posted June 20, 2005 09:56 PM            

From Steven Forrest's "The Book of Pluto:

quote:

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PLUTO IN THE ELEVENTH HOUSE
THE ELEVENTH HOUSE ARENA: Networking; Group Identification; Setting Priorities
THE ELEVENTH HOUSE PITS: Social Overextension; Wasting Time with the "Wrong Crowd"

IN THE TRADITION...
...the eleventh house is "The House of Friends." This title, in my opinion, is a misleading linguistic carryover from long ago, one that can still vex and confuse modern astrologers. "Friendship," in the true eleventh house sense, bears little resemblance to what contemporary people mean by the word. To us, a friend is someone with whom we experience a sense of connection and rapport, someone with whom we share our feelings, fears, and dreams. Friendship, in essence, implies love.
Not so to the astrologers of long ago. What was at stake in the eleventh house was not love at all, but rather a sense of "common cause." Our "friends" were those with whom we chose to cooperate in order to attain certain mutual aims. If we happened to like those people, that was only a pleasant footnote.
Such "friendship" is an inescapable aspect of civilized life, even today. Perhaps, for example, you join a church. Presumably, you wish the church prosperity and well-being. Unless you've recently won a large contest, you're probably not in a position to guarantee that prosperity single-handedly. No problem. Others in the community share your aim; together you can make the church cook without placing undue strain on any one person.
You are experiencing an eleventh house "Friendship" with the other church members, even though we can assume that there are many among them with whom it would not occur to you to have dinner. Human nature being what it is, we can probably go a step further and say that among these "Friends" there are a few who set your teeth on edge. Thus, a sense of one's own aims and priorities has primacy in our understanding of the eleventh house... especially those aims and priorities which we would be hard-pressed to achieve on our own. If our values and direction are clear, we are in a position to choose our group associations wisely; if they are unclear, a life-blurring note of randomness enters into that part of life, and we become overextended socially and rendered shallow by it.
What if you were born with Pluto in the eleventh house?

YOUR HIGH DESTINY
There is inherent in life some tension between achieving results and being a nice person. This is a delicate insight, and can easily be used as a shelter for scoundrels. Our aim here is certainly not to justify cruelty and insensitivity; only to recognize that no one in a position of active leadership could conceivably avoid frustrating and annoying some of the group members some of the time. A CEO might have to lay off workers in order that a company remain viable; if he or she does that in a cavalier way, it's fiendish ruthlessness. But if he or she fails to have the courage to make such a decision and as a result the whole company goes down a year later, the calamity is magnified.
What truly energized, creative person has never been accused of selfishness? Ask the novelist who ignores friends sometimes in order to have time to write. Ask the rock band what the neighbors think of the noise. As the proverb has it, you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs.
The realization of your High Destiny depends upon getting comfortable with this kind of moral relativism. For a person with a conscience, it's no easy task. One immediate comfort: eleventh house structures tend to "bloom late." That is, they tend not come into full biographical expression until mid-life. But one point is certain: your destiny involves group action — you cannot do it all alone. And in those groups, while you may not be the overt leader, you will be asked to be the one who "names the demons" when leaving them unnamed would destroy the group's effectiveness.
That the realization of your own goals involves this kind of thinking is only part of the point. To get to the heart of the matter, we must go further.
There are human enterprises that call for the joined efforts of many creative, feisty, independent people — Plutonian types. Naturally, the ego-wars that can arise when such personalities attempt to cooperate can be spectacular. Your high destiny lies in helping that particular kind of team endeavor. As your story unfolds, increasingly you find yourself in such politically sensitive positions — and politics, as we use the word here, are what inevitably unfold whenever two or three strong, independent personalities are joined together for very long. You are asked, covertly or overtly, to be the "psychologist" who foresees and averts explosive interpersonal friction, or who sorts it out once it has erupted. Diplomacy has a role here, but not so great as the role played by your own Plutonian capacity to confront people, to challenge them, to compel them to honesty, and to reconcile them with the realities of networked effort.

YOUR DISTORTING WOUND
Being the one who tells the assembled tribe the hard truth is not always consistent with good health. People like lies; just look at history. And they have been known to punish anyone who dares challenge the lie.
We can go further. We all get chills looking at newsreels of Hitler stirring up the crowds in Berlin in 1939. Or thinking of the latest urban riots. Crowds have an insanity that transcends the insanity of individuals. A hundred thousand people chanting a slogan — even one with which I agree — is a sight that terrifies me…..in part because it stirs up a part of my deep genetic self that knows how to go ballistic with the tribe, to stampede, to go berserk, to charge the cannons, to forget individuality, moral values, subtle paradoxes, tolerance.
In many ways, the world is a hell-hole. But the people in it are generally not so bad. It's an eternal paradox. We're better individually than we are as groups. What proportion of the human family is actually personally guilty of murder? Rape? The violent abuse of the innocent? How many have even come seriously close to that kind of step?
God knows, the whole point of this book is that it is dangerous to be naive, but I still feel that we are looking at a distinct minority of individuals who've actually committed such crimes. Nations don't fare so well. I can't name a single one that doesn't have the blood of history on its hands. There's a sort of moral food-chain here, with nations at the bottom and individuals at the top. In between, in ascending order, we observe communities, cliques or sub-groups, extended "families" of friends or relatives, literal families, and deep friendships. The order may well vary in given situations, but the point is simple enough: the larger the group, the more pronounced the tendency of that entity to run amuck.
Your Distorting Wound? You've tasted the bitter, demonic side of group-consciousness, and it terrified you. As is usually the case, we must explore many possibilities here. At first glance they bear little resemblance to each other, but upon scrutiny the common Plutonian themes emerge.
Maybe you were born into a group that had gone mad with some form of hatred, darkness, powerlessness, or addiction. Or maybe, in your naivete, you fell into such a group voluntarily. Intense racism of any flavor would provide a good illustration. So would extreme class-hatred or gender-hatred. In one wounding scenario, you simply soaked up a lot of poison there. In another, something in your spirit internalized a profound suspicion of group-consciousness.
In still another scenario, you saw through the horror quickly enough, but saw no ready exit from the group identification. So you learned to isolate yourself, to become something of the lone “steppenwolf.”
Perhaps you were actually the victim of a group's unconsciousness or madness — and again, "group” here basically means any combination of three or more people focused on some common aim, even if it's only survival. We could be talking about a scapegoating family system as easily as a group of mean kids persecuting you in junior high school. Not to mention a nation dressing you in a uniform, filling your head with glorious lies, and sending you off somewhere to blow the brains out of strangers.

YOUR NAVIGATIONAL ERROR
Knowing the dark and potentially vicious side of group-consciousness does not make it any easier to wave a red flag in front of the group. All through history, truth-sayers have been victims. Something inside you understands that idea viscerally. Even in "spiritual" groups, how many times have individuals kept their mouths shut in the face of the “guru's" sexual or financial predations? Or opened them — and been ostracized? How many "prisoners of conscience" are rotting in jails today?
Naming the group-shadow is perilous business. "Maybe we're being too hard on black people/white people, men/women, the rich/the poor. Maybe we should look at the parts of ourselves that need some scrutiny and healing." It's a good formula for crucifixion.
Trouble is, your High Destiny lies down that road. Not crucifixion! But truth-saying and group-healing. Your Navigational Error is that early experiences, wounding you unconsciously, could lead you to shy away from such an active, confrontive involvement in society. You could make a high virtue out of self-sufficiency, focusing everything on the achievement of independence. You could attempt to be content just "taking what you need" from the group (corporation; church; organization; crowd of friends), and "keeping your mouth shut when it wouldn't do any good to open it."
There's dullness and emptiness down that road — always those are the results of unrealized Plutonian force. But worse: even when left unconscious, Pluto in the eleventh house will still make itself felt biographically. Here we find the person who unwittingly winds up in a morally-compromised position: the "team-player" secretary shredding incriminating documents, the "team-player" prison guard who turns his back on violence then denies that it occurred to keep himself free of reproof, the police officer who knows about bribes but keeps her mouth shut out of respect for the "Code."
Anything in the eleventh house gains power as we mature. With Pluto there and with navigational errors compounded and uncorrected, you wind up feeling weak, ashamed, and bitter. Thank God there's a better way...

YOUR HEALING METHOD
The world is full of things in which we can believe. Many of them are charged with high passion: issues of justice, of environmental sustainment, of politics. Spirituality: who could live fully without it? We might say the same for Art and for the Pursuit of Knowledge. You can't get involved with all of them, at least not in the consuming way that Pluto demands; there's not enough time. But you can choose the ones that fill you with the deepest fervor. Down that committed road lies your healing method.
Find what you believe in. Find others who are devoted to the same cause or principles. Join with them, and together begin to advance the precepts or values you share. Natural alliances arise; friendships in every sense make themselves felt. Projects present themselves.
And that's where the healing really begins.
Even among your natural allies, there are differences. No human being exists without a Shadow-side. In any group, there will sooner or later emerge tensions, competitions, scapegoating, and sabotage. And they can destroy the worthy aims that brought the group together. This is where your natural skills and instincts can really shine.
If you've chosen the group wisely and consciously... it will still be a political mess! But you'll deal with it effectively. Why? Because you'll speak with the force of moral authority. Your whole being will be behind the words. When the issue is one that rattles and engages your soul, when you simply cannot experience dissociation and distance, there's fire in your eyes and in your words that makes you impossible to ignore.
Feeling that moral force in yourself — and watching its impact upon others — is the heart of what heals this part of your life. You can do it; the question is, will you do it?

THE ENERGIZING VISION
We live in a society that has made much of individual initiative, at least in principle. Culturally, we are taught to value the solitary, courageous person who bravely seizes an opportunity. As Myths go, it's a good one I suppose. But the larger truth is that we are highly social creatures. Much of what humankind can point to in pride has been accomplished only because of our capacity for complex social organization. If Michelangelo had needed to build the Sistine Chapel single-handedly before he painted it, he might not have lived long enough to chisel David out of the marble as well But there was something special about Michelangelo himself; deconstructing him simply as an "expression of his times" leaves out a quality of uniqueness and vision that was his alone.
Paradox: We humans may be “creatures of the hive,” but we are not just that. Individual genius and initiative interacts with social structure; civilization results. Each piece of the paradox needs the other — and the marriage isn't an easy one! Along with human genius comes human uncooperativeness and pigheadedness; we're social, but we're also rather hard to get along with.
It's that volatile combination that makes us human. Ants may have a more stable, harmonious society, but they had no Michelangelo and no Renaissance. They didn't go from Kitty Hawk to the Moon in sixty-six years.
For humans to function culturally as they do, they need people such as yourself— truth-seers, group psychoanalysts, mediators, arbiters — the ones who deal directly with the friction, tension, and confusion that arise when such "cussed monkeys" as ourselves attempt to put together a pyramid — or a newsletter. We need you to keep us more-or-less honest, more-or-less civil with each other, more-or-less on track with our common goals. You represent about eight percent of the population; but without you, culture stops. Sometimes you're the grease in the gears; other times you're the hammer — or the swift kick. Sometimes you'll be called the saint; other times, the heavy. But always, without you, the team goes unconscious, and the ancient maggot begins to chew.....

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Whaddya think -- feedback?

posted June 21, 2005 04:20 PM              

Zala,

posted June 21, 2005 04:31 PM            

The way I took that "8% of the population" thing was thinking that Pluto may be distributed across all 12 houses pretty much evenly, not all 12 signs (since there's no one alive now with Pluto in Aquarius, as Pluto makes one journey around the Sun every 240 years or so!).....

Hi 26T ~

Sure thing, will copy it in tonite for ya. What's new with you and your roomie, last I knew you were thinking about moving?