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 We are heading toward a singularity in history
 in which yesterday looks nothing like today and today looks nothing like tomorrow at all.
 Almost universally, ancient texts and traditions say that we are preparing for 1,000 years
 of a peaceful coexistence in this world and that sometimes our greatest strengths become apparent
 when we face the greatest challenges together.
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 In the small town of Elberton, Georgia, stands a mysterious monument built in 1980
 by an anonymous gentleman named R.C. Christian.
 The Georgia Guidestones contain a message for the people of the future, describing a new way to live.
 For some, it is a message of hope. For others, a message of fear.
 Every year, millions of people pass by the murals at the Denver Airport.
 These murals seem to be telling us a story about the choices we must face as we look towards the future.
 In the small town of Hendaye in the south of France, there is an ancient monument
 describing the events that will occur at the end of our age.
 In Izapa, Guatemala, the early Mayan people left behind their long count calendar,
 which told of a day when the fifth sun will end and the sixth sun will begin.
 According to this calendar, the shift of the ages will occur on December 21, 2012.
 The Quero people of Peru believe that we are now going through a time of purification.
 They have a prophecy called Pachacuti, which speaks of a time when the Inca will return
 and a new human will be born.
 They say that this will happen in 2012.
 The singularity that arises for no reason in absolutely empty space instantly
 is the least likely of all singularities.
 The Big Bang is the notion that the universe, for no reason, sprang from nothing
 in a single instant.
 Notice that this is the limit test for credulity,
 that it is not possible to conceive of something more unlikely or less likely to be believed.
 That the universe would spring from nothing in a single instant for no reason,
 it makes no sense.
 It is in fact no different than saying, "And God said, 'Let there be light.'"
 What the philosophers of science are saying is, "Give us one free miracle
 and we will roll from that point forward from the birth of time to the crack of doom."
 Doesn't it seem more likely, if we have to have a singularity, that it occurs in a domain
 with a rich history, with many causal streams feeding into the situation that nurtures the complexity?
 In other words, to put it simply, if you have to have a singularity,
 doesn't it make more sense to put it at the end of a cosmogonic process than at the beginning?
 My inquiry into the end date of the Mayan long-count calendar took me to Peru.
 Because of the protection of the high altitude of the Andes Mountains,
 the Quero, or Inca people, are one of the last indigenous peoples of the Americas
 whose ancient traditions are not only still intact, but alive and breathing.
 The Quero escaped the Spanish conquest by moving into the high Andes,
 where they have lived for over 500 years.
 They speak little or no Spanish and still retain the beliefs and customs
 that have been passed down for many generations.
 The Quero have an ancient prophecy concerning the return of Pachacuti,
 their great leader from before the conquest.
 Pachacuti, which means "the turning over of the earth," also left behind a prophecy.
 In this prophecy, he said that this age of conquest and domination would come to an end,
 a new human would be born, and the earth would be restored to its former beauty and grace.
 The Quero say that the return of Pachacuti is scheduled for 2012.
 On my way through some of the highest mountains in the Western Hemisphere,
 I met and came to know the descendants of the once mighty Inca Empire who still live here.
 Extremely poor by our standards, the people of Peru have an inner fire
 and a deeply profound spiritual tradition which has nourished them
 and kept them alive through many historical calamities.
 The sacred valley has been carved out by the Urubamba River,
 which begins with the melted glaciers that lie at the top of majestic mountains
 which rise over 20,000 feet above sea level.
 Eventually, the Urubamba pours its contents into the vast Amazon Delta
 and finally into the Atlantic Ocean.
 Dotting the mountains throughout the sacred valley and beyond are many ancient Inca ruins.
 These ruins are magnificent, and one has to wonder how the ancient Inca
 were able to construct these temples using such huge stones and fit them together so perfectly.
 Once more I met up with Doña Bernardina and Don Humberto,
 shaman healers of the Quero.
 I wanted to know more about the prophecy of Pachacuti.
 I was assisted by Dr. Alberto Violdo, who translated their words into English for me.
 These are the last of the Inca.
 They are the elders of the Quero Nation and their children.
 The Quero fled to high mountain tops at the time of the Quero.
 They went to high mountain tops at the time of the conquest
 and took with them the body of prophecies and processes for awakening the luminous body.
 Evolutionary quantum leaps have always occurred during times of crisis.
 Today we are facing such a crisis with global warming, with depleting oil reserves,
 with an oil-based economy.
 Men and women have lived in high mountains for 500 years,
 and they predict that during the next six years, between now and the year 2012,
 we will be facing global crises of a dimension that we have not dreamt of before.
 And not a single crisis, but multiple crises occurring simultaneously, cascading crises.
 And whereas we may be prepared to meet the challenges of a great hurricane or a storm or an earthquake,
 several of these occurring simultaneously would be devastating to our economy,
 to our society, to the fabric of our lives.
 These seers left a body of prophecy 500 years ago that spoke about the return of Pachacuti,
 the return of the luminous ones.
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 Doña Bernardina and Don Humberto decided to create a despacho.
 The despacho is an ancient healing ceremony where all of our negative feelings and thoughts are purified and burned away.
 The construction of a despacho is similar to that of a Tibetan sand mandala.
 It is formed with symbolic objects of beauty, endearment and humor to the caro.
 During the ceremony, all of our negative thoughts, feelings and emotions are placed inside the objects of the mandala.
 Not only do we release our negativity, but we also blow our prayers into the sacred coca leaves and place them in the despacho.
 At the end of the ceremony, the despacho will be gathered up in paper and placed in a fire,
 thereby dispatching the negative thoughts and feelings and burning them up in the flames.
 The despacho made me think of all that is going wrong with this world.
 I thought of the wars, the collapse of the environment, the lies and deceptions.
 I wondered if we could take all of these negative situations and place them into the despacho.
 It seems to me that the only way that we can solve the dilemma of this world is by honestly facing these problems
 and in that moment of insight, burn away the negativity and reshape the world.
 Maybe that is what the prophecy of Pachacuti is really all about.
 Here at the end of the age, we finally have the opportunity to understand not only what we have done, but who we really are.
 Climate change is proceeding at a very rapid rate.
 We are about 10 or 15 years into a period of sudden climate change for the last 40 to 50 years.
 Right now, there has just been a big report published by the UN that was created by a committee that said that this was all very serious,
 but omitted the most serious parts because they were too "controversial".
 The truth is this, the Greenland ice cover is becoming unstable fast.
 In fact, Greenland's entire ice cover could collapse, especially in the southern half of the country, at any time,
 causing an immediate sea level rise of between 1.5 and 2 feet worldwide,
 causing trillions of dollars of damage that cannot be repaired and will not be repaired.
