Much global turmoil is being blamed on climate change today. And it’s foolish to suggest that this change isn’t happening or significant. But as many spiritual teachers and those who study deep history point out, the Earth has gone through such perturbations many times in its 3.5 billion year history. So, from an admittedly detached cosmic perspective, this is nothing new.

It now appears that the contemporary way of life humanity has adopted, especially in the last 100 years or so, has gone in directions that work against the ability of Planet Earth to sustain us. Out of control Earth-unfriendly consumerism, corporatism, technological overkill, extraction-based approaches to precious and finite resources, all more or less based on the “more, better, faster” values of scientific materialism have made us highly vulnerable to these shifts and changes. Some spiritual teachers go a step further and say that the earth is simply purifying itself and shaking off the abuses that she has tolerated for so long. As Eliza Kendall has noted: “Mother Gaia is purifying, humanity is rapidly awakening . . . Cycles are completing, patterns are dissolving.”

Many scientists and the mainstream media now casually talk about climate change with great certainty. But it’s good to keep a few things in mind. No one can predict humanity’s future at this time. Not psychics. Not scientists. Not spiritual adepts. In terms of psychic ability, the powers of clairvoyance have certain known limitations. Sometimes the exact timing is off or even way off; or certain important details are not included. Some say that this is simply because the ability of spiritual adepts to tap into deeper levels of collective mind or being can often be distorted by their own karmic biases and human foibles.

Putting aside the dangerous and often unethical work still being done now with genetic engineering, the capabilities of Western science are quite amazing. But science also has certain limitations when it comes to climate change. Climate scientists are excellent at describing current conditions but there are important caveats. There are aspects of the natural world that remain elusive and poorly understood even if many scientists are sometimes reluctant to admit this. So, it’s legitimate to ask: how accurate are the predictions of climate scientists as to what will happen 10, 20, or 30 years from now?

Science can describe physical phenomena in the present very well. The same applies to the past. But by definition the work of science is descriptive in nature. How can it describe something that doesn’t yet exist? This is not to devalue the important work of climate scientists about where things might be headed, which is welcome and useful. Where we get into trouble is positing the current body of science as absolute or all-encompassing truth with little room for questioning.

Our current climate science has built-in limitations based on the fact that past data is not necessarily predictive of future outcomes. As a former futurist, I can tell you that this is a frequent error made in any academic discipline that involves making predictions. One interesting climate scientist, Judith Curry, President of the Climate Forecast Applications Network, has noted that there is a huge margin of error in IPCC climate predictions. She points out that, contrary to media reports, there is also considerable uncertainty about how much humans have contributed to it and not enough scientific understanding of solar influence in climate change including solar flares and CMEs.

So what does all of this mean? It means that humanity in the collective simply has no exact and completely accurate idea about what the future holds in terms of the habitability and ecological transformation of the planet. It means that it’s not beyond the realm of the possible that we might be heading for an ice age, a superheated planet, or even some kind of unexpected stabilization. It means that there’s no truly rational way to invest billions of dollars preparing for something that we’re still not sure about. It means that the possibility exists that scientific consensus can be wrong about certain climate issues and predictions. It means that we have to decide to what extent the problem is the climate or the kind of civilization that we’ve built based on a corporate-driven globalization model that implicitly rejects many local and regional resources.

What’s also concerning about climate predictions is how they’re being misused to further advance special and corporate interests. Yes, the climate is changing with significant impacts on weather patterns, ice sheets, ocean levels, and super storms. But mainstream narratives often seem to align a little too well with corporate interests. For example, there are now 8,000 new companies working on “solving” climate change mostly based on CO2 and carbon footprints. And there are several companies using genetic engineering to bring back long extinct species like the Wooly Mammoth and the Dire Wolf. (Species extinction? No problem, we’ll just create some new and improved animals in the lab.)

My suggestion for thinking about all this is a simple one: somewhere between the mainstream official narratives and climate denial lies the truth. What’s really needed is a shift in consciousness. Everyone has a role to play and is empowered to be a change agent in this passion play of spiritual evolution. We know this is already happening and, with enough momentum, this new way of thinking about our planetary home conceivably can guide us through these choppy waters. A return to honoring the natural world and (even better in the words of Morris Berman “re-enchanting the world”) means restoring all the important values that our modern way of life and out-of-control consumer culture have diminished.

