The 2012 Story (44 page)

Why is this relevant to the Maya calendar? Quite simply, the doctrine of World Ages is a version of this same doctrine. Each successive World Age brings about a more perfect reflection of divinity within humanity. As it says in
The Popol Vuh
, humanity is transformed at each successive level, or Age, to more fully honor the spiritual being of the creator, Heart of Heaven. Comparative mythologists, such as Joseph Campbell, are adept at seeing beyond the culture-specific garb and terminology, to identify the universal ideas that link seemingly diverse doctrines from around the world. The World Ages of Mesoamerican cosmology are spatiotemporal versions of the ancient Oriental sacred science of the five spiritual centers of the human microcosm. Implicit in this doctrine is the recognition that this microcosm is a miniature reflection of the macrocosm.

We have to be careful here not to fall prey to false conceptual opposites. Descartes’s error was to apply mathematical plus-and-minus values to nature, resulting in the separation of mind and body, or spirit and matter, into unrelated oppositional domains. The error has cascaded into a sanctioned and institutionalized misconception of the spiritual domain’s relationship with the material plane. The relationship between the two conceptual domains of matter and spirit is not one of rigid dualities set apart and reflecting each other as in a mirror. Instead, one must imagine a vertical conduit running from material manifestation at the base up through increasingly refined levels to unconditioned, nonmaterial spiritual essence. Each successive level moving upward transcends the level immediately preceding it. Transcendence, however, is not to be thought of as being “above” in a separating sense. Transcendence is inclusive of that which it transcends.

The ultimate level of pure spiritual consciousness thus embraces the more material domains of the universe. It is, by definition, unconditioned, limitless, unbounded, timeless, infinite, and eternal. It is, after all, the unmanifest ground state from which the material world of appearances springs, which is a realm in which everything that arises must eventually pass out of being-ness and back into the infinite source, like clouds disappearing back into the underlying blue sky from which they were born.

There is another way of thinking about the many levels of consciousness. Three stages of psychological development can be identified, and are particularly useful for clarifying the problems that the modern mind-set has with the ideas so central to the Perennial Philosophy. The three stages can also be thought of as states of consciousness, and they are: prerational, rational, and transrational. Nietzsche, in his essay called “On Scholars,” presented this idea allegorically. The prerational state is analogous to that of babies, who have not yet learned to process reality in a linear, sequential fashion. Their immersion in the unitary ocean of feeling is a kind of blissful oneness, but it is bereft of the ego sense through which external data can be related to a sense of individual identity. This categorizing and processing of external reality is the province of the rational stage, which requires a more or less concisely formulated ego with which external data can be measured, analyzed, and rationally categorized. This second state is inherently limited by the dualist framework that it requires—an observer and the observed. The being has fallen out of oneness, out of paradise. The unconscious unity of the prerational state has achieved a conscious relationship with the objects of sense perception, predicated on the fiction of the ego. The ego is a good thing, a natural development. As Terence McKenna used to say, we need the ego, otherwise we’d be likely to put food in the wrong mouth. The third stage is a logical development that leads beyond logic. It is the transrational position, or state, that perceives ego within a larger field of a unitary whole. It’s not that the ego is annihilated (that would be a return to the prerational state), but that the ego is transcended, is placed in a nondual relationship with, well, everything else—nature, the world, other egos.

In terms of psychological development, the transrational state perceives connections between “things” that are not contingent upon the cause-and-effect framework utilized by rational processing. We might say that the rational state is logical, while the transrational state is analogical. An analogy made between, say, the form of a river delta viewed from above and lung alveoli takes on great meaning. Though labeled a mere poetic metaphor by the rational mind, to the transrational mind such a parallel reveals an underlying universal ordering principle that is there, exists, is evident to the perception, but cannot be explained by good old-fashioned Newtonian science.

It’s not simply that geological erosion and tissue formation are governed by the same mathematical laws, but that different orders or domains of reality are united by a common principle, as in “as above, so below.” The critical key here is that the transrational position includes the rational position— transcendence includes that which it transcends. It should not be a threat to the rational mind, because it is the logical higher viewpoint in the rational mind’s development. Thus,
meta
-physics (metaphysics), as the term itself suggests, is the larger cosmological viewpoint of which physics is merely a small subset.

This three-part model should make sense, especially to the rational mind, but unfortunately a confusing fallacy is all too common. Philosopher Ken Wilber calls it the “Pre/Trans Fallacy” and explains:

They believe that beyond reason is nothing, or perhaps faith, which is judged a weak recourse of those who have failed to apply rational processing. This is why we have a contentious and misleading debate between “faith and reason,” as if faith was merely a kind of god-sanctioned feeling, a basically irrational personal conviction tolerated only because it provides a safe illusion for the intellectually deficient. The typical rationalist intellect does not see faith as a transrational certainty forged by direct experience of the transcendent. In fact, often it is not; in the modern world faith is very often merely blind faith, uninformed by direct gnosis. What blind faith replaces is knowing, direct gnosis of that which lies beyond the limited purview of rationalist science. In this formulation, we have the prerational, the rational, and the transrational. We can see how easy it is for the rationalist mind-set to mistake the transrational as a form of the prerational.

