Tuesday, October 6, 2015

The 12th House

The final segment of the cycle represented by the houses begins at the Midheaven, the entrance to the 10th House.  This section of the chart deals with the individuals place within the collective body of humanity.
At the 10th house, it is the position the individual has taken.  This could be a position of power, or a position of service.
At the 11th house, the emphasis is in the energy dynamic between the collective and the individual based on this position.  Collective power is given to the individual based on who he is expected to be, based on 10th house position.  This may or may not be in sync with who the individual truly is; the creative seed within this individual may remain hidden, undeveloped, or it may run renegade and become overly dominating.  This leads us to the 12th and final house.

If the true creative seed that is within an individual is planted within the collective body, then the life can be seen as a success for both the individual and the collective.  For each of us, our goal should be to find the creative essence within us that makes us unique, strengthen it, be it, and serve our relationships, our family, and humanity with this force.


Many of us have lived a number of lives throughout the journey of our soul.  At the end of our last life, how did the sacred relationship between our individual incarnation and the collective we were born into turn out?  Death desolves life into Akasha (a universal etheric field of energy in which is stored all past events, becoming itself the basis of the formation of modern archetypes), to return when it's time comes; and in the interim, Akasha assimilates the experiences of the mortal life dissolved as wisdom.  This means that when we were born into this incarnation, our relationship to the collective, as well as our family and key players in our lives, is a mirror, or crystallization, of the dynamics inherited from our past.

For the 12th house, it would be appropriate to use the ocean in our analogy.  The ocean symbolizes the waters to which we came and to which we return.  However, in the 12th house we are not talking about the realm of angels or of heaven.  We are talking about the ocean of humanity, and our only way to relate to this realm while we are living is through the collective unconscious; the realm of archetypes.  We all share, as humans, a common source and characteristics.  However, each of us as individuals have our own creative seed along with a unique set of circumstances that, if life is lived to the highest degree of success can, much like a rock thrown into a pond, cause a ripple effect that will inspire humanity and transform Akasha itself. Individuals have gone before us with the creative seed in the same arenas as we have, and many of them have failed to make a splash in the collective waters.  Some have even been persecuted for who they were.  In the 12th house, often the individual literally faces the ghosts of the past, and these ghosts can either lend support to the native, or uphold the illusion that the native too is doomed to the same fate or failure.  Seperation is an illusion.  We are one with the collective body of humanity and all that we have ever been.  However, in the individual life, HOW we are separated, and the dynamics we face as a result of this, is our karma.  


One of my favorite movies of all time, “The Green Mile” by Stephen King, contains an excellent analogy for understanding the 12th house.  In the book, King painted the picture of the death row section of a prison.  He called the corridor between the prison cells that made its way from the entrance to the electric chair the Green Mile because of the color of the floor tiles.  However, there was a deeper connotation in Kings work that paralleled this corridor with the walk of life, from birth to death.  In both the movie and the book, one man was wrongly imprisoned on one side of the corridor.  He was pure spirit, a healer, and in the book a representation of Christ.  On the other side of the corridor, a rapist and murderer laid in wait.  King wrote in the book that the guards were taught to walk the center as much as possible, and never get too close to the cells for danger of being grabbed or harmed by one of the prisoners.


