How Pluto’s Entrance into Aquarius will Affect Us Psychologically

Hey everyone, this is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology, and today we are going to start previewing Pluto's upcoming entrance into the sign of Aquarius, which is taking place on March 23. So next week, we're gonna start unpacking it. I've done a few videos over the past couple of months. In the fall, I did several videos on Pluto's entrance into Aquarius and sort of what you could expect from it. So this is not the very first time that we've looked at Pluto and Aquarius. You could actually go back into the archives and look back at some of what's already been said because I think we've done some good videos already. But we're going to really be unpacking it a lot, just as we have with Saturn in Pisces, starting today.

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All right, let's put up the real-time clock and remind ourselves of what the heck is going on. So on the 23rd, we're going to see Pluto entering Aquarius; that is, March 23 stays there until about the middle of June this year before retrograding back into the late degrees of Capricorn and then comes back in the early part of 2024. So just getting a little sneak preview of Pluto into Aquarius this year. And it's really by the end of 2024 that the party begins, and Pluto is entering Aquarius to stay. But a little sneak preview, and so there's going to be plenty of videos that we're going to be doing and talks on Pluto's entrance into Aquarius not only now but over the next couple of decades, right?

So we're just trying to warm ourselves up to this right now. And one of the things that is important to remember is that Pluto is entering the sign of Saturn, that is the natural antithesis to the sun sign of Leo. And so the Leo Aquarius axis in all of the archetypal dichotomies that come with the Sun and Saturn's domains are going to be activated by this Pluto transit. So I want to try getting into that a little bit today by talking about five ways in which Pluto and Aquarius will change our personality. So the reason for this is that any planet moving through any sign has a psychological meaning; there's an impact, and there are themes that we experience in terms of our personality and the development or, let's call it, the development of our character.

If life is a play, then a good portion of the play is not just the plotline or the environment that the play is set in, but also our character, and how our character evolves is part of the study of any astrological transit. We've talked a lot, for example, about the different psychological themes you might experience or notice when Saturn is in the sign of Pisces. So we want to repeat that a little bit and try to understand how Pluto and Aquarius might impact us psychologically. And five ways today in which Pluto and Aquarius changes our personality.

So this is rooted in the fact that one of the things that Pluto does is brings a level of recreation into our lives that we consciously recreate ourselves, and also, the unconscious forces represented by Pluto are slowly transforming us and forcing us to look at patterns of behavior and look at the way that we show up in the world through a persona or a cultivated personality, as well as the relationship between a persona and something like a real self. And they're not necessarily like one is better than the other. We'll talk about that today as well. But anyway, let's get into it. So five ways in which Pluto and Aquarius will likely change our personality or will affect us psychologically.

Number one is that Pluto, as it brings the death and rebirth process, brings a transformation of identity or character in terms of how we identify socially. Now that can mean a wide variety of different things in the, you know, fixed air sign of Aquarius, it can mean that there are new ideologies that we embrace. And in ideology could be, you know, social cultural, it could be like maybe also like a religious philosophy. So I'm using the word kind of loosely here, religious philosophies, a paradigm that we enter into a reorientation of our beliefs or the lens through which we perceive the world. And we often experiment with belief systems and ideologies, and as we do so, they tend to reorient who we spend time with, who we know, who we associate with, and what we hope to gain from those associations. So all of that comes along with the fixed Air sign, that is Aquarius. So insofar as our character evolves, I think the character is always evolving, it's always changing.

As Pluto enters Aquarius, one of the ways we might notice that it is evolving or changing is due to a transformation of who we relate to, who we hang out with, what groups we belong to, or what kinds of ideas drive our, our personality and the expression of our personality in the world. And it's not uncommon during this time to say, Well, I used to hang out with this kind of group, and now, I need to hang out with a different kind of group, or these were the social and cultural values that I felt like I fit in with, but now I don't feel like I fit in with those any longer. And I'm joining a new scene. I remember, you know, in the 90s, when Saturn was going into Aquarius, and my entire social life changed really significantly.