Life these days seems to be a hall of mirrors full of contradictions, inversions, and paradoxes. There’s a great quote from the poet Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass about contradictions:

“Do I contradict myself?

Very well then, I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

And I especially like this one from F. Scott Fitzgerald:

”..the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

The rational mind starts to go haywire when it runs into paradox and seemingly unsolvable contradictions. Zen koans are riddles used to bypass the rational mind to get to deeper truths that only spiritual exploration can address. As we undergo the transition to what Eckhart Tolle calls the “New Earth” – the deep planetary transformation predicted for this time by indigenous peoples --- mind-bending contradictions will continue to abound. Reality will increasingly seem…well…sort of unreal.

One reason I’m bringing this up because there seems to be more and more commentary on the Internet about natural health, how to build your immune system, and how to counter the rapidly declining for-profit medical industrial complex. This is a good thing. However, when it comes to mainstream advice about healthcare, I’ve seen more contradictory information over the last few decades than I care to call out. Here’s a small sample:

• Butter is not good for you/butter is good for you.
• Eggs are not good for you/eggs are good for you.
• A little wine is good for you/a little wine is not good for you.
• Coffee is good for you/coffee is not good for you.
• Doing squats is good for you/doing squats are not good for you.

I could easily expand this list to a full page and I’m sure you could add to it from your experience. 

If there’s some kind of useful lesson to be gained from all this, it’s a fairly simple one: at the end of the day, we need to rely on our intuition and judgment and our own guidance to decide the best path forward health-wise and otherwise.  Articles in the mainstream press about health and nutrition address a general audience and your own situation may be exceptional for any number of reasons. Further, there is supportable evidence that physiologies are quite unique to each individual. We know this to be true from experience. A treatment or regimen that works for one person might completely fall flat with another. 

The mainstream media is chock full of articles that begin with the phrase “Experts Say” in the title, followed by some catchy topic du jour. I always wonder who are these mysterious “experts”? And who has decided that they are experts? (Probably other experts.) The question is: are you going to hand over your health and well-being to some random advice just because some hurried journalist quoted someone that some corporate or other for-profit source has decided was a foremost authority? 

As a journalist, I can tell you how this often works. Powerful corporations including those in for-profit healthcare push out press releases to harried journalists who have to make deadlines. They don’t have time to check out the validity of what’s being offered as “expert” opinion. The individuals called out in these press releases (naturally) line up with the corporate interests of the company sending them out. So, guess what often makes it into the news item you happen to be reading? How “scientific” is that?

When it comes to your own psychological and physical health, there’s only one expert: you. But to claim that power, of course, it’s important to step up and make the decision to take charge of your own well-being. This can be a big step for many of us who are used to relying on an allopathic medical  establishment that has become increasingly bureaucratized, profit-driven and run by insurance companies. And yes it can be a bit alarming to realize that this responsibility rests on your shoulders. But I like to think of what Emerson said in his essay on self-reliance: “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”

And then we have the overly simplistic mantra to “follow the science”. The answer to that should always be: What science? Whose science? And if there was a medical study quoted then it’s imperative to ask who funded it and what was the name of the study.  If it was a Pharma or corporate funded medical study (as many are these days) rather than an independent one that has been fully vetted and peer-reviewed, then appropriate skepticism is called for.

I’m not opposed to getting expert advice and I frequently consult many difference sources on healthcare matters including conventional ones like Web MD. Gathering different viewpoints is an important part of the process. But with the healthcare system rapidly degrading, we’re all going to have to take more and more personal responsibility for our own health. While this seems like an unnecessary burden (and it easily feel like that and justifiably so), at the end of the day, it’s probably a good thing for all of us to step up and embrace this. A chiropractor I know once summed it up beautifully: “People take better care of their cars than their own bodies.”

