2012 - Science Or Superstition?/Segment/7
The shift of human consciousness
40:00
Narr: Whether or not the changes on Earth and in our solar system are evidence of a physical, real-world climax in 2012, many believe that there is a coming shift in human consciousness that was the true message of the Maya and to which we must pay due respect and to consider acting on.
JMJ: I tend towards the metaphorical interpretation here. I think that if we're due for any kind of pole shift, it should be a pole shift in our collective consciousness. We have to steer clear of that 'pole' that wants us to live in a world of dualism, you know, to be fixated to that mode of culture that seeks to dominate other cultures around the world, and instead, shift our minds to emphasise a partnership society. [Talk]
GH: The work of John Major Jenkins is very important. It's had a huge influence on my thinking about the ancient Maya. I think he's made highly significant breakthroughs in understanding what was going on with the ancient Maya and what event in the heavens they were able to predict thousands of years ago would occur in our time and in our time only.
The Maya appear to have been able to do that thousands of years ago - to cast forward to a time which marks the end of the calendar system when the Sun appears in the dead center of the Milky Way galaxy. And I take this as a marker. They knew that that would happen. It's easy to read into it a cataclysmic end of the world in our age, but John Major Jenkins' work has been particularly helpful in showing that it's easy to read another possibility into it too, which is: Yes, the world age will come to an end. Everything that has been built for the last five thousand years will be up for grabs. We may not count on things remaining the same as they have done throughout our lifetimes - things are going to change. But also, that this is a rebirth, not a simple destruction, and that, in a way, it may be necessary to sweep away the old before something new, something more positive, more hopeful, a new guiding spirit for the next five thousand years emerges.
John has shown the astronomical correlates of this and has shown how the Sun effectively seems to emerge from the cosmic womb - speaking of rebirth. And so he draws from this a hopeful message, which I happen to share with him, and perhaps this is the best way to interpret the Mayan prophecy:
We live in a time when things will never be the same again, and it is we who will preside over that change, and it is our own choices and what we do with our own consciousness that will govern whether that change is for good or for evil. [Talk]
JMJ: The Mayan calendars speak for insight into a time that is somewhat counterintuitive to western, linear time. For the Maya, it's cyclic. But it's not only an insight into the cyclic nature of time, but it's a vision of time and cycles as a breathing out and a breathing in - moving out of connection to our true selves and moving back into relationship with our true selves [Talk]
AM: The Long count cycle, which we understand as one of the grand cycles of the Maya. It was conceived as a creation moment and a completion of a cycle. These eras, as we might call them, lasted a grand number of 5,125 years. This great tally of years comes to its completion in December of 2012. Curiously enough, it also coincides with the winter solstice. This we thought was quite interesting and profound, and probably not accidental in any way for the ancient Maya, being that these two solar stations bracketed the creation to the completion. [Talk]
JMJ: The Mayan calendars also encode an insight into the inter-woven nature of reality - what we might call a fractal model, or a quantum model of reality. We see this most clearly in the 260-day calendar, the Tzolkin. This is the core building block of all the Mayan calendar systems. It consists of thirteen numbers combined with twenty day signs, so 13 x 20 = 260. 260 is a key number for the Maya because it corresponds to the human gestation period. So there's this nine-month process of human unfolding that we all share. This is the philosophy behind the Mayan calendar: time unfolds like a flower. And it's unfolding the inner essence of consciousness out of the Earth matrix, you might say.
Another use for the 260 day calendar is that it corresponds to the interval between planting and harvesting of corn in the highlands. So that's an agricultural metaphor.
