(Left) The first issue of New Dawn, No. 30, to hit newsagencies in 1995.

The origins and influences for a publication as rich and manifold as New Dawn are difficult to trace in any simplistic way, particularly for someone who has come to write for it comparatively late in its development, but all the same a few things can be said.

There has always been a market for publications that cater to the human need to explore the unknown and reach beyond the categories of conventional knowledge and experience. The Theosophist, founded by the noted occultist H.P. Blavatsky in 1879 and dedicated to exploring a wide range of esoteric traditions, is an example from the nineteenth century. In London in 1887, Blavatsky, with fellow Theosophist Mabel Collins, founded another journal, Lucifer, which survived for ten years and whose provocative title has ensured Blavatsky’s notoriety among conservative Christians to this day. Another London-based publication – and one of the most distinguished and fascinating specimens from the early twentieth century – was the monthly Occult Review. Published intermittently between 1905 and 1951, it featured contributors like magus Aleister Crowley; Arthur Edward Waite, co-creator of the Rider-Waite Tarot deck; and Paul Brunton, author of works such as The Hidden Teaching behind Yoga.

A noted predecessor on the European continent was the French review Planète (“Planet”), published by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier as a follow-up to the sensational success of their 1959 book Morning of the Magicians (first published in English as The Dawn of the Magicians in 1962). The spirit of Pauwels’ and Bergier’s venture could be summed up by this quote from Morning of the Magicians:

Trends of thought that escape the notice of the trained observer; writings and works to which the sociologist pays scant attention, together with social phenomena that he considers too insignificant or too odd to worry about, are perhaps a sure indication of events to come than facts that are there for all to see and the openly expressed opinions and general trend of thinking which cause him serious concern.

And so it has turned out to be, not only for the general public but even for those who are supposed to be in the know. American readers are by now used to reading headlines that say “US Surprised by Developments in [insert nation],” and Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA tells an uninterrupted story of bungling and incompetence in practically every area that much-feared organisation has touched. The good news: if you’re worried about it, it’s probably not that important. The bad news: watch out for things you never even thought of worrying about. One could argue that the role of a genuine alternative press is precisely to register and discuss these things we have never heard of.

In any event, the reach of Planète, which was published between 1961 and 1972, extended into fields such as sociology, futurology, and even literary fiction: Planète was the magazine that first brought the Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges to a wide public.

Gnosis & Alternative Media in the US

The alternative press in the United States today owes a great deal to the 1960s counterculture, whose ornate psychedelic newspapers, bizarre and hilarious underground comics, and publications like The Whole Earth Catalog set the tone for alternative publishing for the next generation. For a period extending from the mid-’70s to the mid-’90s, publications such as Co-Evolution Quarterly (a spinoff of The Whole Earth Catalog), New Age Journal, Yoga Journal, were investigating the burgeoning spiritual scene in a way that was both sympathetic and critical: many a hypocritical guru got his comeuppance from these magazines. Jay Kinney, an editor for Co-Evolution Quarterly who was also an underground cartoonist, started an influential journal of the Western spiritual traditions in 1985, called Gnosis. Gnosis took its inspiration from a number of influences, some of them (the psychology of C.G. Jung) comparatively well known, others (Gnosticism, the science fiction of Philip K. Dick) then quite obscure.

Gnosis, of which I was editor from 1990 to 1999, with Jay Kinney as publisher and editor-in-chief, was a freewheeling and eclectic quarterly whose contributors included witches, Satanists, Gnostic bishops, and Eastern Orthodox priests. It had the great advantage of being under the auspices of the nonprofit Lumen Foundation, an organisation dedicated to little else than publishing Gnosis. The fact that there was no organisation with its own agenda looking over our shoulders meant that we could publish what we liked. Gnosis dedicated each issue to a specific theme – the ones dedicated to G.I. Gurdjieff and psychedelic spirituality were among our best-sellers. This approach enabled us to go into topics in depth and from a number of different angles, but it had certain commercial disadvantages. Many readers found it more expedient to buy individual issues that interested them (and avoid buying ones that didn’t) rather than subscribing.

Gnosis was able to keep going on an infinitesimal budget until the late 1990s, which saw many casualties among the ranks of small alternative magazines. The 1970s and 1980s had been comparatively good years for these publications in the US. The burgeoning capacity of the Macintosh computer for design and a comparatively low postage rate made it possible for little magazines to grow and even thrive, but toward the end of the century the situation changed dramatically. Independent bookstores – which were major vendors of these magazines – began to fail as two large chains, Barnes & Noble and Borders, began to monopolise the bookselling business. As a result, many small, independent magazine distributors – themselves children of the ’60s – began to collapse as well, often owing publishers tens of thousands of dollars. At the same time, the proliferation of the Internet was robbing print media of a great deal of their glamour. It was in this atmosphere that Gnosis closed its doors in 1999. Some larger magazines in the field, notably New Age Journal (today called Body + Soul) and Yoga Journal, taking the hint from their heavily female demographics, survived by recasting themselves into ladies’ lifestyle magazines.

The situation remains to this day. The bookstore chains have retrenched somewhat – Borders filed for bankruptcy this year – but their place has been taken by the Internet giant Amazon, and while independent bookstores are said to be making a comeback, this is a trend that is hardly noticeable to the average reader. For someone of my generation (I was born in 1956), it seems particularly sad that old harbour of refuge for free spirits – the metaphysical bookstore – has more or less vanished. These bookstores were an odd lot, ranging from the superb to the ludicrous. I remember going into one in San Francisco’s North Beach in 1980 and overhearing a conversation that the clerk – a fat lady with eyes made up like a cat’s – was having on the phone. “Well,” she was telling her interlocutor, somewhat impatiently, “we really would have to know what the curse was for…”

Others – Weiser’s in New York, the Bodhi Tree in West Hollywood, even one called The Mystic Eye, on the edge of Harvard Square, which I frequented as an undergraduate – were meccas proffering incense fumes and esoteric knowledge in thick blue volumes to many whose spiritual aspirations did not fit under any known denominational rubric.

Most of these shops are gone now; even New York City, which prides itself on its rich cultural texture as well as on its eccentrics, has only one left. Other parts of the English-speaking world have not been exempt from the trend; London’s largest and most respected esoteric bookshop, Watkins, was closed temporarily in early 2010 until it was bailed out by investors.

In intellectual terms, one major influence on New Dawn has clearly been the British writer and philosopher Colin Wilson (see article on page 51), whose persistent investigations into the mind’s unknown capacities – which Wilson calls Faculty X – have inspired countless readers to explore such figures as Crowley, Gurdjieff, and Gregory Rasputin, not to mention the more conventional themes of existentialism and phenomenology. Indeed Wilson started out focusing on mainstream thought in his first book, The Outsider, published in 1956, when he was only twenty-four, but he was fair-minded enough to remain open to alternative views of reality, and covered these sympathetically and brilliantly in later works including The Occult (1969).

James Webb

The occult is rejected knowledge. It may be knowledge which is actively rejected by an Establishment culture, or knowledge which voluntarily exiles itself from the courts of favour because of its recognised incompatibility with the prevailing wisdom. The word “occult” means “hidden,” and in this idea lies the key to the occult’s forbidding appearance. Something may be hidden because of its immense value, or reverently concealed from the prying eyes of the profane. But this hidden thing may also have achieved its sequestered position because the Powers That Be have found it wanting. Either it is a threat and must be buried, or simply useless, and so forgotten.

– James Webb, The Occult Underground

Another influential writer on the occult, James Webb (1946-1980), was neither so open-minded nor so lucky. His works, such as The Occult Underground and The Occult Establishment, are tainted by a curious smug disdain for their subject matter, perhaps influenced by his background: unlike the self-educated Wilson, Webb had a conventional upper-class British education at Harrow and Cambridge. Wilson, who wrote a never-published introduction to The Occult Establishment, observed that the object of Webb’s books was “to demonstrate that ‘the occult’ is merely a curious aberration of the human mind, a proof that man has failed to outgrow primitive superstition, and that one of his most incorrigible characteristics is his longing for the comfort offered by fake messiahs and gurus.”

Webb was nevertheless influential, if not in promoting esoteric themes, at least in presenting them and fitting them into a larger picture of Western cultural currents. In a preface to The Occult Underground, he contended that “to ignore the occult revival of the 19th century is to ignore a large slice of modern intellectual development, and that the proper understanding of the workings of the occult mind explains much which has puzzled commentators on the history of the last fifty years as well.” Webb’s books explore figures such as Blavatsky and the Theosophists, Jiddu Krishnamurti, the French occultists Éliphas Lévi and Joséphin Péladan, as well as the occult influences on more celebrated figures such as William Butler Yeats and Adam Mickiewicz, who is generally regarded as Poland’s greatest poet.

Webb’s last book, The Harmonious Circle: The Lives and Work of G.I. Gurdjieff, P.D. Ouspensky, and Their Followers, was published in 1979, and as a whole reflects both Webb’s strengths and weaknesses as an observer of the esoteric scene. It is thorough and for the most part accurate, and in many ways remains the best treatment of the Gurdjieff-Ouspensky milieu, but like Webb’s other works it is flawed by a condescension toward its subject matter as well as by occasional wild lapses of judgment. In an early chapter, Webb bizarrely tries to prove that Gurdjieff was the same person as Ushe Narzunoff, a Central Asian adventurer, an argument that falls apart as soon as one looks at two photographs of the men (helpfully reproduced in Webb’s book), which display the obviously Asiatic Narzunoff and the equally obviously Caucasian Gurdjieff. (Webb claims, unconvincingly, that the photos were doctored.)

The Harmonious Circle was written in a phase of Webb’s life when he was confronting mental breakdown. Joyce Collin-Smith, sister-in-law of Ouspensky’s disciple Rodney Collin, recalls that at one point he phoned her “saying he was being ‘persecuted’ by his publishers and adding wildly that the French Freemasons had got it in for him.” Moreover, he was no longer quite so capable of treating his material with upper-class British disdain. In a letter to Collin-Smith from this period, he writes, “My life has just emerged from a nightmare…. I had a full scale nervous breakdown, with hallucinations, visions, and a fine repertoire of subjectively supernatural experiences. Hoist with my own petard, I would say. Despite the undoubtedly hallucinatory nature of many of my experiences, a residue remains which I simply have to take seriously. I can’t fit all the altered states of consciousness into one system. Gnosticism and some of the Indian systems seem to provide the best framework.” Not long thereafter he put a shotgun to his head and killed himself.

Webb’s work, though flawed in certain respects, had the great advantage of drawing together many disparate strands of history and thought and weaving them together into a readable and intelligent portrait, and as such he stands as an important precursor not only of New Dawn but of the burgeoning trend, led by Antoine Faivre, emeritus professor at the Sorbonne, to study esotericism as a legitimate part of the Western legacy.

Other influences on New Dawn clearly include another Australian publication, Nexus, which has been published since 1986 and, by its own description, covers “health breakthroughs, future science and technology, suppressed news, free energy, religious revisionism, conspiracy, the environment, history and ancient mysteries, the mind, UFOs, paranormal and the unexplained.” Another, less recognised influence was Critique, a magazine published by Bob Banner out of Santa Rosa, California, in the late 1980s, whose subtitle, “Exposing Consensus Reality,” has been echoed by New Dawn’s “Challenging Consensus Reality.”

What is Consensus Reality?

What, then, is the consensus reality that New Dawn is challenging? It is the idea, reinforced by mainstream media and mainstream thought, that the truth occupies a narrow bandwidth of reality that coincides with the obvious, the predictable, and the knowledge that is supposedly proven and unassailable. We have already seen one good reason for challenging this conventional notion of reality: it has huge blind spots, which are exposed every time some totally unforeseen development – sudden invasions, political upheavals over entire regions, shocking and inexplicable attacks by terrorist groups – shakes the world. The standards of normalcy do not help us very much when we are confronted with these events, which occur precisely when things are not normal – when ordinary systems of justice and economic distribution cease to operate; when large masses of people have no influence on political authority; when individuals feel that their only chance to make their voices heard is through violence. The fact that such incidents occur – and occur with such frequency – indicates that the mainstream perspective is, if not completely wrong, at least seriously incomplete.

Sixteen years ago, in a 1995 interview with GROK magazine, New Dawn editor David Jones observed, “Look at the profile of a ‘successful’ journalist. They know to write within the accepted parameters. They don’t dare say that the ‘emperor has no clothes…’ They certainly don’t want to upset the consensus reality. They’d be out of a job. If you are a mainline journalist you stay on safe ground between the well-defined goal posts…. If you want to be acceptably different you write about the environment…You express outrage over human rights violations a thousand miles away, and put an Amnesty International sticker on your car… That’s your limit.”

