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Showing posts with label kalpa. Show all posts
Showing posts with label kalpa. Show all posts

Thursday, December 20, 2012

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)
Tourists are seen in front of the "Gran Jaguar" Mayan 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 December 21.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
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

Sunday, July 15, 2012

Meditation on Growing Younger (video)

Amber Dorrian, Wisdom Quarterly

 
(Matt Groening/Highvoltageilene)
Buddhism has an interesting teaching. It is redeath. Time is cyclical, circular, spiraling. We imagine a straight line and do not see it bend away to come around again -- in much the same way, but not exactly the same way.
   
Death after death, there is life. Life keeps coming. One grows young again and again and again. What people mostly misunderstand is that it is not us. No one is reborn. What is reborn is a process. The process does not stop, so it cannot really be said to start again with each death and rebirth.
  
What is now? Some body, feelings, perceptions, willed formations, consciousness. They are altering every moment. They do no reoccur but utterly pass away. If we are them, we are dying. If we are something else, an owner or watcher of them, the owning and watching are dying. It's redeath, redeath, redeath.
   
The body passes quickly, but the mind passes much more quickly.
  
And with each death there is "again becoming." For all the aging, sickness, and falling away, there is rearising, health, and again-coming-to-be. What then would it be like to talk to ourselves, to say to the young ignorant version of the future that keeps reiterating?
   
My pets? They're all dead. My friends? Gone. My family? They wished you well. But all of these tend very strongly to come back again. They are not lost to us completely, just in this form, which utterly passes away as they hurtle toward destruction.
  
But what about me? Dead. My consciousness (awareness)? Gone. My feelings? They wished me well.
   
I'll be young again! But it isn't living "forever" if it isn't living for even two moments.
  
In the future I may become male or female or indeterminate (neuter or androgynous), any race, any nationality, any caste, any planet, any form (a deva, being of light, or dense), any kind of being in 31 very general "planes" of existence.
   
What would I say to that newborn? If it is a deva, it comes fully formed without birth parents. Similarly, if I slip into the Downfall, perdition, the Great Waste (subhuman planes of existence), rebirth is immediate, even if it is into an intermediate state, it comes fully formed. But on the human and animal planes, transformation and impermanence are very obvious.
  
Meditate. End all suffering.
There is no need to "meditate" to see youth fleeting. But meditation, whether as contemplation or profound stillness in non-discursive awareness, is necessary to see ourselves cyclically growing younger only to die again.
  
It works in our favor and can be taken for granted only so long as we have wholesome karma to exhaust. When the profitable is exhausted, we painfully face what the Buddha warned about suffering and taking the Dharma for granted as if it were always available to us.

Living Foolishly Now
What "successful" people do on weekends
Down time is the secret weapon of workplace success in a competitive world. Do this in the morning - Why anxiety is good - How to reach your goals

Thursday, July 5, 2012

Koan: The Rhinoceros-Horn Fan

Wisdom Quarterly; The Book of Equanimity
(Tricycle.com)
   
PREFACE TO THE ASSEMBLY
Real rhinoceros fan (Genju/108ZenBooks)
Lands and seas [planets and space] are boundless; yet, they are not apart from right here.
Things and previous aeons, numerous as the dust, all exist right now.
As when one is asked to it face to face, being caught unprepared, one cannot present it.
Tell me: Where is the fault?

MAIN CASE
Attention! One day Enkan summoned his attendant and told him,
"Go out and fetch the rhinoceros-horn fan."
The attendant replied, "The fan is broken."
Enkan said, "If the fan is broken, bring me back the rhinoceros."
The attendant made no reply.
   
      Later, commenting on this case, Shifuku drew a circle
      and wrote within it the character for "ox" [True Nature].

APPRECIATORY VERSE
Break the fan and look for the rhinoceros.
The word within the circle has prior significance.
Who knows the thousand years' darkness of the new moon?
It subtly turns into autumn's harvest moon.