At the end of the day, the only real political issue is the problem of how to alleviate human suffering. This is mostly easily framed as the need to improve the quality of life. Sadly, this is not how political systems work. In similar light, the only real religious issue is also human suffering. The Buddha tried to solve the problem of human suffering and, we are told, did so through a path to alleviate it (but only for individuals). Jesus showed us a different set of teachings about human suffering largely focused on how we treat others and therefore more easily importable into the political. But his teachings were misinterpreted and distorted by organized religion and those problems persist to this day.

The great existential philosopher Albert Camus once said that he wanted to be “lucid in ecstasy.” I would settle for just being lucid, which is to say seeing and perceiving reality with clear vision.

In our culture, which is dominated by Western scientific materialism, the idea that there is no unseen world and that the material world is “all that there is” is misinformation.

An existential conundrum that I think about sometimes: If we are spiritual warriors traveling through the current dark age, how do we “fight” without demonizing what we’re fighting against and thereby slipping into the error of dualism? (But I suppose, of course, the next question easily becomes: what if the opposition really is demonic?)

Here’s a quote I like:

I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so I can do my laundry and dishes. Joanna Maciejewska

Another quote, this one from a very interesting teacher:

We are a part of Earth's body; interconnected with all living beings via the gold frequency; and we can dream, vision, create, communicate with nature, time travel and are highly telepathic. And that's just for starters. Now that's dangerous. All of this is highly undesirable if the plan is a world takeover with everyone rigorously controlled—doing exactly what they're told via a digital type of enforcement which is biologically integrated into our brains. Oracle Girl

And this from another interesting teacher:

Humanity is at the crossroads of major evolutionary change and has the spiritual potential to awaken into the truth of our hidden past. Lisa Renee

We all have belief systems, and they can be very limiting in spiritual work. The 18th century poet William Blake once referred to these limitations as the “mind-forged manacles.” True enough. Our belief systems are ultimately our crutch as we navigate these new realities at this time in deep history. We have certain beliefs that we have depended on perhaps our whole life or a good portion of our life. When those beliefs evaporate or are challenged, we may likely feel desolate. But that’s simply part of the process of awakening.

I probably have known thousands of people in my life.

For the sake of argument let’s call it 7128 (It’s just a number!)

But imagine how many people the Mind of God knows.

Imagine those countless faces scattered across time and place

and the myriad details of each life seemingly so far beyond

measuring or remembrance. In the Mind of God each

act, thought, idea, and gesture, careless or crafted,

is noted, recorded, and preserved as if our often troubled

and ragtag lives were actually important in the scheme of things.

Some call this the Akashic Record derived from esoteric philosophy,

containing all human experience and the history of the cosmos.

a kind of “universal supercomputer” in the contemporary view.

But I am a minimalist. I would like to compare the Mind of God

to a friend who frequents outdoor cafés and loves to watch

humanity’s comings and goings and the sweet minutia of lives.

(Please do not think of this comparison as frivolous.)

When my friend sits at cafés and watches those milling about

there is kind attention lavished on those who pass by.

She is genuinely interested but knows that she cannot interfere

in any real way—only watch the passing parade of souls totally

oblivious to her interest, diligent actors in their passion plays.

What is this noose

hanging around my neck

like a loud necktie?

No worries, it is merely

old age,

a common enough affliction

affecting 10 out of 10 Americans.

The ancient religious writers

loved to ramble on

about the body’s impermanence:

“dust to dust”

and the whole nine yards.

What a gloomy bunch!

Once while living in the city,

I passed a large gathering

in a public square

where masses of pink and black

balloons were being released.

Someone in the crowd said that

a circus performer had passed away,

and this was his

intended celebration.

The ancient Taoists had

the right idea.

They knew enough

to laugh and

shrug the whole damn thing off,

fear and dread

floating away

like a black balloon, a tiny speck

in the widening deep blue sky.

The July 18, 2024 worldwide computer outage shook up the world and gave humanity a wake-up call about the fragility of the technological systems we’ve created. Critical services at hospitals, airports, banks, and government facilities around the world were all suddenly unavailable. As impressive as our new digital technologies are, these now massively deployed systems are also quite fragile in the larger scheme of things. Computers and the communications systems that support them can concentrate huge amounts of informational power and control by wielding it like an Archimedean lever to manage the physical world. A cynic could probably argue that we’re now building our civilizational infrastructures on a foundation of sand.

