Winter Solstice Reflections
One decade after the end of the Mayan Long Count
A full decade has passed since the end of the 5,125-year Long Count of the Mayan Calendar on the Winter Solstice of 2012. That prophetic threshold was the subject of my 2006 book, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl (currently available as an audiobook here). When I was writing that book, I hoped we would experience a mass awakening or global transformation of consciousness somewhere around that time, because it was necessary.
It didn’t happen as anticipated.
I remain convinced that the Long Count was significant as a prophetic instrument, even if the results were not what I may have hoped for. The last 5,125 (plus ten) years carried us from Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid, through organized religion and Empire, to Artificial Intelligence and genetic engineering. This period defines a full arc of human history, from a time when we were spread out in relatively small societies across the Earth, to now, when we constitute one global civilization linked by networks of communication and commerce.
Our world has changed profoundly over the last decade. It continues to change at hyper-speed. It is not just that psychedelics are more popular now. It is also that our entire reality becomes increasingly psychedelic. It is as if we are living through a collective psychedelic trip: A journey into the unknown.
Perhaps the classic Maya (and other MesoAmerican civilizations with a similar understanding) were able to foresee, from psychedelic intuition and cosmological clues (the alignment of the Winter Solstice Sun with the dark rift in the center of the Milky Way), a global transformation into something radically unfamiliar. But they couldn’t envision what that future world — our current reality — would be like. A technological society like ours was beyond their imagination. As we go deeper into the first baktun (144,000 days or 394.26 tropical years) of this new Long Count, we are discovering the contours of this new state of being.
I recently found Jessica Wildfire’s excellent, if downbeat, newsletter, OK Doomer. She does a great job reviewing recent scientific research and journalism on various distressing topics. One of her recent pieces covers the latest harrowing data on climate change. Another article reviews the latest findings on Covid, which are far darker than I had realized.
In one recent piece, Wildfire introduced me to the concept of “sentinel intelligence.” Someone with sentinel intelligence recognizes threats much earlier than most people. Wildfire writes: “If you have sentinel intelligence, then your brain can aggregate and sift through extraordinary amounts of information in a very short period of time, especially when it comes to seeing latent or hidden dangers… In a lot of ways, it is a superpower.”
Sentinels are the opposite of conspiracy theorists, who tend toward narcissism and psychopathy. Sentinels have a strong sense of civic responsibility and empathy for other people — even for humanity as one collective whole. They generally seek to warn others about what they have found.
Unfortunately, sentinels are often dismissed as Cassandras — gloomy prophets of doom who should be mocked or ignored, or even blamed (“shoot the messenger”) if and when the terrible things they predict happen. I identify a lot with Wildfire’s portrait of the sentinels, constantly scanning the horizon for threats, and getting ridiculed and attacked for their efforts.
Recently, I stopped writing so much about the ecological emergency because I didn’t know what else I could add to what I had already written. Generally, I find that simply tabulating how devastating the situation is doesn’t serve a useful purpose, except to make people more dissociated and detached. I tried to take what seemed to me the best approach in my 2016 book How Soon Is Now, which took me ten years of botched efforts and false starts to complete.
In How Soon Is Now, I outlined the massive scale of our crisis, but I also offered a systemic approach to dealing with it. I proposed how we could reinvent our society, designing regenerative and resilient systems. From a religious or spiritual perspective, we could take the mega-crisis on as our initiatory quest or “heroes’ journey.” I specifically described how we could change both our technical infrastructure and our social technologies (government and economy, for example). I also considered how, as part of this process. we would use media and other tools to reshape the collective consciousness. (Who is this “we,” you might ask? That was part of the problem: This speculative “we” never showed up as I had hoped). I also made it clear that I didn’t think I had all of the answers, but I hoped to present a baseline for future argument and action.
The book didn’t get reviewed in The New York Times, or seriously considered by the mainstream intelligentsia. I still meet amazing people who tell me the book was inspiring and important for them, so it wasn’t a total loss. But I naively believed (idealist that I am) it would spark a mass movement. (my first book, Breaking Open the Head (2002), helped initiate the global psychedelic renaissance, which seemed very unlikely when I was writing it).
In How Soon Is Now, I theorized we need a very deep level of structural change to rescue us from the mega-catastrophe. I still believe this to be the case. But I admit I also struggle, now, with feeling it is too late to change our trajectory. I resonate with Jim Bendell’s infamous Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy. I am currently reading Bill McGuire’s Hothouse Earth, and Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen’s An Inconvenient Apocalypse (both excellent and bracing). I feel most people may not accept this yet, but we are in the hospice stage of post-industrial civilization. I may explore some of the signs of this later in this essay, or in a future one.
Generally, I find that young people, below thirty, believe their future prospects are damaged or curtailed by the ecological emergency. Many of the young people I speak with do not expect to live to old age. It is amazing that our governments, mainstream media, and institutions are unable to admit the severity of the situation directly. The inertia of the establishment is still carrying us forward, even though its ideology is obsolete, moribund. This contributes to the mental health crisis.
