John Major Jenkins, a researcher since 1986, reinterprets the Maya’s 2012 calendar endpoint as a galactic alignment—sun at the December solstice converging with the Milky Way’s center near Sagittarius—marking humanity’s spiritual evolution. He links this to cosmic cycles, shamanic rituals (like Azapa’s visionary tools), and institutionalized Mayan practices, contrasting their optimism with Western apocalyptic fears. Jenkins acknowledges potential physical risks—pole shifts, earthquakes—but argues humanity’s response to death and cosmic energies determines whether the alignment spurs growth or catastrophe. His work, blending academic research and galactic cosmology, suggests Earth’s orientation relative to the "galactic equator" could trigger unseen transformations, framing 2012 as a neutral but pivotal moment for collective consciousness. [Automatically generated summary]
Finally, I'm such a neophyte when it comes to the Mayan calendar.
People have been talking to me about the Mayan calendar for years now, literally years, and I have never, ever done a program on it.
Tonight, that changes with an independent researcher, John Major Jenkins, who claims that he has solved the mystery of the Maya calendar end date in 2012.
And I guess we're going to begin at the beginning here in a moment with John.
And we're going to find out what the heck the Mayan calendar is.
So if you're, as I am, simply unfamiliar with the Mayan calendar, then you're going to want to definitely soak up tonight's program.
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All right.
Independent researcher solves mystery of Maya calendar end date in 2012, which coincides with a rare alignment of the sun with the galactic center.
The book that John Major Jenkins has authored is Maya Cosmogenesis.
Hope I'm getting that right, 2012.
I've been eternally curious about all of this.
John Major Jenkins is a leading independent researcher on ancient Mesoamerican cosmology.
He's authored five books on the Maya and has given a presentation to the prestigious Institute of Maya Studies in Miami.
In March of 1968, he was invited by the Indigenous Council of the Americas to speak at their conference in Mexico.
Well, this write-off points out a fundamental difference in the way that the Maya conceive of time.
The Maya long-count calendar is the 5,125-year-long period that we are currently in.
Now, technically speaking, this cycle began back in 3114 BC, and it ends in the year that we call 2012.
But the important distinction is that the Maya were anchoring their time to the end date.
In other words, following standard Mayan ideas about birth happens at the end of a time cycle or process, the analogy being, for example, the human gestation period.
That's a nine-month-long period of time.
It's a nine-month cycle of unfolding, and the birth moment in that process happens at the end.
So, this is an interesting point to consider because other researchers who have looked at the Maya calendar, the Maya long count calendar, and have tried to decipher or solve the mystery of what it represents have been erroneously looking at the beginning date for some explanation, whereas it's really something that occurs on the end date.
The long-count cycle was designed to calibrate this vast cycle of time called the procession, the procession of the equinoxes, which is a larger cycle of 26,000 years.
Now, this is that great vast cycle of world ages that the Western astrological tradition recognizes as well.
And, you know, it's been interpreted by astrologers as a vast evolutionary cycle of human unfolding.
Now, how could they possibly, that long ago, have understood where we were with respect to the galaxy or even planets and our own sun or anything else since they didn't have that kind of technology then?
Well, there is a part of the Milky Way, it's in the region of Sagittarius, that is very bright and very wide.
And this is the nuclear cauldron of the galactic center, and it's visible simply with the naked eye.
Now, the Maya would have been looking at the Milky Way, and in their mythology, they thought of the Milky Way as the Great Mother.
So that bulging white part of the Milky Way that houses the galactic center, they thought of that as the womb of the cosmic mother, which of course is intuitively a correct interpretation of that place in the sky.
It is the creation place.
It is the center and heart of our galaxy, and everything in our galaxy, including us, has come from that.
Well, it's a question of how long it takes to accurately calibrate the movement of precession.
And the analogy, if we go back to the Greek astronomer who allegedly first discovered the processional movement back in the 2nd century BC, he was working with data that was only 150 years old, and he was able to fairly accurately calibrate precession.
So it's kind of a question of how sophisticated the ancient Maya were, and we're beginning to realize that the ancient civilizations were much more sophisticated scientifically than we previously thought.
Well, I'm sort of conservative when it comes to that.
I would say that their technologies were fairly well developed in terms of astronomy.
I think they were very astute skywatchers.
I don't believe that they had high technologies such as lasers and things like that.
I believe they were very, very sophisticated in terms of their inner development, and that's what makes them so inscrutable to us today because we live in a society that is very materialistically oriented.
Well, even barely discovered or still undiscovered, and there are still many undiscovered tribes that have never touched wilderness down in Brazil and the rainforest and so forth, they seem to all either study or worship something in the sky.