Shifting to a more holistic perspective, humanity’s ability to continue to build these kinds of systems runs into the limitations of our conceptual ability to embrace their vastness and complexity. So, the question becomes: Is there a limit in the natural order of things to the amount of technological complexity that’s sustainable? At what point in pushing the envelope of technology advancement do we get in over our heads and to what degree is a kind of Promethean hubris involved? We may in fact be at a tipping point where it’s worth asking if we can even control what we’ve created and whether the “harmful side effects” of seeming constant chaos is now militating against the quality of life.

Finally, the advent of under-the-radar hyper-technologies such as nanotechnology and genetic engineering also need to be considered in this context. These are also technologies that can only be understood in the conceptual realm and not in any concrete and more immediate way because their primary and secondary effects on society, culture, and politics can no longer be successfully envisioned. Decisively moving into these realms, therefore, is like ad hoc experimentation with nature itself. But as many environmentalists have pointed out, “Nature bats last.” New and seemingly exciting prospects for advanced hyper-technology may dazzle us, but if in the process they also blind us, how can we guide the progress of technology with wisdom?

There are at least two theories about what’s happening on the planet in 2024. Can both be right?

In 2009, I co-founded a nonprofit organization called The Emergence Project, dedicated to studying the Mayan teachings about this time in deep history. I thought that with my skills as a research analyst and many years of spiritual exploration in a wide variety of traditions, I could “figure it all out”. I read countless books, watched endless videos, and talked to many wise and thoughtful seekers of truth. In the end, I had to admit that I had failed to comprehend the enormity, vastness, depth, and scope of the prophecies and teachings about this time that were evident in various traditions for thousands of years. Quite simply, it was a mystery of the highest order and remains so today.

But now the cosmic plot has only thickened. We are in the middle of an enormous set of changes affecting our life here on Planet Earth, beyond any one individual’s or group’s comprehension. While many things seem clearer to me than when I studied the planetary cycles of history in 2008 to 2012, the picture has also gotten more complicated. It seems that more understanding can also lead to more complexity. Funny how that works.

If you’re reading this then you most likely realize that we are here at a most interesting time in our planetary history. Some “spiritual, but not religious” teachers would say that we all chose to incarnate at this particular time and there is a distinct reason and purpose that each and every one of us are here to fulfill now. And we are all experiencing the rather astonishing changes here on Spaceship Earth (as Buckminster Fuller used to call it).

Trying to understand the big picture about what’s happening on the planet is no easy task. The feeling of being overwhelmed with information and events is widespread whether someone is spiritually oriented or not. There are many worthy teachers out there now who confirm this, and are offering suggestions and ways to cope with the overload.

In this blog, I hope to break this down a little and offer my own views in addition to that of others.

The Blind Men and an Elephant

I like to think of the expanded notion of our earth-centric reality now as a diamond with many facets. Each one of us looks at the diamond but taking in the whole is impossible. At best, we can only see a few different facets. One person sees one facet; another sees another. The sum of all of our views is closest to the truth along the lines of the old parable of The Blind Men and an Elephant.

But, of course, how do we arrive at this sum of so many views when everyone is arguing (just like the blind men) that they are right? So, let’s just posit that what we call consensus reality is a huge unknowable thing that is the sum total all human experience and perspectives. And it of course may paradoxically contain truths that seem directly opposed to each other (whew!) Readers of this blog may at this point feel that I’m going down a rabbit hole, by being overly philosophical or complex, but I hope you will stay with me.

With that as a sort of prelude, how should we look at earth changes and where does the climate crisis fit in to the picture? There is so much confusion and division over this issue that at times it seems impossible to sort out. As with Covid, you were either on the right side of the fence or the wrong side. There was no such thing as taking a nuanced or middle position.

So What's Really Happening?