Most incredibly, the 260-day calendar is used as a key in the Maya almanacs. The Mayan almanacs are that calendars that schedule the appearance of Venus, Mercury, and Mars. So there's this very, very important astronomical reference in the 260-day Tzolk'in calendar as well. What we see in all this is the use of 260 as a key to different dimensions in human experience. It's basically uniting the cycles in the heavens and the cycles here on Earth, including cycles that human beings experience. So it's an insight into that paradigm of as above, so below - the microcosm reflects the macrocosm. [Talk]
AM: We do the same thing in our cultures. We celebrate the yearly cycles, we celebrate century cycles. Often times these cyclical changes come with a deeper foreboding, ominous feeling to them. One is not certain whether the universe can be reordered, restructured. We see this happening in many of the ancient festivals such as the New Fire ceremony, for instance, when Tzolk'in and Haab' counts came to the completion of a cycle. All fires were to be put out throughout the territory, and a new fire initiated. These were moments of darkness - the darkness representing this primordial origin once again. The new fire is the creation of the hearth once again. We see these as very symbolic, and very powerful moments of recycling and renewal. The Grand cycle should fall within the same parameters, and so on the closure of the grandest cycle of all, this should also be a moment of closure, but also of renewal. [Talk]
JMJ: There are still daykeepers that are following in an unbroken way, the ancient Tzolk'in calendar. However, there is another calendar, the Long Count, that basically fell into disuse over eight centuries ago. This is the calendar that gives us the 2012 end date. In the Long Count calendar there are cycles, and the longest cycle is a period of 13 Baktuns, which is a period of 5,125 years. This 13-Baktun cycle was conceived of by the Maya as one world age. So it's a key to the Mayan doctrine of world ages that we find in the creation mythology. And scholars now know how to correlate the Maya calendar with our own calendar. We know that the 13-Baktun cycle end date falls precisely on December 21st of 2012. [Talk]
AFA: It is true that when the Sun is at the [December] solstice, it more-or-less lines up in the direction of the constellation of Saggitarius, which is close to what we would call the centre of the Milky Way galaxy, which was not determined until even later. I stress this because when one wants to argue about precision here, I could say in a very general way that the [December] solstice Sun comes through that general area of Saggitarius, whether it's conceived of as the center of the galaxy or not - somewhere between the years 1900 and 2150. To dare to pinpoint it any more accurately is to suggest that the Maya did. Any I'll go back to what I always go back to: I've got to see the evidence. And I've got to see something more than just some interpretation of an iconography on a stela. I've got to see it in the codices, I've got to see it in writing, I've got to see the numbers. If the astronomers cared about that, they would have backed it up with numbers. So one does have such an alignment, but in the crudest possible sense you could imagine. [Talk]
LEJ: 2012 - Science Or Superstition?/LEJ/7 [Talk]
JM: I'm very much aware of all the prophecies and discussion about 2012, but then I also lived through 'the Russians are gonna kill us next week' in the cold war, the harmonic convergence, and Y2K and my first piece of advice to people is don't sell your house and move to the mountains because I think that there is every likelihood that in 2013 your bills will still be coming in. [Talk]
WC: 2012 - Science Or Superstition?/WC/5 [Talk]
JAW: 2012 - Science Or Superstition?/JAW/2 [Talk]
DP: For me, part of the essential shift in consciousness that we may be undergoing is this integration of empirical, rational, scientific thought, and intuitive, shamanic, and mystical knowledge systems. And for me, it's really as those two aspects come together, this next level of human consciousness is beginning to be formed and then to recognise itself. That's what I see as the archetype of Quetzalcoatl also indicating or representing as an archetype is the meaning of bird and snake - the feathered serpent, the meaning of Heaven/Earth, Spirit/matter, or it could be seen as the meaning of materialist-empirical thrust of western culture with the esoteric-mystical framework of indigenous cultures and eastern cultures. So for me, one thing that's really important that's been happening lately - in the last 50 years - is the integration of Eastern metaphysical thought into the Western psyche. You know, everywhere you go, in every airplane, people are reading [?], the Dalai Lami, Eckhart Tolle - the Power of Now, you know, that's philosophy re-expressed for the for the European/Western mindset. So people still tend to think of spirituality as a trend, in a way - I don't like the word 'spirituality' very much but I think it's much closer to being a profound, transformative shift in our psyche. So now, I think there's a second stage in the initiatory process that's going on for the Western psyche, but it's happening on a much more foundational level, because so many more people have made those kinds of connections and have had those kind of experiences and have integrated to a much deeper level. [Talk]
AV: The Inca, the Hopi, the Mayans, were all shamanic cultures. And they entered into altered states of awareness in order to access this body of wisdom, which is infinite. So to do that, they had to step outside of ordinary time, which is the opportunity we all have today as we come to the "end of time," to step into infinity, to step into this body of ancient wisdom. [Talk]
