Betsy Tabor, September 28, 2008
I prove daily how very unenlightened I am! Just last spring in a drama with Sears, I was reduced to racking sobs—about a washing machine! Brand new, it had sprung a huge leak. The repair was scheduled and rescheduled. I spent hours on hold, steaming coming out of my ears. One day, as I watched our new stone steps get nicked by an incoming rental washer, then get re-nicked on the way out (they couldn’t hook it up), I had to laugh that this emotional basket case, undone by a washing machine, was even considering the subject of enlightenment!
Not to mention that Will Saunders always said a sermon should not be written until the subject is fully cooked. For me, this has barely come to a simmer. But I’m not a minister, and the message is kind of urgent.
We are living in a chaotic time. Some would say these are the dark hours of our soul. It is bewildering—so much is happening, so fast, that even the newscasters, in rare humility, confess that they don’t understand what is going on. The headlines are about the stock market, banks closing, war casualties, genocide, starvation…another marriage breaking up, and saddest of all, stories of people who have opted out of life, unable take it anymore. In the US alone, millions upon millions of us are feeling helpless, confused, frightened, angry and not just a little worried about the future.
We are in crisis. Things are breaking down. There’s a sense that we’re stuck. What can we do to change things? Our gut reaction is to be horrified. What can we do to feel better?
Sometimes another perspective is helpful. Of all things, the Mayan calendar has brightened the way I react to the news. We each look through a window of our own making to bring meaning to our lives. Some of us look through the window of world religions and great prophets, others find meaning in the rhythms of the earth, others in reason—there’s no limit to the number of ways humans have tried to answer the big questions—we’ve created lots of windows over the years. UUs, of course, tend to look through more windows than most, so think of this as another one.
It is also helpful in hard times—perhaps imperative—to engage in intentional spiritual practice if we are to get through this with our health and our peace of mind intact. We each need a toolbox of spiritual practices—techniques we can count on to quiet our racing thoughts and restore our sense of equanimity.
My antennae went up about this last winter when my homeopathy teacher Nancy Frederick urged our class to seek light wherever we could, to make a conscious effort to replace chaos and darkness with light. She encouraged us to help people in trouble find light. It was she who knew of a book about the Mayan calendar, written by Johan Calleman.
The Mayans loved time and numbers and patterns. They etched into stone a calendar of all of time. Picture a huge timeline…time as the Mayans understood it began 16 billion years ago and ends …in 2012. That got my attention!
If that isn’t weird enough, this sobering, dark year—literally, from November 2007 to November 2008—was prophesied in 300 BC by the ancient Mayans! I kid you not! By matching events in human history with the intricate patterns in the calendar, Calleman predicted, some seven years ago, that this would be a year of destruction and chaos, when we would see institutions crumble and relationships shatter. As Don Imus says, “You can’t make this stuff up!”
This old calendar even offers an explanation for why it seems that time is flying by faster and faster every year. It’s called time acceleration. The timeline is divided into nine chunks of time. Each chunk is exactly twenty times shorter than the one before it. That could explain it!
A study of human consciousness, Calleman looks at how we have evolved over time. Through a wild lens of astrology, the World Tree, atmospheric and brain wave frequencies, pyramid design and much, much more, he studies our social systems, our technology, and our religions. His take is that the Mayan calendar is a timeline for human enlightenment. He believes that we are exactly where we are meant to me and that now, urgently now, it’s time for each of us to do what it takes to get there.
Well, if we are heading toward it, what is enlightenment? At its simplest, en-light—means, to bring in light. It changes everything. A candle transforms a dark space. Shining light on a situation clarifies it. A friend’s face lights up with interest. A very young or a very old face is luminous. We can all create light, and it is important that we choose to, especially in hard times.
We all know people who just seem enlightened. Artful about getting their egos out of the way, they react calmly to everything. I picture them “big enough,” somehow, to glide through the choppy seas of life and not get swamped. The rest of us know we’re making progress when we overreact less often. As family therapist Terry Real says, our relationships are like a sine wave. The goal is to evolve from having frequent, intense upheavals to living with increasingly less frequent, less intense upsets. I think a gentle sine wave is a kind of enlightenment!
In the words of our own Ellen Forbes, “Enlightened people are inspired by a different understanding of ‘what it’s all about.’ They look over and beyond, not down at their feet the way we do. The music of the spheres is in a different key for them.”