Let’s start with the basics. The climate crisis is real and it’s here. Much of the science says that it’s of human origin because of CO2 production and this is undoubtedly a major factor. Unfortunately, powerful financial interests have started to use this as a distraction from thinking about how humanity has poisoned the planet and our food chain with chemicals, radioactive water from Fukushima, microplastics and in general treating the planet and the natural world with carelessness and a lack of respect. This distraction allows “business as usual” to continue.

Focusing only on this one aspect—CO2 and warming—provides a convenient distraction for the companies that have been largely responsible for these environmental disasters. It allows them to point the finger back at each of us as individuals saying that we are a huge part the problem. This is a case of deflection and diversion of responsibility. It’s part of why this topic is now so confusing.

Not to be overly cynical but the confusion is deliberate. This over-focus on the climate crisis has turned out to be our collective shorthand for “everything that’s wrong with the planet now and everything that’s changing”. Unfortunately, this narrative falls way short of describing the more complex realities at stake. And it smacks of Western scientific materialism’s typical stance of absolute certainty. (Good science requires a certain humility about what we can know and what we can’t. Our best scientists have always had that quality but these days it seems to be in short supply.)

There are two competing narratives out there. One is based on “the science” which is that there is a human-made climate crisis which is mainly caused by excessive levels of CO2. The other is drawn from ancient wisdom traditions and based on narratives of deep history preserved by indigenous people and spiritual teachers, having to do with well anticipated earth changes taking place now. (Note: some traditionally religious teachings also have a sense of this as well.)

In this latter version, we are going through earth changes that have long been predicted as prophecy. This includes the traditions of the Mayans, who were master astronomers and understood the workings of planetary cycles over thousands of years. The Mayans foresaw the events we are now experiencing, as did the Hopi and many other indigenous peoples. 

The much-publicized 2012 Mayan Calendar “event” was widely misunderstood, in no small measure because (more often than not) the media positioned it as a distinct event—something would happen visibly and discernibly in that particular year. The reality, however, is that 2012 should have been understood as the beginning of a cycle—a portal into a succession of great changes taking place over a long period. And this is exactly what happened and continues to happen.

Here’s something interesting to consider: both of these versions of reality can be true.

Not only can both be true, but even putting those two opposing ideas in our poor, tired, information-weary heads at the same time does not tell the whole picture. There are myriad possibilities and don’t let any of the “experts” tell you that they know exactly what’s going on. For example, it’s still possible that we’re headed for another ice age or at least a cooler rather than warmer planet.  Our scientific methodologies are excellent at describing present trends. But they cannot predict the future. The computer models we now use to predict future trends are only as good as the data that we use to program them. This data comes from past and present measurements with predictive data based on algorithms. So, it’s entirely possible that these changes can still lead in many different directions.

In addition, our science still has not caught up with ancient science concerning the effect of planetary and astronomical activity and how the cosmos can effect changes on our earthly life. The sun is very active now and with the earth’s magnetic field weakening, we are being bombarded by cosmic rays, solar flares, and CMEs. Many teachers say that this is positively affecting our spiritual growth and evolution.

There is hope, however, that this gap in science is changing. For example, I was quite surprised to see a recent New Yorker article about the impact of solar flares on the electrical grid and satellite communications systems. Disappointingly, the article stopped short of discussing how this might affect biological systems, and only mentioned in passing that stronger solar radiation patterns and flares can affect how birds navigate. It didn’t take the next logical and obvious step of asking: if it can affect birds, then why not humans?

Explaining the Unexplainable (Or Trying To)

Much of the chaos in the world can now be partially attributed to how huge planetary changes and cycles involving the sun and other space phenomena are affecting human cognition and perception. If the world feels a little crazy to you these days (or a lot crazy) then there’s a reason for it. I suppose you could say there’s a “scientific” reason for it (although, as I mentioned much ancient science has been rejected in our modernist thinking.) Understanding the reasons might not make the changes we’re going through any easier but it might make them somehow more bearable.

These are just a few of the factors bearing down on humanity now in 2024. Conventional science is important but it has limitations and will only give us part of the picture. The climate crisis narrative has been distorted by those who want to use it for financial advantage such as corporations and financial elites who see it as a business opportunity. But don’t fall for simplistic narratives like if we all drive EVs and recycle, everything will be fine. Things are vastly more complicated than that and the onus should be on corporations and governments to fix what needs fixing. In terms of future changes, we should keep in mind that science describes but doesn’t predict and prophecy and clairvoyance predicts but doesn’t describe.

