Hope you don't mind me saying that I see your essence very clearly in his description.....will be very interested to hear your feedback!
quote:
PLUTO IN THE FIRST HOUSETHE FIRST HOUSE ARENA: Leadership, Personal Impact, Style
THE FIRST HOUSE PITS: Mere Egoism and Power-Tripping
IN THE TRADITION….
….the first house is often called the “House of the Personality.” What’s actually at stake here can be expressed more precisely: the first house represents that part of the Self which we make obvious to the world through our habitual styles of action, behavior, and self-presentation. Think of it as the interface between two parts of your humanness: all the complexities and ambiguities of your deep psyche, and the fundamental requirement of material life that we make visible, behavioral choices.
Someone offends you. Inwardly, you experience dozens of emotions and reactions. Anger. Hurt. Understanding. Contempt. Shame. Transcendent Indifference. Fear. They’re all real. Which inner state will you express? Or more precisely, which state will you express FIRST, as a reflex? The answer is reflected in the natures of any planets in your first house, as well as with the cusp of that house, which we call the Ascendent.
Pluto in the First? Let’s have a look:
YOUR HIGH DESTINY
You’ve probably had the misfortune of serving on committees in which the healthy principles of democracy and consensus exhibited their shadowy sides: endless inaction, lengthy obsession with trivial concerns, deadlock. This downward trajectory is often characterized in its early stages by mutual displays of courtesy, respect, and attentiveness. By the end of the process, we typically observe backbiting, scapegoating, and childish vindictiveness reminiscent of a medieval court. And still nothing is accomplished. At such a time, one often longs for real leadership to appear, the sort of leadership that can quickly cut through layers of verbiage and get to the heart of the matter.
Your high destiny involves providing that kind of incisive direction. Such leadership doesn’t need to be cruel or autocratic, but it is not typically much concerned with being liked. Human society needs its truth-sayers, and if they do well in popularity contests it’s generally posthumously. In times of crisis, society needs men and women of action, self-confidence, and steady nerves…..people, such as yourself, who can make painful decisions in ambivalent circumstances quickly and without looking back.
Such sharpness of impact is not simply about galvanizing groups into focused action; it can just as easily be about punching the energizing, challenging truth through to individuals: telling people what they don’t want to hear, in other words. And it does not need to function in face-to-face mode; it can operate less directly, if the rest of the chart favors such an approach. Examples of that latter possibility might exist in journalism, for one possibility.
YOUR DISTORTING WOUND
The first house is a very sensitive area. A planet there is said to be strong in the birth chart. While we all have Pluto in our charts, it would be fair to single you out as a markedly "Plutonian" person, even from very early in life.
Now, a Plutonian person will tend to see the world through Pluto-colored glasses, and that means that you have always been good at seeing the sorts of realities that make people uncomfortable. We live in a world that's full of threatening realities, some serious, some more trivial, but all taboo. I can imagine you as young child at a family reunion. You've overheard some hushed conversations at home, learned some things that no one intended you to know. "Uncle Jack," I hear you exclaiming before the assembled relatives. "What's a bimbo and why are you in love with one?"
Your taboo-sensitive Plutonian radar picked up a certain mishmash of tension and fascination in your parents' voices as they discussed Jack's romantic proclivities. You were not out to hurt anybody. You had no idea that you had stepped into dangerous territory. But, with Pluto in the first house, your natural instinct for action lay in the direction of exploring emotionally charged realities.
Nobody is born knowing what's taboo; we have to learn it. As a Plutonian person, you had a natural hunger to get at that deeper, less comfortable layer of life. But inevitably you were naive.
How does Uncle Jack respond to your query? Unless he himself was a Plutonian type, there's an excellent chance that he punished you for your question. That punishment may have been a sharp, angry word. More likely it was simply a very awkward moment: a pained, clueless look on Uncle Jack's face, then mom or dad to the rescue somehow.....them looking at least as pained as Jack. You never intended it, but you hurt everyone in that tableau. And that itself was your punishment.