So it's not unusual, I mean, for anybody to look at our sky and find some sort of reference or even something to worship in it.
Yeah.
So I'm not surprised that they were studying the sky, but they apparently, you believe, were quite a bit more sophisticated, even if not fully technically, industrially, as we are now.
Spiritually, but also in terms of their cosmological understanding of the nature of the cosmos and reality.
In my book, Maya Cosmogenesis, I make the analogy to this process.
You know, if we think of the Siberian people or the people from the far north, they were interested in the sky as well.
They were very interested in the pole star because to them, in the far northern latitudes, the pole star was sort of like that magical place around which the entire sky revolves.
To them, that was the cosmic center and heart of creation.
But as people migrated southward into the Americas, that ancient belief in the pole star as, you might say, God or the center of creation changed.
And the Maya, driven by this interest in identifying the true cosmic heart and source, eventually realized that it was this place along the Milky Way in the constellation Sagittarius.
Yes, but like I was sketching earlier, their idea is very alien and strange to us in many ways because they believe that creation or birth happens at the end of a process.
Yeah, and if we look at our times, and in your book, The Quickening, I know you were pointing out many examples of this.
It seems like, you know, our culture and our civilization and the rate of change and the way that things are happening, it seems to be accelerating and converging on some point in the near future at which some profound event is bound to happen.
I'm past considering that I think it may be occurring, which was when I wrote The Quickening, what I was observing.
I am now well into we're right in the middle of it, folks.
It's absolutely happening.
A lot of what I wrote about has unfolded, sadly, exactly as I wrote about it.
Now, maybe it is not a sad thing, and maybe you need to take a much larger view about the natural course of events, as perhaps Amaya did, to not be sad about something ending and something else beginning.
And I, too, try to emphasize that this isn't so much about something that is going to happen on the morning of the December solstice in 2012 because astronomy is involved and because it has something to do with our relationship to the galaxy and how we're coming into a situation of resonance with the galactic center, it's basic astronomy and therefore it's something that might be in effect 50 years on either side of 2012.
I think in general, those aspects of our civilization that are not aligned with, you might say, the divine will or With the sources of life are going to fall away or be torn away.
It's kind of like the cycles of birth and death.
During the winter, a tree basically dies on some level, and all the leaves are blown away.
All those things that are not aligned and no longer serve the purposes of life have to be shed.
So that applies, I think, to our civilization, and certainly our many, many institutions and fundamental assumptions in our culture that have served us for decades or centuries, but now, because the nature of humanity is changing so rapidly, things need to be reoriented.
We've got to, I guess, tiptoe around this a little bit, but if the tree, if we could think of this as a tree and it's in full bloom right now, and there's six billion bugs, when the cycle changes, how many bugs would you expect there to be?
You could also look at this process as, you know, humanity and consciousness, I believe, and I think the Maya were tuned into this understanding, consciousness is something that the universe does.
And so here we are approaching this blooming period.
I believe that the Maya were intending their world age metaphors to be interpreted metaphorically.
The idea of world ages, that's very, very central to the Mayan understanding of time and that humanity has moved through these various world age cycles, and at the end of each one, there's a drastic change and transformation, and humanity must transform itself into something else in order to survive.
Well, drastic in terms of the spiritual unfolding of humanity, because the pressures of change and evolution force humanity to make some pretty crucial decisions.
I think that those changes are not so much in terms of evolutionary physiology, the change of our physical organism, but now it has to do with changing our values and assumptions in our civilization in order to survive.
And his introduction, by the way, is by Terrence McKenna, who's a good friend.
I know Terrence.
An absolute wild man, actually.
We're talking about the Mayan calendar, and we're going to get back to it in just a moment.
I'm still not quite grounded in exactly what the Mayan calendar is, but before this program ends, I will be, and I'm sure you will be as well.
Maya calendar, in its final form, Probably dates from about the first century BC and may originate with the Omi civilization.
It is extremely accurate.
The calculations by a priest were so precise that their calendar correction is ten thousandth of a day more exact than the standard calendar the world is using today.
Do you disagree with the origin point first century BC?
The Olmecs were fading in the first century BC, and the Maya were on the rise.
In my research into the academic literature on this question of who invented the long count calendar and where was it invented and when, I identified the first century B.C., what I would more specifically call the Azopan culture.
The Azopans were related to the Olmecs.
And where?
Yeah, the region of southern Mesoamerica that the Azopan culture occupied.
