Chiron and the Awakening of Conscience

by Martin Lass
Copyright (C) 1995
(published in Australian new age journal "Golden Age", 1995)

When we hear the word "conscience", many of us immediately connect it
with guilt and shame. We feel bad about ourselves and associate these
feelings with a kind of impending punishment or retribution. As a
consequence, we make all efforts to ignore or avoid feelings of
conscience because they are too painful to contemplate. I wish to draw a
line that separates Conscience and guilt. To this end, I will spell
Conscience with a capital C as I believe that real Conscience is a much
wider conception than our ordinary view of conscience.

Real Conscience represents the healing of guilt, shame, blame and
judgement. It rewrites the accepted ideas of judgement, criticism, crime,
punishment and retribution. Real Conscience is in the NOW. Guilt, shame,
blame, etc. are of the past. Real Conscience is about acceptance,
understanding, awareness, forgiveness, and unconditional Love. Real
Conscience is accepting who I am.. all of me.. right Now.. good and bad.
It is acknowledging that, yes, I have flaws, but that I wish to be
different Now. I acknowledge those parts of me that need work.. that need
acknowledgment.. that need to be nurtured and forgiven so that they can
grow. I accept the responsibility, Now, for what I am. I acknowledge my
bad feelings in such a way that I can love them and let them go. My Wish
for healing and growth is NOW. I need to heal the past.. to let it go so
that I can be whole again. If I am attached to the Past by my guilt and
blame and shame, etc. then I am not whole.. I am only operating on half
steam.

In this way, the idea of Karma takes on a new dimension. The traditional
view is that, because we have done bad things or neglected
responsibilities in past lives, therefore, now, in this life, we must
pay. We are educated, conditioned and brought up to believe in a system
of success and failure. We are conditioned to accept that failure leads
to punishment or retribution. In this way, we are made to feel bad about
ourselves by our parents, our teachers, our peer groups, our religions
and our governments. This is a society that has become preoccupied by the
ideas of success and failure, right and wrong, good and bad, black and
white, crime and punishment. Trying to accept the burden of many past
lifetimes and the idea of punishment and retribution spanning this whole
life is, of course, more than anyone wishes to contemplate. I can't hold
everything that I have done in the past in the forefront of my
consciousness for even a fraction of a second. Firstly, it is impossible.
Secondly, it would be too painful. As a consequence, if I accept such a
proposal as our ordinary view of karma, but am unable to deal with it, I
tend to push it into the background. I create, unconsciously, a sense of
impending doom.. a sense of judgement against myself.. a sense of not
being good enough.. these are the seeds of more guilt and shame. I can't
change the past, nor can I deal with it.. nor can I make it go away. So
it sits there, in my subconscious, eating me away, affecting my life Now.
And then there are the issues of traumatic experiences in the past that
have not been healed, integrated or reconciled. Childhood abuse,
abandonment, violence, death of loved ones, major accidents, being
unloved, etc. These also become lodged in my Being not allowing me to be
free from the Past. We are not given the tools to know how to free
ourselves from the clutches of our identification with the Past. However,
there is a way..

As the Age of Pisces comes to a close, we can get a more objective view
of how it has affected us personally and as a whole. During this Age, we
have become preoccupied with the Past. We have become attached to living
in the Past, particularly emotionally. When we accept guilt, blame and
shame, we are living in the spectre of the Past. When we fall into victim
roles and self-pity we are attached to the Past. Modern psychology and
psychiatry work on the premise that past events cause current
difficulties or mental illness. The law of historical cause and effect is
tacitly accepted as an immutable axiom. The idea of evolution is based on
this. The general view of the human race is that it is getting better all
the time because we are improving on the past all the time. We are
conditioned to think in these terms. On the one hand, the past is felt to
be not as good as Now. So the future will be even better, surely. When we
are disillusioned with the Past and with the Now as it is, we wish for
tomorrow.. that will cure everything. On the other hand, as the Piscean
Age also taught us, when we are disillusioned with the Now, we hearken
back to "the good old days". We are living in the past again. In "new
age" circles, a commonly accepted belief is that humanity's Golden Age
was in the distant past and that we have lost what "they" had. Either
way, we are hung. Whether that past is full of guilt, shame, blame and
failure or whether it is full of halcyon days and miraculous
civilisations we are stuck.. stuck in the Past.

Enter Chiron.. Enter Conscience..
There is no Past and there is no Future. The idea of the Past is a human
invention. It serves the limitations of our linear time sense. To make
sense of the world, intellectually, humanity has invented many concepts.
The idea of linear time.. Past, Present, Future.. works fine on a
practical level.. but when we accept it as a fact of our spiritual
existence, we are accepting a limitation. From a higher perspective,
Chiron says, "All is Now".

