Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Life with a 12th House Saturn

I'm not completely sure why it is so difficult for me to gather the energy to write on these subjects. As I write and swim through the interchange between my conscious and unconscious self, I am sure the answers will come. Many times the answers come to me when I least expect it...when my mind is most relaxed to "allow" them to come. When I sit and try to call upon them they evade me, taunting me and practically laughing at me. After a moment, even my photographic memory cannot recall the gem that entered into my field of vision for just a moment.
The years of working on this book has been a search for these gems and an attempt to piece them together like a puzzle.... only I am left to my own assumptions and imagination, or perhaps intuition, as to what these evasive gems of consciousness are that seem to hold a key to who I am, who we are, where we came from and where we are going...... the very questions that much of the science of astrology seek to answer.

Dr. Carl G. Jung held that everything emerges into consciousness from the unconscious, thus it is ultimately the greatest SOURCE of our motivations as humans. Humankind, in their conscious state, has created religions based on higher principles of consciousness that truly motivate us. The archetypes of our religions are examples of figures that have sacrificed their egos for the service of mankind, motivated by a higher spiritual "love" that human devotees aspire to, yet hold so very far from their conscious capability. These archetypes represent the closest that our conscious mind is able to conjure that reflects the SOURCE of LIFE, a life that we vaguely understand unites us all as one body. The sacrifice that these archetypal personifications make is merely a symbol the trickles into our consciousness from the collective unconsciousness that reveal humanity as one body...our individual bodies truly in service to a greater body, the body of LIFE that is all of us.
These symbols and archetypal images make themselves known to our consciousness in dreams and psychic experiences that are a glimpse into this collective unconscious. Carl Jung defines the collective unconscious as follows:
It is a part of the psyche which can be negatively distinguished from the personal unconscious by the fact that it does not, like the latter, owe its existence to personal experience and consequently is not a personal acquisition. While the personal unconscious is made up essentially of contents which have at one time been conscious but which have disappeared from consciousness through having been forgotten or repressed, the contents of the collective unconscious have never been in consciousness, and therefore have never been individually acquired, but owe their existence exclusively to heredity. Whereas the personal unconscious consists for the most part of complexes, the content of the collective unconscious is made up essentially of archetypes
I would correct the wording of Jung's definition a bit by claiming that contents of the collective unconscious can in fact enter the consciousness. The creation of these contents can not make its origin in any one human, for they belong to ALL HUMANS. As Jung made clear, these contents make themselves conscious in the form of archetypes (conscious not being synonymous with intellectual awareness. A client may be aware that they are being haunted by a young boy, but they are not intellectually aware that this IS an archetype that is making itself known to them due to their personal relationship with this particular motif of collective humanity.) Insights into this ocean of psychic energy which comprises so much of the source of our motivations and fears, hold much of the key as to who we are, where we came from, and what we are evolving into.

Saturn in the 12th House must face the SOURCE and re-orient himself with his/ her unconscious motivations in order to integrate true wholeness of SELF.
Initially, natives of the 12th house Saturn have a powerful mistrust in the source, and there are different "forms" of the source which become the focal point. This is dependant on Saturn's sign as well as other factors in the birth chart which will be made clearer as we continue.

For myself, with Saturn in the 12th house in the sign of Gemini (ruled by Mercury, the planet of the mind, communication, and ruling the lungs and the breath), generally I have a great distrust of for the source of information. It is not so much that I feel that people are purposefully untruthful, only that I do not trust peoples intelligence enough to give them credit for having channeled or interpreted their information from a pure enough source to carry any adequate authenticity. In other words, I feel that our collective is littered with toxic information and propaganda from a number of motivations going in many different directions. Think of all the commercials on television, billboards, and advertising everywhere that tell us what products we need to define who we are. Think of all the religious zealots telling us why we should show loyalty to their church and the way that they define God. Think of how the expansion of capitalism within the industrial age has created a playground in which each unit of humanity seeks to expand and secure their ego, battling for the resources of our planet in order to do so. The collective result of this not only muddying and toxifying our conscious source of information, but slowly destroying the only tangible thing left on this planet that truly reflects the unconscious source; the forests and oceans of our earth.

