Pluto in the 12th House. Pain?

This is an excerpt from  Steven Forrest’s  “The Book of Pluto”

Steven Forrest is an American Astrological Counselor, Teacher and Writer. His website: Forrest Astrology

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PLUTO IN THE TWELFTH HOUSE

THE TWELFTH HOUSE ARENA: Spiritual Consciousness; Compassion; Self-Transcendence

THE TWELFTH HOUSE PITS: Suffering; Nihilism; Spiritual Emptiness or Shallowness

IN THE TRADITION...

...the twelfth house is "The House of Troubles." Any planet there would be seen as a source of misfortune — and doubly so if the planet were an inherently "unlucky" one, such as Pluto!

Take heart. We'll present a more uplifting and encouraging perspective on this configuration, but before we do, we must consider an unsettling idea: philosophically, there is an age-old association between spirituality and suffering.

Much illusion must be cleared out of the way before this idea has any relevance to our purposes, but it does contain a kernel of truth. Many of us have observed the phenomenon of a person blossoming into glowing spirituality while battling cancer. That single image provides us with the clue we need: loss, endured consciously and with faith, can be a powerful teacher.

Do we need loss and suffering in order to grow spiritually? That's a delicate question, but one sure insight leaps to awareness: certainly we humans are capable of experiencing spirituality in other, more immediately attractive ways. We might, for example, feel very close to the Great Spirit while opening our hearts to a magnificent landscape, or a transcendentally beautiful piece of music — or to each other, for that matter. Safely we can say that suffering is far from the only path to higher faith.

Still, terrible loss strips us down to spiritual realities faster than anything else. And if Pluto, the planet of much that is frightening in life, lies in your twelfth house, what might that imply?

YOUR HIGH DESTINY

Is it your destiny to suffer more than most of us? If so, than no matter how much spiritual sugar we put on it, you'll probably wind up wishing that you had somebody else's birth chart. Fortunately I can honestly report that I've not observed a particular correlation between this Plutonian configuration and a pattern of catastrophe in the biography.

The best way I know to come to terms with the highest potentials of twelfth house planets in general is to think of them as our "master teachers" — inward spiritual giants that guide us, like kind gurus, into transcendent states of consciousness. Each planetary master teacher promotes in you a certain class of experience or perception which is customized to trigger evolutionary leaps. If you had Venus there, for example, experiences of human love or aesthetic rapture might be the ticket.

But what about Pluto? Here's the planet of Evil and Catastrophe. Does your inner teacher want you to suffer? Or, even more incomprehensibly, to become a nasty person? Not at all. Your inner teacher's goal is far simpler to say: the teacher wants you to deepen your compassion.

Your High Destiny lies in becoming one of those beings on the earth whose mere existence is reminder to the rest of us that, when the day is done, compassion is the purest, noblest spiritual attainment available to any human being.

And how do we learn compassion? By opening our hearts to suffering. Whose suffering? Does it have to be our own? From the human perspective, that question is pressing one. But our urgency in asking it would probably make the angels smile. And their answer, I believe, would be that it doesn't matter whose suffering you're considering. Whether it's yours or that of another being, either way compassion is the highest response that might be invoked.

YOUR DISTORTING WOUND

Imagine you've got a friend who carries a lot of political intensity in her character. She wants you to see a film with her tonight; it's about the gruesome use of torture by the corrupt regime in Wazoowazooland. The situation there is real; forces of sadism and destruction are rampaging, and you really do feel compassion for the people. But the film is heavy-handed. Close-ups of mutilation are punctuated only by close-ups of teary faces. And it goes on and on. For the first fifteen minutes, you are dumbstruck with a mixture of horror and righteous indignation: the very emotions the film-maker set out to invoke. But after a while, you're simply wishing it would be over. Forty-five minutes into the film, you find yourself surreptitiously stealing a glance at your watch. When finally the credits roll, you have been emotionally bludgeoned. You feel numbness, and little else except a profound aversion to hearing ever again of Wazoowazooland or its hapless inhabitants.

The next day at work, someone approaches you with a look of naughty mirth. "Did you hear the one about ...' It's a bad joke, a sick joke, about torture. And you laugh until tears run down your cheeks.