It was the first time in my life that I was not hanging out exclusively with my little buddies who liked to play sports, I got interested in theater, and I got interested in playing the guitar, so the arts started coming into my life, and my social life had to adapt and adjust. And that was painful because it helped me, you know, I started realizing, oh, you know, there's quite a difference in how people look at and treat each other between, you know, these artistic groups of people and this group of people that likes athletics, it was very different, and they all had judgments and evaluations of each other.

I remained something of a social butterfly, I had different groups that I belong to, and probably a lot of you have lived that way to where you don't just fit into one group. So I don't mean to say that we only belong to one group, and then you'll change to just another new group; it can be that sometimes we just start including new groups of people, or new social experiments, or ways of looking at the world. And this can also be fields of interest.

For example, if you just start taking in a lot of information, and suddenly like, for me, I would say in the past two years, I've worked out a lot at the gym, I've been taking in a lot more content on things like diet, and, you know, the science of fitness and wellness. I watch a wide variety of podcasts on those kinds of subjects. This was while Saturn was in Aquarius, by the way, which was interesting. But it exposed me to like just a whole different world of people that have different things that they like to think about and learn about all the time. So it's as you do. So it's normal for the exposure to different ideas and different streams of consciousness to literally change your personality expression or to bring out certain elements of the personality that are quieter, you know, maybe than others. And now it's time for a new voice in your psyche to be a little louder in terms of the way you express yourself. And a lot of that's affected by who we associate with.

So a transformation of social identity is not something that just happens all of a sudden instantly, not usually unless there's like a hard aspect from Pluto to a planet in your chart, maybe around the first couple of degrees of the fixed signs. For example, you may experience something more acute when Pluto is making planetary transits. Typically, the ingress and just the entrance into a house in your chart, for example, will just start a process slowly associating and changing associations and the way that ideas start to shape and reshape your personality. It'll be more of a process for most people until actual transits from Pluto happen.

Number two is that there will as Pluto enters Aquarius, there will be a harder dichotomy between persona and self. Now the way that I would express this comes in part from my interest in what like you, And so I had to say between the difference in about the difference between persona and self. Persona is to me like an operating program that you develop, and you adapt to different situations. And it represents truths about who you are and elements of who you are. But you're basically modulating and bringing forth elements of who you are and hiding, or toning down the volume on other parts, depending on the circumstance; you also may have a social interface that's carefully cultivated, like for my YouTube channel or for being around my in-laws, or for you know, whatever, not that I'm fake or anything. And that's the big thing a lot of people think persona is fake. Most of the time, you know, the persona is not fake. But it's not all of who we are. It's a kind of carefully constructed. Part of us that is used like a diplomat to negotiate different environments.

Insofar as the persona tries to take control because it's scared of rejection, or the fear of showing its cards, or like the elements of the fool, or whole self aren't appropriate here, and it tries to control or repress them, then you get problems, then then you have a problem where the like, the persona doesn't match all of who you are. Now, I would say, for example, while Saturn was in Aquarius, and it was opposing Venus and Leo in my chart, which is my ascendant ruler, that was right around the time that I realized that the religious part of me, for example, there is a strong religious component to my personality, my upbringing and the way I, you know, kind of the way I am, but I would say that you know, I had developed like a persona, and it was, you know, through my religious name and participation in the bhakti yoga world, and it felt like that persona was developed, you know, for a lot of different reasons, some of which were very healthy, and, but there was enough that was being repressed by that persona, that I just didn't, I started to not feel right.

It started to feel like there was a growing split between, you know, the religious part of me and the persona constructed around it. And, you know, other parts of me that are not particularly, you know, like, or not particular didn't fit that framework, right? This is very common for people; one of the most common things I see when people have transits to their ascendant, for example, you know, in an astrological reading, in modern astrology will say, the ascendant or its ruler represents your personality or your persona, but not your real self. Well, in ancient astrology, that's not true. In ancient astrology, the ascendant was the place of the soul, the spirit, and the self.