Let's try to be logical. When we speak about the Past, we speak about it
as though it were a place from which we have come. That place does not
have a tangible existence. It resides in our minds. And we have,
collectively agreed that it has an existence. We all dream the same
dream. Our minds and our imaginations are extraordinary things! When we
contemplate the past, we are creating an inner world that has all the
appearance of a tangible place. We become convinced of its existence by
becoming totally captivated by it. We get lost in thought and memories
and the outside world ceases to exist. And yet, the outside world is
still there, in the Now, at the very instants that we are being carried
away within ourselves. We are hypnotised. We are not fully aware or fully
there. If we think logically about it, every thing that has ever happened
to us has a record. Where is that record? Surely it is within us, right
Now. We are, Now, the sum total of everything that has ever happened to
us. We can access everything that ever happened to us by examining
ourselves, Now. It is all there. We have everything that we need, right
here and Now.

Chiron says that we need to Be in the Now. We need to exercise awareness,
not try to escape from it. Chiron says Be who you are, right Now. Sit
down with yourself and experience who you are in the Now. Don't try to
experience everything that you are and have been all in that one moment.
We need simplicity. We need to be gentle with ourselves. Simply watch
what comes up. Feel what comes up. Ponder what comes up. Remain with the
experience. Try to avoid trying to analyse what comes up. Try to avoid
the mental contortions of justification, rationalisation and the tendency
to create mental edifices of cause and effect. Forget about what the mind
has been taught. Just experience  whatever comes up. We don't need books
for this. We have all the possible experiences that we need right here
within us.. right Now. Hawaiian Huna says, "Now is the Moment of Power."
Bring yourself back from the Past at every instant that you find yourself
taken by it. What are you Now? Where are you Now? We need to  exercise
our attention to the Now. When we allow our attention to be taken by
daydreams and by our self-created inner worlds, we are NOT. When we are
here in the Now, we ARE. The Buddhists say, "Be Mindful." What am I,
right Now? Am I elsewhere in my mind, or am I here Now, washing the
dishes or performing my work? When I feel sad or depressed or I feel
guilt or I am discontent, do I really feel it? The residue of past
traumas.. do I feel what I feel about it, Now? Or do I keep replaying the
recordings of the event, getting lost again in the inner spaces of my
self-created limitation? Do I feel it Now, with the deep Wish to
understand? Or do I try to escape again, perhaps blaming the way that I
am on the Past or on something outside myself? I am what I am. Will I
accept that, Now? Why do I always try to escape from it? Can I not just
Be Now, whatever that is? I need to accept what I am, in the Now. I need
to give up my judgements against myself and against others. I need to
release the Past. I need to Forgive. I need to Forgive myself and to
Forgive others who have trespassed against me. I need to be gentle with
myself. I need to Love and Nurture myself the way I would wish to Love
and Nurture a small child. Because I am a small child in the eyes of God.
Judgement, criticism, blame, failure, unforgivingness, guilt, shame, etc.
are all man-made. Compassion, Unconditional Love and  Forgiveness are of
God.. of Now. When we live in the Now, we are living in Conscience. And
then we are in contact with Chiron. Chiron is God's messenger of
Conscience. Healing is possible then. When I live in the Now.. in
Conscience.. I process things as they happen. I am there to experience
what happens.. Now. I might experience Pain. So I experience it. I grow.
I process. I Heal. And then I feel Joy and Freedom. Evolution is possible
then. Compassion, Acceptance, Forgiveness and  Unconditional Love are
possible then because we are God in the Now. If I choose not to
experience the Pain at the moment of impact, I become attached to the
Past again. This, in the long run, is far more Painful. This disconnects
me from the Now.. from God.. from myself. I feel alone then. I feel
forsaken. But the choice was mine.

Chiron, through our natal horoscope, can show us how we store Pain and
trauma. It can show us why we hold on to the Past and how we can let go
of it and Heal it. It can show us how we try to escape from Conscience
and why. It can show a Way to ourselves.. a Way to the Now. Through
Conscience and the Now, we become more of our God-self, accepting the
responsibility for our small part in the cosmic evolution of things. We
are all heading for the same place. The journey begins Now.
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If you have enjoyed this article and/or wish for more to be posted on
CompuServe, please let me know at the address below. In Love and Light..

Martin Lass, PO Box 595, Epping NSW 2121, Australia
CompuServe address 100243,1214
Internet address 100243,1214@compuserve.com