Copyright 2010
The final Mayan small cycle prior to the close of their great cycle, and its corresponding world change in 2012, is due to run for two years from September 23, 2010 until it finally closes at the winter solstice on Dec 21st 2012. Carlos Barrios, a Mayan elder and priest, identifies this final two years as a Cycle of Definition. In his The Book of Destiny Barrios identifies it as “a time of cleansing, when all of the garbage in our minds, all of our consumerism will be cleared away, and replaced with a resurgence of true spirituality and a renewed respect for ourselves and everyone else on this planet.” The function of this cycle of definition is to clarify distinctions between truth and illusion. This is needed to prepare the mass mind to open and receive the first rays of dawn of the great new Mayan Fifth Sun.
Mayan cosmologists use the concept of a Sun to characterize a 5,200 yearlong cosmic cycle in planetary evolution. Their “suns” describe the central cosmic agenda which is unfolding within humanity during that particular cycle.
We shall see that when it comes to the new Mayan Fifth Sun, which dawns in 2012, the nomenclature “Sun” enjoys a qualitatively deeper meaning. For in an as yet unknown and very unfamiliar way the Mayan Fifth Sun promises to be what is known as a “spiritual sun.” As such it is will come to be felt to be even closer to us than the physical sun. Just as our physical sun has a solar wind, a spiritual sun has a divine wind. Perhaps the most noteworthy quality of a spiritual sun is what we can call its esoteric self-awareness. Its self-knowing subjectivity lends both vivacity and authority to the wind that blows inside our spirits. As it births itself inside us it seduces us into harmony with itself. This sun is expected to form the internal organizing principle of a major new cosmic cycle in human culture. In so doing it will manifest its own spiritual cosmology and become the fountainhead of all living poetry and culture.
The sun is so majestic it pushes its own bow wave towards us. In the hour or so before dawn the eastern sky steadily grows lighter. The tone and feel of the new day can be detected in the quality of solar energy that lights up the sky even before the sun can be seen. Above us the solar wind is pushing into our atmosphere a wide spectrum of subtle energies. The sky above awakens us and tells us of what is to come. We call it dawn.
So too with the Fifth Sun. Its pre-dawn bow wave sweeps through the sky above our heads, while the majority of us still lie in darkness, sleeping. The solar wind that washes all around us from the Mayan Fifth Sun is a divine wind. And it has a striking feature. Because it is a new spiritual sun, its particular radiance is as yet beyond our experience. It cannot be adequately anticipated. The cosmic wind from the new Mayan Sun strikes our mental habits obliquely. Coming from a place that is new and different, it can only be culturally insurgent. It is the essence of revolution.
So, what do the Mayan Elders tell us about this new Fifth Sun?
Barrios again. The previous four worlds (suns) have each been dominated by a single, specific element: Air Fire, Water or Earth. The fifth Sun will be governed not by an element but by ether. Ether is a rarified property thought to fill the upper reaches of space, beyond the earth. Ethereal is “of the heavens.” In this telling, ether being celestial lacks material substance. Yet it is no less real than any of the four elements. It radiates wide frequency energy waves that penetrate throughout the third dimension.
Ether will govern by combining with the other four elements on a higher level. Fire, Earth, Air and Water will act together in a subtle manifestation, activating full consciousness in Mother Earth and humanity. This is an uplifted anabolic fusion of polarities. For joining and fusion are priority values in the morning of the Fifth Sun. Metaphorically, Ether permeates all finite separations and erotically vibrates them into a new unity: that unity being stabilized by heaven. It is to be a time of supreme spiritual balance. This includes the revolutionary experience of fully developed male and female, both standing in conscious balance together. Barrios emphasizes “that neither the feminine nor the masculine will be supreme, but that the two energies will be equally balanced. The two will support one another, and the qualities in one will elevate the qualities in the other.”
Mayan elders note with understanding that their own cosmological interpretations regarding humanity’s immediate future are frequently identifiable in other wisdom traditions. They see other cultures are saying something very comparable.
Most interestingly, we can now see that the Mayan worldview intersects very creatively with a particular European wisdom tradition. Jungian transpersonal psychology has now accumulated two generations of practical field experience. It stands out as a dynamic contemporary wisdom tradition. These two traditions illuminate each other. Metaphorical descriptions of the Fifth Sun given to us by the Mayan elders are readily recognizable images of what Jungian psychologists call the Inner Self. Here is the ancient Greek Anthropos, the cosmic prototype world man/woman; the divine Adam. It is the World-Self. It embodies wholeness, balance and universality, spiritually stabilized. Jungians call this the emergence of the Inner Self from its banishment within the underworld of the unconscious. Of primary relevance here is the meta-theme in Mayan cosmology. All of their great calendric cycles of worlds are sequenced preparations for a new “sun” of evolutionary consummation. Here is the therapeutic restoration, the long sought alchemy for which all civilizations have striven throughout history. And that restoration has been so well mapped by transpersonal psychology’s mining of our myths and legends.
