Pluto Back into Aquarius: Animalizing

Transcript

 

Hey everyone, this is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology. Today, we are going to continue our exploration of Pluto's entrance back into the sign of Aquarius, which is happening in late January 2024. So it's coming up. Right now, Pluto is culminating in that last anaretic degree of Capricorn.

I did a video maybe a week or two ago now on the final degree of Capricorn that you may be interested in, in addition to looking at these videos that we've been doing on Pluto's entrance into Aquarius, so check that out if that sounds interesting.

Today, we are continuing our exploration of Pluto into Aquarius and a section in the James Hillman essay that we've been looking at. He is, of course, one of the inspirations for the founding of the field of archetypal astrology, and we're looking at a section on an essay that he did called From Universe to Cosmos.

In that essay, there's a section where he talks about animal intelligence and bodily and animal intelligence, and what kind of universe or cosmos honors the intelligence of animals, and there are actually a lot of really interesting parallels between this part of his essay and the deeper meaning of Pluto and Aquarius, I think you guys will really enjoy this if you stick with it.

Sometimes, when you're visiting Hillman's work, it helps to listen in little pieces and then rewind and listen again.

His essays are a little bit deeper and richer, so I do highly recommend taking some time to listen, absorb, and re-listen to the pieces of the series, the different parts of this series, because, you know, like most of his work, they'll absorb a little bit differently each time you listen to them. Unofficial advice, take it or leave it, but yeah, so that's our goal for today.

Before we get into it, don't forget to like and subscribe share your comments and reflections. I loved reading what you guys said about the first two parts of the Pluto into Aquarius series. So, I would love to hear what you have to say about this one as well.

You can find a transcript of any of my daily talks on the website nightlightastrology.com. As you guys know, we are reaching towards 1777 backers as the goal of our 10th annual Kickstarter, which is the fundraising drive that we do the last 40 days of the year to support this channel for the year ahead and all the free content we provide and making sure that this content is free, accessible, no subscriptions, or paywalls, or anything like that, help us get to our 1777 backer goal.

Right now, as of the time that I'm recording this, we have 544 backers with just 17 days left to go, going on 16 probably by the time you hear this. We still need 1233 backers to show up by New Year's Eve to reach our goal.

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As you guys know, I've also been taking the beginning of these episodes to tell you more about myself, tell you more about the Nightlight school and our vision so that you know you know more about the content you're listening to and also so that you might feel more comfortable donating and supporting this program.

Today, I want to share with you three parts of my spiritual philosophy that inform and directly shape the content that I create each and every day, and I thought you guys might find this interesting. So these are three principles that I create content by, and I really do live by these as an astrologer.

Number one is that successful content should help listeners develop an archetypal eye. That means a few different things. One is that we should be able to notice themes and patterns described in the language of astrology in our lives. By taking in good astrological content, the content should help us to develop an eye for archetypes. It should help us develop an eye for the celestial patterning that is inherent in the language of astrology within the context of our everyday lives and not just in the big things, although that's important.

The big turning points, the big biographical markers, are definitely important, but I'm talking about the little things, too. Can you notice the funny correlation with the Venus-Neptune trine as you go to a bathhouse and sit and go back and forth between the sauna and the cold bath or something.

Can you notice when Venus is trying Neptune and water signs that you end up going swimming or something that you know? It's those little things that really make astrology magical because the big things are usually easier to see. But when you start seeing the little things each and every day, which is what this podcast is dedicated to, five days a week of content year-round,

If you develop an archetypal eye, then you start to see the gods at play in your life, and your life becomes magical, and for most people, we need that more than we need everything to go right more than we need to be in control of everything we can deal and cope with life as it is, with all the disappointments and failures and frustrations, if we can see within it meaningful patterns meaningful, beautiful artistry in the fabric of our experience. So this content is meant to develop an archetypal, it's meant to help listeners develop an archetypal AI, and it's always the intention behind the content.

Number two is to cultivate curiosity and reflection. It's cool to see the archetypes, but it's also really good to get curious about them and to open up reflective or contemplative spaces in our lives where we can not only notice the patterns, but reflect upon their meaning. Sometimes, patterns are here to teach us. Sometimes, they're here to make us laugh. Sometimes, they are here just to create that numinous sense of living in a magical universe.

