Pluto Back Into Aquarius: What’s Wrong With the World?

Transcript

 

Hey everyone, this is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology. Today, we're going to continue our exploration of Pluto's re-entrance into the sign of Aquarius, which is happening in January; we are going to be taking a look at a really interesting selection from an essay by James Hillman who is an archetypal psychologist and one of the people that many modern astrologers attribute to the founding of the archetypal School of Astrology. So, if you've never heard him and his ideas before, he's very interesting, and I think you'll find this essay particularly interesting as it makes some, I think, very vivid connections to Pluto's re-entrance into the sign of Aquarius. So that's our agenda for today.

Before we get into it, don't forget to like and subscribe share your comments and reflections, especially with the big ideas we're chewing on in the series, which will have a couple more parts in it. Maybe one more this week, and I think another next week. So I'd love to hear from you guys and hear what you think. You can find transcripts of any of my daily talks on the website nightlightastrology.com.

As you guys know, we are on our way to trying to raise the support of 1777 backers by New Year's Eve because listen to this show daily, you know, I've been banging the drum and really trying to rally support; you can find the link to the Kickstarter at the top of the comment section pinned to the top or in the description of this video.

Right now, as of the time I'm recording this introduction, we have 441 backers, which means we still need 1336. That's a tall task, but I think we can get there, and I believe that there are a lot of things that make the channel worth supporting. I'm going to tell you a little bit about my goals for the year ahead as a content creator and our goals. In general, at Nightlight, some of the things that we plan to do in the event that we're successful with this Kickstarter.

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Today, I want to tell you three goals that we have in the year ahead, both myself as a content creator and Nightlight in general as a sort of overall astrological school and, like all of the services we offer, because I want you guys to know what we plan on doing with the success that we have if we are indeed successful by New Year's Eve.

Number one is the and the biggest one I'm excited about. We got started on this last year, in addition to finishing up our community herbal medicine project, which took a couple of years to build and is awesome, thanks to you guys. We have done some really cool things with that.

The Roots and Spheres program has also grown right out of that, which is really awesome. But anyway, the affordable reading service is the intention behind it is to create an opportunity for students who are talented and need experience reading for other people to have a platform where they can get paid to do so and at the same time, we can they can get paid at a basic like an entry-level, which you know, many astrologers have to, you know, to gain experience, you may have to set your prices a little bit lower for a couple of years, or for you know, for me, I did 500 clients by donation and then I set I standardized my prices at the beginning of my career. It's done differently by everyone. But this gives people an opportunity to get experience and get paid for what they're doing, which is super important, and then also, for people out there to have a sliding scale and or an affordable rate. We're still finalizing exactly what it's going to look like. But the basic idea here is that if you get an industry professional like a well-known or reputable professional astrologer, that reading is going to price a certain amount of the population out of getting that service.

We don't think that that should be the only price point, and yet most professional astrologers can't dip below that unless they're doing someone a favor now or then or they have like maybe a certain amount of, you know, like pro bono work that they do, so to speak. But what this is going to do is it's going to give students experience, and then in turn, it's going to give people who need an affordable price point that that that price point that's more manageable so that people aren't overextending themselves. That's part of our philosophy with all of our training programs, which is why the Kickstarter also supports when the Kickstarter does well as a sort of sale for the online programs. It also enables us to have a huge number of students that come to us paying very little, like some people, $10 a month.

So, you know, the Kickstarter success this year, we'll extend that philosophy into the realm of readings so that we have students getting experience and people getting an affordable reading service. So, that service will hopefully be available in the first couple of months of the new year. But these things take time. So you know, it'll be there soon, though, especially if we meet our goal.

Number two is rebuilding the website. So, in order to host this new reading service, we have to do some pretty serious reconstruction of the website. So that's a big part of it; they kind of go together; if we're successful, we will be implementing the service, making sure students are paid, having to go through a process of training, and then rebuilding our website to host this new feature.

