Cosmic Consciousness to Convergence

Originally presented at EntheoGenesis Australis conference 2010.

As we neared the Gregorian year 2012, the mainstream media was barraging us with information about this potent cosmic target window, much of it slanted towards the usual doom-and-gloom and disaster scenarios. But what if there was another way to look at the now-passed 2012 date and the cosmic engine of creation that it maps–as a form of cosmic consciousness on a celestial scale? 

When examining the currents underneath the 2012 phenomenon the first thing to let go of is our Western calendar, and with it our linear conception of time. The indigenous Mayans used dozens of calendars to plot the course of the stars and their influence on crops, health and destiny.

And as modern science has wondered, these calendars often drilled down to accurately measure time on the micro-scale all the way up to millions or years on the macro.

The Mayans had an astounding aptitude for astronomical observation, and could predict eclipses, the phases of the moon, the position of the stars and the workings of the heavens, that much is agreed. Why they wanted to know this, and what they did with that knowledge, however, remains tantalizingly beyond Western comprehension.

The Mayans were astutely mapping the Earth's orbit not just around the sun, but the sun's journey around the galactic sun, a grand orbit which takes 26,000 years or so to complete. To the stargazing Mayans, these wheels of time could be used to best maximize the energies of the stars on Earth, to know when to plant crops or map the rise and fall of individuals and civilizations alike.

You could think of it as an early version of the permaculture idea of maximizing yields by going with the flow of energies we are embedded in, or in this case, you could call it "chronoculture".

Mayan stargazing was not a dry, scientific affair, however; the spiritual intimacy of their science is reflected in the language they used to describe the stars. Galactic center and the sun there that our Milky Way galaxy orbits in the grand 26,000 year orbit was called "Hunab Ku", or the "Womb of the Great Mother". Interestingly enough, in 2002 NASA confirmed that the galactic sun is actually a supermassive black hole, sucking in matter and spewing out massive jets of charged particles into space that can spark stars into being. Galactic Current Sheets of energy also push space dust and debris to cause suns to micronova. From death comes life, this is how the universe seeds.

What then, can we glean about our relationship to the stars, and the benefits of "going with the flow" of the natural order?

Armenian philosopher and mystic George Gurdjieff expounded the theory of "reciprocal maintenance" with the heavens in a way the Mayans and other indigenous tribes would be able to relate to. Instead of a one-way flow, Gurdjieff promoted the idea that we had a reciprocal relationship with the Mother Earth, and through it with the moon, stars and heavens.

Gurdjieff suggested that the energy of the plants, animals and humans is a resource that is conserved and at times harvested by the planet, and that as humans grew in numbers and spread across the globe, living unsustainably, our out-of-balance nature has created energetic imbalances that nature seeks to self- correct.

Either we give our conscious labors, our prayers, dance and energetic output, etc. to feed the Earth, or the Earth takes it, harvesting our psychic energy and very life force through natural disasters and the like. That energy is then fed back into the Gaian matrix and regulated through the planet, and then fed on to the moon, which feeds the sun, and then on to the galactic sun, etc.

The organic, intelligent web of life connects the stars and the energy of us all in an infinite engine of creation, that was the not-so-secret truth at the heart of the Maya. All of us are staring down the celestial food chain, fed and being fed upon in one macro-cosmic biomass bigger than human comprehension that creates a cosmic balance.

And that balance is where the idea of consciousness, in all its varied capacities, comes into the discussion.

The Mayans understood that the grand 26,000 year galactic orbit took in a series of successive world ages or quadrants, each of which affected consciousness. Heading towards the super information highway of galactic center saw a peak in the cosmic connection – let's make the analogy to four bar reception on a mobile phone; whereas 180 degrees later, that quadrant world age would see a dropping out of the signal, and a resultant loss of consciousness.

Patterns exist within the world age brackets, and as with Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory, paradigms exist to help understand and map the slow drift of consciousness across the history of mankind (a history which, admittedly, is brief and slanted towards those who write the history books).

Like, Richard Maurice Buck: an influential writer in the late 19^th century who coined the term "Cosmic Consciousness" in the book of the same name, now in the public domain.

Bucke said Cosmic Consciousness is a mystical state "above and beyond" self-consciousness, man's natural state, which is in itself above pure sentient animal consciousness, and so on. This gradating scale imagines a sense of interdependent awareness and connection to the Source that runs through all things, as well as a holographic sense that embodies that Source in the individual.

Many mystics and seers have talked about this connection, but Bucke was one of the first Victorian-era gentlemen to tease new ground with the concept by mapping it across the history books with individuals that achieved mystic states.

