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Maya - The Illusion Of Time
April 21, 2005
At the
top of a pyramid, swarming with tourists, I slipped through
time. We were there on holiday, drawn to the majesty and
mystery of this ancient culture so unique and inspired. In
the Gregorian moment of April 6th, 3:30 eastern standard
time my wife and I swayed on the 356th step of the great
pyramid of the feathered serpent, Kukulkan, dizzy and winded
from the climb, mind's reeling at this point of contact.
We'd finally made it to Chichen Itza. Among the many
exemplary Mayan & Toltec ruins, the central timepiece of
Kukulkan was the reason for our journey and the immediate
point of our first visit. We each, in turn, approached the
great base and laid hands on it's ancient stones, gazing up
along it's ridges at the whisping cloudlets passing in the
wind. Around to the other side and up the steep slope of 91
steps, calves burning moving past numerous apes, some too
unfit to make the journey. Inertia doesn't stop up on the
top in the temple, milling through the thickened crowd,
looking, seeking, tuning...
But it's painfully frustratingly difficult to stop and
silently open yourself to the intimacy and power of such a
site when there are people everywhere around you. The
ambience is just all wrong. And such wonders - power spots,
vortices, monuments - really cry out to the sympathetic for
an urgent communion. I tried not to think about the empty
water bottles piling up under the capstone, then stepped
through time.
Like straddling two rings of a spiral, I felt myself
bifurcate gently between the present moment and a time some
2000 years ago, amidst the ancient Maya themselves. I felt
the great celestial rites commanded from the temple,
aligning with heavenly milestones - the solstice, the
equinox, the rise of Venus. The vultures and falcons above
had flown for millenia, and the lazy iguanas had been
watching the stars since the birth of time. The buzzing hive
around me blurred and thinned, semi-opaque, leaving me
standing in the Isness of this timeplace, it's wordless
moment coating me like amber honey. The information imparted
was experiential, nonlinear, illogical. It was simply being
in that place when it was far richer with meaning and intent
and magick than the unwashed masses would now allow.
In 1935, Sylvanus Griswold Morley wrote:
When the material achievements of the ancient Maya in
architecture, sculpture, ceramics, the lapidary arts,
feather-work, cotton weaving and dyeing are added to the
abstract intellectual achievements - invention of positional
mathematics with its concomitant development of zero,
construction of an elaborate chronology with a fixed
starting point, use of a time-count as accurate as the
Gregorian Calendar, knowledge of astronomy superior to that
of the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians - and the whole
judged in the light of their known cultural limitations,
which were on a par with the early Neolithic Age in the Old
World, we may acclaim them, without fear of successful
contradiction, the most brilliant aboriginal people on this
planet.
While I've been unable to find a direct translation of the
word "maya" in Mayan, it's always fascinated me that the
same word in Sanskrit means "illusion". The enigmatic Maya
of Mesoamerica often seem to shimmer and glimmer, beautiful
and alluring like a mirage rising from hot sands, fleeting
like a sudden glimpse of the Jaguar's spots receding back
into thick jungles. Rising from early Olmec cultures in 300
b.c. the Maya grew to number among the millions with vast
cities and religious complexes extending from Belize,
Gautemala, and Honduras, up into the Yucatan peninsula in
the north. Then around 900 a.d. the great southern lowland
cities like Pelenque and Tikal were abandoned for reasons
still unknown. Some suggest crop failure, others that a
great volcano covered the region in ash. Or perhaps, as
Arguelles and McKenna fancifully suggest, the great emperor
Pacal Votan, having descended into the Underworld of Xibalba,
gained access to the controls of time and swept his people
away to the Galactic Center.
In Vedic philosophy maya is the illusion of a purely
physical, phenomenal and mental reality, in which
consciousness is completely entangled veiling the true
spirit of existence, Brahman. God is reduced to law. Nature
is no more than mechanism. The self is alone and ephemeral.
Karma and ego consciousness are the binding forces of maya,
trapping the individual in the ceaseless cycle of death and
rebirth. The Hindu path of enlightenment entails an
awakening to the illusion of physicality, separateness, and
time itself to the ever-present timeless unity of true
being.
The Mayan god of all gods, Hunab Ku, is said to exist in the
center of each galaxy, radiating its intent out to life
through each local star. It is in this galactic core that
the motion of the galaxy is initiated and it's
superstructure distributed out to it's components. Galactic
time and it's dynamic web of gravitational effects entrains
solar time which, in turn, entrains cellular time through
the circadian rhythms of nature. The Maya were the
emissaries of Hunab Ku tasked with tracking and calculating
the movements of time as they relate to our planet and it's
"harmonic relationship" with the galactic core.
