The Day the World (Cycle) Ended!

Seven, Amber Dorrian, Xochitl, Wisdom Quarterly COUNTDOWN RESET: -144,000

Graphic video re-enactment of the end of a major Mayan cycle... followed by a new cycle (NES)

Aztec warrior at Kukulkan during 12-21-12 Mayan celebrations (ABC.net.au)

 

Pyramids exist all over the world (Klaus Dona)

"Told You So"? That would be a distasteful title. Wisdom Quarterly said the world would end, and has it not?

 

Look around and suddenly see that the world is not the same: It's similar but not identical. Never to return, all phenomena is hurtling toward destruction, just as we were warned in the Buddha's final admonition. On that day the Buddha encouraged the devas and ascetics gathered around him before he blissfully reclined into final nirvana:

"Behold now, I exhort you: All compounded things are subject to vanish. Strive with earnestness!"

All "conditioned phenomena" are that way. (Conditioned? Composite things, heaps that depend on supporting conditions, constituents, parts). The world is on fire! But to say so, that is not something anyone ordinarily wants to hear.

We desire and want to grasp and cling to what we desire. We are hurt to find that it is ALL going away, ALL swirling down the drain, ALL perishing just as soon as it arises. What all?

All the world we have ever known, ever experienced here on this plane and every other plane as well.

Waiting for Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca

That is not to say everything is doomed. There is a further shore beyond these planes we cycle through. There is peace. There is rest. There is the non-arising, the not-coming-to-be of what is perishable and subject to suffering.

One can know-and-see it in this very life. Know what? The going, the going, the going beyond, the going altogether beyond. Oh, what an awakening! So it would be.

How will we see it, how will we awaken, how will we go from here to there and make an end of all misery?

Welcome to the New Age!

David Wilcock/Edgar Cayce before and after 2012 (divinecosmos.com)

Young Goodman Brown's vision (BK)

One night Young Goodman Brown ventured into the forest adjacent to old Salem town. There he saw a vision of evil -- the "good" town folk engaged in a ritual with a devil. The preacher welcomed the circle: "Depending upon one another's hearts, ye had still hoped that virtue were not all a dream. Now ye are undeceived! ...Welcome again, my children, to the communion of your race."

Were it so, the world could not stand. For, according to the Buddha, the world has "four protectors" (Sigalovada Sutra). These are generosity, kind words, compassionate helpfulness, and impartiality. So the world goes on. But "going on" means constantly ending. Everything is perishing. What is here to hold on to? And we haven't even understood this world.
 

"Generous, of sweet speech, Helpful, and impartial to all – By these four fixed, the world goes round As the linchpin serves the moving cart. If these in the world were not found Then this repercussion would redound: Neither mother nor father could expect From children proper honor and respect. But since these four winning ways The wise approve and display, They to eminence have attained With praise and honor rightly gained"
 (The Buddha, closing verse, "Advice to Householders," DN 31).

• VIDEO: Hidden History of Human Race (Klaus Dona)
• Nirbiru is approaching to disrupt our atmosphere
• Nirbiru: What NASA knows but isn't telling us (Camelot)
• Zecharia Sitchin on the Mayan Calendar
• Sitchin made it very clear that the Mayans made no prophecies about destruction. The Mayan Calendar does not represent the end of the world. It is a long-form count (cycles of 144,000 days) between an event that occurred in 3113 BC and its anticipated reoccurrence. What event? The coming of the sky god (winged serpent, naga king) Quetzalcoatl. The date may actually be 2060 not 2012.

Project Avalon presents Klaus Dona with astounding Earth artifacts

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Dec. 21, 2012: The End of Time? (video)

Xochitl, Dhr. Seven, Ashley Wells, Wisdom Quarterly; NPR.org; COUNTDOWN: -1

Official Countdown Clock

Marshall Masters, 2012 researcher and author, offers an in-depth look at the predictions made in a crop circled formation he calls the "2012 Star Map of Doom."