All right, again, now let's go back to where we were before the top of the hour, and that is, most people listening tonight are going to want to know what the Mayan calendar means for them.
Most people are going to say our calendar is, in effect, the Christian calendar based on the death of Christ.
And they're going to be disinclined to think they should be watching some other calendar for any reason at all.
Now, the thing is with the Maya calendar and its prophecy of a transformational time, in my survey of world literature, it's only the Maya cosmology that identifies the underlying reason why, and it has to do with what we might call galactic alignment.
Yeah, that's just a way of identifying the fact, it's an astronomical fact, that the solstice sun is aligning with the galaxy.
And now, that's an astronomical fact, and through my research into this question, it seems strange to me that it was overlooked as being in any way important by astronomers.
But the interesting thing to consider, and this is an interesting thing to look at, is that the Maya, as you pointed out, had created this calendar 2,000 years ago, and they created a mythology to go with it.
And in that mythology, they were saying that the time that we currently live in would be a time of great transformation.
Yeah, I would interpret it in terms of this solstice-galaxy alignment, I think, can be interpreted as an open door such that energies or, you know, we're coming into a situation of resonance with the galactic center.
And basically, you know, what I think this is about, it's about the most profound evolutionary event that the Earth experiences.
And I think the Maya were tuned into that insight.
And I think that, you know, in order to understand this, we need to look at what the Maya were saying about it in their mythology and in their cosmology.
Yeah, I think that basically this alignment stimulates consciousness evolution on the planet.
There is the new idea in evolutionary biology of punctuated evolution.
Now, that applies, of course, to the physical organism.
And I think that a similar kind of model applies to the unfolding of human consciousness.
I mean, I believe that, you know, consciousness is something that is unfolding.
You know, the purpose of life is to grow.
And we are something the universe does.
And this alignment event is something that happens once every 26,000 years and, in a sense, gives us a boost, sort of a kick in the butt from the Creator, to keep us moving on the path towards spiritual unfolding.
I think there's an acceleration of intensity towards that date, and then there's it's kind of like the full moon cycle.
There's a waxing period where the process is building and building and building, and then it's full, and then this full opportunity and alignment is there and fully present.
And then there's a waning aspect to the cycle as well.
Well, I'm a talk show host now, and I've been so for 14 years running.
And before that, I worked in a 911 center as a dispatcher, and I've worked in hospitals in the Air Force as a medic.
And in all of these areas, I don't care what scientists says what.
I'm here to tell you right now that a full moon absolutely, beyond any doubt, causes people to react in a much more radical way in every aspect of life.
Scientists say no, but I'm telling you, it's true.
Yeah, imagine that there's an etheric wind blowing forth from the galactic center, and the door that opens us to that etheric wind, which can offer the opportunity for growth, is the solstice doorway.
So when the December solstice sun comes into convergence with the galactic center, and the Maya, by the way, were observing this convergence happening in the sky 2,000 years ago, they were observing the December solstice sun slowly moving towards the Milky Way.
And they were projecting forward to the year we call 2012 and calling it a time of rare alignment.
Well, they were challenged to interpret it, and I think the interpretation is sort of straightforward.
Like, even if we don't know anything about it, if we know that the galactic center is the heart and source, the Maya called it the womb of the Great Mother, and we know that the December solstice sun is the rebirth point of the solar year,
then when that rebirth point in our local solar year conjuncts and joins up with the source point in the sky, the interpretation fairly straightforward from that is that this is a very, very rare and amazing event and bodes some kind of transformative event for life on Earth.
With that, I can certainly understand that, but I can't understand how they would predict that great change would occur when they had never gone through it, unless they were projecting it based on change they saw in the shorter cycles.
Again, this is one of those strange things where, you know, back in 93 when I was trying to determine if this was indeed what the Maya were intending with their end date, you can get astronomy charts and look up the fact that the solstice meridian is conjuncting the galactic equator.
That's how astronomers would term it, which basically means that the December solstice sun is conjuncting the Milky Way.
But there's no interpretive efforts made by astronomers towards this.
It's strangely a blind spot in scientific discourse today.
I think that the implications are so profound that it's sort of one of those untouchable areas somehow.
So when you go to an astronomer and you ask about this state and this alignment, They shrug or they say, yes, there could be something that would occur.
In other words, scientists would tend to look at orbits and magnetic gravitational influences in these sorts of conjunctions, and they'd try and look at it scientifically, and they kind of, what, shrug their shoulders?
That's what I'm trying to put on the table, you know, for scientists to look at.
I mean, on one level, my book, Maya Cosmogenesis, is very scientific.
I mean, I've went to great pains to document this and make it something that scientists would look at.
