The 2012 Story (58 page)

I was at an attenuated stage of experiencing an ultimate vision of reality; I could see within it the process of history and time, of the creation of the manifest cosmos and created beings, and in one fell swoop the purpose and destiny of humanity unfolded before me and was gone, imprinting me with a knowing that would take a million books to adequately convey. I have preserved in my notebook something that sounds as banal now as it was profound then: “The purpose of life is to grow!” The mystic identity of “Thou Art That,” of identification with the All, began to turn into a feeling of intense ecstasy, of love. Oceans of tears streamed from my heart while a thousand emotions flooded my being in quick succession. Washing over the entire kaleidoscopic panorama was a feeling that God is All, All is God, All is Love, love is all you need, love is all you are. I felt a universal compassion for all beings—these words come to mind now, but I am aware of how trite they must sound and how inadequately they convey the inner ecstasy that my immersion in bliss conferred. I’m condensing this recollection from my notebooks, and at this point I wrote “and then I disappeared.”

Who knows where I went; full identity immersion in eternity extinguishes the “little I” and nothing can be brought back. But there are a million dimensions of being between heaven and hell, between ego and eternity. What I recall next is that, far from any sense of connection with my body or my ego identity, I awoke within a dream in which I was a Chinese man around the turn of the last century. This wasn’t, however, merely a hallucination. In fact, nothing in this experience could really be rightly called a hallucination. I lived out the life of that man. I was that Chinese man and experienced every little thing he had, day after day and year after year. I had first memories, fell in love, got married, had kids, experienced heartache and a million other things that we all register through our lives, and I grew old and died. It wasn’t a speedy overview, either, like a flashback in a near-death experience—it happened in real time. And what I brought back to document when I wrote it down in my notebook was not names and details, but karmic impressions, defining moments, wounds and joys. These are the things that define us.

I then was released into a transhuman realm of being, and I drifted into imagistic reveries involving primordial forests and vast expanses of geological time that occurred as a life cycle of some higher being that I also was. Imagine the life cycle of an entire grove of redwood trees. Some of these groves have been in existence for millions of years. If there is some higher entelechy or ongoing “beingness” of this grove of trees, think of the repository of memories that it holds, or roots, into the earth! Wonder upon wonder unfolded in cosmogonic symphonies before my inner eye. Eventually, my full stride of bold forward motion began to ease. The long journey started to downshift. Ever so subtly, shadows started to creep in; odd angles and question marks began distracting me. I was decelerating now and was about to “come down” into my ego-identity as John. Family faces began appearing, personal thoughts, pathos, compassion, memories, events, disappointments, personal traumas—in broad sweeps I became reacquainted with the knot of karma that is my current incarnation. I could bathe the causal knot of each experience in a compassionate kiss as it passed by, embracing many things that were squirreled away in the recesses of my psyche. I felt this reintegration was a very important part of the entire experience, in which I could recalibrate my identity and reconfigure priorities, goals, motivations, and intentions for my life.

As I was drawn back to the local galaxy, to earth and my waiting body, I remembered I was lying in the isolation tank, a vision box for my underworld journey. I also felt I had never really left my body; I had, rather, explored the cosmic contents of it. Humor percolated into my mind; I began to feel reconnected into my body, and after a while I decided to move a finger. Then a hand, then an arm. The exquisite feel of muscles contracting and blood coursing was as physically pleasurable as the previous mental and spiritual ecstasies I had soared through. After much stretching and moving, getting reestablished into the physical space of my body, I sat up in the box and opened my eyes. Or at least I thought I was opening my eyes. There was no difference between open and closed. I was, in fact, staring out into limitless velvet depths of infinitude. My mind was opened down to the ultimate ground, which was no ground at all but a boundless depth. I was in awe; as the jaw drops in wonder at some fascinating sight, my mind was dropped open in a reverential awesomeness that no word could express. And it was more than some philosophical idea of an alive and bright plenum of infinite space and time. My eyes were actually gazing upon eternity. It was there, always; that, for me, was all I needed to know.

I lay back again and gently glided down into a peaceful reentry as the magic chemicals were processed out of my bloodstream. As I became curious about revisiting the world outside, which was surely going to be brand new to my reborn soul, I reflected back over my visions and experiences and felt I was returning from an immense adventure through time and space. In certain respects it felt as though I had sat down in the tank perhaps thirty minutes earlier (whatever “thirty minutes” means), but when I soon extracted myself from the tank I noted that five hours had passed.

The experience deeply affected me. It was completely different from the several psychedelic trips I had previously undertaken. I walked around north Chicago neighborhoods for a few hours to get anchored back into embodiment. My body seemed newly reborn, as did my mind and soul. I had a few awkward interactions with the hustle and bustle of what seemed an insanely overmechanized world—cars, bikes, trucks, buildings, planes flying overhead. It was a bit jarring, but also edifying, as it taught me how the consciousness closes, puts up a barrier of protection, when violence, noise, and angst-filled disturbances occur. It’s doubtful, I thought to myself, that the modern life of humanity allows people to keep even the slightest sliver of spiritual consciousness open.

I sat in a park, drank water, and ate an apple I had brought with me, which was truly nectar. My senses came alive and my body lapped up its juicy flesh. Wow. I wrote what I could recall in my notebook, and by that evening I was none the worse for wear. My notebook concludes with an odd pronouncement, a kind of philosophical muse that echoes some key ideas from
The Popol Vuh
. At age twenty in 1984, however, I had no knowledge of
The Popol Vuh
:

I don’t advocate LSD use or suggest this experiment should be repeated. What I would like to convey is that the infinite and eternal Divine Ground is our own source-mind and soul, and it underlies and gives rise to all manifest form. To catch a glimpse of this truth is the birthright of every human being, is not impossible, and radically reorients the ego to an awareness of realities much greater than it could ever imagine or hope to rival. Ego’s job is to be an ego, not stage a coup on eternity.

