The 2012 Story (13 page)

In his introduction to Shearer’s book, author Vinson Brown wrote:

By the early 1970s the consciousness-raising cultural and human rights events of the 1960s had morphed into other concerns. The youth culture was speaking out against the dangers of industrial pollution. Brown’s words express a sentiment for the growing concern over gas shortages and impending environmental catastrophe, something that Shearer illustrated in his book with dramatic effect. We also catch a clue about “prophetic dreams” that may come “just in time.” The book was an inspired poetic treatise, and on page 184 we read that, according to Shearer’s reconstruction of the ancient calendar prophecy, the modern nightmare of hellish materialism will end on August 16, 1987. No other details are presented in the book on how this date was derived.

The modern world’s insane materialism has been a recurring theme in the 2012 discussion. It is perhaps the one common thread woven through the works of many authors who otherwise hold wildly different views. A useful framework for understanding this particular thread is the Perennial Philosophy, which subscribes to the idea that all cycles in nature go through periods of increase and decrease. Thus, the materialism and corruption that maximize at the end of a historical cycle are to be expected, and signal an impending shift or turnabout in which the neglected opposite half of human nature, spirituality and integrity, becomes increasingly emphasized.

In 1975 Shearer published
Beneath the Moon and Under the Sun
, which contained both poetic elements and explanations of his research. On his acknowledgments page, dated September 13, 1974, he graciously thanked many people, including “José and Miriam Argüelles for their interest in my thesis of 13 Heavens and 9 Hells.” This is a clear indication of how José Argüelles, an art teacher, author, and visionary, later became the leader of the Harmonic Convergence of August 16-17, 1987.

The “thesis” that Shearer refers to is a reconstruction he advanced as to how the Aztec World Ages are timed. He noted that the Aztec worldview was divided into 13 Heaven realms above and 9 Hell realms below, making 22 distinct levels of the cosmos. Shearer believed the model worked for time as well as space, a valid insight considering the interwoven nature of time and space in Aztec cosmovision. So he connected the 22 realms with levels of time, each one representing a 52-year Calendar Round period, making a total Great Age of 22 × 52 = 1,144 years.

He proposed that the 9 Hell periods commenced when Cortés landed on the Gulf Coast at Veracruz on April 21, 1519. Thus, it would take 9 × 52 = 468 years for the Hells to play themselves out. Similar to the Hindu concept of the Yugas, Shearer saw each Hell as being worse than the last, a deepening darkness of spiritual bankruptcy. In this way he arrived at the year 1987 as the end of the process, when the calendar’s cycles all came together and humanity could experience a return to the Heaven periods. This is, in a nutshell, the idea adopted later by Argüelles, which he applied to the Baktun periods of the Maya Long Count.

Shearer’s first book focused exclusively on the Central Mexican Calendar Round tradition, far outside the Maya realm, but in his 1975 sequel he mentions Palenque,
The Popol Vuh
, and other uniquely Maya material, revealing how the Aztec and Maya traditions started to be blended together. We still have this problem in the popular press today, where the famous Aztec Sunstone is used as a Maya calendar symbol. But Shearer did not, at this stage, specifically discuss the Long Count or 2012—that was taken up later by Argüelles.

Shearer must be recognized for three things: (1) the origin of the Harmonic Convergence date (August 16-17, 1987); (2) advocating that modern seekers could follow the 260-day sacred calendar as a spiritual system; (3) furthering the idea of a dire turning point looming in the near future, based on mysterious calendar systems perfected long ago in Mexico. But it’s important to realize that Shearer worked solely with ideas connected to the 52-year Calendar Round, and his 1987 cycle-ending date is not based on the Long Count.

As we will see, his friend José Argüelles took the baton from Shearer and morphed the entire movement in several ways. He blended the Harmonic Convergence with the Maya 2012 date, suggesting a 25- or 26-year countdown from 1987 to 2012 or 2013 (the exact idea is unclear in his various interviews and writings). He also sparked grassroots gatherings at sacred sites with his Planet Art Network and tied his call for these events to the Harmonic Convergence date. The “be-in” concept, wherein people up for anything gather together to celebrate their being-ness, has been an unquestioned meme in 2012 party planning; it appeals to children of the 1960s. I’ll address in Chapter 13 the effectiveness of these types of gatherings and whether it is worth trying to craft “Partay 2012” in their image.

Finally, Argüelles adopted and advanced Shearer’s notion that following the 260-day calendar could be a spiritual path for modern non-Maya seekers, the only solution to the world’s corrupt materialism. This approach became particularly central to his Dreamspell kit, a teaching tool or game that included a dial for calculating your “galactic signature” (your birthday) and a gameboard, intended to be played with other people who wanted to learn how to be in touch with “natural time.” The kit was printed in China, packaged in a box, and was initially intended to be bought by the case by self-selected Dreamspell evangelists and distributed to potential new members. It came with a book but was lacking in clear instructions.

In 1992, Argüelles announced that the artist formerly known as Argüelles was dead and that he was now the voice of the seventh-century Maya King of Palenque, Pakal. Argüelles’s revealed identity as a wizard-channeler who renamed himself Valum Votan, Pakal’s living channel, is not at all foreshadowed in his brilliant early book from 1975 called
The Transformative Vision
. In an endnote in that book we read of his awareness of Shearer’s work and a glimpse of how he would link it to 2012:

Before we venture more deeply into the controversial work of Argüelles, we need to discuss two other important early books that invoked 2012. They too appeared in that pivotal year, 1975. One used 2012 as an anchor point for a novel theory of time but didn’t mention the Maya. The other was all about the Maya and their Long Count calendar but failed, on a technicality, to actually mention the year 2012.

