The Year of "The Red Magnetic
Moon"What follows is the slightly altered but
complete speech that I had prepared to be delivered at the ‘a day
out of time’ event (a Mayan Calendar celebration) on July 25, 2006
at CorUnum (The Yurt).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_calendar
http://emr.cs.iit.edu/home/reingold/calendar-book/images/
I probably underestimated the time that this speech would
take so as I ran out of time (which is a good thing to
happen on a day out of time) I did not get to the final
part of what I had planned to say… Which was actually also a good
thing!!!
Over the last few days I had been trying to come to
grips with the fact that the Mayan Calendar ‘runs out’ by the year
2012. Now, you will notice at the end the printed version of this
speech that I make mention of the expanding/contracting universe
theory…
As I was preparing this talk I felt more and more driven
to bring this theory up, that we (and the universe :) are likely at
the transition point of that dynamic: the expanding universe going
into its contracting phase. Even while speaking, I could not fathom
(some may have noticed me trying to form the words… but I just could
not pronounce them…) why I was not able to bring this contracting
universe topic up at the event. It was only a few hours after - at
twelve PM to be precise - after I had delivered the shortened
version of the speech that I realized why. It suddenly dawned on me
that I could not bring this up until the Red Magnetic Moon
Year had started, which is… today (July the 26th) as I’m
writing this.
During a phone conversation with Louise today, she
used the word ‘unification’ and then I had another insight, over the
last generation we have found ‘unification’ to become a more and
more important notion to us. Why does ‘unification’ feel better to
us than say ‘diversification’ or ‘fragmentation’… it must be because
we are preparing for the contracting phase of the universe to take
place.
But why mention it today on the first day of the ‘red
magnetic moon’ year? Probably because during this moon year unity
and unification is what we shall be working at more
intensively…
Funny, how my own speech makes much more sense
to me now than when I put it together:
Here we are,
right
now…
A celebration of
“a day out of time”
and… in what a
beautiful place…
“a place out of space” perhaps?
But of
course we cannot really step out of time or step out of space…
as it always here
where we are all the time!
But we can step
away from:
calculated time, exploited time,
… away from
exploited space …
and it is that what we are
celebrating here now in a fuller awareness…
We were just shown in the
yurt the slideshow of the amazing discoveries by Dr. Emoto depicting
those miraculous water crystals:
conscious moments of water as
if frozen in time, we have just participated in that wonderful
Mayan Calendar Ceremony by the pond, and we have thanked ‘the water’
for staying so closely connected and integrated with ‘the earth’,
and later on we will be doing a fire ceremony.
It looks like we
are covering water and fire well - and rightly so - but I feel that
it would not be out of place to spend some moments out of
time devoted to earth… and maybe we can even
cover the remaining elements… atmosphere and space.
I’d like
to donate some of the fifteen minutes that I’ll be speaking here, to
the Earth but… in silence with you. While in silence for the next
few seconds, could you in your mind’s eye imagine how you see our
beloved Earth, how you feel your concerns about her, consider her
past, consider her future, how you extend your best wishes to her?
… … …
Probably some of you may have
considered our earth to be in some pain?
Ah, what have we done to her?
Some of you, after having seen
“An Inconvenient Truth” by Al Gore may have decided to step up your
effort in helping her heal herself.
Ah the Earth… this place
where we are… in this time…
There is something that we,
especially those in, let me call it alternative or new age circles
have worked very hard on over the last two generations, something we
can actually be proud of:
we have really come to appreciate
being here on Earth.
That was not always so. Could you
imagine some 75 years ago that your great-grandmother would be
saying to your grandmother, “You have to ground yourself!” or “Be
Here Now!” ?
In those days it seems that in religion and culture
that it was overall more important to get out of this place… to get
elsewhere: Heaven or Nirvana… and if that did not work out, oh well
Hell or Hades. In bible-based religions they talk about heaven, in
Hinduism they talk about escaping the wheel of Karma during our
sojourn here on Earth, in Buddhism there is Nirvana that cannot wait
except for... the odd Bodhisattva.
It seems that over the ages
Earth was not appreciated too much ‘overall’!
How good that we
now embrace her, she needs our love, she loves our
love.
But still, the other day while I
was leafing through some New Age style magazines on the magazine
shelves at Chapters, I was struck that there still were some
sentiments expressed that found it good to ‘kinda’ escape from here…
(Maybe to end up with an ascended master? :)
And then I saw this
journal that had Stephen Hawking proposing that humankind should
eventually survive on an alien planet… (Can we really? After he
noted that we can hardly survive here?!)
Hmm…, maybe it behooves us to
check out if we ourselves are really not still some ‘closet
escapist’…
The Earth wants us here… fully, with all our
heart, one Heart one Earth.
Let’s give ourselves fully to her
as she so unconditionally gives herself to us… even if it pains her
and as we are we doing her harm.
When Louise, a few weeks
ago, urged me to attend this gathering, she said, “Wim you have
helped me see that this IS the garden!” - NOT ‘Eden Lost’.
Maybe we have not
been excommunicated from Eden, perhaps we have just been made
not to see it.
Let’s help each other to see Eden
here and live it.
This brings me to another point, a subtle one, but
so important, possibly containing a gentle warning.
When I was still receiving clients for counseling
(I’m retired now) I would look out from my window
down into the garden and I would see clients coming
through the garden gate, and I would say as I
observed their energy in glorious colours, “Oh wow,
look what a beautiful being!” Then after they sat
down, I was always amazed how clients would - almost
invariably - spend the first ten minutes trying to
convince me of ‘in how bad a state’ they were.
You see, they of course had been trained to see
themselves through the eyes of those who identified
them as ‘not good enough’ and over time they got so
convinced that those external judgments were valid
that they started to identify themselves that way
and… even live that way.