You began to learn that there was something about your nature that people found upsetting, unsettling, or plain reprehensible. You were too young to grasp that certain truths are kind only in certain seasons, and sometimes never. You began to carry your Wound: a secretiveness, an inward intensity not to be shared, a caution about expressing yourself spontaneously.
Carrying the Wound angered you. Sometimes that anger leaked out half-intentionally... you knew how to hurt people, and sometimes you'd do it just to release some venom. Perhaps you stayed on that hurtful road; more likely, if you're the sort of person who'd be reading this book in the first place, you overcame that kind of compulsive angry self-presentation. You just held all that fiery truth inside. But it's still a Wound: a dark, bitter self-contained edge in your character. Maybe you show it, maybe not. To some extent, that depends on the "politeness quotient" in the rest of your chart. But it's there.
In a nutshell: the idea that truth-carrying and truth-embodying should be a source of shame does not occur to a child. You walked into that trap, and were scarred by it.
There's more. Anything in the first house tends to radiate visibly and obviously from the personality. With you sending out such Plutonian vibrations, people around you often let you symbolize that part of life for them. And when they are not at ease with Plutonian realities — a fair bet most of the time — they'll have a tendency to project their discomfort onto you, naming you the "bad" one: you're "too intense," "too psychological," "too sexual," "too morbid," whatever. This scapegoating pattern has likely made itself felt at some point in your life, and it too is part of the Wound you carry.
YOUR NAVIGATIONAL ERROR
Like the beer can (with steel in it) sitting by the compass in our earlier parable, your truth-carrier's scar or your scapegoat's wound can distort your course through life. Essentially, you can hold back too much, or express yourself vigorously and passionately but in pointless ways that have little to do with who you really are and what you really feel.
Until the necessary inner work is done, you are vulnerable to finding yourself in situations where you "know too much" but feel incapable of acting on that knowledge. You may, for example, find yourself working for a company that's cutting corners in terms of environmental regulations. Depending on other aspects of your character, you may deal with that reality by becoming cynical, or by rationalizing, or by justifying your choice to work there and keep silence as a prerequisite to feeding your kids or paying your bills.....as though no other jobs existed.
In all those dark expressions, we see the basic mark of Pluto: in each, you are bound to the truth-suppressing self-containment that is characteristic of the unprocessed first house Pluto Wound. Further, those accumulated inner toxins would then add an unpleasant edge to your off-the-job character. The natural, healthy urge to express the truth thus becomes vulnerable to being charged with anger and then misexpressing itself. A classic misexpression of such energy lies in appointing oneself psychologist to "safe" people in one's life. Without intending it, you might act in ways that are too pushy, especially in terms of other people's sensitive zones. Illustration: you might tell your best friend that the reason she's having trouble losing weight is that her excess pounds are really just armor against facing her discomforts around sexuality. And that might very well be the truth. But is she ready to hear it? And will it help her? And why are you really saying it?
If your nature is less psychologically-oriented, we might see inappropriate assumptions of practical authority over others — the "too much advice" syndrome. We can also observe manipulative behavior — and such behavior is usually successful because of your instinctual knowledge of other people's woundedness and hence of where their vulnerabilities lie.
Underlying it all, there would arise a dark, brooding "existentialist" mood — the inevitable mark of low Plutonian energy.
Let's add that the first house has much to do with our ability to act and to make choices. When you are in balance in that department, you naturally choose to function in Plutonian ways — as someone who is inclined to delve, to penetrate, to ferret out truth... and often to lead or inspire others in that regard. But if the Navigational Error dominates, then you become directionless, and slip into a kind of existential attitude of coping reactively with a meaningless universe.
We must emphasize repeatedly that, when talking about Wounds and Navigational Errors, we are never speaking of immutable character defects; we are looking at psychological twists that can be untwisted, thereby freeing energy for vastly more helpful and interesting behaviors.