To connect all this with some topics previous explored, realizing a unity consciousness within is completely congruent with the partnership mode, investing in our inner bonobo while divesting ourselves from chimpocracy, reviving the aboriginal Dreamtime, and opening up the transrational perspective. We might call it an integration of East and West, but a transformation of the lower self into higher self is probably a better way to think about it. In addition, assuming that this kind of initiatory experience of non-local immersion in eternity is what the “transformation and renewal” of 2012 is about, then many mystics, visionaries, shamans, and spiritual seekers have already been to 2012.

I’ve saved the best for last. Of the three “methods” for realizing or building the Big Picture, the practical is probably the most important. Undertaking works in service to a greater good is essential for building a foundation for a civilization that honors the whole and desires a sustainable way. We can all offer our unique talents and gifts to this effort. I feel that my writings, guided tours, and conferences are my “activist” offering. Priorities and interests can shift, however, and the unfolding process of self-actualization can activate other abilities and projects. Our outer work in the world reflects, in some way, the inner work we are engaged in. It is precisely through this synergy of inner and outer that both domains receive nourishment and actualization.

I tend to be cerebral, engaged in thoughts and creative mental processes. Writing is also a very introverted process that can only be done alone. Imbalances in the inner being, by reinforcing exclusive focus on one area of the self, need to be tempered by engaging the opposite. Psychologically and energetically, this is equivalent to embracing the shadow. To ground my cerebral tendencies, I recently decided to take up a very tactile and physical pursuit. This wasn’t really a decision but more of a half-conscious groping for wholeness. It was, as Joseph Campbell would say, “following my bliss.” Loved ones might see it as a radical departure from your habitual patterns and can become alarmed. Some people seem to do an about-face, and often the intuitive effort to find wholeness is aborted before it barely begins. A straitlaced practical accountant may take a singing class to express a long-repressed aspect of his being.

For me, the turnabout in the deepest seat of my behavior was to take on physical challenges and invite earth and iron into my elemental life. It was a big, long-term plan that started as a small little voice. The more I pursued it, the more I felt I was paving the way for a new kind of future for myself, one that led beyond 2012 and one that divested me of the cultural matrix that imposes limits and controls. It doesn’t need to have a practical component, it just has to open up dormant parts of the brain. Instead of sitting in a chair and tapping away endlessly on a keyboard like a crazed woodpecker spewing private monologues, I sank my hands into clay. I carved wood, and I began to draw again. I resuscitated my ancient ten-speed bicycle and grounded myself with vigorous rides, reviving my inner sixteen-year-old who loved riding for hours along the Prairie Path in suburban Chicago.

And then a new path inside of that opened up, one that I doubt would have presented itself had I remained stuck in habitual patterns. My friend Stevyn Prothero told me of an old print shop going out of business in my old neighborhood in Denver. I was curious. The dying art of hand-set letterpress printing was already on my radar. Between 1880 and 1940 thousands of printing machines were produced, and they could be operated by hand or foot. Typically, the operator hand-set the type and images in a metal frame, mounted it in the press, inked up the rollers, and pumped the foot treadle. Clang, clang, clang! The beast’s maw opens and closes as you feed each page in by hand, to be inked and pressed into the metal type. True printing! You can design pages with ornaments and use different-colored ink, handmade paper, and then bind your books by hand. It appealed to my sense of doing things off the grid as well as producing something of quality. The craft-guild ideals of William Morris’s Kelmscott Press, or the Roycrofters, stoked my imagination. Our modern marketplace, especially books, have gone down in quality in terms of both content and design ethic, while the primary goal is to sell, sell, sell! The reign of quantity has smothered the value of quality.

As a writer, this concerns me. In my youth I produced my own books. I enjoyed designing intricate book covers and page content, then going to Kinko’s with it. My original self-published version of my book
Tzolkin
, of which I sold an edition of sixty copies, contained forty pages of fold-out calendars and a color day-sign chart. This was well before my letterpress interest blossomed in 2007. Throughout my writing career, in retrospect, it seemed that my more creative side was being eclipsed by the editorial mandates and design limitations of the commercial publishing world. So my escape was to save one of the monstrous Chandler & Price platen presses from the scrap yard. Reviving the ancient art of letterpress printing was not unlike reviving the lost cosmology of the Maya.

I was surprised to find a community of like-minded printing enthusiasts who were happy to initiate me into the Black Art. Stevyn and I wrestled with a ton of iron, loading up a rental truck with “the beast” and other paraphernalia. I strategized a work space in my one-car garage and even got some tips from Lloyd O’Neil, the master printer in Denver, who was folding up his shop after fifty years. There aren’t too many of these around anymore; almost all of them have now succumbed to offset and digital printing. What I love about this is that without once plugging into the grid you can produce a book-as-art, just as medieval illuminated manuscripts were a feast for the senses and an invitation to go deep into an experience that the book’s contents could trigger. Sacred art was designed to transport the viewer into a state of consciousness that could directly apprehend the mysteries they symbolized. So, too, a book could open up vistas beyond the surface meaning of words printed on a page.

My little print shop has opened new relationships in my community with artists, designers, other letterpress fans, authors, and poets. Everyone was excited about the underlying motivation and value that the enterprise creates. And they met it with innovative new enterprises of their own. Our entire American culture is feeling a deep upwelling urge to turn the boat around, to begin doing things differently than our culture wishes us to do. Conspicuous consumption can be rebuffed with creative generosity, dog-eat-dog economics can be mitigated by community-based sharing; dominating others can be diffused by building mutually beneficial partnerships.
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