Chiron's Station/Direct: Being Honest With Ourselves

 Chiron instructing the young Achilles - an ancient Roman Fresco

Two days from today's date of posting (November 5th), at 6:39pm (UT), Chiron will go direct.

That means that as of November 3rd - when this post goes up - and extending through November 7th...we all get to enjoy Chirotic station effects. 

Is 'enjoy' the right word? It could be, yes, depending on how you deal with the idea of learning which involves going outside your comfort zone.

The mythic Chiron being a centaur, we know this is a question of whether we use our human 'higher' mentality (the upper portion of the centaur being human) in the harnessing of 'animalistic strengths' (the horse's body) in doing things which are productive and positive...or whether we will use our human 'smarts' to just get what we want on an 'animalistic' level.

Pictured above as the instructor of warrior/hero Achilles, this question, this quandary, this struggle within the self is one which is pretty obviously of 'heroic' nature. It's also about learning how to harness our (Achilles) strengths and talents so that we don't just go around causing reckless damage. Achilles was a warrior, yes. So he was going to draw blood and (theoretically) change the course of history.

Which he did pretty much at Troy in not only helping bring down a city, but burdening untold millions of students forevermore with the task of reading Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, yes.

But Achilles here is being taught by Chiron to not just slash, stab and maim, but to know what he's doing and why he's doing it. That there should be a reason for bloodshed and - hopefully - an improvement of things all around for the shedding of blood. That this is part of Chiron's tutorial plan is not perhaps evident in this painting but it is evident if we understand that Chiron himself had a teacher: Apollo, god of light and enlightenment and (very much to the point here) medicine. In the lore of Chiron, the fact that Apollo teaches this could-be-rowdy-and-brutally-selfish centaur medicine as a healing art is very clearly akin to the first call of doctors to first, do no harm.

 This does not mean the surgeon doesn't cut. This does not mean that there isn't any pain involved in the resettling of a broken or dislocated limb or the giving of an inoculation to a child.

What it means is that the cost chosen course of action must on balance, be worth the risk in terms of possible - preferably probable - improvements. 

One other thing we know about Chiron - this being on the metaphysical/astrological level: wherever Chiron is, we know that is where we don't know how to get to our goal. Most of us won't even want to try. But try we should; those things we will never attempt end up being exactly what limit our life, clog up the works and in the long run, cripple our life and ability to be the person we really want to feel satisfied with being.

And that's where the comfort zone thing comes in. Particularly during these days ahead, our ability to move ahead almost in spite of ourselves is going to be tested. Because we have two other dynamic players (Damocles and Neptune) also going direct during this time, and because Chiron is going direct in conjunction with Neptune, we can also expect a lot of internal/emotional smoke-and-mirrors to be going on.

Our expectations are high. We are balanced between an expectation and hope for self, and an expectation and desire-to-believe in the world around us. We are now at a moment when we will do well to ask ourselves what we really want out of life.

Like as not there are several things on your list. Also like as not, some things on that list are more appealing or easier or 'more fun' to undertake.

But to really have the life you want, it's probably the hard things, those things you don't know how to do and don't have a clue how they would work...those are probably the things you should tackle.

That's Chiron, and the more astrologers study Chirotic cycles, the more we realize that it's that willingness to harness our head and instinctual strength which gets us through the challenges we tackle. The very nature of not knowing how somehow makes us stronger - it brings out the 'coping Achilles' quality - and thus does Chiron inform Achilles...and pass on the ultimate lesson of Apollo - that of light as a metaphor of truth.

We are truly capable of doing things we 'don't know how to do'...but we can only learn that by doing them.