By John Major Jenkins

… To get to the root of the significance of 2012, it is important to understand the Maya and their calendar. The ancient Mayan day-keepers visited their mountain shrines and tracked the sacred sequence of days. But they were more than just counters. They were also stargazers, cosmologists, philosophers and shamans. As shamans, they interacted with multiple dimensions to divine hidden secrets, access healing powers, and see beyond the veil of mundane appearances. Our appreciation of ancient Mayan genius must take into account this mystical domain of human endeavor, which today is often misunderstood and dismissed as primitive or superstitious. As with other New World societies, the Maya engaged in visionary shamanism as a precondition for the formulation of profound cosmologies and metaphysical teachings. … According to them, the center of time and space would be revealed when their big calendar cycle came to an end—December 21, 2012.
 
… All religious traditions begin with a pure download, or revelation, from the transcendent source of all wisdom. Unfortunately, the original revelation always gets distorted and diluted during the ensuing centuries. Movements splinter, factions compete, corruptions seeps in, and spiritual insights born of direct mystical experience get codified into religious dogmas designed to control access to spiritual truth.

… My own journey with the Mayan calendar has been like a deepening initiatory path. … The breakthrough occurs when we see that Mayan spiritual teachings are not the arbitrary beliefs of an obscure people, but teachings that tap into the great perennial truths that all spiritual traditions share. But there's something more about the Mayan tradition—it exemplifies a great scientific and spiritual achievement in the Americas.

As we explore the Mayan time-philosophy, our guiding light will be the expectation that profound perennial wisdom is waiting to be recovered. The Mayan calendar embodies a comprehensive cosmovision, a grand unified theory of time, space, spirit, matter and consciousness. The Maya were much closer to the perennial metaphysics known to students of esoteric teachings and oriental mysticism, a kind of high-minded New World shamanism firmly rooted in good math and astronomy. Calendar, myth, astronomy and spiritual awakening: all these themes were woven together in the Mayan calendar.

… We are blessed that the carved monuments of Izapa were found undisturbed, silent sentinels to a grand cosmic religion that saw the galactic center as the great transformer and the galactic alignment of era-2012 as a great opportunity for spiritual seekers to reconnect with the source of perennial wisdom. But we shouldn't wait until 2012, for we are in the alignment zone now (1980-2016). The time, as always, is now.

 

Learn more about The 2012 Story: Celebrating Ancient Mayan Genius with John Major Jenkins at Unity Village on May 27, 2010.