I don’t get out much, except for short excursions with a few friends, a few commitments (such as volunteering at the Road Runner Food Bank), writing–when it is outside my boxes–and some daily practice and reading.
Now and then, I’ll venture outside this small three-ring playground. It doesn’t have to extend that far into new territory as long as it touches on existing interests in ways that refresh my accustomed ways of looking at this world. These adjacent explorations can then aerate perspectives that are otherwise in danger of closing in on themselves.
This past weekend, I attended a talk by Carl Johan Calleman, who has written several books on “The Mayan Calendar”. I was drawn to this talk because a friend, JoAnne, has just written a book about her own encounters with Mayan descendants. In her book, she explores how indigenous understanding of our living natural world has contributed to her personal healing. She shares her encounters with energies that still speak to those who know how to listen.
Our modern societies take what they want from Mother Earth without much concern for what allows Her to provide the gifts on which we depend. In the wake of our broken contract, I value any perspective that might help us to return to a healthy relationship with our planet.
His talk held my interest from beginning to end and increased my understanding of early civilizations when pyramids and stone circles emerged concurrently around the globe, as if they were part of a network. But at that time, thousands of years ago, those civilizations were probably not in direct contact with one another.
His talk presented a Mayan Calendar timeline that runs through past centuries and continues into the future, revealing a wave pattern in which human civilizations rise and fall. It also documents cosmic alignments which influenced our ancestors and continue to influence us in the ascending and descending conditions under which humanity lives.
One statement in the talk especially caught my attention: there was a particular year in the Mayan Calendar (3114 BC) when civilizations around the globe made a quantum leap in knowledge: such as in writing and in the still-unprecedented skills utilized in building the pyramids. Carl made the observation that, since this was at a time when places such as Egypt and Central America were not in touch with one another, these civilizations may have been open to a cosmic download of knowledge, that then propelled this sudden evolution on Earth.
In a way, I prefer this interpretation to the claim that cosmic visitors in spaceships intervened in the life of our planet (as in Daniken’s book “Chariots of the Gods”). I have visited Egyptian pyramids and the Nazca lines in Peru, and it is easy to believe that unprecedented kinds of knowledge must have been present thousands of years ago, not present in our modern world.
Like many people alive today, I don’t have a way to relate my personal issues to the cosmic alignments tracked in Astrology. I prefer to believe that a spirit of knowing–present without effort in ordinary life—is available whenever I hearken to its communications.
After the talk, I joined several people and the author for coffee. There were seven of us. Among them were the author, Carl, whose experiences at Chichen Itza Pyramid decades ago clearly changed his life; Glenn, who writes about the intersection of indigenous culture and our modern world; JoAnne, who writes about the healing energies she has experienced through the traditions of Mayan culture still surviving on the edges of our modern world; an indigenous man; and a woman who shared her recent near-death-experience.
I ask myself why I am not more deeply touched by these ancient civilizations and the evidence that, in important ways, their knowledge exceeded our own. Perhaps because I am only able to look from outside? I feel on the edges of any calendar that claims to go beyond what is familiar to me, even when it has impressive credentials.
I see the world outside my window, and extending across the globe to the melting icecaps and burning forests, as being carried along in a momentum that appears to be beyond the power of individuals to curtail. Helplessly witnessing forces that we can’t stop, I would love to believe that 5,000 years ago, in 1314 BC, a burst of cosmic knowledge was received around the globe, giving birth to new civilizations. And I would love to believe that something similar is still possible, now that we so desperately need something beyond us to intervene.
Now that–at every level, societal and individual–all parts of the globe are connected, how would we recognize if new ways of knowing were infiltrating our world?
Perhaps for some of us, it would simply arrive as an understanding that what we hold to be reliable and true is to be treasured; that in appreciating what is positive in our lives, we are resonating with a cosmic download that is doing its best to show us a path through the darkness or our current time.
Thank you Michael this was an interesting blog. Perhaps we can look forward to new knowledge. I hope so.