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Twelfth House of Horoscope
The twelfth house of horoscope is called Vyaya Bhava in Vedic astrology. Looking at its characteristics/significances; the twelfth house represents foreign lands, hospitals, ashrams, refugee camps, prisons, sleep, dreams, imaginations, fantasies, perversions, mediation, creativity, spiritual growth, liberation, paranormal, supernatural, the occult, mysteries, illusions, expenditures, losses, delays, addictions, vices, confusions, fears, phobias, insecurities, secret missions, investigations and many other things.
It is interesting to see that the house which represents sleep, dreams, imagination, illusions and losses; represents liberation. From spiritual point of view, all that is happening around you is real in some sense and it is illusionary in some sense. While you are sleeping and dreaming, your subconscious mind is attached to all the events and imaginations happening in such dream. Whatever experiences you may witness during such dream may feel absolutely real as long as you are in such dream. Once you are awake, the dreams is gone and you realize that it was all an illusion and nothing else.
Hence if you suffer a lot in dream, the suffering sustains as long as such dream continues. Once the dream is gone, so is the suffering. Likewise, if you become a billionaire and you enjoy wonderful things in a dream; all such money and pleasures remain there as long as the dream continues. Once the dream is gone, so are the billions and the pleasures bought with such billions. Whether you experience an extremely good dream or an extremely bad dream; a couple of things are common in both types of experiences.
The first one is the fact that you enjoyed or suffered as long as such dream continued. The second one is the fact that no matter how good or bad a dream is; it may not affect your physical or conscious reality.
Whether such dreams are good or bad; they’re gone as soon as you wake up. Hence you may call them illusions. In the same way, the higher spiritual wisdom considers everything that happens in your physical life like an illusion or like a dream. Everything that happens here is real and meaningful as long as you are a part of it. The moment you die, it’s all gone. Just like you remain intact if you die in a dream; your real essence remains intact, even if your physical body dies.
In this sense, the journey of a specific lifetime may be seen as a specific dream. Everything is real and it affects you as long as you are living this dream. Everything is gone, the moment you die. Just like you don’t die in reality when you die in a dream; you also don’t die when you die at the end of a specific physical life. Just like you may find out that a dream however good or bad was an illusion after waking up; you may find out that everything that happened during a specific lifetime was illusion. Just like the dreamer remains unaffected by the experiences of dream in a bigger sense, your essence also remains unaffected by the experiences of a lifetime.
When we look at it like this, life as well as dream is real in some sense and it is illusionary in some sense. It is real as long as it is happening and it becomes an illusion the moment it ceases to exist. This concept has been explained in details in the book ‘Pitra Dosh – Ancestors are Calling (Revised Edition)’.
As long as you’re a traveller on the path of liberation; there may be no blessing like the strong influence of the twelfth house. However if your journey is that of materialism; like most people; the twelfth house may become a very difficult to handle house. If the eleventh house represents ambition or desire; the twelfth house represents the opposite; which means the loss of ambition or desire. Without ambition or desire; you may grow a lot in spiritual field but you may not be able to do so in the material world. Hence in the deepest sense, the twelfth house may not take away your ability to achieve; it may take away your ambition or desire to achieve. For a person living for material goals; all is lost if ambition or desire is lost.
When the final battle for liberation begins in the twelfth house; a soul may go through experiences lying on the opposite extremes. It means you may completely feel uninterested in every material thing or you may dive deep into all types of fantasies, perversions, addictions and vices. The twelfth house is free from all conditions and the atmosphere is almost always extreme in this house. Which extreme you may touch or live on; depends on your evolutionary status; which is represented by your horoscope. One may have to live certain things to the fullest before he is able to give them up for good; by finding irrelevance in them through experiences. Hence the twelfth house represents a number of such extreme phenomena. It is a no-limit house and anything can happen here.
The twelfth house is a difficult house and placements of weak, malefic, troubled or difficult planets in this house may create problems related to profession, marriage, spiritual growth, black magic, delays, losses, unfortunate events, addictions, vices, mental health and a number of other problems; depending on the overall theme of horoscope under consideration.
Himanshu Shangari