Evolutionary astrology as we understand it today didn’t really exist when I was young. All of my instincts were oriented in that direction, but the only astrologers I could find who thought in that more purposeful, spiritual way were mostly British ones who had been steeped in Theosophy. Despite their more lofty philosophical orientation, they still tended to be quite rigid in their “delineations” of people’s personalities and fates. At least they provided a hint of something bigger going on. I don’t particularly recommend their books today – astrology has come a long way since then. But I still owe them a big debt for helping to get me started.

 

One of my favorites was a Scotsman by the name of Charles E.O. Carter. In his 1925 book, The Principles of Astrology, he describes the 11th house as ruling over “our hopes and aspirations.” Sixteen years earlier, in his Manual of Astrology, “Sepharial” – born Walter Gorn Old in England back in 1864 – called the 11th the house of our “wishes and hopes.” Later, Isabel M. Hickey, in her 1970 book, Astrology: A Cosmic Science, associates the 11th house with “goals and objectives.” Hickey wasn’t a Theosophist, but at least she would speak of us as souls rather than simply as personalities. Finally, the late, great Noel Tyl in his 1974 book, The Houses: Their Signs and Planets, refers to the 11th house in terms of  “new, larger goals that are set to receive the energies of full development.”

 

To be fair, these references that associate the 11th house with development over time tended to be buried under much more extensive references to friends, organizations, and fellowships. However, those nods in the direction of “possible futures” were always there too. Mostly they were left unexplored and undeveloped. Still, somehow this notion of the 11th house having an orientation to the future got me thinking. Like a good Capricorn, I understood that any goal that one sincerely and consistently holds would be virtually guaranteed to bear some kind of fruit eventually. Opportunities would arise, the motivation would be there – and what’s to stop anyone from eating the candy when it’s placed right in front of them? 

 

• I reasoned that anything promised in the 11th house would naturally tend to grow in our lives as time passed. That told me that an 11th house planet would very likely blossom more brightly in the second half of life.

 

Fundamental to the philosophy of evolutionary astrology is the rejection of the notion of “good” planets and “bad” planets, so it wasn’t like if you had a “bad planet” in your 11th house, you were doomed. Ditto, only backwards, for the so-called “good” planets – nothing wonderful was guaranteed. Get it right and it would become one of the guiding beacons defining the purpose of your life. Make “the dog’s breakfast” of it, and you have a formula for becoming a tedious old person. As ever, freedom is inseparable from personal responsibility. Your chart is a tool. You’re the one who is using it.

 

• Mercury in the 11th house? Will you actually have something important to say as you get older – or are you just one of those boring older folks who can’t stop pontificating? 

 

• Venus? In your fifties and beyond, are you loving and creative – or just bloated, vain, and trying to look younger than you are? 

 

THE HOUSE OF FRIENDS

 

What about “friendship?” We always hear that word associated with the 11th house. In this case, “friendship” actually means something more like alliances – tribes, organizations, and fellowships. Emphatically, the 11th house is not about your “near and dear.” If we use the word “friends,” let’s remember that we mean friends like you have a thousand of them and you can’t remember half their names. Once again, words such as group dynamics, teams, and networking ring clearer bells. We all have a sea of familiar and semi-familiar faces around us. That’s your 11th house. How do we link “goals and aspirations” with all those faces?

 

• Here’s the “unified field theory” of the 11th house in a single sentence: if you want to be a writer, hang out with writers. In other words, defining your goals must come first – only then can you choose the kinds of “associates” who might support you in attaining them. 

 

Every front has a back, and so there’s a corresponding danger posed by any 11th house planet: if your goals aren’t clear, there will be an element of randomness in your choice of “friends.” You’ll wind up thrown off your natural track by distracting social associations. You’ll hang out with the wrong crowd. Maybe you want to be a writer, but you wind up wasting every Saturday night with a bunch of troglodytes who haven’t read a book since they were forced to fake it in high school. 

 

And they might be nice people! They just won’t do you any good at all.

 

Synchronicity always plays a role in astrology. By what we are taught to call  “chance,” we inevitably encounter people and situations that offer us the opportunity to learn what we need to learn. That’s vividly true with the 11th house. The universe wants to support you in reaching your evolutionary goal. You might think of how “fate” magnetizes you into a particular set of soul-tribes. Some of that is simply because you are there to help those same people who are helping you. You’re part of a karmic team. Other people’s futures are riding on your success, and vice versa. There’s a lot of that kind of symbiosis in any healthy response to an 11th house configuration. People who share common goals, interests, and values can often be of practical help to each other as well as providing emotional encouragement. Writers ask each other what they’re working on lately. Painters tell each other when paint brushes are on sale. Musicians listen to each other play.

