Seeking Spiritual Guidance
More Resources
Recommended Reading
"The Alchemy of Time" by Jay Weidner. In The Mystery of 2012: Predictions, Prophecies and Possibilities.Book of the Hopi, by Frank Waters
Supernatural, by Graham Hancock
The Teachings of Don Juan and Journey to Ixtlan, by Carlos Castaneda
Walden, by Henry David Thoreau
Siddartha, by Herman Hesse
The Works and Days by Hesiod. Best English translation from the original Greek is by Richmond Lattimore.
Patterns of Culture by Ruth Benedict.
Practical Intuition by Laura Day
Intuition - the Path to Inner Wisdom by Patricia Einstein
Creative Visualization, by Shakti Gawain
The Snows of Kilimanjaro (short story), by Ernest Hemingway
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirzig
The Wisdom of Insecurity, by Alan Watts
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
A Vision for 2012: Planning for Extraordinary Change (2008) by John Peterson.
Keepers of the Ancient Knowledge : The Mystical World of the Q'ero Indians of Peru. By Joan Parisi Wilcox
2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl (2006) by Daniel Pinchbeck.
2013 Oracle: Ancient Keys to the 2012 Awakening (2006) by David Carson & Nina Sammons
The Mayan Calendar and the Transformation of Consciousness (2004) by Carl Johan Calleman
Serpent of Light (2007) by Drunvalo Melchizedek
"2012: The Topology of Time." By Jay Weidner. 2005.
Living Through the Closing of the Cycle by Jose Arguelles (2003) Downloadable PDF file.
The song resounds back from our Creator with joy,
And we of the earth repeat it to our Creator.
At the appearing of the yellow light,
Repeats and repeats again the joyful echo,
Sounds and resounds for times to come.
The Song of Creation
Book of the Hopi
Given the peril predicted for the coming years, you may still be at a loss about what to expect or how to prepare for it. In traditional cultures, people meditate, pray for guidance or ingest psychotropic substances that allow them to embark on shamanic journeys to the otherworld. Yet in a fast-paced, high-tech and highly educated society like our own, all of these methods are snubbed, rejected and even outlawed. The artificial light shining up from our cities at night may help keep the streets safe, but most of us can barely see the heavens anymore.
Graham Hancock explains in his 2006 book, Supernatural, that shamans from the indigenous tribes in the Amazon suspect it's this lack of spiritual connection that's responsible for the planet's ecology getting so far out of balance. Keeping a line of communication open with the cosmos allows people to weigh important decisions and make a choice that feels right. After all, it's backed by a force much bigger than themselves.
Think about it. It's easy to flip on a light switch, much harder to sit and wait patiently for illumination. Nor are we able to easily maintain a link to our past and the people who came before us. We don't know the stories of our grandparents or their ancestors. Many of us have rarely even spoken to these people, let alone looked to them for guidance. That sense of continuity across the generations is gone, leaving us to wonder where we fit into the great scheme of time -- if we fit at all.
If you look at enduring cultures of the past 5,000 years, you invariably find a set of oracles, legends and/or a cosmology and scriptures handed down from one era to the next. As Hancock points out, these cultures also revere and take counsel from softspoken shamans, not from charismatic speakers with hair stylists and p.r. teams.
Virtuous behavior - diligence, discipline, thoughtfulness, generosity etc. - is repeatedly encouraged in the literature and arts of great societies. That's because civilizations fall apart when there's no cooperation or initiative. It follows then that numerous legends exist the talk about how the world has been destroyed and re-created several times as a consequence of human failure. In the myths, those who maintained their intuitive connection to the cosmos got the heads-up about the approaching mega-disaster and prepared long in advance of its arrival.
But what exactly does it mean to communicate with the cosmos? According to the Hopis:
"The living body of man and the living body of the earth were constructed in the same way. Through each ran an axis, man's axis being the backbone, the vertebral column, which controlled the equilibrium of his movements and functions. Along this axis were several vibratory centers which echoed the primordial sound of life throughout the universe or sounded a warning if anything went wrong."
In China, India and other countries in Asia, the concept of "chakras" circulating vital energy through the body is a familiar one. In The Mystery of 2012, Jay Weidner writes in an essay that ancient alchemists also regarded man as a combination of solid matter and spirit, with a field of energy swirling around and through him like the vortex of a tornado. The movement of this energy affects the passage of time, which is why the vortex was often portrayed in the Medieval age as an hourglass.
According to Weidner, at the beginning of our lives, the flow of energy is expansive and smooth, so that a day feels as if it will go on forever. Age 1 to 18 represents a person's golden age. Then time speeds up a little as the energy current accelerates in their silver age from 19 to 36. In their bronze age, 26 to 54, life moves much faster, creating stress at a time when the body feels heavier and moves with more difficulty. The iron age of 54 to 72 is where time seems to fly, while bodies harden and people become more set in their ways. After we die, the spirit leaves the body, potentially to be reborn into a new golden age.
Operating on this same principle, Earth has world ages of its own. Some 2012 investigators hypothesize that these ages (golden, silver, etc.) rise and fall according to a 26,000-year astronomical cycle called the Precession of the Equinoxes. Citing the Mayan calendar, Vedic scriptures and even modern physics, Weidner explains how the planet may now be reaching the end of its Iron Age, which began around 3100 B.C.
Undoubtedly, Earth's maelstrom (or whirlpool) of internal force seems to be gaining more and more steam, as evidenced in the 2004 Sumatra earthquake and tsunami, massive hurricanes like Katrina, the intensifying force of solar flares, the melting ice caps, and increased activity in the Yellowstone caldera and other super-volcanoes.
Curiously, even primitive tribes in western Africa refer to a vortex in their mythology. As the Hopi text quoted above indicates, each of us has an axis or backbone like the Earth's, down which a current of electro-magnetic energy flows, and then back up along the sides of our bodies. The axis route also serves as a pathway for contact with the cosmos. The Hopis speak of the need to keep the top of our heads soft and permeable in order to receive this intuitive intelligence.
In these shaky times, it's the sort of communique that could save our lives.
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Note: The quotes above and on the right (except for Ovid) are from the Book of the Hopi, by Frank Waters, first published in 1963.
Copyright 2009-2010 TheCityEdition.com
Besides, the heavens are carried round with a constant rotation, and carrying with them the lofty stars, and whirl them with rapid revolution. Against this I have to contend; and that force which overcomes all other things does not overcome me, and I am carried in a contrary direction to the rapid world.
-- Ovid, The Metamorphoses
Who'll Survive the Next Apocalypse?
A common theme of creation/destruction myths holds that those people who keep their connection to the heavens are the ones that survive cataclysms. In the case of the Hopis, a group of spiritually-minded evacuees are instructed to follow a cloud by day and star by night in the lead-up to the day of reckoning. According to the legend:
"Many other people asked them where they were going and, when they were told, laughed at them. "We don't see any cloud or any star either!" they said. This was because they had lost the inner vision of the kopavi on the crown of their head; the door was closed to them."
It's a staple of scriptural texts to encourage mankind to tap lightly from the material world and lead spiritual lives or else. Well into 20th century, writers like Henry David Thoreau, Herman Hesse and Carlos Castaneda -- not to mention Margaret Mead, Phyllis Chestler, Riane Eisler and Barbara Max Hubbard -- reiterated this theme as a prerequisite for cultural survival. And not so long ago, the recorded lectures of zen afficionado Alan Watts were regularly featured on the weekend broadcasts of alternative public radio stations.
Today Watts is gone from the airwaves, while alternative newspapers feature many lurid pages of foreign prostitutes for sale. In fact, the bashing of women has reached a fever pitch among so-called progressives, judging from the blog postings and treatment of women like Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin in the 2008 election. The sexualization of girls in the media, which began a decade ago, has further lured Generations X and Y into harm's way.
If we're to believe the prophecies of the Hopis, Vedics, Mayans and other traditions, this type of downward slide, combined with our over-consumption of the planet's resources, may indeed presage an extinction event affecting both animals and humans. Nobel laureate James Lovelock calls it "the revenge of Gaia," a homeostatic response of the planet to all the ecological damage and abuse.
Ironically, the few of us who manage to survive this tumultuous transition to the next world age will then be the ones writing the legends.
