August/September

We Need a Mass Movement of People Like You
Bill Moyers

Is Fox News Biased?
The Center for American Progress

In Praise of Unruly Women
Arianna Huffington

Returning From War: A Family Affair
Shri Estes

Healing Our World From the Inside Out
Carol Hwoschinsky

From Hurt to Heart: Healing Conflict at its Roots
Eryn Kalish

Are We In Danger Right Now?
Peter Moore, MFCC, CGP

Our Clean-Energy Birthright
Jeane Manning

The Organic Foods Movement
Paul Cienfuegos

Genetically Engineered Foods May Pose A Health Risk
Jeffrey M. Smith

Sacred Menstruation
Julie Gauss, CCH

Shifting Into a New Era of Peace and Harmony
John Darling

Cosmic Calendar
Salina Rain

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Shifting Into a New Era of Peace and Harmony

By John Darling

It’s eight years until 2012, when, according to the Mayan calendar, the world reaches the end of a 5,125 year cycle of history—characterized by pollution, aggression and alienation of the individual from nature and spirit—and shifts into a new era of peace and harmony.

During this shift, according to José Arguelles, creator of the 1987 Harmonic Convergence and author of The Mayan Factor, all of our institutions, from the personal to the political, are going to implode. It’s not going to be pretty—that is, unless you’ve already shifted, which lots of people are doing.

Arguelles, now living in Ashland, Oregon, where he operates The Foundation for the Law of Time, is working to help this “greatest mind shift in all of history” with educational programs, community gar-dening, collective living, an art gallery and the writing of many books. He’s an artist and former art professor at the University of Chicago, where he earned his PhD. He also taught at Princeton and UC Davis.

Tall, thin, and dark-haired at 65, Arguelles speaks and writes concisely and bluntly. “When you say 2012 is the prophetically programmed endpoint of civilization as we know it, it makes a lot of people jump, but that’s because everyone knows something’s got to give. Human population has doubled since 1960 and I can’t tell you how many species have become extinct or people who’ve died in wars, but we’re on the brink of disaster for the environment and for civilization.”

Does Arguelles use the dread words “end times,” a favorite phrase or mainstream religion? Yes, he does, but his focus is not on heaven. It’s here on earth—and on helping people rapidly evolve, so as to be able in 2013 to live in “a world that will have a startlingly different look,” he says.

“The non-polluted air will have a different look. We’ll be decentralized in smaller communities. Technology will be wind, solar and zero-point energy. We will be highly artistic. We’ll reforest. We’ll communicate with telepathy. And don’t be surprised to see a rainbow around the earth, from pole to pole.” The rainbow will be created, he says, by interaction of increasingly electronically charged plasmas in the atmosphere and the hooking up of our telepathy with earth’s magnetic fields.

All this, foretold in Mayan prophecies and made famous in The Mayan Factor, is part of the 25-year countdown that began with the August 1987 Harmonic Conver-gence which was widely celebrated in Ashland, Mt. Shasta and other sacred sites and spiritual communities as a global peace meditation. The Venus transit of the sun this year, also foretold in Mayan prophecies as a “sign in the sky,” starts the time of the “big change” moving toward 2012, which Arguelles calls the Harmonic Conversion.

Key to the shift, says Arguelles, is dumping our Gregorian calendar, with its uneven, irregular months, attuned to no natural cycles—and shifting to the Thirteen Moon calendar, made of 364 days or 13 months, each 28 days long, filled with exactly four weeks of seven days, plus one Day Out of Time every July to reset the calendar.

Why are calendars and time so important? After all they’re just numbers. The Gregorian calendar, a creation of Medieval Pope Gregory and Roman Emperors (August for Augustus, July for Julius Caesar, etc.) was molded for political purposes and, being clunky and disconnected from nature, “creates intrinsic, unconscious confusion in our minds” according to Arguelles.

For its followers, the official shift to the new calendar was this year’s Day Out of Time on July 25. Many cities, especially in South America, honored the day and made the shift, establishing its “irreversible momentum.” The years of the new calendar have names, not numbers, and start over in 52-year cycles. We’re presently in 11-Wizard, next year is 12-Storm.

2012 is also significant as the Closing of the Cycle of the 26,000-year zodiacal precession, also called the Platonic Great Year, Arguelles says, as well as another 104,000-year cycle in the Mayan calendar. With the calendar fully in place in the post-2012 world, there will be no more history, which, with all its wars, injustice and socio-economic inequality, was a representation of humanity trying to function with an out-of-balance time system.

What will there be? Peace. Arts (which include gardening and cooking). Living simply and in communities, not each family to their own increasingly expensive and resource-gobbling box.

How is this going to just happen? Here and only here is where Arguelles doesn’t have an answer. “I don’t know how it’s going to happen. I spend my mental energy sending out positive vibrations, because every thought has a charge. We’re creating our vision of the enlightened society to come, with community gardens, kin houses (his three-member staff live here communally in a rented house), and we’re encouraging telepathy to be ready for the breakdown in communications.”