 

LIFE’S OFTEN-HIDDEN PURPOSE

 

Even among people who believe that life is purposeful, it’s often hard to prove it based on an honest appraisal of our own actual experience. Life in fact often feels pretty random.

We fall in love. The relationship lasts six years. Now we don’t even know where our former partner lives.

We work in a restaurant for seventeen years. It closes. We find some other way to keep a roof over our head – and we wonder what those seventeen years were all about. 

In the light of all of that apparent randomness, here’s perhaps the most magical and inspiring dimension of the 11th house – one that we’re only able to see retrospectively as we advance into the second half of our lives.

 

• Looking back from an 11th house perspective over the seemingly random patterns of our life-story, we recognize 1) an orderly pattern of necessary development, 2) an underlying unconscious strategy, and 3) a core purpose in everything that happened.

 

A higher intelligence aimed us at fulfilling our 11th house destiny – a truth that was invisible to us at the time those events were actually happening.

 

THE TECHNIQUE

 

As we analyze anyone’s 11th house dynamics, naturally we pay a lot of attention to any planet that happens to fall in that house – and we never ignore the influence of the sign that planet occupies. Mercury in Pisces is a different beast – and represents different goals – than Mercury in Aries.

 

Second, are there significant aspects to that 11th house planet? They modify, complicate, and further focus its meaning.

 

Third, remember that the sign on the cusp of the 11th house flavors our goals and aspirations as well – even if you have no planet in that house, you definitely have energy there. 

 

Fourth – it is pivotal that you never forget to take into account the position of the planet that rules the sign on the 11th cusp. Its importance would be hard to overestimate. That planet, as we will soon see, offers another critical dimension to the unfolding story. 

 

At a technical level, those are the four pieces of your puzzle. You need to look at all of them and tie their messages together. If you focus exclusively on any planet that happens to be in the 11th house, you’ll be playing a guitar that has only one string.

 

IN PRACTICE

 

As befits my own Neptune in Libra in the 11th house, as you read these words, presumably I will have just finished teaching a course in evolutionary astrology at Omega Institute in New York state – hopefully having had a chance to hug a few of you there too! 

 

So there I am, up on the stage at Omega, doing what I do now that I am older and my Neptune has had time to blossom – I am teaching a large group of people (11th house) about spiritual matters (Neptune) as they apply to counseling techniques (Libra).

In my teens, there was no visible sign of that path opening up for me. In fact, I was an unlikely candidate for such a role. Basically, I was a boring, shy, science-track kid.

By my early twenties, there was just a hint of it – I’d begun to find my spiritual teachers and I was absorbing astrology as fast as I could.

That 11th house path only began to really take off in my late twenties as I got to my lunar and Saturn returns. That’s when I started my astrological practice – and began to overcome my shyness enough to teach.

Ever since then, my Neptune has been like a snowball rolling down a snowy mountainside, gathering mass and momentum. 

 

So far, all of that reflects the classic development-over-time function of any 11th house planet.  

But at Omega, why am I leading the program rather than simply attending the class? Alone, my 11th house Neptune could support the idea of me sitting in row 7, taking it all in – and indeed I have spent a lot of time sitting in such classes, at least as I was growing up. I majored in Religion in college, for example. Before that, I spent a lot of time in church and various church groups. Since then, I’ve been blessed to sit fairly often with some spiritual teachers who were truly heavy-hitters. 

 

But now I lead. Why? Where is that indicated in my chart? The answer does not lie in an 11th house Libran Neptune, at least not by itself.

 

Libra is on the cusp of my 11th house. That makes Venus its planetary ruler. As I mentioned a few lines ago, never forget about the planet that rules the sign on the 11th cusp! It always adds a critical element to the basic message. 

 

For me, Venus falls late in my 1st house – there’s the signature of leadership. It’s also in Sagittarius, and that’s where we see “religion and philosophy,” along with some of the necessary “Jupiter” skills that go with trying to hold the attention of large groups of people for long periods of time.

 

Just so you can visualize everything I just said, here’s a stripped-down version of my chart, only  showing the features I just mentioned. You can do the same thing with yours – and remember, even if you have no planets in the 11th house, you always have a sign on the 11th house cusp. Beyond that important clue, you also have a planet (or two!) that rules the 11th house cusp.

 

GOD’S MYSTERIOUS HAND REVEALED

 

Here’s a line you read a few moments ago: Looking back from an 11th house perspective over the seemingly random patterns of our biography, we recognize an orderly pattern of necessary development, an underlying unconscious strategy, and a core purpose in everything that happened – something aimed at fulfilling our 11th house destiny, and something that was invisible to us at the time those events were actually happening.