 The destruction of New Orleans is justifiably blamed on the most incompetent political administration in the history of the United States.
 Yes, but it is also, it happened because for another reason.
 The stratosphere is getting much colder because global warming gases are holding heat closer to the surface in the troposphere,
 so heat is not radiating.
 Therefore, the difference between the lower atmosphere and the upper atmosphere is getting much larger.
 This means that when storms bulge up into the upper atmosphere, the energy exchange is much more intense.
 So when a hurricane gets large enough to do that, then suddenly it grows into a monster, unlike things we've seen before.
 This can happen at any time with any type of storm anywhere on this planet now, and it does happen all the time.
 That is out of this sufficiency of chaos, of cataclysm, of breakdown, the worst of which, of course, is the climate, the ecological breakdown.
 People feel instinctively the impetus from the Earth herself to wake up and to make a difference.
 We have come to the state where we do not trust politicians, where we do not trust medicine, where we do not trust the media,
 because we know that what we're getting are not news, but opinion pieces.
 So we live in the age of the great lie.
 We are in climate trouble, and people who say, "Oh, well, look at the cold weather, so much for those global warming charts."
 It's because of global warming that the weather has become so extreme.
 The United States government has made such an effort to prevent science from answering questions like that, we can't know the answer to that.
 But if it's happening, then starting this coming summer, and for summers to come, we're going to see extraordinary temperature spikes on this planet,
 killing temperature spikes, followed by violent winter and autumn storms.
 You would think that there's a conspiracy, except that they're not smart enough to come together to have a conspiracy. It's a conspiracy of mediocrity.
 Right now, there are between 5 and 6 billion human beings on Earth. In 200 years, there's going to be 1 billion, or maybe less, on Earth.
 And during this dieback, the human species is going to suffer unimaginable torment of a kind that is completely unlike anything we have known in recorded history.
 All these things seem to be pointing towards a possible extinction event.
 But I think what is probably more likely going on is that we are in the grip of a gigantic change.
 And in that change, something is dying. The old ways are dying.
 There will, however, also be continuing the human spirit purified by this event.
 And I assure you, it's not our fault. It's nobody's fault. It is simply the way nature is.
 When nature unfolds in the life of a conscious species, at this stage, it can be very, very hard.
 All of our gods, all of our beliefs, all of our prayers, all of that, by the end of this event, will have been left behind.
 The media has gone mythic without telling a deeper story.
 So what you get on the media is blips. Not the hero's journey.
 Not the great tales of death and resurrection, of renewal, of great wise figures.
 Except sometimes there's blips.
 This country, the United States, will not be a federal republic in a hundred years, I don't think.
 I think that the pressures that are building on it now are incredible.
 There is a sort of Damocles hanging over our heads as a species.
 The cord that holds it is about to snap.
 There's obviously huge amounts of negative indicators, you know, that we're at this crucial tipping point.
 We really might not, you know, survive in larger societies or even as a species if we keep continuing down the path that we're on.
 So, you know, we're looking at 25% of species potentially extinct in 30 years.
 No more coral reefs, no more honeybees, no more butterflies, no more amphibians.
 And at that point, like the whole mesh of the web of life that supports large mammalian life may not be there anymore.
 So, you know, we definitely are at a critical juncture where we have this window of opportunity to make a really radical and fast transition to a different social paradigm and a different sustainable infrastructure.
 We have lost the hearth where the grandparents told the stories of the wise ones.
 And we replaced the hearth with a television set.
 And the problem is no hearth, no heart.
 No sense of continuity.
 No sense of the great chain of being, the great connectivity between the generations without which civilization perishes.
 I mean, I think we have this tendency to think, you know, to yearn for something to come from outside and save us.
 You know, it's like we've gotten ourselves into a heap of shit and we want daddy or mommy to come along, the benevolent, you know, super being and save us from ourselves, you know.
 And so I think, I'm not sure that's healthy because it prevents people, I mean, that's a natural tendency, but it prevents people from saying no, you know, we got ourselves into this mess and nobody is going to get us out unless we do it.
 And the earth herself and her need and the world society, the world civilization is rising up from the depths and waking us up.
 Sometimes with nightmares, sometimes with a vision of possibilities.
 Yeah, I think it's important to, like, enjoy all the contradictions and paradoxes and, you know, not try to, like, smooth them down, but actually really, like, almost celebrate the absolute absurdity of the situation we're in.
 I mean, the situation looks pretty grim.
 And right now we have no, no escape hatch that's apparent, you know.
 We don't have the capability to leave the planet.
 We don't have, you know, even if that were desirable and maybe it is, maybe it isn't, we don't, you know, there is nowhere to run to.
 We're kind of stuck where we are.
 And so we've got to try to make that work.
 Don Umberto and Doña Bernardina continued to construct the despacho.
 One by one, I placed the negative energies of our times into the symbolic objects of the despacho.
 I blew my prayers into the coca leaves to dispel the wars and suffering that is the story of this age just ending.
 I thought about what I had learned concerning the year 2012, about the other prophecies that also speak of the end of this age and the beginning of a new world.
 So as scholars had reconstructed the Mayan long count calendar and they had been able to correlate the Maya calendar with our own
 in order to come up with the correlation that the end of this 13 bak'tun cycle did indeed fall on the year that we would call 2012.
 But scholars were predisposed to think that it was the beginning of this great cycle that had the most importance.
 Well, that's just not the way that the Mayan understanding of time works.
 The Maya look to the end of a cycle or process for the meaningful event.
 I'm convinced that there is something going on here and that the Maya probably through their visionary capabilities using sacred plants and other shamanic techniques were able to look into the future.
 And that's what governed their timing of their end point in their calendar.
 There is a prophecy that's involved in this 2012 end date, but it's actually anchored to this empirical, physical, astronomical process that's happening and it is the galactic alignment.
 The December solstice sun is lining up with the Milky Way and the galactic equator is really the target of this galactic alignment.
 From the astrological point of view or the astronomic point of view, it's a very significant date.
 There are certainly all these alignments and the center of the galaxy and the conjunction in Sagittarius and all these different things.
 There's no dispute about that.
 That's written into the way the clockwork works. Does it mean anything? I don't think we can say.
 The galactic equator is that midline of the Milky Way in the sky. It's kind of like the finish line in this process.
 The analogy that we can make is to the Earth's equator. The Earth's equator, as we know, divides the northern hemisphere from the southern hemisphere.
 There are distinct field effects in these two different hemispheres.
 We know that hurricanes and tornadoes spin counterclockwise in the northern hemisphere and they spin clockwise in the southern hemisphere.
 There is a field effect involved in these two different hemispheres of the Earth.
 Any spinning body will also exhibit these kinds of field effects and our galaxy is a spinning body.
