posted June 22, 2005 12:05 AM            

This is an extraordinary chapter. I would like to have your thoughts on how it touched you, after you've read it a couple times.....

From Steven Forrest's "The Book of Pluto":

quote:

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PLUTO IN THE SEVENTH HOUSE
THE SEVENTH HOUSE ARENA: Intimacy; Trust; Partnership
THE SEVENTH HOUSE PITS: Emotional Isolation; Constant Interpersonal Drama
IN THE TRADITION...
...the seventh house is "the House of Marriage." And that's a pretty good metaphor, but what's at stake here is vaster than matrimony. What we explore in the seventh house is nothing less than our capacity to interact intimately with other human beings. It represents the basic "I-Thou" circuit in the human psyche.
“Significant Others" — that's one of those painfully correct, painfully sociological, terms that mark the course of the English language in the last couple of decades. Built into it is the notion that the world is populated by another class of "others," characterized primarily by their insignificance. And it's true, in a way: not everyone we meet in our lives really gets to us. Not everyone is a "soul mate" — and that's the term I like to use here. But I don't define it in a narrowly romantic way, or even in a narrowly happy way. A soul mate, as I use the term, is basically someone who messes with your soul, whose contact with you leaves you fundamentally different than you were before. And the seventh house could fairly be called the House of Soul Mates.
Fall in love. If it goes beyond the courtship stage to a point where you are really beginning to see each other clearly, seeing the shadows as well as the light, then you're definitely in the inner circles of seventh house experience. But anytime you throw in your lot with another person, you're doing it too. Start a business with a partner, burning your bridges behind you: that's the seventh house. Make the bond of deep, committed friendship with all its unspoken promises: the seventh house again. Erotic or romantic interchanges, for all their delights, are by no means the heart of this house.
But what does it mean to have Pluto here?

YOUR HIGH DESTINY
Intimacy is a word that gets thrown around a lot nowadays, but what does it really signify? Perhaps we can get at it more clearly by the process of elimination than by a direct approach. Intimacy is not the same as sexuality, although many people agree that the two get along as well as peanut butter and jelly. It is not the same as spending time together, or living together. We have all observed the phenomenon of two people sharing a roof for decades and still displaying little evidence of real intimacy. It is not the same as "magic," "chemistry," or "electricity" — those words we invent to describe the enormous psychic impact of a soul mate upon us. Such experiences may lead to intimacy, but they are not the same thing.
The passage of time alone won't make intimacy. Sudden tell-all, reveal-all flashes don't create it either, at least not immediately. So what is it? Some combination of all the factors: flashes of scary self-revelation on the part of both people combined with a history of hanging in there together. There is a simple word for this happy, unfolding state. The word is trust.
The realization of your high destiny involves trusting someone else. You cannot do it alone. On the road to self-realization, you pass through unnerving situations in which you must allow another person to be in a position where he or she could choose to hurt you very badly. Let's emphasize here that actually getting hurt isn't the point. It's not obligatory, and only happens of necessity on the unconscious road. What is necessary is placing yourself undefendedly in the hands of another person, and letting that person have an impact on you.
The point is that in realizing your fullest capacities as a human being, you require the catalytic impact of certain Plutonian individuals. And to receive it, you must make the choice to be open to them, revealing your innermost vulnerabilities and trusting the process to develop in ways that are ultimately healing for you.
YOUR DISTORTING WOUND
Truth is a strong medicine and like anything powerful, dosage is critical. Not enough truth, and intimacy founders. We are left with the form of love, but none of the content. Too much truth — that's a more difficult notion, but a valid one. Truth can be told cruelly, or in a crude, untimely way, or with manipulative hidden agendas. Then it becomes at least as damaging as outright lies.
Some experience in one of those categories hurt your ability to trust other people. The paradigms of psychology point our noses toward your “formative" years, leading us to wonder about falsehoods and betrayals in your early familial relationships. Or about the darker uses of truth there. And those suspicions may well represent valid lines of inquiry. But as we explored in earlier chapters, we must not rule out damaging experiences from later in your life, or from previous lifetimes if reincarnation is an idea that works for you.
Somebody lied to you and damaged your capacity to trust. Or somebody used loveless, limited, partial truths as bludgeons on you. Or someone in a position of trust simply failed to say the words that needed to be said. And you cannot heal that wound alone. The effect of this distortion is to isolate you, to hurt your ability to judge the characters of others.
A mother sits with a pubescent daughter, trying to find the words to explain menstruation. She gives up, gives the girl a pamphlet. A father never mentions the "birds and the bees" to his son. In either case, we may feel compassion for the awkward, self-conscious parent. Still, there were truths that needed to be said. And they were left unspoken. That is a betrayal, and the child is hurt by it.
Dad hates mom, but stays with her for the good of the children. There is a Big Silence in the house; the kids know it's there, but not what it is or what it means.
Billy is sixteen. Uncle Harry asks him if he's "getting any" lately. Harry may be intending to create some kind of male-bonding ritual in his remark, but Billy is a shy, sensitive kid. He is shamed by the question. And he likes his Uncle Harry and senses instinctively that something special is supposed to pass between an uncle and a nephew — and that delicate instinct provides the wires over which the Wound is transmitted.

