John Lash: Countdown To 2012 (Page 3 of 4)

Jay Weidner on 2012
April 28, 2007

More and more, people at the leading edge of consciousness are focusing on 2012, since authors like Jose Arguelles and Terrence McKenna first brought the matter of the Mayan calendar to public attention in the 1980s.

As we approach the end of the Mayan Calendar, time and consciousness are accelerating. Working with Calleman’s time-acceleration theory, Barbara Hand Clow shows how the cycles of time marked by the calendar match important periods in the evolutionary data banks of Earth and the Milky Way Galaxy and that the calendar describes the evolutionary stage to come.

She explores how our own personal healing is the most important factor as we prepare to make this critical leap in human evolution--now referred to as the awakening of the World Mind.

MonAmie-Zylo

Your Thoughts, matter not if from a biological or mental standpoint, will Manifest in 20 days.

John Lash Wrote:

To my mind, this is the single most significant prospect in the constellation of themes around 2012: the role of histones in the DNA-RNA circuit. Investigation of this phenomena leads directly into epigenetics, a new paradigm in biological science that allows for reprogramming of the DNA blueprint by a molecular mechanism, reverse transcriptase.

Reprogramming at the genomic level is Ollin, the movement of the histones. Is this the secret of transpeciation, the way Gaia selects the genetic signatures that she will resurrect after extinction? I have often wondered how Gaia could make a whole species from a single specimen. How she can, for that matter, select an individual to prefigure an emergent species. It is no joke that in the experiment at La Chorrera (True Hallucinations), the entheogenic genius demanded that the subject of the experiment, Dennis McKenna, be addressed as if he were, not a mere individual, but a species, and it seemed that Dennis could really articulate as a species. Ponder on this.

Applied Creative Mythology 101: The mythic symbology inherited from any race or culture in the past carries a message from the collective psyche then to the collective psyche now, regardless of what the symbol originally meant in the time and setting that produced it. Every symbol morphs over time to register in the collective psyche a navigational cue about where the human species is heading, just as it's getting there. This directive process of symbolic transmutation through time is the equivalent of epigenetic rescripting within the psyche rather than in the genes—that is, in imaginative rather than biochemical terms.

The trick here is, histones lock or seal the genetic code, and when they move they unseal it. These protein molecules are highly water-soluble—chalk up yet another Aquarian motif. Histone shift correlates to the mythological concept of the apocalypse, "the lifting of the seal." Biologists are uncertain what makes histones shift, or precisely how this might happen in individual cases, or for the entire species.

We are deep into a mythogenetic moment when human potential is arising in new expressions, simultaneously with the dissolution of old expressions, and this dynamic, two-way escalation, up and down (Ollin), is revealing the outlines of the Next World when the planet earth will be inhabited by the endtime tribes. Mythological figures such as the Gnostic Sophia and the Aztec Xolotl loom over the emergent tribes and in some manner preside over the birth of a transmuted, transmigrant humanity.

Each such mythogenetic moment holds in solution a constellation of powerful choices, but the magic of the moment only becomes real when these choices are actually defined and made, one person at a time.

The Entheogenic Question

The entheogenic question is intimately related to the theme of histone shift. One way to formulate the question would be: What is the purpose of entheogenic practice in the 21th century? One answer might be: To engage histone shift.

I link the theme of entheogenic practice with Ollin because, as far as I know, ritual use of psychoactive plants is the best way to learn how DNA works, and possibly even to affect its workings.

While writing Dendera Decoded, I came up with the term "sacred biology" for knowledge of nature acquired by direct access to biological and molecular processes in visionary trance. I distinguish sacred biology from conventional biology that relies on instruments such as the microscope, as well as classification of specimens, lab analysis, abstraction from the phenomena to "natural laws," etc. In sacred biology, the investigator interacts directly with Shakti, the animating, formative power of the natural world, the basis of all that is truly sacred in the sense of being more powerful than anything it supports.

The Hindu Devi Shakti may be equated with the Divine Sophia of the Gnostics. Put in imaginative terms, the Shakti endows us with the faculties to know her most intimate operations in our own minds, in our bodies, and across the sensory continuum of the entire biosphere. My studies with the DZ (coinciding with a tour to Egypt with the Marion Institute in February 1999, with venus racing past jupiter and saturn in the Fishes) convinced me that the Egyptian seers had evolved the faculties that allowed them direct access of this kind, and possibly even to induce changes at the genetic level (the resurrection rites of the "grain-god" Osiris).

It is by now rather old news to some people that ayahuascueros have the siddhi or occult faculty to perceive at the molecular level. In Twins and the Double, I proposed that traditional shamanic access to "the realm of the ancestors" was a way of describing clairvoyant vision at the genetic level. Jeremy Narby made a similar claim in The Cosmic Serpent, citing the testimony of Peruvian shamans that the plants in the jungle teach them how to use the plants. More recently, Graham Hancock has popularized this idea in Supernatural. I consider it to be one of the most significant topics of our time.