 The galactic equator, the Milky Way, basically is the dividing line between the northern galactic hemisphere and the southern galactic hemisphere.
 Our sun has been pointed, the Earth-Sun relationship has been pointed into the southern hemisphere of the galaxy for some 13,000 years.
 This alignment on the galactic equator is sort of like the null zone.
 It's as if we had a bathtub on the Earth's equator and we were trying to look to see which way the water was going to spin down.
 It's the null zone in the process.
 At some point we're going to begin to enter into the effects and our experience on this planet of being oriented to the northern galactic hemisphere.
 When this happens, it's hard to say.
 I would say there's probably a 36-year zone of alignment in which we approach perfect alignment.
 Then it begins to wane, but then we're oriented towards the opposite side.
 There's an argument some people put forward that because the central point of this time window, this galactic alignment time window between 1980 and 2016,
 is either 1998 or 1999 depending on which astronomer you speak to.
 That means that these people say that the Maya were out by 13 or 14 years.
 They do say that it's still quite an incredible achievement to see that far in the future with that kind of technology that they had.
 Even so, due to the information that I've discovered, this information about not just about the process, but about the year 2012 in particular,
 has been bubbling up from all kinds of different sources.
 Many of these sources are people that have had altered states of consciousness of various types,
 like near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, remote viewing, abduction, that is alien abduction, people taking sacred plants.
 I started my 2012 quest with John Major Jenkins' book, Maya Cosmogenesis 2012.
 Of all the things that John said in that book, one of the most interesting things is he describes the Maya conception that at 2012,
 you have an opening of the center of the Milky Way galaxy, and a ladder emerges from the center.
 Out of this ladder emerges a serpent rope.
 Riding upon this serpent rope like he's surfing the serpent rope is an enlightened being who may possibly be Quetzalcoatl.
 What John said, which I found so interesting, is he said that he thought he could take out the archaic Maya term serpent rope,
 and insert the modern word wormhole, and you have what the Mayans are describing is going to happen in 2012.
 A stargate or a wormhole is going to open from the galactic center, and out of this is going to emerge an enlightened being or a group of enlightened beings.
 If you follow the serpent rope stargate connection, and you go back into various sacred traditions,
 whether it be Egypt, or Samaria, or elsewhere, Tibet, you find enlightened beings that ride upon serpent ropes.
 You see these same beings entering Earth through gateways.
 I think we've got a real solid connection here that this serpent rope is in fact a stargate or a wormhole.
 What I marvel at is the way that modern science and the ancient Maya concepts are starting to match.
 Researchers talk about the stargate or wormhole as the apex of our science,
 and that if we can get a hold of this stargate science, it will literally lead to our salvation.
 They use religious terms in that sense.
 If we don't get this stargate connection, then we have to start all over.
 They talk about this as the most dangerous moment. This is the moment where we either get it or we don't.
 This is why this Maya conception is so important to me.
 Alchemists in ancient Europe had a 13-signed zodiac.
 This 13-signed zodiac was based on the lunar cycle, 28-day months, 13 months a year, as opposed to our 12-month calendar that we have now.
 So I guess this begs the question, if we have 12 months, we have 12 signs in the zodiac,
 what was the name of this 13th month or this 13th sign?
 This is where the answer gets really fascinating, because the 13th sign of the zodiac was called Ophiuchus.
 It's a constellation in the sky, and it lies between the constellations of Sagittarius and Scorpio.
 What is really fascinating about this is that it is exactly where the center of the galaxy lies.
 So Ophiuchus, or the serpent holder, is the center of the galaxy.
 It is the secret sign of the zodiac. It's the sign that governs all the other signs.
 Just as Jesus governed the 12 apostles, just as King Arthur governed the 12 knights of the round table,
 so too does Ophiuchus, or the serpent holder, govern the other 12 signs of the zodiac.
 The archetype of Quetzalcoatl is integration.
 It's not about rejecting science and technology for intuition and the psychic.
 It's about really bringing those things together.
 To get through this transition, we're going to have to take the technical capacities of the Western mindset,
 that have been almost overdeveloped, but reorient them to dealing with the planetary situation.
 The intelligence that goes into making an iPod, or a cell phone, or a high-definition digital video camera,
 take that kind of technical brilliance, but use it to preserve species.
 How do you create a wilderness corridor that's going to protect the handful of monarch butterflies that are still floating around?
 How do you restore wetlands, coral reefs, and forest areas?
 Now that we've created the knowledge technology and the information age stuff,
 we now need to go to another level and use a depth perspective.
 Where do we actually fit our technical capacities into the planetary biosphere,
 so that we hopefully not only just sustain ourselves, but ultimately thrive and flourish as aspects of the planetary ecology?
 I believe that we are in the most interesting time in human history.
 Other times thought they were it. They're wrong. This is it.
 What we do in the next 5, 10, 20, 30, 40 years will make the difference between whether we grow as a planetary civilization,
 or whether we just are at the end of it.
 I think we're seeing examples of this as the systems of nature break down around us.
 Unprecedented changes in weather patterns, hurricanes, earthquakes, fires,
 and entire cities are decimated and we have to draw upon the strengths of one another.
 It's teaching us about cooperation.
 It's about a cooperation that transcends heritage and bloodlines and borders, income levels, religion, the color of our skin.
 The despacho ceremony provides us with the power to change the future by releasing the past.
 As the objects in the despacho are gathered together and placed in the mandala, they are blessed by Don Umberto.
 To the Caro, time seems to stand still.
 They have no cars, no televisions.
 Their lives are simple and quiet.
 It has been this way for thousands of years.
 They are also comfortable living within each moment,
 and this allows them to be able to see the future and understand the past.
 Once, all cultures on Earth had this capacity.
 Even our own Western culture has its prophets and prophecies.
 In the books of Ezekiel and Revelations, the prophets speak of an angel with four faces.
 The face of a lion, an eagle, a bull, and a man.
 These four symbols correspond to the four fixed signs of the zodiac.
 Leo, Scorpio, Taurus, and Aquarius.
 On an esoteric level, it is very possible that the prophets of the Bible were telling us
 that the great year of the zodiac, which is almost 26,000 years long,
 could be broken up into four seasons of nearly 6,500 years each.
 History shows us that each time we enter one of these four fixed signs or seasons,
 great changes occur on our planet.
 Astrologers tell us that we are now entering the sign of Aquarius.
 The Hindu Cycle of the Yugas
 The Hindu Cycle of the Yugas and Hindu cosmology
 is a very, very important reflection of the same insights that the Maya had tuned into.
 The Maya have an idea of world ages,
 and they believe there was a succession of five world ages,
 and each one of these was 13 bhaktuns, which is a period of some 5,125 years.
