The 9th house is part of the trinity of Houses of Life along with the first and fifth houses. While with the first house, we experience birth and new beginnings, and in the fifth, we engage with our creative expression; when it comes to the 9th house, we’re learning about the world beyond the familiar and how that changes our mindset.
The 9th house is where we create meaning from the intimate experiences of the 8th house. It’s the sphere of rebirth after we’ve gone into the depths of the 8th house. Here we come out of the cave, look up to the heavens, take a deep breath and reconnect with a sense of inspiration.
Look in your memory drawer and find an instance when you were exposed to something utterly unfamiliar, out of everyday routine, neighborhood, or ways of being that opened you up and expanded your world.
It could have been the experience of traveling or living abroad, meeting a foreign friend or discovering a book or teacher that opened your mind to new ways of thinking and seeing the world. It could have been your experience in college, where your ways of being, mindset, and beliefs were tested and expanded. It could also have been a religious experience that helped you see that there’s more to life than the routine we live. Or it could also have been discovering a new ethnic restaurant on the other side of town that blew away your tastebuds and stirred your curiosity to try new things.
In the 9th house, we’re stirred by the flames of our spirit, helping us lift our eyes from the ground to look up at the bigger picture of what this life is all about.
Here we’re called to broaden our thinking, understanding, and ways of living. As Dorothy tells her dog, Toto – we’re no longer in Kansas. We’re now in a foreign land where our ideas and beliefs are tested to see if they still hold true and have wisdom. The 9th house is about expanding consciousness through our desire for meaning and living experiences that take us out of the familiar.
Long Journeys & Cross-Cultural Experiences
The 9th house is also considered the house of Long Journeys, Religion, Education, Philosophy, and Ethics/Law. It’s the area of our birth chart; we’re called to move away from the personal and engage with the larger ideas that inform our culture and give our lives direction and meaning.
Here we explore the intersection of being an individual within the larger fabric of our social and cultural existence. We’re no longer in our neighborhood, in our familial home. We’re in an area that brings forth different ideas that push our thinking, ways of behaving, and engaging with others. It’s an area where we’re exposed and educated through cultural clash and integration.
It’s also about the books or teachers that take your mind out of every day and guide you on an extended exploration for meaning and truth. In this sphere of experience, we’re called to take long journeys – physical, philosophical, or spiritual – beyond the known.
This could be a backpacking trip through a foreign area of your homeland or another country, where you have to adapt to a new culture and way of being in the world. It can also be the spiritual pilgrimage we undertake (physically or otherwise) in our quest for the bigger story.
Changing minds vs. fundamentalism
In a world that’s getting ever smaller through technology and population growth, we’re constantly being exposed to many foreign things. What we may have grown up believing was the truth is now tested continuously in our workplaces and daily life, as we not only meet others from actual foreign countries, but we also meet others that carry on beliefs and cultural identities different from what we’ve been accustomed.
For some, this is a beautiful smorgasbord of diversity. Still, for others, this diversity and constant exposure to different ways of being and thinking threaten their sense of self and beliefs.
In the environment of the 9th house, we can either explore and create a space for dialogue among different religions and their philosophies or lock ourselves up in a belief tower of our own making, refusing to expose ourselves to that which isn’t what we believe is true. Instead of curiosity and inquiry, many prefer to build towers of fundamentalist beliefs. In some areas of our lives, we all sin (meaning ‘miss the mark’) in locking ourselves up in a belief tower of our own making.
Learning a new language
Researches say that speaking another language activates different brain parts, helps memory retention, and gives one a more expansive way of seeing the world. Suppose we extrapolate these benefits beyond linguistic acquisition. In that case, we see that by exposing ourselves to new and foreign things outside our routine, we’re actively learning a ‘new language’ that will broaden our lives and nourish our spirit.
Learning helps us stay nimble both physically and philosophically. In doing so, our beliefs and mindset have less chance of ossifying, and we become less prone to falling prey to rigidity and fundamentalism. The unaccounted benefit here is that through expanding our perspective, learning to engage and learn from that which is foreign to us, we become better, more self-assured, and confident citizens in society. Because when what we believe in is tested in a broader context, whatever survives such an experience is then part of what gives us a sense of meaning and is part of our understanding of life. Not because it is what we learned in our cradle, but because it was experienced out in the world.
Education, purpose & livelihood
For many, the idea that we must go to college to get a good job and have a career is deeply ingrained. It makes sense as the 9th house is also the sphere of Higher Education, but it’s essential to return to the word’s etymology.
The Latin root of education means to ‘bring out, lead forth,’ and it implies that education isn’t about feeding knowledge into another, but it is meant instead to help one bring forth the wisdom inherent within. The implication is that we’re not a blank slate; the true job of education is to help create the environment for knowledge and wisdom from within to flow forth.
In that light, higher education shouldn’t be only a place where we receive training to become and do what our field requires. It should also create a space where what’s inside can come forth. It is meant to be a place that helps us integrate what we’re learning and seeing outside with the inner knowing inherent inside of us.
It’s no wonder so many find themselves lost around purpose and meaning even after years of classes and learning. What’s missing is the integration between our instinctual and learned knowledge.
The quest for meaning and the ability to engage with the larger questions of our human existence have been continuously stripped from higher education. Instead of being in a place where we are guided to discover what lights up our sense of purpose and meaning, we’re drowned by the tests and data-driven demands of the gatekeepers at the Towers of Knowledge. Currently, we’re drowning in a sea of information and data but unable to gain wisdom.
The 9th house is also a preparatory staging for when we reach the Midheaven of our birth charts, which is the place of maturation of our place in the world and of how we bring forth our collaboration to it. Because what we learn in the 9th house informs the gift we bring to the world as revealed by our work in the world.
Expanding your mind is part and parcel of the integration journey of purpose and livelihood. In the halls of exploration and learning of the 9th house, we stretch our minds, learn new ideas and cross-culturally pollinate our lives. It’s an integral part of our heroic journey of becoming more fully ourselves that we go beyond that which is familiar to us and expand our minds.
Photo Credits:
Main image: Jonatan Pie
Subsequent images: Geojango Maps, Prometheus Design, Van Williams and Alex Block via Unsplash
