Don't Believe Your Own Astrological Press. (Pluto in Scorpios, This Especially Relates To You Right Now.)

A little astrological prediction: I have a feeling the Pluto in Scorpio generation is going to start getting a disproportionate amount of play by astrologers in the near future. This will coincide with members of the Pluto in Scorpio generation (born roughly November 1983 to November 1995) reaching the ages where they will be taking a stronger interest in astrology and astrological information. It'll be one of those "creating your own mythology" types of things where the reality doesn't quite live up to the hype being outlined astrologically.

This echoes the disproportionate amount of play another Pluto generation has received - the Pluto in Leos. The Pluto placements of these two generations, not coincidentally, square each other, adding to the drama.

We've barely started the long, hard shift in power from Pluto in Leos to Pluto in Virgos, and instead of giving that shift some much needed attention and analysis, astrologers will be (and already are) turning their attention to the Pluto in Scorpio generation: its catalytic power, its transformative potential, how it's going to annihilate social taboos, how it'll absolutely shred every ounce of social facade or personality-level b.s., leaving bloody, raw, yet authentic! souls in its wake.

Personally, I'm not so sure about all that, and I have some issues with any Pluto generation being set up as the all-conquering, mythical generation.

This is how faddish astrology works. It's also how astrology is hijacked so that its energetic force and influence are wasted on things that really don't matter a whole hell of a lot.

Certain events, certain placements, and certain people with those placements are amped up and glamourized, drawing a disproportionate amount of astrological attention, and other events, placements, and people are skipped altogether, creating distortion, imbalance, and a seriously skewed version of reality.

Sorry, Pluto in Scorps. It's nothing personal, but you're not special on this front. As soon as you've been sucked dry as subject matter, as soon as you're not trendy anymore, it'll be onto the Pluto in Sagittarius kids. Or the Pluto in Caps. Or...oh, just WAIT until the Pluto in Aquarius generation comes of age! Then we're really going to see some big things happening on this planet.

Sigh.

It's actually a small minority of people within any generation that takes on the Plutonic work in any truly effective and sustained way. Digging in as deeply and as tenaciously as is required is heavy, frustrating, difficult, enervating, intricate. Often, the energetic commitment is all-consuming. There is no work other than that work. There is no life other than that life.

Committing to the process of letting your soul drive, come what may, committing to really seeing and intuiting the state we're in on this planet and then finding the most meaningful and effective track to address and move through it is a full body, full mind, full spirit endeavour.

Doing the condensed, hard-slog Pluto work - working to change long-ingrained collective dynamics through the personal life - is not all that glamourous. Doing what really needs to be done, what's been neglected by most others, is probably not going to make you famous. It might even get you killed. It doesn't make for a cool digital pic to show off the edgy angles of your post-post-postmodern awareness of it all. There are no guarantees that you'll receive all that much of an earthly reward for it at all, other than the reward of a satisfied soul.

A lot of people go part way. Not many push farther than that. This has been the case with every generation, and I don't see it changing with the Pluto in Scorpios.

So will there be a group of fine and talented individuals within the Pluto in Scorpio generation that really gets it and can really get the job done? Sure. Absolutely. There will be those who see through the pathology of the collective, cutting through it like a hot knife through butter and extricating themselves from it. There will be those who confront head-on the disconnect from and denial of death that run rampant, creating all types of idiocy, superficiality, and distortion. There will be those who see through any form of manipulation, exploitation, or abuse, who can feel out a dirty motive in seconds flat, who confront and head off the unexamined patterns of the collective, refusing to repeat them themselves. But I do think those people will be few.

The glut will fall into the same traps and the same patterns, using the same power plays and the same old Scorpio tricks to maintain the dominant paradigm or some variation therein, however "edgy" it may be.

They've gotten hold of all the "edgy" these days, you see.

Our Pluto placements relate to the ways in which our generation as a whole is manipulated by the powers that be. And the dark, the taboo, the sexy, the forbidden, the occultish and pseudo-occultish, the hidden, the twisted - these are all ways in which the Pluto in Scorpio generation will be manipulated into doing things, swallowing things, and furthering things that are not in its best interests.

Totalitarianism that lets you keep a job even though you have tattoos, pink hair, and are polyamourous is still totalitarianism.

The Pluto in Scorpios have plenty of poison to dig out and many false layers to shed.

Certain members of this generation are going to understand the ways things are oh-so-wrong on this planet because they'll experience the corruption and exploitation first-hand. But so have members of all generations before them. So do members of all generations living now.

The dogma around Pluto generations is ripe for abuse and manipulation - two Plutonic key words. The amping up of this or any other astrological generation is another attempt to create some "super special, super-human" generation of young people, as the "spiritualism" circles of the day love to do. At the tail-end astrological Piscean era, they're begging for an entire saviour generation. This follows in the line of the "indigo" kids, the "crystal" kids, the rainbows, the blue stars, the seventh rays, the Whodads, the Whatzits. (Sorry, got my wires crossed with a little Dr. Seuss there for a minute.)