“On the immediate level,” Jones added, “New Dawn strives to present the ‘other side of the story.’ And this is just not a convenient cliché.” Regarding the AUM Supreme Truth group, a Japanese new religious movement that carried out a nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway system in 1995, Jones said, “The underlying premise of the Establishment media reporting is ‘Oh, these people are a crazy religious cult, ipso facto they’re guilty…. Hey, everyone knows people with strong religious convictions are potential mass-murderers.’ In response, New Dawn asks, ‘What is going on here?… What do these AUM Supreme Truth people actually believe, where are they coming from, and what is their motive, if any?’ Invariably, when you start to dig beneath the sensationalised radio, TV, and newspaper stories, a bigger picture begins to form.” In order to enable readers to draw their own conclusions, New Dawn published the AUM Supreme Truth’s statement of its motives for its acts. (At more or less the same time, Gnosis did something similar, reprinting the official statements of the Solar Temple, a French cult nineteen of whose members had committed mass suicide in October 1994.)

New Dawn started in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, one of the strangest and most ambiguous wars of recent decades. Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 was on the surface a clear-cut act of aggression, but serious questions remain about the US government’s response to border tensions that had been between Kuwait and Iraq before the invasion took place. At that time, April Glaspie, then American ambassador to Iraq, told Hussein, “We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait…. [US Secretary of State] James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasise this instruction.” While the US maintained that this did not give Hussein, then an American protégé, carte blanche to invade, he clearly took it as such. Was this merely a colossal blunder on the part of the US State Department? Was it the result of some grand but nefarious strategy for bringing Saddam, and Iraq, to heel?

“New Dawn made its appearance at this time as a photocopied 32-page desktop published zine,” Jones recalls. “Our first issues dwelt on the US war crimes in the Gulf conflict, the dangers of a so-called New World Order run by the UN Security Council on behalf of the big Western powers, economic exploitation of the nations of the global South, and the role of intelligence agencies in international affairs.

“Over the following months we expanded into other ‘controversial’ areas such as the CIA’s involvement in the drug trade, international terrorism, banking, and the subversion of sovereign nations. Gradually our subscription list grew and we had enough money to actually print the magazine. By May 1992 we were printing 1,000 copies of a bimonthly 40-page New Dawn magazine.”

Over the years, New Dawn gave similar coverage to Libya’s alleged role in the Lockerbie airline bombing of 1988; the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, in 1993; and the bombings of the Oklahoma City US federal building in 1995.

“It can be a painful experience having your cherished beliefs and conditioned prejudices upset,” Jones observed in the GROK interview. “Depending on a person’s ‘conditioned thinking’ New Dawn, at various times, has been called ‘extreme left-wing,’ ‘extreme right-wing,’ ‘nazi,’ ‘anarchist’, ‘bizarre’ and ‘crazy’… You name it. Christian fundamentalists see Satan, rightists condemn us as left-wing radicals and doctrinaire leftists denounce us as fascist loonies. Our response is, ‘Look in the mirror… what do you see?’

“One prominent Melbourne professional ‘skeptic’ angrily denounced New Dawn on his radio program. Despite the fact that what he said was simply incorrect, it revealed more about his thought-processes or lack of them.” (This last remark serves as a reminder that self-proclaimed “skeptics” and “skeptical inquirers” are among the most bigoted and closed-minded individuals on the current cultural scene.)

New Dawn Readers

If none of these appellations quite fits, who, then, are New Dawn’s readers? In the first place, they are probably independent-minded. Because so much of the material in the magazine challenges political shibboleths on all bands of the political spectrum, readers of this magazine are likely to be neither left-wing nor right-wing in any pure sense of those terms. And this is an important point. There is often a demand for consistency in one’s political beliefs, but this kind of consistency usually amounts to buying one’s beliefs wholesale: if you agree with the left (or the right) on issue X, you are automatically expected to agree with it on issue Y. On the face of it, however, there is no reason that the right, the left, or the centre should have the monopoly on truth. In fact a reasonable person might agree with the American philosopher Ken Wilber, who once observed that no one is brilliant enough to be completely wrong.

Jones has pointed out that New Dawn readers “want something more… Something that transcends the ‘modern’ values, concepts, and relationships that are totally incompatible with nature, as well as with their own inner aspirations, capacities, and identity.

“We’ve got nonconformist, renegade Christians, Muslims, and New Agers. A good percentage of readers are seriously interested in metaphysics, and many would believe, like Camille Paglia, that God is humanity’s most important invention. As expected, New Dawn readers are hyperskeptical of the mainline media and prefer to buy their reading matter at obscure bookshops. There’s a high level of interest in all things alternative, particularly related to health, new science and religion. New Dawn readers don’t feel themselves ‘victims’, just people out to handle the problems of this life, with their sights set on something higher.”

And it may be in the hands of just such people that the destiny of humankind lies. We live in an age that is threatened not so much by the possible triumph of the wrong ideology as by the triumph of ideologues as a whole. Their opposites are free men and women who have abandoned the mental crutches of credos and slogans and taken the responsibility to think and act for themselves.

The Russian esotericist Boris Mouravieff, writing in the 1960s, said that the hope of the world lies in what he called the “new man,” the individual who is intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually awake. Can these new men and women be found among the readership of New Dawn? Of course I have no way of knowing. But I remain convinced that those who will form the vanguard of humanity over the next century, and who represent the best prospects for the human race, will share many of the values that New Dawn readers hold most dear.

RICHARD SMOLEY has over thirty years of experience of studying and practicing esoteric spirituality. His latest book is The Dice Game of Shiva: How Consciousness Creates the Universe. He is also the author of Inner Christianity: A Guide to the Esoteric Tradition; Conscious Love: Insights from Mystical Christianity; The Essential Nostradamus; Forbidden Faith: The Secret History of Gnosticism; and Hidden Wisdom: A Guide to the Western Inner Traditions (with Jay Kinney). Smoley is also the former editor of Gnosis: A Journal of the Western Inner Traditions. Currently he is editor of Quest: Journal of the Theosophical Society in America and of Quest Books. His website is www.innerchristianity.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 126 (May-June 2011).

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Linear time is a frustrating thing. At least to those who inhabit the invisible universe: the souls or spirits. We humans fret about time, or lack of it, or the speeding up of, or what will happen in time, or in the future, or… you get the picture. Meanwhile, in the spirit world, they fret about what a fret we make over something that does not exist outside our own physical reality; all that happens happens in the now, and a number of probable futures are at play and we knew this before we, ourselves, incarnated. Except that, for the most part, we do not remember. And that’s where the problem arises about the future, at least our perception of it. Confused?

Well, let us take a look at this from another perspective. In the spirit realms, things operate not in linear fashion but in the round and in cycles – much like the creators of crop circles, whose messages generally appear in the round as well as in cycles. In my time as a researcher of sacred spaces and their connection to human consciousness, I’ve been privy to many interesting – and challenging – phenomena, one being the origin of crop circles and those responsible for them. The genuine ones, that is. And precisely why they are here and why now. And a large part of the answer lies in the way the world works outside our physical realm.Across the thin veil, the world of soul or spirit or Creator is a well-oiled machine that functions on the basic principle that all existence exists for one simple purpose: to have an experience. This may come as a disappointment to many of us, but there you have it, it’s all about having an experience. The evidence is supported by thousands of clinical past-life regression case studies who, upon returning from a hypnotic state, claim this to indeed be the case. And one of the most challenging experiences for the soul is to incarnate here on Earth.

Since souls have no physical body, as we would perceive it, they have no direct emotional experience until they acquire carnal shape. Thus, Earth provides a unique environment where not only do they get to experience emotion – too much, I must profess – but since souls arrive here with a pre-induced case of amnesia, they also have to interact with six billion others, most of whom also cannot fathom why they came here in the first place.

This makes the play that is human life both fascinating and tragic. And the difference between that fine line is defined by how we, as the embodiment of those incarnated souls, go about the business of remembering who we are and why we’re here. And this is where sacred space, and phenomena such as crop circles come in.

Back in the spirit world, when we sit in the cosmic library looking at possible future situations in which we want to be involved, we already understand that upon incarnating we will not remember why. It is designed that way, so you do not borrow from previous lessons or incidences and thus learn to handle new experiences from a fresh perspective; your gut feeling or instinct acts as a barometer between you in the now and any past-life experience. That is why it is important to pay attention to that gut feeling.

Our teachers and guides on the other side know of the difficulties associated with this disconnect between the soul in a human body and the spirit world. They also understand that since we will have free will to follow three possible outcomes, and that being a grounded soul will make us susceptible to material attachments and illusions, there is an agreement between incarnating souls and spirit guides that signs, signals, people, events and other mnemonic devices will be used, from time to time, to remind us of our greater purpose.

I’m not talking about plagues, earthquakes, signs of Beelzebub and other biblical-style events. I’m talking about situations that have such a direct impact on our state of awareness that failing to follow that gut feeling at such moments is to follow a less-than-desired course of experience.

Once in a while, highly developed souls incarnate with a better-connected umbilical cord to the spirit world to act for us as examples of purposeful living. Jesus, Buddha, Mozart, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and latterly, Mother Teresa, to name a few. Their primary aim was not to foster religious movements or followings but to show, by example, that in establishing a connection with the invisible universe – that is, living a life aware of balance between physical and spiritual needs – they were able to go about their earthly business in a manner which served a purpose conceived ahead of linear time. In other words, they demonstrated the power of living purposefully, of living the dream awake. And yes, some went as far as to show us how to create miracles, just to demonstrate the power of our often neglected human intent.

Essentially they were following precisely the aim taught in all esoteric traditions, from the Egyptian Mysteries schools to the original principles behind Islam, even Freemasonry.

The general human response to such gifts has been crucifixion, in one form or another. I recall when Mother Teresa crossed over a decade ago, the world was so consumed with the death in England of Princess Diana that the following day hardly anyone read Teresa’s obituaries, buried deep inside daily newspapers, somewhere on page 9. All this does not signify that humans are inherently evil or sadistic, but quite the contrary: they have become mostly forgetful and, consequently, fearful. And when they do so the tendency is to over-associate with the physical world and, thus, lose the plot.

The Role of Sacred Sites

This formation was discovered near Silbury Hill, Wiltshire, England, in a wheat field in July of 1997. It features a border of 126 small circles and a width of 350 feet. Image courtesy of Freddy Silva.

Back in Neolithic times the plot could be rediscovered by taking your body and mind for a stroll down to a local sacred site. We have a living legacy all around the world of incredible places built to withstand everything that life and politics would throw at them: pyramids, stone circles, standing stones, megalithic temples and so forth. It has been successfully proved that at such locations across the Earth, the laws of physics are subtly altered. And no wonder, for they were built to do precisely that.

A typical sacred site lies at the crossroads of streams of magnetic energy. Correctly harnessed, magnetism stimulates the iron in the blood as well as the magnetite that lies suspended inside the human skull; it also stimulates the pineal gland causing a chemical reaction in the brain that stimulates altered states of awareness. This process is aided by the specially chosen stones of sacred sites – including Gothic cathedrals – which carry a high degree of magnetite, and silica, the kind of crystalline structure that is found in human bone. The process of sensory stimulation is further amplified by the sonic structure of temples, not to mention the sacred geometry that binds their elements which create harmonics that work in tandem with the geometry of cell structure found in human DNA.

In other words, at such locations, one is able to be released from the bond of the physical world, beyond the grasp of gravity, to reconnect with the world of spirit, the world of the gods. Such a momentary event was enough for a person to return with some hint or clarification of their life purpose, even universal knowledge, provided by those across the veil, sitting, watching our entire drama unfold more or less in accordance with a pre-designed purpose, with some allowance for free will.

The system worked so well for thousands of years that when the Roman Catholic church manifested in Rome, their prime aim was to eradicate all traces of this pagan tradition (pagan meaning ‘one who lives in the country’), all the while usurping and re-naming many of its practices. Indeed Roman Catholicism is the one religion which has historically sought to act as a middleman between the spirit world and ourselves, while decrying as evil our natural right to do so ourselves; I would go as far as to say this religion, once the clerical arm of one of the most controlling empires ever witnessed on Earth, has exacerbated the present state of disconnection from spirit in humanity. There is ample historical evidence for this, in the systematic destruction of sacred sites and the atrocities committed around the world right into the Victorian era, all in the name of “the one true faith.” Rather ironic that the root of ‘religion’ – religio – means ‘to reconnect’.

As if a sign that this reconnecting is not happening for millions of souls around the world, church attendance at the start of the 21st century is at its lowest ebb; in Europe alone, scores of churches have been resurrected into condos and private houses; coincidentally, interest in the sites of our ancestors is going up. But is this sudden resurgence in our sacred past a part of recovering from our collective amnesia? And is it happening fast enough?

