Living Maya

Life is a merry-go-round. Like the one at the end of Strangers on a Train, it’s out of control and spinning faster and faster. Every atom, every neutron, every proton, every electron, increases its spin and raises its vibration as a necessary response to the increasing DENSITY of our times.

Never mind the New Age scuttlebutt: all the evidence suggests that collective human consciousness is sinking deeper and deeper into Matter, like fireflies sinking into the Swamp, or Souls journeying into the Underworld. The denser the Matter, the slower the spin of the electrons, the thicker the quagmire, and the deeper the shadow we are diving into.

Mayans say that the 21st December, 2012, is the turning point. The end of this cycle of human historical time — not the end of the world but the world as we know it — and the start of a new, cosmic cycle of time in which Spirit, and not Matter, holds sway over consciousness. A turning point when atoms change their spin from yin to yang, negative to positive? Probably no one actually knows for sure, because that’s the nature of cosmic shifts – whatever it is, if it is, will be TOTALLY UNEXPECTED. A bit like death. No amount of book-learning or spiritual belief is going to prepare us for the final shift from flesh and blood to whatever lies beyond. Only direct experience counts in the Nether Realms.

Back to the merry-go-round. As we sink deeper into the darkness of materialism and ego-bondage, it becomes necessary to raise our own awareness and energy – our “vibration” — simply in order to keep our heads above the putrid waters of the Styx. Just feeling okay requires ever more discipline, spontaneity, abandon, acceptance, surrender, humor, lightness, and grace, to balance and counteract the increasing pull of darkness and despair in the world. Or so it feels, at any rate.

As the darkness increases, logically, our own capacity to summon light must also increase if we are not to be swallowed up by it. Time is speeding up, or is it slowing down? Consciousness is ascending and descending at the same time, like a tree with both branches and roots. We are being stretched beyond our human capacity, to bridge the abyss between animal and god, earthly and divine. We don’t have to like it; we don’t have to understand it. But we do have to suffer it, because humanity is the only species we’ve got (or so it seems), and earth (and our body) is the only home we have — for now.

As chaos increases and the merry-go-round spins faster and faster, out of control, it gets harder and harder to hang on. Centrifugal force is gravity squared — in the end, your mass is turned against you, so simply digging your heels in won’t work. There’s only one thing that will work, and that’s moving towards the center. In the center, gravity’s pull becomes zero.

If you find your center, you will find the center of the Universe. Each of us is that center, or else we are nothing at all. Because that center is the only thing that will hold.

Darkness is where light lives. Matter is the womb of Spirit. Darkness coagulates and condenses so that the light can break through the matter-shell, like an egg hardening as the baby bird is formed. The egg of your ego-centered world is about to crack around you. Pray that it cracks, because otherwise you will suffocate inside a mistaken identity and die without ever having gleaned the truth, so the dream-nightmare of your life will continue into death—creating a fate worse than death.

Dec 21st 2012 is only 355 days away. It may not be the end of reality as we know it; it may not be the end of time or history or this current civilization (we can always hope). But suppose it turns out to be the end of your life? Suppose that all your hopes and plans end on that day? What would you do with the time you have left? Would you spend it giving thanks and saying goodbyes, and if so, how? Could you live a good, clean life that left the world a better place, knowing that there might not be a world after you passed? Could you crawl all the way to the center of the merry-go-round (drag yourself all the way into the present moment) and still act with a sense of purpose, responsibility, and meaning that transcends your personal goals of glory?

Forget about your life. The heart of the Universe is wherever you are. The thicker the psychic shit you have to wade through just to keep moving forward in these times, the more light you will need to summon from within to guide you. And the faster your spin becomes, the more of that psychic garbage you will be shaking off, the more the shit is gonna fly.

Imagine you spent twelve years of your life sweating blood to become accepted by the “Mayan brotherhood” as a medicine man. Then imagine that you got to see “gringos”—spiritual tourists—coming to your village and paying money to gain the same acceptance from that same Mayan brotherhood without ever earning it or giving a single drop of their blood. Would you be angry? Who would you be angry with? With the gringos for exploiting a sacred trust and profaning an ancient tradition? Or with the Mayans for complying with the exploitation and cooperating with their own corruption? Or would you be angry at your own gullibility and vanity, for ever having thought that your blood was worth more than gringos’ dollars? Or for believing that there was such a thing as a sacred trust or a spiritual tradition outside of your own heart — which is the heart of the Universe?

Finding out that the world’s corruption is a mirror of our own souls hurts. But sooner or later, we’re going to have to realize that, for a spirit being to try and be a spiritual person is just vanity. It is all in vain because it only takes us further from our actual nature. It is as if God wanted to be a Somebody. To who, and for what?!
Being a medicine man or shaman is a job like any other, plumber, carpenter, tinker, tailor, peanut salesman, taco chef. A shaman is all of those because he’s none of them. He is part of a long and anarchic tradition of tricksters, and this is the tricksters’ time now. That’s all. The shaman-trickster’s function is to disrupt routines; to throw a spanner in the works of the ego’s never-ending agenda and of the human-social “matrix” program, to remind people that nothing is what it seems — including the trickster. What tricksters do only looks like a trick, because we can’t see what’s really going on. The only one fooling us is ourselves. The trickster’s job is simply to raise your energy and your awareness any way he can — because that’s how he raises his own.

The trickster treats kids with candy and teaches them to leave flowers outside their houses for quetzales (Guatemalan currency). It’s a generational “trick,” a routine outside of routine, a reminder that all space is sacred, except to the profane. The trickster lights fireworks at religious parades and sticks whoopee cushions under Popes and Kings. He does the unexpected, because that’s his nature, and he just can’t help himself. There’s a trickster in all of us; he just wants to bring it out, any way he can.

As long as we can laugh at his “tricks,” we are beginning to learn his secret. It’s not morality or spirituality that will save us when the darkness descends. It’s laughter and levity.

There’s a war going on now and hardly anyone knows it. Most people don’t even know they’re on the battlefield until they lose a limb, or a head. It’s a war between gravity and levity. Those who can keep themselves light, who keep from buckling under the pressure as the darkness and heaviness of the world increases, will find themselves airborne when the shift occurs. IF it occurs — because, to some small extent, it depends on you, those of you with the capacity to generate light internally (and there are only a few of you). It depends on the lightness and levity with which you can meet your afflictions, on the degree to which you can raise your own energy and awareness, alone or working with others, even as that of the collective continues to sink further and further into despair — into the mass morass of the morose.

There are certain things each of us needs to know before we can access what we already know. That’s my job — to help you to find and do your job. There’s no such thing as a free ride on this boat. It’s all hands on deck as the mother ship ascends. If you can’t carry your weight then you are dead weight, just ballast for the chucking. But at the end of the day, it’s the only ride there is.

I was going to tell my stories, but my writer got carried away with himself and so it will have to wait. This is just a warm-up for what’s to come, a brief teaser as to the energetic facts of life. They are facts which your mom and pop never taught you, because they never knew them. They’re not to blame for that, but they’re not off the hook either. The sins of the mothers and fathers are on your head now. So live it up if you want to live them down.
The most basic facts you need — not only to survive but to flourish and thrive (and procreate) as consciousness in an infinitely expanding Universe — have been kept from you. There’s no need to cry Conspiracy (though you can if you want), because that was how you wanted it. Until now.

Imagine that you only had 355 days to live. Would you want to know all the things that your ancestors didn’t dare to share, because they couldn’t bear to care? Well, would you?

The buck stops here. It’s too late to get off the carousel, except by flying. And there’s only two ways to fly.