Known as Avebury 2008, it tells us that on Dec. 21, 2012, we will begin to experience the onset of a protracted global catastrophe. It will last for years and will include a pole shift, such as the one predicted by America's "sleeping prophet" Edgar Cayce.

For the readers of Marshall's book, Crossing the Cusp: Surviving the Edgar Cayce Pole Shift, this video offers an in-depth back story not included in the book.

Maya expert: "End of Times" is our idea, not the ancients'
Bill Chappell (The Two-Way, NPR)
It is Dec. 20, 2012 -- and citizens of Earth are panicking, consumed by the idea that the world will end [tomorrow]  Friday, something they say was predicted by Mayan astronomers. Of course, most people are not panicking, and Maya expert David Stuart says no one should. The calendar, he says, has plenty of room to go. In an interview airing on Thursday's Morning Edition, David Greene asks archaeologist Stuart, who helped translate influential ancient Mayan hieroglyphs in 1996, if he thinks the world will end on Dec. 21st. LISTEN

• PHOTO: Tourists in front of the "Gran Jaguar" Mayan pyramid temple at the Tikal archaeological site in Guatemala, where ceremonies will be held to celebrate the end of the Mayan cycle known as Baktun 13 and the start of the new Maya Era on Dec. 21.

Safe from the Apocalypse in Europe

In a French village, protection from the apocalypse

Eleanor Beardsley (UFOs and ETs on NPR.org)

Bugarach where UFO and ET conspiracies gather

Friday is the last day of a 5,125-year cycle in the Mayan calendar, sparking talk about the possible end of the world. About two years ago, a rumor began circulating on the Internet that the French village of Bugarach, population 200, would be the only place to survive this apocalypse. But despite many news stories of people flocking to the village, less than two weeks before "doomsday," there was no one on the streets. Houses were shuttered against the cold.... For 40 years, [the mayor] says, people have been coming here looking for UFOs and extraterrestrials or the healing power of the mountain. "And now add this Mayan rumor and the buzz created on the Internet..." LISTEN

 

Buddhist and Mayan Time

Wisdom Quarterly (COMMENTARY)

Mayan and Mesoamerican calendars are very sophisticated (freewebs.com).

   

Studying and calculating (lajhsslab.com)

Twenty-six hundred years ago the Buddha -- like the ancient Vedic seers of the Indus River Valley Civilization and the great Mayan Empire (part of a series of great cultures such as the Aztecs, Toltec, Olmecs, Incans, etc.) -- spoke of cycles of time. In Sanskrit these are referred to as kalpas. 

 

There are various cycles, all confusingly called kalpas. In detail, they are distinguished as great kalpas (maha kalpas), those of indeterminate length, and so on. Translated as "aeons," they break down into ages and epochs and other similar cycles.

 

In just the same way, the Mayan calendar is not simply a lunar-cycle annual timekeeper, or tzolkin with a 260-day cycle. The Mayan civilization's long-count calendar has cycles within cycles. The most important represents a recurring period of 26,000 years calculated by the precession of the equinoxes. 

 

How to read the Mayan calendar

But the baktun is perhaps the best known. All that is happening in speaking of these cycles covering immense periods is illustrating the repetition of tendencies. Things are cyclical but not circular; they spiral. Sometimes they spiral out of control, yet they right themselves in time. Things devolve and evolve again. This is the intrinsic nature of samsara, the "Wheel of Life and Death." 

 

We are now, and we will be again. However, and this is the unimaginable and unacceptable thing, it will not be us as such. Who will be came from us. It is us again, but we will not be the same. We will die, we are dying, and what we hold dear is lost here. But what we have been will come to meet us again (and again and again...).

  

Connecting with the Maya in Mexico (mexicotoday.org)

Things fall apart at every moment, and in the next moment something re-arises. What re-arises is almost the same but NOT quite identical. 

So the stream goes with everything dying, something being reborn, but it is not us. Yet, we identify with and cling to what is now just as we identify and cling with what is yet to come. 

