INTRODUCTION:THE MYSTERY OF THE MAYA: SCIENCE TRANSCENDED
Ever since the triumph of rationalism and the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century, it has been an institutionalized truism that modern science represents the pinnacle of human achievement. This belief is the cornerstone of the doctrine of material, technological progress. The notion that there could have been a science more advanced than the prevailing one which, after all, underlies every aspect of global industrial civilization, has been virtually unthinkable. Yet the moment has come when the rationally unthinkable may be the only solution remaining in order to allow safe passage beyond the treacherous onslaught of nuclear militarism and environmental poisoning which now threatens the existence of this planet.
Entrenched and ever-vigilant in their self-support, the forces of scientific materialism have zealously guarded the portals to their domain, keeping in mind a singular goal: to maintain the myth of ever-progressing technological superiority. Thus, UFOs, varieties of paranormal experience, the discovery in 1976 of "rationally" inexplicable phenomena on Mars swiftly become classified documents, withheld from the public. Yet, on the morning of January 28, 1986, just four days after the triumphant Voyager 2 flew by Uranus with its bewildering information release, the space shuttle Challenger exploded in full televised and public view. In that awesome fiery moment, the myth of technological superiority suffered a severe blow.
It is in the window of doubt and vulnerability provided by the Challenger's fateful mission that intelligent people may question as never before the purpose of technology and the "infallibility" of modern science. Through the crack in the myth of technological superiority strange winds now blow. In the moonlight of that which transcends scientific rationalism, we may pose the questions: What if the way we are doing things is not the best or wisest? What if we are not the most intelligent civilization known to Earth? Could there have been people smarter, wiser, more advanced than us, who in our smugness we have overlooked? Could there have been a science superior to ours practiced both on this planet and elsewhere? What makes us so sure that scientific materialism is the best technique to wrench answers from a cosmos infinitely more vast and mysterious than the rational mind can comprehend? In other words, what the spectre of technological crisis invokes is a paradigm shift of a genuinely radical nature. Such a shift has been in the air for a long time, thanks to pioneering research in quantum physics, but has needed an experiential jolt to get it grounded.
Throughout the twentieth century, sensitive scientific minds have been attempting to inform themselves about and alert the public to the irrational behavior of the world which rational science tries to observe. Though their message has escaped the war-lords and technocrats whose decision-making power shapes the social order, popularizers of the "new science" like Fritjof Capra, Isaac Bentov, and Gary Zukov have made admirable efforts to communicate the similarity between quantum physics and Eastern mysticism, at least to a critical thinking minority. Indeed, the conclusion to Zukov's The Dancing Wu Li Masters (1979) verges on the unthinkable by declaring that we are approaching the "end of science." Yet even he is incapable of surrendering the notion of the "unresting endeavor and continually progressing development of more and more comprehensive and useful physical theories."
The real "end of science," the long-anticipated, radical paradigm shift means the surrender of the notion of unceasing progress itself. Or at least the surrender of it long enough to see whether there may not be non-physicalistic or non-materialistic sciences that transcend the notion of progress—and non-progress—altogether. Of course, the myth of scientific progress and technological superiority could receive no greater blow than to discover that a more advanced science existed prior to the rise of the myth of progress, practiced by a people who, by modern estimation, were still in the Stone Age. Most specifically, I am referring to a system of thought virtually overlooked by all of the proponents of the "new science." This system of thought is the science known and practiced by the ancient people called the Maya.
The closest example to the system of Mayan science known to the champions of the new science is the Chinese legacy of the I Ching. Even the I Ching, however, has not been fully comprehended by the "new scientists," who, still immersed in the doctrine of progress, have not been able to see it for what it is: the code form of a science based on holonomic resonance rather than atomic physics.
Martin Schönberger in The I Ching and the Genetic Code: The Hidden Key to Life (1973), Robert Anton Wilson in The Illuminati Papers (1980), and my own Earth Ascending (1984) are some of the few efforts that approach the I Ching as an example of a system that is more comprehensive than that of present-day science. As Schönberger puts it, the I Ching represents". . .a world formula with the stature of an order of reality. . .the answer to Heisenberg's quest for those 'anonymous basic forms and polar symmetries of uniform nature'."
Like the world-order system of 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 gauges of superiority or progress. For the Maya, if time exists at all, it is as a circuit from whose common source future and past flow equally, always meeting and being united in the present moment. Mayan science, like the I Ching, can be considered both pre-and post-scientific.
How is it, then, that at this moment of technological crisis and paradigm shift, the Maya invite themselves into our consciousness? Who were—or are the Maya? Where did they come from? What were their achievements? Why did they do what they did? Why did they abandon their civilization at its peak? Where did they go, and why?
While Eastern forms of thought and actual practices—yoga, meditation, flower arranging, martial arts and so forth—have slowly become an increasingly prevalent phenomenon over the past half-century, relentlessly revolutionizing our culture and impacting on our scientific thinking, the Maya have remained enigmatic and remote.