The Fifth Sun radiates its own cosmology: Wholeness, Universality and Liberation. The short two-year cycle of definition that precedes it has the purpose of preparing the mass mind for this new and unfamiliar radiance. It does this by bringing experiences that clarify contradictions and distinctions. It is essentially a clearing operation. It obliges us to face questions regarding long established conditions in our current human world. What relationship does a particular thing have with the dawning Fifth Sun? What fits in and what doesn’t? What has to change, or to go? Again the Maya are specific.
Because the Fifth Sun entails a collective transcendence of the limiting perspective of the human ego, the Mayan elders teach us that the world’s dominant culture must change dramatically. This is because it is currently controlled by a cosmology of egoism. That is the maintenance of oppressive negative polarization. The Mayans also recognize that the capitalist economic system is an integral organizing component of that negatively polarized mass egoism. Hence it cannot survive the dawn of the Fifth Sun.
Assuming the Mayans are right, and their track record is excellent, we can expect Capitalism to be in a process of terminal breakdown during this closing Cycle of Definition. The predators on Wall St. know that their game is up, and that the only place from which they can now steal money is sovereign governments. “Definition” is found as we watch the power pyramid of finance capital slowly but steadily implode, from the top down.
If a thing as world encompassing as “Capitalism” is to go, then it throws us into a necessary spiritual exercise. If Capitalism is to die, then clearly it is necessary that we release all attachment to it. But the extent to which America identifies itself as Capitalist measures the danger to which the nation may succumb. For if the American people are determined to retain their attachment to a form which must die, then the American nation is in danger of dying along with it. But America itself is a process of cosmic creation. So the question that confronts us is this. How can America thrive while Capitalism is dying? It can only do this by decoupling itself from the ideology of Capitalism and embracing a revolutionary new self-understanding. The starting point must be; “capitalism is un-American.” But the ego driven propaganda is so thick here that the phrase CAPITALISM IS UN-AMERICAN strikes the mind with the jarring dissonance of cognitive absurdity. For two hundred years Wall St Financiers, aided by their many money-worshipping cronies, have drummed into the heads of Americans the ideological mantra that Capitalism is of the essence of America.
It is for the purpose of clarifying this all-important question that the Mayan Cycle of Definition comes to our aid. America is really all about Free Enterprise. Free Enterprise is authentic American spirituality. The spirit of Free Enterprise exists to enrich the human’s relationship with his or her creator. This was at the heart of the first revolution. To use contemporary language: Free Enterprise is a necessary component of spiritual self-actualization. Here is the real spiritual strength of America. But it is a condition of the culture of freedom that each individual chooses their own level at which they interpret their personal “Free Enterprise.” This is where the turn to error and the dark side can be seen. The American ego has incessantly striven to define Free Enterprise in terms of its own self-limiting nature. This clues us into the fact that there is more than one way to define it. When the western male ego controls the definition of Free Enterprise, it calls it Capitalism. Then in its fear and mania for control, the ego demands that all Americans interpret Free Enterprise in exclusively egoic terms. This is Wall Street’s predatory Capitalism. It is this turn to a spirit denying egoism that is un-American. Capitalism is an oppressive ideological distortion that the ego places upon real, living, Free Enterprise. It sucks the living spirit out of America, and replaces it with a cold-hearted machine of hierarchical domination. Monsieur Capital has given us the madness of empire, and in his final incarnation he becomes a totalitarian class dictator that sees the American people themselves as his enemy. In its deepest relation, Capitalism is the weapon with which the hyper-individualized bourgeois ego wars against spirit. It has become the Death Star.
Here is the point of spiritual self-clarification offered by the Mayan Cycle of Definition. The true spirit of American Free Enterprise is not Capitalist, in the egoic sense. Free Enterprise works best, that is at its most American, when it is a manifestation of spirit rather than ego. Create what your soul loves and the money will tend to follow naturally. The challenge is to stay with the creativity of the soul, and reject the ego’s worship of money power. So American Freedom is always testing people: how do you define your own Enterprise, from ego or from spirit? The clarification offered by the Mayan Cycle of Definition is that totalitarian structures that support egoic domination can be seen to fall away. But spirit based Free Enterprise will thrive in the light of the Mayan Fifth Sun.
This means, for the American nation to awaken into the light of the Fifth Sun it must transform and renew itself. But what could be more American? The Fifth Sun carries within it the potential for a great expansion within the American spirit. But authentic wholeness demands that the social organization of Free Enterprise must embrace a jettisoning of structures that serve the domination of ego, in favor of Enterprise that enables the birth of spirit-centered community. In the new Sun, the fully-grown woman stands freely beside the man.
Integral Fifth Sun 