I learned that as a young child, my grandmother on my father's side would babysit me. Around the age of one, I became sick off and on, and displayed great sensitivity to toxins in the environment. I was allergic to everything!! Among the things that gave me the greatest problems was second hand cigarette smoke. My grandmother was a smoker and refused my mothers request to not smoke around my when I was young, choosing her nasty vice over the health of her grandchild.
Interestingly enough, my ex-wife's mother was a smoker who had a hard time refraining from smoking around my children. I made sure my wife understood how sensitive I was to this subject, I did not want my children subjected to these toxins, and had their grandmother promise that she would take the smoking outdoors. She struggled to keep her promise, and this irritated me greatly. One day she lit one up while talking with my son who was 7 at the time. My body began to shake as my mind attempted to filter my true thoughts with tact, asking as nicely as I could if she would please live up to her promise and not smoke around my child. She was as fed up and irritated as I was, and cut my words off as she aggressively defended her actions. I completely erupted with anger, slamming my plate of food down as I got up determined to explain it to her in a way that it would NEVER happen again, and F Bombs and threats to "stick that cancer stick up your ass" came pouring out, as did her F Bombs to my face. There was no violence, and I have no regrets from this day because although she never spoke to me again till the day she died (of lung cancer two years later), she never smoked around my children again. The purpose of going into this story is that at the time of this incident, I was unaware of the experiences I had as an infant, and so the intense anger for this particular thing was buried in the personal unconscious. The fact that this kind of thing triggers such anger and emotional response in me gave me deeper awareness into my karma with Saturn in the 12th house in Gemini.


Needless to say, I grew up with a great distrust of the SOURCE, creating an inner complex that the air I breath is toxic and impure, whether it be cigarette smoke, car exhaust, allergens, toxic building materials in the home, etc. The source of information I was to gather from my teachers, parents, priests and even my peers was, to me, just as toxic and impure because they are not only the products of the toxic world I have grown up to know, but all of these people seem to feed the beast with their TRUST and BLIND SERVITUDE of a system that seems to be built to defeat the majority of us. If the statement "What comes in goes out" can be said to be true, then it is difficult for me to garner much respect for the knowledge and information passed along for truth in our conscious reality.

One of the greatest sensitivities of a 12th House Saturn is in the power to heal ourselves. Society in many ways has taken this power out of the hands of the individual, and has institutionalized it in the forms of different healing arts; among the most unfortunate of these being what we normally call "Western Medicine" with its emphasis on removing symptoms by suppressing the body's ability to heal with chemical drugs. There are so many things I can say right here that is fucked about the world health crisis, but in order to stay the course I will just say that the biggest problem is that most of us no longer truly have the information at our disposal as to where to turn and how to heal ourselves. Oftentimes we are forced to play trial and error with our own bodies, and to contribute to this problem, the very people we seek to help us with our healing are either lying to us in order to keep us dependant on their way of doing things, or they have been trained in these methods and essentially brainwashed, passing this misinformation on to the collective with conviction.



In the life, there are periods in which a planetary motif is brought to the surface of our consciousness, and astrology in studying the cycles of these planets, can reveal when these periods will occur. We learn the most about what a certain planet means in its placement in the birth chart by what we learn and draw to ourselves during these "peak experiences". During the most recent transits that have brought my 12th house Saturn's energy to a "peak", I finally became fed up with my mother and her inability to listen and respect how important it is to me to filter out the misinformation within the collective, and raise my children with more natural methods of healing and diet. I distanced myself and my children from her to eliminate my children's exposure to her until she is willing to at least show a degree of respect and willingness to embrace MY truth when it comes to my children. I strongly believe that what we eat is vital to our health and well being. I am aware of what growing up eating a diet high in sugar, dairy injected with hormones, unfiltered water with metals and other impurity's, etc has done to my overall health and am working hard to heal this and regain optimal health. My mother thinks that I am way too overboard and crazy about this, but I see her as completely in blind acceptance of whatever society accepts as an appropriate source of nutrition and healing. In fact, she has been a nurse and working in and out of hospitals for the majority of her adult life!

From the parent to the collective, during this recent transit of Saturn I learned about the criminal institution that is the ADA (American Dental Association). I learned about the effects of mercury poisoning, as well as the connection between many metals that are placed as fillings inside the mouth and contribute to serious destruction to the immune system, as well as neurological and cardiovascular systems. I would encourage anyone reading this that is curious to pick up any of Dr. Hal Huggins books, including "Its all in Your Head" and "Solving the MS Mystery". In the latter book, MS is linked to dental poisoning as well as from root canals that trap anaerobic bacteria inside a dead tooth that often attack weak organs in the body after many years. The frustrating thing for myself is that I am ignorant to exactly what the best steps to take towards proper oral hygiene are. We as a collective are forced to trust the people that supposedly have studied this their whole lives. When we find that we have been lied to, we are forced to find the source of real information and refine and filtrate the collective consciousness for this truth. I was so fascinated by Dr Hal Huggins findings and work. Reading his journey of discovery reminded me of myself during my journey to self discovery in astrology. Astrology is no exception as to the sources of information that I trust. I have had to learn many things the hard way either from having experienced them myself, or counseling a client that can act as a second hand living example. I have NEVER read a passage from even the most widely respected astrologers and embraced it as my own truth. The lack of trust in the source of information leads the native of Saturn in the 12th on a very deep and difficult journey of self discovery.