 

To me, this is the piece of the 11th house puzzle that puts tears of wonder in my eyes. In this crazy world, we are under such relentless pressure to believe that life is essentially random and without purpose. The major contribution of the 20th and 21st centuries to the world’s treasure house of philosophical thought seems to boil down to “shit happens.” And honestly life really does look like that a lot of the time! Yet, peering through the lens of the 11th house, we can see irrefutable evidence of a guiding higher intelligence at work, creating an objective order in our lives – and again, it’s an influence of which we are generally quite unaware at the time that it is happening.

 

Quickly, here are some of the ways that this higher intelligence has worked for me. Some of what I’m about to express would require “full biographical treatment” to do justice to the details. I’ll spare you that blather about me, me, me and just offer a few simple hints to illustrate the heart of my point.

 

• One of my first memories was wanting a telescope so I could look at the stars. Thank you, Holy Universe, Incubator of Consciousness, for making a man named Marty Bresnick a close friend of my family. He was an amateur astronomer and he helped me build my first telescope – something that linked me to the heavens in a direct way at a tender age. I was guided and I didn’t know it. 

 

• Thank you, Universe, for introducing me to a German woman who taught me the rudiments of palmistry when I was just thirteen years old. Palmistry uses much of the same language as astrology. And it works. That experience immediately inoculated me against the “scientific” dismissal of the ancient wisdom traditions. I was guided and I didn’t know it. 

 

• Thank you, Universe, for moving my parents to buy a paperback copy of Thomas Sugrue’s There Is A River: The Edgar Cayce Story and to unwittingly leave it on a bookshelf for me to discover at age twelve. Reincarnation entered my consciousness. I was guided and I didn’t know it. 

 

• Thank you, Universe, for blessing me with a good church experience growing up. Until I was about seventeen, the Community Church at the Circle in Mount Vernon, New York, fed my Neptunian soul a diet of love and a genuine search for God. I was guided and I didn’t know it. 

 

• Thank you, Universe, for blessing me with a hellishly bad church experience as I was shipped off to a Fundamentalist school for a couple of my teenage years. It gave me a much-needed perspective on the dark side of religion. I was guided and I didn’t know it. 

 

• Thank you, Universe, for connecting me with my first true spiritual teacher, Marian Starnes, when I was in my early twenties. As I began my astrological work, she believed in me more than I believed in myself. I was guided and I didn’t know it. 

 

• Thank you, Universe, for making me the pluperfect late-60’s hippie dude. The hippies – that very 11th house Libran social movement – aided by Neptunian psychedelics, blew me loose from the shackles of any kind of conventional life. My astrological identity was hatched in that heady environment. I was guided and I didn’t know it. 

 

• Thank you, Universe, for letting me spend an hour with Ram Dass. Thank you for letting me sit at the feet of various Buddhist Rinpoches. Thank you, Universe, for letting Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche feel moved to touch my forehead with his forehead. I was guided and I didn’t know it. 

 

• Finally, thank you, Universe, for letting me play in rock bands for half my life. That might sound like a side track, but for me it was actually a huge piece of the puzzle. As I’ve mentioned, I was a shy kid. I think I never once spoke voluntarily in a class until I was in my second or third year of college. But you can’t look shy and play rock’n’roll! Praise God that there’s no photo of this, but the first time I played in public was at a church talent show in about 1964. I was wearing a Beatle wig. (Tell no one). The point is that, without my experience with my rock bands, I would not have developed the ability to get up in front of large crowds and “perform” like I do. Even in that seeming dead end in my life, the mysterious Hand of God was guiding me toward being able to fulfill my 11th house “goals and aspirations.” Once again, I was guided and I didn’t know it.

 

If we play our part, that’s how life works for you, me, and everyone. Once again, you don’t even need a planet in your 11th house for this to be true. You’ve got a sign on its cusp and that sign has a ruler. That’s enough to get you going.

 

THE MYTH OF RANDOMNESS

 

Randomness is an illusion. Our lives have purpose, even when we have no idea what’s happening. You don’t have to take that on faith – all you have to do is to wait fifty or sixty years and look back at where you’ve been and why you’ve been there. 

 

Your 11th house will spell it out for you. 

 

One more point – there is a symbiosis between you and your 11th house tribe. Get it right, and you are benefiting them just as much as they are benefiting you. Everyone wins. As I stand there teaching at Omega or anywhere, all of you attending are my fellowship – my sangha – helping me to keep on track in my life, helping me a safe distance from the darker side of my own Neptune.

 

All I can do is say thank you.