Number three, is one of the things that were developing me and my team is a bonus series. Now, the bonus series would come on, say, occasional Saturdays or Sundays, and it would be bonus material on the weekends outside of my normal Monday through Friday content, but it would be hosted by aspiring content creators who are nightlight students or graduates. So there are so many talented people out there, you guys who don't have platforms, and something I'm really passionate about is I want to see other astrologers who are talented succeed; they need experience, they need a place to share their creative work.

So, the bonus series will be a way for people to come on and showcase their talent, and it will be in a bonus format so that you're still getting your Monday through Friday, you know, content with me, but then on the weekends, you might get to visit with a cool, talented person you've never met before, who has a really fun topic to share based in the current astrology or something else. So I'm really excited about that; that's something we're developing.

I will be able to pay these people to do this content so that they're getting the experience of being paid for their talent and ability and that they have a platform where people will immediately be able, I mean, a big audience here, right so people can see their work and then jump over and like book a reading with them or support them or follow their work on Instagram and it can help talented you know, people who are coming through our programs to have a space to share.

So anyway, those are our goals for the year ahead. If we're successful, these are things we plan on doing with that success, in addition to supporting the staff of people who are a part of this whole enterprise. These are the things that we hope to get done.

So, if you feel up to it, we would love your support. You can head over to the Kickstarter by clicking again on the link at the top of the comments section pinned or in the description of the video, and I hope you guys will enjoy today's talk on Pluto's re-entrance into Aquarius. Thanks, everyone. Bye

All right, so today, we are going to explore Pluto's entrance into Aquarius once more, and we're going to be doing so by taking a look at a famous essay that was written by the archetypal psychologist James Hillman. Hillman was a student of Carl Jung's and someone who was really paving the way for what would become the field of archetypal astrology. It's a little different from archetypal psychology. Hillman was not an astrologer per se, but he wrote about astrology in many different places.

His son is an astrologer, and his work had a great influence on many of the astrologers that would come forth to establish the field of archetypal astrology. He wrote an essay called Cosmology for Soul, from Universe to Cosmos, and the first section is called What's Wrong with the World; we're going to read that section and the following section of the essay, which is called Cosmos Logos in this first part.

In the second part of the series, we're going to read the next section of the essay, and then finally, in the third part of the series, we will read the final part of the essay; we're breaking it up into pieces, because it's, it's long, and there's also so much to reflect on in each of the sections, that I think it might be more effective to break it up into parts, do some reflecting on each part, and draw out some really meaningful connections to Pluto's entrance into the sign of Aquarius, which, of course, is coming up here again in January.

So anyway, let's go ahead and take a look at Pluto's entrance into Aquarius on the real-time clock and refresh ourselves. So we have the new moon coming through this week, which is fun; let's go to January 20. Here, we can see by the 20th 21st, Pluto has entered the sign of Aquarius, where it will stay all the way until September of 2024, at which point, until late November, it will be in the very last degree of Capricorn one final time, and then in late November, it enters Aquarius to stay for the better part of the next two decades going forward.

So the reason that it's important to start looking at this now is that the ingress of an outer planet like Pluto usually is felt collectively and personally. One of the reasons for that, of course, is that it enters a new whole sign house in your chart, and we'll start activating those topics and, often in a rather dramatic way. Not all on one day, but over the course of the year, you're really going to feel Pluto changing signs.

I think the purpose of this series is to reflect on some of the biggest archetypal motifs that Pluto in Aquarius will likely bring up over the course of a very long period of time. But we're going to be reflecting on this in personal horoscopes and in other ways that will be a little different from the tape that we are examining in this series, right.

So you can think of this as not like the final word or the only way of looking at this, but a really important angle to take on Pluto's entrance into Aquarius. Remember that Aquarius is the fixed air sign of Saturn. It is the masculine domicile of Saturn, and it is related with a classical, Saturnian abstract 20,000-foot view thinking, which means that the sign of Aquarius, as we explored last week when Pluto enters, can have a lot to do with major changes in our paradigms, our thought structures, our ideas and we talked about the importance of chewing on ideas slowly digesting ideas rather than having a relationship with ideas that is too quick, impulsive and perhaps tied to an overly literal and all too urgent sense of time.