But one of the ways in which it does so is not just seeing the patterns that this content is aimed to help you with. But also, it's when we stay curious and humble and open and reflective and interested in our experiences and in the meaningful artistic patterning of our experiences that we tend to learn and grow and stay invested. When you're invested in your relationship with your own life, the byproduct is intimacy, and you guys have heard me say that many times before, but the byproduct is we love the life we're living.

We love it just as it is not the way that it could be or should be, or, you know, we love it even. It's like it helps you learn how to sing the blues, learn you learn how to sing celestial gospel, if you have curiosity and reflection, and you see the patterns in your life. Even if things are really hard and you really get stuck in things, life keeps moving, and eventually, these habits, the habits of curiosity, reflection, and having that archetypal eye, will set you free, and it does, and I see it time and time again, and that's the content that I try to create is the content that gives you those capabilities.

All right, and last but not least, is constantly relearning the basics. The content that I create is meant to help people rethink about the sign of Leo, to think about the planet, you know, the planets the Sun, Saturn, Mercury, and Venus, to think about signs, planets, and houses in in new ways.

See, the thing is, most of the time, we think that we know more than we do about simple things, and we have severely underestimated how deep and multifaceted multi-dimensional and multi-valence the most basic features of astrology are.

If we spend more time with basics, you know what the 13 different ways that you can turn a Mars-Neptune dynamic. You know, if you keep turning the simplest combinations of planets, looking at the signs in the simplest way, looking at houses in new ways, looking at them from the standpoint of childhood versus being retired or midlife.

If you keep looking and keep turning simple archetypal concepts in astrology, you become wiser, you know astrology better, and you advance in your understanding of the language, and that, in turn, reinforces the archetypal eye and the relationship with experiences. So this channel is aimed at constantly turning basic things into meaningful ways over and over and in different ways and in different ways. So that it feels like mantras, you come here, you know the intro that you're going to get from me, you know that I'm going to have a list, you know that I'm going to turn the jewel of the archetypes, you know that we're going to tell stories, you know that this channel is going to be a place where you will go through a year and you know that there's going to be things I've talked about like Venus-Pluto and you've heard ten videos of me talking about Venus-Pluto, but you know, you'll get a different take this time. You'll hear some things are the same. But you'll hear a new story being told about a familiar archetypal friend, you know, and that's intentional on my part.

So anyway, I hope that you guys enjoy getting to know me and the channel a little bit better. We could really use your help. We have a long ways to go. You know, it's coming down to it. We're just a little out between two and three weeks left to go. We still need 1233 backers; I deeply believe that we can get there and that this channel is worth supporting, that all of our goals are worth supporting, that our staff is worth supporting, and so if you have a chance, think about pitching in. The link is at the top of the comment section, pinned to the top, or in the description.

I hope you guys will enjoy today's continued exploration of Pluto into Aquarius, and thanks so much to everyone who's already pitched in. We really appreciate it.

All right, let's continue now our exploration of Pluto moving back into the sign of Aquarius. We have been looking at this entrance of Pluto into Aquarius through the lens of several essays written by James Hillman, who was an archetypal psychologist who was one of the great influencers of modern archetypal astrology.

People like Richard Tarnas Liz Greene, who came out of the Jungian School of Psychology, were contemporaries with or often inspired by Hillman's work, and so a lot of the place that Hillman is coming plays a really large role in the history of modern astrology even though he's not writing about astrology per se.

His son Laurence Hillman is a famous astrologer. I had the opportunity to interview him once upon a time for an article that I wrote about James Hillman in The Mountain Astrologer. So it was really fascinating to hear Laurence speak about his dad and, and I also had the chance to see James Hellman's wife, along with Richard Tarnas, give a weekend of talks on the legacy of his work in psychology along with Carl Jung's work.