So, summing up, here’s a short list of factors possibly affecting what we as humans perceive as severe instabilty and chaos in the global landscape:

• Long predicted earth changes
• CO2-induced climate instability
• Chemical and plastics pollution (e.g.Fukushima)
• Global saturation of 5G and other wireless radiation
• Solar radiation and other space weather and planetary resonance

The spiritual teacher Lee Caroll has pointed out that it’s human-made pollution that has worsened the heating up of the planet, but cautions that it’s not the primary cause. He also suggests that the current warming is temporary and is preparatory to a cooling phase (but not an Ice Age per se). Mix all these factors together and we can see the incredible challenge in trying to understand how all these trends and earth changes interact as we try to parse the myriad forces shaping the new earth. But without fully understanding them, any actions we take to improve our situation may not result in beneficial results.

I believe the great spiritual teachers of our time are mostly women. This is not surprising at a time when the sacred spaces of nature and the earth are either under attack or suffering some form of less-than-benign neglect or (worst of all) being subjected to mad science ideas that all of nature can be hacked or replaced according to humanity’s whims. 

The Divine Feminine

This is the time of the return of the Divine Feminine, the concept that there is a feminine counterpart to patriarchal spiritual structures. Some teachers guiding the way include Christina Lopes, Barbara Hand Clow, Lisa Renee, and Sandra Walter, who I was privileged to work with years ago on a Webinar project when she was still living in the wilderness on Mount Shasta. (I exclude from this list Regina Meredith, who supports transhumanism and the idea that AI-based brain implants will be a positive step for humanity.)

Barbara Hand Clow is an indigenous astrologer, conversant with the complexities of deep history (the distant past of the human species) and ancient indigenous wisdom and traditions. She and other teachers confirm that the year 2024 will be even more tumultuous than 2023 as old patterns disintegrate to make way for what’s generally called and perceived as “the New Earth.”

In the meantime, we will all be living in a rather liminal space where the old world is dying, but the new one has yet to be fully born. This is the challenge.

In a recent live event that included 3,300 people from around the world, Christina Lopes noted that 2024 will be a rocky, mind-bending ride unlike anything we’ve seen before.I especially like her approach because, as I’ve noted before in this blog, there are teachers in what I call the “light and love” school who don’t focus on the shadow at all or the intense suffering of much of humanity during this time. It’s just good vibes all-round. 

Christina, by contrast, is a spiritually-grounded realist and acknowledges the difficulties being experienced by those who are working on what we call this process of “awakening.” In the YouTube event, she said: “It’s not an easy time to be on the planet.” She also noted that feeling chaotic, uneasy, stressed, anxious, lost, or sad are part of the package.

Christina also acknowledged the enormous violence and suffering around the world as a cause of much of this. And so we continue and “carry on regardless,” staying as grounded and positive as possible through these choppy waters.

As I think about the year ahead, for some reason a line from an old David Bowie song springs to mind: “You better hang onto yourself.” So true.

I ran across a news item the other day: “Scientists think they’ve finally figured out the Mayan calendar” according to an article in TechNews. The study was done at Tulane University. 

I do understand that the Mayan calendar can be viewed solely as an anthropological puzzle. But the calendar is not just some Rubik’s Cube to solve. When we approach the mysteries of deep history through a contemporary lens and one that’s tinted by the distortions of scientific materialism, I would have to question whether of all this academic work has contributed to a clearer understanding of how the calendar relates to what has been called the Great Awakening, and what we’re all experiencing now with this incredible planetary shift.

There’s no question that the Mayan calendar is shrouded in mystery. John Major Jenkins was one of the foremost spiritual interpreters and decoders of its meaning and significance and spent his entire life working on how we should understand it. I was privileged to know John personally (he passed in 2017). He was a keynote speaker at Boston’s first and only conference on the 2012 phenomenon. The event was sponsored by the Emergence Project, a non-profit that I founded with Annette Farrington in 2009. John’s life’s work was spent writing a series of books on the Mayan mysteries and I highly recommend them.

