which the universe displays and can be observed as like a mechanism that has interacting parts that, that create causal chains of action and reaction, chemistry, physics, etc. and that's one part of the known universe.

However, there's this other part where living beings that are sentient living beings have this animating, we'll call it consciousness or being, and that that energy or consciousness is not caused by anything and its volition, its choice, its will, its creative agency, is also it can't be contained. Or it does not participate in the same realm as the causal, although there's meaningful interaction with it.

To me, that is really important because that's where I see astrology coming in. That's where I see all divination coming in. I believe that divination is the way in which we speak to the universe as a living thing that is, above and beyond the causal laws, that that the causal laws of the universe, it's a way of talking to the universe through the appearance of observable, repeatable patterns, the motions of the planets and so forth. But it's a way of looking at the sort of causal realm as a language that is being spoken.

That or that depends on why you approach it and, who approaches it when you approach it, and so on and so forth. That divination itself is like this. They're using those observable kind of causal looking patterns, but you're using them to speak to something that is ultimately not bound by causality. It's living, it's alive, and it has a meaningful intersection with those laws and properties, so to speak, but it's also beyond them.

I love this idea, because this is to me this means, for example, that, like, and I've used this example before, but let's say when you're playing music, and you're tapping into something that is, it moves the soul, there's poetry, there's meaning there's beauty, that the choice on behalf of the living being to express itself in one way or to make a choice or to play music, or to write poetry or to fall in love or to connect with other living beings. The byproduct might be to describe the chemistry that happens when you play music or the chemistry that expresses itself when you fall in love with someone.

But the choice, the agency, the sentience, it is the consciousness of the living being to make free, unbound choices that interact then with this interesting bound world of causality. I don't want to live in a universe that doesn't include both, you know, that doesn't include causal freewill sentient beings that are not ultimately not bound to a first cause. Right, that, and that's to me exactly.

If you look carefully at what a lot of Eastern yogic philosophy says about the Purusha, the living essence that we might call ourselves souls or spirits. That's what it's describing, and it's saying that reality itself is more than a series of laws and governing causal principles, even though reality also does contain and express those kinds of things.

But there's an interaction between the two. I believe that this is something that we may be; I really believe that there are people who are open-minded enough in the realm of science and philosophy and theology and art that we might be close to understanding that there is an aspect to reality that is completely a causal, that not everything is bound up in laws and properties and causal dynamics. So, to me, that's the kind of radical idea you can see what Pluto is in Aquarius, and I hope I didn't leave it at that too long.

The third one is basic. You've heard me say it before, but it's the idea that aliens are real. Now, I'm not saying like, I think most of you probably listening to this are like, Well, yeah, of course, we all you know, if you believe in astrology, we probably don't have a hard time thinking that alien life forms might be real, but consider all of the different ways in which our ideas about ourselves and reality and the universe and other planets and other star systems could shift tremendously if we got in touch with the reality of alien life and got in touch with another species talk to them learned about what they know about things like causality and a causality consciousness and the realm of, you know, physical causal interactions, what is the relationship between the causal and a causal? How do paradigms work?

Just imagine maybe meeting a species of life that is maybe a little bit more mature than we are in their understanding of these kinds of topics; think of, I mean, so many things, from technology to philosophy to theology, to science and physics, think of what we could learn from getting in touch with another form of life that is intelligent. I wouldn't be surprised while Pluto is in Aquarius if we did. So that's another thing that could really shift our ideas.

Number four answers our present problems. This is not new. This is 1000s of years old, and indigenous people from all over the planet know this. Shamanic people know this; any contemplative traditions, religious and mystical traditions know this. But imagine if there was a study or a New York Times bestseller or something, and it became more broadly understood that answers are present in problems or solutions are present in problems. I actually saw a video that reminded me of this recently, and it was the guy from Dawson's Creek, I forget it, James Van Der Beek. I think that's his name.

I guess he likes to muse. Philosophically, he likes to share his thoughts and ideas, and I saw this thing on Instagram or something. Anyway, he was saying something I've been thinking about lately is that the answers are present in problems, and he was talking about how he has a wood stove, and the glass pane to the woodstove is totally covered in soot, and he was getting chemicals and all sorts of stuff, trying to figure out how to get it off and then he learned that actually, if you take some ash from the inside of the fireplace and get it a tiny bit moist, put some on it, like a paper towel, get it moist at the ash will actually easily clean the soot off the glass and he said, Isn't it amazing that the answer here is actually present in the problem, the soot and the suit has become a problem right next to it, the ash exists that can take away the cert on the glass and he was using that as a way of suggesting that maybe we should be looking and contemplating the heart of our problems themselves more deeply.