The issue here is holding others, and especially ourselves, to an INTEGRITY of MOTIVATION. If we are driven as a collective to heal others in the medical community, then it is important to have the integrity to check the motivation of that healing and make sure that our methods truly work. Sometimes the receipt of other needs, such as money or the illusion of love can make someone blind to the truth. Truth tends to be a great equalizer because when the truth is known and people are truly in service to the greater spiritual body, each human is further empowered and become interdependent along with others in the body, no longer DEpendant on the collective institutions. The problem is that the way of life and the source of income for these institutions would break down if the truth would be revealed. There is a great duality within the collective to protect these institutions so that the reality we live within and know does not crumble and force us to face the unknown; the UNCONSCIOUS, and on the flip side there is motivation from the unconscious to empower ourselves and each other and evolve the greater body.

This duality has always come across to me to reveal great hypocrisy in action. My teachers and parents always tried to teach me certain values, but the way they ate and the institutions that they upheld demonstrated that they must not truly know HOW to reach these values. The truth is that these dualities exist in ALL OF US, and it is the responsibility of the 12th House Saturn native to go deeply within and check the unconscious motivation. To touch the unconscious and bring a greater purity of motivation and integrity into conscious reality! It is to detach from the collective consciousness enough to hold oneself in check to ones own standards, and ultimately to find the PURE SOURCE, to FIND THE TRUTH, to KNOW THYSELF!


The mirror of the 12th House in astrology is the 6th House, which deals with purification and refinement of the BODY. The 12th House reflects this need on a collective level, and it is my responsibility as a 12th house native to sift through the sea of paradigm that our world has to offer and filtrate and refine it all to the point where the illusions and fear are removed from the motivation, and the spiritual TRUTH remains from the essence of expression.

My study of astrology has been quite a difficult one, for this outlook has been projected out unto the collective of astrologers, not fully trusting that any one of them is tuned into the PURITY of the source enough to have found the answers to questions that are holistic in nature, answers that are so evasive such as one to the question "What does it mean to have Saturn in the 12th House?"
On the surface, I realise that this question alone is so difficult to answer because everyone with Saturn in the 12th house has a different set of variables alongside it that adds to the greater picture. For example, I have Jupiter in Saturn's ruling sign of Capricorn, as well as Saturn squaring the Midheaven/ Nadir axis and forming a Grand Trine in the air signs with the Moon in Aquarius and the Sun/Uranus conjunction in Libra. Any person with Saturn in the 12th is going to have different variables which bring added significance and details to the "story"....so many that eventually it begins to feel like information overload.....Toxic levels of information which drown the initial gem that once revealed itself in much simpler terms.

This is how I feel, and this is perhaps at the core of the nature of the 12th house.....feeling that it is I that is the Gem buried within the collective consciousness that is so overloaded with superficial information that I cannot be found. The collective consciousness, a major SOURCE of the individual consciousness, with so many toxins that it tends to lose itself, and no longer know where to turn within the collective for reflection and reminder of who they are.....except perhaps INWARD.
The collective itself seeks to refine and purefy itself and its people, not necessarily in a way that supports the individual in question, but at the least....refines what attempts to be a SOURCE for the individuals within the collective, whether this source conspires to control the individuals within it for its own objective , or attempts to heal and lift to greater heights in order to build a stronger evolving society.

The truth is the latter is a duality that exists within our collective society, as well as within the individuals living within it!
One of the greatest examples of this, and the 12th House in general came from a book/movie called the "Green Mile" The story interestingly enough is written as a more modern Crucifixion, as it centers around a wrongly accused healer on death row with the purposeful initials of J.C.
However, at the core of the story is the message that both the healer and the killer
are aspects of consciousness that our society locks away outside of its own refinement
filters because both expressions in pure form not only fall outside the spectrum of
expression that is acceptable in the eyes of the collective consciousness, but tend
to also make the individual feel further isolated from anything other than a mystical
source....isolating itself from the environmental source of the collective that they either
seek to lash out against (the killer), or heal and transform.
The Green Mile in the book is the walk along the green tiled corridors of the prison to
the electric chair. However, it is written as an obvious analogy to the walk of life, and
in the story the walk of the straight and narrow moves in between the extremes of the
killer and the healer, who in the story are locked up on opposite ends of the hallway...
representing aspects of self that are closed off on either side as we walk the walk of
life.

