The Light of Asia (and the World)

Sir Edwin Arnold (BuddhaNet.net); Wisdom Quarterly

Book The First

The Scripture of the Saviour of the World,

Lord Buddha--Prince Siddartha styled on earth

In Earth and Heavens and Hells Incomparable,

All-honoured, Wisest, Best, most Pitiful;

The Teacher of Nirvana and the Law [Dharma].

Then came he to be born again for [humans].

Setaketu, Tusita world, high in Sense Sphere

Below the highest sphere four Regents sit

Who rule our world, and under them are zones

Nearer, but high, where saintliest spirits dead

Wait thrice ten thousand years, then live again;

And on Lord Buddha, waiting in that sky,

Came for our sakes the five sure signs of birth

So that the Devas knew the signs, and said

"Buddha will go again to help the World."

"Yea!" spake He, "now I go to help the World.

This last of many times; for birth and death

End hence for me and those who learn my Law.

I will go down among the Sakyas,

Under the southward snows of Himalay,

Where pious people live and a just King."

That night the wife of King Suddhodana,

Maya the Queen, asleep beside her Lord,

Dreamed a strange dream; dreamed that a star

from heaven--

Splendid, six-rayed, in colour rosy-pearl,

Whereof the token was an Elephant

Six-tusked and whiter than Vahuka's milk--

Shot through the void and, shining into her,

Entered her womb upon the right. Awaked,

Bliss beyond mortal mother's filled her breast,

And over half the earth a lovely light

Forewent the morn. The strong hills shook; the waves

Sank lulled; all flowers that blow by day came forth

As 't were high noon; down to the farthest hells

Passed the Queen's joy, as when warm sunshine thrills

Wood-glooms to gold, and into all the deeps

A tender whisper pierced. "Oh ye," it said,

"The dead that are to live, the live who die,

 

Setaketu ("White Banner") reborn as Siddhartha ("Wish-Fulfilled") finally awakened.

 

Uprise, and hear, and hope! Buddha is come!"

Whereat in Limbos numberless much peace

Spread, and the world's heart throbbed, and a wind blew

With unknown freshness over lands and seas.

And when the morning dawned, and this was told,

The grey dream-readers said "The dream is good!

The Crab is in conjunction with the Sun;

The Queen shall bear a boy, a holy child

Of wondrous wisdom, profiting all flesh,

Who shall deliver men from ignorance,

Or rule the world, if he will deign to rule." More

• Project Gutenberg: Light of Asia (online reader)

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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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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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Meditation: Will Anything Happen? (cartoon)

June 2010, Wisdom Quarterly

Trent sings "Will Anything Happen?" by Blondie. Daria Morgendorffer sits cross-legged.

   

I always said you could make it. I know what I said, and I meant it. I always liked the way you wandered like a star. I always knew that someday you'd go far. And if you do, will anything happen?

Will it come true, will anything happen? Will light see you again? Light said it'd be through here again. Please don't forget I'm here waiting. Light always said that it would never change like the people that you've met and the places that you've been.
  
And if you do, will anything happen? Will it come true, will anything happen? Will light see you again? Will light see you again?
   
I always said you could make it. Just don't forget that I said it. 'Cause I always liked the way you wandered like a star. And I always knew that someday you'd go far. And if you do, will anything happen? Will it come true, will anything happen? Will light see you again? Will light see you again? Will light see you again? And if I do, will anything happen?

• 

  What is a nimitta? It is a learning or counterpart-sign, a light produced by the mind in meditation that becomes the object only when it becomes established at the point of concentration.
• Attachment, even to the good, is something to abandon. But first make use of it. The sign is a treasure to protect, to cultivate, to bring to culmination. It is associated with bliss. Equanimity awaits.
  

  • The Real Daria (interview)
  • The Secrets of Meditation
    

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The Little Shrub.

This is one of my favorite poems and sounds very much like something a Zen master would say. It reminds me of the teaching to be in the present moment and try to be the best you can be in that moment and not to worry too much about what will come:

"Yes if you can't be a pine on the hill, be a shrub in the valley, but be the best little shrub on the side of the road - be a bush if you can't be a tree.
If you can't be a highway be a trail.
If you can't be a sun be a star.
It isn't by size that you win or fail - be the best at whatever you are."

-Dr Martin Luther King.

James: It's so easy to feel insignificant and worthless in this world that constantly tells us that we aren't good enough, smart enough, pretty enough, rich enough, healthy enough, spiritual enough and on and on. Well I say, enough with the expectations because no matter how hard we try to be perfect it will never be enough because as Buddha taught us this very existence is imperfect. It's so hard to remember this sometimes but it's so true and when it does click for us it is so liberating from our suffering and self-doubts. We must remember that while we might be comparing ourselves to someone else--they are comparing themselves to someone else too.

~Peace to all beings~

PHOTO: Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh.

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