The 2012 Story (42 page)

Most books that covered the material I did in Part I—the approach of an objective survey—would not dare venture into this area, the domain of “soft” science, comparative mythology and philosophy, and something barely talked about in academic circles, except among a small cabal of brilliant and underappreciated philosophers. It’s rarely discussed in the universities, is outside the box of progressive West Coast experimental colleges, and has been smothered by personality-driven gimmicks in the spiritual marketplace. That is the Perennial Philosophy, also known as the Primordial Tradition. It is about time this framework of understanding is embraced, as it helps us understand so much of what 2012 means in the larger sense.

My investigation of the larger perennial context of the Maya’s teachings for cycle ending (for 2012) has nothing to do with Atlantean New Age fantasy. Those who believe so are distracted by their own issues and projections and ignore what I’m actually saying. This work isn’t some kind of theosophical assertion hinging on faith, but an identification of the archetypal and perennial content of Maya spiritual teachings. Ironically, scholars themselves often skirt the fringes of languaging a universal level within Maya teachings, but use abstract and clinical terminology—as if speaking gingerly about it will make it less objectionable. Even so, if this area of my interest be deemed irrelevant by scholars, it shouldn’t interfere with my breakthrough work on the 2012 alignment, which received a long-awaited, late-breaking boost from, of all places, academia itself.

The Big Picture is thus an integration of the objective and subjective approaches. This book is really a two-fer, a two-for-one offering that embraces and shows the intimate interrelationship between subjective experience and objective analysis, between science and spirituality. Why is this relevant? Because when these two domains are forcibly kept apart, the result is the crisis of the modern world. And when our consciousness allows them to integrate, the pathway through to a sustainable future opens.

CHAPTER EIGHT

SACRED SCIENCE AND PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is where we turn everything upside down, so let me start with the conclusion to this chapter:
The essential spiritual teachings within the Maya Long Count calendar belong to a universal Perennial Philosophy
. This conclusion will seem, especially to Maya scholars unconcerned with cultural comparisons, like an unwarranted step toward a New Age interpretation of Maya tradition. It’s not. There are plenty of statements by Maya scholars that suggest the same thing. Maya archaeo-astronomer John Carlson, for example, compared the Mesoamerican tradition of fourfold city planning oriented to celestial coordinates to similar practices in Asia.
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That’s a tangible example; in regard to ideological parallels scholars usually do not utilize appropriate terminology from the interdisciplinary field of comparative mythology that allows us to state the connections bluntly. Joseph Campbell’s archetypal mythos would be helpful here. In this regard, the Maya king’s voluntary sacrifice in bloodletting rites is symbolically parallel to a Minoan king’s willingly acquiescing to his own sacrifice at the end of his reign.

James Frazer wrote of these royal rites of “putting the king to death” when the king’s powers began to fail or when his appointed tour of duty was complete.
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His season of rule was seen to reflect the natural seasons of change, and the king selflessly acknowledged the high truth that death and life go together. His sacrifice would ensure the continued prosperity of the kingdom that he had served. Clearly, this distant Old World paradigm parallels Maya cosmovision—not by route of ancient boats circling the globe, but via a shared human psychology, what we could call a “higher common factor” of truth from which all ancient cultures drew their sacred teachings. I suspect scholars tend to dance around directly admitting a universal ur-mythos for precisely the reason stated above, that it sounds like a New Age generalization. Succumbing to this tendency does not, however, do justice to Maya tradition that partakes of, in its essence, the same great spiritual wisdom that animates the core of all of the world’s religious traditions. For scholars, identifying differences is more defining than seeing parallels; the academic categorizing reflex is built upon distinctions, which automatically tend to whitewash any sense of “universally shared” ideas.

The problem is that exoteric forms of religion (and scholarship) conceal, to the uninitiated eye, the esoteric principles that religions and cultures universally share. For example, the Long Count calendar expresses a World Age doctrine, a fundamental doctrine of all cultures that have adopted a cyclic time philosophy (which covers virtually every cultural tradition save one—the Judeo-Christian). The 13-Baktun cycle ending is a period ending, and there are other smaller period endings within the Long Count calendar. The Maya perceived these period endings as being connected to astronomical cycles, big and small, as well as the life cycles of royal lineages (sometimes running upward of twenty generations of dynastic successions) and the overall life cycle of city-states. With the fall of the Classic Maya civilization around the Baktun 10 period ending (830 AD), some scholars suspect that Maya civilization rose and fell according to a life cycle based on their Long Count calendar. The 13-Baktun period endings, in 3114 BC and 2012 AD, would obviously have been incredibly important for the ancient Maya, the alpha and omega of a grand cycle of human and celestial unveiling.

