2012 with a Capital '2'
The Red Road
Written on 2 I’X, after being composed on a run:
I want to borrow from a blog written by Filomena a few months back: ‘Mayans carry a pouch for the objects that protect them, give them strength, and can even make them invisible. Many people don’t believe this, and not just the gringos, but who believes and doesn’t believe the truth isn’t so important. The red kidney bean is the color of blood, and is kept in the pouches for its energy, the vital force held in our blood. Blood is itz, a living fluid, like the resin incense of copal trees, and a food for God, an offering. If you don’t believe this ask a Christian, who prays to be washed in the blood of Jesus. Blood carries life force, and the bean is blood red. Of course, red kidney beans are also poisonous, and eating just a few raw beans can put you in the hospital with pain and vomiting. The beans are cooked to destroy the poison. Those are the two sides of the red kidney bean, the vital life force and the poison. When I was in college I had to take a psychology class and they talked about the shadow side of people, how every choice you make includes two possibilities that you, the person, could make. Even if you don’t choose to, say, take the money from the cash register before leaving work, if you had to choose, that becomes part of you, a potential you, a ‘you’ pushed into the background and called shadow. Plants also have their shadow sides, like the life and death sides of the red kidney bean.
‘Which brings us to tobacco. Tobacco is a sacred plant, like the copal tree. It is the smoke of the tobacco that brings our offerings upward, to God, including the spirit force carried by our breath. When European gringos found the Indians smoking tobacco up in North America, they were looking for an export crop, but had to invent the pipe bowl to increase the dose, and make the nicotine more addictive and guarantee their market. Indian pipes were small, and ceremonial. Tobacco was not a recreational drug. It was used to communicate with the divine. And so we have the huge, growing tobacco shadow, as God searches for the prayer from the Mayan fire or the Hopi kiva pipe, among the billions of cigarettes sending their smoke in the same direction. Like the red kidney bean, the shadow side of a strong living force is death, the poison of life.’
I received an email asking if ‘2012’ was going to be the death of the shadow, and the end of duality. In my training I have learned that even the Nahual spirits themselves have a dual nature. Tijax is a day of healers, but also a day of sudden death. Keme is coming death, but also a day of transformation. This same dual nature is seen in the God-man Christ, who could touch a withered arm and make new muscle and sinew (Matthew 12) and also touch a fig tree in anger and make it wither (Matthew 21). What did the Christ tell us about good and evil? When called ‘good’ he rebuked the speaker, saying no man is good (Mark 10), but when he saw evil in man he also rebuked it (Mark 8). Christ walked what the Dakota call the red road.
The red road is a path of balance, not falling too far to the good (an impossible task and recipe for failure) or to the bad (a destructive path, and recipe for death). This by author A.C. Ross in his book Mitakuye Oyasin: ‘The sun dance circle is outlined by the four sacred directions, the circle representing the entire universe. At the center of the circle is a sacred tree which has two dominant branches on top, which stand for the duality of everything in the universe. Everything in the universe is in pairs of opposites: positive and negative; good and bad. This is one of the teachings of Dakota ceremonialism.’
I cannot speak for the next world, but if God-Ajaw is anywhere in this physical world, he is within us, and the nature of God-Ajaw written within us is a dual nature. Will God build a world against his/her own nature? I believe the answer is no.
The capital ‘2’ of this story are the two things I can say with certainty regarding ‘2012.’ The first is that it will come and go and most people will not notice. Many may even feel that the entire thing was hype, no more than a marketing hoax. In retrospect, the beginning of this Mayan cycle 5000 years ago was global and revolutionary: the first written language, metallurgy, and cultivation, the first nation state and divine monarchy, the beginning of the Hindu calendar, and the building of Stonehenge, and the first Egyptian pyramid. Yet all of these were processes that unfolded over the span of generations, and as I type here on my laptop keyboard I realize that some of these, like the written word, are evolving still.
The beginning of the Christian calendar began much the same. In retrospect, modern Christians view Christ crucified as the tearing of the very fabric of the cosmos. Still, that day came and went with only a small handful of people noticing, and what followed were hundreds of years of persecution and mass execution. It’s the way God-Ajaw changes his/her world.
The second of the capital ‘2s’ is the reality that the shadow self will be a part of that world just as it is part of this world. Our duality is not the result of sin or sorcery, but the cosmic wisdom that keeps our world in balance. There is no balance without opposing forces, and to expect otherwise is like expecting the galaxy to reverse itself and begin turning the other way, or stop turning altogether.
So what can we do? You will never prepare yourself by going to a movie or a conference, or reading a book. The shadow cannot be killed. It is the nature of the shadow that the more one tries to put it to death, the stronger it gets. Our own denied and repressed shadows are our own worst enemies, the very forces that seek to control us.
The end of duality is not the death of half of us, but the marriage of the two halves, and the embrace of the whole self, with the spilling of the ugly parts into the light of day, where they can be transformed. In the open for all to see, those around us can help us with what we cannot fix on our own, and the negative forces of the shadow can be used to do good. There, anger becomes assertiveness, timidity becomes grace and stubbornness becomes resolve. This is the landscape upon which we prepare ourselves for the new age.
Begin now.