The Maya spiritual teachings connected with 2012, in their deepest transrational implications, are not likely to get a fair or accurate treatment by scholars limited to rationalist reductionism. Again, it’s important to note that transrational processing of ancient metaphysical wisdom teachings is not the same as prerational. Transrational includes rational processing; it can do rational process just as well as the exclusively rationalist intellect. It admits into its consideration integrative ideas and cosmological perspectives—doctrines, one might say—that science would reflexively dismiss or reject. As an example, let’s take astrology, a hugely misunderstood topic that scientists just love to skewer. The only way that science can think of critiquing astrology is on its own terms—that of scientific cause and effect. Thus, Jupiter’s position and movements are identified as being gravitationally irrelevant, since a paper clip two feet away from you exerts as much influence on you as Jupiter does.

Now let’s consider the acausal basis of astrology, which explains astrology via the principle “as above, so below” (or “the macrocosm reflects the microcosm”). The outer realm of planetary motions and the inner subjective realm of the human psyche do not need to be linked through the cause-and-effect zinging of gravity waves or energy from one to the other. The connection is not even one of “effect” but of resonant unfolding because both realms, the subjective and the objective, spring from the same source and unfold with the same rhythm. Jung called this “synchronicity, an acausal connecting principle.”
¹⁵

The basic tenets of astrology, such as extroverts in solar signs and introverts in lunar signs, were proven by the statistical analyses of Jung and parapsychologist J. B. Rhine,
¹⁶
which should mean something to scientists, but the main point is that scientists should not be expected to embrace an acausal connecting principle because it is, by definition, beyond the limits of their worldview. It isn’t the realm of physics, it’s the realm of metaphysics, which nevertheless includes physics in a larger cosmo-conception. Metaphysics, in the topsy-turvy interpretation if science, is mistaken for an irrational approach to reality, when in fact it is transrational. Here, again, we see the pre/ trans fallacy at work, sanctioned by scientism.

In my book
Galactic Alignment
I identified how precession angled the earth’s North Celestial Pole toward the Galactic Center some 12,000 years ago. This happened to be the era of the previous galactic alignment, when the June solstice sun was aligned with the dark rift in the Milky Way. Plato’s account of the fabled sinking of Atlantis, in his
Timaeus
, dates that sinking to 9,600 years before his time, thus about 10,000 BC, or 12,000 years ago. Since then, the effect of precession shifting the direction of the North Celestial Pole has caused the nuclear bulge of the Galactic Center to slowly reach lower and lower meridian transits in the southern sky. It has, in effect, been sinking, and the observation is relevant for northern latitudes. Eventually, from the latitude of Greece, for example, the Galactic Center no longer rose above the southern horizon; it sank below the horizon. I believe that Plato’s Myth of Atlantis refers to this precession-based process. Intriguingly, Atlantis-as-Galactic Center will one day “rise again” when the North Celestial Pole reaches the other extreme—pointing away from the Galactic Center. In my investigation of these astronomical processes I discovered that these extreme points are keyed to the eras of the galactic alignment. At the time of the June solstice-Galactic Center alignment of Plato’s 10,000 BC, it began “sinking.” With the December solstice-Galactic Center alignment of era-2012 “Atlantis” will begin to shift upward once again, reaching higher and higher meridian transits in the southern sky. The Galactic Center timing of these eras are generalized, because the nuclear bulge of the Galactic Center is quite large. The important thing to understand here is that the turnabout points are keyed to the galactic alignment eras, an idea that occurred to me in my investigation of Old World precessional cosmologies.

The Atlantis legend makes more sense as an astronomical process than as a literal sinking and rising of a physical continent. I believe, however, that the astronomical metaphor can be extended to the domain of spiritual cycles. Remember, the principle of “as above, so below” is merely another way of stating a modern notion of quantum mechanics, that
subject and object are inseparably linked
. The Primordial Tradition, or Perennial Philosophy, observes cycles of forgetting and remembering that consciousness on earth undergoes. It progressively forgets its true, multidimensional nature, and later resurrects or remembers this true Self. In this way, we might think of the rise and fall of Atlantis as a metaphor for the forgetting and remembering of the Primordial Tradition. Our craving to raise a physical sunken continent is a displaced desire to awaken our spiritual true natures.

In this view, the Primordial Tradition is a state of mind rather than a long-past Golden Age or ancient physical location. As a state of mind, the Primordial Tradition is accessible to any person or culture, at any time or place, without the aid of direct transmission through lineage or Atlantean antecedent. The current pop-culture quest to trace fragments of compelling “evidence” back to some Atlantean ur-civilization misses this point, and is evidence for the overliteral preoccupations of Western “modern” consciousness. An incredibly low-minded manifestation of this is the mass media’s treatment of Maya and Egyptian archaeology, revealing an inability to see anything beyond treasure hunting, gold artifacts, and scary mummies. The deeper truth of our search for lost “artifacts” is our desire to make visible a knowledge or mind-set that is more comprehensive and fulfilling. As with Shambhala, which faded into invisibility as humanity lost the ability to see it, the Primordial Tradition fades but reemerges in places conducive to discovering and appreciating its profound depth and wisdom. This explains the ancient Maya’s isolation and independent genius, which nevertheless had tapped into the same doctrines also found in ancient Vedic and Egyptian cosmology. Transoceanic voyages are not required for this parallel emergence of the same insights.