My strong intuition is that the dam is going to break pretty soon, and things will start to go haywire. As a sentinel, I don’t see how we avoid massive droughts, massive famines, mass migrations, most likely leading to resource wars that might end in nuclear conflict. I expect this to be seriously underway within the next five to ten years. Of course, in some places it is already happening (Pakistan and Syria for instance). But it is destined to become a more-or-less universal condition in the near future.
The kind of radical changes I consider in How Soon Is Now as what we need to do to adapt to the unfolding crisis includes, eventually, doing away with private property, whether owned by an individual, corporation, or a state. In The Ecology of Freedom, Murray Bookchin wrote: “The private ownership of the planet by elite strata must be brought to an end if we are to survive the afflictions it has imposed on the biotic world, particularly as a result of a society structured around limitless growth.” Private property is not only the origin of inequality, as Rousseau recognized 250 years ago, it also creates different classes of human beings with divergent interests.
We can replace the mental concept and legal construct of ownership with the old Medieval idea of “usufruct.” Usufruct means you have the right to continue using something (a house, a piece of land, a tool, etcetera) as long as you are using it actively and productively. If not, it becomes available to anyone else who might want or need it. The end of private property includes getting rid of all intellectual copyrights, something I also support. I realize, in retrospect, this kind of idea was too much — too large, too abstract — for most people to handle.
Personally, I don’t believe any kind of reformed or “green” Capitalism can possibly bring about resilience or sustainability. Of course, I am happy if corporations make any effort to move in this direction, if it slows down the pace of destruction. But much of the sustainability initiatives promoted by Capitalism only unleash more destruction.
For example, check out Ketan Joshi’s excellent “CCSs Causes the Problem It Fails to Solve,” analyzing the carbon credits or “carbon cap and trade” racket: “Carbon offsets are allowed and encouraged to proliferate because the climate funding they enable comes at the cost of delayed mitigation elsewhere.” Rather than a phony “solution” that can’t work but actually perpetuates fossil fuel extraction, Joshi proposes we reduce global demand for energy through lifestyle changes: “Reductions in demand for energy could occur while lifting the poorest out of poverty and shaving the ghastly excesses from the wealthy. We could figure out, collectively, how to live good lives without having to consume so much.” But of course, doing anything of this sort goes against the prevailing economic model, requiring constant growth and over-consumption.
I will leave this here for now, to pick it up next time.
Recently, I've come to see life itself as the initiation. I am a teacher in an initiatory yoga tradition, and I have also gone through several shamanic initiation ceremonies. Initiation is an important rite of passage in many spiritual paths and traditions. However, I think we got it all wrong. For example, a typical vision quest lasts only a few days, but it is a mere microcosmic representation of the macrocosm, which is the entire human lifespan. In the etheric realms, where we exist prior to incarnating into form, it is quite possible that we decide to go on a decades-long vision quest on a particular planet where we can learn important lessons necessary for our "graduation" to higher levels of existential reality. In other words, shamanic and yogic initiations are merely symbolic of an entire lifetime. Life itself is the initiation.
We are cosmic travelers who incarnate into form to undergo a decades-long initiation ceremony. When the body is no longer viable, we move on to other experiences and learning environments. I have found it useful to view life in this way. It gives meaning and purpose to all the suffering and hardship that we're forced to endure, just like the hardship that we experience during a vision quest.
I have also come to accept that there is no other way to learn what we need to learn. If there were, the universe would have manifested an alternative by now. We must endure the suffering...there is no other way. In other words, we come here to suffer. Buddha had it right when he taught that life is suffering. However, he was attempting to escape that which he came here for. I'm no longer convinced that the purpose of life is to escape from suffering. Instead, it's more likely that the purpose of life is to withstand and endure suffering. Again, if there were any alternative to the necessity of the lifelong initiation, the universe would have already figured it out.
One cannot skip steps in the evolutionary process. We are forced to pass through each step one at a time. This can be seen clearly in the fossil record of all species. Therefore, whatever shitstorm that humanity is currently passing through is a necessary step in our collective evolution. There is no avoiding it or getting around it. We must pass through our own personal initiations, but also our collective initiations as a species as well. There is no other way. It is what it is.
Another great piece! Love the sentinel archetype. For many of us lifelong sentinels the experimental vaccines are more suspect than Covid as existential risks at this point. The linked article from ok doomer doesn’t consider that the risk factors they list correlate faithfully with the unprecedented global mass vaccination campaign.
Likewise for many eco-sentinels the years long war on drugs/terror/communists/poverty and now germs is strongly implicated in the ecocide we are living through now. I agree with Jem Bendell. Perhaps we weren’t meant to control everything?
Deeply grateful for your soulful inspiring work Daniel. 🙏