by Daniel Pinchbeck
Will Daniel’s words replace that of Terrence McKenna’s to be the gatekeeper of lost and obscured knowledge? Are his solutions on course? We think so.
As I trekked the desert road, I realized it no longer mattered to me whether I received a direct transmission of the Hopi prophecies. I had little desire to intrude on their traditional knowledge, as so many had done before me. I felt I had attained my own understanding of the nature of prophecy. I understood that a spectrum of possibilities was indicated by the esoteric foretellings of the Hopi and Maya, and it was up to us to determine the outcome, for ourselves and our world. The cataclysms, polar shifts, and “earth changes” that alarmed writers like Graham Hancock, (who concluded in Fingerprints of the Gods that the Hopi and Mayan prophecies were all that remained of an advanced civilization’s foreknowledge of a literal end of the world) were a negative projection of our own fears and limitations, and “a passive vision.” Hancock, like many others, could not perceive Apocalypse — the end of the Hopi’s Fourth World — as an inner as well as outer event, a process of psychic transformation, restoring a direct and sacred relationship to reality.
In the middle-class New Age culture and “New Edge” festivals such as Burning Man, much lip service is paid to Native American traditions. Perhaps millions of white people hang dream catchers over their beds and put kachina dolls on their shelves. Despite this sentimental interest in indigenous culture and spirituality, precious little is done by us those of us with the leisure for yoga and raw food and sweat lodges — who often consider ourselves especially “conscious” or “spiritual” beings — to repair relations with the Native Americans on this continent. The indigenous people are resettled next to toxic waste dumps, abandoned to the least arable lands, ignored when the fish in their rivers are poisoned, when their resources are robbed. They continue to be treated with disregard and contempt.
As climate change accelerates, along with the global depletion of resources, we are being forced to recognize that our current system is unsustainable, even in the short term. The Hopi situation provides a microcosm of the global crisis — a cruelly ironic situation considering the essential meaning of their culture. As Whiteley notes, “The phrase “Hopi environmentalism” is practically a redundancy. So much of Hopi culture and thought, both religious and secular, revolves around an attention to balance and harmony in the forces of nature; environmental ethics are in many ways critical to the very meaning of the word ‘Hopi.’’’ Indigenous prophecy, in itself, arises out of a profound attunement to natural cycles, rather than anything “spiritual” or immaterial.
According to Victor Masayesva, a Hopi filmmaker and executive director of the Black Mesa Trust, “It is our water ethic that has allowed us to survive and thrive in one of the most arid areas on planet Earth. It is the knowledge and teachings of our elders that have sustained us. This water ethic, that has been handed down to us by our ancestors, we are eager to share with everyone who will be facing water shortages — and according to some studies, water wars — in the next few decades. When the water is gone from Black Mesa, so will be the traditional cultures that could have taught the world so much about living successfully with less.” The Hopi prophecies tell of the return of Pahana, the elder white brother, in a real exchange of knowledge and a true communion, as the Fourth World comes to an end. Such an exchange could only take place without the slightest taint of paternalism or condescension. As I walked, it occurred to me that we have as much to learn from tribal people like the Hopi — about sustainability, initiatory ritual, and nonhierarchical social organization based on trust and telepathy — as they might have from us, if we stopped trying to force our worldview upon them.
After several hours trekking the desert road, a rare car passed and actually stopped for me. Inside was an entire Hopi family, several kids and a couple, and they laughed merrily as I climbed inside. I asked what they were doing out so late, and they said, “Just looking around,” and giggled. They seemed to find it hilarious that I was out on that road. I told them how I ended up there. The father said; “If you have the right intentions, anything is possible.” This is a basic tenet of Hopi wisdom.
Earlier in Phoenix, a graduate student had brought me to meet his teacher, Mark Emery, a tribal leader and professor of the Hopi language. Emery had told me that, for the Hopi, “The person who has the greatest power is the one who has a perfect heart,” and even a child, if he could realize that power, could do great things.
