#9 - The Search for Meaning

This episode moves us forward in self-understanding. The 9th house in astrology is where we gain new perspective and meaning. Life's experiences alter us and then we frame them and what we learned as new part of who we are. Join Craig in this continued journey of the houses and how at this place, the 9th, our lives take on a deeper, more truthful way.

Transcript

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Hello and welcome to episode number nine, The Search for Meaning. I thought a lot about the eighth house and the experiences that lead us to question our personal truth. They're the intense experiences that transform us. So this transition from the eighth to the ninth has all to do with what those experiences were. Whether it was about intimacy, which is emotional honesty, some kind of vulnerability, uh, which of course intimacy creates for all of us, crisis in our lives, which can be, you know, varied, and we all know what they look like. The fact that we have to surrender, or different emotional truths that we might learn about ourselves or others. Those experiences tend to be so intense, they're so emotionally intense that they change us. You know, when we come out the other side of it, we have to say, okay, well, who am I now? What did those experiences that I just had change me into? I think when someone close to us passes away, which is a very eighth house experience, or we meet someone who has a profound effect on us, we begin to question everything that it is that we know about who we are up until that point. And something new has to emerge. So the ninth house, which is connected to Sagittarius, is our third fire sign. And fire signs are fundamentally all about who am I when we when we were looking at Aries, and then how do I express who I am in um in Leo? And now that we get to the ninth house and Sagittarius, it's again a reorientation of that identity around something deeper, like what is meaningful to me, and how does that become who I am? How does what I discovered about life that actually has a deeper meaning expand my understanding of the self? So we reorient based on those transformational experiences that we had. And the ninth is seeking direction, seeking truth, seeking purpose. When uh we talk about the ninth house in basic uh astrology, we often think of it as, oh, it's philosophy and higher truth and higher education and travel and law. And we are going to talk a little bit about why those things individually connect with uh the core theme of this house. But really, it before we get to that, we want to talk about meaning and perspective. The intense emotional experiences of life create a different kind of perspective for us. We look at life in a different way, and we want to assign some kind of significance to the experiences that we have. We don't just move through uh the experiences of life like an AI chatbot. It's not like that for humans. We are saying, oh, this happened. I fell deeply in love with someone, and then the relationship fell apart. That's not just something that you walk away from without asking, why was that significant or in what way did that alter who I am? So perspective and meaning are an essential part of the ninth house. They take us back from the immediate reaction that we may have when we're in eighth house crisis, and say, you know, what is the larger truth here? That's why it's connected to higher truth, or what has this experience revealed? Uh, and um, how does this fit into my life as a whole? And how does this fit into life as a whole, the experience of life? So when we've been on this developmental journey of the houses, and we get to seven, which is the interaction with other individuals and having them mirror for us what they see. Eight, which is having the emotionally based experiences with many of those same individuals that we've decided to have relationships with, but we have emotional interactions with them that change us in some way through the intensity of the experience. The eighth destabilizes old understandings that we have, and the ninth searches for a new understanding. So I like the way that the um the eighth and the ninth work together. I say many times in therapy sessions, you know, you bring the shovel, I'll bring the flashlight when I'm talking to um counseling clients or clients that are coming for readings. You know, you're going to have to do the digging, but I'll shine the light on the area that needs to be dug, right? So the ninth house then is that searching, that digging for a new understanding of what is being seen in the eighth. We think of Jupiter, which is the ruling planet of Sagittarius, and it's also connected to the ninth house as being expansion, which is like the keyword, the way in which we expand. How? How is the ninth house connected to expansion, or why is ninth house energy seeking expansion? And the reason is because Sagittarius looks beyond current limitations, it is willing to say my current understanding or the old understanding is is not the whole picture. I'm gaining new information through uh philosophical encounters, spiritual encounters, travel encounters, etc. Right? There are all of these ninth house subcategories, and they all lead back to an expanded understanding of life and the self. Very beautiful. We encounter different cultures, different beliefs, different philosophies, different ways of living, and the identity expands through that expanded understanding. That's what we mean by Jupiter and the way in which it creates expansion. People often think that when they're having some kind of positive Jupiter encounter in their life, right? Or here classically, people will say, Oh, Jupiter is in my sign this year, so this is going to be my year. As if in their framework, you know, they're going to win the lottery or something. And then the year passes and they can look and be like, Well, you know, Jupiter was a bust. But the truth is, is that it wasn't supposed to be necessarily bringing you a husband or a promotion or any of those things. It was bringing you a deeper understanding of the self. So that if you wanted to go and manifest a husband or a wife or a job promotion, that you would be able to do that through understanding yourself better. The various, again, subcategories, things like philosophy. Well, philosophy is an attempt to organize truth into some kind of understanding, right? Philosophical questions. What matters? How