The ascendant ruler insofar as people get transits to their ascendant ruler, they will often grapple, grapple with the distinction between the persona that they're operating from in one situation or another and elements of their true self that are maybe not getting to come to the surface. So in a way, the ascendant does have to do with the persona, but only because wherever there is the self, there is the persona in a social reality.

Wherever there is, you know, a whole cast of characters in the psyche that we call the self, that, you know, they're, they're used in different ways, in different circumstances to, to navigate, right, so the, you know, the ruler of the planet associated with the helm, the first house was Mercury, who's a, you know, ruler of navigational intelligence. And the first house was called the helm, like the steering wheel of the ship. And you think about the sense of there being an ability to navigate life and to bring forth different elements of your character for different reasons at different times. That comes along with being a soul who has a who, who is a gathering of, like, multitudes inside, but we still have to know how to use them and let which character speak at which time.

So persona and self can't be separated, they're always they always come as a dyad. That's always, you know, in a kind of tension, but when they're in a creative tension, and when they're both sort of aware of each other. That's usually when we find that we're happy and we're able to, you know, we're able to act the part in the appropriate time and place and also make sure that we're not acting so much that we're repressing something, and that, you know, this is a lifetime of work. And every time people have transits to the ascendant, it's not so much that they're, we're just talking about their persona as much as it is that the split between the two are present now.

Why bring that up now? Because when Pluto goes into Aquarius, we're talking about a sign that is opposite the sun sign, and the Sun being emblematic in some ways of the sense of being a spirit soul, an eternal spark of the divine of us being a self, a full and whole self. Saturn is the natural planetary opposite of the Sun and has to do with everything that is in some ways different from or excluded from the self. And sometimes that, especially in an Aries sign like Aquarius, is really about what parts of the self have to be quieted or repressed. And that's why you also have this interesting history that mirrors that same dichotomy within the history of ideas. Well, this idea represents more of the total truth, and let's bring it forth. Oh, but wait, there are, you know, different establishments that feel threatened by that full and total truth scientifically, like the heliocentric theory. And so no, let's repress that; don't bring it forth.

So the same kind of tension can exist in Aquarius for all of us psychologically, there's something more that wants to come forth, but then the carefully constructed elements of our social realities are going to say yes or no to those things or being more or less of a tension of them because of what they may threaten socially.

So you find that sometimes there's like a more of an awareness of the split between our social selves and some and their limitations and uses and functions versus some a larger sense of self that wants to come through and in some ways has to say screw it, I don't care what people think. So these are, this is like Pluto and Aquarius territory.

Number three is rejecting conformity. Now, this kind of goes along with it. But it's broader than that; it's the idea that you'll be more aware while Pluto is in Aquarius of the social pressures that want to refine or define your actions, behaviors, and choices. Along with that comes on this realization that some of these motivations have been in the unconscious but now I'm starting to see them. And you know, what, I don't want to conform to what those sort of unconscious social factors are telling me to do. I'm not going to listen to them.

So the idea of becoming more aware of what social forces drive your behavior and your choices unconsciously, and then looking at them, and maybe saying, Well, I don't want to conform to those things any longer. That's a Pluto and Aquarius kind of theme.

Number four would be relocating the center in the same way that you know, Copernicus writes about the heliocentric theory, while Pluto is in Aquarius and relocates the center of the solar system from the earth to the Sun. There is a way in which it's almost like the gravitational center of our lives needs to change because of a paradigm shift. And the paradigm shift could be, I mean, Neptune was in Aquarius, for example, opposing my ascendant ruler when I was in the midst of having my entire paradigm changed because of working with psychedelics.

It's funny, like, the other day, I was talking to someone, and they were like, you know, you, this was really a compliment, cause it was someone who's a bit older than me, and they were saying, you know, I'm sorry, let's get the camera back here. They were saying, you know, you're very, like, self-aware for your age, like you're in your early 40s. And like, you just, you just seem like, you're really healthy. And you have like a level of self-awareness that I wish I would have had at your age. Where do you think you got that from? And first of all, I don't think that was particularly true or anything, but I was like, well, thank you. That's really nice to hear.

