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Past and Present: Inner healing with Chiron

Introduction

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 resides in the present. Guilt, shame, blame, etc. represent the past. Real Conscience is about acceptance, understanding, awareness, forgiveness, and unconditional love. Real Conscience is accepting who each of us are in our entirety - good and bad. It is acknowledging that, yes, we have flaws, but that we wish to be different ‘Now’. We acknowledge those parts of ourselves that need work, that need acknowledgment, that need to be nurtured and forgiven so that they can grow. We accept the responsibility, for what we are. We acknowledge our bad feelings in such a way that I can love them and let them go.

Our wish for healing and growth is ‘Now’. We need to heal the past; to let it go so that each of us can be whole again. If we are attached to the past by our guilt and blame and shame then we are not whole. We are 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. None of us can hold everything that we have done in the past in the forefront of our consciousness for even a fraction of a second. Firstly, it is impossible. Secondly, it would be too painful. As a consequence, if we accept such a proposal as our ordinary view of karma, but are unable to deal with it, we tend to push it into the background. We unconsciously create a sense of impending doom, a sense of judgement against ourselves, a sense of not being good enough; these are the seeds of more guilt and shame. We can't change the past, nor can we deal with it, nor can we make it go away. So it sits there, in the subconscious, eating you away, affecting your life each and every day. 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 and so on. These also become lodged in our Being not allowing us 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 the present. So the future will be even better, surely. When we are disillusioned with the past and with the present 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 present, 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 in the Past.

Enter Chiron. Enter Conscience. With Chiron there is no past and there is no future. The idea of the past is a human invention which 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 and 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 reminds us that, "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 present, 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, everything 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. It is all there. We have everything that we need, right here and Now.

Chiron reminds us that we need to be in the present. 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 present. 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.

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 present. 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 present, we are.

The Buddhists remind us to, "Be Mindful.

" What am I, right Now? Am I elsewhere in my mind, or am I here in the ‘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 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 present. 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. Judgement, criticism, blame, failure, lack of forgiveness, guilt, shame and so on, are all man-made. Compassion, unconditional love and forgiveness are of god - of ‘Now’. When we live in the present, 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 present - in Conscience I process things as they happen. I am there to experience what happens today. 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 present. 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 present - from God and 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 reveal a way to ourselves; a path to the present. Through conscience and the present, 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 today.



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