What I'm putting on the table is for scientists to look at the dynamics of this kind of alignment with the galactic center and determine whether or not there are demonstrable effects that could stimulate life on Earth.
I mean, you know, in comparison, there are, you know, people look at the sunspot activity and that certainly seems to have some effect for life on Earth or the tidal cycles.
Definitely, like, our changing relationship to the larger galactic situation, I mean, we're embedded in it.
So it's reasonable to assume that, you know, our changing relationship to it has some effects for life on Earth.
And I like to interpret it.
I mean, I'm a philosopher.
I mean, you know, ever since I was small, I was interested in the big questions, you know, what are we doing here?
I wondered the same thing about George Bush, actually.
All right.
I see, getting more serious for a second, I could run through, which I will not bore my audience with, this long litany of environmental degradation that's going on right now that seems to be accelerating at a pace, I'm not one of those who thinks the Earth will go away because the Earth will keep spinning.
But at present rates of deterioration in the environment, I would say that our chance of continuing to spin upon it is getting slimmer by the day.
You know, big chunks of the Antarctic breaking off, ice caps melting, glaciers retreating, global warming, and all the rest of it, all the problems in the ocean right now, the dying of the fish, the waters where there's virtually, scientists are saying devoid of life.
Things are occurring at a rate now that would seem to indicate that the uh-oh moment is not very far away.
This might, in fact, be a situation in which the earth has to go through a dying, and whatever survives after that is where the long journey to spiritual unfolding picks up the game again.
Well, what I've found in corresponding with other researchers that are doing work in other areas, other cultures on this question, what's emerging strangely is that all of the major philosophical religious systems, including Christianity, are pointing towards some events to happen in the future.
In other words, philosophical thought around the world has been evolving towards an understanding that this kind of alignment to the galactic center is the transformative and evolutionary event for the planet.
For example, within Christianity, to make a long story short, and I could point readers to resources for this, the return of Christ, that moment when the Christ consciousness returns to Earth, and there is a lot of prophecy and prediction around this with Edgar Cayce and Nostradamus and so on.
I believe that that event that Edgar Cayce pinpointed for 1998 is an intuitive, prophetic vision of this alignment.
My reconstruction work in the mind cosmology stretched over four years when I was first seized with this realization in 93 that, yes, indeed, this galactic alignment seems to be the reason why the Maya chose 2012.
And, you know, I didn't want to assume that it was coincidence, and I was forced to look really deeply into the academic literature.
And what I found was basically a lost galactic cosmology, what I call galactic cosmology.
The Maya had taken this profound event and they had woven it into their basic institutions, such as the ball game.
The Mayan ball game is a symbolic metaphor for the movement of the December solstice sun into conjunction with the goal ring.
Then the ending of their calendar in 2012 may, and I know I'm simplifying this, but it may mean that there is an ending there or a beginning, depending on how you want to look at it, and they have no idea what comes next.
This is what I wanted to address earlier, and if we're at a loss as to how to understand this, I think that we need to cast back to what the Maya have said about this and what remains for us to interpret in the Mayan mythology and the corpus of hieroglyphic texts and so on.
I mean, there are many hieroglyphic texts that Mayan scholars have been digging up and are being deciphered.
The most profound legacy to us about this end-date phenomenon is the Maya creation story, the Popol Vu, the hero twin myth.
And basically, mythology and astronomy go together.
So this astronomical event has a mythological correlate.
Now, as I mentioned before, the Milky Way is the Great Mother, and the galactic center would be the womb of the Great Mother.
Now, the December solstice sun was mythologized by the Maya as the first solar lord, the cosmic father deity.
The December solstice being the beginning point of the solar year, the first sun of the year.
So the Maya interpreted this mythologically as the union of cosmic father with cosmic mother.
And if this is what they really were seeing when they were looking at this, and if we give them credit for having a solid understanding of what this is about, then that to me means that this era is going to be about some kind of cosmic insemination of new life into the Earth's sphere.
In Revelation, in the Bible, it talks about a new earth and new heaven.
And also there's prophecies about the 2,000 years after creation, there was Jesus, and so on, every 2,000 years.
And we're coming up to it again.
And just your comments, is there any prophecies in the Mayans that indicated that there would be a major turnover at our point 2,000 years ago and now?
Yeah, in other words, as I listen to you, John, one moment it sounds like you're talking about a spiritual awakening change, and then on the other, you're not ruling out a complete physical change.
In other words, life ending and then again beginning.
A thousand years of peace and prosperity and new creations and inventions.