Terence McKenna was a brilliant speaker and a pop icon, having boldly taken center stage as an advocate for psychedelic drugs. Born in Colorado, McKenna came of age in Berkeley, California, in the 1960s and graduated in 1969 with a bachelor of science degree in ecology and conservation from the Tussman Experimental College, a short-lived outgrowth of UC Berkeley. Thereafter he traveled widely in India, Southeast Asia, and South America in pursuit of shamans and hallucinogenic plants. The term “psychedelic drugs” is misleading. Terence encouraged greater sophistication in how drugs are categorized and talked about. He played a formative role in a new field of study called ethnomycology—the study of the interplay between psychoactive mushrooms, culture, and human consciousness.

Terence’s far-reaching and comprehensive mind allowed him to operate on many levels. He was at once a visionary philosopher, a pioneer ethnomy cologist, a botanical preservationist, an extemporaneous speaker, a writer, a logos bard, a world explorer, and a shaman of inner realms. His work deserves a comprehensive treatment, which I can’t undertake here, but by focusing on his Time Wave Zero theory we’ll be able to understand his work with 2012 and how several ideas have become tenaciously attached to 2012. In
The Invisible Landscape
, a book Terence cowrote and published with his brother Dennis in 1975, we learn of the unusual experiment they undertook in Colombia in 1971. That experiment triggered the formulation of the Time Wave Zero theory. The McKenna brothers had traveled with several friends to Colombia in search of an exotic hallucinogenic plant called
oo-hoo-ké
. What they found instead were fields of psilocybin mushrooms.

After several weeks of tripping and gathering samples, Dennis formulated an experimental plan: On a certain night they would ingest the mushrooms and Dennis would induce a visionary breakthrough by forcefully humming in a high pitch. The vibratory catalyst of the humming would, theoretically, open him up to collective memories and universal truths believed to reside in DNA. That was the plan. Terence recounts the experiment at La Chorrera in his 1993 book
True Hallucinations
:

The inner perceptions of explorers stumbling through uncharted domains of Mind may be hard for the uninitiated to digest. But the fact is that
something
did happen. And although Dennis eventually came down from his trip, Terence was launched into an ongoing dance with the I Ching (an ancient Chinese oracle), elaborating its secret contents through mathematical operations that were inspired by intuitions he was being given by the mushrooms. The I Ching seemed to him to contain ancient insights about the nature of time. Terence found corresponding insights in the work of philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, whose term “concrescence” perfectly fit what Terence was seeing—something in the very nature of time that caused unconnected events through history to speed up and converge on a precise moment in the not-too-distant future. That totalized convergence would immanentize, or reveal in the now, the eschaton, the “transcendental object at the end of time.” The term
eschaton
comes from Middle Eastern studies in reference to eschatology, the study of the final ends of all things.

Terence advanced the notion that time is not a constant but has different qualities tending toward either “habit” or “novelty.” This idea counters a fundamental premise of Western science—that the quality of time is constant. An experiment conducted on Tuesday should give the same results as the exact same experiment conducted on Friday, all other conditions being equal. The fluidity of time and the advance of new or novel occurrences is what interested Terence, and his perception that novelty was increasing over time implied something profound: time and history were speeding up and approaching a culmination point. Change might be, according to the ancient Chinese Taoists, the only constant in nature, but that change was accelerating.

Over a period of inspired investigation in the early 1970s, Terence worked out a mathematical wave form based on the 384 lines of change that make up the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching. Each of the 64 hexagrams contains six lines, each being either solid or broken. When you consult the I Ching as a traditional oracle, you build these binary lines sequentially from bottom to top. When you are finished, you can look up your hexagram in the
I Ching: Book of Changes
and consult the reading. The sequence in which the 64 hexagrams are ordered, known as the King Wen sequence, appears to be random, but Terence did an analysis of the “degree of difference” between each successive hexagram and found a statistical anomaly suggesting that, for some reason, the Ken Wen sequence was an intentional construct. With the degrees of difference codified into numerical values, Terence was able to graph a wave, and this became the Novelty Time Wave. His friend Peter Meyer worked out the formula and computer software enabling them to graph it and explore its dynamics.

Terence noticed that the time wave exhibited a quality of “self-same similarity.” It unfolded like a fractal pattern in which a given small section of the wave was found to be identical in form to a larger section of the wave. Because the wave displayed the ebb and flow of novelty within time, Terence called this fractal modeling of time Temporal Resonance.
⁵
It implied that larger intervals, occurring long ago, contained the same amount of information as shorter, more recent, intervals. History was being compressed, moving quicker. And the process had to have an end.

Terence’s tetherball analogy describes the quickening process nicely: A ball tied by a long rope to a pole will swing around and around very slowly, but as the rope wraps around the pole and the ball draws closer it revolves more and more quickly. The closer the ball gets to the center, the more quickly it is drawn toward it. The center point is when the ball theoretically reaches infinite velocity. In truth, the mathematical wave form doesn’t really describe a
constant
acceleration; the staccato up-and-down pattern of the wave implies an ongoing vacillation between habit and novelty. The wave trends, however, with each successive iteration, toward infinite novelty. The mean average trend is one of increasing novelty, experienced as accelerating change. A requirement of the Time Wave Zero theory is thus that infinite novelty will be reached on a specific date.