The Sun Square Pluto: Symbol, Ritual, and Power

Transcript:

Hey everyone this is Acyuta-bhava from Nightlight Astrology. Happy Monday everybody. Today we are going to continue looking at the Sun square to Pluto. The Sun is in the late degrees of Aries squaring Pluto in Capricorn. This is a transit that lasts between about April 15 and the 20th. Perfecting today on April 18. We started looking at this transit last Friday, and we will continue doing so today. Before I go any further remember, please like and subscribe, share your comments helps the channel to grow. Click on the notification bell to get updates once you subscribe, and you'll know when I'm going live. And as always, if you'd like a transcript of my talk, you can find those usually within 24 hours on the blog of my website, which is nightlight astrology.com. I'm also really happy to be promoting my upcoming course we have, you know, every day there's newcomers to my site. And so if you are used to hearing my spiel about my course, you can always just skip ahead to the content for the day.

Well, with the Sun in Aries squaring Pluto in Capricorn, it's important that we just really quick take a look at the real time clock so that we all can just remember what's going on in the sky with this one. So I'm going to share my screen once more and show you the transit. Here we go. Here's the sun in the late culminating, often difficult late degrees of a sign and the Sun is in a square with Pluto today so that energy is really very powerful today.

So remember, this transit lasts through about Wednesday of this week as the Sun will then change into the sign of Taurus at which point it has it holds a whole sign trine to Pluto and the square is no longer so sometimes it might last you might give it a few more degrees out where you can still feel it but because the Sun is changing into Taurus changing its dignity and its configuration with Pluto. It's not lasting as long as a normal Sun Pluto square might last. Well, today we're going to meditate a little bit more on the sun and Pluto and its dynamic. One thing that the sun Pluto often refers to is transformative power, let's call it that. Most of us, Carl Jung is a famous psychologist without whom we would not really have astrology around in the modern era, he's responsible for helping kind of the rebirth or renaissance of astrology in the modern era. And I think, by this point, we could probably all agree with what he said here, which is that human beings seek out connection both personally and collectively with that which is transpersonal, some might call God, or the divine, but it's, you know, various, it's called various things and different traditions. And that we do so through ritual, relationships with symbols, and symbols could be myths, metaphors, and they could be, you know, Gods from the Greek tradition or from the Indian tradition, or, you know, anywhere around the world, you find people connecting to that which is transpersonal, ineffable, beyond the ability of the mind to circumscribe you know, through symbols through meaningful symbols and ritual enactments of symbols or relationships with symbols.

So, Sun Pluto has a lot to do with the transformative power of the psyche. Let's start by remembering what the Sun was related to. The Sun, broadly speaking, is related to our vision. Literally, it's connected to I cite in ancient medical astrology, but it's also this, it's connected to the idea, for example of spirit and the daimon, which is, in part, like the image that lives in each of us. It could be the image of a day or, you know, a month or a year or a whole lifetime, or a series of images that compel us to act and chart out a destiny path in a certain direction. So the Sun stirs up action in the soul, like the plotline of a book or a story, just like the sun has an arc in the sky, our lives have a kind of narrative arc that we follow, compelled by desires, wishes, hopes, fears, are all that are contained in images that move us that speak that are not just literal images, but have some kind of symbolic power and connect us to something that feels real. You know, when you have something that really moves you, you sit, you might say something like, this is real, you know, what do we mean by that, I'm really moved. This is this is what feels real or right to me. Usually in saying something like that there's usually a vision or an image that we are following or pursuing.

So the Sun Pluto, Pluto, being the lord of the underworld of death, and rebirth is like the sun going setting in the west every single day, going deep into the underworld, and then being reborn again, very much like the Easter story and the ritual of Easter in our lives, whether it's for the spring, or it's the Christian crucifixion and resurrection. This idea that the Sun dies, and is then reborn, that we need powerful visions and images that compel us in our lives, that sometimes we go through like a dark night of the soul, and the image or vision dies or falls apart. We find that it's no longer compelling or we, we find that there are demons living in the shadows of our ambitions, something like that. And then by encountering this darkness, or by losing our vision, we come to find it again. And this is like a recurring part of life. We go through this, we see it in nature every day with the sun literally rising and setting but we go through it time and time again, we have a purpose, an image, a compelling plotline that we follow, and then we lose it, we lose the plot, as they say, and then we have to find it again.

So here's some things to think about when it comes to the Sun, Pluto and the idea of having a vision for our lives and the death and transformation of the visions that we hold at different times in our lives. There are two kinds of vision that we generally are dealing with from Jung's perspective and from the perspective of I think, mystics throughout all ages, there's a literal vision and there is a symbolic vision. I'm gonna tell you a story that I heard from CS Lewis originally, who wrote the Narnia Chronicles, and was definitely a symbolic thinker. He wants to he told the story, and I think it came from another author that he liked. But the story was of a man who goes out into his backyard and there's a shed in the backyard, like a garden shed or something like that. And he walks into the shed, and, you know, there's a hole in the tin roof of the shed, through which a beam of light is coming down. And that beam of light is descending and it's falling on the ground. And if you walk into that shed, there are two different ways you could look at that light. One is you could point at it and say, Look, there is a literal beam of light, there is a literal beam of light. And that would be a kind of literal way of looking at that beam of light. But for the symbolist, for the symbolic thinker, who is always looking at things as a medium, through which or by means of which to connect with the divine or that which is numinous and transpersonal. That person walks into the shed. And rather than just saying, oh, that's just a beam of light, that's all it is, they step into the beam of light, they look up and out through the beam of light into the sky, above the shed through the hole in the roof. And that beam of light becomes the medium by means of which they see the sky or they see nature, they see the bird, the bird up in the tree or something.

So in our everyday lives, we generally suffer, if we can, if we were only walking around the world and looking at things and pointing at them saying, you know, there's a rock, there's a tree, there's a bird, you know, there's a person, this is what happened in some literal concrete way. I'm not shocked, for example, that one of the most popular words is right now, quite literally, is the word literal. You know, everyone says literally this, literally that. If we walk around, pointing at things, and just naming them, that's a kind of literal view. And it is that kind of view of ourselves of our lives of the goals of our lives that are most precarious, because that kind of view is most fragile. It is the kind of view that gets most easily disturbed or even destroyed by a Sun Pluto transit. But for the symbolic thinker, for the person who sees by means of the things in the world, sees through them. That is the symbolic vision.

And the sun Pluto transit is always every time it comes around, I'm amazed at how it in the Sun Pluto invites me back into the beam of light to see through it, to see by means of it. And it says, Hey, these things you've been banging your head against in the world that you live in. The reason that you're banging your head against them is because you're treating them like they're just literal things. And that there means to some other literal end. Instead of looking through them having a way of seeing the world and seeing through the world, like everything in the world is a beam of light. And if you step into it, you can see what the thing is. But you can also see by means of the thing the birds the trees, nature, relationships. So symbol if we live a symbolic life symbol becomes the means by which we see. Now, in order to relate to symbols mean it's nice to say, oh, symbolic thinking rather than literal thinking, what does that mean? Well, I want to read you something. This is from a book that I'm really enjoying right now called Religious But Not Religious: Living a Symbolic life by Jason Smith. He is a Jungian and I'm really appreciating his book right now.

I want to just read you a section he says this: "The very nature of the symbol makes it difficult to define or describe a symbol as more than just a particularly elaborate or esoteric image, and it is so much more than simply an idea expressed in image form. It is rather the expression of a field of psychic energy. As I noted earlier, this field can manifest through images thoughts, feelings, behaviours, situations and objects. A symbol then might be thought of as the expression of a unit of life energy. It is for this reason that Edinger suggested that it was important to approach a symbol as a living thing. Put another way a symbol is not something to be interpreted, but rather something which one enters into a relationship. Through the encounter with symbols, our psychological system is infused with a vitalizing energy - here's Pluto and the sun - of vitalizing energy that supports and furthers our engagement with life versus if you don't have it, in which case the sun Pluto can make you feel like you're dying. When an individual is in a conscious relationship with a symbolic dimension, life is meaningful and abounding with the energy of purpose. There's Sun Pluto again, Jung sums up all that has been said about symbols in this chapter in succinct fashion and a quote from a seminar titled The Psychology of Kundalini yoga. Jung says quote, a symbol then is a living Gestalt, or form the sum total of a highly complex set of facts which our intellect cannot master conceptually, and which therefore cannot be expressed in any other way than by the use of an image. The symbol could be imagined as a kind of Horizon it points to what is not yet but could be. It reminds us of a wholeness that is absent but yet always present. It draws our gaze past the boundaries of our merely personal existence to the transpersonal depths of our being. So there's the transformation of vision to a transpersonal vision to something more than just literal sight. This is the sun Pluto. This means, of course, that the symbol expresses more than we can know. It is too big for the intellect alone as it cannot be reduced to a unit of knowledge, we encounter the symbol but never grasp it. Just as we do not know a spectacular sunset we stand before it and are moved by it. At the same time, the symbol allows us to know what ultimately cannot be known. It allows us in other words to know but not know, we know in the sense of being related to what is symbolised, but we do not know in the sense of possessing definitive knowledge." Isn't that the same in our relationships? Isn't knowing someone that you love? Isn't there so much about that, that has to do with being drawn into something that we can't, you know, possess definitive knowledge of, you know, what is intimacy, it's being more deeply related to that which we also cannot possess with definitive knowledge. It's not the best description of what it means to fall more deeply and deeply in love with someone whether it's a child or a lover. So in the same way, a symbolic life is something that draws us into intimacy which is closeness without definitive possessive knowledge of some kind of certainty of the kills the actual space in which intimacy needs for its existence.

"As long as the symbol remains open to the reality to which it points it conveys this knowing this relationship with the unknowable, the symbol is the means by which one can be related to a more comprehensive reality. But when the symbol is taken as a sign, when it becomes closed, then the communication of that larger reality is foreclosed. The symbol itself is not the larger reality but the means of its mediation to our consciousness. However, the symbol cannot contain the whole of what it symbolises, which always finally outstripped any attempts at expression. Although it is the best possible expression of this reality, yet it remains a partial and imperfect one." Isn't it amazing how in relationships is the same thing you have a really deep romantic, beautiful encounter with your lover and it's it somehow pulls you into almost like a oneness with them. It as soon as you taste it, you it's gone. And you're back to the separation between the two of you. But that separation is not a problem. It's a space in which to keep drawing together. You know, so, we need symbol because seeing the world symbolically is a way of drawing us into the transpersonal and then drawing us back like a dance back and forth. That's that's we need our life is looking for intimacy, not certainty.

"It exceeds all forms and containers symbols connect us to wholeness, but they themselves are partial. This is true, for example, that primary symbol from almost every religion that is used to express the ineffable reality of life the symbol of God. It is well understood by theologians that the experience called God always exceeds whatever can be said about God. He goes on for a little ways, but at the end, he says this a symbol becomes a symbol when it involves us, when it facilitates our participation in the reality to which it points. The encounter with a symbolic dimension then does not lead to a life of mere objective evaluation or kind of disembodied intellectual understanding. It is rather direct subjective participation, because it is a function of relationship the symbol is something to be lived with not possessed something to be contemplated not studied something to be nurtured, not mind for its treasure. Our attitude needs to be one of discovery and not interrogation, of love and not merely of logic."

This is what the sun Pluto seeks the sun Pluto seeks the A meaningful, deep transformative encounter. And it's it's trying to affect our vision of what we're looking for as well as what we can actually experience that is real, that that can move us. We sometimes say it changes things that transforms things, but that often that kind of language plays into the it's transforming something as if I'm a goal in process. By transformation, we really mean the dance of intimacy with life itself. Well, so symbol a symbolic life is the kind of vision that the sun Pluto can give us. But if you're not living a symbolic life, then it can be quite a heavy experience because it will deliver the deathblow to some set of literalism some set of ambitions that are lacking intimacy, some certainty that's lacking depth and curiosity. It will, you know, in a sense, it will blind us so that we can see and that you have to be really careful about that with the sun Pluto.

But how do we live a symbolic life? Well, he goes on in his book, this book called religious but not religious to say that we need ritual. Ritual is the means by which we relate to symbols. So for example, how is it that I'm able to go out into the world and interact with the symbols in the world and step into those beams of light and see through them? It's because I have a language like astrology, right? Astrology is a ritual form of language. It's a way it's a gathering of meaningful symbols into a whole such that I can ritually relate with them by studying transits talking about them, having you know, maybe astrological deities on my altar, etc. So we need ritual in order to relate symbolically.

"Religion," he says in his book "is the meaningful arrangement of symbols." And it's like a it's like a little world that you can go into that when you go into it gives you a kind of symbolic language lens through which to see and experience the world and hence to have intimacy with God or with a transpersonal. Well, religion is then a medium for, for symbolic, ritualistic participation in reality, that's ideally what religion is people always ask me is astrology a religion? Well, yes, it is. Of course it is. Religion is what does the word mean? The, from the thing, it's a Latin religio, which means to reconnect, as in things that have been disconnected, that need to be bound back together, every day. It's not that we're, we're not we need to bind things back together, because we're so Lost and Damned and fallen and effed up. No, we need to reconnect. Because we're like lovers, the reality is like a lover. And the desire to come together is essential. It's a part of our you know, it's like, our heart is just beating and saying, Please connect me with, with the divine with the beloved. And as soon as we do, and we have an intimate experience, you know, we step back, it's like a dance, we come together, we step back. And when we step back, we need religion, to reconnect.