You know, and others will disappear from the earth, and a lot of us Christians are saying, well, they're going to say, well, you know, the UFOs will take us away is what the people here on earth will say about us.
Exposed to the light of truth, the illusions will squirm away.
And I think that the model with the alignment, if there is some kind of new energy coming into the Earth's sphere as a result of this doorway opening to the Christ consciousness, or however you want to term it, that could be heaven coming down to Earth and creating the new millennium.
Well, in the hero twin myth, in the Maya creation mythology, we go through, humanity goes through a series of world ages, sort of like chapters in the story of humanity's unfolding.
And at those critical nexus points between the world ages, humanity has to transform itself in order to move to the next level of development.
So they cast back over a period of five world ages.
So now if we remember that one world age cycle is this long count calendar, which lasts 5,200 years, five of those equal 26,000 years, and that's the processional cycle.
So again, it's this intuition that this cycle of procession, the cycle of our changing relationship to the galactic center, is sort of the evolutionary gestation period of human spiritual unfolding.
It brings up a lot in terms of, okay, if we're coming into a situation of resonance with the galactic center, then all planes and all dimensions in between are coming into alignment.
Now, there's a lot of phenomena happening today.
There's crop circles.
There's these UFO alien abductions.
There's some kind of paranormal thing that's going on on the planet.
More and more.
Yeah.
So again, this alignment might be the underlying explanation behind it.
But certainly, I think what we're moving into, and this might be part of our challenge in terms of growing, is to accept that there are other beings that live alongside of us in other dimensions, as Aldous Huxley said, separated by the filmiest of screens.
Last night, Linda Moulton Howe, the gal who did the report at the beginning of the program, talked about dimensions, separate dimensions.
And we seem to, we have these weird things occurring, creatures appearing and then simply disappearing, poof, like that, sometimes right in front of people's eyes.
I had an incredible story that a man emailed me about, oh, I don't know, two weeks ago.
It was up on my website.
And I'll take a second to tell you about it because it may relate.
He woke up in the middle of the night because one of his children woke him up and said, Dad, we can't sleep because of the voices.
And this is a technical man, a ham operator, as I am.
And so he went into the other room and he listened.
And when he got to the spot in the room the children were talking about, he could hear voices.
Not threatening voices, just voices in some kind of conversation.
He described it as if you were listening to voices through a fan, you know, a type thing.
And strangely, at first he thought, well, it's some radio station resonating on something here in the room causing this.
But guess what?
Over a period of days, weeks, and even months, the voices began to move literally an inch or two a day.
In other words, the spot you had to stand to hear the voices would move an inch or two.
And now it's a year later.
And the voices, he's actually got to go out into his yard to a certain spot to hear the voices.
Now, that clearly suggests that there might be some sort of rift between this and another dimension allowing this sort of thing to occur.
And I'll tell you, some of our best minds, theoretical physicists now, proclaim there are indeed at least 10, perhaps 12, different dimensions.
Yeah, and also there's a strange parallel between the most recent discoveries of atomic physics, this idea of wormholes.
Oh, yeah.
Some kind of rift in space-time that can affect the channeling between dimensions, you know, beyond the normal space-time route.
That's fascinating material.
I've traveled quite a bit in Mexico and Central America, you know, exploring the temples, and I've met up with many people that tell me stories of encounters with some kind of transdimensional beings.
People call them the alouche.
They're sort of like the Mayan fairy folk or something.
I'm not particularly psychic myself, but it's hard to disregard these very honest stories of people having encounters with the temple site.
And in my slideshows, I'm finding that people are offering stories.
You know, sometimes they're like the one you told.
Other times they're just stories of strange synchronicities.
Those normal space-time boundaries that we have been operating on as a culture, you know, the whole cause and effect paradigm that we've been indoctrinated with seems to be not that true.
I mean, people are having these experiences, and I think that it's accelerating.
These kind of things are accelerating as they are resolved as we approach the alignment.
And a lot of people who talk about major change like to refer to it as spiritual growth and all the rest of that.
But if you sit down here in the physical right now, earthquakes, mass death, ice ages, things that will wipe away a great deal of humanity, that's the other way to look at it.
I guess my question, based on some of the things I've read, I don't know if your guest has had a chance to read any of William Sullivan's work with the Secret of the Incas, a fairly recent book.
And the great pains they went to to try to simulate galactic star formations when they would take their children out to sacrifice them on the winter solstice day at the precise same moment, no matter how many miles it took to match those points to the various spots.
And again, the Aztecs, of course, they carried it to an extreme with sacrificing people to satisfy the sun so that the sun would leave them alone.