should life be lived? Philosophers answer those kinds of questions, and certain kinds of philosophies do that. So if you were to study philosophy, what you would be wanting to do is expand your understanding through truths. Religion also helps us to interpret things like the transformation or morality or mortality or what our purpose is here, because it offers the people who are wanting to participate in religious experience or spiritual experience to say these are a base of higher truths that I should be able to live my life by and gain a greater understanding of the experiences. Higher education, which is college, is not just information. Higher education is about expanding the worldview through encountering young people our own age who may have differing points of view. But the ninth is where we take the factual information that we know and we seek wisdom and concepts. That's the big word for higher education in the ninth, is that it's not just about learning, it's about putting it together and developing a concept that says, oh, this is something that I believe now, that is something that I can incorporate into who I am. You know, one example could just be, you know, people are generally good. You could come out of life and life situations believing that based on the way a community might gather around you if you had a crisis, or if you were to get married and see that the way the community shows up for you. I had someone um say to me yesterday, people are so cute. I know I thought that was adorable. People are so cute when they laugh, when they love and take care of their children, when they're celebrating. This is a beautiful thing to be able to see in the world. And we gather a lot of that through the higher educational experience if we allow it to. And foreign travel, which is a part of the ninth house, is a perfect physical example of the way in which we expand our consciousness because travel breaks through all kinds of psychological narrow-mindedness. It says, oh my gosh, the world is much larger than my conditioning. These little small beliefs that I had about different races, different ways of living, different belief systems. They're challenged by my foreign travel experience. And one thing that I've always liked about foreign travel myself is that it's also shown me higher truths that exist between cultures. All cultures seem to value nature, they all have national parks. All cultures seem to value their families, they're out on the weekends in parks and um in streets, enjoying meals and each other's company. I feel like being able to say then, oh, you know, I see that. I'm a person that values nature, I'm a person that values my family, and that that's a universal truth. That's definitely something that's a part of the ninth house and the experience of Sagittarius. Law is another subcategory of the ninth house, and it is, of course, at its best searching for justice and morality and order, you know, you know, within our society. And it's a high-minded thing because obviously law can get um misused, um, bastardized, or whatever is the right word there. It can get distorted. So, but at its best, it is some kind of an attempt to create guiding principles, guiding principles that are larger than personal emotional experience, the way in which we can live with each other. So that's why law fits in there. Remember, all of those things are an attempt to provide perspective, perspective, which is the view of life, and meaning, something that says, Oh, this actually changed me because this had some importance in my life. The shadow side of the ninth house is, of course, going to be about a lot about the shadow side of Sagittarius, which is a lot of righteousness, right? No, being a know-it-all, um, dogmatic beliefs or superiority or preaching or spiritual egotism, like you know, higher truths and you're the only one who knows it, or you know, addicting, being addicted to searching without grounding, um, without making anything practical out of those beliefs, escaping into spirituality or sort of endless wandering around. But the the real question there is, you know, are we expanding towards those higher truths in a way of creating a more complete identity, or are we merely expanding our certainty? And then it becomes more like an ego game. No matter which house we're talking about, the shadow side is always about the ego. And the healthy relationship that we have with the ego is um an absolutely essential part of growing, understanding who we are and leading a meaningful life. The ego is a good thing when it's there to protect us and help um us to gain an understanding of what we feel passionate about or where we want to be creative or the different kinds of life experiences that we want to have when the ego is functioning well, but when it is in its shadow self, then that's the work that ultimately we need to do. The reflective questions, right? What is what is um what is the ninth house really asking us? Because it is philosophy, right? It's philosophy, so it should be bringing about certain questions like, you know, how did those experiences change my life? How and and and what no longer means anything to me, and what how what have I outgrown? Things like that. And where am I being asked to expand myself, or what larger meaning am I trying to gain from life as I move along, right? I think people really have a crisis when they um find out that they're leading a fairly shallow existence. Um that is certainly one of the more painful things that I've witnessed is people finding out that they have a shallow existence that has very little meaning and that they have very little to offer in a conversation, just even going on a date or whatever, and and that's always sort of a difficult thing for someone to encounter. The um the uh the ninth house uh is very, very much an awakening. It's a place where we awaken to a more meaningful expression of our own truth, and that is part of the core of where we're going to move forward in our 12 house discussion because once we gain that, once we know who we are, we know how we want to express who we are, and we filter it through the lens of what is meaningful for us through different truths that we experience in life, then we know how to move forward in service to the world. And that's where we're headed. I'm Craig Martin. You've been listening to the Sage of Stars podcast. You can find me at SageFstars.com, and I hope you have a great day.