Resting my sore legs at breakfast the next morning, I overheard a woman say she was driving to the Phoenix Airport that day. I introduced myself, and she agreed to drive me. Since we had some time to kill, I suggested we go in search of Gasheseoma, and she eagerly agreed. We drove to his house, where another relative told us he was already out working on his land, giving us convoluted directions on how to find him. We drove down the canyon and past several buttes, through utterly dry desert terrain, until we saw the gnarled old man in the distance, hoeing his field under the scorching sun. He seemed an iconic figure, standing alone in the arid landscape, surrounded by stubbled rows of tiny corn and bean plants. I called out to him, asking if he would like to talk to us. He put his hoe down and came to greet us in a manner that was friendly, unguarded, and without surprise. We sat together in his little shelter, and I asked him about the time ahead.
“It goes like a movie now,” he said. “Soon there is corning the time of purification. But this has all happened before.” He believed the U.S. government was already building “machines” for exterminating huge populations, which would be employed as resources dwindled. These machines were being built in the South. This would be part of the “purification.” His tone was stoic, serious, yet surprisingly matter-of-fact. I asked him about treatment of the Hopi by the United States.
“Everything has been done illegally;’ he said. “We didn’t want a Tribal Council. The majority voted against it, and it was forced on us. We didn’t want the highway either.”
“What should be done with it then?” I asked.
“Smash it up,” he replied, waving toward it.
For Gasheseoma, there was an obvious distinction between “right-doing” and “wrong-doing.” He was quite clear about what should be done about persistent “wrong-doers,” such as the executives of the Peabody Corporation. “Cut off their heads,” he said.
As we left him, he returned to his field — a tiny, indomitable presence in the vast desert, beneath the wide sky. I felt the deep schism of the soul that still needs to be addressed, a wound that will only be healed when our culture forges a real relationship with the indigenous people of this continent, no longer prying into their secrets or imitating their ways, but expiating our dominator guilt and denial by acting in solidarity with them.
Although we do not know how the Classical Maya interpreted the prophetic culmination of their Long Count, Carl Johan Calleman has elaborated a meticulously exact fractal model of time from the Mayan calendar, in which human consciousness evolves through nine “Underworlds,” each 20 times faster in linear time than the previous one. Each underworld passes through a 13-stage process of alternating light and dark energy currents — or seven “days” and six “nights” of creation — culminating in a new level of realization. According to Calleman’s model, sometime around the year 2008 — the “fifth night” of the current underworld, ruled by the energies of Tezcatlipoca, the jaguar god of night and black magic — our current socioeconomic system will suffer a drastic and irrevocable collapse.
The primary catalyst for this collapse could be an approaching energy crisis. A report recently issued by the U.S. Department of Energy states: “Previous energy transitions (wood to coal and coal to oil) were gradual and evolutionary; oil peaking will be abrupt and revolutionary.” According to a 2005 feature in The New York Times Magazine, “The consequences of an actual shortfall of supply would be immense.” As Peter Maass reported, “When a crisis comes — whether in a year or two or ten — it will be all the more painful because we will have done little or nothing to prepare for it.”
The effects of such a crisis could be exponentially magnified by the side effects of accelerated climate change, resource depletion, military conflicts, and declining food production. According to a 2004 report issued by Pentagon scenario planners, if climate change were to intensify, “major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.” The analysts concluded, “Once again, warfare would define human life.” Ignoring the possibility that such a crisis could lead to a compassionate readaptation of human life and society, the Pentagon report may indicate the type of contingency planning currently underway in military circles.
Whatever the Pentagon prophesizes, ecological feedback loops are currently accelerating the process of climate change beyond earlier predictions. Reseachers from Oxford University in the UK and Tomsk State University in Russia have recently discovered that a vast frozen peat bog in western Siberia, “the size of France and Germany combined,” has started to thaw, potentially releasing “billions of tons of methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere.” As reported in The Guardian, this new discovery could cause a “10 percent to 25 percent increase in global warming,” accelerating current forecasts. The increasing rate of ice melting in the Arctic Circle is forcing a similar reevaluation of data. According to a new study by the American Geophysical Union, “Warming in the Arctic is stimulating the growth of vegetation and could affect the delicate energy balance there, causing additional climate warming of several degrees over the next few decades.”