He's one of my intellectual heroes. I don't agree with everything he says. But, I love the way he says things, and I love the conviction with heroes, which with he wrote, with which he writes, and I love that. I love that he loves archetypes so much and that he sees the universe as living and relationships among living things in a living Cosmos. I'm using the words cosmos and universe kind of interchangeably, but we know he's drawing distinctions between the two if you listen to the last talk in this series.

I love that he sees the cosmos as a living set of relationships between living beings and that the cosmos itself is alive. I just love that point of view; I would say it's my own point of view, and it's something that I think many people when they read Hillman, find that someone's putting words to the way they experience reality.

It is one of many perspectives, and so I want to say, as a qualifier before we get into this, this is not an indoctrination hour; you are free to think for yourself and consider these ideas. I like reading ideas and essays on topics and astrology and psychology on my channel once in a while from my favorite thinkers as a way of helping us think about archetypes that are coming through our space.

But one of the greatest things that we can do is just in the considering of ideas, we often find our own, and in the considering of ideas, we often shift some of our own. That does not mean we need to adopt every last idea that's being presented by anyone we ever read. So anyway, all that being said, you are now safe to move about the cabin.

All right, we're going to continue reading Hilton's essay on A Cosmology for Soul from Universe to Cosmos. The next section of the essay we read in part one, the first section, which was called What's Wrong with the World?

Then, part two is called Cosmos Logos. We're now reading the next part, which is called analyzing, and I'm going to read through this section and then either pause as I go or, at the end, offer some reflections and try to explain why I think this portion of the essay also ties in very nicely to Pluto's entrance into Aquarius.

Remember, in this series of essays, we're using them as a way of looking at some of the elements that Pluto in Aquarius is likely to bring up philosophically and thematically. There are others, and we will continue visiting other dimensions of this transit as we go. So keep that in mind every a lot of the talks that I do on my channel are meant to turn the archetypal jewel and catch the light bouncing off from it from one perspective, and then we turn it again and again, and so we're going to continue doing that with Pluto and Aquarius over the next month and over the next years to come we'll have lots more to say.

All right, Animalyzing now to the subheading of this conference beyond humanism, however, the beyond the human that I wish to talk about our animals, a theme that meets in America with approval only at the fringes of intellectual discussion, whereas, at Tenri, I am sure this theme will be welcomed since animals play such a large part in your creation myth and your cosmology.

I venture the idea that a cosmology with soul gives special attention to animals. I propose that any acceptable new cosmology will have to receive approval from the animal kingdom, and the animals, to be sure, would not vote for the Christian Cartesian Newtonian or Einsteinian cosmologies. Cosmology has been such a hyperborean and odorless enterprise of light years and galactic gas far indeed from house pets, pigeons, and cockroaches. To give cosmological importance to animals is not really so scandalous.

In fact, the idea is quite orthodox at the very beginning of the Judeo-Christian tradition; after God has wiped out the Earth with the flood, God asked Noah to build a mathematically precise ark to save his family and the animals. Neither artifact nor text nor symbol, neither mineral nor vegetable, only the animals were to be perpetuated. Genesis chapter 618, through 22.

Another masterwork of cosmology, Plato's Timaeus, again, a main root of the Western and Islamic tradition, district describes a dodecahedron used by the creative maker for the whole, following up on the geometric shapes for fire, water, air, and Earth. There is a fifth, the most comprehensive figure, which has, says Plato quote, a pattern of animals they're on, and that is also an allusion to the zodiac.

It reminds me of another passage in Plato's The Republic, where he presents a quote, "the symbolic image of the soul as a multitudinous many, headed beast with a ring of heads tame and wild." Let us consider this 12-sided animal-headed image seriously indeed, although seriously does not mean literally.

Rather, we may imagine this final and essential image of Plato's cosmology, strange, unexpected, obscure as it may be, to be awarding animal being cosmic superiority. Plato's image does suggest that mathematical abstraction and elemental substances, i.e., theoretical physics expressed by the first four components, the elements in his vision, require something further an animation and animalization. It is as if only an animalized cosmology that is many-faced and sensuous can adequately imagine the essence of things.

Plato's animate image also indicates that the mathematical and organic do not have to be divided. Just as God's instruction to Noah, Genesis chapter 7:15, and 16 uses the exact numerical language of architecture. In both cases, a single image holds the abstract and animated together.