As we now peel back the layers of deep history, we’re paradoxically in a way going “back to the future.” Like Stonehenge, the calendar is an artifact of a path to a particular consciousness (much like a mandala or a labyrinth) and something we have a hard time wrapping our Western brains around.  For those of us who are intrigued by the long cycles of history that the Mayans understood, the subject can be approached as a roadmap, a guide, an illumination. In that sense it is never “solved.”

Limits of Science

I’m not anti-science by any means. In fact, I’ve written two books on science and technology and spent most of my life in the field. But when a culture assumes that science is the ultimate arbiter of reality, then there’s nothing, even the most elusive mysteries in the great arc of human history, that can’t be explained away. The way that Western scientific materialism sometimes takes complex realities and then, with characteristic hubris, purports to explain them in overly simple terms is what’s called reductionism.

I have no problem with scientists trying to figure out the meaning of the Mayan calendar. They may indeed have come up with some perspectives that could help with future studies. But I would be willing to bet that their explanation of its significance will fall far short of a deep understanding that extends well beyond simple dates and complex mathematical relationships. 

Mayan Calendar: Misinterpretations Abound

The Mayan calendar and the date 2012 have been widely misunderstood and that continues to this day. When the year 2012 hit, many wrongly expected that there would be signs and wonders. Existential fireworks. The Big Something. But that’s not how the patterns and unfolding of long historical cycles work. In fact, the year 2012 was just a gateway, only the beginning of a cycle that is now intensifying in scope and power. 

As I’ve noted, the sense of deep history that the ancients had does not always mesh with our Westernized perspectives. The mainstream press jumped all over the lack of an “event” in 2012 as some sort as “proof” that the Mayan Calendar was nonsense. The good news is that the notion of the Great Awakening, the Shift, the Ascension, or whatever your preferred term might be for the intense energetic changes happening now, has taken hold in our culture, even if imperfectly understood. It’s wonderful to see so many becoming aware of it despite the outward appearances of a “world gone wrong” in the words of Bob Dylan.

In addition to being master astronomers, the Mayans also developed teachings about how the unfolding of earth changes and events in our solar system and beyond (i.e. galactic events) would affect our lives politically, culturally, and in many other ways. This too should be considered a kind of science. In Mayan cosmology, galactic events had specific impacts on human affairs, in part through the alteration of the earth’s energy fields and grids.

Recent and strong changes in solar activity are now playing a large role in this process as the Mayans predicted. These energies are powerful and increasing in intensity with many ripple effects. They are destabilizing world events, repatterning our individual "reality bubbles", accelerating changes in the earth’s geomagnetic grid and infrastructure, altering our perceptions of self and other, and bringing up blocked energies for clearing, 

This is simultaneously an exciting, troubling, and very intense time.

But for those who appreciate and can open up to these cascading energetic waves of change, the opportunities for spiritual growth are unparalleled.

I spend a lot of time pondering what the deeper forces that are shaping world events might be. News stories tell us facts about the world we inhabit. But they often just skim the surface of what’s going on at a deeper level.

We rely on philosophers, cultural commenters, spiritual teachers, and others to help us understand these kinds of truths, but what fascinates me is trying to connect the dots between the two.

While on occasion there are thoughtful articles that break this pattern in the mainstream media, journalists are so busy scrambling to meet deadlines and hold onto their jobs in corporate-dominated media environments that most of the time, they don’t have time to step back and look at the deeper forces shaping our world at this interesting, albeit troubling, time in history.

Academia used to fill this void to some extent, but because university education is increasingly involved in supporting corporate agendas, it seems all too often that we can no longer can rely on it to supply these broader perspectives either.  

Between Two Worlds

The narratives we’re presented with about the world and important world events are constructed narratives.

Some may remember Carlos Castaneda, who wrote many books that studied the life and ways of Mexican shaman. His term for this was “consensus reality."

But when there are huge changes taking place in the world picture, consensus reality dissolves because consensus dissolves. Things begin to seem chaotic, unanchored, and impossible to understand because, basically, we’ve lost our map of reality.