Yet, to evoke the Maya of Central America is at the same time to evoke a curious resonance from the East, from India. After all, Maya is a key Hindu philosophical term meaning "origin of the world" and "world of illusion." The word Maya in Sanskrit is further related to concepts meaning "great," "measure," "mind," "magic," and "mother." Not surprisingly, we find that Maya is the name of the mother of the Buddha. And in the Vedic classic, The Mahabharata, we read that Maya was the name of a noted astrologer-astronomer, magician, and architect, as well as the name of a great wandering tribe of navigators.
Not only in ancient India, home of high metaphysics and spiritual adventure, do we find the name Maya, but also farther to the west. The treasurer of the renowned boy-king of Egypt, Tutankhamen, was named Maya, while in Egyptian philosophy we find the term Mayet, meaning universal world order. In Greek mythology, the seven Pleiades, daughters of Atlas and Pleione and sisters of the Hyades, number among them one called Maia, also known as the brightest star of the constellation Pleiades. And finally, we know that our month of May is derived from the name of the Roman goddess, Maia, "the great one," the goddess of spring, daughter of Faunus and wife of Vulcan.
Returning to the Maya of Central America, we find that their name is derived from the word Mayab, the term given to describe the Yucatan Peninsula, key area of the Mayan bioregional home base. So the question remains: Who were the Maya? Why is it that the name associated with this Central American civilization appears across much of the rest of the world? Is that just coincidence? Where did the Maya come from?
Current anthropological dogma has it that the Maya were part of the large group of Amerindians who crossed the Bering Strait from Asia during the last Ice Age as recently as 12,000 years ago and eventually settled in what is now Central America. To read late Mayan texts like the Popol Vuh, The Book of Chilam Balam, and The Annals of the Cakchiquels, we get the distinct impression that indeed, the Maya arrived from afar, "from the other side of the sea we came to the place called Tulan, where we were begotten and given birth by our mothers and our fathers . . ." (Cakchiquels). Lest one think the matter is simple, we read elsewhere in the same, somewhat garbled text that there were four Tulans:
"From four (places) the people came to Tulan. In the east is one Tulan; another in Xibalbay (the underworld); another in the west where we came ourselves, from the west, and another is where God is (above, heaven). Therefore there were four Tulans."
In examining the foregoing passage, we find that the place of origins or the process of origins described by the Maya in this late text is mandalic, celestial, and cosmic in nature. The Four Tulans represent the solar passage, east and west, as well as a superworld and an underworld. Furthermore, a reading of ancient Mayan and Mexican history and mythology in general shows that Tulan (or Tollan) is an archetypal code name as much as an actual place. What if Tulan describes not necessarily a geographic place, but a process of becoming and point of entry from one world-realm into another? In this regard, the Mayan recollection of origins resembles the Hopi, which describes passage from different worlds, of which the present is the fourth. But what are these worlds? Do they describe earlier stages of life on this planet? Or do they describe cosmic passages simultaneously occurring on this planet and/or elsewhere?
Leaving aside for the moment the question of origins, we find ourselves on firmer ground in contemplating the achievements of the Maya. Unquestionably, the Maya represent one of the great civilizational flowerings of planet Earth. Scattered across the jungles of the Yucatan and the highlands of present-day Guatemala are incredible numbers of ancient cities and temple sites. Towering stepped pyramids, finely laid-out plazas, and ceremonial centers are exquisitely adorned with sculpted stones, covered everywhere with hieroglyphic inscriptions.
Several things strike us about the magnificent Mayan ruins, chief among them being their isolation. Even in relation to the closely connected highland Mexican civilization, the Mayan artistic style is unique. Isolated in the Central American jungles, the Maya appear as aloof as they are remote. Yet in considering their pyramids towering over the jungle tree lines and their intricate hieroglyphics, we are also struck by how late in global history the Maya appear. Almost three thousand years after the peak of pyramid building in Egypt, with whose civilization they rightly beg comparison, the Maya thrust themselves onto the scene.
Even more dramatic than the relatively late rise of Mayan civilization is its sudden abandonment. By A.D. 830, after some 500 to 600 years of intense activity, the principal centers were left to time and the jungle. Of all the puzzles presented by the Maya, this seems to be the greatest one. Though efforts are made to hypothesize internal revolution, drought, or pestilence as a cause of the abandonment of the great centers, there is no convincing proof for any of these theories. The probability still remains, as stunning to our way of thinking as it may be, that the Maya consciously abandoned their civilization at its very peak. If this is the case, we must ask why?
Intimately related to the mystery of the abandonment of the key centers around A.D. 830 is the enigma not only of the meaning of the hieroglyphs but of the calendrical, mathematical, and astronomical data left behind by the Maya. If the Maya had just left behind their architecture and artwork, their civilization would still rank with the highest that humanity has achieved: the Egyptians and the Greeks, the Gupta Dynasty of India, the temples of Java, the T'ang dynasty of China, and the classic Heian dynasty of Japan. Yet, it is their scientific achievements that stand out as much as, if not more than, the harmonic heights of their artwork and continue to astonish us.