You needed the relief. Subliminally, the film was still with you. It is a psychological commonplace that humor is mostly about dealing with the unthinkable. Most jokes are humanity's way of coping with the darker realities of existence: death, old age, illness, infidelity, sexual problems, catastrophe, accident. And there is no shortage of any of those sources of pain in this world; they abound. Life can sometimes be a little too much like that film about Wazoowazooland.

With Pluto in the twelfth house, you were born with a unique psychic attunement to suffering. Were the world a softer, more gentle place, in your youth, you might have sat beneath the Bodhi Tree, so to speak, and simply entered into a kind of compassionate meditation. But instead what happened was that you were flooded, overwhelmed with the psychic shrieking, whimpering, and wailing of embodied life-forms. And you shut down, at least partly. You had to.

This Plutonian configuration is distinct from the others in that the Wound connected with it can arise in the psyche independent of any particular "wounding event" in the youthful or karmic biography. Nobody had to hurt you personally, in other words, in order for you to be hurt by the synchronous howling of all the loneliness, sorrow, and pain on the planet.

Still, wounding biographical events do have some relevance here. We may find stories of direct exposure to intimate catastrophe in the early life: grandma lives in the family home and endures a long, stretched-out cancer death. What does that atmosphere mean to the child developing in it? Perhaps there is the loss of parent to death, to madness or via abandonment. Maybe a sibling is seriously ill. Perhaps violence touches the home, or the early life.

Whatever the outward story, the real Wound arises not so much from the direct reality of the painful event — as we've seen you're psychically wired to deal with that dimension of life quite satisfactorily — but rather from the impact of other people's adaptations to the difficulty. The child who, for example, sees mom grow hard, unreachable, and steely in the face of sister's leukemia ...he or she internalizes that model. The boy whose dad is full of bitter, black-humorous jokes as a defense against his own tears ...what does that boy learn about manhood?

It would be dishonest to leave this territory without making reference to our numbed-out, violence-mad culture. A child with Pluto in the twelfth house will be seated in front of the TV with the rest of his or her peers, learning to laugh and cheer at bludgeoning, maiming, and murder. We have grown appallingly anaesthetized to the suffering of others; this is the opposite of compassion, and thus, to the extent that you internalized it, this attitude itself is part of your wound.

YOUR NAVIGATIONAL ERROR

Little could be more natural or more instinctual than the avoidance of suffering. We approach pleasure; we retreat from pain. You, me, and a paramecium wiggling on a microscope slide: we all hold that pair of reflexes in common.

And compassion is pain. It may be more than pain; it has subtlety, even nuances of bliss in it. But primarily, overwhelmingly, it hurts to let ourselves feel the hurt of another. To open ourselves to the ache of grief or the ragged edge of fear in another creature is to welcome that energy into ourselves. To make it our own.

Let's be sure that we are speaking the same language here: I am not talking about abstract concern for "world hunger" or "abused children," as laudable as those sentiments may be. What I am talking about is the look in the eye of the panhandler who stops you on the street wanting your spare change. He's human, and he hurts. He presumably hates his situation, whatever his own responsibility for it may be. He likely hates you too, for that matter. Maybe you give him a few coins. But can you give him a moment of eye-contact? A little empathy? Can you stand it?

I don't mean to sound preachy here. And let me hasten to add that most days I can't live up to the standard I'm describing. But what I am depicting is real compassion, and it's an extremely difficult attitude to maintain.

Your Navigational Error lies in slipping too far away from that compassion. The point is that, while you're naturally inclined to feel it, the sheer unpleasantness of the emotion might incline you to shut it down. Maybe you do that by taking refuge in normalcy: give the bum a couple of dimes maybe, then get away fast before he says anything. Maybe you hide in cynicism or nihilism — a real trap with Pluto in the twelfth house. Perhaps humor is your refuge, a kind of black humor that thrives on jokes about grievous loss.

Down that road lurks disaster — and not only because of the evolutionary opportunity which is lost. When Pluto is forced out of consciousness, it tends to express itself biographically. If Pluto's effects are not about your consciousness, they'll manifest in your story, in other words. The point here is a fierce one: if you are hesitant to open up to compassion regarding other people, you increase the probability that you'll sooner or later have ample inspiration to feel compassion toward yourself.