That was a really interesting exploration that we did last week. It was the first part in the series, and that was also through the lens of a very brief James Hillman essay on whether or not we're addicted to the future. So that was a fun way of opening this; we're going to continue today with this essay, Cosmology for Soul from Universe to Cosmos, where we first have to ask the question, why is it important to look at the soul? Well, for one thing, ancient astrology, philosophically speaking, was most likely coming from philosophical traditions such as hermeticism, Platonism, Pythagoras, monism, Egyptian mysticism, the orphic Indian astrology that believed not only in a personal soul but also in the transmigration of the soul.

Pluto is also associated with this. The Roman name of the Greek God was Hades, and Hades was like the soul, invisible or had an invisibility cap, like a helmet, and was associated with the transformation of the soul in the afterlife. There are a lot of different things that were said about Hades, but you can; we'll just read you something really quick.

The concept of Hades as unseeable is notably reinforced by the mythic reference to his cap of invisibility. He goes on to talk about that a little bit, and he goes on and the point being that the soul was also thought of as an invisible part of the human. You see, my body, my face. These are expressions of a soul that is invisible, and so the realm of Hades pertains to the soul because, like the soul, the realm of Hades is a realm of shade. It's a realm of night; it's a realm of invisibility. It's the realm of the nocturnal, so to speak.

Pluto, as a transiting planet, will often draw forth the soul and also distinguish it from those activities, people, or relationships that are somehow not reflective of who the soul is. It's as though the process of the soul going through Hades and upon death and entering a new body is a purgative purifying process that is always showing us, stripping us; by the way, when you go to Hades, you can't take anything with you, and worldly materials, no clothing, you're sort of stripped naked, as the day that you're born.

In this transformative space, the question about who you are authentically, who you disguised yourself as in life, and whether or not your actions were in accord with your soul. There are similar images in ancient mythology, where the soul has the heart is weighed against the feather, and we all know that a heart is always going to be heavier than a feather. So, this is not your typical kind of measurement. This has something to do with the lightness of spirit, and Hermes, of course, is the guide of souls who can bring the soul down into Hade, so to speak, and back out through the process of transmigration.

So it's a really, really fascinating thing that wherever Pluto goes, there is a kind of soul process; even in life, we're taken into that underworld, that subterranean space and we are asked to consider what is authentic to our souls nature and what isn't, we are asked to go through some kind of soul purifying process.

So there's a lot connected, there's always been a lot of meaningful connections between transiting Pluto and a process of examining what is soulful, and perhaps what isn't what is artificial. So these are good reasons for us to be thinking about soul in relation to the planet Pluto entering Aquarius.

On top of that, we have the sign of Aquarius as a sign that, again, the fixed airy sign of Saturn has always been associated with big-picture thinking; what are the ideas that shape history? What are the ideas that are fighting it out? In the collective discourse? What are the ideas that guide our life, they could become ideologies, they could be religious beliefs, they could be scientific paradigms.

Aquarius has always been associated with that very large, broad way of looking at the universe like an architect, like an engineer, like an astrologer, or a cosmologist, and so, actually, the relationship between the soul and cosmology is maybe one of the most succinct ways of describing what Pluto and Aquarius is likely to be about over the course of almost 20 years, that we're going to be looking at our ideas about the cosmos about the universe in relation to the human soul.

So, for that reason, I thought this essay was particularly fitting since it is a very thought-provoking essay that asks us to look at what kinds of theories or ideas we have about the universe about the cosmos and whether or not they reflect something of the authentic nature of the human soul, of the soul's reality of the souls' participation in reality and I think you'll like this.

I also encourage you to think about it, not just agree with it. It's something that I think we miss somehow. We think if someone is reading an essay, they're trying to indoctrinate us. You don't have to agree with anything presented here. However, I do think you'll agree that these ideas are probably really good ones to be thinking about or mulling over putting in your intellectual or spiritual crockpot, so to speak, and then eventually, you know, like tasting the dish and seeing what you if you like it or not.