Buddhist Pema Chodron says it “is not the end of anything. Enlightenment, being completely awake, is just the beginning of fully entering into we know not what.”
Portsmouth Aikido teacher Judy Ringer told me a friend’s theory that enlightenment is the [whole] point of identity. Our Mayan scholar would certainly agree with her.
We’ve all had glimpses of enlightenment. Here’s one of mine. About ten years ago, I learned to meditate and had a recurring experience. I would sit facing the window, eyes closed. My thoughts raced at first but, with a bit of luck and with practice, they’d quiet down. It was helpful to imagine a super high tide glistening out there in the sun, the water pulsating outward towards the marsh in widening circles….
And after a while, I would have the strange sensation that the top of my head was opening up. Opening all the way to a vast night sky, full of stars. Huge and silent. I remember a feeling of spaciousness, of gentle, silent travel. Then, I would realize it was happening—and it would end immediately! The window would snap closed—like waking from a vivid dream and losing it. But that briefest of moments, open to a feeling of the infinite, was intoxicating. So I would sit down and try to make it happen again. But it didn’t work that way…. and life moved on. I didn’t sit there so much, and I pretty much forgot about it. How does a person forget about that?
Well, spiritual practice doesn’t happen automatically. It’s something we have to decide to do. Given what’s gong on in the world, I’m inclined to take it up again.
There is a conversation going on these days about enlightenment. Maybe you’ve heard about the new consciousness, or perhaps “The Shift”? Oprah and Eckhart Tolle had an on-line series about it. It’s what the woman with the stroke described.
In our way, we too are part of this conversation. It’s to do with finding spiritual practices, many from Eastern world religions, which take us to a place where time ceases. We go to yoga and tai chi classes, we meditate, we visualize, we dig in our gardens, walk in the woods, we pray, and we chant. Peaceful, we float out into the world. Briefly, we just are—our breathing is quiet, our bellies are soft, we smile and are delighted with our companions, and for a while all is good in the world. The Shift Report, published by the Institute of Noetic Sciences, says, [We] “report an experience of what’s possible that touches every aspect of [our] being.”
According to the Mayans, the path to enlightenment is predictable and orderly. Calleman’s understanding is that every time we enter a new era on the calendar, our consciousness shifts. And when there is a shift, our world view, our way of interacting with one another changes markedly.
He says we are in the midst of a shift now. He sees the last couple hundred years which, happen to correspond to the lifetime of our country, as a period of hierarchy, polarization and fundamentalist thinking. It’s been an era of materialism: of the earth’s resources being exploited, of wealth and acquisitions at one extreme and poverty and starvation at the other. Calleman calls this a dualist, “Western” mindset. He believes that at this very time we are starting to move away from our divided, polarized way of being toward a sense of unity and interconnectedness. He envisions our no longer being pulled apart by our differences, but starting to come together with common purpose. Imagine countries cooperating with countries—he points to the European Union—or Democrats partnering with Republicans, fundamental Christians seeing eye to eye with atheists—or pagans, or Unitarian Universalists! Neighbors living in harmony, and in our homes, couples putting aside our own agendas and re-connecting with each other.
Calleman also defines this shift as a time when people will start to turn, spiritually, toward the East.. We see this as more and more of us take up yoga, for instance, and Qigong. The shift he describes sounds very much like the one I mentioned earlier. We are at a fork in the road. If we step up to it, he says, we can and we will enter a new way of being, a shift of consciousness.
For me, the idea of intention—you and I choosing a path to enlightenment!—resonates. Now and then I try to resist the temptation to respond to difficulty by descending into angry or defensive or tit-for-tat behavior. It’s harder than doing what comes naturally. And when I can be mindful, and respond instead in a loving way, it feels pretty good afterward. I think that, when we do that, we evolve a bit.