 So there's five world ages, and if you multiply these together,
 you get a great cycle of 26,000 years, which is precession.
 In the Maya concept of the Yugas, they believe that there was a golden age
 many thousands of years ago.
 That is when human beings were experiencing the greatest connection with the source.
 But then there was a process of diminishment,
 and darkness entered into human consciousness.
 So we moved from the golden age to the silver age,
 in which there was greater spiritual darkness,
 and then into the bronze age, in which there was even greater spiritual darkness.
 Finally, to the iron age, in which darkness had completely occluded the spiritual light.
 And in the Hindu Yuga doctrine, that is where we are right now.
 The long count calendar was lost.
 Before the Spanish arrived, the long count calendar was out of use.
 So many of the indigenous people are sort of affronted
 that Western people are actually talking about their knowledge.
 But the fact is that without those Mayanists, who were non-indigenous people,
 that knowledge would have remained buried, and nobody would know about it.
 This is really just an insight into the cyclic nature of all processes
 that all cycles in nature undergo.
 We see it in the moon cycle, we see it in the year cycle, we see it in the day cycle.
 And the thing is that there is a point of maximum darkness,
 but then we turn the corner, and we begin the ascent,
 in which we reverse the process, and there is a progressive unveiling of the veils
 that have occluded human consciousness from having a direct connection with the source,
 the infinite light.
 When I first began looking into the cross of Hende many years ago,
 I realized that Fulcanelli was right when he was telling us that the cross of Hende
 is describing the events that will lead up to the end of time, to the end of this age.
 Not the end of the world, but the end of this age, or the end of time as we know it.
 I realized from the pedestal and from the symbols on the cross of Hende
 pretty much the exact nature of what was about to happen at the end of time.
 But one of the things that baffled me throughout this entire thing
 was the Latin inscription on the cross.
 Fulcanelli tells us in his chapter on the cross of Hende from his book, Mystery of the Cathedrals,
 that this inscription is describing a place where man can find refuge
 from the catastrophe that's going to occur at the end of time.
 He says that a country is being named.
 From my perspective, spending time in the ancient indigenous cultures
 and from the traditions that I've studied in the texts and on the temple walls,
 every day of life is the opportunity for us to deal with whatever it is that life naturally brings our way.
 The 2012 alignment is when we have reached the maximum point of darkness.
 It's like galactic midnight.
 And I also think that this is the deep insight encoded into the yuga doctrine.
 Basically when I deciphered the Latin inscription on the cross of Hende,
 I discovered two messages, two messages that are very similar to each other.
 The first message was "Inca cave, Cusco, Peru."
 The second message was "Hail to the cross of Urcos."
 When I looked up the word "Urcos" in a world atlas,
 I discovered that there was a town called Urcos 20 miles south of Cusco, Peru.
 This seemed beyond coincidence, and so my interest in Peru greatly increased,
 and I began reading everything I could about the country of Peru.
 It's very clear that the yugas are directly related to procession.
 So we can divide procession into two halves, the descending half and the ascending half.
 And with this information and with the Mayan insights into this world age cycle,
 it does appear that 2012 would be the end of the descending yuga cycle in the Hindu chronology.
 I talked to the Peruvian anthropologist Juan del Prado,
 who told me that there was a mysterious cross in the town of Urcos.
 And so when I visited Urcos, I discovered this cross on the edge of the lake there, Lake Urcos.
 And unfortunately, I discovered also that the ancient cross had been removed
 and a new cross had been fixed to the old cross's base.
 So if there was a message on the cross of Urcos, it has disappeared into the well of time.
 If we can reconcile our fears and our judgments and our bias, our jealousy and our anger,
 as well as all the love and accept the forgiveness and the tolerance and the compassion that comes our way every day,
 if we can do that, by virtue of doing that day in and day out,
 we have already prepared for whatever eventuality can happen on any day, on any calendar, in any year.
 Remember, this moment in time was created by a people millennia ago.
 And so it's not about any one date.
 It's about this process that we find ourselves in and the foresight that they had to understand
 that we would continue to disconnect, to detach our beings from the natural world until it was too late to recover.
 Western science has now shown, without a shadow of a doubt,
 that for every emotion that we create in our bodies and for all the feeling that we create in our bodies,
 there's a chemistry that matches that feeling.
 So some of that chemistry is what we would call life-affirming chemistry, and some of it is life-denying.
 Every day of our lives we have the opportunity to nurture the life-affirming or the life-denying chemistry in our bodies.
 And ultimately, I believe every day is preparing us, if we really stop and think about it,
 for whatever it is that 2012 or 11/11 or 10/10 or 12/12 or whatever date might happen to cross our paths.
 Now having said that, what we know is that cosmologically there are cycles within cycles and cycles of time
 where magnetics change, where frequencies change, where planetary alignments make it easier to access the changes
 that we have the opportunity to experience.
 And 2012 appears to be a grand alignment where many cycles within cycles converge in the moment in time
 and that's when we wake up one morning.
 Can you imagine what it feels like, Sharon? Can you imagine to wake up one morning in an Earth that has no magnetic field?
 We really don't know what we feel like.
 The despacho ceremony continued.
 With each object placed in the mandala, our negative feelings were released.
 With each leaf, our prayers were being sent out into the world.
 What had first led me to Peru were the messages left on the cross of Hende.
 I wanted to know what was so special about the caves at Cusco and why was Peru the place of refuge.
 I learned that there is an ancient tradition among the Cairo that teaches that it is possible to turn a human being into a body of light.
 The pacos, or holy shamans of the Cairo, teach that one day all humans will have this ability.
 They say that this is the promise of the prophecy of Pachacuti.
 I wondered if there was a connection between the light body tradition of the Cairo and alchemy.
 Sacsayhuaman is the main ancient ritual complex located in the mountains above Cusco.
 Cusco is shaped like a gigantic puma or South American mountain lion with its entire body pointing towards Sacsayhuaman.
 Nearby is the Temple of the Moon.
 It contains a series of ritual caves, some natural, some carved by humans.
 It is said that the local Cairo still use these caves for ritual and ceremony.
 Traditional tales of the ancient Inca tell us that the shamans used the caves to ignite their bodies and luminous energy fields,
 essentially turning them into beings of light. The alchemists, Egyptians, Tibetans, Hindus, Kabbalists, Sufis and Christians
 also speak of the transmutation of the human being into a body of light as the ultimate goal of the human endeavor.
 Maybe the place of refuge is not just an Inca cave in Cusco, Peru, or in Tibet, or anywhere else.
 Maybe the true place of refuge is in our hearts.
 My adventure in Peru took me to the small town of Urcos.
 Urcos is most famous for being the last stronghold of the Inca in their struggle against the Spanish conquistadors.
 There I discovered the cross of Urcos and saw that its base had indeed been broken off and replaced with a new cross,
 its message, if any, forever lost.
 But I also discovered a second cross at Urcos.
 This strange medieval-looking cross heralded the approach to the town cathedral.
 I learned of a legend in which the four Pacos or holy shamans of the ancient Incan Empire would one day meet at the cathedral in Urcos
 and then go off in the four directions to bring to the rest of the world the message of Pachacuti,
 the end of time and the secret of the luminous body.
 So according to the prophecy, the end of this age and the start of the next would begin here at the cross of Urcos.
 Might this be what "Hail to the Cross of Urcos" means on the Hende monument?
 Maybe the unknown builder of the cross of Hende knew that the ancient knowledge of the body of light, the secret of alchemy, was still intact in Peru,
 and that is why he was instructing the earnest student to come here.
 Every day, in every way, we are making the future.
 As Don Umberto and Doña Bernardina continue to construct the despacho,
 I began to realize that modern people are trapped by time.
 We are prisoners of time.
 Einstein once said that the reason we invented time was to prevent everything from happening at once.
 In our modern world, we want everything now.
 We want instant food, instant love, instant entertainment, instant sex, instant spirituality.
 The ancients believed that the process of achieving one's goals was more important than the actual attainment.
 That which is important must be worked towards.
 Nothing of significance comes easy.
 It's almost as if time itself has played a monstrous trick on us.
 We are born, we grow up, we age, and we die.
 The clock goes on ticking as we go on wanting and needing and taking,
 always longing for but somehow never accomplishing our real goal.
 How many humans have drawn their last breath, never realizing that it is the present moment that is important,
 not the projection of a fantasy that may never be fulfilled.
 All calendars are human interfaces between our perceptions and larger rhythms.
 It doesn't matter what the calendar is, they're all based upon a way of the human mind trying to understand,
 trying to integrate, trying to make sense out of these larger rhythms.
 In the West, we know of only one kind of time, which is linear time,
 which is time that flies like an arrow, in which the future is always before us and the past is behind us.
 This kind of time is founded on the notion of causality, of cause and effect.
 Indigenous societies, shamanic societies, spiritual traditions know of a different kind of time that turns like a wheel.
 It doesn't fly like an arrow, in which the main operating principle is not causality but synchronicity,
 in which you can influence events that occurred in the past and in which you can nudge destiny.
 We have actually in effect a population of time and wage slaves who are creating this and feeding this giant mammon,
 which is called the technosphere, and it's to the complete detriment of the living organism of the Earth itself, the biosphere.
 So we're at this total climax of this process now.
 The human being is totally deceived as to the true nature of him or herself, their soul, as well as to the nature of time and reality.
 We've created a world which is basically an artificial goldfish bowl where the water has gotten quite dirty.
 The problem with linear time, which is the time that we know, is that it tends to produce psychologists and psychotherapists,
 which are wonderful people, but psychology is founded on the notion that who you are today is the result of what happened to you
 when you were six or when you were twelve and when you were in the womb or maybe in a former lifetime.
 So we're always the result of an earlier cause.
 When we are able to engage a different kind of time, we're not only the result of an earlier cause,
 we can be the result of something that hasn't happened yet.
 You're not only the result of your genes and your genetic inheritance that might predispose you to heart conditions and breast conditions.
 You're not only the result of your childhood, but you might be the result of something that happens to you ten years from now or ten thousand years from now.
 So that the future can reach back like a giant hand and bring you forward into who you are becoming.
 We can be informed by who we are becoming and not only by the genetic baggage and the karmic baggage,
 the psychological baggage that we've inherited.
 So this is the time in which we can truly begin to pattern where we are, where we're going, what can be.
 Now one of the things that's lacking in the world today is a sense of the vision of the possible.
 The vision of the possible society, the vision of the possible human, the vision of a planetary civilization,
 where I personally think we're moving towards, with high individuation of cultures, so that the genius of culture can come forward.
 No longer can we make the soul of culture as a satellite, to be a satellite of economics.
 Rather, economics has to be a satellite of the soul of culture.
 When that occurs, then we realize that we're actually traveling through time and not through space.
 It's no longer spaceship Earth, but timeship Earth and timeship Earth.
 2013 will be the inauguration or the initiation of that phase.
 We will have returned to universal synchronization, but we will be stabilized where we are all conscious of the fact that we are in synchronicity.
 At least we know of only one kind of time, which is this linear time.
 And we have only one calendar.
 But for example, there are societies like the Maya, the Mayans or the Inca that have many different calendars.
 The Mayan have 24 different calendars. We have only one.
 Now the origin of this is very interesting, because our myth of creation, our story of creation is founded on the division of space.
 On the first day, God separated the waters above from the waters below, the dry land from the waters on the second day.
 So our mythology is founded on the division of space.
 And the first five books of the Bible have to do with the right that you have to own private property, to own the land.
 Whereas the indigenous mythologies are founded not on the division of space, but on the division of time.
 So that the notion of owning the land is very foreign to the shamanic societies.
 But the notion of owning time is a very familiar one.
 So indigenous cultures are possessed by the land.
 You're born in a village, you never leave that village. You're owned by the land.
 But you have time. In the West we're possessed by time.
 But we own the land. We have no time. Time is not available to us.
 So I think people have to, first they have to become firmly grounded in this alternative paradigm and really get it.
 That actually there's something here which is more substantial and even corresponds better to their lived experience of reality
 than the secular materialist paradigm that they maybe were brought up in or whatever religious paradigm they were brought up in.
 And so once they're firmly grounded in this alternative paradigm, then there's this shift that has to take place, as a Burning Man sign said, from ego to we go.
 How do you then use your intelligence, your strategic capabilities, your skill set, your resources, your karmic factors to assist the transition?
 And for everybody that's going to be different.
 For some people it might be gardening or making a sustainable community somewhere.
 For other people it might be creating new internet social network applications.
 For somebody else it might be using their law degree to work for indigenous people or something.
 A lot of people will have to be willing to take a hit on their idea of comfort and affluence in order to serve a transformational process.
 We've run out of time. We're running out of time. And this is exactly what we're talking about, the end of time.
 It's that this paradigm of being caught in the grip of time and being possessed by it is devastating us.
 And it's coming to an end. And it's going to come to an end either gracefully by each one of us individually learning how to step beyond time, or it's going to be chaotic and dramatic and devastating.
 What we've been trained to and conditioned to believe in the system of reality that we're currently involved in, which dominates the world, is that the third dimension is reality.
 That what you see is what you get. It can't be physically defined or proven, then it doesn't exist. This is the attitude of modern science, for instance.
 The fact is that we live in a multi-dimensional reality. The third dimensional reality is just what we call the plane of testing.