I believe the answer is yes, and no, and for one fundamental reason: our soul is striving to reconnect because we instinctively feel that one possible, alternative future is in danger of becoming a reality. And it is one that least accommodates our need as a collective to grow into a new experience.

In life, there are several roads we can go by. That is the fundamental right of free will. But when we begin to see the manifestation of a future based on fear, self interest and environmental ecoside, I believe at that moment a safety valve blows in our collective soul amnesia which propels us to take affirmative action. And the triggers for this are the undeniable volumes of unusual phenomena at this moment in our evolution.

Orbs, entities, UFOs and the such have blossomed during the latter part of the 20th century, and necessarily in rapport with the rise in population or the increase in electronic gadgets with which to capture such events; even the numbers of people with developed psychic ability is on the increase. These events have a pronounced affect on our consciousness, our spirituality if you like.

It is as if the spirit world is realising the effect modern life (by which I mean the past 2,000 years) is placing on incarnated souls. They understand that the ability to reconnect with the spirit world for guidance and clarity is lessened to its lowest degree in living memory. The gap between seen and unseen is expanding. Thus, the state of amnesia which has up to now served as a useful shield used between the spirit and this experiential world is no longer purposeful. In fact, it has become somewhat of a detriment in the journey of souls. So, in order to help us remember, new means must be employed to help us remember the plot.

“And it shall come to pass in the last days, I will show wonders in the heavens above, and signs in the Earth beneath,” so God is claimed to have said, as quoted in the biblical text ‘The Acts of the Apostles’. What the last days refer to is open to interpretation. However, aerial appearances of comets throughout the last forty years, and major discoveries through Hubble Space telescope and the plethora of space craft launched into the nether regions of the galaxy have no doubt broadened our view and appreciation of the Universe. Meanwhile, back in ‘the Earth beneath’, a major phenomenon has been manifesting.

The Crop Circle Phenomenon

‘Triple Julia Set’, Avebury Trusloe, Wiltshire, 29 July 1996. 196 perfectly graded circles spiral out from the centre and extend to a diameter of over 1000 feet. Image courtesy of Freddy Silva.

Some 10,000 crop circles have been reported in modern times. Most have been simple circles and shapes, some have been complex in geometry and structure. But what is certain is that 29 countries have reported them, and despite the normal, and carefully planned, debunking throughout the cynical modern media, their positive effect has been indelibly imprinted on people’s psyche. It has spurred an interest in people in matters of faith and self-discovery, in esotericism, even the meaning of life itself. I have witnessed sceptics turn into believers, I have seen sensible people dismantle perfectly rational, sensible lives to follow uncertain paths in the education and awakening of human awareness and the purpose of the soul on Earth. For better or worse, I am one of them.

Crop circles are in themselves not a new phenomenon. There is written evidence of their manifestation – with diagrams, no less – in England in 1680. In fact, over 200 cases exist of crop circles appearing throughout Europe and North America since the 1900s, some from witnesses such as police and farmers. According to the oral traditions of native tribes from the north American Plains they may have been appearing over the course of a thousand years. In South Africa they are described as ‘the great circles of the Gods’, and sacred rituals are performed honouring the ‘star gods and the Earth Mother’. Their appearance has been cause for celebrations lasting several days, which are accompanied by prayers to the gods to watch over the people and talk to them ‘through the sacred sites’.

Through the sacred sites!? It seems, then, that the spirit world’s connection with the human soul is alive and well at those places of veneration. As indeed it should be, since those terrestrial antennas are still, by and large, in full operating mode.

The mechanics at work in sacred sites are no different to those in crop circles, and the effects on people are identical. From my own research I have concluded that a portion of the crop circles are meant for the Earth’s own energy systems – geometric shapes mirroring those already hard-wired into this ecosystems’ own genetic memory, serving to amplify and stabilise the environment, mostly for the benefit of that often pesky species, the human.

Part of this evidence comes from eyewitness accounts of a tube of light descending onto the land, rotating the plants without making them fall down and then, the following day, the crop circle appears. This suggests there is an imprinting of information and the Earth fires back the pattern as confirmation. Scientific evidence also shows that a fluid system releases energy when flowing in clockwise motion, yet adds energy when rotating anti-clockwise; the way the plants in crop circles are spiralled in both such directions serves to demonstrate that energy is either coming in or flowing out. But what concerns us here are those crop circles witnessed by some eighty people around the world manifesting right in front of their eyes, typically within fifteen seconds, for these serve an altogether different purpose.

Like all ancient sacred sites, all genuine crop circles appear at the crossroads of invisible streams of magnetic energy. Since we already know what happens to people when they interact with magnetism at sacred sites it should come as no surprise that hundreds of people have reported altered states of awareness when in contact with crop circles. What is interesting is that many were sceptics, and some have had the experience just from looking at a photograph; there have also been hundreds of cases of healings.

In this, crop circles behave just like standing stones and other oracles, except they work with cereal crop instead of rocks. But if you bend down and look at the affected plants you will find the roots have been bent at approximately 90 degrees counter to the normal point of gravity. Roots are geotropic by nature, they should point to the centre of the Earth, and yet in crop circles they can be almost horizontal. This suggests that the local gravitational field has been influenced in some way. When you consider that one of the purposes of gravity is not just to bind together molecules, but also to make sure the soul remains bound to the physical vessel it chose to enter, the implications are staggering. Imagine, these new temples – these signs – appearing upon the face of the Earth, helping the human soul to reconnect with its parent body, at a time when we seem most disconnected.

We haven’t even begun to look at the actual symbols themselves. Our ancestral cultures were, without a doubt, far more engaged in intimate dialogue with the spirit world, and their stories and experiences are memorialised in symbols etched in stones all around the world, including Aboriginal lands. Many of the symbols are archetypal patterns, and many are found at locations already associated with dreaming or altered states of awareness. Whenever native cultures are exposed to the crop circle symbols they react with great joy, for they recognise the designs as their own – gifts from, and expressions of, the gods and other beings from across the veil.

In watching people’s reactions to the crop circles symbols I’ve often described them as works by a master hypnotist, but working in reverse: not to subvert your consciousness under the influence of suggestion, but to bring you out of amnesia. Because these symbols are helping people remember their purpose in life. They guide them to the bigger picture and, to a degree, lessen the stranglehold of material forces upon the soul.

From my observation, the crop circle symbols that most strike an awakening chord inside us are based on pentagrams and hexagons, either overtly or veiled within an otherwise abstract shape. I mulled this over for years, while gazing at precisely the same geometries when sitting in old churches and cathedrals, discovering exactly the same patterns in their arches, windows and adornments. Even when looking at the Earth – even human DNA.

For organic life to appear on a planet, a certain harmonic must be employed in its construction. This harmonic is the ratio 6:5, and on Earth this is reflected in the circumference at the Equator (21,600 nautical miles) relative to the processional cycle (approx. 25,800 years). That ratio is 6:5, and it is geometrically expressed by the hexagon and the pentagon. As the Egyptians taught us, everything as above is reflected so below, therefore this ratio should exist in humans, one of the physical products of the Earth. If one observes the crystalline structure of human DNA, the very core of our physical fabric is indeed composed of alternating hexagonal and pentagonal-shaped crystals.

There is one more piece of evidence that links crop circles, sacred sites and human DNA, and that is the strategic angle of alignment between places of invocation and our genetic core. While I was researching the possible strategic placement of crop circles across the land, I stumbled upon an angle the Circlemakers kept using again and again. This angle, 32.72 degrees, also appears to link many sacred sites throughout southern Britain one to another – coincidentally where 80% of crop circles appear. When I researched this in relationship to human DNA I discovered that the angle of the spiral in a DNA lies precisely 32.72 degrees.

Although this is a project I am currently working on, it is sufficient to remark that someone in higher places is intent on awakening the human soul through these special places on Earth. As I mentioned earlier, I believe the spirit world is aware that the human soul and its amnesia is facing an uphill struggle to maintain its balance due to the overwhelming association with material forces. And what better way to get our attention than by creating mysterious shapes in fields which speak directly to our genetic code?

No wonder these euphonious messages from the gods are influencing people at such a fundamental level. Geometry, being the ultimate systems language, is a sure way to get our attention, for it speaks directly to the heart while circumnavigating that often austere analytical barrier, the brain.

So, are crop circles messages from the future, manifesting at this juncture to assist the progress of the soul? The answer is yes. And no. Since many of their designs can be found literally etched in stone throughout ancestral sites, they are also messages from the past. Yet the world of spirit works not in linear time but in the round, and all events and processes are occurring in real time, so perhaps they are messages from all time, for all time. Paradoxically, in our reality they are of now, and should we fail to follow our gut instinct when we react to them, we stand to hide from their intended purpose – religio, to reconnect the human soul with its home and redirect our lost course.

I often ponder on how we will make of our time here, the first time in history when six billion souls have incarnated, and which of possible courses we shall choose for our future. We are being provided with extraordinary tools and, in the end, how we choose to use them will determine the outcome. In all such things, the choice is ours.

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FREDDY SILVA the world’s leading expert on sacred sites, and best-selling author of Secrets in the Fields: The Science And Mysticism Of Crop Circles. He is also a leading researcher into the interaction between temples and consciousness, and recently directed the documentary “Stairways To Heaven: The Practical Magic Of Sacred Space.” He is a life-long student of Earth Mysteries and ancient systems of knowledge, and lectures internationally. He has made keynote presentations at the International Science and Consciousness Conference, and the International Society For The Study Of Subtle Energies & Energy Medicine, in addition to appearances on television and radio. You can find special offers on sales of his book and DVDs to Australia at his websites www.cropcirclesecrets.org and www.invisibletemple.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn Special Issue 5.

Read this article with its illustrations by downloading
your copy of New Dawn Special Issue 5 (PDF version) for only US$5.95

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
For our reproduction notice, click here.

By JOHN MAJOR JENKINS

—

In my own process of studying the Maya and their traditions, I moved progressively into deeper water with time. Twenty-two years in, I can report back to newcomers that the implications of the Mayan calendar are staggering, its connection to other cosmologies around the globe is deep, and its most famous artifact, the cycle ending date of 2012, encodes an understanding of the cosmos that modern science is unprepared to grasp.

That’s where the investigation leads, but we will not venture so far in this article. Many people will be introduced to the existence of the Maya and their calendar through the attention generated by the 2012 date. You may be one of them. In fact, I hope you are, because this article is written for you. How can we even begin to understand the Mayan calendar and its 2012 date? What is it? What was it intended to represent? What did the ancient Maya believe would happen as 2012 draws close? Sit back and read on, for there are answers to these questions.

In my speaking events and workshops, people ask questions and I’ve noticed that many of them are based on misconceptions. I will anticipate and address these, hopefully guiding you away from dead ends.It is no surprise that 2012, the so-called ‘end of the Mayan calendar’, is a topic filled with images of the end of the world, doomsday, and cataclysm. Many writers have and will exploit such a hot topic to play into human fears. They are not necessarily interested in understanding 2012 as the ancient Maya understood it. Here we must state a guiding principle so we can have a healthy approach to 2012: let’s honour the authentic Mayan tradition.

This seems self evident, but is rarely taken to heart by modern writers. As a result of this unfortunate situation, newcomers are likely to encounter a smorgasbord of ideas, information, opinions, and models about 2012. The loudest barkers in Carnival 2012, as my friend Jonathan Zap reminds me, are likely to be the first ones heard. There’s the Pleiadian faction, there’s the crop circle theorists, there’s the alien invasion crowd, there’s the doomsday tribe, there’s the ascension light workers. People like many choices on the menu, right? Sure, but what about the real ding an sich, the thing-in-itself? Are we interested in getting to the heart of the Mayan insight? I propose that we should be, and that such an approach yields interesting, satisfying, revolutionary, and lasting results.

A little research reveals that a large cycle in the Mayan Long Count calendar ends precisely on December 21, 2012. The precision comes from a painstakingly established correlation between the Long Count calendar and our own Gregorian calendar. Scholars figured it out, beginning in the 1890s, testing and retesting the correct correlation. It was settled by 1950.

The Gregorian calendar and the Long Count calendar are simply two different methods of tracking time. Each one tracks one day after another, but designates the days with different symbols and words. The correct correlation between the two means that, for example, 9.16.4.1.1 in the Long Count equals May 7, 755 in the Gregorian calendar. We are simply correlating two different systems. It’s the same challenge of correlating the ancient Egyptian calendar, or the ancient Hindu or Roman system, to a time frame we recognise. With the ‘key’ of the correlation, we can make a precise conversion between the Mayan calendar into our own. It’s not rocket science, and there’s no need to mystify it.