Usually, the Mayan scientific achievement is spoken of in terms of its calendrical attainments. The Maya computed the length of the Earth's revolution around the Sun to within a thousandth of a decimal point of the calculations of modern science. This, we are endlessly told, they did without our precision instruments. Not only that, but they kept calendars of the lunation and eclipse cycles; and even more, they maintained calendars recording synodical revolutions and synchronizations of the cycles of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. And, on certain of their monuments, we find the recording of dates and/or events occurring as much as 400,000,000 years in the past. All of this they did with a unique and incredibly simple yet flexible numerical system that counted by twenties (instead of tens) and used only three notational symbols. Why, and to what end?
How does the Mayan calendrical knowledge relate to the mystery of their origins and to the enigma of the abandonment of their major cities by A.D. 830? And where did the Maya go following A.D. 830? Certainly there were those that remained, and yet there is such a clear break prior to the recommencement of Mayan civilization in the late tenth century that it is as if the rupture had been conscious and deliberate. Not only is the break between the so-called New Empire Maya and the pre-A.D. 830 Maya profound, but by the time the Spaniards arrived, it is as if all understanding of the past had been forgotten. And yet the calendar remained. A clue—for whom?
The archaeologists, of course, see the calendar system as just that—a way of recording time. But the question of why so much time is spent recording time remains unanswered. The suspicion dawns that the calendar is more than a calendar. Is the number system, so exquisitely proportioned, also a means for recording harmonic calibrations that relate not just to space-time positionings, but to resonant qualities of being and experience, whose nature our materialistic predisposition blinds us to?
There is no question that in the volumes of literature written about the Maya and their bafflingly precise intellectual accomplishments, few are the writers who approach the matter with anything but the view that Mayan civilization, being a "thing of the past," was not as advanced as ours. The entrenched progressivist view, that the Maya represented one of several streams of civilization struggling against all environmental odds to attain to our level of materialism and science, is the view that informs almost everything said about the Maya. And for this reason, most everything said about the Maya may be dead wrong.
After many years of study and contemplation of the Mayan mystery, I have come to the inescapable conclusion that the Maya cannot be understood with the yardsticks that we have used to measure and judge them. Having long intuitively felt that the purpose of life according to the Maya might have been far different than our materialistic imagination can reckon, I have most recently come to the further conclusion not only that the Maya—at least the Maya whose civilization came to an abrupt halt at its peak in A.D. 830—were smarter than we are, but that their science was well in advance of ours. For this reason, it matters little that they used no metal tools or labor-saving devices such as the wheel (they also had no beasts of burden).
Because they could accomplish so much with so little, the Maya have something very important to teach us in our moment of technological crisis and paradigm shift. Indeed, the Maya may already possess not only the "new" paradigm, but also the scientific knowledge by which that paradigm may be applied. This being so, it may also be not just by chance that the Maya were the last of the ancient streams of civilization to come to flower on this planet. Nor may it be chance that the Maya represent the last overlooked ancient tradition to be examined and understood in the "light" of modern thought. In fact, it may just well be that the time is ripe for a "rediscovery" of the Maya.
In considering all of this, I have come to feel the spiritual presence of the Maya. Uncanny sages of what we call time, masters of synchronization, the Mayan presences chuckle and grin. Of course, the time is right. It has all been mapped, laid out, blueprinted. The clues have been amply left behind.
All that has been wanting is the right frame of mind to look at the clues. The breakdown of the present frame of mind allows the emergence of the possibility of reading the clues and drawing the right conclusions from them—conclusions that may have much to do with steering planetary affairs from a course of extinction to one of transformation.
In preparing the presentation of this text, I am guided by two things: the study of a phenomenon that I have come to understand as a galactic master-code, and the intuition that a dramatic break with the current scientific paradigm is absolutely necessary if we are going to not only survive but transform in the most positive and benign way possible. Having been so long overlooked, the Mayan Factor must be now examined.
The thought of doing this book came to me very suddenly. Yet, as I reflected on it, I realized I had been working with the material for over thirty years. At this stage in my life and in the life of the planet, it is necessary to present clearly, coherently, and honestly that which is true. The ways to truth are manifold. Insight, direct intuition, experience, and revelation are complemented by study, research, testing, and examining. All of these elements have been brought into play in dealing with and presenting the Mayan Factor. But more than anything else I feel it is my duty to present as simply and directly as possible the Mayan Code, the Harmonic Module.
More than a calendar, the Mayan Harmonic Module presented atthis time evokes the image from the I Ching for Hexagram 49:
Revolution (Moulting):
Fire in the lake
The image of REVOLUTION
Thus the superior person sets the calendar in order
And makes the seasons clear.
It is in the interest of setting the calendar in order-the calendar as the cosmically voyaging Maya knew it—and making clear that we are involved in galactic seasons that this book is presented. Armed and reassured with such knowledge, we might set ourselves aright with the Earth and drop our childish and now very dangerous infatuation with the myth of progress and technological superiority. In this lies the import of The Mayan Factor: Path Beyond Technology.
GREAT WHEEL, MANDALA OF PACALVOTAN