 

Ultimately, we are not all this -- these forms, feelings, perceptions, formations, or consciousnesses -- and we will not be that either. But in the smoldering haze of ignorance it will seem that way, driven by fires of lust and the embers of fear/resentment. Far better, then, would it be to occupy ourselves with doing something about these three defiling influences -- greed, hatred, and delusion.

(Divine Cosmos) Edgar Cayce, reborn as David Wilcock, on prophecy

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The Penultimate Day: Mayan Calendar (sutra)

Ashley Wells, Dhr. Seven, Amber Dorrian, Xochitl, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly, COUNTDOWN: -2

Siddhartha meets Mara under the Bodhi tree the night before the dawn of enlightenment.

"Therefore, since the world has still/Much good, but much less good than ill,/And while the sun and moon endure,/Luck's a chance, but trouble's sure,/I'd face it as a wise man would,/And train for ill and not for good./But take it: if the smack is sour/The better for the embittered hour;/It will do good to heart and head..." (A.E. Housman).

 
Well, this just about does it for us in the Old Age. "Any last words, Zaphod?" "No." "Trillian?" "No."

 

"I don't have any either," Arthur Dent exclaimed. 

"We figured that, monkey man."

"You, Ford?" "Well, I find the prospect of death contracts the mind wonderfully."

Fortunately, Trillian's been meditating. So she's saved, and her eventual liberation is guaranteed. Not as much can be said for the rest of us. We did make some merit, good karma, and that's a comfort.

 

(Dhammalokasuttas, Perth, Australia) Ajahn Brahmali explains the discourse on "Fear and Dread" (Bhayabherava Sutta, Middle Length Discourses 4).

Fear not for fear weakens one. Love.

Near the end, this is the end, what to do as it ends? Shall we glance at the nice town, review its war plan, tour the mass graves? If we know there's nothing to fear but this very fear itself, how shall we dispel the fear? It is a problem as old as ancient India. At that time the Buddha dispelled fear by delivering this sutra.  

 

Study Guide: Discourse on Fear and Dread
Sati Center for Buddhist Studies Sutta Study Program 2008-2009 (edited)

Fearless mudra (samuizoom.com)

The Pali commentary to this discourse explains that if someone attaining meditative absorption (jhana) with a white disk (kasina), focusing until whiteness fills the mind, emerges from absorption unexpectedly at night then he or she might mistakenly think it is daytime. But this explanation seems forced. 

Another explanation is that a mistake was made during the [memorization, repeating, and] transmission of this part of this discourse. In other words, perhaps the text originally had something that made better sense.

This theory is supported by the fact that the Chinese version has alternative wording:

 

Abhaya gesture (mesosyn.com)

“Both day and night, some recluses do not understand the path of the Dharma.” It also has a different description of the third knowledge (Section 31). It contains no mention of the Four Noble Truths or the fourfold formula for the taints (defilements of heart/mind).

The Chinese (EA 31.1) simply has: “When my mind became composed, purified, clarified, without blemish, without defilement, grown soft and workable, fixed, and immovable, I called to mind knowledge to eliminate the taints. Then I truly knew suffering” (T125 p666c15).
 

Given the centrality of the Four Noble Truths and the importance of the Buddha’s enlightenment, it seems unlikely that this would have been dropped during transmission. It is more likely that it was added to the Pali version sometime after the original composition. Some support for this idea is found in MN 6 (Section 19), MN12 (Section 19)... More
 

Penultimate?

(Wonderlane/flickr.com)

"Next to last." That's not today. That's not even tomorrow. We're always living in the last moment, because every moment ends with a falling phase. If we could see that, we would not cling. But we do not see that, so we fear (a kind of hate). Or we desire. Or we become confused. And in our aversion-attraction-delusion, we grasp. Then we cling. And so are born all manner of troubles. Fear not. Love more. Sit in self-development to quicken the personal evolution that is trying to happen. Let the solstice, the New age, the advent of the next cycle help speed up the process.

