By Cathy Lynn Pagano
Somalilandsun – Today is the end of one of the Mayan calendars. As many of you know, the Maya’s had three separate corresponding calendars.
The Tzolkin (divine calendar) and the Haab (civil calendar) are secular calendars, in which time is cyclical and a set number of days have to occur before a new cycle can begin.
The Long Count is the third calendar and it is an astronomical calendar which was used to track longer periods of time, what the Maya called the universal cycle.
In fact, the end of this Mayan Calendar (archeologists have discovered Mayan calendars that go beyond this date) on December 21, 2012 is not about the end of the world but about the simultaneous ending of all these calendars. They all turn over at once and come back to zero. For the Maya, the cosmic clock is reset. It’s time to set the world in order again. And then time moves forward again. But now it’s a new time, a new beginning. Perhaps even a new creation.
Whatever you believe about this cosmic event, I invite you to use it as a marker, a marker in time where you get to choose what you want the future to look like. During the last 25 years since 1987’s Harmonic Convergence, many of us around the world have come together to pray, to visualize and to feel our unity. Scientific theory supports us doing this. We are all connected. So the fact that we’re all aware of and awake to this day will generate something new. That’s what concentrated energy does. It breaks through or manifests or transforms.
The Mayan Calendar presents us with a special mystical marker, a moment in time when our individual consciousness can shift. Each of us must make a choice about what kind of shift we want to make, whether or not something comes to help or hinder us from the vast mystery of the universe. This is a time to take responsibility, a time for humanity to begin to make different, conscious decisions about what kind of world we want to live in. So it begins within each of us. And then our choices are added to the great ocean of everyone else’s choices. There will be many who are unconscious that they have a choice, and so they will stay stuck in a dead story and live in fear of the unknown. Others will make different choices. Conscious choices will balance those stories of the fear of change. Conscious choices come from being open to our inner spirit, which calls us to action, to create a different future for our children and ourselves.
Our collective beliefs have made this time a mythical time. We have taken on a mythology to mark a hoped-for change, a change that will bring peace, unity and consciousness to our world. However, when we live in mythic times, we need to take on our mythic identity. Whether spaceships or dragonriders descend on us from the sky, we each have our own part to play in the story of change. Each of us gets to choose if we want to shift our awareness from me to we, from fear to courage, from hate to love, from rationality to imagination, from limitation to creativity. In mythic, world-changing times, each of us has a destiny to play out, a purpose to pursue. And to meet our destiny, we have to put ourselves in the mythic story.
We lost a vital part of our human nature when we shut down our imaginations and settled for a rational story about life and death. We lost the mythic dimensions of our lives, the very part of us that creates a full and creative life. All ancient cultures looked to the sky for answers to life’s questions. They wrote stories across our night sky that comforted them and grounded them in the universe. And while science explores the mechanics of the universe, it does not give it meaning, as the old stories did. Patriarchy’s extremely rational worldview believed it was getting rid of superstition; instead, it shut down the imagination, our vital link with the rest of the cosmos.
Our stories give us the inspiration to create what we imagine. But if our stories no longer inspire us, it leads to the death of the imagination, the mind and ultimately the heart. Don’t doubt that these inner “deaths’ contribute to the senseless violence erupting in our culture. Look at the story we’ve been “living in’–our modern worldview of patriarchy–the rule of the fathers (meaning old white guys). Their story is comprised of three elements: competition, domination, separation. It’s a killing mentality and it’s killing our world and our children.
There are other ways to live in the world. Especially if we honor the feminine values of life: love, partnership, unity. Feminine wisdom can transform patriarchal competition into the freedom to shine, its will to power into the right use of power, and its insistence on personal autonomy into a search for our genuine uniqueness. When we learn to live in balance, we see the world through new eyes. We grow up and take responsibility for life.
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors
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Cathy writes about political, psychological/spiritual, and cultural issues.
Cathy Pagano, M.A., C.E.C, is a Jungian Psychotherapist, Astrologer , Wisdom Life Coach , teacher and storyteller.
Cathy works with the tools of the imagination – dreams, alchemy, myths, astrology, symbolic language, storytelling, ritual – to awaken the Soul’s wisdom.
I believe that Americans are called to a higher consciousness at this point in our history. We are called on to live up to our ideals and create the country our forefathers imagined. Inner consciousness needs to be acted upon for social justice.
Cathy believes that our writers and artists must take up our responsibility to create art that inspires, teaches and heals our humanity. She has a weekly internet radio show on storytelling called The Bard’s Grove on BlogtalkRadio.
