I think buried in us is this sense that there is much more that we have lost in our ancient past....something that manifests as an interest in things like the lost civilizations of Atlantis, Mu, or that the pyramids are older than they are. Its as though we want so badly to reach back into our collective memory for something....as though some great answer lies there.
Currently there is a big fascination with the Mayan calendar, and its hit such a nerve in us that its even tied up in our sense that the world is reaching some important "end" point and that something new is coming. The Hopi happen to say much the same thing. I had a memory from a past life at age 18 that was of a vision foretelling of a day in the future when I would be reborn as a new person, a time of great change, a time when the earth would be sick and be in need of cleansing. I was told that this would all happen as the being in the storm said, "When the Great Wheel comes full turn." It was explained that I would know this life because I would remember the vision that was happening to me atop that mountain bluff back, I'd guess in the mid to late 1880's. I have since been able to figure out that what I was experiencing was a thunder being vision, that it involved issues related to clearing cleansing, and healing. It also turns out that there are all sots of prophecies in Native lore about something called "The Cleansing Time." So much of it I have been able to come to some understanding of because it seemed to me that this was an important message from the past to a future self. I always felt that the Great Wheel had something to do with a cycle of time, but I just didn't quite understand how it was connected. Until now. I have felt that perhaps there is indeed something to the Mayan calendar, that all time has a cyclical nature to it, for certainly the Mayan calendar is itself an endless count of small and large cycles all repeating. This, the ancient Maya, must have had some piece of knowledge about the very workings of time as part of some phenomenon about our world that was entirely different from anything the Western mind had up until that point been able to conceive of. Its interesting, too, for the fact that most aboriginal cultures see time in a cyclical way. On its self arrogating perch, the western mind has considered all of this nonsense, and brushed it all off with the notion that all of these cultures are primitive and thus their ideas are somehow intellectually stunted and not worth paying attention to.
There is a problem here, though, and it gets back to our fascination with the past. My sense has been that there have been developments and rises of knowledge that have taken place that go way back into time, but that through the rise and fall of civilizations and political and theological shifts and conquests, that the great knowledge from our collective past has been obliterated except for a few straggling remnants. The picture these remnants provide is very much at odds with what we in the western world have sanctioned and called consensus reality. I say that because our books and beliefs and everything else that we produce are based on models of the world that are linear, unconnected through the most basic of phenomenon here on earth. If the world shows us that things happen in cycles, like the turning of the galaxies, of solar systems, of planets around the sun, or electrons around an atom, then why does it seem so incredibly strange that our time here would be pegged or rise out of this phenomenon in an elegant fashion? I think its because we as humans chose to pit ourselves against nature rather than trusting it. The aboriginal people had a much more intimate relationship with nature and the tides and cycles of time as measured in natural phenomenon.
I just sat through a very long talk that Terence McKenna had made that was recorded back in 1990. In it, he described how, on a mushroom trip, he was instructed by the mushroom being how he should look deeper at the I-Ching. Terence was fascinated by this ancient divination method enough to analyze it. This took place in the early 70's. He had this long interaction with this intelligence that kept prompting him and directing him towards something more, that the I-Ching was itself something different from what it appeared as merely a divination method. Now the structure of the I-Ching as McKenna describes it during his discovery is quite complicated, but its also very simple, and elegant. He was told by this mushroom being that the I-Ching was a "map of time" and that this map was recursive, which means its more like a fractal than anything else. This makes it cyclical rather than moving in a straight line.When I had my epiphany that the intelligence within the energy that is kundalini I saw how everything was interconnected through a very simple oscilation of two elements which we can call in and yang, but that I felt as the energies we know to be masculine and feminine. Through them, I saw, all phenomenon emerged. This made the nature of cells and tree leaves and solar systems all connected together in an unfolding design that was complex yet also simple. So here was McKenna explaining how he saw that the I-Ching was part of an old system for understanding the universe. For McKenna, he was able to develop a map of time that he was able to sync up to our own flow of time, using the end of the Mayan calendar as the reference point for the end of one major cycle as the way to go back some 6 billion years in time and watch as the system accurately showed all major geological changes and shifts on the planet. Based on what he found he discovered that his system fit perfectly with all major events through our known history with humans as well as the geological record that had an oscilation between what he described as essentially a movement towards a zero point and away from it. This he describes as the wave-form nature of time. This, he explains, we have been doing since forever, and that while his system does not predict actual events in specific, it does predict the waveform nature of time. In his model, all of life in human terms is a movement away from and then back to what I call in my book Waveform Awareness. This Waveform Awareness is our higher selves, that part of us that is not enmeshed in time as we think of it as physical beings, but is nonetheless a part of the phenomenon. In our history, then, we move from this state of profound knowing and increased creative output as we move closer to this field of the Wave but we become increasingly rational, more Particalized as we move away from it. I describe Particalized Awareness as our individual awareness, the pat of us that acts like a discreet soap bubble that tells us that we are separate and all that we know and see and feel is the result of what we experience through that soap bubble. For that type of awareness, there is nothing else but a very materialistic view of the universe. When I say materialistic, I am talking about this in the way that science is materialistic. A good example of this is that the world is merely here, that it is not the result of any higher form of consciousness directing it, and that life is the result of random interactions with compounds that clustered and managed to create life. My experience has been that there is indeed an intelligence within everything. The world is not some empty parking lot full of chance happenings, but is instead so amazingly complex for how consciousness interpenetrates through everything that its more like living as a cell within a giant body than anything else. This body is unimaginably huge, so huge in fact that what we see as distant stars is just the tip of the iceberg. We are only seeing beyond the cell wall of our awareness the dendrites and capillaries that are the galaxies of this giant body that we live within. Just as an animal is a world unto itself with countless cells all living and dying and coming back again, so too are we specks in a much grander body. I have to say that this makes much more sense to me than the materialistic view.
