Twelfth House

The Twelfth House

The twelfth house, moksha, means liberation. It relates to the end of our evolutionary journey. It is the house of loss, letting go and enlightenment. The twelfth house can be the loss of our physical body at death. It also relates to loss in the sense of money where we escape from the inevitability of mortality through pleasure seeking and spending sprees. In addition, the twelfth house relates to emotional loss that we may feel throughout life—either as a legacy from our past life, or as a result of a traumatic event in our childhood.

The twelfth house also signifies international associations. We may also feel a loss of our own cultural identity as we become exposed to foreign ways of thinking.

The letting go of our physical body at death confronts us with the reality of the soul. We may recognize that we are a soul within a physical body throughout our lives; in this case, our death is simply a shift from one reality to another. If we don’t realize our soul nature in this life, we have great difficulty letting go of life, and the imminence of our death makes us angry, bitter, and terrified.

The loss of physical possessions such as money can be viewed as a positive or negative condition. We may see the lack of money as a way of simplifying our life so that we can focus on matters of the spirit; this is a state of liberation for us. Conversely, we may have lost our money in the pursuit of pleasure in order to distract ourselves from the inevitability of our death.

We can also view international associations as either positive or negative. For instance, our family may have immigrated to another country when we were young. In this case, we may feel the loss of our hereditary culture and feel forced to accept the culture of our new country as a survival strategy. The move may even create a cultural identity split within the family. As we grow, we can choose whether to view our cross-cultural experience as either positive or negative. Alternatively, our work may require us to travel internationally. As we become exposed to new ways of thinking: we can feel that our own cultural experience is being enriched, or we can feel a sense of dissatisfaction with our culture. Then again, we may be comfortable within our own culture, but feel a strong desire to explore other ways of looking at life. In this case, we are likely to have a positive experience and develop a broader outlook on life. Even if we are disappointed with our international associations, we return home even more appreciative of our own culture than before.

The twelfth house is also the house of Buddha where, faced with our mortality, we experience a state of nirvana in our life. We are in a state of enlightened bliss where we realize we are an immortal soul.