It was a moment of profound contrast for me to find myself and two companions kneeling in prayer in a little park on the perimeter of Ground Zero in New York City. After more than a week of swirling through Manhattan as part of a festival of new musical theater, we had finally come to pay our respects to the souls of those who had departed so tragically just days before. None of us was prepared for the enormity of feeling that engulfed us. In the midst of devout prayer, bombarded by the cacophony of mechanical sound created by the Herculean rescue effort being made just a block away, we had descended into an outpouring of tears and sorrow, unlike anything any one of us had ever experienced before. Deeper and deeper our hearts sank and we might never have returned from that awful pit of sorrow, had it not been for the single braid of prairie-grown sweet grass Ann had brought for the occasion.
For eons, sweet grass has been used by indigenous peoples of the prairies, to assist them in prayer. The rising smoke from a smoldering sweet grass strand is said to invite the sweet spirits of Nature, to come join the proceedings and to bless participants with the insights of higher consciousness. It seemed to me that nowhere in my life had I personally needed such a blessing more than here in New York City, where the sweet things of Nature have been so completely obliterated by Man's awful rush to mount his technological achievements higher and higher upon her scarred and humbled back.
Annie's sweet grass, however, was not to surrender itself easily. After several unsuccessful attempts at lighting the braid, it became apparent that the only way the blessings were to come, was if we were to unite our breath as one, and continue to blow on its glowing tip. This, of course, had the effect of bringing all three of us, directly into the present moment, where, according to spiritual leaders from around the world, our salvation ultimately resides!
Prayerful, grounded, clutched together in a little triangle, we blew on that braid of sweet grass for most of an hour, all the while praying and grieving, deeply. We searched our souls for some thread of understanding of what had happened there at Ground Zero. Each in our own way reached out to the souls of those still caught in the grim remains of what was once, the largest office building in the world. In such an altered state, it became increasingly clear to me that I was grieving, not only for the many people who had died at the World Trade Center, but for the very land itself, upon which this terrible tragedy had occurred.
Now, a gruesome pile of rubble, strewn with the body parts of over 3000 people, the World Trade Center had been a pinnacle of achievement of the global industrial empire. In less than an hour, it had been mysteriously and completely, destroyed. Like millions of people all over the planet, I asked myself, why? By whom? And how, in the face of the overwhelming complexity of the event, could one ever come to a comprehensive understanding of it?
The answers to these questions were not forthcoming in our short time there in New York City. However, recently I have encountered a remarkable book by one of the most compelling visionaries of our time: Jose Arguelles. If you, like me, were one of the hundreds of thousands of people who participated in the in the worldwide ceremonial event called Harmonic Convergence, August 16, 1987, you might recognize Jose' as the person who called that event into being.
In his book Time and the Technosphere (Bear & Co. 2002), Arguelles declares that the September 11, 2001 collapse of the World Trade Center and the related attack on the Pentagon, was none other than the predictable outcome of the rampant growth of a military-industial hegemony pieced together by the misbegotten threads of a flawed timing system: the Gregorian calendar. First showing how the Gregorian calendar is a disharmonic human fabrication, out of synch with the natural order, and thereby the cause all manner of man-made problems, Arguelles goes on to distinguish the clock as the henchman of disharmony, parceling out tickety tock, all manner of human psychological dysfunction and maladaptaion. Together, the 12 month calendar and the 60 minute hour unite to form what Arguelles succinctly calls, the "12:60 error in time." Because it is based on this 12:60 ratio and its associated cultural programming, the military-industrial complex of modern global civilization -- what Arguelles calls the technosphere -- is doomed to collapse because it is ultimately not in harmony with the natural order. This is why Arguelles calls the collapse of the Twin Towers, the Inevitable Event. And by placing this event in the context of a universal frame of reference he calls the Law of Time, Arguelles is able to provide a convincing revelation of its ultimate meaning for humanity.
The Law of Time, refers to the same 13:20 timing ratio as that utilized in the Mayan sacred calendar. Applying this ratio to an overview of history, Arguelles has created 5000 year time map which provides a symbolic frame of reference for the whole of human history, extending from the common start date of the Mayan calendar, 3113 B.C, to its highly anticipated end-date, of 2012 A.D. Within this overarching framework, Arguelles locates the Inevitable Event at the very conclusion of the technospheric stage of civilization. Throughout that stage, humanity has been dispersed to the far reaches of the globe. Now, it seems, humanity is on the verge of entry into a fundamentally new domain of consciousness called the noosphere, a term coined several years ago by visionary, Teilhard de Chardin to refer to an etheric realm of consciousness, discontinuous from and transcendent to, both the technosphere and the biosphere, the realm of the natural world in all its diversity and profundity. Operating according to the Law of Time and its 13:20 ratio, the noosphere manifests an absolute harmony where all people, things and events find their natural place within the higher cosmic order. This transcendent order is what the ancients called the "music of the spheres."
Because he sees the technosphere to be an intermediate stage in the evolution of human consciousness, he views the Inevitable Event as being beyond the simple control of its few terrorist perpetrators. Rather, it was the natural outcome of a gigantic, evolutionary process that required at some point, a synchronous, species-wide, media event as big and as dramatic as 911, to awaken the masses from the mechanization of consciousness inherent in the technospheric phase of evolution. What this means is that responsibility for the 911 disaster, and for what it has since brought forth, lies not just with the terrorists, but with everyone perpetuating in large or small ways, the military-industrial complex of modern man.
Though manifestation of the 911 tragedy, an event witnessed live on global television by as many people on Earth as have ever witnessed anything at one simultaneous moment, humanity has irrevocably pierced the veil separating the technosphere from the noosphere. A multitude of resolute decisions are now required for it to enter successfully into the transcendent harmony beckoning from beyond that veil.
According to Arguelles, successful navigation through this perilous period of humanity's evolution, will require that we consciously and actively free ourselves from the pervasive and largely unconscious influence of the "error in time " perpetuated by the globally standardized Gregorian calendar. Affirming the obsolescence of that calendar, Arguelles asserts that humanity should begin adopting the alternative he suggests: The Thirteen Moon/28-Day Dreamspell Calendar.
To facilitate this changeover to a new world calendar, Jose', and his wife Lloydine, have initiated the World Thirteen Moon Calendar Change Peace Movement, a movement which is focused precisely on July 26, 2004 as an auspicious moment for global calendar change. The Arguelles' vision is that those who join the movement, will consciously unite with other like-mindeds all over the planet, to personally utilize their 13 Moon Calendar, to become inspired and empowered by the noospheric knowledge coded therein. Each person so engaged, will thus be guided to align more directly with the natural order of the cosmos, and will consequently, make real, through synchronized collective acts, what is as yet, only the promise of a new world .
Galactic Mandala - 13 Year Dreamspell Calendar - Planetary Ephemeris
Currently Available in Poster Formfrom the artisr Peter Eglington. RETURN TO INDEX