The height of the 12th house Saturn is at the search for the pure, authentic self....finding
it in its bits and pieces reflected in our collective society, and TRUSTING its reflection
within the sea of what we cannot see. It is difficult to trust THIS divine source in the
face of a toxic collective source. For the 12th house native, the aspects of self expression that society tells us to lock away call to us, because they are integral and important parts of our wholeness. While it is true that the nature of Saturn is crystallization, the source of formlessness must be remembered and used to refresh the self, the crystal not scene as a static rock, but as a dynamic BECOMING. If I were to decide to take a road trip to the coast for a week with my daughter, I would pack all of the things I thought I needed for the trip. When I got there, I would not forget that I had a home with other possessions and longevity of life after the week was over. Through the journey of our soul, when we choose to live out a life, most of us forget the "Home" from which we came. We forget that we came for a reason and that motivation is still within us, and it is not necessarily that we should suddenly remember "Oh yea, I am here to rediscover some deep astrological truths to help others make sense out of the cycles in their lives and to be of service to my fellow man", but we should embrace that life is a process of BECOMING. Remember that Saturn has a 29.5 year cycle around the sun, and this is an exact mirror of the 29.5 day cycle of the Sun and Moon. The Sun and Moon are a continuum of dynamic becoming, awareness moving in phases and cycles. We are not ever going to be conscious of all the we are at any given time. However, we can refine and recenter our motivations with integrity. Saturn in the 12th forces us to reorient our trust to a greater source, the unconscious, to ultimately come into self mastery and an ultimate trust in the self. Through this complete trust in the self and in the source, service can be imparted to our fellow humans that swim lost through this sea of paradigm. We can serve them with authentic healing, with pure love with no ulterior motive, or with information that is channeled straight from the source.

In most cases when it comes to Saturn, the learning process of the same motif is usually expressed from one extreme to the other. The native either isolates him/herself as they search for truth or they trust too much and become greatly disappointed when they find that the person, group, or institution that they trusted had self serving motivations.
In the case of trusting too much, here in lies one of the conventional definitions of the 12th house, the "House of Hidden Enemies". It must be understood that the native is drawing to themselves the exprerience of intense let down in order to become dissatisfied enough to find the true answer. I personally have gone through this many times. There is an INTENSE desire to find authenticity whether it be information, love, healing, etc. We are only human and if we cant find it we are going to project it from the unconscious archetypes to something in the collective that seeks to mirror it.
The other extreme is to trust so little that the individual closes themselves off from the collective almost entirely. The experience of isolation is necessary to allow the native to face the unconscious. The experience of this can be voluntary, or in some cases be forced due to imprisonment or hospitalization. Just as the individual must refine the consciousness by first projecting or seeing the toxicity everywhere and realizing that it is the native that must refine the inner self in order to face the truth and move forward with integrity, the collective as a group makes refinements themselves, refining and shaping society in accordance with the laws of consciousness within that society at the time (9th house). Unfortunately often the individual and collective can be at war here as the individual may find themselves on the cutting edge of consciousness, living by a different dimension of law so that they find themselves being refined by the collective and caged along the side as in the example of the Green Mile. The collective itself in this way becomes both the healer and the killer, imprisoning and destorying some and attempting to heal those whose health has deteriorated.
In some ways this forces the individual to fall into a degree of TRUST to the collective consciousness as some form of SOURCE, and in doing so perhaps he is enlightened enough to
work with this source, realizing that healing cannot come purely from the self, nor
can it purely come from the collective....the key not in realizing that the collective
can be trusted, but to trust that it is a process of BECOMING...just like we are as
individuals, and that individual and collective work together to ultimately reinact
that which brings about success. Success in this way is defined as that which makes
ALL of us flourish....the trail and error of success brings so many situations in which
a group thrives or is successful to the detriment of another group, or perhaps even
another species or even the planet itself. Ultimately we will become aware that all of
these forms of expression have their correct placement in the greater body....and that
each body within the body, in trying to fight and find a place within that greater body..
to in a sence put themselves in position at the nipple of the greater body in order
to recieve the nourishment in fear that they will be cast out....we realize that these
individual bodies wear a mask that may create illusion as to their true form, and seem
to toxify the informational environment.

