Towards the end of the Mayan calender

Do not expect a logical argument from the following words.  They are purely my random thoughts and reflections on the rising tide of geopolitical and earth events as we head towards the end of the Mayan calender

--Seemorerocks

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"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy".

-- Hamlet (1.5.166-7), Hamlet to Horatio

"What is love?"

"The total absence of fear," said the Master.

"What is it we fear?"

"Love," said the Master.

--Anthony de Mellor

"Try to be mindful and let things take their natural course. Then your mind will become still in any surroundings, like a clear forest pool. All kinds of wonderful, rare animals will come to drink at the pool, and you will clearly see the nature of all things. You will see many strange and wonderful things come and go, but you will be still. This is the happiness of the Buddha."

– Ajahn Chah

Making Sense of it all

Seemorerocks

Today has been a day of sorting out my thoughts and feelings.

There has been such a flood of information indicating that something big is afoot – it is rapidly becoming impossible to keep up with all the details, much less make sense of it all.

A good friend sent me a text this morning wondering aloud whether the fact that the UN is asking Israel to account for its nuclear weapons indicates a turning of the tide.

I don't believe in such 'turnings-of-the tide” in the dimension of political action. Things have reached such a turn that we cannot look for hope in the mundane human realm.

There is too much collective insanity, too much corruption of the political system at every level.

The world fiddles, it celebrates a royal pregnancy, “the Hobbit” - or whatever other trivia comes the way of the media, while the world burns.

The media has acknowledged that we are looking down the barrel of catastrophic climate change (although that appears in some notice buried somewhere at the back of the paper).

Meanwhile, If you look there is a growing cascade of earth events – earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, strange explosions and sink holes oozing methane and oil. From where I'm sitting it all means that Gaia has had enough. Mother Earth is awakening.

I have little doubt that on 22^nd December the world will wake up and the media will be able to scoff that the end of the world didn't happen, so we can all go back to sleep.

Well, they will be wrong.

People will say “it didn't happen” - but it already IS happening.

I recall a very memorable a very memorable exchange between Mike Ruppert and Derrick Jensen. They were talking about those people who continually carp on about “when's IT going to happen?”

Essentially, they replied, these are very small-minded, selfish people who are asking 'when is it going to happen to ME', 'when is it going to affect MY life'.

It is self-evident to me that for the people of Japan, of NYC and New Jersey, to the people of Christchurch IT has already happened. For the poor of Bangladesh, the Philippines and anywhere else you want to throw a stick, IT has already happened. For the people that live homeless in the bushes not a mile from where I live IT has happened.

So for the rest of us whose lives have not yet collapsed but have an acute awareness of what Is happening around us there is still the challenge of making sense of it all.

What DO we do?

Perhaps a time has come to stop being lost in the details.

….

There are many ways to describe what has befallen humanity and why we, as a species have so completely lost our way.

The answer can be found in this quote from Genesis 1: 28:

“And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth”

Whether Jew or Christian or 'heathen' this has become the modus operandi of the patriarchy and the reason for why the elite is following infinite growth on a finite planet.

Quite simply, as Joseph Campbell pointed out many years ago, we need another mythology.

Amongst ordinary folk, looking at comments that one finds everywhere on the internet, the scorn (and foul language) that is directed at good, well-meaning, thoughtful folk,is yet another indication as to how and why we have lost our way.

At its simplest it is a question of transformation of consciousness – in the words of Mike Ruppert “evolve or perish”.

It is also a question of Consciousness.

Several times I have heard a quotation from Anthony de Mello, used on various occasions by Mike Ruppert – along the lines that you reach the stage where you are either going to go stark, raving mad …. or you become a mystic.

I had heard of de Mello, but never read nor knew anything much about him.

In one of those synchronicities that one encounters so often, when I searched I found that de Mello, a Catholic mystic, was based at the Sadhana Institute of Pastoral Counseling near Poona, India (where my wife visited to practice yoga) and was criticized by the church for his views largely because he was profoundly influenced by the Thai Buddhist monk, Ajahn Chah, who has, indirectly, exercised a huge influence over my own life.

As with any of the great spiritual teachers it doesn't matter where you open the book – you'll always find something that is appropriate to the moment.

The first thing I found was de Mello talking about prayer.

He talked first of all about what it wasn't – the sort of prayer where we forget to do what we have to do (“have faith in God and tether your camel) or beseeching God for some egotistic outcome (“winning the lotto”).

When it comes down to it prayer is what we actually DO, but in a more profound sense WHO WE ARE.

Getting back to the matter at hand.

I have always been somewhat of a rationalist – not at all in the sense of putting my trust in materialsm (at least not since my teens when I explored Marxist materialist dialectics) – but more in the sense of staying with the 'WHAT IS” rather than the 'WHAT SHOULD BE”. The influence of J Krishnamurti is quite deep.

....

A part of me has been quite allergic to any teachings about a 'golden age' when this manifestly imperfect world is to be replaced by 'perfection'.

I have not been drawn to any of the 'new generation' of teachers.

However my attention was drawn to this explanation of the Mayan calender by a hypnotherapist named Dolores Cannon.

