{"id":114,"date":"2009-10-26T16:07:32","date_gmt":"2009-10-26T23:07:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thetolteciching.com\/blog\/?p=114"},"modified":"2021-01-30T23:04:26","modified_gmt":"2021-01-31T06:04:26","slug":"2012-end-of-the-world-view","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thetolteciching.com\/blog\/2012-end-of-the-world-view\/","title":{"rendered":"2012: End of the World View"},"content":{"rendered":"

The ancient Mayans, along with the other peoples of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, held a view of time as cyclical<\/em> and spiritually potent<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Cyclical<\/em> in the sense that history is divided into a series of Ages (sometimes called Suns<\/em>), each of which led to a better, more humane<\/em>, world.<\/p>\n

Spiritually potent<\/em> in the sense that the creative forces<\/em> governing certain time periods (sometimes called gods<\/em> in Western thinking) have sacrificed and invested themselves in the creation and sustaining of the world.<\/p>\n

We moderns tend to view time as linear, forgetting that, as one Taoist sage put it, Everything we know about spirit we learn by analogy from nature<\/em>.\u00a0 The seasons of the year correspond to the times of day, both of which correlate to the four directions of the compass in what has been termed the Spatializaton Of Time\u2014<\/p>\n

\"The

The Map of Inner Change<\/p><\/div>\n

By analogy, we know that Spring symbolizes the sowing of seeds, that Summer symbolizes the cultivation and care of what we are growing, that Autumn symbolizes the gathering in and harvesting of our efforts, that Winter symbolizes the resting and saving up of energy for the next creative effort.\u00a0 This is the cyclical<\/em> aspect of time:\u00a0 starting something new, nurturing and developing it, sharing the benefit with others, and consolidating resources for the next endeavor.<\/p>\n

But the spiritually potent<\/em> aspect.\u00a0 That<\/em> is something else.\u00a0 It requires that we sensitize ourselves to the Livingness of Space<\/em>.\u00a0 It means leaving behind the view of matter as dead and directly experiencing stone and tree and animal and weather and the sun and stars as Alive and Aware<\/em>, with no less a spiritual half of their<\/em> body than ours<\/em> possesses.\u00a0 It means standing in Spring and feeling<\/em> the mood and intention of the creative force<\/em> governing that season.\u00a0 It requires, in a word, returning to the world view of indigenous people everywhere who hold every thing in creation as sacred<\/em> persons<\/em>, each with a lifetime and heart-mind of its own.\u00a0 It is only our lack of sensitivity to the mood and intention of the creative forces invested in, and emanating out of, each thing that keeps us bound up in isolation and alienation from the loving embrace of Spirit-Nature.<\/p>\n

It will seem strange to some to think of a stone as a sacred person.\u00a0 But then again, have they ever thought of themselves as a sacred person?\u00a0 They may know that indigenous people ask the plant for permission to take its leaves or ask the stone for permission to carve it but do they understand that the plant or stone are being treated as a sacred person?\u00a0 One thing we can see as utter fact is the equality with which the universe treats all things:\u00a0 the eagle may take the hare, but it dies touching the high-voltage wires around its nest, dooming the rabbits offspring as well as its own.\u00a0 Any hierarchy we imagine to exist is leveled by death and accident.\u00a0 The electrons making up my body come from stone and tree and sun and stars and, when this body disintegrates, its electrons will fly off into billions of directions to help constitute other persons, many of whom will not be human beings.\u00a0 The webwork of subatomic particles forming the space-time continuum has no “holes”.\u00a0 It is simply one unbroken interwoven Livingness of Space<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Every practical person in the world knows that things cannot go on like they have been any longer.\u00a0 Only blindfolded ideologues and self-serving demagogues continue to push civilization closer and closer to self-destruction.\u00a0 The rest of us know\u2014or are rapidly coming to recognize\u2014that we cannot simply go on propagating the same old dead worldview that allows the most brutish among us to continue desecrating Nature and Humanity.<\/p>\n

The ancient Mayans and their counterparts throughout ancient Mesoamerica\u2014as well as other indigenous peoples around the world, such as the visionaries who constructed the ancient Chinese oracle, the I Ching<\/em>\u2014were well aware of the patterns of human behavior, both individual and collective.\u00a0 Intrinsic to such worldviews is the concept of a universal duality that makes up the universal unity of the world.\u00a0 While this has many cosmological significances in term of the creation and sustaining of the world, it plays itself out in the patterning of human perception and behavior through the rule of action and backlash<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The future, in other words, becomes predictable simply by understanding that sooner or later, everything changes into its opposite<\/em>.\u00a0 The art of such predictions lies in being able to recognize when things are getting to be either “too much” or “too little”, states which call forth their opposites.\u00a0 This requires a sensitivity to the underlying mood and intent of things, which manifests itself as a keen sense of timing.\u00a0 The greater the historical shifts from one opposite to another, the longer the time frame.<\/p>\n

December 21, 2012 marks the end of a 5,128-year cyle.\u00a0 The Mayan Long Count calendar is established as beginning on a purely mythological date of August 11, 3114 BC in order that its end date would occur in our time.\u00a0 The Mayan mathematicians went so far as to drop the date directly on a Winter Solstice, just to get our attention.\u00a0 Aware of the patterns of human perception and behavior, the Mayan priest-scribes foresaw this time<\/em>, our time<\/em>, as the one in which the dead worldview would give way to the Living Worldview<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Let us honor their sensitivity to the changing Ages of human nature and their keen sense of timing.<\/p>\n

Let us honor our own sacred nature by ending this Dark Age of inhumanity and joyfully advancing in the next, more humane, Golden Age of Humanity.<\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n

The Toltec I Ching<\/em><\/a>, by Martha Ramirez-Oropeza and William Douglas Horden has just been released by Larson Publications.\u00a0 It recasts the I Ching in the symbology of the Native Americans of ancient Mexico and includes original illustrations interpreting each of the hexagrams.\u00a0 Its subtitle, 64 Keys to Inspired Action in the New World<\/em> hints at its focus on the ethics of the emerging world culture.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The ancient Mayans, along with the other peoples of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, held a view of time as cyclical and spiritually potent. Cyclical in the sense that history is divided into a series of Ages (sometimes called Suns), each of which … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,41],"tags":[335,10,49,51,53,7,48,52,36,59,6,18,57,56,58,45,62,15,60,61,9,55,54,63,5,50],"class_list":["post-114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-11","category-inner-activism","tag-335","tag-animism","tag-aztec-calendar-stone","tag-creative-forces","tag-cyclical-time","tag-divination","tag-end-of-the-world","tag-gods","tag-golden-age-of-humanity","tag-heart-mind","tag-i-ching","tag-intent","tag-living-worldview","tag-livingness-of-space","tag-map-of-inner-change","tag-mayan-calendar","tag-mayan-long-count","tag-nahuatl","tag-patterns-of-perception-and-behavior","tag-rule-of-action-and-backlash","tag-shamanism","tag-spatialization-of-time","tag-spirit","tag-timing","tag-toltec","tag-world-view"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thetolteciching.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thetolteciching.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thetolteciching.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thetolteciching.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thetolteciching.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=114"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.thetolteciching.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":495,"href":"http:\/\/www.thetolteciching.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114\/revisions\/495"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thetolteciching.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thetolteciching.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thetolteciching.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}