Therefore, the language we use for speaking cosmology, the logos of Cosmos, dare not reduced to mathematics without forsaking in the very act of cosmological construction, the palpable actuality of the animal crowd. Within an animalized Cosmos, theories would not depart from the actually palpable. We would have no hidden God, pure being abstract truth, linguistic fundamentalism, symbolic logic, unobservable particles as sufficient accounts, little physics, and less metaphysics.

Yet the biblical arc is precisely measured in cubits, and the fifth essential shape in the Timaeus is a dodecahedron. So may we conclude that formal abstractions provide containing shapes for animation, but that is all they are. Houses for the habitation of animism, or, because form and animal are presented together in these ancient cosmologies, let us conclude that the animal is structured, contained, and law abiding within the inherent shapes of its specific species.

This inherency of Cosmos order, which self limits life and is as eternal as geometry surviving as the ark, psychology calls instincts. The return of cosmology to the animal is not merely to invite brute palpable sensuousness into our thinking; the animal opens not only into the flesh of life but also toward the gods. According to fables, legends, myths, and rituals worldwide, animals impart to humans the secrets of the cosmos.

They are our instructors in cosmology; that is, they mediate between the gods and humans, and they have divine knowledge. In most polytheistic cultures, they are themselves divinities. For the ancient Egyptians, animals were divine, according to Henry Frankfurt, because, quote, their inarticulate wisdom, their certainty, their unhesitating achievement, and above all, their static reality with animals that continual succession of generation brought no change, they would appear to share the fundamental nature of creation. It's repetitious, rhythmic stability.

For the people from Africa to far north latitudes for whom animals display the divine and animal is an eternal form walking around the palpable presence of the regeneration of time of adapting and surviving and immortality utterly of this world. This world it's eaten, needing no elsewhere and no transports.

No being guarantees its existence. Its existence guarantees being. Each animal is eternity sensuously displayed, and so the stars were imagined with animal names. The mechanistic indirect theory of perception so essential to modern epistemology and cosmology, of course guarantees an anthropocentric universe. Only humans are conscious; animals have less memory, less stored knowledge, less mediating reason, less subjective interiority. Have they interiority at all?

Unless they have this interior subjectivity, they cannot claim consciousness. The mediating subjective factors necessary to our human definition are the very same factors required by the indirect theory of perception. Dismantle the radio signals and the code system, all the intervening variables, and we shall find we have jumped as well our notion of consciousness as an interior mediating process.

For it is this definition of consciousness that is maintained through centuries from stoic philosophy and Roman law through Christian dogma and European rationalism that animals are non sentient, irrational, unconscious, and inferior.

This condemnation of their consciousness assures our human superiority, allowing us to ignore, quote, their inarticulate wisdom, their certainty, their unhesitating achievement. Were animals to define consciousness, it would not mean what the dictionary says knowledge within oneself inward knowledge in which, rather than a knowing of, it would mean again a knowing with. The root sense of the word which includes conscience as conscientiousness in regard to something scrupulous observation.

Nor would an animal define interiority, literally, as inside the black box of invisible subjective cogitation, so tied with language and reason in the human definition, the inward reasoning subject, the self, the ego, those obdurate spirits persisting from Augustine and Descartes through whose role that defend against cosmic participation would melt into air leave not a rack behind.

The West would not have to turn east to lose its mind. Animals do not need the mediation of reason because they immediately perceive, and thus, no, within their meal us, they make no perceptual mistakes requiring no theory of illusions of memory of civilization. Could we call this absolute knowledge as they read their worlds scrupulously? So are they read by their worlds, their language ceaselessly and certainly speaking in their manifestations of themselves, presenting their interiority in display?

This last is of utmost importance presenting their interiority in display. Here, I turned to the work of the late Adolph Portman, the eminent basal zoologists and philosopher of nature; he demonstrated displays of interiority is as essential to organic life as are the useful behaviors of survival. Animal life is biologically aesthetic.