Here we have an example of the average man and how the two primary archetypes are set in relation to himself throughout the average life.  The pure spirit, and dark side of humanity, lie in complete polarity.  These extremes are rarely reached, for most of us never go to war with humanity to such a degree that we become a killer or rapist, and most of us never maintain the pure source of light in human form without ever becoming tainted by the crystallization of being human.  
In the 12th house, an individual faces his relationship to collective humanity as a result of his past.  Allow me to offer a speculative reality, that as our soul incarnates, doing so from the sea of our own past experiences sets us up in the current life with or against archetypal forces that we must work through in order to strengthen our ability to effectively serve collective humanity, and or transform these forces by righting our own past failures, as well as those of the ghosts of ours and our collectives past.  We may not have walked the safe and narrow middle ground.  One individual may embody more so the side of spirit, having the job of healing the self and their collective.  Another individual may have stepped too far away in terms of power dynamics, and must make a serious adjustment or have this adjustment forced upon him by the collective itself.
The 12th house has been called the house of "Self Undoing".  Conventionally this is thought of as relating to death.  However, death is merely a transition point between lives.  Planets or emphasis in the 12th house indicates a responsibility to transfer our inner light, our creative seed into the collective, not only to evolve humanity but also to strengthen ourselves as we reincarnate into a world that WE took part in creating with that seed.  In the 12th house, the native must embrace that much of what he experiences is due to the seeds he planted in the past.  
Both the 12th and 6th houses, each being the final house of the two hemispheres of the birth chart, represent a point of crisis in which the native must make adjustments.  This crisis exists in polarity.  It would be a tragedy for the collective to drown the individual, to where the collective is never able to grant the individual responsibility or power because it was never developed.  Many individuals with loaded 12th houses want to bring about their own self undoing.  Drugs, alcohol, illness… they seek to escape and jump back into the ocean that from the perspective of the individual, can beckon as the archetype of the mother imago, the ANIMA, the womb from which he came.  Obviously this will only lead to reincarnation under similar or perhaps even higher pressure circumstances.  The other side of the crisis polarity would be an individual whose ego has grown cancerous, and has used collective energy and responsibility for personal power rather than to serve and grow in balance.  An example of this would be Adolph Hitler, who had Uranus in the 12th house under hard karmic aspects.  The result of this is always in some way or form, the collective taking its power back to the detriment of the individual.  Hitler is obviously an extreme example.  In most cases, this end of the crisis spectrum can lead to imprisonment or necessary death.  Ultimately through reincarnation, the karma the individual must face is that in order to thrive as a creative individual, one must come to terms with the reality that the collective he is a part of, is a part of him.
I dreamed my teacher came to me and told me that I was needed by the group.  He was with others that had gained a great deal of respect in the spiritual community.  They had a task for me that would prove my value to the group, and that was to jump into the pool and capture the sparrow that moved through the deep water.  I was honored for the initiation.  I jumped into the pool and swam deep into the water, spotting the sparrow between the rocks.  As I moved towards it, it jetted across the pool to another set of rocks.  It was unbelievably fast, but I was in my element as well, and I was fast enough to capture the sparrow and prove my worth.  As I grabbed the sparrow and held it while ascending to the surface, a deep feeling of guilt and sorrow came over me.  I could feel it in every fiber of my being.  My teacher and the others, they were not trying to initiate me into their group by having me prove my worth.  They were using me to capture the sparrow, which they themselves were incapable of… and suddenly I felt unworthy of my own gift, for the reason I was able to catch the sparrow was a trust and vibration between our energies.  And there I was, about to deliver this sliver of living light to a dark group that sought to use this light for its egotistical purpose.  I released the sparrow, who swam away in a pool now heavily proportioned with my tears.
Again, the 12th house can give indication as to how the archetypes have formed in relation to ourselves, giving us an indication as to how well we have planted our inner seed in the past.  With Saturn in my own 12th house, I relate to the feeling of tragedy associated with the individual loss of the creative seed.  This was a powerful dream indicative of my own relationship between individual and collective.  There has been a fear of failure and a fear of repeated patterns that has been my own karma to work through.  Saturn is associated with the father, and I have found my relationship with my father replayed throughout my own life.  In my dream above, my teacher took on a fatherly role.  However, was he representative of the archetype of the Old Fool whose past has led to failures in the marriage of collective and individual?  Or does he represent the Redeemer himself, the Wise Old Man who has learned the way and offers support?  

The truth is, the Redeemer and the Fool are one and the same.  They both exist within us, and we are born in relation to them in the way in which our soul needs in order to give us the greatest chance of success in this life.  Or perhaps it is the collective success, to receive the seed and the light of the individual.  In the 12th house, we come to terms with the fact that the collective is as much a part of us as we are of it.  
In this life, I have had to come to terms with this polarity of archetype through my role as a single father, and I assure you I have found myself playing both the role of the redeemer who protects my child from the Old Fool who will take us off course, as well as that of the Old Fool himself.  I have found myself in both archetypes in the role of both Father and Child to the collective as well.
I recall at about the age of 10, a verbal comeback against my parents where I exclaimed to them "I shall have the last laugh when on Judgement Day, God calls me by name and you by number".  Perhaps in more truthful and modern terms, I can say "on the day of my death, the life that I lived will continue to be significant because of how I lived.  And at the moment of my rebirth, I will intuitively recognize myself in the collective I once lived among, and the collective too will know my name by my vibration that resonates within it"!
The waters of the collective unconscious, the Akashic Record, is collective memory.  With successful integration of our relationship to the collective, we drop our stone into the collective waters… we formulate a new karma.  When it is our time once again, the New Ascendant will perhaps recognize itself within the collective, and instead of the extreme polarity often experienced, the name he gives himself and the name the collective gives him will be one.  At the very least, it should promise a collective filled with the same light that is within the individual, leading to what we all want; greater recognition, trust, responsibility, and joy!  

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