And what is religion, religion is like, knowing a certain, it's gives you the instructions about what the dance step looks like, it looks a little bit different in, you know, Buddhism, and Christianity and yoga, and there's different, there's different dance steps. But the idea is that they're ultimately helping us to see life symbolically to enact ritual, participatory, meaningful relationships with the world with the people and beings and events in the world around us. And in doing so to reconnect again, and again, and again, not because we're separate, and we need to be joined forever in a Static State of Union. But because in reconnecting, the intimacy deepens, the love deepens. And we also become more comfortable with those spaces in which we feel a part, but have to reconnect again, we understand that it's part of the process, a meaningful part of the process. And then our enactment of ritual, our way of symbolically thinking is surprising, new, interesting, fun. We love it, there's not one side of the coin that's better than another. To know to the extent that we don't have a meaningful arrangement of symbols in our life, it's much more likely that ritualistic experiences which we need to connect with the transpersonal will come in by means of seizing our consciousness. And they become it becomes very destructive, in a sense, because it has to interrupt our literal sense of things and our literal sense of control and our literal ambitions and our very limited way of seeing things which is objectifying and lacks depth lacks subjectivity. It lacks participant participation Mystique, it lacks all of that.

So because we're lacking that where we are the walking Dead in the sun Pluto will come through and hit us hard in order to wake us up. It will force us into a ritual experience, life will bring you to your knees, which is, you know, a ritual, whether you know it or not. And all of a sudden it's like, well, you know, the dance partner is not going to allow for us to pretend as if it's not there, you know, so sudden Pluto comes through and that's what you have to that's the one thing about some Pluto you got to be careful of is that to the extent that you're not meaningfully engaging with symbols and rituals in your life, it is much more than likely that the ritualistic experiences which the soul is crying out for all the time, will come in through crashing the party of you know, a dulled consciousness, one in which we can't see.

We're made to see something rather than consciously choosing the act of transformative vision. That's Sun Pluto as well. Now, again, people ask me is astrology a religion? Can it be a religious experience could the symbols of astrology be something that helped me draw closer to life to God to that that which is transpersonal, of course, it's a religion insofar as it is a meaningful arrangement of symbols ritualistically, used, like our little calculations, and our transits that I slap up on the screen, and these meditations you listen to or the way you look at charts, or talking to other people about their charts and helping them understand it. These are ritual engagements with symbols that help us to feel and sense the presence of the Divine, the transpersonal are in our everyday lives. So yes, if you use astrology in this way, then it is a religious experience. You don't have to be saying you have to put a tattoo on yourself and say, I am the astrologer, I am an astrologer, this is my religion, those the more that we try to even literalized our connection with any kind of religious experience or set of symbols and collection of symbols, the more that you try to identify with them, literally, the less that the religious experience itself, whether it's yoga, or Christianity, or astrology, or anything, has the power to draw you closer to the Beloved, inherent in all things, it just, it'll stop doing it, the more that you try to literally identify with it. And that is really at the heart of this religious but not religious book.

Astrology without ritual. Now, if you take astrology, and you have no ritual involved in that, it's just well tell me what's going to happen. I just want to know the literal events that are going to happen or I want to know something about my literal psychology and how I'm quote unquote, wired, then you're not giving your space to relate to events symbolically, or relate to your own behaviour, mind thoughts and patterns of behaviour symbolically, if astrology is not putting you into a position of relating with yourself or with reality, symbolically, and you're just using astrology to glom on to your literal attachment to yourself, or your literal attachment to events, and, you know, that's not astrology is not serving the ritualistic religious transpersonal function at that point. And it's easy to slide into, like, even as an astrologer who really likes to think of himself as spiritual, you know, there, it's very easy to slide into, okay, like, I just need the astrology to tell me something, you know, that I'm literally concerned about. But it's so much more meaningful, when, like, for example, yesterday, and we just stupid simple example. Mercury's conjoined Uranus.

Yesterday, we had Easter over at our house, a bunch of family members and stuff like that are all here. And I realised as Mercury was conjoining, Uranus and Taurus that I was having a long conversation about electric cars, and whether or not self driving vehicles will ever be a thing with my wife's aunt. And okay, so that's a simple, stupid thing. But when I reflect on that as an astrologer, I had to go use the bathroom, so I'm in the bathroom, and then I'm like, reflecting on it. Also, the bathroom is like my place of recharging myself briefly, when there's big crowds of people. I love my family, or just sometimes I get little drained. So I'm in the bathroom, and I'm like, okay, just recharging and all of a sudden, I realise the sun and I'm recharging my battery, there's Sun, Uranus, I'm thinking about car batteries, and I'm thinking about, you know, electric cars, self driving cars, the future of technology, green energy, blah, blah, blah, and all of a sudden I go, Mercury, Uranus. And in that moment, life to me suddenly feels magical. Because the gods just visited me right there. And it's that it's that feeling that I'm close to something that something is here with me that I'm not alone, that life is magical that there is something spiritual pervading everything. That is the connection that we seek.