However, we are challenged by this as we must see ourselves AS A SOURCE. I am a source
of information and love, energy, trust to my children...to the people that I love, and
what they recieve from me shapes what they project into the collective....everyones
expression together cocreating the shape of the collective consciousness....shifting
the expression.
During this current major progression of Saturn in my own life and chart, I realize how
these energies began with such a mistrust of the source, and the source especially being
mistrusted from the MOTHER...leading also to an extreme mistrust of WOMEN in general.
I even have come to the realization that mistrust of the FATHER in many of us is transfered to the MOTHER for choosing to except the seed of such a man that lacks trustworthiness. And now here I find myself during this transit, living as a single father to a woman and future
SOURCE OF SUPPORT to a grandchild of mine. It is imperative that I refine myself, and
realize and embrace what may be toxic of my own consciousness!
On another dimension, my daughter is an outer manifestation of the feminine principle within myself, and regardless of the complete mistrust I have for my mother and the women of my family and life, through the process of my relationship with my daughter, I seek to gain authority over the feminine principle within me....to nuture it. I am challenged of course to be the VERY SOURCE of something that I have difficulty finding within myself everyday, as if the gem of this feminine principle evades me, but it stares at me everyday through her eyes, reminding me that it is all in the process of becoming, and that her existance gives me the strength to channel that energy from a source I DO trust.

For many of us with Saturn in the 12th, self destruction and frustration becomes a vicious cycle. We have reached the point now to understand that the battle between the self and the collective, the isolation that seems to separate the two is reflected internally. The conscious self and the unconscious self are not fully in sync. The 12th house is said to be the house of unfinished business, of success and failure and dealing with the fears of what has been tryed and failed in the past. We must embrace ourselves with the realization that we are ready to become more aligned with group consciousness...that motivations that are ego driven will not lead to success because we are not allowed to have success in what is in a sense a lie. It may seem unfair to see organizations like the ADA line thier pockets with gold knowing full well that if we tryed such a scam that we would land ourselves in prison or far, far worse. Karma works much more quickly for us because we are ready to face the authentic self and move forward with integrity. We are ready for the journey into the unconscious and to bring to the conscious self a more solid structure of the mind, a clarity of conciousness.

Saturn in the 12th forces us to give form to some degree to that which evades for much
of the life....for it lies only in aspects of expression throughout the collective, rarely
in forms pure enough for us to fully see it. We must find it within us and even then it
is difficult to trust it. Here, the process of success and becoming is a long one, and
so many roads may seem to lead to dissolvement of the "gem", of the "self" just as in
the collective it may seem that "GOD HIMSELF" has dissolved and has no authentic form within
the collective psyche. It is the responsibility of the native to keep hold of this
inner gem, and in the refinement process not lose touch with the totality of self, but
refine the self to a point of being able to help the collective by projecting upon it
that in which it is in the purest form, and only by doing this can it help create a vision
for what the collective can be

I asked one of my closest friends if, upon acheiving success, could he handle it coming with absolutely no recognition. I believed it would be a huge disappointment for him if he is not viewed by others as a SOURCE, a paternal figure, given his 1st house Saturn placement in strain with the Sun and Neptune. For myself, I acknowledge that I want so badly to be recognized, because I feel that for all of the gifts I know that I have, I have been able to truly reach few, if any, and show them ALL that I am. With this book, I give all that I am, and just as I asked my friend....regardless of the fact that in writing this book, I have clarifyed and made sense of the source and mapped out clearly in a language that I can understand a system that gives me greater clarity. It is my need, with the Libra Sun and Aquarian Moon focalizing towards the rising sign of Cancer, it is my need to be able to impart upon you as well as the rest of the collective some of this information that has been channeled and imparted from the purety of a source that is a part of all of us, filtered through the lenses of my own experiences, tested against case studies of other beings within the collective, and fused together with my mind to bring you a perspective that can help you to understand the complexity of your own life experiences and how they fit in to a bigger picture...how you fit into a greater body of which we are all a part.

I desperately need to know that it has helped you, for that service is what truly motivates me...however much of my imprisonment is the acknowledgement that my service lies in putting the information out there and letting it be a process of BECOMING...that perhaps it will go misproved and rejected by many of whos opinions I dearly value. Perhaps as the energy that now lies within the collective unconscious becomes conscious, someone will pick up this book and find that it leads to the heart of what they were seeking to know. The seed has been planted, and no matter how long it takes, whatever impact it has will be fused with the consciousness of each individual, transformed by their own experiences and made real, perhaps no longer looking like the original...and certianly not meaning to.