#12 - Our Shared Humanity

This is the place in our exploration of the 12 houses in astrology where we discover we care about other people. It's where we realize that life's journey is not all about the self and our personal wellness, but that others matter to us. And they matter in a way that makes us feel for what they are going through! Join Dr Craig in concluding the 12 houses of astrology discussion and the importance of empathy and compassion as part of the develop of a whole human; someone who nurtures the self at the same time they nurture others. #learnastrology #sageofstars #bedeep

Transcript

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Hello, this is episode number twelve, our shared humanity. What a journey. The complete picture of psychological and spiritual development noticed by Carl Jung, the great psychologist, and expressed in the twelve houses of astrology. And now we're at house twelve. When we left off, we were talking about the 11th house and how it created like a conscious affinity. We're connected on a conscious level through shared values. These are my people. We understand each other and we share something together. The 12th is not actually going to be that big of a leap, but it's very interesting how and why we get there. Because the 12th is about an emotional permeability that happens between people who care about each other. Because I feel connected to you, what you're going through reaches me, it touches me, it moves me. It's not a random set of words that we might often associate with the 12th house, like hospitals, prisons, monasteries, the hidden. You know, often when we talk about the 12th house, I don't think most people really understand it because it feels like everything that's in it is so um grossly unrelated. But the truth of the 12th house is that our importance to each other makes me experience something that I will experience through love towards you. And that thing is empathy and compassion, and it is the twelfth house and it is Pisces. I become emotionally and spiritually affected by the condition of others. It's very beautiful, really. And because we're back in water, Pisces and the 12th house are water, it has to be about emotions and sensitivity. The 12th house doesn't appear out of nowhere. It's not like we jump from the 11 to 12 and we're like, oh, friends and friendship, and then all of a sudden the hidden and um uh hospitals and prisons, and and you're we're like, wait, what? How? How did I get here? The the way that we get from 11 to 12 in this arc of development from 1 through 12 is that it emerges because once we've connected with people, it expands beyond the self, the personal self. We may first encounter it for a spouse or for family or for children or for something else that's beloved or for an intimate circle, and then it moves to the community, and for 12th house energy, it moves beyond the community. We no longer even really need to be in like mind in order to be in the collective unconscious because everyone is there, everyone is in the collective unconscious. So we all, no matter what our political belief system is, our religious belief system, our ethnicity, the way in which we grew up, or our racial divide, everyone cries with death, everyone celebrates marriage and the birth of babies. There's a collective experience of emotional integration that all of us share, and the twelfth house expresses the possibility of us knowing that, seeing that, and becoming an integral part of that. So the water houses progression is very deep here. The fourth house is I can feel my origins, I can feel the imprinting of my parents. The eighth house is I feel what's happening between us and the intimacy that evolves, and then those emotional experiences that we have to go through together. But the 12th takes it that one step further that says, I feel what's going on in humanity, I feel the human condition. It's not just the unconscious floating in space, it's an emotional field of energy that we enter into when the self gets softened by relationships and meaning and dedication and belonging. And the the opening on this grand zodiac journey is the widening of what concerns us. I'm concerned about me. I'm concerned about mine, I'm concerned about my home, I'm concerned about people I love, I'm concerned about my purpose, I'm concerned about my people, and finally, I'm concerned about humanity. That's why this can almost make you cry. Because the 12th house is where astrology stops being descriptive in a way, and it starts becoming kind, it starts becoming selfless, and that's really the promise of the 12th, is that through connecting with each other we can find our common good and our common purpose. So we could be recognizing ourselves in others. That's something that's possible to say, right? We we all know that we could um do that, be that. We could all say, like, I'm I'm going through this, or that person's parent just died, and I recognize that, and I can find compassion for that person there, and I can find what connection exists on a deeper level than just my identity and my beliefs, and much deeper than my differences with them, but more like my similarities. So, yes, this is the second half of the zodiac, and it's the upper half, and it's house 12, and it is the the final house, but the the energy here is the energy where we've evolved to the point where a certain part of our selfishness, our ego, and our desire for it to be all about me, me, me, transcends into an understanding of how we can help each other by understanding each other. It's not just oh, I can help you move across the country, it's I can help you because I understand why you're scared or I understand why you're frustrated or anxious. The conscious affinity, right? The the eleventh really, what brings us together because we're aware of it, um, creates an understanding. Oh, these are my people because I share something with them. But the 12th deepens that into their joy is something that makes an impact on me, their struggle makes an impact on me, who they are as an individual makes an impact on me. So, what happens when the connection of the 11th, and certainly the connection of the 7th, because that's where we found a marital partner, right? What happens when those connections become compassionate? When it extends out from the nuclear family to the extended family, brothers and sisters and beyond, to friends and groups, to humanity as a whole. And I think that boy, the sensitivity really comes upon us. Water has a way of doing that, it it immerses us, it surrounds us, it is something that we can move through, but something that truly is magnificent. We can float on it, right? We