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.


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