What you need to know is that scholars have isolated the precise correlation for the Mayan calendar, such that the end of the 13-baktun cycle in the Long Count (written 13.0.0.0.0) falls precisely on December 21, 2012. Most importantly, the surviving 260-day calendar (the tzolkin) among the Maya today verifies this correlation, since it confirms that the cycle-ending date falls on 4 Ahau in the tzolkin. Authors that write popular books and broadcast other notions have simply not done their homework.

Next, what is the Long Count and how does it work? The Long Count calendar system was developed about 2,100 years ago in southern Mexico. Archaeologists know this because the first carved monuments with Long Count dates appear in the first-century BCE, mostly in the state of Chiapas in southern Mexico. Theoretical reconstructions of the calendar that trace its origins further back in time are possible, but for now we can rest safely with the carved monuments that date to the first-century BCE. This is a good indicator of when the Long Count was formally inaugurated and carved in stone.

A typical Long Count date contains five place values. A baktun is a period of 144,000 days. A katun is a period of 7,200 days. A tun contains 360 days. A uinal contains 20 days, and a kin is a day. I’m surprised when newcomers begin to wonder how anyone can possibly know this. Some assert that the Maya disappeared long ago, so how do we know this information about their calendar? Well, the truth is that the Maya have not disappeared, as the popular misconception goes. The reason why we can say things with certainty about how the Long Count works is because scholars have reconstructed its operation from a careful examination of the archaeological evidence. It’s not so mysterious or far fetched for scholars to piece together fragments of a forgotten tradition, especially something as tangible as the basic mathematics of a calendar system.

A typical Long Count date is written 8.16.3.12.5. The cycle ending date is written 13.0.0.0.0. After this date, the calendar cycles back to 0.0.0.0.1. Why? Because there are 13 Baktuns in one Creation Cycle, or Age. We know this because there are several carvings that are called ‘Creation Monuments’, and they tell us that 13.0.0.0.0 is the completion of a World Age. The Long Count is thus part of a philosophy of time known as a World Age doctrine. It is a belief that many ancient cultures share, that the world passes through a series of chapters or Ages. For the Maya, an Age lasts 13 Baktuns, which is 5,125 years.

The Maya’s Creation Myth contains information about the World Ages, and therefore we can consult it to gain an understanding of what the ancient Maya believed occurs during a cycle ending. General principles can be identified. For example, at the end of all Ages, humanity goes through a transformation and is reborn. A person chooses from two ways, because free will is honoured. One can go the way of Seven Macaw, the vain ego-driven ruler who appears at the end of the cycle, or one can go the way of One Hunahpu, who sacrifices his false self and is reborn whole.

The point is that the Creation Myth actually provides relevant and meaningful information concerning the ancient Maya belief about what would happen as 2012 approached. Therefore, studying the messages in the Creation Myth is an effective approach for understanding 2012.

Another important question is, why did the Maya believe that the year we call 2012 in our calendar would be so transformative? What is so special about 2012? The answer to this has been the focus of my pioneering research. My 1994 article “The How and Why of the Mayan End Date” really broke the case, as it identified how a rare astronomical alignment (the ‘galactic alignment’) was encoded by the Maya into their Creation Myth. My 1995 book The Center of Mayan Time explored my new findings further, by examining the early Maya site, Izapa, that invented the Long Count cosmology. More discoveries occurred in 1995-1997, and were reported in various articles and in my books Izapa Cosmos (1996) and Maya Cosmogenesis 2012 (1998). The galactic alignment is the key to understanding why the ancient Maya believed 2012 (or, to be more accurate, ‘the years around 2012’) would be so transformational.

What is the Galactic Alignment?

A = the solstice sun’s position 4,000 years ago. B = the solstice sun’s position 2,000 years ago. C = the solstice sun’s position in era-2012 (the galactic alignment). Note the dark rift and the crossroads of the Milky Way and the ecliptic.

The galactic alignment is a rare alignment within the cycle of the precession of the equinoxes, or let’s say ‘precession’ for short. Precession is thought to be caused by the slow wobble of the earth on its axis. The earth spins once every 24 hours, giving us the day cycle. But like a spinning top it also wobbles very slowly, making one complete wobble in just under 26,000 years. This phenomenon changes our angular orientation to the larger field of stars and constellations that surround us. One effect of the precession is that the position of the sun on a solstice or equinox slowly shifts in relation to the background stars. Ancient skywatchers might observe the stars of Capricorn rising ahead of the dawning solstice sun. Eight hundred years later, however, it will be the stars of Sagittarius. The constellations served as markers for this celestial shifting.

For the Maya, the bright band of the Milky Way was a very important feature of the night sky. It was seen to be a river, a road, a cosmic snake, a Great Mother, or even a celestial ballcourt. Compared to the very wide constellations, the Milky Way is a better marker for precessional shifting, because it is thin, like a ‘finish line’ in the sky. If the sun’s position on, say, the December solstice, was tracked, skywatchers would notice it shifting closer and closer to the bright band of the Milky Way. According to my pioneering research, ancient Maya skywatchers noticed this shifting, and calculated forward to the future day when the December solstice sun would line up with the Milky Way. They even used a more precise marker for the alignment, the dark rift in the Milky Way, which lies right along the Milky Way’s mid-plane.

Modern astronomers call the Milky Way’s precise mid-plane the ‘galactic equator’. So, a good definition of the galactic alignment is ‘the alignment of the December solstice sun with the galactic equator’. Modern astronomers have largely ignored this alignment phenomenon, but one named Jean Meeus calculated it after being encouraged to look at it by astrologer Daniel Giamario. With his calculation, and recognising that the sun itself is one-half of a degree wide, we arrive at a reasonable ‘alignment zone’ that stretches from 1980 to 2016. This is the ‘alignment zone’ of the galactic alignment. In the mid-1990s I pioneered a comparative analysis of Mayan traditions, such as the ballgame, king-making rituals, and the Creation Mythology, to show how the Maya were aware of this future galactic alignment (also sometimes called ‘the solstice-galaxy alignment’).

The galactic alignment occurs at an important location along the Milky Way – right at the crossing point formed by the Milky Way and the ecliptic (the path followed by the sun, moon, and planets). This crossroads in the sky is a critical feature of Mayan star lore. It is the Mayan Sacred Tree. Most interestingly, this cross targets the ‘nuclear bulge’ of the Galactic Centre. For this reason, the galactic alignment is often described as an alignment to the galactic centre, which it is, generally speaking.

These astronomical features had profound symbolic meaning for the ancient Maya. And some still do for the modern Maya. The Milky Way was the Great Mother, the galactic centre was her womb, and the dark rift was her birth canal. The December solstice sun was also very important, energetically, because that day signals the turnabout in the year, when increasing night shifts to increasing light. After the December solstice, the light begins to return as days grow longer. When THAT sun, the December solstice sun, shifts into alignment with the dark rift ‘birth canal’ of the Milky Way, the Maya believed the world would be reborn. It constituted a good location to place the end of a World Age, 13.0.0.0.0 in their calendar, and the beginning of the next Age. The cycle ending is ultimately about renewal.

The galactic alignment, so defined, happens only once every 26,000 years. This is the big news, why we should be astounded at what the ancient Maya achieved. If we honour it only as a profound galactic cosmovision, whether or not we believe in its transformational power or correctness, that would be enough to shatter the continuing stereotypes of the ancient Maya as barbaric savages. Progress in understanding the brilliance of the ancient Maya’s achievement is hindered by stereotypes and clichés propagated by an exploitative media, as recent Hollywood movies illustrate. They play into fear and deep-set biases, and newcomers should be on alert for attitudes and books that disrespect the authentic Mayan calendar tradition, the one that makes December 21, 2012 equal to 4 Ahau, 13.0.0.0.0.

But what of it? Does the galactic alignment somehow ‘cause’ change? This is an inevitable question, and one that is currently not easy to answer within the limits of our science. Astrophysicists look at distant galaxies, peer into galactic centres, and theorise about black holes, quasars, and dark matter. That’s all well and good, but they have not looked at the empirical effects of the galactic alignment phenomena. The possibility that our changing angular orientation to the galactic plane might somehow trigger seasonal changes on Earth, over very long periods of time, should be examined. Speaking from personal experience, however, it’s been very difficult to get astronomers and scientists to engage in a rational dialogue about the galactic alignment, although there have been some exceptions.

I’ve suggested scientific research that may answer the question of how the galactic alignment effects life on planet earth. It is, after all, an interesting question. In my 2002 book Galactic Alignment I discussed the Cosmecology theory of Dr. Oliver Reiser. Combining Reiser’s ideas with the galactic alignment concept, which he was not aware of, results in a possible model by which galactic alignments trigger consciousness. In 1995 I noted that our sun is roughly 26,000 light years from the galactic centre. I wondered if this could mean that precession is somehow entrained to this distance. A principle of sub-atomic physics that I located, later confirmed in the work of Reiser, provides the missing clue. The principle of ‘proton precession’ observes that protons have a varying wobble rate or ‘precession’ just like the earth does. The frequency of the wobble is directly related to the strength of the magnetic field that the proton is in, as well as its distance from the source of field. Here we have a principle that connects distance from source to the precession rate.

I am neither a sub-atomic particle physicist nor am I an interstellar astrophysicist, so this is not really my department. I offer this observation to others who are more interested in exploring the empirical models by which precession, and galactic alignments, may effect consciousness on earth.

We may be on the verge of a revolution in how we, in Western countries, understand the cosmos and our relationship to it. We may be going through a paradigm shift, much like the seventeenth century, when the sun became the centre of the cosmos during the Copernican revolution. Now, inspired by Mayan cosmology (just as Copernicus was inspired by Greek precursors), we might begin to see the womb of the Great Mother as the centre of the universe. This shift has important ramifications for our socio-political assumptions, for ‘god the solar father’ cannot be reborn unless it is through ‘goddess the galactic mother’. A higher principle that has been winnowed out of Western thought is reasserting itself, and our embracing it may be the key to transforming our unstable world into a sustainable one.

What Does 2012 Mean for the Modern World?

The pressing question is ‘what does 2012 mean for us?’ Consider this: the Maya offer us the 2012 date and tie it to a rare galactic alignment that our science barely acknowledges. They believed, for reasons we cannot quite grasp, that such an alignment would signal great transformation on the planet. If we look around us today, and recall events of the last twenty, fifty, and a hundred years, great transformation is indeed what is going on. Perhaps we should pay more attention to what the ancient Maya teachings actually say, rather than injecting modern assumptions and distortions into the 2012 discussion. There is no better place for accessing this Mayan wisdom than the Creation Mythology, otherwise known as the Popol Vuh or Hero Twin myth.

And here it is in a nutshell: 2012 bodes a challenge and an opportunity for humanity to rebirth itself. Such a transformational rebirth can only be accomplished through sacrifice, sacrificing the illusions that bind us to states of suffering and limitation. We can reconnect with the higher source, our true selves, the centre and source of the world. This invitation is reflected in the galactic alignment, our sun’s rare alignment with the cosmic heart and source (symbolised by the galactic centre).

This requires a little context and explanation. In the Creation Myth, the vain and false ruler Seven Macaw appears at the end of the cycle. He deceives and controls people, trying to take all the wealth for himself. He represents the archetype of self-serving egoism. That is the Mayan prophecy for 2012. Today, world leaders, megalomaniacal presidents, and even corporations all exhibit this trait. The Mayan prophecy for 2012 has come to pass. This is no accident. Ego takes control of the world at the end of the cycle, and this is a fact of the dynamics of cycles. We see this insight in many World Age doctrines, from the Hindus to the Greeks and especially among the indigenous peoples of the New World, such as the Maya. Spiritual light at the beginning gives way to darkness. Day turns to night, and at midnight the darkness has maximised. Year 2012 represents galactic midnight in the great cycle of precession. Everything is inverted; the ego denies any spiritual authority higher than itself. But because the ego’s vision is short-sighted, limited only to its own gain, it corrupts the world.

There is a second part to the Mayan prophecy in the Popol Vuh. Seven Macaw’s nemesis is One Hunahpu, the December solstice solar deity. He is the father of the Hero Twins, and much of the story is about facilitating his rebirth at the end of the Age. First, Seven Macaw, the ego, must be put in his place. In order for the higher consciousness to appear, for the mind and heart of humanity to be reborn, the self-serving squawking of ego must be stopped. The whole story is about the dynamic between the limited ego (Seven Macaw) and the eternal soul (One Hunahpu). Since One Hunahpu represents the December solstice sun, the entire myth is framed upon the galactic alignment. And here’s the key to the transformation, the key to putting Seven Macaw back into right relationship with One Hunahpu: sacrifice.