So, I say that also because, again, people sometimes, when I read things, will think, you know, I have to agree exactly with, you know, exactly what is being shared here or something like that.

So, anyway, all of those qualifiers aside, let's get into it. This is Cosmology for Soul from Universe of Cosmos. I'm going to read the first part, and then I'll offer some reflections here.

I shall begin as a patient with presenting a complaint addressed to Doctors of Philosophy, science, and divinity. The patient is the soul, the psyche, psyche, by the way, was another word for soul. In allowing soul a voice, I follow a rhetorical tradition going back to ancient Egypt and used by Tertullian in his day, testimonials. The soul's complaint, as I hear it, now is this. Why am I so neglected in your theories of the universe? Why am I given such a contingent place in the scheme of things? Why does the creation myth by which everything is explained in Western culture evolution through time put me in, if at all, at a late stage, and such a little space inside human skulls and skins?

What do your theories of matter, their mathematical formulations, their astronomical calculations, your very notions of reality, say to my actuality, and its main concerns with living on Earth, and the puzzles of love and beauty, of justice and right action of breeding and sickening.

Why do philosophical cosmologies offer scant nourishment to the interiority, imagination, sensuousness, and suffering that these same cosmologies declare to be my domain? I want cosmological help. A therapeutic cosmology. Cosmo therapy. Psychotherapy can never accomplish its tasks with the soul since the worldview in which psychotherapy works is fundamentally limited by cosmologies that declare the soul to be inferior.

Whether these cosmologies be materialistic, monotheistic, evolutional, or idealist, none start in soul. To formulate a cosmology of soul invites three great dangers. Three inseparable monsters guard the gates.

First, the demon of the academic method tempting us to an exhaustive review of the field, showing that all other approaches are faulted. This tempter would transform us into the redemptive hero.

Second, the demon of big words, a special English language danger of speaking and then believing in abstract concepts. This wizard would turn us into metaphysical literalist with large heads carved of stone.

Third, the cosmological danger. The monstrosity that is the topic itself, this overvalued idea, cosmology, which invites the inflation of embracing all and everything, this demon would turn us into a paranoid God omniscient and wholly self-justifying by his own light to sidestep these dangerous, let me tell you a tale.

A wealthy and most intelligent nobleman in his late 20s went forth from the enclosure of father and wife and home to venture with his driver in horse downtown. On several brief occasions, Siddhartha Gautama, for such was the young man's name, was held first as an old man, aging, weakening decay, the irreversible arrow of time. Second, a sick person. Pain, vulnerability, affliction, the fundamentality of pathology.

Third, a corpse, the universal truth that all life whatsoever presents, is finished in death. His last encounter was with a sage. In this tale begins Buddhism.

Siddhartha first considers the sage and answer to the first three as wisdom might follow from suffering. The sage, however, belongs to the same image as the first three; it too is an inevitability from householding and husbanding; there is escape from philosophizing, no exit.

Perhaps the fourth, the sage philosophizing, rather than an answer to affliction, is also another of the few utterly necessary afflictions of human life. Classical cosmologies usually give answers to the question of suffering in four different ways.

They say affliction is not primordial merely, in effect, the result of a cosmological fault or rupture. Or they say that affliction is merely an indication of a life astray, owing to ignorance and illusion about the true nature of reality. Discover its laws, its reason, and the truth shall make us free. Or they affirm its reality and necessity but argue that the ways of the universe God are unfathomable. The meaning of affliction is cosmic, a mystery that can never be known by the human mind.

Finally, they affirm affliction literally giving to its own universal principle, Seth Arman Satan, or the blind chance of Jacque Moana, declaring the disordering principle to be either intentionally evil or unintentionally meaningless.

The first two views imagine affliction to be basically an unnecessary illusion and, therefore, remediable. The second two imagine affliction to be basically necessary, cosmically occasioned, and therefore without true remedy. Could we possibly reach toward another perspective that does not shrink from the hard facts of affliction and yet offers a cosmology to which affliction belongs? Affliction as both necessary and remediable.