And I didn't know what kind of insights you had to offer on that.
And then maybe one other thing as to what correlation some of the creation myths of the lions might have with the Hope East creation.
Had to do with the Inca secrets that William Sullivan brought up to where they went to such great pains to take their children to sites that matched, he finally concluded, galactic situations or the size of certain alignments and sacrificed them so that it wouldn't happen again because they feared that the Earth would turn over in the sun wave.
William Sullivan's book was looking at the ancient Andean astronomy, and he had determined that the Andean astronomers were looking at a similar process of convergence in the cycle of procession.
His interpretation of that was that the Andean people wanted to stop that.
They began this war against time because they wanted to stop the vast convergence in the sky, and so they would do sacrifice rituals in order to try to stop that.
I interpret based upon the Maya idea that human beings are co-creators in the great process of cosmogenesis, that as in the Maya ballgame, human beings were actually involved in trying to facilitate the future rebirth of the world, kind of in the same way that the Hopi pray to the sun to help it break free from the horizon.
The caller that I saw on the line, I'm going to bring him back for part two, but I really want to expand on part one.
He said, well, you're kind of sugarcoating, kind of sugarcoating what's going to happen.
And frankly, I've interviewed a lot of people like yourself, and you try to stay on the positive side of things, and you talk about growth, spiritual change, evolution, but the reality of the physical change from our current today perspective could be horrible.
Well, I try to keep a positive outlook because basically, if there are going to be sudden catastrophes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, these kind of a pole shift of drastic nature, I don't think there is any way we can prepare for it.
I mean, we're toast.
I think, however, you know, if this event is more about an energetic opportunity to grow spiritually and we all turn 80 and the earthquakes haven't happened, then we may have missed the boat.
So I don't know, I'm not a spiritual guru or anything, but I think that we're being confronted by the threat of imminent death, and that's a real fundamental thing.
So I think that it's our own relationship to death and God that is being called into question here.
And of course, that's a very personal thing.
I mean, this has to do with, I believe in reincarnation, and I believe that we're on this journey of spiritual unfolding.
So it's how we're oriented towards death that I think determines how we're oriented to this kind of millennial threat.
And I think, you know, he touches on something, too, that I think you're even tapping into a little bit, Art, about, as our spiritual development goes, you know, there's been some people, and the Hopis even said it, that we could avoid some of these problems and how we focus ourselves and how, you know, whether it be mass concentration, as you've been trying to accomplish for weather changes or not, there may be a speck of possibility there.
I just thought I threw in.
But when I was thinking about how afraid some of the other ancient cultures were, especially the extreme that the Aztecs took it to because of their fear of the sun.
And the book that just came out about six, eight months ago, I think, with Maurice Cotterell and Ian Gilbert, where they started tapping into a lot of the things that John is talking about with his book, which I definitely intend to read.
But that, you know, there was such a fear of the sun and all the activity that seems to be stirring up on the sun, like it's a precursor of what might be to come.
And I'm just curious if there's anything on that.
It's the Janus-faced aspect of deities like the sun, of course, is the great nurturer of life, but it can also be unbearably hot and destructive.
And that also relates to, like in the Hindu tradition, the nature of the goddess.
I mean, the goddess is from where all life comes.
It's the great nourisher, the great birther, but it's also the great destroyer.
So it's that, you know, dual process of creation and destruction that is probably a very hard truth.
And it's the nature of change and the nature of growth.
But I'd really like to return to the Mayan interpretation of this kind of event, going back to the metaphor of cosmic father and cosmic mother joining as a metaphor for the alignment of the solstice sun with the galaxy.
West of the Rockies, you're on the with John Major Jenkins.
Hi.
unidentified
Hi, Art and John.
I have a couple of questions, actually, some quick questions.
First, something that Linda brought up on Thursday and something that seems to have been brought up often on your program, Art, is the idea of fractal geometry and how that seems to be relating to these things.
And also, it's interesting to me that Terrence McKenna writes the, if I'm correct, writes the introduction for John and how Terrence is really interested in how fractal geometry relates to this idea of 2012 and the Mayan prophecies.
And I'm wondering if John had any comments as to that.
Yeah, he challenges some of the imagery around that.
Yeah.
But I think that he's brilliant, and he's also got a great BS meter.
And he doesn't suffer fools gladly.
And I think that he is saying something very, you know, for him to say that in his forward that my book Is a revolutionary work of discovery and synthesis.
I think that that's a very honorable thing to say.
I have gone to great pains to make this a very well-documented argument, and I don't really fall into talking about ancient astronauts, for one.