Shifting up to the enlightened society is going to happen because of a shift in human consciousness and that’s already well underway, but at the same time, you may have noticed, life is getting more complex, chaotic and challenging.

“As you get toward the end of the cycle, the quantity of karma increases. There is more to take care of, life becomes more complex and there is less time for finer, spiritual matters. Ignorance increases, and that in turn increases karma. When you have so much karma—unconscious effects of past actions—it becomes ossified in the institutional complexity of industrial life. This is experienced as a kind of clunky, difficult-to-maneuver density. Red tape, grid lock, terrorism, longer lines, more rules, less flexibility, more machines, less manners—a great morass known as karmic gridlock.”
Sound familiar? It’s behind what everyone says at one time or another and we see it in increased TV watching, use of prozac, alcoholism, religiosity, relationship intractability and breakup, political polarization and hysteria, all the modern ills.

“We are living in a massive value inversion. Nothing old will work anymore. Relationships, institutions, programs and forms, everything old is now out of the evolutionary norm, being dissolved or evolved. The old is being split apart from the new. We are living in the splitting of the worlds,” writes Arguelles in his Living Through the Closing of the Cycle; a Survival Guide to 2012.

“There are any number of danger signs,” Arguelles says. “The handwriting is on the wall and we’re already starting to hit that wall. That was apparent from 9/11. The system we live in is coming down of its own complexity. It can’t be sustained—and there are millions of people ready to make that change.”

Do we get to, and through, the shift by seeing the error of our ways and, like good, happy scouts, just reasoning together to create a newer world? Have we ever? Nah. We’re going to do what we’ve always done, though Arguelles doesn’t like talking about it.
“I’m afraid there are going to be certain events that reduce our population.” It might have to do with the much-discussed polar shift, which could cause earthquakes, tsunamis, movement of tectonic plates or a scrambling of electronic data and communications. It might be triggered by global warming, deforestation, water shortage or a “bad outbreak” of war, especially the nuclear kind, possibly from the “volatile” relations between Israel and Iran.

That sounds horrendous, but is it? These are the sort of cataclysms foretold in the Mayan prophecies (and many other traditions) and, from the point of view of the Earth and all other species, a big reduction in human population, according to Mayan elders in Guatamala, “is going to make the Earth a much cleaner and better place.”

The good news is that matching the karmic gridlock is an “acceleration of dazzling new possibilities—the greatest opportunity that our souls could possibly imagine. A profoundly spiritual moment for a mind shift back to the nurturing bosom of Mother Nature.”

Job one in the Closing of the Cycle is care of the soul, and guess what the main technique is? Learning one’s own mind by good, old-fashioned meditation and lots of it, until you witness and experience out obsessive thought patterns and begin living in the space between the thoughts, which is your True Self. As you engage and work through all your own karma, Aguelles imparts, remember to cultivate “good mental manners,” which means:

• Reality is neutral. Don’t label what is happening as good-bad, right-wrong. It’s all stuff for our learning! Self-accept and self-forgive. If we judge events or self, we miss the point.
• Avoid polarizing. We do this when blaming or feeling in the right. The ossified institutions of this time are largely the result of polarizing. Step up and think: the one whom I deem my enemy is really giving me the opportunity to evolve out of a lesser state of polarity to my higher state of transcendent consciousness. This creates harmony.
• It’s all lessons. We all came here to learn. We’re here now to graduate to a new evolutionary level. It’s all consequential. When we learn, we transform. We can’t learn if we already know the answer. Relax. Open your mind.
• Take responsibility for yourself. No matter what the changes, they are for your benefit. Evolutionary change often manifests as disruptions in our life routine. These might be shocking and we might react by blaming people or events outside us. Blame only stops us from becoming our true selves.

Arguelles stresses that this is a cosmic event, not some retribution on earthly humans for our many follies. The slate is being wiped clean. We are all part of this Universal Nature that is being renewed. Our earthly state and its deconstruction-rebirth are a reflection of this. In short, it’s all good. Scary, but good.

“We are the people who have decided to answer the higher spiritual call that is born into each of us. Our jobs are no longer important to us, nor, if they stand in our way, are our families, nor most certainly are our nations. What matters to us is the truth. And the truth is our species has run out of time. We cannot go on every day with business as usual and think the air will get cleaner or that we’ll become less aggressive.

“We are calling for a stop altogether to this way of life. Global civilization is not experiencing a political or economic crisis, but a crisis of evolution that can only be solved by the exercise of higher spiritual will.”

John Darling is an Ashland writer and counselor, contact him at jdarling@jeffnet.org. The Foundation for the Law of Time (and art gallery), is at 500 A St, Ashland, OR 97520; POB 156, (541) 488-5060, www.foundationforthelawoftime.org and www.tortuga.com.