Wikipedia defines Cosmic consciousness as "the concept that the universe exists as an interconnected network of consciousness, with each conscious being linked to every other. Sometimes this is conceived as forming a collective consciousness which spans the cosmos, other times it is conceived of as an Absolute or Godhead from which all conscious beings emanate."

It has echoes and resonances with the Buddhist concept of Indra's net, Teilhard de Chardin's noosphere, James Lovelock's Gaia theory, and many more. Bucke graphed and compared the experiences of saints and mystics like Jesus, Mohammed, William Blake, etc., etc. – the list is well developed for a pre-20^th century work.

But the shallow thesis he developed has since been exploded by the collective expansion of consciousness through technology like the internet and our social networking-interdependent-webbed world, not to mention psychedelics.

The baseline consciousness is now higher, and higher consciousness is even further out there, or as William Gibson once said, the future is here, it's just not widely distributed yet. Well, the good news is the distribution chains are getting better.

Since the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s, fuelled by chemicals and mystic reintegration with indigenous cultures, we have seen a collective blossoming of consciousness, trickling down to the ashrams, yoga centers, and now ayahuasca lodges of the West, to name just a few.

Millions upon millions of people have had profound glimpses of cosmic consciousness aided by neurochemicals, and the experience of the 60s and 70s wave was that many then settled down into more traditional spiritual pathways to ground that glimpse into a lifelong journey of remembrance.

If cosmic consciousness was once a sporadic concentration in the genepool, isolated to the occasional mystic or messiah, as the world ages turn full circle and we come back into the activating energy of galactic center that can birth suns in outer, and perhaps inner space as well, it seems that a collective awakening of consciousness is blossoming around us.

A generation of psychonauts grounding in the ambient celestial energies, collective messiahs, perhaps, activating a circuit beyond any one node's ability to channel.

So, what is the demonstrable effect of the incoming celestial energies on our consciousness?

Solar sunspot radiation and the associated energies have been known to affect mental health. New Scientist magazine reported in 2008 that: "The most plausible explanation for the association between geomagnetic activity and depression and suicide is that geomagnetic storms can desynchronize circadian rhythms and melatonin production," says Kelly Posner, a psychiatrist at Columbia University in the US.

The pineal gland, which regulates circadian rhythm and melatonin production, is sensitive to magnetic fields. "The circadian regulatory system depends upon repeated environmental cues to [synchronize] internal clocks," says Posner. "Magnetic fields may be one of these environmental cues."

So, if this celestial daisy chain we are all embedded in has a verifiable effect on Earth, and the health of us as individuals, what then can we say about the alignment of our solar system with galactic center and the supermassive black hole in the cosmic circuit?

To the Mayans it was 0.0.0.0.0 on their calendar, or the moment when the 26,000 year orbit concluded, and a new cycle began. But at that zero point the circuit of energy is channeling down core galactic center energy, and as we know from electronics, if too strong a surge of energy is sent through a circuit it can fry it out completely.

In 1988, the entire eastern seaboard of Canada was blacked out for days, and back in 1859, a mass coronal solar flare ejection from the Sun, dubbed the "Carrington Event" disrupted the Victorian era's power grid, which at that time was limited to magnetometers and the telegraph system.

The modern electromagnetic atmosphere, filled with tens of thousands of sensitive satellites, and our cities now heavily reliant on the grid, electricity and technology to run the interconnected, globalized world, is extremely sensitive to just such electromagnetic surges in the ionosphere that solar maximum and sunspot activity produces. So much so that the Obama administration ordered a beefing up of the grid to protect against such an electromagnetic surge.

But enough about the cities: if solar radiation affects our mental health and our physical bodies, what could a solar tsunami do to us here on Earth?

As the New Scientist article hinted, the pineal gland is directly affected by sunlight and the magnetic fields tripped by the light, and through the pineal, the metabolism of the body is regulated. Endogenous dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, a powerful psychoactive chemical in our brains, as well as in most mammal and many plant species, is thought by some scientists to be part of the pineal gland connection, perhaps to help regulate higher consciousness functions like dreaming, and our connection to higher realms experienced at birth, death or near-death experiences.

As stellar radiation swarms in right on its natural tide, we have the opportunity to let it activate our pineal, and through it our very consciousness, or it may very well fry our circuits.

Or as modern mystic-author Eckhart Tolle says,

As consciousness is also a part of the cosmic seasons of growth and harvest, perhaps we can look at the emergency our consciousness has created on the planet as a natural growth phase of our species.

And as the celestial seasons shift and turn, and the energy of galactic centre streams in to activate consciousness, we have an unparalleled opportunity to grow, to align, and to become something new.

And that is real illumination.