YOUR NAVIGATIONAL ERROR
If the rest of your birth chart suggests a high degree of independence and self-sufficiency, then we would expect this distorting wound to manifest as an exaggeration of those autonomous qualities. That phenomenon might appear wearing a mask of breezy friendliness or a hermit's cold attitude; again, the rest of the birth chart will provide the clues.
If your nature is more naturally interactive and interdependent, then we would expect the wound to express a more subtle pattern: there would be the appearance of intimacy in your life, but close scrutiny would reveal that while you know a lot of emotionally sensitive facts about the people around you, their knowledge of you is limited to material that does not empower them to hurt you. Of course much of their power to help you goes down the same drain.
With an unconscious, unhealed Pluto in the seventh house, there are basically three distinct dark roads available. They look rather different from each other, but they all hold as a common denominator a dysfunction in the trust department.
The first is pure isolation. Here we find the individual who takes a cavalier attitude toward tenderness. Typically he or she speaks a language of cynicism regarding love and sexuality, and may very well use or exploit other people. That exploitation may be conscious, or it may be denied: no matter. The effect is the same: a trail of anger and broken hearts. On that same road we may find a person who simply withdraws completely from any kind of "entanglements," perhaps not hurting anyone but existing in an emotional vacuum.
The second dark road involves simple shallowness. The afflicted person may lead a busy social life, but he or she systematically avoids any possibility of charged psychological reality making itself felt between people. The paradox is that such a person still has Pluto in the seventh house and will continue to draw Plutonian people into his or her life, perhaps challenging the person to open up, or more likely, simply representing some of the bleaker aspects of Plutonian behavior. So here we may observe the "harmless person" afflicted by a long line of traitors, liars, philanderers, and emotional vagabonds.
The third dark road takes the form of endless drama. Here we find the individual who "is simply unlucky in love." A person on this road may very well talk an excellent game when it comes to intimacy and its complexities. He or she seems wise, grounded psychologically, and seemingly conversant with most of the paperback books published on the subject of love since 1938. But love never actually stabilizes in his or her life. Why? Basically either he or she sabotages every relationship, or more likely pre-sabotages them by choosing impossible, unconscious, wounded partners.
In every one of these paths we observe the phenomenon of self-shielding, one way or another. Trust does not develop; it is not allowed to. The mysterious alchemy of lasting love never takes hold. There is no transformation, only pain and the avoidance of pain.