A fantasy of this proportion invites the grandiose demons of the gates. I've been concerned with this question before. In another previous lecture, he mentions I argued for pathologizing as a bedrock activity of psyche, defining this activity as the psyches autonomous ability to create illness, morbidity, disorder, abnormality, and suffering in any aspect of its behavior and to experience and imagine life through this deformed and afflicted perspective.

I did not then recognize that I was taking up Gautama's question and that the last two of those lectures may be considered as a response to Gautama's metaphor of the sage for psychologizing or seeing through, as I called it, and dehumanizing or the return of human activities to a mythical location that cannot be circumscribed by the only human can be imagined parallel with Gautama sage. Those last two lectures suggest to cosmological practice. They present de-literalizing as a mode of making all things soul-making psyche of world of soul-making a cosmos of soul.

De-literalizing as a deconstructive process itself depends upon the psyches' primary activity of imagining narratives. Psyche tells itself stories about how things are. These myths and theologies manifest what Jung has called the religious instinct, referring to the fact that psyche natively instinctively compulsively contemplates cosmologically. This contemplation asks many different questions, leading to many different cosmologies.

It may ask how does it all work? And we theorize thermodynamics and gravitational fields? How'd it all begin, and we imagine an expanding universe, Big Bang Theory, or a God out of nothing? Of what is it all composed, and we discover particle physics? Where is it all going? Entropy, randomness, eschatology, Apocalypse reincarnation, we might also wonder that it is so beautiful, so ordered and lawful, where from where it comes injustice and disorder? What does it mean? How can I know it? And how can I know that I know it? Until finally, the contemplation turns inward, Deconstructive. Why do I ask these questions? Who is the one who asks these questions? What is the cosmological impulse itself?

I'm going to pause here before I read the next little section. What I love so much about what he is doing. He is not saying at all that cosmological, or philosophical, or even religious answers to our biggest questions are bad or wrong. Instead, he's saying that they present us with different worlds that we can inhabit because the imaginative aesthetic of those worlds, that are themselves answers to questions that we ask, are appealing to the soul.

It's like, I want to live in the Big Bang universe because there's something about that that's very beautiful and interesting to one person. Whereas another person wants to live in the story about the fall of mankind that comes from some original Edenic state and a movement through history toward redemption, personally and collectively, because he would say there's something beautiful and imaginatively compelling to the soul about that explanation and for him, we live in a universe that is big enough and rich enough and diverse enough and mysterious enough, that it can somehow provide us with, validate, and cooperate with our desire to live in through a variety of different paradigms that somehow speak to the soul. Isn't that beautiful?

It's like a pluralism of answers and worlds that somehow all exist as a part of an archetypal tapestry. But what he wants to remind us of is that it is an archetypal tapestry and that we can also take time to deconstruct and go internally and say, well, these are all amazing worlds, created through amazing narratives that we weave in response to the questions we ask, but who is the one asking? Why do I ask? Right?

That question, from his perspective, takes us into the very nature of the soul as a participatory imaginative being who asks questions and lives into the stories the answers provide, and tests them out, learns, and lives through them. With that kind of awareness, he believes that we would also take our answers and the paradigms that emerge from our answers less literally.

On the one hand, to do that, people immediately say, well, that means there's no objective truth. But what he's asking us to consider is that rather than thinking about truth as objective, think about it as relational. Think about it as participatory. No, there actually is a Big Bang universe. But it's like an archetypal dimension of reality; it's a paradigm that's real if you participate in it, and its results relationally to the soul are real; you get to live into the Big Bang theory of the universe.

Or you get to live into the creation story, or you get to live into any other paradigms that come as the answers to the questions that are most relevant to you, and the universe is somehow so intelligent and beautiful that it's like this matrix of possible realities that all have their own ontology and validate the souls' aesthetic interest in participating in such ways.

To me, that is so profoundly inspiring because it takes away the impetus for my participation to be valid; those that somehow don't cohere or live in the same world that I'm in must be wrong, and then there needs to be defensiveness, and then there's judgment, and then there's war and so many things.