Each species presents itself and designs coats, tails, feathers, furs, curls, claws, tusks, horns, hues, sheen's shells, scales, wings, songs, dances, and this display of secondary qualities is primordial. The aesthetic is rooted in biology; nothing precedes it genetically.

The coat of an animal is phylogenetically prior to the optical structures necessary for seeing the coat. To show is primarily to show, secondarily to be seen. There are creatures and ocean deeps where no light falls that nonetheless have brilliant colors that can never be perceived, and there are symmetrical markings on primitive oceanic organisms that bear no useful purpose. Neither for camouflage against enemy attractions for breeding signaling, staking territories lures for prey, sheer appearance for its own sake, or what Portman also calls unaddressed phenomenon.

Sheer appearance as the purpose of its own recalls constant notion of the aesthetic as purposiveness without purpose, and more sheer appearance as its own purpose recalls the original aesthetic meaning of Cosmos, ornament decoration, embellishment, dress.

An animalized cosmology restores the aesthetic to primary place to restore this aesthetic sense of Cosmos, therefore requires giving first place to animals and to live as animal with an animal eye.

That's a super beauty passage from Hillman again, and really like challenging us to not be tempted down the path of abstract, rational conceptualizations of the universe, the cosmos, reality, ourselves, the solar system, and nature. What I love about what Hillman is doing here is he's essentially telling us what to be careful of when Pluto enters Aquarius, which is the hubris of thinking that we are above the Earth, that we are above animal, that we are above what is essentially the aesthetic display of the cosmos that has no purpose other than the display itself.

Just as he said that, there are, you know, ocean organisms that have design on them that serve no purpose and that are just there for the sake of showing a beautifully arranged display. I don't believe that Hillman is going so far as to say that purpose doesn't exist, but what he's doing is he's saying, God, can we just step off the purpose, train for a second, and recognize that there is so much beauty in the cosmos when we look at it as nothing more than an ornamental display of beauty.

To do that requires a kind of daring because we have to go beyond in a sense while not discarding, eliminating, or condemning a moralizing view of the universe, as a struggle between good and bad, fallen and redeemed sinner and Saint, the good society and the corrupt society, all of which are narratives that I haven't read all of humans work, he certainly validates right.

But what happens when Pluto enters Aquarius is we have to visit the shadows of how we tend to think of ourselves as better than or more elevated than the rest. The rest of Earth, the rest of the cosmos. Why? Well, I mean, if you think we spent a lot of time last year looking at the mythology of Ganymede, and the association of the water poor, and the story of Ganymede with the sign of Aquarius.

One of the things that sets Ganymede apart is that he is sort of an elevated choice, human that Zeus desires and takes up to Olympus, and so Ganymede finds himself close to the gods but far away from his own kind.

Alienated from his own kind not fully able to be a god either and there are many things we can take from the story of Ganymede, but one of them is that in our attempt to be godlike to ascend when we think of the goal of humanity as transcendence over and above the Earth, the sensual the body, the Earth in its beautiful complex display.

We run the risk of alienating ourselves not only from the Earth, which is our actual home from the body, which is the souls vehicle, temporary as it may be, and we run the risk of alienating ourselves from each other.

A view that sees who humanity itself as somehow closer to the gods than to the Earth is one that can easily foster a kind of judgmental ism toward one another about our most animal-like parts.

Now, I do not like violence and murder and cruelty, intolerance, greed, you know, I think probably any more than anyone else, and yet, this perspective would ask us not so much to condone those things. But to not think to ourselves that it is so easy to part with them, and this is one of the great Aquarian shadows, is that our most noble ideas become the most savage, and by that, I mean violent.

That word to me is not I'm not using that word as a reference to, like, you know, sometimes people will use that pejoratively toward indigenous people, and I don't mean it like that. I just mean like, you know, violent and, like, brutal. Those are better words.

Our best ideas often become those that were most convinced will save or lift or take humanity to some higher plane and elevate us above our most primal violent instincts that we see as animal-like. Those are the very same ideas that have often, in fact, been those that have somehow justified, you know, genocide and warfare and the elimination of people that we thought of as below us.

