Desire
By Catharine J Anderson
In Evolutionary Astrology, the Soul is defined by Pluto, and Pluto is powered by desire. Desire is not viewed as a flaw or something to be ashamed of. It is the fundamental engine driving all human evolution.
Every Soul carries two core, opposing desires operating at the exact same time: the desire for separate existence, which is the urge to differentiate and engage with the material world, and the desire to return to the Source, which is the deep longing to merge back into the Divine and transcend the ego.
Separating desires are the specific impulses that pull us into individual incarnation. They are the urges to build a career, form a specific identity, accumulate possessions, seek personal recognition, or form exclusive relationships. They are called separating because they rely on the perception of an isolated self living in a world of separate objects and people. They anchor the Soul in the realm of earthly experience.
There is a pivotal evolutionary principle regarding these desires: separating desires can never bring ultimate, permanent peace. They are structurally designed to be finite.
The Soul does not evolve by trying to forcibly crush its desires. Instead, evolution occurs through the direct experience and eventual exhaustion of separating desires. This process usually unfolds in a couple of predictable ways. First, through satiation, where you get exactly what you wanted or attain the goal, only to discover a lingering quiet emptiness inside. You realize that no material outcome can fully satisfy the Soul's deepest thirst. Second, through frustration and loss, where external circumstances block your desire or take away what you built. This forces a sudden confrontation with attachment and loss, stripping away another layer of ego.
Through repeated lifetimes and experiences, the Soul gradually exhausts its separate desires one by one. As separating desires are experienced, understood, and outgrown, their hold on the Soul weakens. The second fundamental desire, the longing for return, naturally becomes the primary force in a person's life.
The goal is not to judge yourself for having personal desires, but to observe where they pull your energy, recognize what they are teaching you, and allow them to refine into a deeper surrender to truth. Separating desires are not spiritual mistakes. They are the very scenery the Soul must travel through to remember where home actually is.
While Jeffrey Wolf Green gave this dynamic a specific astrological language anchored to Pluto, he was touching a vein of truth that runs through almost every deep spiritual tradition.
Within astrology itself, Steven Forrest explores this same territory. Where Green focuses on Pluto and the purging of separating desires, Forrest looks at the Nodal axis. He speaks to how the Soul clings to familiar ego-dramas and comfortable past-life habits, slowly learning through conscious choice to break free from those old loops.
If you look toward Eastern philosophy, the roots of Green's work become obvious. Green himself credited much of his insight to the lineage of Swami Sri Yukteswar and Paramahansa Yogananda. In Yogananda's writings, the soul gets caught in the material world through personal attachments and cravings. The wheel of birth and death keeps turning as long as there are lingering earthly desires to play out. Liberation comes when those desires are finally lived through, seen for what they are, and dissolved in something much larger.
The classical Indian teachings speak of vasanas, the subtle subconscious tendencies and cravings that pull a soul back into physical skin time after time. Buddhism anchors its foundational truth in tanha, the fundamental craving for separate, individual existence that creates the illusion of a self detached from everything else.
This same pattern echoes through Western esotericism and Gnostic thought. The Gnostics spoke of the divine spark falling into the material world, becoming enchanted by physical life, and forgetting its home. The journey back requires shedding the heavy desires of the physical realm layer by layer. In the Seth material, physical reality is described as a vast classroom where consciousness constructs its own conditions through desire and belief. We stay in the room until we have explored every corner of it, realized what we are doing, and no longer need the props to remember our own nature.
Different names, different eras, but the story is identical. The Soul walks through the physical world, tasting every desire it thinks it wants, until it realizes that none of it can ever fill the quiet space inside. That is when the long walk home begins.