It's a fairly small and concentrated group of individuals that sees the whole machine and how we're being manipulated within it, that strikes at the roots, rather than becoming consumed by whatever manipulated Agenda of the Day has risen to popularity at that moment.

The members of the Pluto in Scorpio generation have a lot of power to expose the corruption and the to-the-brink-of-human-annihilation situation we have on our hands. But they also have an almost overpowering tendency to get caught up, coerced, distracted, overwhelmed, consumed.

Their power can be misused and abused - or siphoned - quite easily.

Destructive obsessions and misanthropic tendencies can be stoked. Energy can be wasted in the nihilistic narcissism that Pluto and Scorpio do so well.

This generation has a big tendency to be enamoured of its own complexity. There's a tendency to self-absorption that has gone to an extreme I don't think another generation has experienced, facilitated to a great extent by internet, social media, and affordable digital cameras. Distracted by the gratuitous documentation of the absolute minutiae of their personal lives.

With the early Pluto in Scorpios came a sub-generation that was used as a gateway. This sub-generation involved the members who had Chiron in Gemini (1983-1988). The test group. Through this sub-generation's flooded synapses came the initial implementation of constant connection, constant stimulation, constant diversion, constant attention through cellular phones, cheap, accessible internet, iPods, social media, Blackberries, digital cameras, and computer programs designed to manipulate image. Through wounded Gemini circuits came a take-over of minds, bodies, and electrical impulses that has shown no sign of letting up since. And a new, encrypted language has developed within the Pluto in Scorpio generation, reinforcing its insulation.

There are a lot of layers to peel here.

Plutonic/Scorpionic issues of power, corruption, dishonesty, lack of integrity, betrayal, abuse, murder, manipulation, exploitation, oppression, suppression, and social taboo have been here all along. And there have been people working on this stuff all along, committing their lives, risking their lives, losing their lives.

There's a thread of people throughout time, space, and astrological Pluto generation that has taken on the work of deep, core-level change on the planet and has taken it on body, mind, and soul. They've done dangerous work, and for most, it was not a choice. This is about more than paying lip service to it or throwing some money at it. It's about living it, staying true to the course, even when no one is watching, when no cameras are flashing.

To set one group of people up as the most powerful, the most magical, the most catalytic is - to use Scorpio terminology - complete b.s.

To be at the most relevant point for the astrological Aquarian era, we have to shift out of the incessant desire to find and then exploit the next It Generation. This has become a dominant drive within a mainstream paradigm - fueled by the Pluto in Leos - that is enamoured of and obsessed with youth. It's absolute silliness. Anyone who is truly "hip to the now" will not be chasing tween, teen, or twenty-something trends. Aquarius goes beyond age and generation to the common threads that unite us in the struggle toward freedom and improved conditions.

Generation doesn't matter among comrades. It's a team effort. It always has been, and it always will be. The responsibilities, the pain, and the glories are shared.

Scorpio relates to soul lineage, and any member of the Pluto in Scorpios with the benefit of wisdom will understand his or her context within the long line of people working this stuff out. To understand yourself or your generation as something superseding that is to fall for a line that has been used countless times before.

Generational hype is a layer of detritus that inevitably slows the Pluto in Scorpios down, keeping them from their most effective points during this burgeoning astrological Aquarian era as part of the cross-generational, cross-cultural effort, fully aware of their context within that.

We're in a dicey little time on this planet. Those in positions of stolen power are attempting to purposefully replay an extremely nasty historical cycle.

To have any chance of righting this ship, we need all hands on deck. This means all Plutonic types from every Pluto generation, baby to senior citizen.

Through the Pluto in Leo generation, en masse, we had the proliferation of Sun sign and personality-based (Leo) astrology. This was fun enough, but it led, to a certain extent, to an excessive (Pluto) need to celebrate (Leo) certain placements, certain signs, certain personality traits, and certain people as special or important above the others, rather than focusing on how it all works together.

A new, more thoughtful and nuanced astrology has to emerge here, one that works with the real diversity of the astrological system as a symbolic framework of life itself, not just the most sexy or dramatic bits that will get the most web hits or sell the most books.

The astrological idols have to fall.

So Pluto in Scorpios, since you're a group that relates to the death of everything that must die, we might as well start the process with you before it even starts.

Chiron Dips Into Pisces: Yoo Hoo! Not So Fast There, Buckaroos

Ah, yes. Here we are. (And we've been here before, haven't we?)

The Atlantean throwbacks are poised to destroy the world again.

And those with the Piscean understanding of how things work energetically as a whole can see and feel it happening and still haven't figured out quite what to do about it.

