It's been almost three minutes now. The initial embrace was a good 30 seconds long, but the nose-to-nose soul-gaze they're locked in now has lasted for what seems an eternity. The Mexican waiters squeeze by them with puzzled looks, but the ladies stare on.
There's a lot of this happening down here, but this time it's happening in the hotel coffeeshop. Both women are wearing fashionable, blinding-white outfits and sport robust crystals.
Another minute goes by, but finally, they part, smile meaningfully and glide away. These hugs of spiritual import are commonplace; everywhere you go you run into ingratiating, I-know-what-you-know smiles. The upscale tourist hotels here in downtown Merida, Mexico are filled with people who have signed up for the Mayan Solar Initiation Journey, a week-long ceremonial adventure aimed--once again--at healing and uniting our planet.
Yesterday was the spring equinox and everybody was out at the ancient Mayan pyramid at Chichen Itza to welcome the new cycle of the Mayan calendar with ancient Mayan solar ceremonies. Whether you're aware of it or not, we've just entered the Itza Age.
The Itza Age will be an age of belief rather than knowledge--an age of cosmic light. A new age of galactic citizenship, a time to reawaken humanity to the ancient knowledge of the cosmos, a time to fulfill our sacred destiny. (Am I leaving anything out?)
Now, I'm as anxious as anyone to be reawakened to the ancient knowledge of the cosmos, so I arrived--with chakras tuned and well-lubricated--singing: "Gimme that old-time sacred wisdom." However, I begged off on the Mayan Solar Initiation Tour. Though it included hotels, meals, ground transportation and a week of top New Age guest lecturers, the price tag for the week's events averaged around $1,500, not including airfare. Nobody said galactic citizenship came cheap.
Participants were advised that they would "be working with superior powers throughout the journey" and given a few suggestions for enhancing their Mayan Solar Initiation experience. You don't want to piss off superior powers, so everyone was asked to abstain from sex and eating red meat for three days preceding the journey. Additionally, they were told to maintain harmony if traveling with a partner. Also, be open-minded, be respectful and of course, wear white!
About 400 signed on for the tour--mostly Americans and mostly women. A good number were in their late forties or early fifties--women who have shed husbands, with kids who are grown and time on their hands--many of whom are just arriving at the New Age buffet table. Plenty of healers and psychics have shown up. A lot of astrologers, too. A few who even claim to "communicate with the spiritual hierarchy," which I suppose means God actually takes their calls.
A fair number of people seem to have picked up a new name along their spiritual paths, which of course, upon introduction, necessitates a lengthy discourse on how they arrived at a name like "Padma Sunbright" (More on him later.)
If you ever wanted to talk about energy, this was the place. People felt it, saw it, created it, shifted it, diddled it. Man, this was a downright energy convention! A lot of serious discussion of the "light body" and how to anchor it. And in the hotel bar, I heard one of the best pick-up lines ever: "I'm from the Pleiades."
Hunbatz Men was the driving force behind the week's events. Born to an indigenous family in Yucatan, Mexico in 1941, he was only seven when his uncle began educating him to take the responsibility for continuing the Mayan tradition of his ancestors. He has traveled internationally teaching the sacred Mayan solar culture and is the founder of the Center for Mayan Studies in Merida. Some folks are unimpressed with Hunbatz and write him off as just another New Age shaman. Others call him a messenger working hard to fulfill ancient Mayan prophecy.
Archaeologists are pretty much baffled by Mayan culture. Throughout the jungles of the Yucatan and in the highlands of present-day Guatemala, thousands of exquisitely carved pyramids tower above the tree line and carefully planned ceremonial centers reveal a highly intelligent civilization that was entrenched in mysticism. And yet, there is no evidence that the Maya used metal tools, beasts of burden or labor-saving devices like the wheel. Even more perplexing is their calendar system, so precise that the earth's revolutions around the sun coincide to within a thousandth of a decimal point of modern scientific calculations.
