Pluto Travels through the Mind

The transformation that is taking place in Americans' attitudes toward mental health is very exciting. Of course, as an astrologer, I see this as the result of Pluto, the planet of transformation, moving slowly through the polar signs of Gemini and Sagittarius. These two signs deal with the workings of the mind. One of my clients devoted her life to a study of the mind. When she was in high school, she fell in love with a very nice boy. His parents were against the liaison because she was not of the same religion. They dated for 3 years but were forced by family pressure to end the relationship. He "lost his mind". The last time my client saw him was a visit to a mental hospital where he had been committed -- labelled incurable. "What is a mind that you can "lose" it?" she thought. Thus began a lifetime journey for her to settle this question to her own satisfaction. The much acclaimed film, "A Beautiful Mind" has been the first of many recent films to take a new look at the mystifying territory of "the Mind". The mental disintegration of mathematical genius John Nash is explored with interest and sensitivity. Nash wrote a 27-page dissertation, "Non-Cooperative Games", in 1950 when he was just 21 years old. Eight years later he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. In 1970 the disease went into remission and in 1994 John Nash was honored with the Nobel Prize in Economics. Nash claimed his mental condition was due to living on the "ultralogical plane" and breathing "rarefied air" not meant for mere mortals. Nash believed this permitted him to make unique contributions to his field. He was not so sure that being normal was the way to go. I attended a high school in the Midwest with over 4,000 students. It was in another era, and our school was divided into sections according to how smart we were. The academic pecking order was no secret. The "gifted" on one extreme and the "educable mentally handicapped" (henceforth, EMH) on the other, flanked the vast "average" majority which included homecoming queens, cheerleaders, football captions and others equally blessed with normalcy. The three groups were segregated from each other during the school day. Kids from all three learning groups were mixed together in study hall and I noticed that the two extreme groups - the gifted and the EMHers -- seemed to meet somewhere in the middle. They were more like each other than either was like the normal. This is a phenomenon of polarity. For example, hot and cold are both degrees of temperature. Dry ice, a temperature extreme, is so cold that it burns. It really seems hot. In this context, the saying "when hell freezes over" really makes sense. Both the gifted and the EMH groups were fidgety and restless. Both were socially ill at ease and amazingly un-self-conscious for high school. Both groups tended to "read aloud", mumbling words or moving their fingers across a page as they were reading. And, I'm sorry to say, both groups were chosen with equal degrees of victimization to endure the teasing of the average group in the middle. An astrologer notices that the amount of mental energy surging through the circuits of the gifted mind does not leave much to focus on the physical world. As with Nash, these people tend to live in a rarefied atmosphere and don't often "touch down" to the mundane world to take care of things like dandruff, acne and body odor. In the case of the EMH students, one suspects disrupted mental circuits, dead ends and hot wires, to speak descriptively. The charts of both gifted and educable mentally handicapped are indistinguishable save for the focus and grouping of planets so common in the charts of the gifted (called Stelliums or more correctly Stellia). Without this grouping, they would be as "scattered" mentally or mentally "undone" as the EMHers. Another characteristic of gifted charts is an afflicted Ascendant. What results from this is that many gifted people are unable to make a positive first impression. If you will pardon a play on words, they do not speak well for themselves. Is it any wonder they escape to the higher realms? Or is it because they escape to the higher realms that they make such a poor first impression? (Fortunately there are plenty of people in this world who can see beyond first impressions.) The Ascendant describes the way you appear upon first meeting, including the way you talk and process information from your environment. The genius Albert Einstein may not have talked until he was 3 years old. Winston Churchill, another genius, had a lisp and failed often in school when something didn't capture his interest. According to his official biographer, Churchill was believed to be physically repulsive to his own father. Of course this is entirely subjective and unjustified, if you look at photos of this great man as a baby. But life behind the Ascendant of an astrology chart IS very subjective and the outer world will confirm to the expectations embodied in the chart. No one would argue that world renowned Stephen Hawking is a very compelling example of this phenomenon. Hawking, who suffers from Motor Neurone Disease or Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, the complications of which have made it impossible for him to speak at all (tracheotomy), is quoted on his website (www.hawking.org.uk) as saying, "One's voice is very important. If you have a slurred voice, people are likely to treat you as mentally deficient." Often in the charts of the educable mentally handicapped, the afflicted Rising Sign characterizes a physical condition which has led to mental problems or an approach to social situations that reflects an inability to process and respond to social cues such as proper distance, appropriate gestures, chat style, and so forth. Sometimes mentally deficient individuals simply do not understand or care how their physical body connects with the social stratosphere. I once read an article about a retarded couple who had a baby that kept slipping out of the carry seat because her well meaning but borderline retarded parents simply could not remember to strap her in. Please remember that I am being descriptive, not critical. What happened to John Nash? Did the bundling pull too tight and break the circuits? Was too much mental energy sent through the circuits at one time because of the tremendous rate of vibration of his brain? Were emotional and psychological territories starved for energy and left to atrophy like a limb with gangrene? Nash's own words are as descriptive and "poetic" as these