Now, practically speaking, there are going to be conflicts between paradigms. It happens another archetypal reality is the reality of conflicting ideas and conflicting, imaginative, or participatory modes of consciousness. It's not like you can take that away, but you can certainly loosen up. You can certainly develop a more open mind when you start thinking about reality as relational, soulful, a matrix of beings participating in and through the beautiful images and worlds that open up through the questions we ask and the answers we arrive at.

This might sound like a very high-minded dissociated philosophy, but this is the realm of Aquarius. It is the realm of the biggest ideas that capture our imaginations and tell us where our place is in the family of ideas, which is also why Aquarius can be such a dogmatic sign because if we don't recognize ideas as modes of relating as modes of soul as modes of knowing and relating to beings in a matrix of being, then we tend to hold ideas in a way that actually dissociates us from other people, and that's exactly what he's talking about.

So let's go on to the next section, where he talks about the next section is called Cosmos Logos. We're going to read this, and then that'll be it for today.

Before going on, we need to clarify two serious confusions regarding the very word cosmology. First, cosmology, as logos' verbal account of cosmos, has been confused with cosmogony, the generation or origin of cosmos. This first confusion arises partly from the conviction that prior events give the best or fullest account of present events, suggesting that temporal history is the same as efficient causality or, to borrow from Whitehead, the most rational account of anything, quote can only be reached by pushing explanations to its utmost limits, conceived as ultimate origins, at most limits, assumes and ultimate God termed the resting place of inquiry, such as the Big Bang before which nothing can be imagined or God as the prime mover.

We try to grasp this by turning to that further away, the utmost outerspace of astrophysics pre-historical time of paleontology transcendent fictions of revelational theology. These vast perspectives allow the soul only a minuscule and utterly contingent place. Its concerns with pathology, as told in the Gautama story, seem meaningless, and its plight, rather than addressed by cosmology, is accentuated.

Lostness, dread, and the cry for salvation describe its excellent existential condition. In psychology, which cosmogony either reduces or ignores is expected to find a remedy for the disorder because cosmogony has brought about the second confusion of concerns the other half of the composite term Cosmos logos.

Cosmos, when translated into Latin, became universe, which means turning around one, or one turn, or turned to one universum; the direct antecedent of universe meant the whole world, the world as a whole, the adverb universe, some meant whole in general generally, Cosmos logos imagined as an account of universe will be biased toward universals general principles, in a way from sensual particulars, which are the very concern of Cosmos.

For cosmos is first an aesthetic term that can be best translated as fitting order. Therefore, it is equally a moral term use, for instance, by a scholastic for good order, good behavior, and decency and by Homer in the negative kata Cosman. For bad order. Shamefully. Liddell and Scott gives such translations as becomingly dually, decently; other connotations are disciplined form and fashion.

A second group of meanings refers especially to the world of women where cosmos is used for ornament decoration, embellishment dress, and is descriptive of sweet songs and ways of speech. The verb Cosmos means to arrange, adorn, furnish, our word Cosmetics is closer to the original atmosphere of Cosmos than is the Latinate universe.

From the perspective of the Greek word, the physical world is an orderly arrangement, a display of palpable things, and so it may be conceived as a whole universe only because of its aesthetic and moral fittingness. Without these sensual echoes, without the aesthetic and moral connotations contained in cosmos, the word today refers only to a vast gas bag, outer, empty spacey cold, while the logos of the cosmos, cosmic, is without sweet psalm.

By this, I mean that the mode of adequate response to the world as universe is to seek sufficient explanation to the world as cosmos to seek sufficient appreciation.

See how he's talking. Specifically, he's talking about universe being something that's more abstract and cold and mechanical and has to do with what is the objective truth, whereas cosmos is a way in which we arrange an understanding so that it is morally aesthetically pleasing and relationally validating.

That it's a view that validates the place of beings who relate to other beings in a universe or a cosmos that is seen as alive, first and foremost not mechanical, but alive. The monistic and abstract Roman term actually divides the truth about physical nature from goodness and beauty. The universe splits into separated realms what is supposedly being held by it in unity, and our modern cosmologies are forever attempting to reconcile aesthetics with ethics, and each with truth is understood objectively, scientifically, without moral or aesthetic implications.