It's interesting to relate the glyph of the Hunab Ku to the
concept of a black hole, which we now suspect lies at the
center of the Milky Way. Like the yin-yan, the Hunab Ku is a
dynamic interplay of black and white. A black hole is an
ultra-dense gravitational object so powerful that light
itself cannot escape it's surface. While the galactic core
keeps the dark firmament moving and hung with bright stars,
their light is always being drawn into the darkness. The
glyph of Hunab Ku is said to be a two-way street, allowing
access to the core of any galaxy. Warping and bending with
gravity, at the point of dissolution time ceases, space
collapses, and infinity is revealed.
Mayan cosmology is intrinsically bound to time and the
Tzolkien is their codification of a fractal, cyclical
conception of motion radiating outward from the galactic
center, through our star to Earth. The product of a 365 day
solar/lunar calendar and a 260 day sacred calendar, the
Tzolkien presents a great cycle of 5200 tun of 360 days
each. This is roughly 5128 years for the current cycle,
beginning at about 3113 B.C. Within this cycle of 5200 tun
are 13 baktuns, or eras, of about 144,000 days each (Current
144?). The present baktun is the 13th and last, set to end
on that fateful day in December of 2012.
The Bhagavata Purana tells that Lord Brahma asked his four
sons to go and create progeny in the universe. When they
refused Brahma grew angry and a crying child appeared from
his forehead. The child, Rudra, becomes Shiva and was asked
to go and populate creation. Shiva, though ultimately
formless, is often pictured in a dance, as the delicate play
of nature - creation and destruction - as it unfolds through
time in the 5 energies: Shrishti (creation, evolution);
Sthiti (preservation, support); Samhara (destruction,
evolution); Tirobhava (illusion); and Anugraha (release,
emancipation, grace). Shiva, in fact, is the Conqueror of
Time and has always been regarded and worshiped as the
greatest deity of the Hindu pantheon. Maya only exists
through the efforts of Shiva, and it is Shiva's to destroy
with the blink of an eye.
Essential to an understanding of Mayan time is that it is
cyclical in nature, like rings in a spiral. The events of a
day within one baktun will be reflected in the same day of
another baktun. Jose Arguelles has opined much on this
notion, though it was perhaps Terence McKenna that
demonstrated it best with his Timewave model of novelty
based on the I-Ching (another fascinating model of time).
Note that McKenna's model also crashes at 2012. Arguelles
suggests that the I-Ching is the key to understanding the
genetic code while the Tzolkien is the key to understanding
the galactic code. Both timepieces at the very least suggest
that time is nowhere near as linear as we'd like to think.
In a way it seems far more elegant (or at least romantic) to
imagine a resonant fractal harmonic superstructure of time
set and stamped by the rotation of our galaxy and
distributed to Earth by our star. If so, what happens in
2012 when the entire cycle resets itself? Only time will
tell...
The Maya established the first and most complete
understanding of time as it relates to our planet and solar
system. While western science only stepped on the moon once
in 1969, the Maya were thinking galactically before the
birth of Christ. Within the complex codices of the Tzolkien,
perhaps aided by the intricacies of the I-Ching, appears to
rest a template for eternity. Time, like the flow of a
river, appears linear on the surface, only to reveal complex
dynamics - eddies and vortices and currents - whorling
below. The human penchant for eschatology surely must be
beyond apocalyptica. The end of time may be simply that: the
sudden collective awareness of the illusion of history. Like
standing on the top of Kukulkan, tourists to my left, Mayan
priests to my right, all of time is everpresent,
compartmentalized and portioned out only by the fragmented
self struggling to make sense of the vast data of
hyperspace. Like a tesseract, the structures within time
remain, only rotating in a higher dimension, archaic but
entirely new. Within the Hunab Ku, the black hole, the
vortex, as above and below, the singularity of spacetime -
galactic or personal - collapses temporality into the
timeless moment of eternity. The serpent gains wings, flying
feathered towards the sun, a blackened silhouette against a
fiery white star.
Like the world-order system of the I-Ching, the system of
Mayan science is one of holonomic resonance, as much of the
future as it is of the past. Indeed, from the perspective of
Mayan science the terms future and past are of little value
as guages of superiority of progress. For the Maya, if time
exists at all, it is a circuit from whose common source
future and past flow equally, always meeting and being
united in the present moment. - Jose Arguelles, The Mayan
Factor
History repeats itself, as the old saying goes. But for how
long?
Posted by LVX23 at April 21, 2005 11:10 AM
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