The DK Foundation

Conversations with the   Magi: 4

Our Star of Direction

“You really think that you are so important?” my Magian friend said after I had described to him the best that I could the significance of Chiron in western horoscopy. What he meant was “do you Westerners really encourage yourselves to think that, individually, you are factors of such significance?” The idea was obscene to him and my fleshing it out had made it no less so.  His body language showed it, and there was what I can only call bitterness in his voice.

We were very aware of our differences then, the Middle Eastern ascetic and the Westerner staking everything upon giving the personality spiritual validity.  

Implicit in the Magian stance is the view that we Westerners are spiritually culpable for developing personalities so strong that they will not be subdued by eastern spiritual practices.

I cannot and will not take on that guilt. What we are is what we are; what we have is what we have. Collectively and individually we have to start our spiritual journey from where we stand, wherever that is. How does it help us or serve the World if we simply lament our lot and our loss? We have heard enough of that kind of talk in the past two thousand years and one consequence of this is that there are now many, many young people walking around, flaunting a spiritual identity derived from feeling as though they are in the wrong place. This attitude wastes opportunities. It breeds inertia, alienation and impotence and, worse still, it is usually underpinned by a delusive vanity of the too-spiritual-to-be-here kind. It is a posture that serves no useful purpose whatsoever. If we are to help our planet and get back to where we came from (basically one and the same thing), we need to use our personalities and recognize the opportunities that they bring. And smartish, before the existing system of reincarnation changes, as it will do at the next Planetary Initiation.

The tape of that session records my rather exasperated reply: “We have to. Otherwise we are lost. Understand that we have to make personality consciousness work for us. Its what we have. We have to make it productive of soul awareness, otherwise we might as well lie down and wait for death to make us into ‘food for the moon’.”

‘Food for the moon’ was one of Gurdjieff’s favourite expressions. Brought up on Fourth Way shock tactics, I know them to be good conversation stoppers.

And our conversation stopped.

Yet, this was achieving nothing. We both had a responsibility to recognize that. The fact was that the Magi had troubled to contact us to find out what was the message of Chiron as it moves through the sign Sagittarius, and so what was the point of our underscoring our differences? There was no point. My friend and I had to find some common ground, even if it was only the willingness to continue with our project.  

“Can you accept that personalities, working consciously towards integration, are trying to redeem themselves?”  I threw that out to get things moving again.

His reply was total silence. But it was a receptive silence, one that absorbed and contained our differences. It was a master stroke. I was to read into that what I liked, in the interests of peace!

As it moves through Sagittarius, Chiron is encouraging us to lose differences and divisions whether internal or external in pursuit of higher goals, as a candle flame gets absorbed in bright sunlight.

The message of Chiron, whether we respond to it as the co-tenant of Sagittarius, Virgo or Aries, is to turn the attention outward, to become more inclusive and to lose the focus upon self: in pursuit of knowledge (Sagittarius); in Christ consciousness (Virgo); in soul consciousness (Aries).

Chiron bridges the gap between Saturn, the symbol of personal reality and Uranus, the symbol of egoic consciousness. It does away with the duality that makes spirituality separate from everyday life.

In 1998, the year before Chiron entered the sign Sagittarius (a time, incidentally, when Britain and America were at least beginning to emerge convincingly from a twenty year infatuation with psychology and ‘sorting stuff’, a process which could have people in therapy and analysis for years, their lives on hold), I was contacted by people living in a house in which there was increasing poltergeist activity. They were all ill and depressed and the family dog had behavioural problems. On this occasion, D.K. advised me to keep it simple and adopt a completely different strategy which involved going in, and without delving and communicating with the presences, to overlay the vibration in the house with a higher vibration. That was all; that was it. In less that two hours, I moved out and the family moved back in.  

Of course it worked, and it is a strategy that I have used in all clearance work ever since. As an activity, it perfectly enshrines the message of Chiron in Sagittarius: lose the lower in the higher, and keep moving.  

The direction in which to keep moving is indicated by Chiron’s position in the natal chart. This is why it is our star of direction: it points the way to purposeful, soul oriented activity, the practical way to lose divisive differences, whether they exist in our own psyches or between ourselves and others. (Once again, basically the same thing.)

In the final two articles that make up this series, we will look at Chiron by sign and house position.

Suzanne Rough

2001