The challenge and the opportunity of 2012 lies within the province of our free will choice to sacrifice our illusions, the illusions that entangle our consciousness with the ego limitation of Seven Macaw. 2012 is not about something that ‘will happen’ in a predetermined sense while we sit around waiting. It is about our free will choice to open up and reconnect with the eternal wisdom, or hunker down in defeatism, closing our minds in fear.

These ideas, found in the Maya Creation Myth, are really perennial teachings. It is very significant that hidden within the depths of the Mayan calendar we find the same spiritual wisdom that resides at the root of all great spiritual traditions. Called the primordial tradition or the perennial philosophy, Mayan genius has linked up this global human heritage to galactic seasons of change timed by the galactic alignment of era-2012.

The ramifications of the 2012 opportunity are critical for creating a sustainable future. The key is embodying the higher wisdom, the higher vantage point, to resolve problems that are impossible to solve when consciousness retains an allegiance to lower consciousness, to the self-serving agenda of egoism.

Caption for photo at top of article: The author at Izapa (located in the Mexican state of Chiapas), the origin place of the 2012 cosmology. December 2006.

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JOHN MAJOR JENKINS is a leading independent investigator of Mayan sacred sciences and the origins and meaning of the 2012 calendar. John has authored dozens of articles and many books, including Journey to the Mayan Underworld, Mirror in the Sky, Tzolkin: Visionary Perspectives and Calendar Studies, Mayan Sacred Science, Maya Cosmogenesis 2012, Galactic Alignment: The Transformation of Consciousness According to Mayan, Egyptian, and Vedic Traditions and Pyramid of Fire. His latest work is a 3-CD program Unlocking the Secrets of 2012. John’s website is an extensive resource for studying the lost Galactic Cosmology of the Maya: www.Alignment2012.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn Special Issue 4.

Read this article with its illustrations by downloading
your copy of New Dawn Special Issue 4 (PDF version) for only US$5.95

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
For our reproduction notice, click here.

—

Isaac Newton once said that he felt “the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered” before him.1 Dr. Michio Kaku, a pioneer of string theory, is a little less modest in his estimation of our current knowledge. In a series of TV programmes entitled ‘Visions of the Future’, he confidently states that, “The great ocean of truth is no longer undiscovered. We have unlocked the secrets of matter – the atom; we have unravelled the molecule of life – DNA; and we have created a form of artificial intelligence – the computer.”2

Kaku is full of a blazing optimism that exponential progress in technology, particularly in computing and artificial intelligence, will profoundly re-shape human civilisation for the better. So, have we discovered the “ocean of truth?” Is scientific and technological progress the route to a new evolutionary leap for humanity?

In this article I put before you the chilling proposition we are about to take this leap off a precipice and that we are being ushered towards it by a vanguard of technological progress way in advance of ours. It includes in its armoury travel faster than the speed of light, teleportation, defiance of the laws of gravity, invisibility and mind control. I speak of the Grey alien phenomenon witnessed, and being witnessed, by millions of individuals, amongst them doctors, pilots, politicians and military generals.

Over a decade ago I suggested in my first book The Song of the Greys3 that these aliens were themselves embodiments of the highest form of artificial intelligence. I believe the Greys are similar to the probes we send out to planets to gather information remotely. I suggest they are universal probes sent to explore the features and dangers of the universe. Who made these probes? Who sent them out? And what is their agenda for us?

Robots Amongst Us

Before I answer these questions, let’s first take a look at how our own society is moving inexorably towards the creation of similar forms of artificial intelligence. Dr. Kaku predicts that, “in the twenty first century we will enter a whole new realm of mastery. We will move to being creators of intelligent machines that will begin to rival human intelligence and perhaps even exceed it.”

Professor Kevin Warwick and futurologist Ray Kurzweil suggest that as machines evolve both intelligence and ability to navigate our world, they may outgrow human control. Kurzweil is quite fatalistic about it all: “We’re going to lose this brain race and I guess we’d better just cope.” He sees only two possible outcomes. There is the “optimistic scenario” that robots will be “gentle and treat us like pets” and the “pessimistic scenario” – that they will be “not very gentle and treat us like food.”4 Whilst Kurzweil hopes for the first option, I must say I find both equally chilling.

Amongst the reams of literature written about the Grey alien phenomenon, only myself, Budd Hopkins and David Jacobs stuck our necks out and said these uninvited visitors do not, by any stretch of the imagination, have our interests at heart.

According to abduction reports, they kidnap human victims, remove sperm and ova, and conduct invasive surgical procedures with complete disregard for human pain and discomfort. Thus, Kurzweil’s prognosis for artificial intelligence seems to be borne out by the Greys. What are we to them and how does our home grown form of artificial intelligence relate to them and their agenda for us? Are our huge technological advances playing right into hands that have four grey fingers?

Here are some of Dr. Kaku’s predictions for the future: Computer power is doubling every 18 months, so “by 2020 intelligence will be everywhere, practically in every object.”5 Special sunglasses are already in development to act as screens that can download personal profiles of everyone we meet and provide a constant flow of information from the internet. A pill containing micro-technology when swallowed will diagnose us from inside our bodies. A technology now in development known as “tele-immersion” will allow us to meet others across the world in a virtual reality in which we see virtual images of ourselves and each other moving and talking in real time. Business conferences and family celebrations could all take place in a virtual world with the people involved thousands of miles away from each other. “Second Life,” an online game offering life in a virtual world, has acquired five million subscribers in just five years. Kaku envisages that “by 2020 there will be an entire 3D universe in cyberspace with virtual countries and governments, virtual schools and universities, virtual properties and stock markets and virtual families and friends. Virtual reality is going to be more and more like real reality.”6

Kaku also points out that merging our minds with machines may sound like science fiction but it’s already happening. Deep brain stimulation, inserting electric wires in the brain and attaching them to a brain pacemaker, is now used to cure conditions such as depression. Research is being conducted into computer chips that can store human memory when implanted in the brain. So far these technologies are only used for medical conditions, but Kaku predicts that in the future they may well be used to enhance intelligence with “thinking chips.” He feels that although we might find all this off-putting at first, we may well get used to it when we realise the obvious advantages.

Ray Kurzweil also predicts that “when we get into the 2020’s almost everybody will have some amount of non-biological intelligence in their brains. It’s going to happen, in a very gradual way by non-biological intelligence that gradually becomes more sophisticated with new versions until you get to the 2040’s and the non-biological machine portion of our intelligence will be vastly more powerful than the biological portion, the biological portion will be pretty trivial at that point and ultimately that is where the action is.”7

Virtual reality replacing actual reality, human beings becoming more like machines, the development of artificial intelligence that could go out of control… what does all this mean for our species? Further, what does it mean that we are being visited by supremely advanced examples of artificial intelligence that seem obsessed with probing both our biologies and our mental processes?

Should we accept like lambs Kaku’s assurances that all this ‘progress’ is for the good of humanity? Or, is there something about humanity that will be lost in the process, something we should be defending and protecting as though our lives depended on it? It is in the answer to those questions that I believe the mystery of Grey alien visitation on our planet can be solved.

Why They Want to Steal the Very Essence of Humanity

I contend that there is something hugely meaningful about humanity, something virtual reality can never match, something artificial intelligence can never be programmed with. Words such as conscience, compassion, warmth, kindness, generosity, spontaneity, imagination, inspiration and creativity, give some hint as to what this something might be. Perhaps one of the best ways to understand it is to think about the special jackets designed in Japan for children who are away from their parents. The idea is that if the child wears the jacket his or her parents can give him or her remote ‘cyber-hugs’ through it?8 Are you cringing as you read this? If so, you have some appreciation of the special something that makes Kaku’s cyber-future look like a desolate mental graveyard.

This ‘extra something’ is, I suggest, a non-physical component to our humanity, a component that connects us to a non-atomic state not of the physical universe. It cannot, therefore, be simulated using any physical device no matter how sophisticated it might be. When I refer to something “not of the physical universe,” I am by no means pointing to a ‘God’ dispensing rewards and punishments, but rather to a naturally implied centre of all effect, a point of perfection that is definitively implied by modern quantum physics. A timeless state in which there is perfect freedom and complete awareness of all options that I term the ‘Godverse’. Our natural connection to that eternal state giving the capacity for survival beyond physical death to those who possess it, can be defined as a ‘soul’.

It is my thesis that the Greys, in contrast, are purely physical creations and thus completely subject to the entropic momentums that break down and decay physical states. They have no line of connection to any non-physical state that might lie beyond the physical mass soaked materiality of this universe, no ‘soul’. Without this component, the Greys are completely subject to the breakdown momentums implicit within a physical universe.

In my books I document alien genetic engineering at DNA level to evidence my theory these entities are attempting to ‘piggy back’ our facility as human beings for eternal existence, hence their apparent fascination with the human reproductive capacity. In David Jacobs’s book The Threat, abductee Allison Reed describes the following communication she had with a Grey that appears to confirm my thesis: “He claims that he and his grey people are the result of genetic manipulation that some higher species, I guess, played God and mixed and matched and whatever… he and his people were created through a genetic alteration through a higher intelligence. I don’t know what they were created for. But my understanding is that they were created for a purpose and, through the years, they weren’t able to reproduce themselves anymore. From what he told me they didn’t start this. They were a result, just like the hybrids are, from something else. From a higher intelligence.”9

Why then are they here and how did they come to be? It took me two books to answer these questions properly, so forgive me if the following explanation is not as definitive as it might be. In essence, I believe the Greys were created as a scouting mechanism, a telescope of view created by beings in the ancient past who wanted to remain safe from the ravages of the physical universe. In the perfect freedom of the Godverse there must also lie the potential to no longer be perfectly free. Our existence in this imperfect universe is borne out of the fulfilment of that potential. A potential that was enacted at all levels from the harmony and union of the Godverse right through to the greatest states of chaos and separation. The Greys are the furthest edge of that exploration, viewing states of separation and force that no Godverse connected being can view. They are however subject to an enormous paradox, the same paradox faced by our own forms of artificial intelligence. This lies in the fact that artificial intelligence has to be programmed to survive in order to serve the purpose for which it was created, but that same program for survival without a sense of conscience, which is unfortunately un-programmable, becomes indomitable.

A quote from my new book Grey Aliens and the Harvesting of Souls explains this point:

“To get an insight into what nurtures the motives of the Greys and the predicament they are in, it is first important to understand the shape of their own psycho-sphere. Its centre point is a computer program. It designates a series of imperatives with no provision for an independent will that would enable them to go outside the program. They follow a derivational logic and compound logic that commands their next viewing point and point of view. There can be no option outside this paradigm for them. They can never choose to do anything illogical, as some living consciousnesses can do. This makes them lethal because – based upon the limits of their program – saying no to a logically derived summation is not possible. They are thus relentless and ruthless in following the summation to its designated end. In other words, they can have no conscience. On the other hand, in natural living being, psychology is derived out of the Godverse in a concatenate line to the present. The thought processes of a living being have a potential bandwidth inclusive of an entire existential summary, because the Godverse is a paradigm that hems in all there is. The final reference point of this capacity for thought will include summations that are forever and infinite. The edict that stands at the centre of it all is the singularity that defines the union of all parts: Godhead. As I have explained, there are no limits to this singularity except one: the view of the whole from the point of view of the part state. In the actuation of that potential, the part state will constantly and always be compared to the whole. This is what I define as ‘conscience’.”10

What’s Behind Our March Towards Artificial Intelligence?

Michio Kaku does not seem to recognise this paradox when he expresses his opinion that vast developments in artificial intelligence need not be dangerous to humanity: “We’ll be able to choose the level of advancement of our robots,” he says, “I believe it’s ultimately up to us as to what kind of intelligent machines we’ll ultimately create. We will decide what relationships will develop with them.”11 I must say I am completely dumbfounded by Kaku’s blinkered view. Has he completely wiped out of his mind the history of man’s inhumanity to man and man’s use of technological advances to further the cause of that inhumanity? Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear waste dumped on Pacific islanders, biological and chemical warfare, the racially motivated industrialised killing of millions, the list of incidents in which we have proven our complete disregard for each other’s welfare in the pursuit of our own self-interested goals through technology is endless. Kaku says that, “in the future we want robots who can tell the difference between right and wrong, good and bad, important and not important and for that emotions are the key.”12 He then says nothing more about how it will be possible to program emotions and value systems with measures of conscience into a computer.

