Beau­ty meets the Beast. What hap­pens when Value/Love encoun­ters Willpower/Control?… Well, let’s just say that this is not going to be pret­ty unless you under­stand the nature of the choice you face. 

The chal­lenge is about under­stand­ing and express­ing your val­ue or self-worth, and you are under pres­sure from with­in and with­out. Venus is wing­ing its way through Aries, singing the song of indi­vid­u­al­ism and the val­ue of being “I”. You feel you must assert your unique­ness and be free to be yourself.

Yet “pure” free­dom leads to a chaot­ic “state of nature”, where every­one is for them­selves with­out regard for one another.

Now that urge for per­fect free­dom is encoun­ter­ing Plu­to. Plu­to is lay­ing down the chal­lenge from Capri­corn: that your pur­suit of “I” must be lim­it­ed by the need for order and the ful­fill­ment of respon­si­bil­i­ties; it is the out­er order you sub­mit to and the inner order of your self-con­trol. In fact, your abil­i­ty to be free depends upon a gen­er­al social order, (and with­in that order by the qual­i­ty of your per­son­al rela­tion­ships), and upon your capac­i­ty for self-con­trol. It is that gen­er­al order and your rela­tion­ships formed with­in it which cir­cum­scribe your free­dom as they also pre­serve and pro­tect it.

Yet an order that just “is”, that upholds order and tra­di­tion uncrit­i­cal­ly, leads to stag­na­tion, mean­ing­less­ness and the denial of spir­i­tu­al growth.

So the urge to be free to be one­self more tru­ly is con­fronting the order which helped cre­ate the con­di­tions for free­dom. The ten­sion is between how con­di­tions for free­dom are cre­at­ed by a cer­tain struc­ture of rela­tion­ships, and the fact that this struc­ture must also lim­it your free­dom at the same time.

What is the les­son, what is the choice?

As always the les­son is about your spir­i­tu­al growth. You and your world are con­stant­ly evolv­ing: phys­i­cal­ly, emo­tion­al­ly, men­tal­ly and spir­i­tu­al­ly. The val­ues cre­at­ed and embod­ied in your rela­tion­ships cap­ture a moment in time in the growth of spir­i­tu­al self-real­iza­tion. As you con­tin­ue to unfold your poten­tials that very struc­ture which sup­port­ed you now comes to lim­it you. The les­son is to remem­ber that you are the cre­ator of the world you are in… You can and will change it. The only ques­tion is: how con­scious­ly will you bring about a new order?

The false choice here is between assert­ing free­dom and break­ing with the order that is, or using force to main­tain rela­tion­ships that are one-sided. You either break your respon­si­bil­i­ties to oth­ers or force them to ful­fill your needs. (Or they force you to serve them.) Either way denies true free­dom or mean­ing­ful order. But, remem­ber, there is always the “Third Way”, the Way of Understanding.

The core issue here is Venus/Value. It is your shared val­ues that bind you to one anoth­er in any rela­tion­ship from the per­son­al to the col­lec­tive. What you must do now is use the pow­er of Plu­to to deeply re-exam­ine what val­ues are true for you and for the oth­er. What you need to do is deter­mine your hier­ar­chy of val­ues, and come to know which are worth sac­ri­fic­ing in order to make the rela­tion­ship pos­si­ble. And as you do this you re-affirm the com­mon val­ues that you share with one anoth­er. These com­mon val­ues are what bind you to one anoth­er; these shared val­ues are the liv­ing real­i­ty which forms what is Love.

Even­tu­al­ly, as you go still deep­er, your spir­i­tu­al growth is quick­ened by your expe­ri­ence that all of cre­ation comes from one Spir­i­tu­al source, and that we are bound to one anoth­er not by com­pul­sion but by that Greater Under­stand­ing, which is so sub­lime­ly met in our Love for one another.

So, let Pluto/Hades take you into the depths of your being so that you may find the “Pearl of Great Price”, the secret trea­sure of Venus/Value at the core of your soul. For it is there that you will meet the one with­in which is the same as the One of Creation.

You will under­stand that the great illu­sion of this world is your sense of sep­a­rate­ness; and, you will under­stand the Great Truth, felt through your expe­ri­ence of love, that we are one in Spirit. 

E Pluribus Unum! (Out of many, One!)