The word Cosmos emerges within a polytheistic context; it makes no monotheistic demands for reduction to unification. Yet Cosmos holds an orderly arrangement what universe cannot. From the perspective of universe in orderly arrangement depends on the logic of hole in part in their external relations phenomenon are imagined within the universe as a whole.

Molecules, planets forces, all events whatsoever become merely partial, and so must be knit together by external relations to form a unified field theory or coherent universe. Even the transcendent God of most theologies connects with the world's variegated events by means of eternal relations as creator of phenomena, their Sustainer, or Redeemer. From the perspective of universe, events can only be partial insufficient, dispensable, and unnecessary; they are, in fact, condemned a priority.

So they cry out to be fitted in finding salvation from their contingency and their externality only within an embracing whole, the universe which alone can give them their meaning, their beauty, truth, and moral value, phenomenon as such, need explanations, they do not provide their own reason their own inherent intelligibility.

By stating above that Cosmos holds an orderly arrangement what universe cannot, I am emphasizing the intrinsic aspect of cosmos as if every event showed Cosmos, its form or fashioning pattern with that specific space and time internal to the pattern and required by it. Order is event itself, the set of its internal relations displaying its inherent truth, beauty, and moral value, each of these aspects implicated by each of the others, or as the adverbs becomingly, duly, fittingly, decently cannot be appropriated exclusively by truth, over against beauty or moral value.

So, an event is an indivisible Cosmos, not a universe but a unity. This unity is immutability that it is this now, as it is with its scope boasts or intrinsic intentionality, and therefore intrinsic intelligibility. Its meanings are afforded by its appearance, among other events. Could we go so far to our utmost limits to say that this inherency of cosmos is another way of speaking of a soul? That which Whitehead calls pattern is what Jung calls image, and both I would call soul.

That Anima Mundi, or soul in the world, making possible the sympathy of all things without need for an overarching principle of unification and preferring eachness to wholeness. I come back to William James's pluralistic pragmatist universe he writes for pluralistic pragmatism. Truth grows up inside of all finite experiences; they lean on each other, but the whole of them, if such a whole, there be liens on nothing.

All homes are infinite experience, finite experiences as such as home less. Nothing outside of the flux secures the issue of it; it can hope, salvation only from its own intrinsic promises and potencies. The polytheistic context of Cosmos suffuses the neutral numerical word, pluralistic with a religious hint, and fosters multiple tales of archive. Those are archetypes told by many gods, many kinds of causes and reasons, many origins and ends even the thought of many worlds.

Plato himself, immediately following his mention of the 12-sided figure with animal heads that would be a reference also to the Zodiac, raises the issue of plural worlds attempting to comprehend the universe; however, by means of universals leads cosmology into single vision and Newton's Newtonian sleep.

The return of cosmology to cosmos also leads to an emptying out of all first causes single equations, ontological unifying grounds, no one God will do, being evaporates only beings at home in their own decor, asking not for evermore inclusive and abstract explanations for their existence, but for ever more profound and differentiated appreciation.

I love that so much. It's such a rousing and interesting way of thinking about the difference between universe and Cosmos, and how there are actually really significant differences, and how we talk about the cosmic environment that we live in.

Now, Hillman often draws really sharp differentiations only to, you know, collapse the differences or commingle them later. So I would encourage you not to hear what he's saying, although he almost sounds like he's condemning, you know, universals. I would encourage you not to take that too literally but to see him as doing something sort of alchemical, drawing out the difference between cosmos and universe, because that meaningful distinction can help us see something of the shadow that rises up frequently.

It is a shadow of Pluto and Aquarius, and that's why I think it's worth looking at. Especially when we think of Aquarius in terms of universals, this is a sign that absolutely loves universals, but it doesn't have to be that way. It's not the only thing that Aquarius loves.