can float on water. So, water, the element, creates buoyancy and permeability, and in many ways, metaphorically, it's capable of dissolving us just a little, just a little so that we can permeate, so that we can feel what someone else is feeling. Beautiful thing. Traditional meanings, right? The hospitals, prisons, monasteries, retreat centers, how about dreams? Also, art and music, and how it is that they fit into um uh the uh the 12th house. These things are not random, these things are are are have a common principle, right? Hos hospitals, right? It's a place where we surrender control because we have to allow and feel what's going on. Why do hospitals and prisons and monasteries and art and music all belong in a place that has to do with feeling the collective? And partly it's because those experiences create compassion for the self, so they create compassion for others. Vulnerability, any kind of vulnerability reminds us of what truly matters: grieving, any kind of confinement that prevents freedom of movement, it creates an enormous amount of time for reflection. So there's plenty of time to think about what's truly important. Monasteries and retreat centers, that could be a voluntary form of surrender and stepping away from the noise to create a deeper space for awareness. But hospitalization does the same thing, even if it's forced upon us more. Why art and music? Because art and music communicate an experience that language itself pales to be able to convey. Music bypasses the rational mind completely and causes us to feel something simply because of the words, the poetry, and the composition, the musical notes that are behind it. That's taking away our ability to have to think about why it is we feel a certain way. And we could be drawn to certain kinds of music because we want to repetitively go back there. We might want to listen to sad love songs if we just broke up with someone, because it helps us to feel that pain. And in feeling it, we collectively understand everyone that's gone through the same thing. Each of the experiences softens our ego and the boundary that separates us from each other, so it can deepen our awareness of what connects us to one another and ultimately what grandly connects us to life itself. The promise of the 12th house is not that, you know, it's going to be about pity or rescuing people, it's about compassion and the ability to remain present while other people are having an experience. Why is it about the hidden? That's a customary extra astrology thing. The reason is because it's hidden from us until we encounter it. We're not often engaging with the 12th house specifically, unless we have a lot of planets there. People can have you know predictive things that happen there. You could look at someone's chart and say, oh, the 12th house is going to become very activated. That person's going to have to go through a time of self-reflection or potentially isolation in order to be able to get in touch with compassion. But not everybody needs that. Some people naturally have compassion and can remain present with other people's experiences of life. Selflessness is not about erasing the self. It's not about self-denial, it's about recognizing that we can be concerned about something else besides ourself. That's to say we're part of something larger than just our personal story. It's certainly why a soldier would go to war to say that there's a value, there's a concern that that person has beyond that person's concern for their own life. That's enormous, that level of dedication. That's something that needs to be completely honored. That's why we have reverence for people that are in the armed services, why we should have reverence for anyone that that participates in a particularly selfless journey. Somebody that's spiritual, somebody that's religious, somebody that's trying to educate our children, taking enormous cuts in salary in order to be able to make sure that a future generation benefits from their knowledge. It's enormous. The selflessness of the 12th house is understanding that they are part of something larger than just themselves. Perhaps that's why it's the end journey of the wheel. Because once we finally get to a place of meaning and we build things and we find a community, we know that whether that community is our country and we want to give back to it in some way, that we do. That we feel like there's something important about giving back to. Again, it can be small, it can be the school system, that we want to selflessly show up for that, even when it might be hard. People who are on the board of the PTA are not all there for their own self-aggrandizement, right? The treasurer and the recorder that's taken down notes every month, those people are important to the functioning of the group, and yet no one's really ever really, you know, like shining the spotlight on them. It's thankless work, selflessness, and yet it is a part of who we are, because it additionally adds meaning to what we do as human beings. There is a course of shadow side to Pisces in the 12th house, right? Giving and suffering, martyrdom, being a victim, escaping isolation, all the same things that are Pisces, right? Self-sacrifice with no boundaries, losing your identity or losing yourself into the suffering of other people. We don't want to do that. When we do selflessness, we want to do it on our own accord for the highest purpose of love, a higher level of love and a higher level of responsibility. That's why we want to have children to have a higher level of love and a higher love of response and a higher level of responsibility. We don't want to do it so that we can end up being a victim and everyone can feel sorry for us because of the sacrifice we made being a mother or a father. That's not certainly not what we want to do to the kids. Doesn't make them feel better. So there is a shadow side to the 12th house, and it's definitely about um feeling taken advantage of because many 12th house people allow themselves to become taken advantage of because they confuse that with selflessness, but we don't want to do that. How can I care? How can I understand without disappearing or without it being at my expense? That's a big question for the 12th. We have a shared humanity. It's one that I think we don't spend very much time thinking about, but perhaps we could. I'm Craig Martin, you've been listening to the Sage of Stars podcast. This episode completes the first 12 episodes, the episodes of the 12 houses of astrology and the development of human personality and our psychological wellness. Stay tuned for episode 13. I'll look forward to talking with you more, and I hope you have a great day.