I listened to a part of a long talk she gave, where she explained that we are not bodies, but have a body, and that we are reincarnated, not only on this earth but at other planets in the universe. This earth is regarded as a very hard place to be incarnated as it represents the coarsest possible form of energy.

Those of us that have incarnated here have to keep coming back until we have learned our lesson.

This was said with such simplicity and sincerity that I must at the very least open myself to the possibility that it may be true.

In any case, it provides a very good myth, a basis to make sense of a period of great suffering, great turbulence and of transition – transition to what I have to say, in all sincerity, I know not what.

I think that now is a period for prayer and meditation, for taking time out just being in Nature, for finding whatever is going to sustain us in these uncertain times.

I believe strongly in fully acknowledging the full reality of what is happening and of  being very aware of the strong emotions that this brings up.  

All the wisdom traditions tell us that the feelings we experience are universal, not individual.  There is more to bring us together than there is to draw us apart.

I would like to finish off with these wonderful lines from Anthony de Mello as well as the timeless poetry of TS Elliot.

"What is love?"

"The total absence of fear," said the Master.

"What is it we fear?"

"Love," said the Master.

--Anthony de Mellor

....

Burnt Norton


TS Elliott

I

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future

And time future contained in time past.

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.

What might have been is an abstraction

Remaining a perpetual possibility

Only in a world of speculation.

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened

Into the rose-garden. My words echo

Thus, in your mind.

But to what purpose

Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves

I do not know.

Other echoes

Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?

Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,

Round the corner. Through the first gate,

Into our first world, shall we follow

The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.

There they were, dignified, invisible,

Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,

In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,

And the bird called, in response to

The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,

And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses

Had the look of flowers that are looked at.

There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.

So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,

Along the empty alley, into the box circle,

To look down into the drained pool.

Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,

And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,

And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,

The surface glittered out of heart of light,

And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.

Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.

Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,

Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind

Cannot bear very much reality.

Time past and time future

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

II

Garlic and sapphires in the mud

Clot the bedded axle-tree.

The thrilling wire in the blood

Sings below inveterate scars

Appeasing long forgotten wars.

The dance along the artery

The circulation of the lymph

Are figured in the drift of stars

Ascend to summer in the tree

We move above the moving tree

In light upon the figured leaf

And hear upon the sodden floor

Below, the boarhound and the boar

Pursue their pattern as before

But reconciled among the stars.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.

And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.

The inner freedom from the practical desire,

The release from action and suffering, release from the inner

And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded

By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,

Erhebung without motion, concentration

Without elimination, both a new world

And the old made explicit, understood

In the completion of its partial ecstasy,

The resolution of its partial horror.

Yet the enchainment of past and future

Woven in the weakness of the changing body,

Protects mankind from heaven and damnation

Which flesh cannot endure.

Time past and time future

Allow but a little consciousness.

To be conscious is not to be in time

But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,

The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,

The moment in the draughty church at smokefall

Be remembered; involved with past and future.

Only through time time is conquered.

III

Here is a place of disaffection

Time before and time after

In a dim light: neither daylight

Investing form with lucid stillness

Turning shadow into transient beauty

Wtih slow rotation suggesting permanence

Nor darkness to purify the soul

Emptying the sensual with deprivation

Cleansing affection from the temporal.

Neither plentitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker

Over the strained time-ridden faces

Distracted from distraction by distraction

Filled with fancies and empty of meaning

Tumid apathy with no concentration

Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind

That blows before and after time,

Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs

Time before and time after.

Eructation of unhealthy souls

Into the faded air, the torpid

Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,

Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,

Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here

Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

Descend lower, descend only

Into the world of perpetual solitude,

World not world, but that which is not world,

Internal darkness, deprivation

And destitution of all property,

Dessication of the world of sense,

Evacuation of the world of fancy,

Inoperancy of the world of spirit;

This is the one way, and the other

Is the same, not in movement

But abstention from movememnt; while the world moves

In appetency, on its metalled ways

Of time past and time future.

IV

Time and the bell have buried the day,

the black cloud carries the sun away.

Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis

Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray

Clutch and cling?

Chill

Fingers of yew be curled

Down on us? After the kingfisher's wing

Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still

At the still point of the turning world.

V

Words move, music moves

Only in time; but that which is only living

Can only die. Words, after speech, reach

Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,

Can words or music reach

The stillness, as a Chinese jar still

Moves perpetually in its stillness.

Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,

Not that only, but the co-existence,

Or say that the end precedes the beginning,

And the end and the beginning were always there

Before the beginning and after the end.

And all is always now. Words strain,

Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,

Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,

Will not stay still. Shrieking voices

Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,

Always assail them. The Word in the desert

Is most attacked by voices of temptation,

The crying shadow in the funeral dance,

The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.

The detail of the pattern is movement,

As in the figure of the ten stairs.

Desire itself is movement

Not in itself desirable;

Love is itself unmoving,

Only the cause and end of movement,

Timeless, and undesiring

Except in the aspect of time

Caught in the form of limitation

Between un-being and being.

Sudden in a shaft of sunlight

Even while the dust moves

There rises the hidden laughter

Of children in the foliage

Quick now, here, now, always-

Ridiculous the waste sad time

Stretching before and after.