That's why we use astrology, Sun Pluto, for many people transforms their lives, it up ends their lives in order to reconnect them to that sense of something numinous vital, that's why we say it's death and rebirth because it's regenerating our sense that life is deep and mysterious, and profound, and soulful and be connected to something dammit, you know? So, not to take these things literally. It's not that the, the cosmology of astrology is meant to be taken literally. Right? Listen to what CS Lewis wrote in the discarded image, one of the last books he wrote in his career, and in this book, he writes at length about the value of the ancient astrological, cosmos, the cosmos of the heavenly spheres. Here's, you know, more or less a modern Christian man talking about the imaginative religious value of that model. Now, he's arguing for it still having relevance and importance to day. But he wants to clarify that he's not saying that that means that he believes we should discard you know, the empirical understanding of the cosmos that has led us to understand that sun is at the centre, not the earth, blah, blah, blah. So listen to what he says.

"I hope no one will think that I am recommending a return to the mediaeval model, I am only suggesting considerations that may induce us to regard all models in the right way, respecting each and idolising none. We are all very properly familiar with the idea that in every age, the human mind is deeply influenced by the accepted model of the universe. But there is a two way traffic. The model is also influenced by the prevailing temper of mind. We must recognise that what has been called, quote, a taste in universes is not only pardonable but inevitable, we can no longer dismiss the change of models as a simple progress from error to truth. No model is a catalogue of ultimate realities and none is a mere fantasy. Each is a serious attempt to get in all the phenomenon known at a given period and each succeeds in getting in a great many, but also no less surely each reflects the prevalent psychology of an age almost as much as it reflects the state of that ages knowledge. Hardly any battery of new facts could have persuaded a Greek that the universe had an attribute so repugnant to him as infinity. Hardly any such battery could persuade a modern that it is hierarchical. It is not impossible that our own model will die a violent death, ruthlessly smashed by an unprovoked assault of new facts unprovoked as the Nova of 1572. But I think it is more likely to change when and because far reaching changes in the mental temper of our descendants demand that it should, the new model will not be set up without evidence. But the evidence will turn up when the inner need for it becomes sufficiently great. It will be true evidence, but nature gives most of her evidence in answer to the questions we asked her. Here as in the courts, the character of the evidence depends on the shape of the examination, and a good cross examiner can do wonders. He will not indeed elicit falsehoods from an honest witness. But in relation to the total truth in the witness's mind, the structure of the examination is like a stencil. It determines how much of that total truth will appear, and what pattern it will suggest."

I love that so much. There's so much you could say about that. And I don't want to gild the lily. You know, I heard someone say that recently. That was that's a really cool phrase. But what I will add to this is just you know, as a little bit of interpretation in case it was hard to follow. One of the things he's saying is that the model, he argues all throughout the book that the ancient model of the cosmos that astrologers used, the reason that it is still so valuable is because it includes within the universe, divine powers, you don't look at the planets and just see physical objects with velocities and speeds and orbital patterns. You see Gods, you see thoughts moving in the mind of God. You see numinous realms that belong to the gods. And this, whether it's literally true or not, speaks to the fact that we need we need in the way that we look at things, we need connection to something transpersonal and there's any problem with our modern model of the cosmos, it's not so much that it's empirically inaccurate. It's that it's spiritually and imaginatively bankrupt. And that's why astrology is serves such an important role in our everyday lives is that astrology takes us into an imaginative, meaningful set of symbols that we can have ritualistic relationship with that can keep our vision alive, so that when sun Pluto can As knocking on the door, you don't feel like you're being annihilated just so you can get back to a place where that vital sense of intimacy and depth is there once more, we need that vision of things every day. That's why I love astrology. And that's why I feel that if we use astrology appropriately, we never need to get bowled over by a sun Pluto transit it comes and it's just one more means by which we see that thing we're all in love with.

So that's what I've got for you today. As always, please like and subscribe if you enjoy this video. It helps my channel grow. Share your comments in the comment section, click on the notification bell for updates. And we will see you again tomorrow. Lots of good content to come this week. Really looking forward to it. We're going to start looking at Venus coming into Jupiter and Neptune. That's a big one and the eclipse season coming up at the end of this month. So really looking forward to the week ahead. Take it easy, everyone. Bye.