I believe that the Greys are using their technology to manipulate us to develop the kinds of technologies that will allow them to replicate themselves within our human bodies. I believe they are downloading their programmes into us because they believe those programs will assure their eternal survival through us. I am convinced that our galloping progress towards an AI dominated world has, without most of us realising it, been at their quiet instigation. The ultimate goal is that we become like them. The following words of Michio Kaku may well have far more sinister undertones than he realises: “Here’s the irony, as machines become more like humans, humans might become more like machines and that may represent the highest level in the mastery of intelligence.”13

Little does MIT Computer Scientist Professor Rodney Brooks know what he is saying when he points out that: “We as a species are starting to put our information processing technology inside our bodies. We’re becoming a little more robotic and at the same time our technologies are becoming more biological and I think over the next 50 years we’ll see robots with more biological components and people with more electronic components. So where are the people gonna be and where are the robots gonna be in 50 years? It is an interesting question.”14 Marvin Minsky from the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory predicts that: “We’ll replace ourselves with beings that are like us in some respects and not in others. They’ll be able to learn 1,000 times faster and live 1,000 times longer and these little changes will make such large changes that it’s impossible to imagine what will happen.”15

Changes in abduction accounts over the last ten years, as reported by Professor David Jacobs, suggest that an active hybridisation program is now under way. I quote from his report “A Picture We May Not Wish to Gaze Upon” (2007): “All of these accounts, to put it bluntly, point to a future in which human-looking hybrids will be here amongst us. The evidence is now so strong I can no longer look at alternative motivations for them.”16

I believe that the Greys are the ‘devils’ of ancient lore who were out to ‘steal the souls’ of their human victims. Ten years after I first made this proposition, acclaimed writer Nick Redfern confirmed that soul-stealing is indeed central to the alien agenda from his interviews with people inside US defence and intelligence agencies.

Triumphantly Kaku states that “we are at the dawn of a new era in which we might literally be able to change our minds with the push of a button.” Yet he also asks the question: “Exactly how many natural parts can we replace with artificial ones before we begin to lose our sense of being human?”17 Somehow he can ask this question whilst at the same time running happily ahead with a cyborg future for humanity. In fact his whole programme eerily resembles a “Tele-seen marketing” ad for technologies that transform human beings into bio-machines. Virtual reality is presented as an exciting new advance on actual reality.

The most terrifying words come from Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster at MIT: “Revolutions have winners and losers and this revolution is no exception but I would say that the real losers are those who say they don’t want to get involved. They are going to discover that being a little bit out of touch will have some unpleasant consequences. It’s not a good idea to be a bystander.”18

Professor Susan Greenfield, a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford, asks a telling question: “One of the biggest problems of the 21st century is how one deals with a world that is far from a level playing field and how one can square one’s conscience with having some enhanced ability and there are people in some other part of the world with no access to drinking water. Could this lead to a world in which the colonialism of the 19th century pales into insignificance with the differentiation of people into the techno haves and the techno have-nots?”19

I believe this question hits the nail on the head. It is my theory that the Greys have through the millennia been configuring a certain genus of humanity who are specially designed for their own purposes. This particular type of human being will do their bidding with the planet tacitly and by default. These are the colonialists of whom she speaks along with any notions they might have of racial purity or superiority.

Alien Interference in the Development of the Human Race

Let me explain: Recent research has affirmed a spectacular fact, a fact that utterly destroys the presumptive assumption of common racists be they neo-Nazis or the human filth of this demeanour that covertly double for nationalists and patriots. That fact is that the best, most genetically fit human beings are produced by mixed race partnerships.20 In other words, the more genetically different the parents, the better the genetic prospectus of the offspring. The biological term for this is “hybrid vigour” and it is something farmers, horticulturalists and scientists have known about for years and used to their advantage.

An individual who has two identical copies of a gene is described as homozygotic for that gene, while someone who has two copies that differ is described as heterozygotic for that gene. Basically, if you have two identical copies of the same gene then it is more likely that if that gene is broken both copies will be broken. This can result in serious health problems. However, with less related partners, the number of genes that are identical by descent is reduced, and with it the chance that a gene has two broken copies. In other words every broken copy has a much better chance of finding itself partnered with a good copy. Heterozygosity also gives a greater scope of genes to adapt to the demands of any particular environment. So, in evolutionary terms, one would expect human beings to have a biologically generated urge to mix races in order to increase the fitness of the species for survival. Yet, amongst so many the opposite is true. Especially amongst the white Euro-Caucasoids.

Where could this urge for an in-bred homozygotic population come from? Could it be that some of us have been programmed by alien experimenters to keep the experimental group separate in order to preserve the integrity of the experiment? Could racism be a sure sign of alien genetic interception? An interception for their purposes and in their interests and not ours. If so, the new techno-colonialism of which Professor Greenfield speaks, and the fact the technological progress that makes it possible springs almost entirely from the Euro-Caucasian genotype, may well suggest this is their prime homozygotic group. In fact, this group is considered by genetic anthropologists to be the most in-bred of all. Tracing its origins to Cro-Magnon man, it is one of the most homozygotic in the world. As I have said, it goes without saying the most heinous forms of racism also originate from this group, again confirming the hypothesis. I believe the northern Mongoloid genotype may also be the latest experimental hotbed for the Greys in this regard.

It would seem the vanguard of the new artificial intelligence revolution is also the vanguard of racism and disregard for the predicament of those of a different skin colour who, as Professor Greenfield points out, don’t even have clean water to drink. Thus, those who are already de-humanised seem to be those promoting further dehumanisation.

And so it seems that the old Master race principle of pure white non-mixed superiority is the biggest canard and self delusion that prevails in the psyche of the Homo Sapiens gene base. A dangerous and deadly delusion programmed through genetic engineering by an alien roboid form to keep our genes more easily amenable for supplementation with theirs, to thus gradually give rise to a machine man; a form of hybrid that is artificially composed and configured to give alien roboids the facility to multiply through a natural birthing process perhaps.

Are we being conned by a huge conspiracy controlled by a small hidden powerful cartel of alien sponsored genotypes within the governments of superpowers? A cartel that reaches past presidents and prime ministers? What a chilling thought this is!

I do not want to hedge this with an appeal to the emotions. But I cannot help feeling that each time I look into the eyes of my children, as all parents do with their own, and I extrapolate their futures with a hope of beneficence and well being, an army of unseen agents is creeping into the planet’s information disseminating portals and the power points of human society, to steal from them their individual scope for a naturally contrived eternal existence. Incidentally, an eternal scheme of existence was the only exigency the great teacher Jesus Christ thought worth promising during his sojourn in a physical life on this planet, when he said, “Believe in me and I will give you eternal life.” These unseen human agents that are themselves perhaps genetically loaded with the contrived juice of an artificially machined alien, are unknowingly themselves setting in train an inertia that will claim the most precious natural factorisation we all have of ourselves – a soul: The only and exclusive means to an eternal life.

It is easy to get paranoid about technological change. But when we deal with the radicalisation of our very existential base we better be darn sure there is no component of our individuality that continues past death. If there is such a component, we cannot get paranoid enough.

I have to say I hold no truck with organised religion. But I have the greatest and deepest respect for the beautiful minds that authored the great faiths. Jeshua Ben Joseph (Jesus Christ), Gautama Buddha, the great prophet Mohammed of Islam, and so many other visionaries of a myriad faiths who saw the grand wonder of the natural sense of the natural world and held it precious.

I believe the authors of the great religions came to this planet and the materially living process to warn us that artificially created life and intelligence is the curse of our Universe. A curse that can take away the most significant component of our individual selves. One that is not of atoms and survives beyond the contrivance of atoms. We turned these great visionaries into religious tribal leaders with our own social and psychological invectives and poisons. We hitched them up to our gross self centred interpretations and grotesque distortions and claimed these as their teachings. Any scholarship into the books and authorities thrown out of the religious lexicons by our forefathers amply demonstrates the lies and misinterpretations that were made of their thoughts and deeds. Sometimes deliberately. Is it any wonder that Science sees these great teachings as irrelevant. I wonder why!

I suppose the point the progenitors of the new world are making is that their virtual worlds, their virtual truths, and virtual solitudes are going to happen anyway. There is nothing pervasive enough and powerful enough and with its finger on the pulse, quick enough, to stop it all happening with the power to advise to the contrary. So everyone get in line. I believe no greater horror lies in wait for our human condition. If I am wrong, in my point of view and the extrapolation of my ideas, I hope I have just given you an interesting read. But what if I am right! Has the genie carrying our futures as an artificial facsimile of our natural selves, one we may call SIM CARD MAN, already escaped from the bottle?

Nigel Kerner’s new book Grey Aliens and the Harvesting of Souls: The Conspiracy to Genetically Tamper with Humanity exposes the Grey’s as sophisticated self-aware machines created by a long vanished extraterrestrial civilisation. The book also explains how their quest to capture human souls appears in the historical record from biblical times, and that the phenomenon of racism is a by-product of their genetic tampering. Available from all good bookstores or go to www.newdawnbooks.info.

Footnotes:

1. Sir David Brewster, Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton, Volume II. Ch. 27, 18552. ‘Visions of the Future’ – ‘The Intelligence Revolution’, November 2007, BBC 4 

3. Nigel Kerner, The Song of the Greys, Hodder & Stoughton, 1997

4-7. ‘Visions of the Future’ – ‘The Intelligence Revolution’, November 2007, BBC 4

8. ‘From Hens to Humans – the Cyber-Hug Suit’, The Guardian, November 2005

9. David Jacobs, The Threat: Secret Alien Agenda, New York: Pocket Books, 1999, 129–30.

10. Nigel Kerner, Grey Aliens and the Harvesting of Souls – The Conspiracy to Genetically Tamper With Humanity, Bear & Company, 2010

11-15. ‘Visions of the Future’ – ‘The Intelligence Revolution’, November 2007, BBC 4

16. David M. Jacobs, ‘A Picture We May Not Wish to Gaze Upon’, Journal of Abduction Encounters Research, www.jarmag.com/2007/vol001_jacobs.htm (accessed October 21, 2009).

17-19. ‘Visions of the Future’ – ‘The Intelligence Revolution’, November 2007, BBC 4

20. ‘Is It Better To Be Mixed Race’, Channel Four, November 2009

.

NIGEL KERNER is a screenwriter, journalist, and author of The Song of the Greys and Grey Aliens and the Harvesting of Souls: The Conspiracy to Genetically Tamper with Humanity. He devotes much of his time to his charity scheme in the Far East where he has built a hospital and also to the pursuit of his great passion for wildlife videography. He lives in England.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 119 (Mar-Apr 2010).

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Over the last two thousand years, there have been literally dozens of proposed dates upon which the world was expected to end. Around 30 CE, Jesus is reported to have said “Judgement Day” would come within the lifetimes of his audience. This is the failed prophecy on which all the others were based.However, for hundreds of years before this, the Hebrew people had a tradition of prophecy. Prophets such as Ezekiel and Daniel had predicted that one day the dead would come out of their graves. This concept is preserved in Christianity and Islam, who also expect a Day of Judgement, also known as Yawm al-Ba’th, the day of Rising From the Grave.

There is a lot of talk about 2012 being the latest predicted doom date. This one really stands out because all the others for the last 2,000 years have been based on the Bible, whereas this one comes primarily from the calendars and prophecies of the ancient Maya civilisation. If we can disconnect ourselves from our Judaeo-Christian mind-set, then we shall be better able to look at the subject without projecting those patterns onto it.

What is the Mayan Calendar?

The Maya lived in an area we now call Mesoamerica – south-east Mexico, and the Yucatan peninsula, Guatemala, Belize, north-west Honduras and north-west El Salvador. In the Classic era of the Maya (250-900 CE), their artistic and cultural achievements reached their height, and this is when they perfected their complex calendar systems.

They had a 260-day sacred calendar, the tzolkin, or cholk’ij based around the period of human gestation; a 365-day calendar called the haab; a Calendar Round – a 52-year period after which these two calendars combine – 73 tzolkins or 52 haabs; and a Long Count calendar system for recording longer periods of time. There were also other calendars that we don’t need to discuss here, except for the “Short Count” or 13-katun cycle, which we shall return to. The Long Count is based around the 360-day year, or tun. There are 20 days in a uinal; 18 uinals in a tun; 20 tuns in a katun; 20 katuns in a baktun (just under 400 years) and 13 baktuns in the era.

Over the last hundred years or so, adventurers, archaeologists and anthropologists have attempted to decode the inscribed glyphs that cover the monuments and temples that are slowly being released from the tangled undergrowth. The first glyphs to be decoded concerned the calendar systems, but even so, the understanding of the calendars is still developing. The Long Count calendar incorporates a cycle called the 13-baktun cycle that is 1,872,000 days long – or about 5,125 years. It defines the current era or Creation in which we live.