In the West, of course, colonialism has been fueled by aspirations and visions of what a good society looks like that have often been so high on themselves that they thought, well, you know, indigenous people should either come with us on this elevated journey, or we should annihilate them.

So you have to be careful, especially in the modern New Age astrology. We just automatically think everything Aquarian is good, but this is a Saturn-ruled Air sign that is incredibly idealistic, and the closer we get to sort of play, play, play tonic idealism about how a society should operate, or what constitutes the good life, or what is the highest, moral good or whatever and we try to aspire for those things with a narrower and narrower point of view, and less and less tolerance for the fact that we are also instinctual animals living with a close relationship to Mother Earth.

What happens is, ironically, the ideas by means of which we try to ascend become the ideas but by means of which we oppress other people, and it's always the ones that we think are most noble that end up somehow validating our ability to be like jerks to other people, you know what I mean?

So this is what Hillman is getting at is that, you know, any cosmology that we come up with has to account for the animal perspective; it has to include an honor the animal perspective, which is one of the reasons the language of astrology is so very beautiful.

Here, we have 12 temples of the gods, many of whom are expressed; their emblems are natural animal beings. We have the fish; we do have the human, the water pourer for the gods, which interestingly is itself another kind of animal image; if we can think carefully about it and then it's something we humans do as animals.

Then we have, you know, the sea goat, a mythical creature; we have the centaur, a mythical creature; we have the scales, a human made instrument. We have the Virgin, the young girl. Aries, originally by the way, it was associated with a young man or young boy; we have the ram, we have the bull, right? We have the the twins, we have the crab, we have the lion.

The Zodiac itself is rooted in a cosmology that was meant to be a marriage and dance between the celestial, the above and the below, not the below as in the worse, but the two as a kind of interconnected relationship that you can't sever that's fundamental somehow, and that's what Hillman saying he's saying unless we have a universe in which the animal, the primordial, the instinctual.

Which includes, by the way, the animal I mean, just why it's like I sat down with my kids, let's watch planet Earth, you know, it's like, and you guys have run into this too, I'm sure it's like, oh my god, that crocodiles eat the shit out of that gazelle. I don't like the horrors and cruelties of the world, and there is a way in which we don't have to condone those things while also not pretending that it is so easy to rise above them because as soon as we think that there is something that when we condemn and look down upon the kind of darkness or the shadows and the interplay of light and dark itself when we look down upon it and think I'm above that we've immediately polarized all over again, but we've done so unconsciously, which means that our noble aspirations will become will be filled with shadow and that is Pluto and Aquarius.

We have to be so careful about that going forward that the temptation of virtuous ideas that we weaponize. This is why virtuous ideas about technology, virtuous ideas about medicine, virtuous ideas about astrology, any of any and all of them.

So, as soon as they become the means by which to say, These things are better than the Earth, better than the complications of light and dark that reality displays, we're going to go above and beyond all of them.

Problems. Problems start to happen. You know, the problem of evil, right? The problem of suffering, those problems, in as much as we are humans who contemplate those problems, those problems, their contemplation or philosophizing about them, or attempts to remediate them are all part of what we do as human animals, and it turns out that as human animals who contemplate those problems, and try to fix them the best we can, we also end up killing each other in response to those problems and the way we think they ought to be solved and that has been a truth for 1000s of years.

It doesn't appear to be one that we have thought about, you know, enough, or maybe it's not one that we can ever fundamentally get over. Just as this is, like, heavy to consider, but just as much as some animals eat other animals and some, you know, there is there's a viciousness in nature, and I think what Pluto in Aquarius will ask us to do is to examine our own viciousness as humans, especially in those areas where we tend to think about ourselves as exceptionally angelic or elevated.

That is not easy. I'm gonna like, you know, even bring it up. I'm like, Oh, God, you know, it's hard to even talk about. But these are some of the shadows of Pluto and Aquarius.

I want to just call to mind something he said here. The last is of utmost importance, presenting their interiority in display. Animal life is biologically aesthetic. Each species presents itself in designs, coats, tails, feathers, furs, curls, claws, tusks, horns, hues, sheen's, shells, scales, wings, songs, dances, and this display of secondary qualities is primordial.