Visionary Instruction

The entheogenic question is about accepting visionary instruction from nature, as it might be called. In Not in His Image, I show that the Pagan Mysteries of pre-Christian Europe belonged to a millennial tradition of trained seers, the telestai, "those who are aimed" —so called because they saw the purpose of life as cultural coevolution guided by what the Gaian intelligence taught them. Instruction by the Organic Light was their method. Their teacher was Sophia, not any human person. With the shamanic revival now at a crossroads, if not a dead-end, we have the advantage of hindsight plus intensive understanding of the cognitive dimensions of visionary trance. Given what we've learned in 50 years, the telestic method can be ours once again. If we choose to reclaim it.

In my case for the Pagan Mysteries, I insist that visionary access to the secrets of the biosphere (the planetary body of the Goddess Sophia, if you will) cannot be had except by egodeath and ecstatic immersion in nature. Confined to the normal egobound state of single-self identity, no one can either enter or sustain the high somatic concentration of instruction by the Light. Such concentration (dhyana) involves the meltdown of egoic boundaries leading to open-field psychosomatic illumination, full-spectrum body-knowledge. Gnosis is rapturous knowing of the Other in the lucid state of no-self. Paradoxically, it is not the self that encounters the Other as not-self, it is the no-self that encounters the not-self.

Perhaps the signal development leading into the 2012 endtime is the world tour of the 13 Indigenous Grandmothers with their basket of psychoactive plants, including iboga, peyote, and psilocybin mushrooms. The Grandmothers are appealing to humanity to return to the wisdom practices that rely on instruction by the plant-allies, who are also powerful healers. Both for our enlightenment as a species and the healing of our sick society, traditionally psychoactive plants are indispensable. Such is the Grandmothers' message. This is also the overriding message of this site.

Having made this case, let me say that I am the last one on the planet to convince anyone to undergo entheogenic initiation with psychoactive plants. My argument stresses the necessity of that practice, but I am not here to persuade anyone on an individual basis to undertake it. All I can say in that vein is this: as someone who has had direct access to molecular and genetic levels of nature, and received visionary instruction from nature, I don't know any experience in this world that could be more profound, or more interesting, inspirational, and educational. It is also fabulously entertaining.

But visionary instruction from nature does not come with recreational use of psychoative plants, not is it consistently available in the traditional modes of shamanic ritual preserved by indigenous peoples. In short, we lack the method for it. Okay, here I am back to my pet peeve: the destruction of the Mysteries. The telestai had a method, consistent and time-tried, simple and transmissible. Can we learn the ways of coevolution from Gaia-Sophia in the scope and depth that those ancient seers learned them, if we do not follow that method? Perhaps we can, but you'll have to show me how.

So, Ollin is about movement ahead, and movement back. Going into the sixth extinction, we have to look back to the primal learning resource of our species, the entheogenic path of wisdom, and discover ways to re-invent that path. The religious phenomenon of shamanism as it is understood so far has gotten us to the threshold. What will get us across the threshold lies beyond shamanism and depends almost totally on the daring of human imagination, not to exceed or replace nature, but to defend it, revere it, imitate it, and lovingly follow Her instruction.

Jose Arguelles calls it "the climax of matter," Jean Houston refers to it as "jump time," and Ray Kurzweil names it "the approaching singularity." Each person who studies this phenomenon calls it by a different name, or uses different terms to describe it, but they are all speaking of the same idea—that human experience is reaching some kind of ultimate point.

According to these traditions this approaching singularity will be the most profound event in history; everything that we know, everything that we are, is about to undergo a radical change.

It might be said that right now there is a great slumber across the land, Alberto Villoldo refers to it as a cultural trance, Jose Arguelles, a dreamspell, Riane Eisler calls it "the dominator trance" or the last gasp of the patriarchy. It is as if a “glamour” has been cast over our collective eyes, a veil of delusion. Lost in the media haze of spin, bogus reporting, and talking points, which reduce deep issues that affect our future to mere sound bites, it has become more and more difficult to discern the false from the true. The prevailing forces of the modern world have brought us to a state where we are out of balance, out of tune.

I believe that the answer is to free our minds; wake up from the trance. And how can we do this? By shifting our focus inward, realigning ourselves with the highest spiritual values. If we look inward, truly align with spirit, perceive and strip away the conditioned actions and karmic traces that have led to [highlight]the fear-based nightmare of the current “manufactured reality”[/highlight] the veil that obscures our true vision will dissolve.

It is time to become the heroes and heroines of our dreams, to move beyond fear and transmute its fundamental energy into right action. With every thought we are effecting the shape of the future, with every action we are creating angels or demons.

In this extraordinary moment of reintegration, the psychic knots that bind us unwind, and the karmic veils are lifted. In that moment we can see with true clarity the pure essence of our being; we come face to face with our eternal nature. Time dissolves into space and all things appear in the perfect simultaneity of the state of pure immediate present. This is the moment of true awakening; it is the still point between the thoughts, the pause between the in breath and the out breath.

[highlight]It is time to dream a new dream for humanity, move beyond the confines of linear time.[/highlight] What is going on right now on planet earth is that a new level of consciousness is emerging. The Quero of Peru say that that there has been a tear in the fabric of time itself, a window into the future through which a new species will emerge.