I have proposed that this intensifying global crisis is the material expression of a psycho-spiritual process, forcing our transition to a new and more intensified state of awareness. If Calieman’s hypothesis is correct, this telescoping of time will mean a high-speed replay of aspects of past historical epochs — echoes of the French Revolution, the rise and fall of the Third Reich, and so on — before consciousness reaches the next twist of the spiral. As part of this transition, we will reintegrate the aboriginal and mythic worldviews, recognizing the essential importance of spiritual evolution, while understanding that this evolution is directly founded upon our relationship to material and physical aspects of reality. The higher consciousness and conscience of our species will be forged through the process of putting the broken and intricate shards of our world back together, piece by piece.
Epochs of radical transformations have mythological and archetypal dimensions — and we may be closer to such a stage than most of us can imagine. Before the French Revolution, the Enlightenment philosophers, pamphleteers, and cafe intellectuals of the ancient regime had little clue that they might end up the vanguard of a new social order. After all, before 1989, how many analysts predicted the sudden and astonishingly peaceful fall of the Berlin Wall? Is it conceivable that Wall Street could collapse as suddenly? While millions pin their future and their ambitions on the stock markets, the system has become delinked from any tangible resource, supported solely by mass belief in it. If that belief were to fail, our system would go into freefall. Although it would be a tumultuous transition, an economic collapse might be bracing as well as clarifying, leading to a sea change in priorities and values, and a concomitant change of the elites.
Right now, in this interim period, we have the opportunity to develop alternative support systems — localized organic food production, alternative energy, conflict-resolution projects, complementary currencies, and so on, that can be applied on an increasingly large scale as the old structures continue to give way. The federal government’s response to the flooding of New Orleans should serve as a warning that the support structures upon which we have relied are dangerously corrupt and no longer dependable. When a major crisis comes, local communities organized on a basis of trust and self-reliance may find themselves at a distinct advantage.
According to Hopi prophecy, at the end of the Fourth World, the elder white brother, Pahana, will return in a true exchange of hearts, as well as knowledge. From an entirely unpatronizing perspective, we may have quite a lot to learn from the Hopi and other traditional cultures. The philosopher Alan Watts noted that the materialism of modern civilization is paradoxically founded on a “hatred of materiality,” a goal-oriented desire to obliterate all natural limits through technology, imposing an abstract grid over nature. The spirituality of tribal people is rooted in a deep and unsentimental connection to the Earth, expressed through a careful attentiveness to and reverence for particular plants, geographic features, and local differences. We can regain a humble reverence for the physical world from indigenous cultures, integrating nature and spirit, if we so choose.
Based on his years of fieldwork, anthropologist Peter Whiteley noted that Hopi ceremonies sometimes seem to have a direct effect on natural forces. If this is the case, it would mean that focused psychic energy can be used to alter climatic conditions — a potentially critical proposition in a time of accelerating climate shift. By attaining knowledge of the interrelatedness of mind and world, as the Hopi and other ancient indigenous cultures understand it, we might be able to concentrate collective psychic energy for planetary transformation and healing. At the same time, the subsistence agriculture of the Hopi — and other edge-dwelling people — capable of sustaining themselves from food grown in extreme climate conditions, may prove to be of more than academic interest for our own near-term survival.
If we are graduating from nation-states to a noospheric state, we may find ourselves exploring the kind of nonhierarchical social organizational “synarchy” based on trust and telepathy — that the Hopi and other aboriginal groups have used for millennia. If a global civilization can self-organize from our current chaos, it will be founded on cooperation rather than winner-take-all competition, sufficiency rather than surfeit, communal solidarity rather than individual elitism, reasserting the sacred nature of all earthly life. Those who desire such a world will work to create it.
As the Hopi also say: We are the ones we have been waiting for.
Excerpted from 2012: Return of Quetzalcoatl by Daniel Pinchbeck (Tarcher; 2006)
