“We’ve come to an age in which you can no longer call yourself sane unless you have a spiritual life and you can no longer call yourself spiritual unless you’ve done your psychological work.” — Steven Forrest

The Collab of the Century: Neptune x Pluto

Planets are constantly shifting in their geometrical relationships to one another. In astrology, the angles that form and disappear among them are called aspects. Each person’s aspects are as unique and unrepeatable as a fingerprint — with one very weird exception: a “Neptune-Pluto sextile” appears in the birthchart of almost everyone alive today.

That means that those two planets are about 60 degrees apart, give or take a bit, for basically everybody. The only exceptions are people who in their 80s and older. The Pluto–Neptune sextile began forming during World War II, in the mid-1940s, and remains active until the mid-2030s.

Soon we will enter a time when nearly every person on Earth will have the same aspect in their charts!

Inescapably, we must recognize that this obscure astrological reality is the key to understanding our present epoch of human history.

Both Neptune and Pluto move very slowly -- they formed that 60-degree angle in the 1940s and they’ve been more-or-less that way ever since. The situation won’t last forever — they’ll begin to drift gradually out of that geometric relationship in 2032 over the following few years. But even then, children born in 2032 will carry this signature forward in their characters beyond the end of the present century.

The implications of this event are huge, but what does the fish know of the sea? If it’s something that everybody shares, who can stand outside it and describe it to us? That’s where the craft of astrology enters the equation.

The heart of the Neptune-Pluto matter, in terms of the evolution of human culture, is the blending of two previously unrelated notions: our spiritual journey and our psychological work on ourselves. The first is Neptunian, the second is Plutonian. Meanwhile, a sextile aspect suggests mutual benefit, stimulus, and excitation — spirituality is good for psychology and psychology is good for spirituality, in other words.

In short, we are looking at an emerging global paradigm that involves the synthesis of Plutonian psychology and Neptunian spirituality.

We suspect that we may come to a time when the two words become synonymous — or disappear entirely, only to be replaced by some new word that refers to them both at once.

Because of the strange universality of this Pluto-Neptune sextile, essentially everyone on the planet is part of this same evolutionary process now. That covers a wide range of human responses to the possibilities this sextile represents, from the lowest to the highest. For now, let’s concentrate on understanding the higher ground. Later, to keep ourselves honest, we’ll take a peek in a darker direction.

Concretely, the re-emergence of astrology in popular culture itself is one good illustration of the higher potentials inherent in this combination. The Lila app can be understood as a three-way synthesis of astrology with ancient metaphysics and modern psychology. We embrace past lives, psychic phenomena, energy healing, contacts with the spirit world — the whole nine yards of subject matter that would get you thrown out of a modern existentialist/materialist university psychology department. At that level, Lila is purely Neptune, in other words — it involves pure unadulterated human mysticism.

But Lila is also very hard-hitting psychologically. Nobody gets away with taking a “Flight into Light,” so to speak. Here’s an example: let’s say transiting Pluto is squaring your Fourth House Saturn. Maybe that means that it’s time to deal with your underlying anger at your father. Time to forgive him for abusing you? Not so fast — before you can forgive him, you’ve got to get in touch with the part of you that wants to murder him.

We hope you’re laughing. That line makes us laugh too. Forgiveness is pure Neptunian spirituality, and it’s obviously a beautiful, liberating thing. But how do we actually get to forgiveness? The route will probably take us through some emotional minefields. If we are not brave enough to risk threading our honest way through them, we’ll never reach authentic forgiveness. Instead we’ll settle for some virtue-signaling posture with little basis in authentic reality.

Getting such passages through the honest dark and thus into the higher light is what we mean by synthesizing Neptunian spirituality and Plutonian psychology.

The Lila app is flowering under this stimulus, but it’s really just one reflection of a vast impulse that rose like a tide in the collective awareness. Under this sextile we have also seen the emergence of transpersonal and archetypal psychology, integrative medicine, energy-healing, research into reincarnation and near death experiences, and parapsychology as legitimate fields of study. The roots of all of those disciplines are far older — ancient, really. But the popularity and widespread relevance of the practices are part of the present cultural wave.

The Cutting Edge Cohort: The Pluto in Scorpio Generation (1983 - 1995)

All of us have this sextile in our charts, but some of us have it placed very prominently — that naturally ties such people to the cutting edge of this unfolding process. Some of us, for example, were born between late 1983 and early 1995, with Pluto in its own sign, Scorpio. When a planet is in “the sign it rules” like that, it hits everyone at a much higher amperage.

If you have that Pluto-in-Scorpio signature you are simply carrying more of the juju of the psychological side of this revolution. You are helping to establish a new human relationship with the unconscious mind — and, really, a new relationship with many things we humans have been so scared of for so long that we have demonized them: sexuality in all its forms, extreme altered states of consciousness, and a new relationship with the ideas, values, and practices associated with death, for just a few examples.

If you were born between 1983 and 1995, you’re sitting down to dinner with those demons, brave souls — and thank you for that. You are an essential part of this wider evolutionary process. Some of you will be casualties of it. Some of you will be the wisest and psychologically bravest humans who have ever lived.

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