That's an interesting thing with the Maya material.
You look at these carvings, and it seems like they're taking journeys into outer space.
He arrived at through his intuitive work with the I Ching, and he came up with this fractal model of time, you know, in keeping with the idea that time is accelerating, that we're approaching some kind of breakthrough point.
Yeah, yeah.
Another reason why I asked him to write the forward is because he was one of the first people to suggest in print that this alignment of the solstice meridian with the galactic center might have something to do with these profound, interesting times that we are living in today.
A quick comment on that, I would like to say that there's certainly evidence that the way that Terrence has been approaching this through chemicals is certainly one of the ways that the Maya approached it as well, and that this is something that's very ancient in many cultures, this use of crystallogenics.
So the fact that Terrence has hit upon these insights may give us some insight as to how the Mayas came up with these insights.
Well, perhaps there's something in that experience, not that it's the only way to approach the experience, that may lead to some of these ideas that have been converged upon by many of these different researchers.
And one thing I point out in my book, there's a large chapter on the shamanistic techniques of vision journeys.
And this early site, this early Mayan site that I write about called Azapa, well, two things happened there.
The early Azapans invented this long count calendar, which pinpoints 2012 as in transformative time.
They also created the Maya creation myth, which is the mythological telling of that astronomical process.
The third factor in this early Maya context at Azapa is that that was the place where a very early mushroom cult existed in Mesoamerica.
So they were utilizing these tools of vision to have an understanding of the very complex nature of reality and what I call the galactic cosmology, which is basically about our changing relationship to the galactic center, was then incorporated and built into their basic institutions, such as king accessions.
For example, the Maya institution of king accessions is, like the ball game, another metaphor for this astronomical process of the solar king, the December solstice sun, moving into union with his throne in the womb of the great mother.
unidentified
That's really interesting.
I have another quick question, or just a quick comment.
I'm wondering if you think that we may have lost many of the keys to these ideas you're thinking about because the missionaries burned, I don't know what the actual percentage is, but we lost about 90% of what the Maya actually wrote when they burned all of the codexes.
They thought that they were satanic, which was the common view back then of anything that wasn't Christian.
So I wonder if you feel like we have enough of the Mayan material to really be able to judge what they were thinking, or if we may have lost some of the major keys to understanding good.
I think we do, and that's been my challenge in reconstructing the ancient cosmology of the Maya.
Luckily, in the last 10 years, there has been a huge amount of hieroglyphic material, text carved in stone.
There is a huge corpus of hieroglyphic material on vases, the ceramic codexes, as they're called.
It is true that there's only four surviving Mayan books, but there is enough information left, particularly at this early site of Azappa, to reconstruct this profound vision of nature and human unfolding.
A couple of years ago, more now, when I wrote this book, The Quickening, I did this.
I'm a complete layman.
I haven't studied the Mayan calendar.
I'm not even a very good Christian.
I'm just an observer, a talk show host.
And I began to notice that in every single aspect of human endeavor, you know, from politics to the economy to the environment to, you name it, in every aspect of human endeavor, events are speeding up.
Without question, they're speeding up.
Things are becoming more radical.
And what I think I said in the book, and what I'll say now, is that it became obvious to me that we are exponentially racing toward a great change.
But I'm not a prophet.
I'm a talk show host, and I have no idea what's coming.
I just have a sort of general sense that something big's on the way.
And I wonder how many people worldwide share that view.
And do you think that as we move closer and closer toward it, more and more people will simply begin to conclude naturally the same thing within themselves?
Well, you don't have to be a great intuitive, sensitive, psychic kind of person to see All the changes around us that are happening.
I mean, even socially.
Young people are killing young people mindlessly, little blank-eyed youth wandering around with guns, taking life to see how it feels, that kind of thing.
More and more of that kind of thing.
That's what I'm talking about.
I mean, even the fair dullard out there can see these changes occurring.
Even the environmental ones.
You don't have to be an atmospheric scientist to look at nearly any major city in the U.S. and see, on most days, this giant brown paw hanging above it.
What's happening, I think, is that there's a particular style of being in the world that exemplifies our civilization, and it's called the dominator style.
Our system is based upon this model of setting up hierarchies of dominance and subordination.
We are being confronted with the shadows of that system.
And these shadows are in the form of global pollution, insane things happening, disaffiliated youth, and so on.
So we're being confronted in this era of the light of truth coming down to us, of confronting and incorporating our shadows that have been projected onto the world and that are coming back to us.
You know, our whole Western civilization is related and based on the notion of driving nature out and conquering nature.