It turns out that what McKenna hit upon had a connection to the Mayan system, and this may be so because of the very likely fact that the Maya are in fact Asian or Chinese in descent. When I took a course in Precolumbian art in college I can remember looking at the art forms and remarked at how amazingly they looked Chinese. On top of this were all these sculptures of the people and there was a core of people at certain places that were totally Asian in appearance. I could see how some of the cultures merged, and blended later, even. It was so obvious even to me, who knew very little about Chinese culture but had seen enough to know that these pots and sculptures were a dead ringer for their Asian counterparts. A learned PhD., our teacher, remarked that there was absolutely NO evidence for this culture having anything at all to do with the Chinese. I can remember at the time just how silly this denial was. Here this guy was leaning on those in academia who had themselves not been intellectually curious enough to consider the most obvious possibility. And why not? The Maya had an incredible developed system for counting time, of astronomy and math. What if their knowledge was the result of a still older tradition that just happened to have come from another culture? I am not suggesting that the Maya owed their greatness to another culture at all, but simply that the Chinese may have been seafaring at some point in their development, perhaps thousands of years ago, and in the cycling of time and through conquests, had fallen from a still greater height. Why not? Some would say there is no evidence for this, no records, no stored boats to attest tot he greatness of this period in their history. It turns out that there is one such example, a commander for the Chinese emperor did in fact exist and I include it here mostly to make an important point, less about that the Chinese may have been here and that the Maya were influenced by them, but as an example of just how short sighted we can be in imagining it possible that such a thing could take place in the first place.
Article Credit.
The article goes on to explain that there is an account made by this Commander that fits very well with a description of the coast of California. Given the sheer size of these craft, it was possible to have vast amounts of food stores aboard that could take them just about anywhere in the world. But why haven't we seen any of these ships? Why is this such a great mystery to the contemporary world? When the emperor Yongle died, his predecessor ordered the fleet burned and all evidence of its existence wiped from the record. What we have is a copy of a document that describes what happened back in the 1400's. But if it happened in the 1400's then why not earlier? Australian Aborigines have stories of golden skinned people who lived among them long enough to hunt and fish and to grow rice. These same people lived in stone houses, which were different from the ones the Aborigines knew about. There have been anchors discovered off the coast of Australia that fit the design of the Chinese anchors, for example.
The Olmec were the earliest group of people that had the greatest Asian or Chinese features. In the sculpture I include, carved from green jade (which coincidentally the Chinese have esteemed for centuries just as the Olmec, Aztec, and Maya did), you can perhaps see why I felt that this had, at the very least, a few influences of the Asian variety.
All of this also points to a corollary between the I-Ching, the Maya, and how similar McKenna's discovery was in relationship to the concept of cyclical time as evidenced in both Mayan and Chinese systems. I mention this is a vivid example of how people within academia as well as in the scientific research often get settled in their notions of what is based on what they have been told for years, essentially the same kind of indoctrination that happens in religion, and then by way of that become brittle and inflexible in their imaginations so that they are unable to consider new opinions, ideas, or possibilities. IN a post further down I include artifacts that scientists call problematica, so called because what they do is shelve these things and ignore them because they offer a total contradiction to the popularly held views which I contend is treated no differently than a dogma is. It enshrined and if anyone comes along to question it, its as though the hive mentality sparks and there are bees buzzing around that hive ready to protect something that ought not even be protected. Its a very curious trait that we have in this way. But I mention it to highlight how things can and very likely are very different from how we have imagined them in all of our theories and presumptions based on what we have thus far found in fossil records, archaeological digs, and historical accounting of our past. What I am also pointing to in providing this article is the possibility that the Chinese and other people (there is the idea that there is also an African influence as evidence in the Olmec ball player heads cared out of massive pieces of basalt which have features that are specific to African Peoples). The idea is that it entirely reasonable t consider, I think, that the Mayan calendar, the I-Ching as McKenna discovered it, these all could have been part of a still older system of knowledge, available to us now only as remnants, not completely understood for what they are or what they are pointing at. This was all gathered, most likely through careful observation and record keeping over long periods of time in order to develop systems that corresponded so closely to real world events. Somewhere someone had a giant a-ha moment when they began to see odd correlations between the movement of the planets, the solar phenomenon, as well as planetary processional effects which take some time to happen and would need to be recorded over long time frames. Its also likely that one would not have had to take records over hundreds of thousands of years in McKenna's system, but only a cycle or two of time. Its also possible that the system was discovered in ways more akin to how McKenna discovered it, which was while munching mushrooms and tripping in the forests of South America.
I suspect that we do indeed know that there was more in our history, but that we have somehow managed to lose all memory of it as the veil of this oscillation of time has had its effect on us.
The concept that McKenna puts forward about this being a cycle repeating fits perfectly for how many others are coming to the same conclusion on their own, that there is a spiraling happening through history where events do repeat, where Great Wheels come full turn, but that at each point of the turning of the wheel, we are at a different place. Instead of a cycle merely repeating, its more like a vine that is growing and spiraling upwards toward the light of day with certain recurring things happening such as a stem during each turn of the vine, and from that stem there are a certain numerical range of leaves that tend to sprout and while none of this is rigid in its expression, it serves as a kind of template for life, for time, and perhaps the whole of phenomenon here on the planet. A spiral is in fact an elegant solution for how to think of this, that at each recursion, or repetition, while certain factors remain the same, there is also evolutionary change in some fashion or another. All of this seems built upon an ordered hologram where the information is coded into everything else as this whole body of life springs forth. Yes, there is this sense of destiny that is perhaps expressed as a result of this recursive phenomenon, but destiny is also capable of growing beyond what it was yesterday instead of remaining static. Its a growing living thing, and time is an expression of this as we move from the zero point of the Waveform Awareness towards a Particalized Awareness, all of which fits how we move from imaginative and hip and creative to stodgy and linear and limited and even warlike. Its as though we are moving away from our eternal natures and away from the realm of spirit into a place where we feel as though we are somehow alienated from all of life. According to McKenna, these cycles are waves within waves, interference patterns from the larger realm of time that effects other cycles as they hit upon countless coincidences (to coincide) of other times that were along the same arc. So in this method or model, it turned out that the end of the great Roman emperors corresponded with the end of Ronald Reagan's presidency, with a subsequent fall of Rome later, which as it turns out corresponds to what we are headed towards now. it isn't that someone like Reagan will BE an emperor, but that there will be tides and similarities that will tend to influence events and people along certain lines. Events will themselves be recursive because of the energy involved in how time is being formed and rolled out. I suspect that instead of seeing all of this as linear, we would instead see a very visual image of something that would look more like a map of waves, a kind of psychedelic pattern much more like an eastern mandala than anything a scientific mind could think up. And this would make sense since those who saw into the mystery of the world were those people who were grooving with the wave awareness themselves for the simple fact that the Wave has the ability to move you out of your individual awareness and into a sense of the All.
The difference here, though, is that this All-ness is available to us NOW. With so many waking up, with people feeling as though the veil is thinning, its no wonder that this wave of awareness is building. What I am suggesting is that we can use these cycles to bring ourselves to a new place, to learn the secrets of this wave as part of our own physiology as a cell caught up within its vastness. When we do, we "awaken." All of this experience has a corollary with what I would call a class of experiences in human experience, and all have a transcendant quality to them. For McKenna, he experienced it through the liberating effect of the mushroom and dmt experiences. In tantra, we connect into the All through the energetics of this divine pulse that is in everything. The force of kundalini is itself naturally tantric because it leads us into that place of bliss, of union with a "body" of awareness that cycles like the moon has cycles, how heavenly bodies come close and then move far from each other. Its part of a larger oscillation of a reality that isn't material but alive, an incredibly complex yet also simple life form that lives in everything from rocks to cells. The idea here is that as we move away from this bliss field we wind up in all our institutions, falling prey to the idea that the rational mind has it all figured out. This though only one part of the bigger picture, and if we fall prey to its force in life, we allow it to bring about some pretty horrible changes as a result of our feeling separate and apart from not just each other, but from our waveform awareness which is the bliss and joy and sense of connection that everything has. I am not content to merely study this but to suggest that we can use our understanding of how this works to vault ourselves out of the hole we seem to keep falling into.
I suspect that the being in the vision I had at age 18 was simply pointing to a knowledge or understanding that all time turned in cycles. Perhaps in the culture of that time they too knew about the "great wheel" as it was called. Sadly, that culture has been completely wiped out and subsumed within another tribe over a hundred and 20 years ago, so I am not sure there is anything remaining that would tell me one way or the other whether they had this term in their culture. For me, though, I think the guessing is over. Clearly, we ARE nearing the end of a giant cycle, a very important one. If I follow what the vision was telling me, I take away from it some important elements about what it is that we need to do as a species. At the very least, I know what I have to do microcosmically, and its all very interesting in terms of just how much we have been provided in the way of tools to prepare for this event that us upcoming. As a result, I see there are no accidents, but a willful desire to prepare, to grow, to become. This is the impulse in everyone as we learn to drop the self made conceptual shackles that we have chosen to imprison ourselves with. In this new world, the water is great; come on and jump in! Its really not that hard once you give it a try.
So much of what I have been saying is that what we need very much to do is not to go for one end of the spectrum or the other, but to learn how to integrate both ends of the spectrum into our experience so that when one wave rises over another, we do not feel as though we are being swept along a path that leads us to annihilation, or to madness. We need both. For the same reason I find that a reliance upon the scientific materialistic model is just as wrong-headed as the monks who say we have to toss out all ego and pretend like its dead and gone. These are merely, to my mind, just opposite ends of the same wave and instead of letting them be separate, we need to recognize them for what each imparts and find a balance between them. Otherwise, we will get so caught up in the rational that we will go mad for looking at the tiny cells in a tree leaf and never see the larger forest standing in front of us. Its this same narrowness that leads to nature suffering. We look so close at one phenomenon that we are unable to see how our actions in the moment could have a negative effect on the whole. We can likewise get so blissed out that we effectively leave this world for that place of pure bliss and never really participate in this experiment that is life on the planet. Surely the confluence of events today where we multitask and do not have time to sit in silent meditation in an ashram has its positive effect on us in this regard. By balancing both ends of the spectrum, we reach upwards into that evolutionary spiral that is our own future.
Now as an aside, Mckenna, in the recording from 1990 stated that since the calendar ends in 2012, he posits that perhaps what has happened is that we discover time travel and that this would explain why his model also comes to an end. We, he suggests, have exited the cycle of time so that we are now no longer prisoners of this oscillation but become part of something more. This would be an entering of the 5th dimension in all truth I suppose, and whether his notion is correct or not, I think that it hits it into the right ballpark. If all of this phenomenon is correct as he has seen it to be, then it makes sense that the end of the same system would suggest that something happened of a pretty significant nature that somehow also involves time itself. I suspect that its because we finally catch the wave of this hyper spatial reality that has always lived inside of us and that we have managed to hitch a permanent ride on it. The Hopi describe two paths that will happen, what some suggest are two different time lines. One leads upwards while another leads on a jagged lower course. I suspect that we are coming into contact with a choice and some will make one choice while another will make a different one. I wont say one is better or more desirable, but will simply match where you are at the time. The absolutist notions that Christianity has helped to promulgate in the past of there being a hell that you are forever imprisoned within doesn't seem to help some people's notions of how things work. It isn't like this is some race that we must win in a certain way. We are here to learn, and as McKenna suggests, there are endless cycles of time and if not now, another will come along eventually if the last phase inward didn't help us realize what it was we needed to in order to reach the highest within ourselves. And just as each transit from one cycle tends to create a sense like the world is coming to an end, Terence suggested back in the 90's to simply sit back, relax, and let the wave hit you and do its work. In effect, this is what those who awaken learn to do in their daily living with this; they surrender. Its just possible that if you just let go and trust what the wave is doing, you will give it more room to work. Don't fight it. Give in to all of that bliss, the joy and wonder that is inside of you, for it is here that the universe opens up like a wonderful flower. In you. Outside you. Its all around, waiting.....
Note: I will add that one of the effects of Awakening is a very different perception of time. I say this because I experienced very strange time phenomenon the year before all of this began for me. Later, once I had worked through a large part of material so that I was less focused on immediate things, I discovered a different view of how time is. This will have to be the subject of another post, but its worth mentioning as McKenna intuited that the 2012 event may have something to do with time....
Currently there is a big fascination with the Mayan calendar, and its hit such a nerve in us that its even tied up in our sense that the world is reaching some important "end" point and that something new is coming. The Hopi happen to say much the same thing. I had a memory from a past life at age 18 that was of a vision foretelling of a day in the future when I would be reborn as a new person, a time of great change, a time when the earth would be sick and be in need of cleansing. I was told that this would all happen as the being in the storm said, "When the Great Wheel comes full turn." It was explained that I would know this life because I would remember the vision that was happening to me atop that mountain bluff back, I'd guess in the mid to late 1880's. I have since been able to figure out that what I was experiencing was a thunder being vision, that it involved issues related to clearing cleansing, and healing. It also turns out that there are all sots of prophecies in Native lore about something called "The Cleansing Time." So much of it I have been able to come to some understanding of because it seemed to me that this was an important message from the past to a future self. I always felt that the Great Wheel had something to do with a cycle of time, but I just didn't quite understand how it was connected. Until now. I have felt that perhaps there is indeed something to the Mayan calendar, that all time has a cyclical nature to it, for certainly the Mayan calendar is itself an endless count of small and large cycles all repeating. This, the ancient Maya, must have had some piece of knowledge about the very workings of time as part of some phenomenon about our world that was entirely different from anything the Western mind had up until that point been able to conceive of. Its interesting, too, for the fact that most aboriginal cultures see time in a cyclical way. On its self arrogating perch, the western mind has considered all of this nonsense, and brushed it all off with the notion that all of these cultures are primitive and thus their ideas are somehow intellectually stunted and not worth paying attention to.
There is a problem here, though, and it gets back to our fascination with the past. My sense has been that there have been developments and rises of knowledge that have taken place that go way back into time, but that through the rise and fall of civilizations and political and theological shifts and conquests, that the great knowledge from our collective past has been obliterated except for a few straggling remnants. The picture these remnants provide is very much at odds with what we in the western world have sanctioned and called consensus reality. I say that because our books and beliefs and everything else that we produce are based on models of the world that are linear, unconnected through the most basic of phenomenon here on earth. If the world shows us that things happen in cycles, like the turning of the galaxies, of solar systems, of planets around the sun, or electrons around an atom, then why does it seem so incredibly strange that our time here would be pegged or rise out of this phenomenon in an elegant fashion? I think its because we as humans chose to pit ourselves against nature rather than trusting it. The aboriginal people had a much more intimate relationship with nature and the tides and cycles of time as measured in natural phenomenon.
I just sat through a very long talk that Terence McKenna had made that was recorded back in 1990. In it, he described how, on a mushroom trip, he was instructed by the mushroom being how he should look deeper at the I-Ching. Terence was fascinated by this ancient divination method enough to analyze it. This took place in the early 70's. He had this long interaction with this intelligence that kept prompting him and directing him towards something more, that the I-Ching was itself something different from what it appeared as merely a divination method. Now the structure of the I-Ching as McKenna describes it during his discovery is quite complicated, but its also very simple, and elegant. He was told by this mushroom being that the I-Ching was a "map of time" and that this map was recursive, which means its more like a fractal than anything else. This makes it cyclical rather than moving in a straight line.When I had my epiphany that the intelligence within the energy that is kundalini I saw how everything was interconnected through a very simple oscilation of two elements which we can call in and yang, but that I felt as the energies we know to be masculine and feminine. Through them, I saw, all phenomenon emerged. This made the nature of cells and tree leaves and solar systems all connected together in an unfolding design that was complex yet also simple. So here was McKenna explaining how he saw that the I-Ching was part of an old system for understanding the universe. For McKenna, he was able to develop a map of time that he was able to sync up to our own flow of time, using the end of the Mayan calendar as the reference point for the end of one major cycle as the way to go back some 6 billion years in time and watch as the system accurately showed all major geological changes and shifts on the planet. Based on what he found he discovered that his system fit perfectly with all major events through our known history with humans as well as the geological record that had an oscilation between what he described as essentially a movement towards a zero point and away from it. This he describes as the wave-form nature of time. This, he explains, we have been doing since forever, and that while his system does not predict actual events in specific, it does predict the waveform nature of time. In his model, all of life in human terms is a movement away from and then back to what I call in my book Waveform Awareness. This Waveform Awareness is our higher selves, that part of us that is not enmeshed in time as we think of it as physical beings, but is nonetheless a part of the phenomenon. In our history, then, we move from this state of profound knowing and increased creative output as we move closer to this field of the Wave but we become increasingly rational, more Particalized as we move away from it. I describe Particalized Awareness as our individual awareness, the pat of us that acts like a discreet soap bubble that tells us that we are separate and all that we know and see and feel is the result of what we experience through that soap bubble. For that type of awareness, there is nothing else but a very materialistic view of the universe. When I say materialistic, I am talking about this in the way that science is materialistic. A good example of this is that the world is merely here, that it is not the result of any higher form of consciousness directing it, and that life is the result of random interactions with compounds that clustered and managed to create life. My experience has been that there is indeed an intelligence within everything. The world is not some empty parking lot full of chance happenings, but is instead so amazingly complex for how consciousness interpenetrates through everything that its more like living as a cell within a giant body than anything else. This body is unimaginably huge, so huge in fact that what we see as distant stars is just the tip of the iceberg. We are only seeing beyond the cell wall of our awareness the dendrites and capillaries that are the galaxies of this giant body that we live within. Just as an animal is a world unto itself with countless cells all living and dying and coming back again, so too are we specks in a much grander body. I have to say that this makes much more sense to me than the materialistic view.
It turns out that what McKenna hit upon had a connection to the Mayan system, and this may be so because of the very likely fact that the Maya are in fact Asian or Chinese in descent. When I took a course in Precolumbian art in college I can remember looking at the art forms and remarked at how amazingly they looked Chinese. On top of this were all these sculptures of the people and there was a core of people at certain places that were totally Asian in appearance. I could see how some of the cultures merged, and blended later, even. It was so obvious even to me, who knew very little about Chinese culture but had seen enough to know that these pots and sculptures were a dead ringer for their Asian counterparts. A learned PhD., our teacher, remarked that there was absolutely NO evidence for this culture having anything at all to do with the Chinese. I can remember at the time just how silly this denial was. Here this guy was leaning on those in academia who had themselves not been intellectually curious enough to consider the most obvious possibility. And why not? The Maya had an incredible developed system for counting time, of astronomy and math. What if their knowledge was the result of a still older tradition that just happened to have come from another culture? I am not suggesting that the Maya owed their greatness to another culture at all, but simply that the Chinese may have been seafaring at some point in their development, perhaps thousands of years ago, and in the cycling of time and through conquests, had fallen from a still greater height. Why not? Some would say there is no evidence for this, no records, no stored boats to attest tot he greatness of this period in their history. It turns out that there is one such example, a commander for the Chinese emperor did in fact exist and I include it here mostly to make an important point, less about that the Chinese may have been here and that the Maya were influenced by them, but as an example of just how short sighted we can be in imagining it possible that such a thing could take place in the first place.
Article Credit.
Depicted to the right is a comparison of one Admiral Zheng's massive treasure junks to the Santa Maria that carried Columbus. He used these ships under the service of the Chinese emperor in an effort to explore the vast chinese empire of the middle ages and to bring wealth back to the emperor. Zheng He was a muslim eunuch who eventually became commander of the Chinese Navy as his master, the emperor Yongle, ascended through the ranks of the chinese nobility. The first of his six voyages was in 1402 and by the end of his sixth he had sailed west around the Indian ocean all the way to the coast of Africa and brought vast amounts of gold for the emperor. (1 pg 1-2)
Chinese naval technology was well advanced over that of the Europeans. By the 11th century they had a fleet of ocean going junks which were extremely sea worthy. They were also immense as the picture above shows. They could reach well over 400 feet and be over 150 feet wide. There were several decks below the main deck and several decks above at the stern of the ship. They were typically complemented with a crew of any where between 450-700 members and they remain some of the largest wooden vessels ever built. They were able to handle deep ocean weather due to their very deep, sharp keel which gave them more stability, that fact combined with water tight compartments made for a very sturdy ship. However, even with all their technological adaptations during their first expeditions they never sailed very far from land though there is solid evidence that they sailed all the way to the eastern coast of Africa and possibly even Australia. (1) Thus it seems the only limitation to Chinese exploration was the tenacity and daring of their leaders , however, recent evidence seems to suggest that they may have been much more daring than anyone dare believe.
There have tails among the aborigines of Australia for centuries about a group of people who came before either the Indonesians or the Europeans called the Baijini. The legend tells of a people of light golden-colored skin which seems to be a fairly accurate description of an asian complexion. They came and stayed for period of about six months hunting and fishing as well as planting fields of rice. Also their homes were made from stone and bark which is uncharacteristic of the Indonesians. In addition anchors have been discovered off the coast of Australia that fit the design of those known to have been used by the Chinese. There are also Chinese tails that involve creatures whose descriptions seem to point to wildlife characteristic of Australia. These items are just a small part of a great deal of evidence that seems to prove that China had discovered Australia long before any other group which means that the Chinese may have not been as
limited to sailing along coasts as first thought. (2)
The link to this article can be found here
limited to sailing along coasts as first thought. (2)
The link to this article can be found here
The article goes on to explain that there is an account made by this Commander that fits very well with a description of the coast of California. Given the sheer size of these craft, it was possible to have vast amounts of food stores aboard that could take them just about anywhere in the world. But why haven't we seen any of these ships? Why is this such a great mystery to the contemporary world? When the emperor Yongle died, his predecessor ordered the fleet burned and all evidence of its existence wiped from the record. What we have is a copy of a document that describes what happened back in the 1400's. But if it happened in the 1400's then why not earlier? Australian Aborigines have stories of golden skinned people who lived among them long enough to hunt and fish and to grow rice. These same people lived in stone houses, which were different from the ones the Aborigines knew about. There have been anchors discovered off the coast of Australia that fit the design of the Chinese anchors, for example.
All of this also points to a corollary between the I-Ching, the Maya, and how similar McKenna's discovery was in relationship to the concept of cyclical time as evidenced in both Mayan and Chinese systems. I mention this is a vivid example of how people within academia as well as in the scientific research often get settled in their notions of what is based on what they have been told for years, essentially the same kind of indoctrination that happens in religion, and then by way of that become brittle and inflexible in their imaginations so that they are unable to consider new opinions, ideas, or possibilities. IN a post further down I include artifacts that scientists call problematica, so called because what they do is shelve these things and ignore them because they offer a total contradiction to the popularly held views which I contend is treated no differently than a dogma is. It enshrined and if anyone comes along to question it, its as though the hive mentality sparks and there are bees buzzing around that hive ready to protect something that ought not even be protected. Its a very curious trait that we have in this way. But I mention it to highlight how things can and very likely are very different from how we have imagined them in all of our theories and presumptions based on what we have thus far found in fossil records, archaeological digs, and historical accounting of our past. What I am also pointing to in providing this article is the possibility that the Chinese and other people (there is the idea that there is also an African influence as evidence in the Olmec ball player heads cared out of massive pieces of basalt which have features that are specific to African Peoples). The idea is that it entirely reasonable t consider, I think, that the Mayan calendar, the I-Ching as McKenna discovered it, these all could have been part of a still older system of knowledge, available to us now only as remnants, not completely understood for what they are or what they are pointing at. This was all gathered, most likely through careful observation and record keeping over long periods of time in order to develop systems that corresponded so closely to real world events. Somewhere someone had a giant a-ha moment when they began to see odd correlations between the movement of the planets, the solar phenomenon, as well as planetary processional effects which take some time to happen and would need to be recorded over long time frames. Its also likely that one would not have had to take records over hundreds of thousands of years in McKenna's system, but only a cycle or two of time. Its also possible that the system was discovered in ways more akin to how McKenna discovered it, which was while munching mushrooms and tripping in the forests of South America.
I suspect that we do indeed know that there was more in our history, but that we have somehow managed to lose all memory of it as the veil of this oscillation of time has had its effect on us.
The concept that McKenna puts forward about this being a cycle repeating fits perfectly for how many others are coming to the same conclusion on their own, that there is a spiraling happening through history where events do repeat, where Great Wheels come full turn, but that at each point of the turning of the wheel, we are at a different place. Instead of a cycle merely repeating, its more like a vine that is growing and spiraling upwards toward the light of day with certain recurring things happening such as a stem during each turn of the vine, and from that stem there are a certain numerical range of leaves that tend to sprout and while none of this is rigid in its expression, it serves as a kind of template for life, for time, and perhaps the whole of phenomenon here on the planet. A spiral is in fact an elegant solution for how to think of this, that at each recursion, or repetition, while certain factors remain the same, there is also evolutionary change in some fashion or another. All of this seems built upon an ordered hologram where the information is coded into everything else as this whole body of life springs forth. Yes, there is this sense of destiny that is perhaps expressed as a result of this recursive phenomenon, but destiny is also capable of growing beyond what it was yesterday instead of remaining static. Its a growing living thing, and time is an expression of this as we move from the zero point of the Waveform Awareness towards a Particalized Awareness, all of which fits how we move from imaginative and hip and creative to stodgy and linear and limited and even warlike. Its as though we are moving away from our eternal natures and away from the realm of spirit into a place where we feel as though we are somehow alienated from all of life. According to McKenna, these cycles are waves within waves, interference patterns from the larger realm of time that effects other cycles as they hit upon countless coincidences (to coincide) of other times that were along the same arc. So in this method or model, it turned out that the end of the great Roman emperors corresponded with the end of Ronald Reagan's presidency, with a subsequent fall of Rome later, which as it turns out corresponds to what we are headed towards now. it isn't that someone like Reagan will BE an emperor, but that there will be tides and similarities that will tend to influence events and people along certain lines. Events will themselves be recursive because of the energy involved in how time is being formed and rolled out. I suspect that instead of seeing all of this as linear, we would instead see a very visual image of something that would look more like a map of waves, a kind of psychedelic pattern much more like an eastern mandala than anything a scientific mind could think up. And this would make sense since those who saw into the mystery of the world were those people who were grooving with the wave awareness themselves for the simple fact that the Wave has the ability to move you out of your individual awareness and into a sense of the All.
The difference here, though, is that this All-ness is available to us NOW. With so many waking up, with people feeling as though the veil is thinning, its no wonder that this wave of awareness is building. What I am suggesting is that we can use these cycles to bring ourselves to a new place, to learn the secrets of this wave as part of our own physiology as a cell caught up within its vastness. When we do, we "awaken." All of this experience has a corollary with what I would call a class of experiences in human experience, and all have a transcendant quality to them. For McKenna, he experienced it through the liberating effect of the mushroom and dmt experiences. In tantra, we connect into the All through the energetics of this divine pulse that is in everything. The force of kundalini is itself naturally tantric because it leads us into that place of bliss, of union with a "body" of awareness that cycles like the moon has cycles, how heavenly bodies come close and then move far from each other. Its part of a larger oscillation of a reality that isn't material but alive, an incredibly complex yet also simple life form that lives in everything from rocks to cells. The idea here is that as we move away from this bliss field we wind up in all our institutions, falling prey to the idea that the rational mind has it all figured out. This though only one part of the bigger picture, and if we fall prey to its force in life, we allow it to bring about some pretty horrible changes as a result of our feeling separate and apart from not just each other, but from our waveform awareness which is the bliss and joy and sense of connection that everything has. I am not content to merely study this but to suggest that we can use our understanding of how this works to vault ourselves out of the hole we seem to keep falling into.
I suspect that the being in the vision I had at age 18 was simply pointing to a knowledge or understanding that all time turned in cycles. Perhaps in the culture of that time they too knew about the "great wheel" as it was called. Sadly, that culture has been completely wiped out and subsumed within another tribe over a hundred and 20 years ago, so I am not sure there is anything remaining that would tell me one way or the other whether they had this term in their culture. For me, though, I think the guessing is over. Clearly, we ARE nearing the end of a giant cycle, a very important one. If I follow what the vision was telling me, I take away from it some important elements about what it is that we need to do as a species. At the very least, I know what I have to do microcosmically, and its all very interesting in terms of just how much we have been provided in the way of tools to prepare for this event that us upcoming. As a result, I see there are no accidents, but a willful desire to prepare, to grow, to become. This is the impulse in everyone as we learn to drop the self made conceptual shackles that we have chosen to imprison ourselves with. In this new world, the water is great; come on and jump in! Its really not that hard once you give it a try.
So much of what I have been saying is that what we need very much to do is not to go for one end of the spectrum or the other, but to learn how to integrate both ends of the spectrum into our experience so that when one wave rises over another, we do not feel as though we are being swept along a path that leads us to annihilation, or to madness. We need both. For the same reason I find that a reliance upon the scientific materialistic model is just as wrong-headed as the monks who say we have to toss out all ego and pretend like its dead and gone. These are merely, to my mind, just opposite ends of the same wave and instead of letting them be separate, we need to recognize them for what each imparts and find a balance between them. Otherwise, we will get so caught up in the rational that we will go mad for looking at the tiny cells in a tree leaf and never see the larger forest standing in front of us. Its this same narrowness that leads to nature suffering. We look so close at one phenomenon that we are unable to see how our actions in the moment could have a negative effect on the whole. We can likewise get so blissed out that we effectively leave this world for that place of pure bliss and never really participate in this experiment that is life on the planet. Surely the confluence of events today where we multitask and do not have time to sit in silent meditation in an ashram has its positive effect on us in this regard. By balancing both ends of the spectrum, we reach upwards into that evolutionary spiral that is our own future.
Now as an aside, Mckenna, in the recording from 1990 stated that since the calendar ends in 2012, he posits that perhaps what has happened is that we discover time travel and that this would explain why his model also comes to an end. We, he suggests, have exited the cycle of time so that we are now no longer prisoners of this oscillation but become part of something more. This would be an entering of the 5th dimension in all truth I suppose, and whether his notion is correct or not, I think that it hits it into the right ballpark. If all of this phenomenon is correct as he has seen it to be, then it makes sense that the end of the same system would suggest that something happened of a pretty significant nature that somehow also involves time itself. I suspect that its because we finally catch the wave of this hyper spatial reality that has always lived inside of us and that we have managed to hitch a permanent ride on it. The Hopi describe two paths that will happen, what some suggest are two different time lines. One leads upwards while another leads on a jagged lower course. I suspect that we are coming into contact with a choice and some will make one choice while another will make a different one. I wont say one is better or more desirable, but will simply match where you are at the time. The absolutist notions that Christianity has helped to promulgate in the past of there being a hell that you are forever imprisoned within doesn't seem to help some people's notions of how things work. It isn't like this is some race that we must win in a certain way. We are here to learn, and as McKenna suggests, there are endless cycles of time and if not now, another will come along eventually if the last phase inward didn't help us realize what it was we needed to in order to reach the highest within ourselves. And just as each transit from one cycle tends to create a sense like the world is coming to an end, Terence suggested back in the 90's to simply sit back, relax, and let the wave hit you and do its work. In effect, this is what those who awaken learn to do in their daily living with this; they surrender. Its just possible that if you just let go and trust what the wave is doing, you will give it more room to work. Don't fight it. Give in to all of that bliss, the joy and wonder that is inside of you, for it is here that the universe opens up like a wonderful flower. In you. Outside you. Its all around, waiting.....
Note: I will add that one of the effects of Awakening is a very different perception of time. I say this because I experienced very strange time phenomenon the year before all of this began for me. Later, once I had worked through a large part of material so that I was less focused on immediate things, I discovered a different view of how time is. This will have to be the subject of another post, but its worth mentioning as McKenna intuited that the 2012 event may have something to do with time....