One of the things we tend to do is when a problem presents itself, we don't like it, and so we look away from it, and then we run around looking in any other direction because of how uncomfortable it is to look into the heart of a problem, and we run in all directions looking for the solution.

For example, I was watching a documentary about fungi, and, you know, Psilocybin mushrooms, but from Paul Stamets, I think it was called Fantastic Fungi. It's on Netflix; I think it's a great movie if you're into that kind of thing. But anyway, I was looking at watching this movie with Ashley, and one of the things that I thought was really interesting was that they were talking about, oh, gosh, I'm gonna forget, it now had something to do with the bees and the bee's relationship with the fungus and their way of using a fungus to solve the problem of like a pest that they had invading their colony or something. But it was more than that, too, because it was about looking at fungus as the possible solution to removing various kinds of contaminants from the ocean if I remember correctly.

Anyway, the point that I found fascinating from all of this is the same one we're making here, which is that we look at problems in the environment, on the earth, and we start thinking of solutions that need to happen in labs and sometimes we miss the obvious point, which is that there are a lot of things present in nature that present solutions to problems that are in nature. I found it interesting that I think James Van Der Beek was saying that there are certain kinds of elements of snake poison, and there's an antidote that's present in the snake as well, or there was another thing.

Ashley always points this out where they often close by to nettles, which can sting is another kind of plant, which, if you rub on the sting, will instantly help take away the stinging effect of metals, and they tend to grow right next to each other. So there's lots of that. That's a paradigm shift. That's a radical idea that we should look closer to the heart of problems for solutions because they walk together. Different ways of knowing.

Number five is what if, so what if someone came along tomorrow and said, Oh, you know what, I've discovered that the universe is infinite, and so, you know, there's really no such thing as growth in some hierarchical sense. What if we came in contact with the idea that everything that we perceive as growth is just relative valuations of change, and again, those valuations are not meaningless? They're not to just be discarded?

Think of how dramatically it would shift our experience if someone came along and said, You're an infinite soul, You have no cause, you have no start. You have no end. You're in a universe that is exactly like you that has no start. It has no cause; it has no end. In the big scheme of things, you have absolutely nothing to worry about. In the big scheme of things, you can't grow. Not really, you can change. You can change directions. You can change clothing, you can change environments, you can change ideas. You can change people and relationships, places and adventures, but you're not growing positively or negatively. You just are.

Now imagine that people really knew that, you know, like, what if that was collectively recognized? Just I mean, on the one hand, you might have people that swing into nihilism and go, Well, if that's the case, then nothing matters.

But you'd have another group of people that would probably say, if that's the case, then I can take a deep breath, a sigh of relief, and maybe I can start letting go of things that also do not matter. Like my constant judgment of myself and others. Materialism, greed, vanity, you know, maybe that realization could feed into radical compassion and empathy. See what I mean?

So, again, I don't necessarily predict any of these ideas will come about, but I find that these are the kinds of ideas that I sort of anticipate that Pluto and Aquarius will be pushing us to think about, and maybe not directly, but maybe indirectly through other things that are happening in the collective in politics, and science and technology, and, you know, medicine and so forth.

So, anyway, I hope that you enjoyed this; these are ideas that I hope are sort of provocative because when Pluto gets into Aquarius, it's like, if you're not feeling like the biggest ideas that you have the organizing principles, most of which, for us are so axiomatic and assumed that we're not even conscious of them.

By getting in touch with ideas like this, they should make you feel like, you know, like you're talking about all these big ideas, you know, you're just trying to sound smart. You know, if you notice yourself getting irritated by talking about radical ideas and radical challenges to everyday ideas. Good, because that's Pluto coming into Aquarius; it's not just me saying these things. I'm trying to introduce things that you are likely to experience in the next 20 years that you're likely to be sort of provoked or rattled by.

The last thing that I will say is that if you missed yesterday's horoscopes, you can look back at those for sort of more practical, you know, where's Pluto and Aquarius showing up in my life? I think that might be beneficial for some of you.

Okay, more on Pluto and Aquarius to come for sure. But I hope you guys have a great weekend and that we prepped you this week for the confluence of events that is happening this weekend. It's a big astrological weekend.

If you have stories to share, don't forget; you can always use the hashtag #grabbed. Tell us the transit and tell us your story in the comment section, or email us your story at grabbed@nightlightastrology.com.

We probably get a storytelling episode coming up soon here because we have a lot of good ones come in around the New Year as well. Alright, that's it for today. Have a good one. Everyone. Have a great weekend. Bye