What did the Maya teach about period endings? What did they do at period endings? Following a cyclic time philosophy, they saw period endings not as final ends, as a linear time philosophy would, but as times of transformation and renewal. The inscriptions are filled with period-ending rites involving sacrifice and transformation. Even today, the modern Maya do ceremonies at cycle endings within the tzolkin-haab calendar. The role of human beings during such times is to consciously facilitate a successful transformation and renewal by willingly sacrificing the dross of the old cycle, sacrificing the illusions that will not be useful in the new cycle. They invoke the day-sign deity of the next cycle, feeding it with prayer and incense, while the old day-sign, ruler of the passing zeitgeist, undergoes a metamorphosis. Fire ceremony has always been the quintessential medium for sacrifice and transformation.

The spiritual teachings for Long Count cycle endings are thus easy to identify, and can be stated as a three-part process: sacrifice, transformation, and renewal. The Maya shaman facilitates the transformation in the role of Sacrificer. On a deep symbolic level he is also the Sacrificed, for his effectiveness is contingent upon his ability to set aside his personal ego so he can be a conduit for a higher purpose. The process is one of individual spiritual transformation in service to a larger analogical transformation of humanity and culture. Change springs from within, beginning with the free-will act of sacrifice made by the individual. These ideas of spiritual transformation at the end of a cycle can be identified at the core of all of the world’s great religious traditions. Whether it be located at the end of a cycle of time or the end of a mortal life, the decision to relinquish illusion defines the future state of the individual soul and the world at large. Notice here that free-will choice is a key.

The intent of these traditions is to initiate the spiritual seeker into a higher level of being, a state of unified consciousness. Attachment to limitations is what gets sacrificed and transformed, recentering the being on a new identity locus, one that is timeless and eternal, rooted in the Divine Ground of all manifestation. Huston Smith in his books
The Primordial Tradition
and
The Religions of Man
, Aldous Huxley in his book
The Perennial Philosophy
, Alan Watts in his book
The Supreme Identity
, Joseph Campbell in his
Hero with a Thousand Faces
and in his four-volume
Masks of God
series—to name just a few of the better-known scholars—identify Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Confucianism, and Christianity as having this transformational intent at their cores. They all belong to what is referred to as the Perennial Philosophy. It’s about time that we nominate the Maya for admittance into the Perennial Philosophy, as their tradition not only possesses all the hallmarks of this perennial vision but also provides an astro-theological piece that has been buried in the other traditions and has remained, until now, shrouded.

In 1946, philosopher and novelist Aldous Huxley wrote a brief introduction to a new translation of the Hindu sacred text the Bhagavad Gita
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The way he framed it, as an expression of universal wisdom, doesn’t seem that surprising to us today, but at the time it was a radical notion. In four doctrinal points that he called “the Perennial Philosophy in its minimal and basic form,” he elucidated the underlying reality of a universally relevant framework of “first principles” that inform all spiritual traditions at their deepest core.
⁴
His point was that the ideas contained within the Bhagavad Gita
,
properly understood in their archetypal and symbolic context, were expressions of that perennial wisdom.

Regarding symbolism, a symbol is not a sign in the same way that myth is not a lie. Ananda Coomaraswamy, art historian and philosopher, wrote:

This understanding of symbolism opens up for the rational mind a whole new way of thinking about the reality of ancient myth, archetypal psychology, dreams, and visions. And luckily, an entire cadre of intelligent thinkers have talked about it. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, for example, simplified Coomaraswamy’s intent when he wrote, “The symbol is the revelation of a higher order of reality in a lower order through which man can be led back to the higher sphere.”
⁶

In this light, the Bhagavad Gita was, to Huxley, a sacred text that had something of great symbolic significance to say to modern people. Let’s remind ourselves of the ingrained sentiments toward Hinduism that were still in vogue when Huxley was writing this in the late 1940s. First of all, prejudicial Americans were likely to conflate Hinduism with the “Japs” who had just dropped bombs on Pearl Harbor. Second, scholars of religious history were still prone to think of Hinduism as a polytheistic animism filled with superstitions, certainly not a tradition that shared any wisdom with Christianity. Yet Huxley’s point was precisely this, that Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity all share a “Highest Common Factor.”
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But in order to see this, you must pierce into the esoteric core of the tradition, beyond the exoteric cultural veils of dogma. The symbolic narrative of myth, although utilizing culture-specific deity names and scenarios, points beyond itself to an underlying (or “higher”) reservoir of gnosis. Here are Huxley’s four definitive points of the Perennial Philosophy, through which all these traditions are linked: