Our Mayan World

By Graeme Jones, copyright 2008
First Posted on Tribe.net
Jan. 17, 2008

This is to offer some thoughts on the current American situation in the light of my recent readings on the Mayan calendar. It is popularly thought that the Mayan calendar of cosmic time comes to an end in 2012. It is sometimes surmised that nothing solid can be clearly known about life on earth beyond that fast approaching date. However, I read that the 2012 date marks the beginning of a new world of cosmic time. But not to leap ahead of ourselves, the Mayan cosmology forecasts that the world capitalist system will begin its final collapse in November of 2007.

As a political astrologer, I would want to add that the planetary configurations that mark the heavens in the years circa 2012 bear a strong resemblance to the configurations that began with 1929 and lasted through the 1930’s, before finally opening out into the titanic victory of World War Two and the Chinese revolution.

In 2008, Pluto, the planetary archetype of evolutionary transformation transits from Sagittarius (religious turmoil and massive economic overreaching) into a fifteen year journey through the sign Capricorn. Here is our culture’s mythological winter experience. This is where the American capitalist dream-world collides with the cold heard granite of objective material reality. Debts become due, and organized systems of false consciousness become increasingly destabilized by the tectonic emergence of “reality.” Institutionalized denial of the real cosmic agenda that governs planetary evolution will shatter like a car driven by a drunk, colliding with a solid brick wall. Ouch, what fun!

So there we have it. Thirty years of Reaganism, with Bush’s presidency as the icing on the cake, has gutted the American economy, creating the material conditions necessary for the denouement of the cosmology that has shaped our minds throughout the entire 5,000 years of patriarchy.

When we talk of financial and economic meltdown we fall back upon our experience of the depression of the 1930’s. Serious economic pressure generated an intense universal need for shared relief. This resulted in the emergence of what can be described as “spiritual politics.” It took two distinct forms, and the polarity tension between those two contending visions of spiritually liberating politics drove world politics for a generation. They were Nazi mysticism and Mao Ze Dong’s Chinese adaptation of Marxism.

Fascist spirituality was neurotic to the point of catastrophe, but Chinese socialism was successful, at least to a large degree. So we can see how something comparable must come again. Here we add that the cosmic tides of time are bringing to us the returning feminine essence. This is the great unifying agent that carries us across the bridge from one Mayan cosmic world into the next. The erotic function of the feminine is now lovingly drawing all separated human experience into unity. Culturally and politically this emerges as a desire for democratic Socialism.

Such a great world death, as the Mayan priests knew well, is of course an even greater new beginning. The Mayans call our post 2012 epoch, the time of the emergence of the “galactic underworld.” This means that the cultural experience of cosmic unity emerges from within the collective unconscious. The readers of the Mayan system interpret this to be prefigured in Western spiritual culture by the Christian concept of “apocalypse.” That is the revelation of a core truth that had been hidden throughout the now closing cosmic cycle.

The collapse of American, and world, capitalism is therefore an emptying into an already self-establishing new cosmic culture. And that new epoch is the unified culture of “one world.” It has already successfully established itself in our cultural underworld. One quick example. It has mythically manifested the principle of “dynamic cosmic wholeness” in symbolic form as the galaxy class star ship Enterprise. This is the real reason for the Star Trek TV series’s enormous popularity. “Welcome to the federation” is a mythic anticipation of life in the new Mayan “galactic world.”

ONE WORLD

Here in 2008, this can only mean that the culture of “one world” is now hegemonic in the collective unconscious of world civilization. The culture of liberated planetary unity is simultaneously victorious, and yet, unfolding. In our mythic winter transition crisis it is the new bedrock of all of our shared well-being. But the juicy part is bringing it up into the collective consciousness. Because we are still relating prior to 2012, this new culture is far from yet fully emerged. Its component parts appear to be isolated, sometimes even alienated, from each other. This is largely because the currently ending cosmology invested so deeply in a dualistic alienation between core human opposites, heaven and earth, male and female.

In “one world” culture, heaven and earth marry. This process is now fertilizing all of humanity’s drives for liberation. It requires that we open our languages of salvatory world wholeness. There we find ourselves in a discussion of Christian spirituality and its relationship with its own modern offspring, Socialism. One world culture shifts the ground here by requiring the marriage of Christianity and Marxism.

This is a necessary path because the salvatory Christ is an agent of heaven, but wholeness requires the “prince of the world” join him. As Jung put it, the devil is a therapeutic myth. The point being; the world-view of Marx is the most highly evolved language yet produced by world civilization - that speaks to the alchemy of world whole systems liberation. It is the vital alchemical complement to the European spiritual tradition.

History has shown that we mythologically experience democratic Marxism, or at least the attempt to actualize it, as a psychological foundation for shared sense of liberated one world culture. It follows therefore that this language system can most easily accommodate the higher tantric delights flowing up to us from the numinous “One World.”

But this requires what Marxists would recognize as a major dialectical shift in the collective consciousness of world socialism. Marxist materialism, which is the dominant orthodoxy in socialist philosophy has always been (ever since Engels incompletely interpreted Marx) trapped inside its own dialectic, that is its alienation from its opposite, spirituality and metaphysics.

To update the cultural metaphor, the modern alchemists became alienated from their own Christian spiritual roots. A war was set up by false consciousness; that being the either/or game between spirituality and materialism. But that is a universal symptom of the cosmogenic alienation between heaven and earth. Anyway that’s how I read the Mayan system applying here.

So One World Culture requires a transformative journey into the philosophical outlook of 21st century socialism. Here, the evolving dialectic turns upon itself at a higher level, inside the consciousness of socialism. From emphasizing the material, it now emphasizes the spiritual quality of Socialism. It calls for the promulgation of a structured vision of world liberation that anchors itself in the union of heaven and earth. That is the unity of all spiritual systems of liberation, with Marx’s socialist science of mass cultural and political liberation.

When the universal and the materially concrete find fullness together the alchemical stone is found. That is the work. And it requires the European humanist tradition realize itself in the form of a unified system of thought, a system that holds Jungian, transpersonal psychology as being the essential esoteric center of the entire edifice of socialist political understandings. This new union (including the revolutionary advances it enables in socialist practice) will, in time, be strong enough to hold all of the traditions of world culture in stable, liberated wholeness. Well, according to the Mayan’s at least, such is the emergent power of the new “Galactic Underworld.”

By Graeme Jones, copyright 2008