I ran across a news item the other day: “Scientists think they’ve finally figured out the Mayan calendar” according to an article in TechNews. The study was done at Tulane University.
I do understand that the Mayan calendar can be viewed solely as an anthropological puzzle. But the calendar is not just some Rubik’s Cube to solve. When we approach the mysteries of deep history through a contemporary lens and one that’s tinted by the distortions of scientific materialism, I would have to question whether of all this academic work has contributed to a clearer understanding of how the calendar relates to what has been called the Great Awakening, and what we’re all experiencing now with this incredible planetary shift.
There’s no question that the Mayan calendar is shrouded in mystery. John Major Jenkins was one of the foremost spiritual interpreters and decoders of its meaning and significance and spent his entire life working on how we should understand it. I was privileged to know John personally (he passed in 2017). He was a keynote speaker at Boston’s first and only conference on the 2012 phenomenon. The event was sponsored by the Emergence Project, a non-profit that I founded with Annette Farrington in 2009. John’s life’s work was spent writing a series of books on the Mayan mysteries and I highly recommend them.
As we now peel back the layers of deep history, we’re paradoxically in a way going “back to the future.” Like Stonehenge, the calendar is an artifact of a path to a particular consciousness (much like a mandala or a labyrinth) and something we have a hard time wrapping our Western brains around. For those of us who are intrigued by the long cycles of history that the Mayans understood, the subject can be approached as a roadmap, a guide, an illumination. In that sense it is never “solved.”
Limits of Science
I’m not anti-science by any means. In fact, I’ve written two books on science and technology and spent most of my life in the field. But when a culture assumes that science is the ultimate arbiter of reality, then there’s nothing, even the most elusive mysteries in the great arc of human history, that can’t be explained away. The way that Western scientific materialism sometimes takes complex realities and then, with characteristic hubris, purports to explain them in overly simple terms is what’s called reductionism.
I have no problem with scientists trying to figure out the meaning of the Mayan calendar. They may indeed have come up with some perspectives that could help with future studies. But I would be willing to bet that their explanation of its significance will fall far short of a deep understanding that extends well beyond simple dates and complex mathematical relationships.
Mayan Calendar: Misinterpretations Abound
The Mayan calendar and the date 2012 have been widely misunderstood and that continues to this day. When the year 2012 hit, many wrongly expected that there would be signs and wonders. Existential fireworks. The Big Something. But that’s not how the patterns and unfolding of long historical cycles work. In fact, the year 2012 was just a gateway, only the beginning of a cycle that is now intensifying in scope and power.
As I’ve noted, the sense of deep history that the ancients had does not always mesh with our Westernized perspectives. The mainstream press jumped all over the lack of an “event” in 2012 as some sort as “proof” that the Mayan Calendar was nonsense. The good news is that the notion of the Great Awakening, the Shift, the Ascension, or whatever your preferred term might be for the intense energetic changes happening now, has taken hold in our culture, even if imperfectly understood. It’s wonderful to see so many becoming aware of it despite the outward appearances of a “world gone wrong” in the words of Bob Dylan.
In addition to being master astronomers, the Mayans also developed teachings about how the unfolding of earth changes and events in our solar system and beyond (i.e. galactic events) would affect our lives politically, culturally, and in many other ways. This too should be considered a kind of science. In Mayan cosmology, galactic events had specific impacts on human affairs, in part through the alteration of the earth’s energy fields and grids.
Recent and strong changes in solar activity are now playing a large role in this process as the Mayans predicted. These energies are powerful and increasing in intensity with many ripple effects. They are destabilizing world events, repatterning our individual "reality bubbles", accelerating changes in the earth’s geomagnetic grid and infrastructure, altering our perceptions of self and other, and bringing up blocked energies for clearing,
This is simultaneously an exciting, troubling, and very intense time.
But for those who appreciate and can open up to these cascading energetic waves of change, the opportunities for spiritual growth are unparalleled.