THE HEALING METHOD
Instinctively, we humans are cautious about the prospect of falling from a great height. A person raised to adulthood in flatland would feel the nervous edge the first time he or she peered over the railing of the Empire State Building, even if no one suggested feeling that way. Instinctively, we are sexual creatures. A girl-child and a boy-child raised past puberty in complete isolation, then placed together on a tropical island: What are their prospects for chastity a year later? Pretty dim, is my guess. They may be a little clumsy at first, but they would figure things out. Instinct exists in all creatures, ourselves included. It can be thwarted, controlled, misdirected, twisted.....but it cannot be utterly rooted out.
Abandonment and child abuse are realities, but on a more fundamental level there is a sweet instinct of nurturing and trusting in our genes. An infant depends absolutely on its mother for survival. There is a tender instinct in both mother and child, an instinct that leads to the formation of a bond of profound trust on the part of the newborn.
That instinct is what you must recover. Your healing method lies in first finding someone trustworthy, and then trusting him or her as an act of sheer will.
Clearly, making good choices about whom to trust is critical here. Your natural soul mates are Plutonian people, which is to say they are intense and self-revealing. Early in your relationships with them you will experience a kind of rite of passage in which they bring up serious, unsettling questions. Frank talk about death, for example. Or about sex or aging or fear. Not the sort of material that flies easily at a typical cocktail party. Such soul mates will generally make rather penetrating eye contact with you — that in fact is one of the simplest ways to pick out Plutonian people.
But be wary of their wayward cousins: the power-trippers, the self-appointed gurus and psychologists, the self-involved Walking Wounded who want to thrust their own pain onto you. Telling the two species of Plutonians apart is not hard. High Plutonians will always be willing to listen to you, to share their own uncertainties with you, and to learn from you. Furthermore, they typically have something energizing going in their own lives, something that fills them with intensity and fire. Their lower cousins betray themselves in their inability to receive insight openly. As to their passions, they may have enthusiasms and hungers in their lives, but they tend revolve more around generating appearances than true interest in the intrinsic subject.
Can't find the right people? One possibility is to enter psychotherapy with a well-recommended shrink. Another is to get involved with some public Plutonian activity on your own, and see who you meet there. Volunteer in some front-line capacity: environmentalism, idealistic political causes, shelters for the wounded in whatever form. Plutonian people flock to those venues. Once you've found the right ones, you begin the delicate. scary, time-consuming task of gradually discovering the happy meaning of the words trust and intimacy.
Slowness and patience must be emphasized here. The sudden peak experience of mutual revelation is a glorious part of life's journey, but it is not to be confused with seventh house intimacy. For that to develop, both people must reveal their boring sides, their crazy sides, their foibles.....the whole palette of their humanity. Laughing together is a big part of it. Being miserable and clueless together sometimes is another part. Probably getting through a stupid fight or misunderstanding is another piece. Touch is a huge element. Intimacy is never simply about sharing the best of what we are.....it is about sharing wholeness.
THE ENERGIZING VISION
You were born with an extraordinary capacity for connecting deeply with other people. All those loving, trusting instincts we described in the previous section are actually extra-powerful in you. But something went haywire and they were damaged.….that at least is a way to say it. But there is a deeper truth. In your ascent out of darkness, you return to the bright world of day with more than you had at birth. Your naivete has been tempered; you now have a perception of love far deeper than Adam's or Eve's — or anyone else whose else whose journey has been smoother than yours.
You know how love can go wrong, how we can lie to ourselves and tie our lives in lonely knots. You understand what is at stake when people trust each other.
You know about the presence of the frightened child in all of us, and how that child can sometimes make our decisions for us.
You understand the centrality of our human capacity to be trustworthy ourselves, and you know that it means more than doing what we say we're going to do. It also means listening openheartedly to the howl of banshee in the beloved sometimes.
Intimacy exists between two human wholenesses. And the Shadow is part of the package. When you've done your healing, you understand that notion profoundly and you therefore carry the Mark of the Counselor. You'll be drawn into complex situations as a mediator, bringing people together who might otherwise do terrible damage to each other. You are quite capable of getting paid for that work, although that's far from the heart of the matter. You may mediate in a business context, or among friends, or between lovers. There, you are a truth-seer and a truth-teller, and when people are ready to hear their demons named, they'll be drawn to you.
There is a rightness in that path for you. It will fill you with a sense of meaning, purpose, and fiery enthusiasm. And it is part of your destiny as long as you’re calling Earth your address.

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posted June 22, 2005 06:23 AM              

My problem with trust is true, I’ve been building walls around myself since I was a child - with the help from the adults that let me down. I never really thought about it before, but I do have a big problem with trusting people…so I remain very detached. Because if I let my defences down, they have the potential to do some real damage.

But I always ignored it thinking it was just another Piscean trait - all water signs use different methods to protect themselves emotionally.

“sabotages every relationship”

Sadly, I so do that. I seem to go for the type I’m either gonna lose interest in quickly, or the ones I can’t have.

Either way, I have a new bf more frequently then I have new shoes. Which is scary lol. And I don’t want to keep doing this forever. I mean I don’t want to settle down yet, but this game I’m playing ( and losing ) is getting old.

“Your natural soul mates are Plutonian people”

I’m not sure what that means - does it mean Scorpios? or someone with their Sun in the eighth house?

Anyway, I tried Scorps before…but I guess they were the “low Plutonian” type - seeing they dumped their emotional waste on me till I couldn’t function.

Funny thing is, I always thought I’m better suited with a Cancer, seeing their nature is to nurture. Scorpio ( in relationships ) tend to scare me because they don’t seem to have that warmth that I need - I’m talking about guys btw. They just seem too harsh and strong…while I’m very different. I believe you have to be strong to handle a Scorpio. Like in Sun Signs, Linda wrote “run as if King Kong is pursuing you. He is.” and “the girls who are in danger should be in the next state by now, if they ran fast enough. They’ll thank me some day after they’ve married a nice, safe Libran or Cancerian.”

lmao - I love Libras and Cancers. Anyway, imo a gentle Piscean can not handle a Scorp just like I couldn’t - but I suppose that’s just my experience. However, I do love all Scorps

posted June 22, 2005 06:30 AM              

Pluto here will age slowly and commit later, and need someone more dependable and stable.
Very similar to Pisces/7th, which needs a stable partner to depend on, only Pluto hides it's needs under a layer of bitterness and sarcasm.

Tough placement to take for this Venus lady, but pluto here does make a person wise,