This is the Aquarian/Piscean divide we're looking across. At times it seems we're so very close to securing the necessary connection. It's right there, and it seems there's hope that we'll be able to impart the necessary spiritual/soul-level concern and balance before it's too late.

But then in a matter of seconds, we're light years apart again, left exhausted and shaking our heads at the hideous arrogance and the astounding lack of foresight or wisdom behind these shiny, new technologies and hybrids and patented ideas.

It makes me laugh (we're dealing in black humour here, folks) that much of the scientific establishment believes it is so very far advanced, so far beyond the common person's ability to understand, with its carefully crafted jargon and purposefully obscured intelligence. It's as if they feel they are speaking to children, feeding us carefully-chosen, easily-palatable crumbs related to what they're up to behind the scenes...when we already know damned well the whole pie has been corrupted.

See, we know these things because we feel them. Our souls tell us what we need to be aware of, even when we don't have the exact scientific terms for it. And this is how we know just how far off they really are at this point in human history.

We know that the world scientific establishment is working on "proving" things that have been understood through spiritual knowledge and wisdom for millenia. Things that really are so very simple that, yes, children are born knowing them.

But they've got only small pieces of the whole that they're playing with. Combine this segmented understanding of things with excessively masculine arrogance developing blisteringly dangerous technologies, and you've got a highly risky situation on this Planet Earth.

Powerfully simple spiritual truths are passed over for the trendy and the sexy pseudo-cutting edge. BOR-RING! say the teenagerly Uranian charge addicts, spiking their veins with nano-technology and robots controlled by thoughts, colonization of the moon and trans-humanist garbage.

It's the Pisceans who have the understanding of the whole, and this is why we keep going, keep trying, despite exhaustion, resistance, betrayal and physical and psychic danger. The stakes are high, and we know it.

There are certainly some within the scientific establishment who still have a working connection to their souls. These people drive a certain level of tokenism for the spiritual/energetically-interconnected/humanist side of things. They're hipper and more in-the-know on this front than their strictly Aquarian counterparts, and we can be grateful for this. But still, it's tokenism, not the driving motivation. It doesn't penetrate to the top.

Money and power and those who hold them are still in the driver's seat here. Top-down hierarchical agendas still rule the application of these grand technologies and the scientific minds behind them. Thousands of Manhattan Projects going on all over this globe...and much worse. An army of tortured monkeys scream out their warnings from nightmare labs around the world. A billion canaries gasp their last gasps in a billion toxic coal mines.

As we know, all this never bodes well for humanity as a whole.

And this placement, Chiron in Pisces for the next eight/nine years, during the first official years of the Aquarian paradigm, indicates the challenges ahead.

To me, it speaks of the same-old, same-old dynamics of the arrogant and masculine-heavy rushing in where angels fear to tread. Patenting life itself, getting it under the establishment's thumb. Misusing energy and nature in the most horrific of ways with no care at all about long-term repercussions.

Those who hold real Piscean understanding are doing what they can to bring the 12th energy of the zodiac to the decision-making table. They see the massive, gaping holes in understanding (and in ethics) of the Atlantean throwbacks toying with the power to dismantle humanity and all living things.

But let's be honest. The Pisces energy and those who embody it have taken quite a shit-kicking up to now. We're tired. We're a little punch-drunk. We're psychically and physically taxed. We feel powerless and helpless at times, as if we're destined to see a history we hoped we would never experience again repeating.

And our numbers are not as strong as they could be with so many still caught up in useless spirtual hierarchy, materialism and ego, feeding their precious energy and talents into the same top-down control mechanisms. Squandering it in one diversionary, escapist past-time after another.

So these are some of the conditions as Chiron begins its transit of Pisces.

The flip side of the wounding is the healing - related, in this sign, to finally anchoring the spiritual understanding and knowledge we've been carrying forward for so long. Activating the 12th energy of the zodiac, the energy that brings everything back together from wounding segmentation. And seeing this energy properly applied as a motivating force guiding the decisions being made on this planet...little by little.

Chiron is entering Pisces at an opportune time, a crucially necessary time. It dips into the first degree of the sign Monday, April 19 until July 20, at which point it retrogrades back into Aquarius.

This adds just a touch of the Piscean understanding and impetus to the proceedings - maybe palatable enough for even the most arrogant of scientific minds to accept? Let's hope so.

We have to be gentle here, but firm. There is no un-knowing what we know. There is no going back to a more fragmented understanding of humanity and life on Earth. So we hold our positions.

And we're aided in this pursuit as the Sun joins Venus and Mercury Rx in the earthiest of earth signs, Taurus, also on April 19, just as Chiron ingresses Pisces.

