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NOTE TO SELF: MAKE VACATION PLANS - WORLD IS SAFE


After reading doomsday scenarios - I'm big on these - it's a relief to read that the 2012 Mayan cataclysmic end-of-the-world scenario has been cancelled. At least according to a new textbook "Calendars and Years II: Astronomy and Time in the Ancient and Medieval World" (Oxbow Books, 2010). As much as this news is a relief, there is no correction or re-prediction of when the end will come.

According to the critique which I haven't read, the accepted conversions of dates from Mayan to the modern calendar could be off as much as 50 to 100 years. Good. Still time to place my bets in Vegas. Since the Mayan calendar ended in 2012, earthlings interpreted this as an omen or indication that our time was up on planet earth.

In an article published on the Live Science site: ( http://www.livescience.com/culture/mayan-apocalypse-miscalculated-calendar-101018.html) "the Mayan calendar was converted to today's Gregorian calendar using a calculation called the GMT constant, named for the last initials of three early Mayanist researchers. Much of the work emphasized dates recovered from colonial documents that were written in the Mayan language in the Latin alphabet, according to the chapter's author, Gerardo Aldana, University of California, Santa Barbara professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies."

Later, the GMT constant was bolstered by American linguist and anthropologist Floyd Lounsbury, who used data in the Dresden Codex Venus Table, a Mayan calendar and almanac that charts dates relative to the movements of Venus. There is a further explanation focusing on the rationale for reaching this conclusion in the Live Science piece.

Over the years and centuries, there have been numerous end-of-world predictions, obviously all of which have not panned out. The James Randi Educational Foundation, a non-profit organization, "aims to promote critical thinking by reaching out to the public and media with reliable information about paranormal and supernatural ideas so widespread in our society today." The Foundation offers a $1,000,000 prize to any person or persons who can demonstrate any psychic, supernatural or paranormal ability of any kind under mutually agreed upon scientific conditions. This prize money is held in a special account which cannot be accessed for any purpose other than the awarding of the prize.

The site features an impressive list of end-of-world prophecies that have failed over the centuries. For example:

- October 3, 1533, at Eight A.M. Mathematician and Bible student Michael Stifel (known as Stifelius) had calculated an exact date and time for Doomsday from scholarly perusal of the Book of Revelation. When they did not vaporize, the curiously ungrateful citizens of the German town of Lochau, where Stifel had announced the dreaded day, rewarded him with a thorough flogging. He also lost his ecclesiastical living as a result of his prophetic failure.

- 1665 With the Black Plague in full force, Quaker Solomon Eccles terrorized the citizens of London yet further with his declaration that the resident pestilence was merely the beginning of The End. He was arrested and jailed when the plague began to abate rather than increasing. Eccles fled to the West Indies upon his release from prison, whereupon he once again exercised his zeal for agitation by inciting the slaves there to revolt. The Crown fetched him back home as a troublemaker, and he died shortly thereafter.

- October 13, 1736 London was once again targeted for the "beginning of the end," this time by William Whiston. The Thames filled with waiting boatloads of citizens, but it didn't even rain. Another setback.

There is a whole list of failed appocolyptic prognostications listed on the

tatiana de la tierra


It’s a new decade and times are grim as we head into the scripted doomsdays, with 2012 just around the corner. Will the world (as we know it) end with the Mayan calendar? Will there be a massive shift toward higher consciousness that will lead the planet to true healing? Or will humanoids continue to limp on amidst wars, poverty, corporate deceit, and rampant consumerism? Religious zealots are talking cataclysm and spreading the word with glossy pamphlets urging sinners to give it up for the Lord. Others are chanting for peace, meditating on divine love, and gearing up with vibrational healing tools.

I barely know what’s in store twenty-four hours ahead of time and make no claims about the future. But let me suppose that things will stay on the same course at least a bit longer. Today’s hot issues—unemployment, global warming, gay and lesbian marriage, health care, war, education, hunger, and immigration, to name a few—are also tomorrow’s. And they’re not going to magically go away as long as corporate interests continue to reign or as long as misogynist (mostly white) men are making decisions to affect us all.

What to do? If you’re tired of waiting for social justice or if you’ve lost all hope for change, you can take a few things into your hands. Make your own change, or speed up the process of deterioration so that the prophetic transformations can finally take hold. There’s a magical spaceship out there—there has to be.

Meanwhile, as a public service, I offer up some ideas of things you can do in times of doom.

1. Become a communist. Republicans claim that having health care for everyone is a sure sign of socialism. They’re right! Want health care? Go socialist!

2. Join the military. Out of a job? Can’t get into college? Can’t afford a gym membership? If you’re young and in your prime, the military is a great option for getting in shape, learning discipline, and being part of the brotherhood. Sure, you may lose a limb or end up with post-traumatic stress syndrome, but if you make it through, you might have a shot at an education.

3. Buy an illegal immigrant. They’re great for taking care of your house and kids. They can cook, clean, build things, do errands. And they’re cheap since there’s no comprehensive immigration bill being considered and they have no guaranteed rights. It’s the deal of the century!

4. Have more babies. Disposable diapers do a great job of choking up landfills, are wonderfully toxic, deplete the earths’ resources, and take a few hundred years to decompose. Want to push pollution and global warming along? Use disposable diapers!

5. Heal yourself and others. Medical doctors are great at diagnosing and prescribing pharmaceuticals, but they’re out to lunch when it comes to herbs, supplements, nutrition, and energy medicine. There are a zillion alternative healing modalities you can train in, such as homeopathy, Reiki, Quantum Touch, acupuncture, Tong Ren, crystal healing, sound healing, shamanism, Emotional Freedom Technique, midwifery, and naturopathy. They’re fabulous, low tech, and cost-effective modalities that people are tuning into more and more.