One of the things that has been said as a joke many times about Aquarians, right and it's truly kind of one of those stereotypical jokes that you can laugh at, but there's so much more to Aquarians, so please, Aquarians, don't be offended by this. You'll hear people say Aquarians love humanity, but they hate people.

This is what Hillman is talking about. The whole essay could be summarized as we have a problem if the way we think about the universe causes us to love the idea of people but is also creating, ever isolating, detached, abstract, idealistic, ideological distinctions that actually alienate us from one another unexposed, an underlying dislike of embodiment of sensuality, of the of nature of Earth, and of the messiness of being human.

There is something about Aquarius, as I said in video one in this series, that loathes the way things are and prefers to imagine everything in accordance with unifying grand principles or ideas, and there is something deeply intolerant in human, lacking sensuality, lacking relationality, lacking the subjective center, that a soul requires; that a soul is.

So there's so much to be said about Pluto and Aquarius presenting us with the contrast between the need for an embodied, soulful, sensual view of the Cosmos that we live in. A cosmos remember that for the ancients, everything was connected music, math, numerology, astrology, ethics, and beauty. They were all interpenetrating fields of concern when it came to philosophy or spirituality. I mean, that's, in a sense, what defines art too. That's, in a sense, what defines the Renaissance, and the Renaissance, in turn, is a turning back to the Greek universe. Well, it's a cosmos, we would call it right.

So the Greek Cosmos, if you want to think about it like that, is this distinction that Hillman draws; I often use the words interchangeably; by the way, I'm not into word policing, right? But if you think about it, the, this the, and by the way, when we say Greek, we're talking about not ethnically Greek, but Greek culturally, which is the broadest definition of the Hellenistic era in which horoscopic astrology emerges.

It's a sort of Greek world. But of course, that world is inhabited by a pluralism of religious, spiritual, philosophical, intellectual points of view, which is one of the things that makes it really, really interesting.

One of the ways that Hillman talks about that Greek imagination and its contribution to the world that is still valuable to us today is that it is essentially pluralistic polytheistic and speaks in terms of beings rather than being as the abstract thing of which all beings are somehow related back to that the prioritization is not about taking individual beings and referring them back to the great web of being but rather taking them out of that and bringing them back to their particularity their literal humanity as opposed to an idea of humanity.

These are tensions so present in the sign of Aquarius, so we're going to look at two more parts of this essay. But today, I just wanted to get the wheels turning and have us starting to think about what the end like we just put it broadly over the next 20 years; big ideas are going to come about that, on the surface, may seem like they have this sort of universal appeal.

But we should ask ourselves the question in the grand universal appeal, are we further alienating ourselves from our the actual, the sensual, relational, subjective, soulful bodies, you know, and daily human life that we inhabit. There can be also, just to be fair, there can be the emergence of ideas that do both right that help us to inhabit our particularity while exposing us to unifying principles or truths. I believe that particularity and universality, like imminence and transcendence, are sort of like two sides of the same coin.

So again, just because humans drawing this sharp distinction and saying go towards Cosmos, you're lost in the universal. It's a good calling, and it's a good like banging of the drum. But both can also be true at the same time, and that goes back to this basic idea that he proposes throughout all of his work, which is that the questions we ask and the answers they provide us with are compelling to us because the soul imagines its relevance to its personal existence as meaningful and interesting and worthy of, you know, like, that's the Choose Your Own Adventure path I want to go down as those answers to those questions.

Or maybe you know, even you're in an agnostic space, you're like, I don't know, it's a mystery. I can't know if that's still your participation path. That's the Choose Your Own Adventure; you're going to take in the point that Hillman makes again and again, is that these paths are attractive to a subjective living being. They're not just objective answers; they are modes of relating and participating in reality.

So it's good to have this kind of reflexive awareness of big ideas, big questions, and big answers as modes of soulful participation as we go into a period and in time that can very easily pit ideas against living beings.

So anyway, I hope this is interesting. Food for thought. So. Yeah, leave your comments. I'd love to hear from you guys. Don't forget we have. We are trying to reach our goal of 1777 backers by New Year's Eve. We are almost, we're moving along nicely. We still have a ways to go.

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