The first thing I said, and I mean this, said, I think all of my 20s, I was really fortunate to work in some very healthy and safe spaces with psychedelic medicines. And, I mean, there are lots of ways to accomplish personal growth. And this person said, What was it about those experiences that, for you, gave you something positive or whatever. And I said, Well, what it did was, it just completely, like, relocated me into a different, like, sense of what reality is. And it diminished my sense of being at the center of reality. But it didn't, it didn't like crush me or diminish my value or dignity in the process, but it like reoriented me into an understanding of being like just a little grain of sand on the beach, but an incredibly valuable one. And that reorientation is, in a nutshell, that's like the best thing that I ever got. And it didn't happen all at once. It happened over a long period of time of working with psychedelics, especially ayahuasca, and also like yoga and meditation and other stuff, you know, but that was it in a nutshell.

What I have experienced time and time again cause that's just my story. But when I talk to my clients and people who pay me, they strike me as having some kind of life wisdom that's really benefited them. And I'm like, Well, where did that come from? You know, where did you get that? And I'll tell you, it's always not. I'll use the word initiation, even though I feel it's sort of like a quarter jar word at this point, but they had an initiation of some kind, and the initiation could have been through pain or trauma or some kind of altered state of consciousness, or an incredible series of synchronicity.

Something, though, relocated their center. And it like shifted them from being at the center of everything to, you know, moving into the periphery. And maybe the center of everything becomes God or spirit or the goddess, or it becomes nature or the divine in some ways, you know, but whatever. It's like a reorientation that can both diminish the ego.

Anyway, that's it, right? That's it in a nutshell. You feel suddenly like, I've lost no importance, but I've lost the illusion of being all important. And it's like that, however, that happens for a person that is a Pluto and Aquarius kind of thing. And the really exciting thing is like that if even if that happens in little ways, for humanity, for humankind, that's a positive, that's a really good thing, which is why I always, like, just kind of jokingly said, this would be the time for the aliens to land, not so much because of what technology they might offer, or, I don't know, the shock and awe of it, but because it would just decentralize our sense of being at the center of the cosmos.

We sit around and wonder; people do like, I know, you were mean; you and I might not sit around and wonder this, but a lot of people sit around and think that there's no other life in the universe but us. I mean, you and I might wait; that's not enlightening to think that these days, but a lot of people do. They're like, you know, we're probably it. This is, this is hokum, you know, like, and I mean, you know, especially people who have any kind of altered states of consciousness realize very quickly that the web of life is, exists in multiple dimensions. What to speak of this physical earthly reality and things that we're not even aware of that are here.

I always think, for example, the fact that there's so much unexplored in our own oceans, you know, it reminds me of that movie The Abyss by who did that, I forget, it was like an alien movie under the ocean, anyway. Well, I don't know where I am now, but the center has been relocated. So maybe that happens while Pluto is in Aquarius.

All right, number five, looking for the lone wolves. Pluto in Aquarius being Saturn sign, the sign of outcast, the sign opposite the Sun, the sign that falls outside the city walls, you know, the hut at the edge of the village kind of motif with Aquarius, there's always something in order to, you know, like we were saying about you have to move outside of being in the center. And then you relocate the center somehow, and you find something that it reorients your whole sense of meaning it's a paradigm change. But the same thing is true in the psyche when we take the time to give voice to parts of ourselves that have not gotten their day in the Sun. These are the lone wolves of our own psyches. Where are they? We need to go into the woods to find them, and the woods are dreams, and the woods is dark nocturnal spaces and creative spaces, and risky spaces and doing things we haven't done before.