Jose Arguelles, author of The Mayan Factor (Bear & Company), believes that the Maya were doing much more than just marking time and wonders whether the calendar isn't speaking to "resonant qualities of being and experience whose nature our materialistic disposition blinds us to."
Whatever the case, archaeologists haven't been able to come up with the reason for the abandonment of key Mayan centers in 830. Experts hypothesize that drought, pestilence or internal revolution might have been causes for their disappearance, but Arguelles wonders about that: "There is such a clear break prior to the recommencement of Mayan civilization in the late 10th century. It's as if the rupture had been conscious and deliberate. By the time the Spanish arrived, it's as if all understanding of the past had been forgotten. And yet the calendar remained. A clue--for whom?"
Maybe for us. According to a sacred text released by the Center for Mayan Studies, in 1475 the supreme Maya priestly council assembled to reveal that two calendar cycles of 260 years each would have to pass before Mayan solar culture could flourish again to benefit mankind.
Five hundred twenty years later, here we are.
The text also says: "A brother from a faraway land, way beyond the sea, will come to awaken the Maya people, who are to remain asleep during a period of darkness. This brother will come dressed in the colors of the sun, which will remind the Maya people of their ancient commitment to the solar creator."
Perhaps the three Tibetan lamas--wearing orange and red robes--fulfilled that end of the prophecy. Throughout the week, they stood side by side with traditional Maya during the week's worth of ceremonies. They offered their meditations and also delivered their message to the solar initiates, which boiled down to one of simple kindness: Be nice to each other.
Out at Chichen Itza though, Hunbatz Men had to deal with 400 giddy, spiritual
gladiators who seemed incapable of keeping their hands linked while circling
the pyramid three times under a 90-degree sun. Hunbatz circled quite a few more
than that in trying to shore up the breaks and a few times lost his temper
shouting, "What is the problem? Why can't you do this?"
He later acknowledged, with a touch of embarrassment, that he had acted the militar out of frustration with the lack of discipline demonstrated by some participants. "The work we did is very sacred for me. Maybe some people, they can't understand very well right now. Some time, I need to push very strongly. But I doing something that's good. Good for them. Good for me. Good for the future."
The spring equinox also fell on Benito Juarez Day, a national holiday. For the Mexicans, a regiment of New Agers who looked like they'd stepped out of a laundry-detergent commercial must have been a curious sight. Certainly, the relentless influx of visitors must have additionally distracted Hunbatz Men, especially when mariachi music from a nearby soundstage occasionally punctured the solemn solar rituals at the foot of the pyramid.
For their part, the lamas seemed unperturbed by the increasing frenzy. Prior to their invocations, they posed for snapshots with Mexican tourists and genuinely seemed to delight in the increasing frenzy. In all, 40,000 people arrived to celebrate and gawk at a pyramid-side light show that night, but also to take a firsthand look in the afternoon at the shadow of the serpent that undulates up the pyramid stairs just twice a year.
The ancients called it Kulkulcan, for which the pyramid is named, and it's revealed in light and shadow only on the equinox, and creates seven pyramidal shadows. These seven shadows supposedly represent our seven chakras and our connection to the constellation of the Pleiades. The spectacle of the serpent grows in popularity each year. It's yet another tribute to the attentiveness of the ancient Maya who watched the heavens for thousands of years in order to understand the great law of their Creator, Hunab K'u.
This year is considered decisive, so says the sacred text, because the human race will have to enter the path of cosmic light if it is to remain a thinking species. I wonder if a pyramid-side laser extravaganza will cut us any slack, because I don't think the monumental, Chichen Itza-style traffic jam afterward will.
Two days later, more ceremonies were performed--this time at the ruins in Uxmal. These were intended to make participants aware of their dormant mental, physical and spiritual powers. The rites were better-organized and far less peopled than the day of the equinox. Hunbatz Men, in ancient ceremonial dress, led a decidedly different procession of journeyers into Uxmal's spectacular Quadrangle of the Nuns in a far less carnival-like and more purposeful solar ritual.