6. Learn Chinese. Want to be forward-thinking and speaking? Already a quarter of the earth’s population, the Chinese have a commercial and economic edge and will be a dominant force in the future. Learn the Mandarin mother tongue to get in step with the times, ahead of time.

7. Become a reverend. Gays and lesbians are busting to do the “I do’s” and more and more state legislations are permitting same sex unions. Who’s going to marry all these queers? Who’s going to baptize all their babies? If you become a reverend, you can be the one to do the honors.

8. Get a medical marijuana license. Who knows when we’ll have a health care plan that favors the people instead of insurance companies, medic

By tatiana de la tierra

There was a time when I was one with the universe. I ate dirt, rolled on the ground, talked to the flowers, hung out with the trees, became entranced with the clouds. Inhaled the crisp oxygenated air of the Colombian Andes. I was all earth and sky. I was safe, living in beauty, connected to the primal source of life. Mother earth had a hold of me. Her vibrant colors and textures were the raw material of my soul. Everything was beautiful, and anything was possible.

I was nine months old.

Fast forward several decades and I find myself living in a metropolitan city where I’ve practically lost my connection to nature. The hills and mountains of Los Angeles exist in the distance, on postcards, far from me. My reality takes place 80 mph on the freeway. I live in Long Beach, just a mile from the Pacific ocean, right by the Los Angeles Harbor. When I hit the 710 freeway, my miniscule Yaris is a little flea on the back of one of the loaded eighteen wheelers heading off to Somewhere, USA. Downwind of the cargo ships and the industrial waste of the bay, and with a picturesque oil refinery just off the shore, going for a walk on the beach is a touch scary.

I don’t want to be scared. I don’t want to focus on the stained sidewalks, trash, or flies swarming on fresh dog feces that I encounter on my morning walks. Yet this is my landscape, an urban etching of concrete paths with people trying to survive, boxed up in homes and apartments, many of us, myself included, without a swath of grass to call our own.

Dear Mother Earth: I miss you. I remember you. I yearn for you. And I promise to watch out for you and to be with you once again.

Earlier this year I joined a few dozen spiritual adventurers and received the Munay-Ki rites. Alberto Villoldo, a visionary who was taken in and trained by Laika shamans of Peru for 25 years describes the Munay-Ki as “nine rites of initiation to become a person of wisdom and power who has accepted the stewardship for all of creation.” It’s probably a good thing I hadn’t read the fine print before going forth with the installation of the rites, as this is a daunting responsibility.

I just went with the flow and said “Yes” to Melinda Allec, a modern medicine woman who studied with Villoldo, Marcela Lobos and others. I invited her into my psyche some time last year and participated in a workshop that involved trance dancing, mythic mapping, metaphorically dying, and stomping out fire with my bare feet. In my first private session with her, she invoked sacred space outside, in nature, beneath black bamboo trees and blue skies. She rattled me into another plane, cleansed my energy field with scented Florida water, did a “decoupling” that sent my internal jaguar back to the jungle, and retrieved pieces of my scattered soul and brought them back to me. After all that, the installation of the Munay-Ki rites was the natural thing to do.

My friend Mario and I went together to receive the Foundation Rites from Melinda Allec at the Goddess Temple of Orange County . While I didn’t know anyone else there, it was special to be a part of this group of people. We took the time to reserve a day to ritually align ourselves with luminous beings, the Earthkeepers that will guide us into our future. We received the Bands of Power into our luminous energy field, the Healer’s rite that connects us to the Earthkeepers, the Harmony rite that transmits seven archetypes into the chakras (my favorite is the hummingbird of the third chakra), and the Seer’s rite to activate the ability to “see” the invisible. Those who had previously received the Foundation Rites received the Master Angels and Archangel Rites.

There’s a lot of buzz about December 21, 2012, the date that the Mayan calendar ends. The Hopi, Maya and Inka all prophesize that this is indeed a magical moment, a time of deep change. While some people interpret this to refer to the end of the world, others are sensing a new one. According to Alberto Villoldo, the Munay-Ki rites are codes for the next evolution of our species, which, in time, will transform us into “Homo luminous” beings with the ability to “perceive the vibration and light that make up the physical world at a much higher level.” Now that sounds pretty cool to me.

But as Melinda relentlessly reminds me, the rites are seeds that we have to grow. And in shaman-speak, that means that the seeds are nourished with fire ceremonies and breath of fire meditations. We have to work for our luminous bodies.

I’ve come to really dig the shamanic ways of viewing the world. It is a complex view that encompasses various layers of existence all at once. I like the ideas of rainbow bodies, luminous energy fields, and connecting to an ancient healing lineage. I’m particularly enamored with the wiracocha above my head that connects me directly to source energy. It’s like I’m in this world yet simultaneously in another world. That makes being “here” a bit more palatable.

As I go out for my morning walk here in my neighborhood in Long Beach, I take in the whole picture, Styrofoam and all. For sure, it’s not all pretty. Yet I have to acknowledge that despite the drops of dried blood splattered on sidewalks there are trees and little patches of grass here and there. Some of the people with yards have planted flowers and ferns. If I listen, I can hear the birds among the urban clatter. I connect with the cats on the streets and in the windows. Say hello to the people who walk their dogs in the early morning. Walk right into the rising sun, toward the fire. Acknowledge the Pachamama beneath my feet and all around me.

Maybe someday I can roll in the dirt again, and hang out with the clouds. As it is, I’m heading back to being a child of the universe.

--

For more information on the Munay-Ki rites, and to find someone in your area who can transmit the rites, click into the “Resource List” tab of the Munay-Ki Web site. For those in southern California, Melinda Allec is installing the rites September 11^th and 12^th. You can find more information about shamanic healing from the Four Winds Society, and you can also order a DVD about the rites from them.