 So our mythology of origin says that we own space and we travel across space. We can travel from here to Africa, go to Europe, go to South America, which seems very foreign to an indigenous person.
 Whereas they are able to travel across time. And that seems very foreign to us.
 They're able to journey along their timeline to visit an event that occurred in the past or travel along their timeline or the timeline of their village to visit or influence an event that will occur in the future.
 That's why seers of long ago were able to foretell the events surrounding 2012.
 We need to walk away from the illusion of linear time that has enslaved us.
 If we don't walk away from this, then the whole cycle after this disaster occurs, and it's going to take place, it's too late now,
 after this disaster occurs, the whole cycle will repeat itself again over the next 10,000 years.
 We must find a new way to deal with time. And that is facing the reality that there is only one moment of time.
 There has never been anything except now.
 There is an ancient Sufi saying, "Don't mistake the map for the territory."
 Sometimes I think we look at time this way. We are always trying to save time.
 Instead, maybe we should be saving ourselves.
 We were nearing the end of the despacho healing ceremony.
 As I watched Don Umberto and Doña Bernardina work together to place the last objects into the mandala,
 I could see that the next world, the next age, would be built around the idea of partnership and cooperation.
 It would be a revival of the archaic, the return to a world of mystery, balance, and shamanic intent.
 Once more, nature would be restored, and men and women would live together in peace.
 We see, really, the struggle for our future today, and it's not between East and West, or North and South,
 or capitalism and socialism, or religious and secular. It's between partnership and domination.
 The anthropologist Rianne Eisler contends that thousands of years ago, men and women lived in a partnership with each other,
 that humans and nature lived in a partnership with each other, and that something happened which separated us from each other and from the earth.
 This could probably be traced back to the beginning of desertification in the Middle East,
 a sense of desperation among the people that lived there, and the solar masculine principle rising forth,
 probably with all good intentions of trying to feed their women and their children.
 But what this created was a new world, which she calls the "dominator world."
 So the dominator trance goes way, way beyond mass media, way, way beyond the issue of drugs.
 It goes to a way of relating, starting very early on, that continues worldwide, unfortunately, in cultures and subcultures all over the world.
 Before, in olden days, the Inka had a lot more power than they do today.
 They could even change stones. They could cut stones only with their wishes.
 They could even call, awaken the life of stones, and the stones would hurl themselves or move themselves on their own.
 They had much more power than they do today.
 In the time of my grandmother and my great-grandmother, they had great power.
 They had great power to heal. They had great power to see the future.
 They had great power to help the dead and to help the living.
 Today, that power has diminished because of the encroachment, because of the colonizers that came and imposed a new way upon us.
 But during my grandmother's time and my great-grandmother's time, we had a great power available to us.
 And this is the power that, with our prayers, we call back to us.
 We call back to us because a new story is beginning for us today.
 It's beginning for us during these times of great change.
 I do believe powerfully in the potential of who we are, of humankind, of our species, of our truest nature, which I believe is a peaceful and benevolent nature.
 And I also believe that when--that we are a species of survivors, and when pushed to the limits and the extremes of what we experience in our lives, that we betray our truest nature.
 And this is what I see all over the world, is this rather rapid evolution, or if you will, acceleration, of need, of yearning, of desire to make a difference and to grow, to become an adequate steward of this incredible singularity, this evolutionary process in history.
 Everything tries to prevent us from filling this destiny in the culture that we live in now.
 The primary superstition is the religious superstition.
 The primary ideology is the ideology of science, which says that there is nothing at all beyond the body.
 I don't know whether or not we live on after we die, I have no idea, but I do know that there is this extraordinary, extremely sensitive and complex, numinous process that is going on right now for me, centered around my body.
 We have to undertake the disciplines of shamanism so that we can travel in these dimensions, or we have to become a yogin, or we have to strive for enlightenment.
 And then, so it's a motivator to undertake these types of disciplines.
 It's not for everybody, but some are motivated to do that.
 And then they become, you know, people that do that tend to become in the culture, they become the people of knowledge.
 [Speaking in a foreign language]
 My grandmother was a pampamisa, she was a midwife, she could read the stories in the stones, she could read the coca leaves, she could heal, she could read the heavens, she could read the cycles of the moon, she knew the ways of the earth.
 The women were very powerful in our day.
 It's like every shadow that ever existed has risen to be faced, so that we can make the next step.
 And I look at the end of the cosmos, and I look at our little planet, which is on a medium-sized star, at an outer edge of the galaxy, we're not in the center, you know, where all the action is.
 We're on the outer edge of the spiral arm of the galaxy.
 And I wonder why are we here, and I wonder whether we're not an experimental lab out here, with the sufficiency of talent, of complexity, of crisis, of challenge, to grow us into god seeds, or rather to make the god seeds that we already are, begin to emerge into those profound and potent beings who then are sent forth, both into outer as well as to inner space,
 to help orchestrate, evolve processes all over the universe.
 The Kero use the coca leaves for divination and telling the future.
 I asked Don Umberto to once again read the coca leaves and tell us what they say.
 In the United States there will be problems. There will be problems in many cities in the United States, as they are unable to adapt to this change that is coming.
 The United States has a great power, has great brilliance, great resources.
 It is up to the United States to take leadership in the world, to bring peace, to bring balance back to the planet.
 Without the leadership of the United States, there's no hope for the world.
 For us who are following the path of the earth, of the earth people, we will not have problems.
 But those who do not follow the ways of the earth people, the path of the earth people, will have many, many difficulties.
 Many will be expelled from the earth.
 There will be problems in many, many countries.
 In many countries there will be many people that suffer as they do not find their way or are unable to find their way back to the earth, back to the ways of the earth.
 But for us there will be no problems.
 We must make our prayers to the feminine. We must make our prayers to the mother.
 We must come back to the ways of the feminine, of stewardship, of protection.
 Without that, without our making our prayers to the earth and to the ways of the feminine, there's no hope for anyone, for any of us.
 The problem is bigger than we want to acknowledge. It is so much bigger than any one of us can perceive.
 The solution that the mother tells us is by coming back to her.
 We are her children and she will look after us, but we must come back to her.
 The United States has a great head, has great brilliance, great talent.
 That talent must come back down to the heart, must come back down to the mother, back to the earth.
 Without the gifts of the heart, we're not going to be able to think our way out of the problems that we have created.
 Francis Bacon was a British philosopher and a Freemason who lived around the same time as the discovery and colonization of America.
 He believed that the New World was going to be the location of something that he called the New Atlantis.
 When the Founding Fathers created America, they built monuments and cities exemplifying this ancient ideal.
 But this was not just a European experiment.
 Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were extremely interested in the indigenous Americans, their politics, and their spirituality.
 It is said that they even designed much of the U.S. Constitution on the guidelines that ruled the Iroquois Confederacy.
 There is even a suggestion that Benjamin Franklin knew about the ways of the Mayan people.
 Benjamin Franklin, following up on the earlier research of Leonard Euler, he noticed that you can arrange squares, like say an 8x8 square for example,
 then you have a grid of 64, and you can arrange the numbers from 1 to 64 in such a way that all the rows and all the columns add up to the same number.
 And for the 8x8 magic square, that number is 260.
 That's kind of interesting, because it points up this relationship between the number 64, 8x8, 64, the number of blocks in this magic square,
 and how you can arrange the numbers from 1 to 64 such that 260 is the constant somehow.
 We know that 64 is the magic number of DNA, but also it's the number of squares on a chess board, and it's the number of hexagrams in the I Ching.
 So we can see that what Benjamin Franklin is doing here is he's laying out a pattern of 64, and then he's arranging numbers,
 so that no matter how you add up the numbers, either way through the magic square of 64, every single number comes out to be 260.
 The sacred sciences of ancient Egypt, for example, relate to 64 because it's the power of two thing, the square root two thing,
 and then 260 refers to the golden proportion, which is a square root five thing.
 So there's this entire sacred science cosmology built into these systems.
 260 I knew was the magic number of the mind, so here was a magic square of 64,
 and what they call a magic square of 8 with an array of 64, every row adds up to 260.
 Then I saw that was what I was looking for because I also knew that the 64 was the magic number of the DNA code,
 and so therefore what that showed me was that this mathematical magic square, as it was called,
 actually showed the relationship between the DNA and the natural timing frequency, which is a number which is 260.
 260 is the sacred Zolkin calendar of 260 days.
 The Maya day keepers, they say that it's based upon the human gestation period. It's roughly nine months.
 So that makes sense just on a philosophical level because 64 DNA is like the code that unfolds in the 260 day cycle to generate one individual human being.
 260 is a harmonic, not only of the 26,000 year long procession of the equinoxes, which we know they were mapping with their calendar,
 but also it's a harmonic of the number of days that an average human lives.
 If a human being lives around 72 years, they live approximately 26,000 days.
 We know that they chose, or at least they tell us that they chose this 260 number because it's the number of days that a human spends in gestation.
 It's the number of days that a baby spends in the womb of its mother before it's born.
 And I thought about how Ben Franklin had been studying the electromagnetism of the Earth and the poles and so on.
 And I said, well, I had a kind of aha, I said, oh, I see this is actually a mapping of the, what I call the side bank, the underlying structure of the noosphere around the Earth.
 So we can see that time is governed by this 260 day harmonic.
 And we can see that 64 is the magic number of DNA, which is matter, which is living matter.
 And so Ben Franklin is trying to marry up the aspects of living matter with the aspects of time.
 He's trying to marry up matter with spirit. And this is the secret of alchemy.
 All of these ideas start to come together and one of the key pieces of it that the ancients discussed,
 that we have left out in our modern Stargate conceptions, is they recognized that the serpent rope could equate to Kundalini.
 It equates to that spiritual energy that we must all lift within ourselves.
 And what we need to begin to plug into this is that, yeah, maybe we will be able to build a giant particle accelerator,
 a space-based particle accelerator that could open these holes in space.
 But more than likely, it's going to be the heart-mind connection that is going to enable us to do this.
 We're enchanted in the West with DNA. It's a brand new discovery, Watson and Crick. It's very sexy today.
 But DNA basically manufactures proteins. That's all it does.
 DNA is the hardware that is informed by the software, which is the luminous energy field that informs the hardware.
 So if we can download version 7.1 of the software, we can instruct our DNA to grow new bodies that age differently,
 that heal differently, that die differently.
 And that's one of the key points of our time right now, is reclaiming or putting together those old sacred secrets about how we activate our light bodies.
 One of the main secrets of alchemy is that there is an invisible luminous energy body that exists around every living thing,
 whether it be plant, animal, human.
 And the alchemists even believed that stars and planets and minerals had this invisible luminous energy field around it.
 This invisible luminous energy field is really what we call 4D space.
 One of the things that I see is that we seem to be coming up to a moment, a moment in time where these secrets are going to be revealed.
 In that time, we don't know how long these secrets and this information, this consciousness is going to be available.
 My sense is it could be a very short period of time.
 So this is all going to come up, people are going to lock onto it, and then it's going to fade away.
 We know that DNA pulsates at the rate of 100 cycles per second, 100 Hertz.
 DNA basically functions with light.
 So it emits light at the rate of 100 pulses per second.
 Well, what it is, is that it's emitting information, because all light contains information.
 So when we bring in the light, the light of who we are becoming, and that's why all the spiritual traditions speak about enlightenment,
 about awakening to the light, they're awakening to the light of not only the Christ and the Buddha, but who we are becoming as a species.
 We're re-informing our DNA, instructing it to express itself in ways that have never been explored before.
 And so what people have to become aware of is that there are high-energy phenomena that our light bodies are interacting with,
 and it's awareness of those that will assist us in this transformation.
 So this hypersphere exists around the Earth. It exists like a donut. It's called a torus in physics.
 And it comes down through the top, swirls down into the north pole of your sphere or your human,
 comes out through the bottom, goes around like a donut, comes around, and comes back down through.
 Once you get a hold of this, you're bumped up the evolutionary ladder, so to speak.
 And it opens up, this is the basis then for the Stargate science, for opening wormholes.
 I mean, literally, at CERN, they're talking about creating baby black holes.
 And so with this, we are literally transforming ourselves into god-like beings.
 Do you know that 90% of our DNA is considered to be junk DNA?
 Redundant, only 10%, less than 10% is actually the cohesive practical DNA that creates our bodies.
 Well, there's nothing redundant or junk in nature.
 This 90% is the pool of possibilities, the pool of possibilities that we can draw from to express a new human here on Earth.
 But it has to come from the information field that surrounds the physical body, from the luminous energy field.
 Shamans have known this for millennia.
 And once you inform the luminous energy field, that informs the body, and we evolve.
 Each human has a hypersphere, and it enters through the top of the brain and comes down through the bottom of the spine.
 Alchemists know that this is what they're trying to achieve.
 When they say they're trying to turn lead into gold, what they're really saying is,
 they're trying to turn the body into this luminous energy field, to unite it with the luminous energy field in a more cohesive fashion.
 The luminous energy field already comes laden with a tremendous amount of information, not all of it positive.
 So that the predisposition that may run in your family towards heart disease is encoded not only in your genes, but in your luminous energy field, which contains information. It's an information field.