• Mayan Calendar may not end in our 2012
• PHOTOS: Life in Labrang Monastery, Tibet
• Watch Mt. Everest melt (Himalayan heat) 
• Sherpa: climate chaos is ruining Everest
• Fearless Feng Shui in the home
• The art of Sam Antonio Photography
• Atheists suffer persecution

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What if the "apocalypse" is a fiscal cliff?

Harry Shearer ("Monty Burns," The Simpsons); Occupy; Wisdom Quarterly, COUNTDOWN: -3

Still reeling from the results of the presidential election, Burns tries to explain the upcoming "fiscal cliff." Although it is a creation of the mainstream media, we are all talking about it as a reality. Why would the MSM promote fear and loathing with this fiction? It is because now any eventuality, any fiscal fiasco, can be used as a pretext for war, austerity, police state surveillance and other measures... for depriving the needy and further enriching the greedy. But never mind. Look, over there, Justin! Stars! Hot girls!

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2012 Mayan meditation on Death

Dhr. Seven, Amber Dorrian, Xochitl, Wisdom Quarterly (COUNTDOWN CLOCK: -8)

Mayan meditator sits cross-legged in earth-witnessing gesture (news.discovery.com)

World knows (indianetzone)

Buddhism came to America long enough ago to affect the various empires that ruled what is now Mexico and Central America -- the Maya and Aztecs, possibly the Olmecs, Toltecs, and other predecessors as well. 

"Impossible! Preposterous!" those who have not read How the Swans Came to the Lake: A Narrative History of Buddhism in America  (Rick Fields, Shambhala) will say. But those who have read it will understand that the country Guatemala may derive from the name Gautama (the Buddha's surname) + mala (meditation beads, rosary). 

 

"Maya" (Mayans) comes from the Buddha's beautiful mother, Maya. The word literally means "illusion," a nod to her illusory/unreal/too-goo-t-be-true beauty. So much of our Western culture is doubly influenced by Buddhism without most of the Western world noticing. (Scholars in the past may well have discovered this, but they buried the finding to prop up Christendom and exaggerated the East-West divide).

Buddhism entered ancient Greece, the cradle of Western civilization, before going to China. 

 

What will 12-21-12 mean? A new cycle.

Moreover, Alexander the Great created a united Indo-Greco empire that included parts of northwestern India as a Hellenistic realm (Bactria, Scythia, Sogdiana, Parthia, etc.). This occasioned a great cultural exchange, East (India and beyond) and West (now called Central Asia but once ancient Greece), planting many of the precious ideas we take as uniquely Greek contributions:

Democracy and the atomic theory, which the Buddha taught as the Monastic Order's Disciplinary Code (the parliamentary procedures regulating the Sangha) and kalapas or the theory that qualitatively different elementary particles form the basis of materiality. That is only the beginning.

 

"Do not let craving for pleasure distract you from meditation or the Path. Free yourself instead from both pleasure and pain" (H-K-D/flickr.com).

 
All of this may seem impossibly difficult to accept. But it is in line with the Buddha's claim that there are Four Imponderables, the first of which is the extent of the influence of a samma-sam-buddha (a supremely awakened teacher of liberation from all suffering). 

The Mahayana message -- having formed in India and been imported by China, which sent missionaries to the holy land to gather more of this marvelous Dharma -- took Eastern teachings attributed to "the Light of the East" out into the world.

But by this time the Dharma was already successfully being supplanted by Brahmanism (later folded into Hinduism) ideas the Buddha had troubled himself greatly to correct. 

Therefore, Mahayana Buddhism, early Christianity, and modern Hinduism have a great deal in common. It is not coincidence. They all took and blended the historical Buddha's message combining it with Vedantic Brahmanism and Mithraism (Zoroastrianism of Thus Spake Zarathustra fame).

Meditation
Okay. That's the backdrop. Now the question is, How to meditate? There is an old-timey Southern Christian saying: "Everyone wants to go to heaven, but no one wants to die."

