Avalonian Aeon Publications: January 2011

Arguelles 2012 Circumpolar Rainbow Bridge.

‘Self-divination is the Art form of the Dreamspell. Through self-divination, you become your own authority in charge of your own destiny.’
‘Who owns your time, owns your mind. Own your own time and you will know your own mind.’

Jose Arguelles.

Following on from my previous post on the archaic consciousness of New Year celebrations, here is another extract from my Avalonian Aeon dealing with the mystery of time. This section is an edited version of material discussing a period in July 1992 that Jose Arguelles believed was an important moment in the larger process of the huge cycle set to culminate in 2012.

The weekend of 25th/26th July was promoted as a global New Age event that formed a kind of Part Two to the “psychic Woodstock” of the 1987 Harmonic Convergence, the extravaganza that had first drawn popular attention to the Mayan calendar.

In preliminary promotional material, Arguelles offered a prophetic critique of the established calendar and the way it dictates our relationship with Time. He referred to the current “third-dimensional timing frequency,” of “12:60.” We have a 12 month year and a 60 minute hour. This has been determined by the 360 degree circle rather than the natural orbits of the Moon and Earth. The western Gregorian calendar mechanised Time. “By the beginning of the 17th century, the 12:60 timing frequency was in place, creating a purely third-dimensional mental bubble around the planet. Thus was made possible the revolution of scientific materialism, followed by the Industrial Revolution, and, in quick succession, the various democratic and socialist revolutions of the past two centuries. All of these 12:60 clockwise revolutions have been accompanied by a staggering increase of human population, a rapid spread of materialism, and the environmental pollution and degradation of the current world crisis.”

He believed that our calendar has played a major role in the current global crisis. “The entire purpose of education and socialization in the modern world is to fit children into a 12:60 slot so that they can carry on the burdensome business of materialism”, which Arguelles called a “Time Drug.” “Time is money”is based on the 12:60 ratio. Everything is valued according to how much you can get out of 60 minutes.” Reforming the calendar would literally change Reality. Arguelles announced “the Time Shift, July 26, 1992----the moment when the 12:60 frequency attains maximum entropy.”

The Dreamspell Peace Plan was inaugurated in which people, “agree to follow the 13-moon calendar, effective July 26, 1992, the Time Shift. The 13-moon calendar measures the solar year according to thirteen perfect months of 28 days each. The 12-month Gregorian calendar (the current global standard) distributes the thirteenth month as 28 extra days randomly added to eleven of the twelve months. (One extra day, the 365th, is accounted for in the Dreamspell as Green Day, July 25.)” This would enable the human race to make “the transition from 12:60 third-dimensional time to 13:20 fourth dimensional time,” best represented by the Mayan 13 x 20 Tzolkin.

It was interesting for me to contemplate how the nature of the messenger can determine how and where their message may be heard. If some of Arguelles ideas on the 12:60 Time is Money matrix had been espoused by some French Neo-Marxist post modern types like Derida or Baudrillard they would probably be taught on university courses by now, having become part of political debate. It hasn’t quite worked out that way but a zone of interface between different ends of the philosophical spectrum can sometimes be discerned.

Beyond the strange mindset of New Agers, with the approach of the millennium, a general theme of “Endism” was emerging amongst post-modern cultural theorists. One major work saw the theme break the surface of the mainstream that very year and generate ferocious debate. In 1992 American political theorist Francis Fukuyama published The End of History and the Last Man, a completed form of arguments that had initially appeared in journals a few years previously. It’s quite interesting and instructive to compare and contrast him with Arguelles. It was mighty strange to see their two apparently divergent perspectives appearing about the same time. Fukuyama likewise pondered the extraordinary rate of change best represented by the fall of the Berlin Wall and Soviet communism. He also felt that a huge epoch had culminated. In this case though, Fukuyama came to strikingly different conclusions. He believed that, rather than indicating the demise of the 12:60 reality-tunnel, such events were in fact a sign of its ultimate and most worthy triumph. American capitalistic liberal democracy cannot be improved upon. It represents the ultimate perfection of human culture and all other systems will inevitably fail before it. The only worry for Fukuyama was that the Last Men of his title might find such perfection a tad boring and maybe be dumb enough to restart the general nonsense of history for want of something better to do. Little episodes like Stalin’s Russia and Nazi Germany were minor aberrations on the obvious road to perfection. Howls of protest and derision greeted Fukuyama but he remained unphased. He continues to affirm his theories in the present day, 9/11notwithstanding.

Fukuyama

Some post-modernists rejected anything that could be called a “meta-narrative,” a bigger picture that explained why history and cultures worked the way they did, whether it was the Bible or Karl Marx. Crowley’s Aeon of Horus was a meta-narrative. The Mayan calendar likewise. What the PoMo contingent didn’t seem to grasp was that any concept of an era that was “post” something previous was also a meta-narrative. I found both Arguelles and Fukuyama to be part of a bigger picture that Eliade had outlined for me a decade before. It was that old theme of the ending and regeneration of history/time.