 The karma from a former existence, the trauma that occurred to you when you were six or you were eight, is encoded in the luminous energy field.
 We cannot download new information until we clear the luminous energy field.
 The Maya seem to be describing this magical moment where we have this rare galactic alignment, and from out of this alignment is where the serpent rope emerges.
 And if we equate the serpent rope with the wormhole, then it appears we're at this magic moment where we're going to create this incredible new level of technology
 that's going to align each of us with the source of where many shamanic traditions tell us we came from.
 Is it that the Freemasons had this knowledge passed down from some long ago civilization?
 I think that that's extremely possible because the cross of Hende, as Volcanelli tells us, was also built by a 33rd degree Mason, and the cross of Hende reveals extremely profound information.
 I believe that the Freemasons, at least the Freemasons from a long time ago, had some kind of incredibly profound knowledge that had been passed down to them, and which they were trying to preserve.
 For the Inca, the new luminous body is represented by a figure that in geometry is known as a torus.
 It is a donut-shaped figure that represents the human luminous energy field.
 That field is the central hole that runs up our spine.
 The sides of the torus represent our luminous energy field that flows out the top of our head, around us the width of our outstretched arms, into the earth for about a foot, and then right up the center of our bodies.
 This torus is not only a representation of the luminous energy field, but it is also a representation of a gateway, of a gateway between the worlds, of a gateway to infinity, of a gateway back to spirit, back to our source, back to where we came from, and back to where we're going.
 Don Umberto and Doña Bernardina had already wrapped the objects of the despacho with paper.
 Now they placed the bundle into the flames, where they would burn and be purified.
 I could almost see the negative energies being dissipated in the fire.
 [Music]
 Near the end of my trip to Peru, I met Don Martín, a Kero shaman.
 The condor he wears is his totem animal.
 He told us of the prophecies of Pachacuti, and what to expect as we approach 2012.
 [Speaking Spanish]
 Pachacuti was the great Inca, but he was also a great prophet.
 He left us with a body of prophecy that spoke about a time of great change right now, of hunger, of famine, of war, of conflict between neighbors, of conflict between tribes, conflicts between nations, of scarcity, when there was once a time of great abundance, of there being hunger now.
 We are in the middle, in the very middle of the cycle of the prophecies.
 We're in the very middle of war, and there's increasing war in the coming years.
 Countries that are not even involved in any conflict today will be drawn into conflict.
 The shamans are coming together with their prayers that this does not happen.
 They're bringing their prayers to bear, to call forth on the spiritual world, which is the world that will come after the Pachacuti.
 Pachacuti said to us before he left, he said, "They will kill you. They will slay your bodies, but they can never slay your spirit. Your spirit will always live. My spirit is your spirit. Your spirit will always live, will always rule."
 And this is the spirit that we're calling forth today, that I call forth in my altar, that we can call forth in each one of our altars.
 It's that spirit that rules with benevolence and with grace, and that needs to come down today from the Hanak Pacha, from the upper world.
 This is the work that all of us are dedicated to.
 Hanak Pacha, Pachacuti, Santaripa, and Pachacuti.
 The sun, the apple, the saffron, the wind, the conch shell, the moon, the ceremony, everything.
 This is how we do our prayers. We take kintu, we take three leaves, we call on the heavens, we call on the mountains, we call on the earth, and we blow our prayers and we surrender to the wind.
 Whatever may come is what comes.
 All the prophecies are coming true.
 Bring your prayers to the apus, to the mountains, to the Mother Earth, to all of nature, so that all of nature can come back with her life, to bring back life to us, so that all of the prophecies can come true.
 Bring your prayers to all.
 Gracias, Martin.
 There is a simple sense of connection that I witness among these people.
 A feeling of warmth, compassion, and community that is disappearing among the people of my own country.
 We don't seem to care for each other in the same way as the Kero.
 We have forgotten how to live together.
 We have forgotten how to love each other.
 [singing]
 [singing]
 The ancients say that the body of light can only be achieved through love, that compassion and forgiveness are the path towards true liberation.
 Maybe 2012 is not only a purging, but also an embrace of all that is really important to us, and all that we hold dear to our hearts.
 [music]
 [music]
 [music]
 [music]
 [music]
 [music]
 As I sat among these ancient ruins and thought about the millions of people who have lived, and the billions more who are alive today, I wondered,
 what does the future hold in store for us?
 Who are we becoming?
 Will we remember what we've had, and what we've lost?
 Time has accelerated. Time has left the gentle ebb and flow of gene transfer and adaptation that characterizes biological evolution, and instead, historical time is generated.
 Only one of us, I think, can imagine that history could go on for another thousand years.
 I mean, what would it look like at the current rate of population growth, spread of epidemic disease, rate of invention, connectivity, depletion of resources, the atmosphere?
 It is impossible to conceive of another thousand years of human history.
 We have burned our bridges. We are preparing for a kind of cultural forward escape.
 The simple example of metamorphosis, that of caterpillar to butterfly, we all know that there is this intermediate resting stage where the caterpillar is, for all practical purposes, enzymatically dissolved, and then reconstituted as an entirely different kind of organism.
 With different physical structures, different eyes, different legs, a different way of breathing, with wings where no wings were before, with a different kind of feeding apparatus.
 This is what's happening to us.
 History is a process of metamorphosis.
 It's like what a butterfly is doing in a cocoon, or what is happening to a child in the womb.
 It's a gestation process where one form of life is being changed into another.
 It begins with naked monkeys, and it ends with a human-machine-planet-girdling interface capable of releasing the energies that light the stars.
 And it lasts about 15 or 20 thousand years, and during that period, the entire process hangs in the balance.
 This would all happen naturally and with a great deal of anxiety, I imagine, as history builds to its ever more climactic and horrifying crescendo, and we would all be ignorant or very baffled about what's going on, were it not for the institution of shamanism.
 The shaman actually rises into a domain where past and future are different areas on the same topological manifold.
 It's what's really going on.
 If you think about shamanism, it is about predicting weather, predicting game movement, and curing disease.
 It's as though the members of culture are imprisoned in linear time, and the shaman is not.
 Culture is simply clothing upon the human experience, but the human organism, outside the confines of culture, in a direct relationship to nature, transcends time and space.
 It was a fact, I believe, that was known in prehistory, and in fact was the source of paleolithic values, which were not material, not linear, not surplus-oriented, not class-oriented, not power-oriented,
 but rather oriented toward a kind of egalitarian partnership in an environment of great material simplicity.
 Human beings lived like that for probably a half a million years, with poetry, with dance, with mathematics, with magic, with story, with humor,
 but not with the paralyzing and toxic artifacts of the late-evolving, machine-worshiping, linear, fanatic, alphabet-tight-ass straight culture that we are a part of.
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