THE HEALING METHOD

Of all houses, the twelfth is the most transcendent — which is to say that of all of them, it has the least direct connection to the visible world. Extraordinary events can take place in that part of being and produce not even a ripple in your outward life. The point is that your healing method here is not so much something that you must do as it is something you must become.

Meditation is the heart of the matter. But meditation is a word that is easily misunderstood. Astrology, if it is anything at all, is a celebration of human individuality. Were I to espouse any particular religious or philosophical position here, I'd be doing a disservice to you, to myself, and to the spirit of what's best in astrology. If my word "meditation" translates best for you as "prayer" or even as "concentration," that's fine.

What I am speaking of is the highly focused and sustained visualization of an image in the mind. The more three-dimensionally "real" the object of the meditation becomes, the more powerful is the healing experience. And for our purposes we must add two more layers: the emotions must be engaged with the image; it must be felt as much as seen. And the image must be one that fills the heart with compassion.

Christians may image Jesus on the cross. Buddhists may see Gautama vowing to serve the world until all beings are liberated. Anyone might image a child, a fawn, a kitten.....young things in their innocence and defenselessness often fill us with compassion. We might visualize a friend who is going through something painful, and let his or her psychic reality into our hearts. And if you want your Pluto-in-the-twelfth-house PhD., maybe you should try visualizing a someone you find antagonistic or unpleasant in that same compassionate light.

The inner work is the real work in the twelfth house; everything else is less important, and tends to follow naturally. Once you have recovered your native capacity to feel compassion, there often arises a strong desire to address suffering in the outer world. In practical astrology, it is not unusual to find people with Pluto in the twelfth house working in hospitals, or prisons, or shelters, or asylums — places where human suffering is at a crescendo. But to frame such work, however noble, as the Healing Method, would be misleading. It is not the healing method; it is only a typical side-effect of the deeper opening of the heart.

THE ENERGIZING VISION

Rightfully we revere our scientists, the artists who make our hearts soar, the comedians who give us laughter, the healers who bind our wounds. But we always reserve a special place for the ones we call "saints" — the compassionate ones who love us wholly and utterly. Sometimes those saints undertake extraordinary feats of service and incidentally garner a lot of attention; Mother Theresa leaps to mind. Others live more quietly, and attract less notice. But even without much prospect for film bios and pilgrimages after they're dead, these saints are precious nonetheless. I believe I've seen such beings once or twice in toll booths on highways, recognized them in a split second of eye contact, and was a quarter-mile down the road before I even knew what had happened.

"Saint" may not be the word you'd naturally use here; somehow "Good Person" just isn't strong enough verbal medicine though, so I'm going to stick with saint. My only regret in using the word is that the churches of every stripe have told a terrible lie over the centuries; they've made saints seem much rarer than they really are, so I seem to be invoking something very exotic when in fact I am not. We've all known a saint or two; life just seems to be set up that way. Caring and support radiate from such people; we turn to them naturally when our burdens are heavy, when we need someone to affirm our basic worth and goodness, despite our guilt, our confusion, our frustration. They don't pity us; that emotion is far colder and more distant than what they radiate. Whatever we may feel inside ourselves, they have felt it too — however dark or abased it may be.

Thus, we expose another lie the churches tell: these saints are utterly human, and utterly accepting of their humanness. What distinguishes them is only the extent to which they have opened to their own humanity. And that openness empowers them to open equally to your humanity or to mine.

To say that with your twelfth house Pluto, you have the chart of a saint — even in the milder, broader definition of the word I am advocating here — would be misleading. There is really no such thing as the "chart of a saint." The cockroach born under the manger had Christ's chart. Sainthood refers to an attainment; a chart refers only to potentials, and read accurately, it describes dark potentials as well as bright ones.

It is more accurate to say that in this lifetime you have the opportunity to attain that level of compassionate engagement which I am characterizing as "sainthood," and to touch people's lives in that intimate, inspiring way. That is your High Destiny, and reaching it is in no way automatic. As we have seen, there are other roads you could go down.

But this high solitary road, maybe the highest road of all, is now open to you, if you choose to travel it...

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More about Pluto here.