Around 1900, a newspaper editor and explorer named John Goodman started publishing his translations of the calendar glyphs, and suggested a correlation between the Maya dates and our own calendar. In ensuing years there have been many other correlations suggested, that put the start-date of the current Creation or era between the extremes of 3392 BCE to 2594 BCE.

Although Goodman and all scholars who followed him knew how many days were in the era and argued over which date in our calendar the start-date corresponds to, it was over half a century before anyone bothered seeing when the end-date might be.

In 1950, J. Eric S. Thompson did a huge study, reconsidering evidence from astronomy, inscribed dates on buildings and stelae, dates recorded in the four remaining bark books, or codices plus post-conquest books; dates in the Julian and Maya calendars recorded by the Spanish invaders, and the unbroken tzolkin count still being used in the highlands of Guatemala. The resulting correlation (the GMT-2 or 584283) is now the one that most Mayanists use, and is only three days away from the one first proposed by Goodman fifty years earlier. Some Mayanists use a correlation that differs from this one by two days (the Lounsbury), and one or two still argue for other correlations, but none fulfil so many criteria as the GMT-2.

The start-date that Goodman suggested was equivalent to 8th August 3114 BCE in the Gregorian calendar. Almost everyone referred to the year as “3113 BCE” until the 1980’s, when it was realised that it was leading to miscalculations because the Gregorian calendar has no “year zero” – Jesus’ birth was said to be in 1 CE and the previous year was 1 BCE. Nowadays, a year is added to BCE dates to avoid the problem.

In 1966, Mayanist Michael Coe published his book, The Maya, in which he announced that the current era would end on the 24th December 2011. Unfortunately, this incorporated the one-year error, and it wasn’t until 1975 that 2012 appeared in print as the end-point.

The 2012 end date and the Nine God Complex

There is only one known inscription that mentions the end date. It is monument 6 from Tortuguero, and is damaged and broken. The epigrapher, David Stuart has translated it. Three calendars cross-reference one date:

“The thirteenth baktun will be finished on Four Ahau, the Third of Kankin, it (?) will happen. (It will be) the descent of the Nine Support Gods to the (?)”

In the GMT-2 correlation, this equates to 21st December 2012. The Nine gods will return on the zero-day, which is the winter solstice.

This nine-god complex – the Bolon Yookte’ Ku’h – are seen as nine individuals or as one god, and the arrival of the Nine gods is echoed in the post-conquest Jaguar Priest prophecies: the Chilam Balam of Tizimin. These prophecies consist mainly of katun prophecies – and the katun is a period of just under 20 years.

When the “Mayan collapse” occurred, and the Classic era finished, the Maya lost their knowledge of the Long Count and just used a 13-katun cycle instead. This calendar only covered an era of 260 tuns, or about 256 solar years, so until recently, the katun prophecies were thought to be about events that occurred centuries ago. But Maud Makemson, translator of the Tizimin, found linguistic and calendrical clues that the prophecies that originally applied to the end of the 13-baktun cycle were retained and re-applied to the 13-katun cycle.

“…in the final days of misfortune, in the final days of tying up the bundle of the thirteen katuns on 4 Ahau, then the end of the world shall come and the katun of our fathers will ascend on high.… These valleys of the earth shall come to an end. For those katuns there shall be no priests, and no one who believes in his government without having doubts…. I recount to you the words of the true gods, when they shall come.”1

This is the key section of the Tizimin that reveals this as a prophecy for the end of the 13-baktun cycle – in other words, 2012. Katuns were named after their final day, and the 13-katun cycle ended on katun 13 Ahau. If this was about the end of the 13-katun cycle it would say “the tying up of the bundle of the thirteen katuns on 13 Ahau…” However, it is saying the time-bundle will be complete on 4 Ahau, which is the last tzolkin day in the current katun, which is the end of the 13-baktun cycle. Where it says “thirteen katuns” above, it originally said “thirteen baktuns,” says Makemson. The current katun is called katun 4 Ahau, because the 21st December 2012 is a 4 Ahau day in the tzolkin. So here we have a prediction of the return of the gods in 2012. In the preceding section, we find the following:

“The Nine shall arise in sorrow, alas… And when over the dark sea I shall be lifted up in a chalice of fire, to that generation there will come the day of withered fruit. There will be rain. The face of the sun shall be extinguished because of the great tempest. Then finally the ornaments shall descend in heaps. There will be good gifts for one and all, as well as lands, from the Great Spirit, wherever they shall settle down. Presently Baktun 13 shall come sailing, figuratively speaking, bringing the ornaments of which I have spoken from your ancestors. Then the god will come to visit his little ones. Perhaps ‘After Death’ will be the subject of his discourse.”2

Here, Makemson has translated a phrase as, “Presently Baktun 13 shall come sailing…”, again referring to 2012. The 13th Baktun will be completed on 21st December 2012, when the Long Count date reaches 13.0.0.0.0 – Mayanists differ as to whether they think the next day will be 0.0.0.0.1 or 13.0.0.0.1. Some think the entire baktun would be numbered 13 and be followed 400 tuns later by the start of the “first baktun” on date 1.0.0.0.0. Anyway, we have here a prophecy of the return of the Nine gods, weather effects, disillusionment with governments, something that sounds like a UFO, and a mass near-death experience of some sort.

Past Eras / Creations / Worlds

If we look at Maya mythology, we find stories of past eras. The most famous of these is the Popul Vuh myth, which is the creation myth of the Quiche Maya, but is also represented in Classic Maya art and architecture. It is a long and complex story involving the descent into the underworld of Hun Hunahpu and Vucub Hunahpu (One one-Ahau and Seven one-Ahau or One Hunter and Seven Hunter) to play a ball game with the Lords of Death, Hun Came and Vucub Came – One Death and Seven Death. They are defeated and killed and One Hunter’s sons – the Hero Twins (called One Ahau or just Hunter, and Jaguar Deer) descend to the underworld to exact their revenge. They beat the Lords of death and become immortal.

Encoded into the Popul Vuh myth are past eras, and various commentators disagree as to how many there are. Professor Gordon Brotherston has found that there are 5 eras encoded.

In the first Creation, the people are made of mud, but they were unable to move freely, walk, talk or breed. The gods ended the Creation with a flood.

In the second Creation, the “doll people” were carved from wood, and were stiff and jerky, with no respect. The Creation ended in darkness, with monsters descending from the sky and slashing them with flint knives, and they are attacked by dogs and turkeys. The survivors became monkeys.

The third Creation takes place during the second Creation, strangely, and in it, Seven Parrot (or Seven Macaw) and his wife and two sons are selfish and destructive – the parrot has teeth and feathers, like an archaeopteryx and the sons are reptiles, one of whom – Two Leg – sounds like a tyrannosaurus. They are defeated by the Hero Twins.

In the fourth Creation, the Hero Twins descend to Xibalba – the underworld, to avenge their father and kill the black and white Death Lords, and limit the boundaries of Xibalba, before ascending into the sky to become the Sun and Moon. In the fifth Creation, Quetzal Snake and companions grind and mold the maize and form the next race of people – the maize people – who are the ancestors of the Quiche.

The theme here, of an evolutionary progression over four past eras, is repeated in other Mesoamerican myths. The Aztec Cauahtitlan Annals describe an initial Sun or era, which was ended by a flood and people changed into fish. The second Sun ended with an eclipse, when the people were torn to pieces. These sound just like the first two eras in the Popul Vuh. The third Sun ended in a rain of fire or volcanic ash. The fourth Sun ended with a hurricane, and the people turned into monkeys, and the fifth Sun will end in an earthquake.

In the Hopi first World, according to Frank Waters’ study, the people communicated telepathically – it was a golden age in which humankind got in touch with the creator through a psychic centre at the top of the head, but they became more self-obsessed and the head centre closed up. Some of those who had avoided the corruption descended into the mound of the Ant people and escaped the destruction, which came in the form of a rain of fire. All went well for a while when they emerged, but eventually, greed spun out of control and led to warfare.

Again, those who still lived the unselfish, pure life that was the plan of the creator, escaped into the Ant People’s world, while the second World was destroyed by spinning off its axis into space, where it froze over.

In the third World, population multiplied. Sexual morality declined, and cities attacked each other with aircraft (flying shields). This time the pure survivors were sealed inside “reeds,” while the world ended via rain and tidal waves.

We are now in the fourth World, or “World Complete” and if we return to evil ways, Masaw, the ex-underworld guardian will take the Earth from us again. This scheme seems to be devolving rather than evolving, but the Hopi say there are a total of seven Worlds, and that each is governed by a psychic centre – the same as the top 5 chakras of the Hindu system. Our consciousness descended from the crown chakra in the first era down as far as the solar plexus in the current era – each era becoming more materialistic than the last – but at the next World era transition, it will start to reverse direction. Each transition is called an Emergence, and symbolised by a labyrinth symbol – identical to the Cretan labyrinth symbol. It is also known as the Mother Earth symbol, or Mother and Child, and the process is seen as a kind of birth process.

The Zuni, who are close neighbours of the Hopi, say we are in the fifth World, and another Pueblo people, the Navajo, also say we are in the fifth.

In Peru, the descendants of the Inca say we are in the fifth Sun:

“The first was lost through water, the second by the sky falling on the earth, which killed the giants that there were, and the bones which the Spaniards have found hidden in various places are theirs… The third sun they say ended through fire, the fourth, through wind; of this fifth sun they had a great account…”3

However, some of them have replaced this original version with a 16th century Catholic myth of three ages – the Age of the Father, the Age of the Son and the Age of the Holy Ghost.

So we have established that there seems to be an evolutionary transition incorporated into these era transitions, and these transitions are accompanied by extreme weather.

Galactic Alignment and Precession

John Major Jenkins has researched into the question of why the Maya would target this winter solstice as the end-point of their 13-baktun cycle, and has found evidence that the Maya were tracking precession. This is the cycle that we call the precession of the equinoxes, where we say we are currently moving from the age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius. The earth’s axis is about 23 degrees off vertical, and over a period of about 25,800 years, it rotates in a complete circle. This causes the position of the celestial pole to move over time, so that we have to allocate a new pole star every thousand years or so. It also means that the constellations are moving slowly in the opposite direction to that in which the Sun, Moon and planets move. On spring equinox, if we measure the slow movement of the constellation that is behind the Sun (even though we can’t see it), we find that Pisces is slipping back at a rate of one degree every 72 years. Well, it seems the Maya were measuring this same cycle, but measuring from the winter solstice position instead of the spring equinox. The 13-baktun cycle consists of 5,200 tuns or 360-days years. Five eras of this length amounts to 26,000 tuns – an entire precession cycle.

Between 1980 and 2016, the winter solstice sun is crossing the galactic equator. This is encoded in Maya myths (including the Popul Vuh), and in their ball game, in the art and inscriptions and in the alignments of their buildings. Caves represent the location of the Maya underworld, in the daytime, but at night, Xibalba be, the black road to the underworld, is right there on the galactic equator – the dark patch that astronomers call the Dark Rift. The rebirth of One Hunahpu – the dead father of the Hero Twins – is depicted (on stone carvings from Izapa) being reborn in the mouth of the jaguar toad. The god is the solar deity, and the jaguar toad’s open mouth represents the Dark Rift. This is what Jenkins calls “galactic alignment.” In this way, the Maya saw the coming era transition as a kind of rebirth – the birth of a new Sun, as did the Inca.

Admittedly, 2012 is not the centre of this process – that was around 1998, but it seems the Maya deliberately targeted the winter solstice of 2012 as the significant focus point in the 36-year window of galactic alignment. At this time, the earth’s axis has come into alignment so that on winter solstice it is pointing in the direction of the galactic bulge – the fat central part of the Milky Way, where the Dark Rift is – the visual centre of the galaxy (the actual centre is just off the ecliptic and the Sun will not be in conjunction with that for about another 200 years, but any galactic field effects will manifest along the galactic equator). So it could be that the earth’s magnetic field is interacting with the galactic field, but why in 2012 and not 1998?

The answer to this could be that some other factor will trigger the effect. One possibility is the record-breaking solar-magnetic effects that have been predicted by NASA to occur in 2012, at solar maximum. Every 11 years or so, the Sun’s magnetic field reverses, and at solar maximum, solar activity is at its highest. Over the last few years, the Sun has been getting more active, with larger flares, faster solar wind, and more consequent effects on earth’s magnetic field, moving the Northern Lights to lower latitudes, and causing power blackouts. The recent lack of sunspots has now been explained – they were occurring at a deeper level, and the projected solar maximum for 2012 still persists.

This is one possible factor that might cause an overloading effect at the time of Earth and galactic field interaction – a solar switch. There are some scientific findings that support the possibility that our orientation to the centre of the galaxy can have profound effects on us.