How can we enter the new without leaving behind the old? 

The New Age awaits. And we ourselves are ready to go. But, oh, the baggage! Let go, let go, let go, repeating "letting go" is not letting go. We CANNOT let go as a simple act of will. However, here is something we can do, something the Buddha recommended.

Star Trek's Spock, the West's idea of exotic Eastern "cool" (anhedonia)

 

Spock and Modernism (Age of Intuition)

It was a brilliant realization Siddhartha had under the Bodhi tree. Why not reflect on the unsavory aspects of the things we are attached to that hold us behind? All things have multiple aspects, savory and unsavory, a flipside, a hidden danger. We struggle to keep the pleasant in mind, fall into depression not being able to ignore the unpleasant. But there is a better way, even better than Spock-like dispassion. Let's look at the repulsive (asubha) with a view to letting the mind/heart shake itself free of all bonds.
  

WARNING: Foul! Not suitable for any age! Meditators only!

 
Lust, Lust, Lust

"Lust, lust,lust!"

What are we attached to? Bodies? Lust for form, beauty, sensuality? Most of us are attached to something as basic as this.
 
(A recent scientific study found that Americans like Sex, Alcohol, and other distracting pleasures best. Science can be fun if this constitutes a study. Of course, pleasant distractions are no solution).

Pleasure is fun, and we've had tons of fun, not only in this life but in countless lives before this. The pain has been enormous. At some time it gets to feeling pointless and unprofitable. Things can happen so that great suffering comes our way, we forget what we've learned, and we swirl out of control on a downward spiral. That is a danger during the good times.

(death skull/tumblr.com)

Becoming a partial "saint" (stream entry and beyond) in Buddhism is not the end of pleasure. Sakka, ruler of the devas, lives in the Sense Sphere space world enjoying a great deal of sensual pleasure. And yet, for all that, he is destined for complete freedom (nirvana) without ever being reborn below the human plane. Why? He is a stream-enterer assured of complete enlightenment within seven lives.

Reflecting on the 32 parts of the body instantly cures craving and pining for sensual lusts. (The way to bring lust back is unwise reflection on the attractive aspects of bodies, but neglect and carelessness also work very well). 

Moreover, reflecting on the inevitability of death -- or better yet contemplating the death that is happening right now and cannot be stopped or slowed down, which is the knowing-and-seeing of anicca or "radical impermanence" -- has a wonderful healing effect: 

For a moment, maybe only an instant, the mind/heart lets go!

It opts not to cling to the (partly) repulsive, the utterly futile, the insidiously painful.

Don't worry; ignorance and illusion quickly reassert themselves, and we can know something full well in the mind without being affected in the heart: We just ignore until we forget, and the veil comes over our eyes us again. So this is a very safe meditation. 

The only way to get it to work permanently is to develop neighborhood-concentration or full-absorption (jhana) first followed by insight-practice (vipassana) based on the at purifying-intensifying meditative foundation.

A beautiful death? (Zemotion.Deviantart.com/Zhangjingna.com)

Reflecting on Death
(10 Mindful Recollections, Path of Purification, VII)

(KenLeePhotography.com)

''Recollection of death, developed and frequently practiced, yields great reward, great blessing, has deathlessness (nirvana) as its goal and object. But how may such recollection be developed?

"As soon as the day declines, or as the night vanishes and the day is breaking, the meditator reflects: 'Truly, there are many possibilities for me to die: I may be bitten by a snake or stung by a scorpion or a centipede, and thereby lose my life. This would be an obstacle for me. Or I may stumble and fall to the ground, or food eaten may not agree with me; or bile, phlegm, and piercing bodily gases may become disturbed, or people or ghosts may attack me, and I may lose my life. This would be an obstacle for me.' Then one has to consider: 'Are there still to be found in me unsubdued harmful, unwholesome things which, if I should die today or tonight, might lead me to suffering?' If one understands that this is the case, one should use the utmost resolution, energy, effort, endeavor, steadfastness, diligence, attentiveness, and clear-mindedness in order to overcome these harmful, unwholesome things" (A VIII, 74). More

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Mayan Calendar may not end in our 2012

Dhr. Seven, Wisdom Quarterly; LiveScience.com; Kevin Todeschi (A.R.E.) UPDATED

The Maya had calendars and  time "synchronizers," not unlike this Aztec version. They do not correspond to our degenerate Gregorian calendar. For our simplistic chart was designed to distance us from cycles associated with the stars, planets, astrology, and the 13 annual phases of the Moon.

