Cosmic Café 23:
Pluto's Lesson

We turned away from the glass window, and the voices faded. We walked up the street a bit, and Pluto began to speak again. I sighed heavily. I was tired—but the lesson was far from over. “You see, my dear,” Pluto said, “true danger lies with those who wield power. Power is The Issue. Not death, not drug abuse, not even sex. Power is the thing."

“That,” he said, nodding toward the Capital dome, “is where the most collective power in this world assembles. Some of that power is navigated honestly, and some isn’t. Doesn’t matter to me. I’m just the dealer. I give you all enough rope to either hang yourselves, or pull yourselves out of the current. Some of you do quite well with it, and some of you don’t. But it’s not up to me. It’s up to you, each of you.”

"I thought about taking you to a recycling plant so that you could see what happens to what’s useless after it’s been purified—because that’s really what death is about—purification. Everything needs to be purified at some point. Nothing mortal lasts forever—and when it’s done, it’s done. That goes for relationships, jobs, and life itself. My job is simply to get you all to understand when something has gone past the point of no return—it's up to you to trash it. My job is to en-lighten you—to get you to molt, and shed your skin periodically, so that you can take your next step without any excess baggage on your soul. Every time you live through a loss and shake it off, you’re lighter. You’re purified. You’re clear for the next step. "

“Sometimes, however—and I will never, ever understand why mortals are like this—you hang on to what’s outlived its usefulness to you. You refuse—at least you try to refuse— to give it up. That makes me angry, and that’s when I step in and allow you to be beaten up, just like I allowed that man back there to be beaten. You’ve got to cooperate with me. It’s the evolution of your soul we’re talking about—do you understand?”

I nodded. “I think so. But where does sexuality come in? That’s yours too, right?”

He smiled. “Well, some of it is. The aspect of sexuality that I'm involved with isn’t so much the attraction, however—that's Venus' job. It’s the idea of intimacy and surrender that belong to me. When you engage in sexual relations with someone, you present yourself to them as you truly are, naked and vulnerable. Of course, there are many ways to be intimate—but sex is the way you humans most easily reveal the intimate you. You’re surrendering to your desires, about to be as close to another person as it’s possible to get, and to let them get just as close to you. There’s no covering up your scars—both physical and emotional—when you’re truly intimate with another person. Of course, humans also use sex to control each other—which takes us full circle to the idea of power."

“I'm not the kind of guy who deals with ‘maybes,’ you see. When I pull something from one of you, it’s already gone. It’s just your acceptance of that fact—that’s what I’m after. That and your ability to be totally, brutally honest with yourself—about yourself. That’s what you’ve got to do if you want to evolve.”

We continued our walk. “What about obsession?” I asked him. “How does that fit in?”

“That’s power, too,” he answered. “When you obsess on something—or someone—it’s because you want to control it, you want it to do things your way. The ironic part of obsession is that it always ends up controlling you more than you realize.”

We walked on in silence, until we were back at the entrance to the hotel. Pluto released my arm. The limo, with its black windows, waited. The driver got out and opened the door for me—but Pluto took a step toward the hotel door, extending his hand. “Care to come up for a drink?”

I stood on the sidewalk for a moment, considering my options: Surrender, or try to escape?

I took Pluto’s hand and walked with him past the doorman. My Sun, after all, is at 4 degrees of Sagittarius, and I've learned to surrender over the past year or so.

Next Week: Jupiter and Saturn
Meet Up In Taurus

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Kim Rogers-Gallagher is a well known columnist, lecturer and author of Astrology for the Light Side of the Brain and Astrology for the Light Side of the Future(ACS Publications).