While this feels alienating and troubling, the good news is that what’s being experienced isn’t a permanent condition. Rather, it’s just a characteristic of a transition when the old world is dying and the new one is still being born.

The Roles of Tribalism and Spirituality

In this context, we might reflect that history has been described as “the lie commonly agreed upon,” then remember Peguy's famous saying that “What begins in mysticism ends in politics.” This beckons the realization that, to understand changes in the world, we have to peel back the surface of things and look deeper at the powerful forces behind world events including spirituality, religion, and culture.

These are sometimes grouped together under the heading of tribalism. But tribalism can also include other powerful beliefs such as a belief in science and technology as the ultimate arbiter of truth.

We see this most obviously manifested in the increasingly disturbing transhumanist movement, which appears to be an attempt to replace spirituality with science.

Here in the US, what the media presents to us as merely political issues is often underpinned by powerful spiritual or religious themes, and these deeper aspects are rarely discussed or even acknowledged. 

Natural Living v. Artificial Living

Another huge underlying theme is the notion of natural v. artificial living. In my opinion, the biggest undercurrent in what we see going on in the world today (especially here in the US) is a kind of tug of war between accepting an artificial but deliberatively constructed reality v. primarily focusing on rebuilding and restoring the natural world.

We’ve been systematically destroying the Web of Life through many decades of living an unsustainable consumer lifestyle coupled with certain out-of-control technologies that serve to accelerate it.

Unfortunately, this is not what we might call a fair fight. This is because those on the side of the technology juggernaut (i.e. powerful corporations) are using immense public relations and media resources to paint this rather ugly reality as something desirable that will benefit humankind. Nothing could be further from the truth.

My own connection to this issue derives from 22 years of studying Tai Chi and Qigong, both very rooted in the need to connect with natural world on a deep level.

There are no Taoist organizations that exist. Rather it’s an oral tradition that goes back thousands of years.

The ancient Taoists valued our connection with nature above all else. And, like yoga, its practices were designed in its deeper manifestations to bring us into harmony with it.

The Transhumanist Movement

In the strange and at times unrecognizable world we see unfolding today, the value of even having this connection is being gravely threatened by the dehumanizing idea that both our core humanity and the natural world that sustains us are deficient in some way and can be “improved” through the use of technology and genetic engineering.

A lot of this thinking can be traced to a Silicon Valley secular philosophy called Transhumanism.

The extremes of transhumanist thinking appear to be a kind of “mad science,” something that writers such as Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, and many science fiction writers have warned us about... warnings that have clearly gone unheeded.

A False Solution

According to these cheerleaders of endless progress and technology as a kind of new but soulless religion, the solution to our existential crisis is to re-engineer the entire planet.

Animal species are dying and going extinct? No worries: with genetic engineering, we can create new ones.

Large factory farms are inhumane to animals and creating unhealthy food? No problem: we’ll use genetic engineering to create artificial meat in huge vats.

Ecological catastrophe is threatening the planet and its ability to sustain 8 billion people? No worries, we’ll colonize Mars and the moon.

It’s a horrendous form of abandonment of the natural world.

While much of the technology we’ve invented can be beneficial, Western culture especially has generally not learned how to use it wisely.

And rather than acknowledging how we’ve brought on this existential world crisis by not fully considering the unintended consequences of our consumer-driven lifestyle, the solution being offered by governments and corporations now working together is simply to do more of the same under a different framing and naming.

Just because the word “sustainable” is used in conjunction with some initiative doesn’t mean that it’s beneficial or desirable.

An Alternative Path

Instead of buying into the false narrative of transhumanism and its plans to re-engineer reality to suit the vision of elites who have their hands on the levers of technological power, the real work ahead is to reconnect with the natural world and the Web of Life.

I don’t believe that it’s too late. We need to resist how technocratic leaders with increasing control over government are forcing the use of very harmful technology systems concerning which we’ll have no choice and no say.

We need to restore Planet Earth and in the words of cultural historian Morris Berman, “reenchant the world”.

This is the real work ahead of us.