In the areas where we had begun to fear we were losing our grip, losing our footing and our connection to this Earth, we're reinforced. Our feet are planted. We fully inhabit our bodies here and draw on their inherent wisdom. Our feet grow roots that tunnel deep into the soil, connecting us to the lifeforce that has sustained our entire physical ancestral lineage.

Safely, stably, in a grounded, earth-connected manner - this is how we proceed. This is the fixed foundation we need as we bring forth Piscean wisdom, insight and understanding in practical application. With the deepest respect and reverence for this planet, the ancient wisdom of its natural timing and cycles and the living things upon it. Like this, putting one foot in front of the other, we're sustained.

It's not so easy, though, to find the trust and the courage to fully ground into and inhabit these bodies. Taurus is about what feels sensually good, and much of what is going on on this planet doesn't, especially for sensitives. For many of us, being on this planet, aware of what we're aware of, has not often ever felt truly good.

Our bodies tell us that knowing what we know has brought down a world of pain and injustice on those who have preceded us in carrying this knowledge forward. So we're wary and kept from trusting this physical existence completely.

But the truth of the matter is, the chips are down. It's now or never. We need to let go of the escape hatch door, to fully come to Earth and into these bodies, in order to anchor this wisdom we have, to nourish it, apply it, and give it a fighting chance.

It's not simply the awareness of past abuses that is stopping this from happening. People still attempting to make a go of it within mainstream systems are forced to live at such an unnaturally accelerated pace that it's impossible to truly care for their bodies. They don't have the time to connect to their deepest body wisdom, and they certainly aren't allowed to use it if they do manage to.

People are made to feel guilty about living on 'Taurus time' or needing time in fresh air, out of the office buildings. So they come out of their canned air cubicles only for a smoke break or a quick coffee, the drugs they use to insulate their senses enough to continue, and then plunge back in.

The 'Too Much Information' Chiron in Gemini generation has been manipulated in this way to an unbelievable extreme. This was a gateway generation, the first one to grow up constantly connected and driven by that Uranian charge addiction - cable, satellite, radio, internet, cell phones, text messages, iPods, Blackberries. Constant bombardment. Constant stimulation.

There are so many people living at this bizarre, manufactured Uranian pace, and there is going to be a massive purging and purification required, especially as the Pluto in Scorpios reach the point of electromagnetic toxicity saturation - when they realize what has been fed into their collective. The balancing polarity point for Pluto in Scorpio is Taurus.

Chiron will be in Pisces, conjunct Black Moon Lilith, during the initial cardinal t-square/energetic cardinal grand cross this summer along with that potent Capricorn eclipse conjunct Pluto. The spiritual whole coming together is key in what is initiated here, though this coming together will be obscured (Chiron/BML).

The feminine, spiritual understanding that has been forced into the fringes and the shadows and kept there for so long peeks its head in here, just long enough that it cannot be denied by anyone with even a hint of ancient wisdom in their bodies.

And the power of it, having taken a back seat to the masculine for so long, starts to let itself be known. The damage done will be hard to ignore from here on in.

At the same time, the dark side of Pisces - the delusions, the blind spots, the rosey puffs of Neptunian glamour that lead around by the nose - will be easily manipulated within the collective. Watch the Neptunian smokescreens and identify when the collective subconscious is being pumped full of diversionary energy - both fearful and hopeful. This is some of the trickiest energy to get on top of on this planet, and it is often used against us. We have to work together in earnest to maintain clarity of vision because with Chiron on one end of Pisces and Uranus on the other, the conditions are ripe for traumatizing uses of this energy.

Saturn in late Virgo provides its mastery to assist us with this clarity and precision so we don't miss pertinent details. Deciphering manipulated/manipulative Pisces energy from the holistically healthy and sustaining is never easy, but no one said we were living in easy times.

We have to be much smarter now with this Pisces energy, channelling it into only the most precise and necessary practical application (Virgo). Accepting and working with only the holistically healthy, grounded, sustaining version - rejecting all else. No dumbassery allowed. No leaks. Rock solid boundaries. This is what we've been getting on top of throughout the Saturn in Virgo - Uranus in Pisces opposition cycle. Refining the energy of the 60s and getting real with it. Chiron will be at the potent zero degree of Pisces for the final Saturn-Uranus opposition in these signs April 26. Again, the damage related to unsuccessfully working with this polarity will be hard to ignore.

We really do hold the trump cards here. Despite all attempts, there's no destroying what we know or what we're connected to. We just have to hang in there until we get our chance to play them. Holding steady as grounded Taurus infuses the entire Chiron in Pisces transit...

Storms make trees take deeper roots, and the deeper the roots, the stronger the tree.

We certainly have to be strong little trees these days, don't we?

But we can do this. We were born to do this. We just have to pace ourselves because it's a marathon, not a sprint - more so now than ever.

Chiron retrogrades back into Aquarius July 20 until February 8, 2011, when it re-enters Pisces for good for the following eight years - until February 2019.