During this meditation, at this supposed center of magnetic energy, many members of the journey were obviously experiencing something transformational. One younger woman performed an extended, trance-like repetition of movements that seemed to involve scooping energy from the earth, carrying it skyward and releasing it to the heavens. Some threw themselves prostrate on the ground to better experience the earth energy. Most participants stood with palms raised outward to better receive whatever energy was being created. The energy of the sun was as brutal as ever and caused some confusion for one participant: "Am I feeling the energy or am I dehydrating?"
Padma Sunbright showed up again, as he had at Chichen Itza, and performed his
own personal brand of ceremonial jive. Dressed like a Dr. Seuss character and
carrying a gaudy sacred staff and a flute with feathers, he shuffled about the
ruins slowly chanting, bowing and intoning all kinds of solemn bullshit,
exhibiting, generally, the subtlety of an elephant. He also permitted himself
the high honor of standing with the lamas, but not until after he regaled them
with a little ditty on his flute.
I ran into him in the hotel lobby and asked him his story. He readily confessed that he was both the reincarnation of Mahatma Gandhi and the True White Brother of the Hopi prophecy who would one day arrive from the east to assist in the Day of Purification. I didn't have the heart to tell Padma that since he presently lived in Wisconsin, he was actually arriving directly from the north. Details, details. However, it's reassuring to know that the True White Brother prefers Keds.
Hunbatz Men was not distressed by Padma's insistence on insinuating himself into the ceremonies. "Chichen Itza and Uxmal are very sacred centers," he said. "Not belong to me--belong to humanity. If that person need to do something, I need to let him do it. I am Maya. That place is Maya. But the Great Spirit is there. If that person feel the Great Spirit within him, I'm not going to interfere."
But were members of the Mayan Solar Initiation journey upset? "Many people, but their situation may be they're not ready to understand. Maybe they have to wait a little to change. Maybe next year they will be different. This kind of world we're making, we need to be only one spirit--your spirit, my spirit, the spirit of the tree. It need to be one spirit. When we admit that, the Great Spirit is there."
Hunbatz also expressed no surprise over the majority of women in attendance. "Maybe the men were not ready, but the women, maybe they're more sensitive than men. And that's true. The women are more ready and more sensitive. So they begin to feel something change."
The ceremonies at the Mayan ruins were by no means closed to outsiders. Scruffier-looking pilgrims, touring Mexico on the cheap, seemed well-acquainted with the import of the incoming Itza Age and conducted private meditations and freely joined hands with those on the tour. After all, Hunab K'u says he will reclaim all his beloved beings.
If the Maya are right, there is a sacred destiny we have to fulfill: to become "true sons and daughters of the cosmic light." That's what the Mayan document says. It also says: "The time of knowledge approaches. The light in center of the pyramidal house of Hunab K'u will flash like lightning [and] pierce through the shadows that envelop the human race. Let us prepare to receive the light of knowledge that comes from Hunab K'u and transcend into the memory of the Creator and become beings of eternal luminosity."
Ceremonies give us milestones to chart our progress, spiritual and otherwise. If the Itza Age has truly arrived, the real work will take place in between them. Certainly, there's is no telling how valuable concerted, spiritual group endeavor might be. It certainly can't hurt our present global condition and besides, I don't mind the idea of becoming a being of eternal luminosity in the least.
On my last night in Merida, I strolled down the boulevard in the warm darkness, trying to feel maybe just a few glimmers of this great, galactic beam. It was about 11 o'clock, hardly anyone on the street, when I saw I was being trailed by a young Mexican girl, about eight years old, selling flowers.
I have two children of my own, but I hesitated. Should I make a big deal and buy all of her flowers or should I hang on to my money for cabfare to the airport tomorrow?
Questions for the Itza Age.