And here we are in this time in which we're approaching the end of this great cycle of time in both the Judeo-Christian calendar and the Mayan calendar.
And we're being challenged to embrace our shadows.
I don't know if there's time left to activate a positive change in that regard.
I would hope.
And that's why I think that something's got to change.
Well, it's how we I don't know if we have any power to change what's going to occur, but it's perhaps how we relate to it that can further the spiritual growth of humanity on this planet.
It's that whole thing of our relationship to death.
Well, the alternative, and I think that this is a very important question to address, and it's not one that I've resolved.
My sense is that this sense that we're heading towards hell is maybe the deepest fear that's implanted in our civilization's assumptions, and that's the biggest shadow that we need to re-embrace.
Again, it boils down to that question of whether the universe is basically a really bad place or a really good place, and that the divine will has our best interest in store with all things that happen.
It's like we can align ourselves with the source and heart and thereby become aligned with the divine will that will help us evolve, or we can resist that and end up spiraling in the other direction.
Well, trends and statistics can kind of operate on a level of abstraction that is removed from an individual's esoteric experience and individual growth.
But to answer your question, yeah, you know, these projections of population growth, and certainly I think that our civilization is founded upon the control of oil resources.
And I think that that's got to end pretty soon here.
Well, yeah, I didn't really get a chance to tell a little bit about my story.
I first went to Guatemala in 1986, and that's when my interest in the Maya really began to develop, and I started researching certain unresolved questions in Maya cosmology at that point.
In 1989, I wrote my first book, Journey to the Mayan Underworld.
And by the way, I just wanted to mention also that my previous publications are available on my website.
So, yeah, to answer your question, I really started working in earnest on this question of the Maya end date in 1992.
And, you know, asking the right questions and finding the right answers, as an independent researcher, I've availed myself of the local university to answer these questions.
And luckily, we live in an age in which with some amount of computer technology, you can access vast fields of information and do your deductions and synthesis based upon that.
So for a period of about three years between 94 and 97 is when a lot of these discoveries gelled, and I was able to support a lot of my theories as they appear in my Cosmogenesis 2012 with a real solid academic argument behind it.
And with the consequences and more that I just told you about.
And it would have the effect, you know, of fulfilling the mythology that you've talked about tonight, the Maya mythology, about a change, an end and a beginning.
It would be like pushing the reset button on your computer.
Well, let me offer this as a mechanism that might explain how that pole shift phenomena would work, if indeed that is what is in store.
You know, the galactic alignment, the December solstice sun has been slowly moving towards the galaxy.
The astronomers call the galaxy the galactic equator.
It's kind of like the vast equator in the sky.
We've been on the southern side of that galactic equator dividing line.
Now, we're right on target, right on the equator.
And after this, we're going to move into an era in which we are on the northern, or at least, you know, through This alignment of the solstice sun, we will be oriented towards the northern part of the galaxy.
Now, if there are field effects that the galaxy has intrinsic to its nature, I don't know, electromagnetic, gravitational, our changing orientation to that might be enough to cause this kind of flip.
The analogy I like to use with this equator metaphor is to the Earth's equator.
We all know that when we're in the northern hemisphere, water spins down the drain one way.
I'm not sure exactly how to interpret that in terms of, you know, this is just one of my attempts to interpret the nature of this event and the kind of effects that it might have on us.
The metaphysical, philosophical interpretation that would extend from that is that in some fundamental way, our civilization, perhaps our thoughts, or our values even perhaps, are going to be reversed.
And certainly that would seem to be what is necessary if we are to avert apocalypse.
And it is strange that our own calendar is fomenting this millennial fever at a time that the Maya predicted would be a time of incredible ambiguity and change and uncertainty for the planet.
And if it continues to worsen at even present rates of increase, how much physical presence there is of people on Earth in 2012, I think, is a really open question.
And they have looked at the alchemical tradition in the Middle Ages and are deciphering that whole alchemical effort to create the Philosopher's Stone and to create gold out of base metals as a metaphor for the journey into the galactic center.
That's just one example.
There's other work, the Vedic astrology.
Implicit in that material is a recognition Of the galactic center as the supreme organizational principle.
And for the Maya, the thing that we can be just astounded about what the Maya accomplished is that they had oriented their entire civilization to the galactic center as a supreme organizational principle.
And apparently they had aligned themselves with the right thing.
You know, I don't have any answers to, you know, what's going to happen.
You know, I get that a lot when I'm giving presentations.
Sure.
I can't really say anything beyond that it's going to be incredibly transformative, and I think it's how we are individually oriented to the energies of transformation that will determine what our experience is.