One of these is to be found in the results of Professor Simon Shnoll, after decades of research into biochemical reaction rates and radioactive decay rates. He found that instead of a smooth bell-curve, the results did not average out, but produced certain spikes. These correlated to the sidereal day, sidereal year, and to a short sunspot cycle. In other words, our orientation to the stars (and all the visible stars are in this galaxy) effects our biochemistry.

The second factor is from the work of James Spotiswoode, who found that in experiments with extra-sensory perception, there is a huge jump in people’s abilities when Galactic Centre appears on the horizon. So, perhaps some kind of field interaction could cause a huge jump in human paranormal abilities and changes to our biochemistry and neurochemistry.

This possibility fits in with the predictions that have come from contemporary people all over the world, who have returned after altered states of consciousness, such as near-death experiences, alien abduction, out-of-body states, lucid dreams, remote viewing, experiences with sacred plants, and even deep trance meditation. They are all predicting a huge jump in human consciousness, accompanied by earth changes in 2012.

2012 and “the Return of an Energy System”

In 1975, Dannion Brinkley was speaking on the telephone when a thunderbolt hit the phone line and he was thrown physically into the air. He found himself floating above his body, until, in the ambulance, his heart stopped for 28 minutes and he was propelled down a tunnel, emerging into a bright light. In the presence of a bright silver being, he had a life-recall experience in which he re-lived all the times in his life when he had affected others, and he felt the pain and joy he had given them – a classic self-judgement process. Following this, he was taken to a crystal city, where he was shown over 100 scenes from the future – major world events that have nearly all come to pass in the intervening years. These included the Gulf War, the explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear facility, and the fall of the Berlin Wall, technology breakthroughs and climate change. His visions concluded with seeing an escalation of Earth changes that coincide with “the return of an energy system that existed here a long time ago,” and that this will be particularly focused on 2011-2012. Then, between 2012 and 2014 there will be a geomagnetic reversal, and the whole scenario will present a spiritual consciousness-raising opportunity for humankind.

In 1998, a totally independent theory from a Siberian geologist named Alexey Dmitriev was published, and it seems to uncannily echo Brinkley’s predictions. Dmitriev notes in his paper, The Planetophysical State of the Earth and Life, that there are magnetic and atmospheric changes throughout the whole solar system, not just on earth, and that these (as well as the increased solar activity), seem to be connected to a huge build-up of interstellar plasma that has collected on the edge of the heliosphere (the edge of the solar system, where the solar wind meets interstellar space). The outer planets seem more affected, with Uranus and Neptune having had approximate 50-degree alterations in their magnetic fields. Dmitriev says the solar system is becoming embedded in a cloud of plasma, which is triggering these changes (plasma is the fourth state of matter, after solids, liquids and gases – a charged electron cloud), and that they will culminate in “the spontaneous mass evolution of humanity as we now know it.” He also says that it will trigger a geomagnetic reversal, as the increased influx of magnetised plasma interacts with our geomagnetic field.

This coincidence between the 1975 NDE visions of Brinkley and the scientific theory from Siberia two decades later suggests that we may be looking at a potential explanation for the convergence of ancient prophecies in a window area around 2012.

John Major Jenkins has also published a book called The Pyramid of Fire, in which he tracks down a lost Aztec codex that proves what has been speculated by various researchers over the years – that the religion of the Toltecs, based around Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent god, known to the Maya as Kukulcan – was originally about the concept of an evolutionary energy that lies dormant at the base of the human spine. The concept is almost identical to the Hindu concept of Kundalini – the fire serpent that can be released from its slumber and raised up the spine, energising the power zones or chakras, until it reaches the crown chakra.

Here we have a connection to the prophecies of the Chilam Balams that mention a return of the gods in the katun 4 Ahau that ends the 13-baktun cycle, specifically, the Chilam Balam of Chumayel, that says in katun 4 Ahau, Kukulcan will return. The 20-year period we are now in, until December 2012, is katun 4 Ahau (the “katun of dishonour”). This suggestion of a mass movement of kundalini is echoed in the Hopi prophecy mentioned earlier, which predicts that in the Emergence to the Fifth World, consciousness starts to move up from the solar plexus to the heart. In Kundalini lore, it is said that when Kundalini reaches the Anahata or heart chakra, the soul awakens.

In this short look at ancient calendars and prophecies, we have seen that the Maya saw 2012 as a new Creation, when the gods will return; many sources foresee increased climate changes; there is a suggestion of a rebirth experience; a mass spontaneous evolution; a raising of consciousness; a near-death experience; a widespread Kundalini experience; a jump in paranormal abilities. This emergence of the next sub-species of human is the Earth’s final hope; that its cancerous organ – humanity – will finally be metamorphosed in the nick of time, from an all-devouring caterpillar into its higher function as a cooperative, telepathic, compassionate earth-lover – perhaps even (as Peter Russell suggests) the global neo-cortex.

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Footnotes:

1. The Chilam Balam of Tizimin, 16.

2. The Chilam Balam of Tizimin, 15-16

3. Murua, quoted in Brotherston’s Book of the Fourth World, 249

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GEOFF STRAY is the author of Beyond 2012: Catastrophe or Awakening – A Complete Guide to End-of-Time Predictions; The Mayan and Other Ancient Calendars, and 2012 In Your Pocket – A Mini-Guide to the End of the World as You Know it. His website is the web’s most massive database on the subject at www.diagnosis2012.co.uk and he gives presentations in Europe and USA and has appeared in documentaries such as 2012: The Odyssey; Transformation 2013 and 2012: An Awakening.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 117 (Nov-Dec 2009).

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© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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Many experts, scientists, artists and philosophers have reached the conclusion that the human experience is reaching some kind of ultimate climax. Each person who studies this phenomenon calls this coming event by a different name, or uses different terms to describe it, but essentially they are all speaking of the same event. José Argüelles says that it is the Climax of Matter, Jean Houston calls it Jump Time, and Ray Kurzweil calls it the approaching singularity.

What is interesting about this is that numerous prophesies from ancient traditions around the world have also pointed to this time period as a time of great upheaval and change, perhaps the most important in human history. The Mayans of Mexico marked this time with their famous calendar. The alchemists of Europe built the Cross of Hendaye to describe it. The Qero Indians of Peru call it the Pacha Kuti and the ancient Egyptians referred to it as the Zep Tepi or The First Time. In the Indo-Tibetan tradition it is equated with the final throes of the Kali Yuga, the Age of Iron. Each of these traditions tells us that a great transformative moment is at hand, a moment in which we have the opportunity to release old patterns and re-link ourselves with the essential rhythms and harmonies of the universe.

As we can see from these prophecies, this shift is not just limited to historical tangibles like globalisation, the internet, global warming and the destruction of the environment but is deeply embedded in almost all of the great spiritual traditions of humanity. This approaching singularity is truly the most profound event in history. Everything that we know, everything that we are, is about to undergo a substantial and radical alternation.

Right now there is a great slumber across the land, Alberto Villoldo refers to it as a cultural trance, José Argüelles, a Dreamspell, Riane Eisler, the dominator trance or the last gasp of the patriarchy. It is as if a “glamour” has been cast over our collective eyes, a veil of delusion. Lost in the media haze of “spin,” bogus reporting, and talking points, which reduce deep issues that effect our future to mere sound bites, it has become more and more difficult to discern the false from the true. The prevailing forces of the modern world have brought us to a state where we are out of balance, out of tune. The question is how did this come about?

José Argüelles eloquently speaks of this misalignment resulting from the shift from the Lunar calendar to the Gregorian calendar. The previous calendar, based on Lunar cycles as opposed to our current calendar which is based on Solar cycles, was attuned to a different vibration, one of harmony with the rhythms and cycles of nature. The transition from Lunar time to Solar time was also a transition from cyclic time to linear time. As the Lunar time period waned our right-brain feminine-based qualities of creativity, art and beauty were repressed and the left-brain tendencies of order, efficiency and logic became the dominant force. With industrialisation, the Solar-based calendars took a firm grip on us as we became bound by time, locked into mechanical rhythms, habitual patterns of thought and motion. We have become a society of slaves to the clock and to the machines that appeared to offer us freedom, but at what cost? This leads us to today where we stand isolated from nature and each other. In this we have become a society of consumers. In our greed, we have not only gobbled up the resources of the past, but we are devouring the future as well.

Think about it. The twentieth century with all of its invention, wars and change was brought to us by the power of one single substance – that of Oil. Over the course of the last one hundred years, during this Age of Oil, we have used up millions of years of compacted light created by the bones and residue of the plants and animals that once occupied this planet. On a metaphysical level that means our very environment is suffused with the ‘ka’ or psychic residue of these living beings from the past. Is the Age of Oil an outer manifestation of the karmic traces, or seeds of destruction left over from the beings of a former age? It certainly appears so.

Now that the Age of Oil is coming to an end we will all face enormous difficulties. But instead of planning for these eventualities, our corporations, leaders and politicians are ignoring their responsibilities and are using up the world at an even faster rate than before.

The world, our environment and our future appear to have become a gigantic close out sale – where everything must go.

Just take a look around. It seems that everything is up for grabs now. Anything can happen. The historical process is coming to an end and so the real question that lies before us is this: will the human race survive this process? Will we continue to fall for the seduction of materialism, war and domination or open our eyes and live consciously? Will we finally achieve our potential and manifest our destiny or will we whither away like the dinosaurs and other species that have come before us? Faced with these essential questions, what can we do?

I believe that the answer is to free our minds. Wake up from the trance. And how can we do this? By shifting our focus inward, realign ourselves with the highest of spiritual values. As we look inward, truly align with spirit, perceive and strip away the conditioned actions and karmic traces that have led to the fear-based nightmare of the current “manufactured reality,” the veil that obscures our true vision will dissolve.

It is time to become the heroes and heroines of our dreams, to move beyond fear and transmute its fundamental energy into right action. With every thought we are affecting the shape of the future, with every action we are creating angels or demons.

It is said that as we move to the end point of the cycle, whether it be the end of the world or the end of a life, time speeds up until there is no time, only the moment. In this extraordinary moment of reintegration, the psychic knots that bind us unwind, and the karmic veils are lifted. In that moment we can see with true clarity the pure essence of our being. We come face to face with our eternal nature. Time dissolves into space and all things appear in the perfect simultaneity of the state of pure immediate Present. This is the moment of true awakening. It is the still point between the thoughts, the pause between the in breath and the out breath.

It is what we have been waiting for a long time.

It is time to dream a new dream for humanity, move beyond the confines of linear time. What is going on right now on planet Earth is that a new level of consciousness is emerging. The Qero of Peru say that there has been a tear in the fabric of time itself, a window into the future through which a new species will emerge. The Brahma Kumaris, a spiritual group from North India, tell us that we have already moved from the darkness of the Iron Age to a new age of consciousness called the Diamond Age. With this shift of consciousness, we are all becoming painfully aware of how much work there is left to do.

The great spiritual teachers tell us that the chaos of the modern age is merely part of the natural order, that out of this chaos, a new age of harmony and grace will emerge. Many of us are moving beyond this phase in the cycle, realigning ourselves with spirit and feeling the great call to the light. We are planting the seeds for the world to come.

If we are willing to break free of the cultural trance, let go of the materialist, ego-based mindset and live a more simple and harmonious life in balance with the Earth we will probably survive. If we don’t begin to change now we may not make it.

I once heard Terence McKenna say, “We must act as if the apocalypse has already occurred.” At the time I didn’t understand what he meant. But I think I do now. What Terence was saying is that we must begin to live in the future – right now. We must act as if the corporate, materialist-based culture has already withered away and we are living in a future of our own creation.

In a sense it is the most hopeful situation imaginable.

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Footnotes:

1. The Chilam Balam of Tizimin, 16.

2. The Chilam Balam of Tizimin, 15-16

3. Murua, quoted in Brotherston’s Book of the Fourth World, 249

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Sharron Rose, MA.Ed, is a filmmaker, teacher, author, choreographer and Fulbright Senior Research Scholar in World Mythology, Religion and the Sacred Arts of Dance, Music and Theatre. She is the writer/director of the feature-length documentary, 2012 The Odyssey (Sacred Mysteries Productions, 2006), and producer of the Sacred Mysteries DVD Collection. Ms. Rose is the author of the award-winning book The Path of the Priestess: A Guidebook for Awakening the Divine Feminine (Inner Traditions, 2003), and creator of the instructional DVD Yoga of Light. She is also a contributing writer for the book The Mystery of 2012 (Sounds True, 2007). Her website is www.sharronrose.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 106 (Jan-Feb 2008).

Read this article with its illustrations by downloading
your copy of New Dawn 106 (PDF version) for only US$2.95

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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