Finally, I get to blog about 2012. (All 2012 posts here) Over the next few days, I'll post as often as possible to talk about the solstice, 2012. Whatever this is, it's a great reason to dig through a lot of rich imagery and powerful ideas. Please use the comments thread to elaborate ( Also, sign up for email blog alerts, and follow @ZenGlop on the Twitter.)
I'm not going to call it the Coming Mayan Apocalypse. I'm not going to call it The End of the World, either. Every moment is the End of The World, so nothing special about 06:11 AM EST, December 21 2012. I don't think I've ever thought there was a prophetic catastrophe on its way.
Although we've been through various planetary alignments together - to a soundtrack of bleeping/blurping music - including a rioutous reading of R J Stewarts small but powerful book The Prophecies of Merlin, still I'm not sure that anyone I've known has really thought that either.
This is a riff, an improvisation. Nobody knows anything, but all these shiny objects in the air - ideas cast up like sycamores, clouds of whirling seeds falling in patterns complex and unpredictable. I've got a stack of books (next to Merlin), including Teilhard de Chardin, John Michell, Rupert Sheldrake. Alan Watts. A bit of Stephen Hawking, although I'm better of with Brian Greene , and the source physicists didn't write atractive books for lay people. James Joyce for a laugh, and some American Civil war stuff, just because that's what I'm reading right now so why mess with it just because we're facing the end of time (I'll have that on the record player also, Messiaen).
Those guys are great, with lots of mileage. But I will keep returning to Carl Jung and Terrence McKenna. Carl Jung sets up a profound model for thinking about UFOs in his monograph Flying Saucers: A modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, and I'll propose using something similar to talk about 2012.
"If we close our eyes a little so as to overlook certain details, it is possible to side with the reasonable opinion of the majority ..., and to regard the thousands of UFO reports and the uproar they have created as a visionary rumour, to be treated accordingly. They would then boil down, objectively, to an admittedly impressive collection of mistaken observations and conclusions into which subjective psychic assumptions have been projected (my italics)."
Jung identifies the process of projection, where the psychic form "extrapolates it's contents into an object" . Up, down, all around or singing the blues, there's a load of psychic form extrapolated on to the idea of 2012. In Hollywood movies. In quiet disquisition late night on the fire escape. Everywhere in between. It is important that the 'object' could begin as either a psychic, or as a physical phenomenon. That disctinction isn't useful so much in the discussion of the UFO phenomenon, and it isn't useful so much in talking about the 2012 meme.
And '2012' is a meme in the strongest and strangest sense of the word. NASA gives primary source to Terrence McKenna:
Dennis and Terence McKenna discussed it in The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching. That book at least got the Baktun-13 end date right: Dec. 21, 2012. It also noted that the date is the winter solstice, when the Sun will be "in the constellation Sagittarius, only about 3 degrees from the Galactic Center, which, also coincidentally, is within 2 degrees of the ecliptic." The McKennas continued, "Because the winter solstice node is precessing, it is moving closer and closer to the point on the ecliptic where it will eclipse the galactic center." In reality this event will never happen, but it hardly matters. The McKennas linked the whole arrangement with the concept of renewal and called 2012 a moment of "potential transformative opportunity."
The Mayan calendar is actually incidental to the insight that Mckenna was writing about, which is the Timewave. More on that in the next post. I first heard of Terrence McKenna in 1992, close enough to 20 years ago. (That fact alone baffles me more than the immanent end of time. ) I heard him in a track by The Shamen:
What does he say here - he says an awful lot, which I'll keep coming back to. But this first:
It's almost as though this object in hyperspace - glittering in hyperspace - throws off reflections of itself which actually ricochet into the past illuminating this mystic, inspiring that saint or visionary.
I love that image. This object, whatever an 'object' is when it doesn't reside in time/space, shooting off sparks, substance raining down into becoming. Beautiful.
McKenna also talks about history as the "shockwave of the eschaton". It's wildly sexy. I've used the word ZenGlop to capture what I feel when I think through the idea of the eschatological object. ZenGlop....good name for a band, or a blog. Or maybe a brand new puppy dog?
Anyway. Thursday night heading in to dawn on Friday morning, I'm going to be sitting, perhaps meditating, perhaps sleeping. Listening to Messiaen, drinking tea.
'Substance raining down into becoming.' I really like that, too.
Posted by: Kathryn Kane | December 20, 2012 at 09:31 AM