I will tell you that like, just as a personal share, while Saturn was in Aquarius opposing Venus, one of the things that I realized, like what is the lone wolf in me, and for real, it was my physical body. And, like, I just realized that so much of my religious persona was, like, pushing down this other part of myself that was about fitness and my body and my health and my physique and my love of sports and my love of more like traditionally, I guess masculine things, although I'm not, you know, I tried jiu-jitsu and basically almost broke my entire body. So that was really fun, though. And it was part of that part of me kind of coming out. And I didn't mean that, you know, I know, it's not a great idea to, like, grab that metaphor from the gay community. So I didn't mean to do that purposely.

The idea of that there being a part of me that comes forth, that was, you know, in the shadows before that was huge, huge. It's for a lot of people probably seem stupid, you know, it's like, look, so you're working out, and that's a big revolution. Well, for me, it's not so much the working out as much as it is loving it. Right, or for another, another example would be that there's, like, there's a part of me that's pretty snarky. And, like, I have a pretty biting, cynical, dark sense of humor. And those elements have always tried to like push them down. So I don't want people to think that I'm a bad person, you know? I like it, but then those parts of you grow, and they become more distorted and weird if you don't just let them have their day in the Sun, so to speak.

So we have to seek out the lone wolves in the psyche. Pluto in Aquarius can help us do that; it can help us look for those; you know, it reminds me of; Do you remember the story, Peter Pan Lost Boys, you remember that? There's there are lost boys and girls in the psyche, there are lost, there are lost characters roaming around, and they have to really they're interesting, especially the ones were the most afraid of or the ones that we feel like their trouble, you know?

Well, you know, they might be troubled because we neglect them more than they are trouble if we actually let them talk. I have found, for example, that time and time again, when my daughter, my older daughter, is being like really loud and sort of obnoxious, I just want her to shut up. I'm like, Oh, my God, you know, just be quiet. It's so much because, you know, if you're a parent, you know what I mean? Just go, sometimes the kid's energy levels are way up here, and I'm at a five, and I'm exhausted or whatever.

It's interesting, though, because one of the things that I've learned I'm not very I'm not good at this; I'm just saying it, but it works is that if I can in that moment when I catch myself being like, just please be, you know, trying to get her to be quiet. And instead, I kind of go into those parts of her and open them up with questions or a little bit of playfulness. I find that, Yeah, it's like, I don't want her to shut down parts of herself, that I that is like that she will start labeling them as irritating or obnoxious, right? Because they're creative and they're just, you know, they're just a lot, you know what I mean? But I just recognize that I'm like, I don't want her to label those things is like too much. Because then they don't get a chance to be refined and develop. What interesting ways can those cast of characters that that character within the cast of characters like evolved, and so I try, it doesn't always work like God, it doesn't always work. But, you know, you got to try the same.

We have to do the same thing for ourselves; we gotta go into the woods. And we got to hold out a little bit of food. And, you know, it's like, make sure that you're not developing or that you know, that story about, like, if you just starve this, this part of yourself, it becomes like an angry beast, you know, and you don't want that. I have a feeling that Pluto and Aquarius will highlight mental health in our everyday lives in the communities that we live in and the way in which we create some of the most pathological like some of the issues that we see in people that are, you know, taking other people's lives or doing terrible, horrendous things. I think Pluto and Aquarius can help us reflect on what kinds of patterns and what we say yes to and what we say no to, what we value, and what we judge that can contribute to a little bit of that. Obviously, there's personal responsibility too.

We create the monsters, do you know what I mean, in terms of our inability to look at the least among us, or the strangest, or the ones that don't fit in. And we have to do that for ourselves. Well, Pluto in Aquarius. And I think that's one of the most promising things Pluto in Aquarius can bring when it comes to its psychological benefits or effects. So that is, those are my five points. Always gotta have a handy list.

I hope you guys are having a good day. And I hope that, as always that this was useful for you and that this gives you some good things to consider as Pluto is preparing to enter Aquarius next week. That is it for today. I hope you have a great weekend. Watch for that pop-up Kickstarter reboot sale next week. Hope some of you will be able to take advantage of that and come and sign up for one of our upcoming classes. We'll talk more about that on Monday. Alright, take it easy, everyone. Bye.