And, you know? I’m thinking we all are doing this. We ARE evolving toward our higher selves. Now and then… I even feel it happening. Now, I happen to be a true-blue supporter of one of the presidential candidates. Just last week I received an especially nasty email about his opponent. And suddenly, I’d had it! Instead of gleefully forwarding it to everyone I knew, I wrote back that I was concerned that this was only going to make people mad. It wasn’t going to change votes. And it wasn’t helpful. I like to think my higher self did that
Call me a Pollyanna, but I feel a whisper of a fresh breeze blowing these days. It’s the “We’re all in this together” breeze—can you feel it? It’s even drifting through Wall Street, where no one in America is untouched by what’s happening. It’s billowing through our environmental sensibilities—we are all affected by what kind of mileage your car gets, by how big a house you choose to build. Idling for ten minutes while the bridge is up matters. Your oil is my oil. So, as polarized as we might be in our daily lives, in our politics and in our religions, our choices affect each other, and so…we are more and more interconnected. As the Mayan calendar predicts
At the grassroots level, our kids are leading the way. Their generation seems more interconnected than ours—they certainly think globally. I recently bumped into a friend from Little Harbour School days. Our kids are now juniors in college. I remember that Junior Years Abroad used to be to established cradles of civilization—a kid going to South America was quite a risk taker. Today, our 20-year-olds encircle the globe—Molly’s in Bolivia, Marta’s in Madagascar, Dante’s in Edinborough, Rachel’s in Moscow, Laura’s in South Africa, her best friend Amanda is in China. Lucy’s going to Mali, Jackie to Australia and Sophie to Ecuador. I imagine their world does not feel as divided to them as ours does to us. Perhaps they’re more evolved than we are! Anyway, their being all over the planet feels like a good thing--our kids are bringing people together. Calleman says this too is part of the shift. He even suggests it could all be part…of a cosmic plan
WHAT? Could there be an overarching plan to bring humans together as one? It was crazy enough that the Democrats split the primary vote down the middle. I wouldn’t be surprised if Americans today are evenly divided in half, everyone positive that their candidate’s the right candidate! Do you know anyone like that, hmm? Our country is remarkably, eerily evenly, and, getting to be for me, painfully polarized.
Sometimes I wonder if we are at this point in order to see something. Maybe it is a message from on high. Or maybe it’s about evolution—could it be built into our genes to get to the 21st century and be so divided that we are stuck, unless we choose to change?
Could this be the time we move toward each other? Last Sunday New York Mayor Bloomberg said, “There is a partisanship that has paralyzed our country. The conservatives are less willing to move to the middle, and the liberals are less willing to move to the middle. We’ve got to get over that,” he went on. “We’ve got to understand that we’re all in this together.”
Roberta talked last week about the Baptist minister who invited her and the rabbi to come talk about their faiths. It turned that people had more in common than kept them apart. She said “it was an enlightening evening for all of us.”
If today’s headlines aren’t enough reason for us to try to bring in light, then maybe the prophecy of the stone tablets is. I find it hard to ignore the convergence of troubled world, fascination with a new consciousness, and predictions of all of this from an ancient culture. For me, that feels urgent! I find myself thinking about enlightenment for us, today. Yes, for us, we who balance jobs and care for family members, who try to keep our homes in good shape. Enlightenment for us…who cry over washing machines.
Life gets busy, and spiritual practice often ends up on the back burner. We know it delivers a great feeling, but our work, our to-do lists, even the laundry calls more loudly to us. But when the washing machine is in pieces and the Sears telemarketers in Texas have weeks to talk about it, maybe a few minutes of spaciousness are in order. After all, as the ancient Zen saying goes, “After the ecstasy, the laundry.”
I agree with the Mayan scholar and with the brain scientist. We don’t have to wait for grace to surprise us with unexpected moments of well-being. We can create these moments ourselves. Why on earth shouldn’t we?
What if better times are right around the corner? What about finding what we have in common with strangers, with “others,” with our political and our religious opposites? What if, by asking about their hopes and concerns, we draw closer to them? None of us is right—reminds me of the bumper sticker that says, “I don’t know. And you don’t either!” At the end of the day, all of us want the same things—to be safe, happy, to be loved.
So I encourage you to think about light—look for it in each others’ faces, notice it wherever you go. Wish it for others. Send it out into the world. And feel the cool breeze of “We’re all in this together”—it might blow in opportunities to replace feeling polarized with feeling connected. Reach out, as Calleman says, “out of necessity, not whim…for the good of the rest of humankind.”
We can choose how to respond to headlines, be they overseas or in our homes. As we start to think as one, as we make a place in our interior landscape for buoyancy and well-being, as we soften toward people we struggle to accept—and soften toward the people we love—we are indeed healing our world, and we are evolving. I like to think we are moving toward enlightenment.