THE HEALING METHOD
Going beyond first house Plutonian traps is not polite business. To succeed, you have to take two steps: you must face the dark and you must express what you learn to at least one other human being.
Facing the dark can take many forms. Sometimes — but only sometimes — that means doing deep psychological work on oneself. Anyone who has been through the process of real psycho-therapy, including its bleak terrains, has done it.
Other possibilities exist. I am imagining a person volunteering to work in a hospice. Perhaps she approaches the work with idealism but some naivete, expecting lots of "cosmic" experiences around death. If she sticks with it, she'll have some of those high experiences too — but she'll also see a lot of petty, frightened, dispiriting behaviors on the parts of people who are dying exactly the way they lived.
What will come up in our volunteer as she faces these people? All the dimensions of her Plutonian Wound. She'll face some taboo truths in the hospice to be sure; death is the ultimate taboo subject. But she'll also face cynicism, coldness, and anger in herself, and those are the marks of her own wound: the burden of her own silence.
A young man might undertake a Vision Quest in the Native American style. He goes alone into the wilderness, perhaps with armed with crystals, shamanistic fantasies, and naivete. By the second day of his fast, he is terribly hungry, frightened, empty and vulnerable. He feels his death close by, and it's not very inspiring. His Wound rises up — but perhaps something else rises up in him as well. Perhaps he finds something in himself that is strong enough to face all his primal fears, to name them, and to integrate them.
The point is that, with Pluto in the first house, you were born with a capacity to function decisively in the presence of fierce truths. Since even acknowledging those truths is not common practice, you were shamed and punished for having that capacity. The healing process for you lies in placing yourself in situations where that ability to look darkness in the eye and act consciously anyway is necessary and useful. The hospice image illustrates the idea of undertaking the healing process in a public context; therapy or Vision Quest illustrate its more private face. Either method works.
But both methods only begin the process. We must recognize that the first house is quite social. That is, it pertains to our social presentation of ourselves. To complete the healing process, a first house Pluto person must integrate the experience of the dark with his or her outward, social self — and that's where expressing what we learn to another human being comes into the picture.
In the hospice there's an old man dying of cancer. He's pretending he'll be fine. He's cursing his doctors, his nurses, his family. Nothing is good enough. He's obsessed with money, fears he's being robbed. How do you really feel about him? Well, sadness and maybe even compassion for him might figure in your answer. But anyone who sits with such a curmudgeon on a daily basis is going to have saltier emotions to express as well. The first house Pluto person must find somewhere to express all those thoughts and attitudes, and thereby to integrate that earthy, dark-facing energy into the Self.
THE ENERGIZING VISION
Human culture needs its beads read sometimes. We need people such as yourself who are born with the rare ability to face their own radical fury and their own bleak desolation. We need them, after that personal "descent into Hell," to emerge and help us face the dark in our own lives. You can do it, and you were born for it. You will thrive in an environment where people are up against their most basic issues and fears, willing to face them, but perhaps uncertain of how to do so. When people are ready for the truth, you can step in. You'll help them, of course, but that's only part of the point. The rest of it is that you'll feel alive and energized there.
Something extraordinary happens in you when real human drama unfolds, when people are stripped of their pretenses and posturings and stand naked. Then, they are like dynamite waiting for a match — and the match is a sense of what to do, where to aim all that fire and willingness. The match could be called leadership, and you can provide it. That leadership can unfold in obvious collective ways, such as in a business or a civic group you might influence, or it can be expressed in private, a mind-triggering word uttered to one individual. It might put you in the public eye as a kind of role model, or it might develop more quietly. Those kinds of distinctions can be made astrologically, but only through knowledge of your entire birth chart. Either way, you are at your best in situations of naked honesty, immediacy, and directness. And conversely, you are least comfortable in circumstances where truths are being avoided, hidden behind theatrical veils of form and propriety.
Lindaland
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posted June 20, 2005 08:40 PM
posted June 21, 2005 02:37 PM
I can identify with much of it.