How to read the calendar

Predictions about the Mayan calendar may be greatly exaggerated, which is to say: The world may not be coming to an end on December 21, 2012.

(Needless frenzy? Do we remember demanding toxic, autism-inducing "swine flu" vaccinations for our kids -- creating a profit bonanza for pharmaceutical companies and giving governments greater control?)

• Mayan Calendar: Official Countdown (clock)
• The REAL Mayan Calendar
• Another brick in the Mayan Calendar mystery 
• More on the Maya

But a chapter in a new textbook, Calendars and Years II: Astronomy and Time in the Ancient and Medieval World (Oxbow Books, 2010), could throw off all those ominously titled Discovery Channel specials. According to Live Science, Professor Gerardo Aldana of the University of California at Santa Barbara writes that methods for converting the Mayan calendar to the popular Gregorian calendar are inaccurate by 50 to 100 years. More

• Mayan Tzolkin calendar glyphs and amino acids
• PHOTO: Mayan calendar crop circle?
• Astronomers find the oldest galaxy so far (NPR)
• Remembering "past lives" with Dr. Weiss, M.D.

The Tzolkin: A Religious Time Keeper
Wisdom Quarterly (COMMENTARY)

Tzolkin (mayanmajix.com)

The Tzolkin ("Sacred") Synchronary was not a calendar as such. It used a 260-day cycle in use throughout Mesoamerica and not only by the Maya. The sky "gods" (Buddhist akasha-deva and/or asura extraterrestrial visitors) provided it. 

The Maya's startlingly advanced society -- like that of the Khmer empire centered in Cambodia but extending its influence throughout Southeast Asia (like that of the Mesoamerican Olmecs, Toltecs, and Aztecs on this continent) -- was consumed by reptilians (Buddhist nagas). They are still here influencing human affairs.

The Tzolkin may be the oldest "calendar" in the Mayan system of calendars and may have been the most important. The others kept track of cosmic cycles of time (Buddhist kalpas), time spans too enormous to be of significance for short-lived human cultures. But they were very important to extraterrestrials.

But that the world's ancient "myths" could be more history than fantasy is simply too hard for modern earthlings to believe. So why talk about it? Better to worry needlessly about Doomsday or dismiss all Mayan Calendar talk as a hoax. However, the America's "Sleeping Prophet," Edgar Cayce, had much to say about the shift to a New Age, which the Maya (Mayans) framed not as the end of this world but the end of that cycle.

Edgar Cayce on 2012

 Edgar Cayce (edgarcaycecatalog.org)

To the most famous American psychic of all time, 2012 is only the arrival of a New Age -- according to Kevin Todeschi, executive director and CEO of Edgar Cayce's A.R.E. (Association for Research and Enlightenment).

The Brave New World Order is not about the supremacy of some nations over others. Instead, it is about a new focus for the world as a whole. We are caretakers of one another. Cayce's readings describe that responsibility in this way:

• "Make of thine OWN heart an understanding that thou must answer for thine own brother, for thine own neighbor! And who is thine neighbor? He that lives next door, or he that lives on the other side of the world? He, rather, that is in NEED of understanding! He who has faltered; he who has fallen even by the way. HE is thine neighbor, and thou must answer for him!" (Edgar Cayce Reading #3976-8)

The next age, the new cycle -- starting on December 21, 2012 -- will eventually embody an understanding of this focus. Welcome to the Age of Aquarius.

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