The aesthetic is rooted in biology; nothing precedes it genetically, the code of an animal is phylogenetically prior to the optical structures necessary for seeing the code to show is primarily to show secondarily to be seen.

It is possible to do two things at once; I think that is or to think or believe or to hold two different kinds of truths at the same time. If we don't have an imagination for that, I think we're gonna get really sideswiped by Pluto and Aquarius because two things can be true at once. We can from humans perspective, we can look at ourselves and nature, and even all of our attempts to make a better world and the most Aquarian ways imaginable. We can look at all of that as nothing more than the showing of the stripes of the tiger.

In other words, there's something about these endeavors to think about ourselves and think about our problems and try to overcome them that is as natural to us human animals. As you know, the things that ladybugs do the ways that ladybugs show can we hold that perspective, which, in a sense, says all of this activity about trying to solve the world's problems and trying to make a better world whether we do so or not, is a beautiful display of our human nature?

Maybe beautiful isn't that you see; it's really hard to then separate the showing of beauty from the question of morality. But was it a good showing? Is it morally neutral? Is it good to be morally neutral? Is it good to be morally ambivalent? Shouldn't the way we display things be more than just a display? Should it have some larger purpose that takes us from a more primitive, you know, unevolved state to some higher evolved state? There's the Aquarian; it's like a loop.

So it's a sign that will ask us to contemplate our own nature as something that participates in both heavenly in animal dimensions at the same time, and two things can be true. We can live in a cosmos that we can't imagine as ambivalent to our moral quandaries, and we can try to solve them, and we can have the perspective that regardless of if we succeed or fail, there's something about all of this, that is the cosmos living and showing itself with that as its primary purpose and if we can hold an appreciating capacity for the cosmos showing itself as it is, without it needing to be anything else, there's a kind of interior freedom that starts to loosen up the soul feels like it's seen for what it is, it's not being moralized that barked at told to get into shape to become something better to climb up the evolutionary rung toward level 10.

Once it has that freedom, it's actually a lot easier. There's no condemnation at stake, there's no ultimate damnation at stake, and that freedom, I think, it allows us to, I mean, I know for a fact that if I'm relaxed, creatively speaking, I do a better job writing content, I do a better job writing my book, I do a better job with my kids, when I'm creatively relaxed and somehow I remember that there's two things happening at the same time, there's nothing at stake and I want to try to do the best job I can.

So Hillman says, There's no way that we can, you know, make the best world possible unless we also have an appreciating capacity for the cosmos as brilliant animal display without secondary purpose. If you have an appreciating capacity for that, it's only that the freedom of that perspective that has now included and honored the animal, the complexities, the light and dark of animal reality. It once that's included, this other stuff we can do, and hold it with some awareness of the animal, and that's the tension of the opposites that we have to hold for something like Pluto and Aquarius to not dissociate us to not pit heaven and Earth against one another in visions of progress.

So anyway, I hope this has been useful. Oooh, I've got a wolf on my shirt and a sleeping dog somewhere behind me. Let's see if I can. Can you see her? There she is; you can see her butt.

I hope that I did an okay job of communicating some really difficult ideas and ideas that I do not think are like, I don't know when I read stuff like this, I let it just sit and work on me for a while, and I sort of have to I have to wrestle with it, and I assume you guys will too. So you're in good company. I think that these are ideas that are that are really challenging.

So anyway, squeeze an animal, squeeze yourself. It is beautiful and not always easy to be human, and I'm really looking forward to the last part of this series. The last part of the series, by the way, has an interesting title. Shifting the universe is the last section we'll read in part three.

Don't forget before you leave; we're trying to get to 1777 backers before New Year's to support the channel. The work that we do the whole team that supports the work that we do; you can hit the Kickstarter link at the top of the comment section. It's pinned in the description of this video. Help us get to our goal, buy New Year's Eve, pick up 50% off our classes, or get a class bundle and save even more pick up one of our talks pick, up on one of my talks, pick up my book, or you can add them to you can pick a couple of rewards if you want, or one of our readings. So anyway, thank you, guys, and we'll see you again soon. Bye, everyone.