I felt it to be my task to help them to convince
themselves out of those initially
unwarranted identifications, accusations and
judgments - the ones that over time had become so
self-accusing and self-incriminating. Eventually a
client would discover how innately beautiful and
unharmed he or she actually was… self-confidence
fully restored.
We heal ourselves from within, especially after we
see that the external things we used to do to
‘better ourselves’ - our usual ways of dealing with
assumed problems - that those actions prolonged the
problems... actually made them persevere… It’s like
picking at a wound!
Let’s for a moment do ‘a no-no’ and take ourselves
out of this place, away from time here, and imagine
that we are (all of us here together)… that we are a
heavenly counselor perched somewhere in the
universe.
Let’s imagine that we see Mother Earth - our first
client - approaching us through some heavenly gate,
“Ah, look at her energy” we say, “and those
wonderful atmospheric colors like an aura encircling
her, that blue watery veil partially covering her
fertile body…” Ah there she is Sister Earth! And we
want to listen to her.
But… but, lo and behold, we hear only complaints
coming from her!
For minutes we hear voices attempting to convince us
that she is not as beautiful as we just saw her,
that she is in pain, that she is ill, at the point
of feeling like… blowing herself up…
Imagine that we are now helping her to convince
herself that she is actually how we saw her to be
when we first saw her approaching us: so beautiful
and whole, energetic, showing her pride in glorious
colours... and slowly we see her discover that she
is not how she was made to be seen…!
And as a client would wipe away a tear when
discovering that she was actually never really as
bad or inadequate as she was made out to be, Sister
Earth is now also showing a glimmer of a tear,
having rediscovered herself…, recovering her real
being… not being at all what she was made out to
appear to be…
The following is subtle and might not immediately
make sense…
What if our lovely beautiful Earth is actually in
good shape - really! - as beautiful as we saw her as
she approached us just a few minutes ago?
What if our usual human concerns about her are
actually our self-judgments and self-incriminations
projected onto her?
What if we, in a way, force her to identify herself
with how we constantly identify her, by means of our
acquired and mistaken self-identities?
If that is so, aren’t we then contributing to her
lack of self-confidence and thereby actually
hampering her self healing?
Are we aware enough that Earth can heal herself and
that even our most well-meant strategies might not
be the right ones, that they might actually prolong
her pain?
What if our worries about her and the way we usually
try to solve those worries, are actually part of the
pain we are contributing to the Earth and… that we
actually make her pain last longer?
Could it be that our fixes, however well intended,
are also picking at her wounds?
I know, that’s a novel way of looking at this…, we
are so much ‘the doer’, our work ethic is doing, but
does our doing actually help Gaia (as Dr. Lovelock
called the earth)? Really?
Is Earth getting better as we think her to
be so ill?
Is part of our thinking not actually part of her
acquired illness, something we are pushing onto her?
The first thing we as humans did in historical times
to “better” Gaia for us was perhaps
that we made her feel bad and inadequate in the
first place…
What good do we actually do to Earth even when we
think we ‘do good’? Ah Mother Dear!
The things we do, eh?!
One cannot gain genuine peace by fighting a war…
Can we heal the earth, when we actually fight those
whom we see as hurting her, while we are thus
engaged in a futile game of mutual pain?
We do that sometimes, don’t we?! We can be so
unaware, hating those who do the hating.
Gandhi’s approach might still be the right one; he
dealt with Mother India’s liberation by increasing
her self-confidence by improving that of her
inhabitants.
The point is subtle and complex and has a twist to
it: The human survival syndrome has nothing much to
do with the survival of Mother Earth, in fact
we are surviving, we can
let go of our syndrome. If we can do that with
confidence - when we are aware that we ‘made it’,
that we are surviving, then the remnants of our
habitual survival machinations, maneuvers and
manipulations can disappear…
But each of us may still be harbouring too much of
that human survival syndrome…
There is theory that says that currently in our
expanding universe, everything expands… that means
‘us to’. That theory also states that the universe
will at some point start contracting.
Could it be that the universe is starting that
contracting phase right about now, and that survival
starts meaning something else than what it used to
mean, instead of more of me, more for me it
will be less of me, less for me ; instead
of more of us and more for us, it
will be… …
I have a feeling that Gaia is responding to a
Universe that is on the edge of contracting… and we
are invited to respond to it in kind... Invited?
Actually, I don't think we have a choice, we are
part of Gaia, we are one organism... just as we are
part of this universe... we are one organism...
In a contracting universe there will be less time,
less space… maybe that is why this particular
‘day out of time’ in this ‘place out of
space’ is so significant!
The Roerich Pact and Banner of Peace was designed by Russian
artist and humanitarian, Nicholas Roerich (1874 -
1947) as a response to the destruction of the first
world war and the Russian Revolution.
It is an international treaty signed by India, the
Baltic states, and 22 nations of the Americas
including the United States. The Roerich Peace Pact
established an international agreement allowing any
nation to protect its cultural or artistic heritage
with a symbolic banner, the Banner of Peace. Signed
in 1935, this treaty is international law today.
Just as the Red Cross protects hospitals, the Banner
of Peace was implemented to protect culture.
Written with the assistance of international experts
and lawyers, the Banner of Peace was praised by many
notable figures during its signing including Albert
Einstein, George Bernard Shaw, and H.G. Wells. The
Pact states, "educational, artistic, and scientific
institutions... shall be protected and respected by
the belligerents ... without any discrimination as
to the state allegiance of any particular
institution or mission... these missions may display
a distinctive flag (the Banner of Peace).. which
will entitle them to special protection and
respect..." Thus any site of cultural activity
around the world can fly the Banner of Peace to
declare itself neutral, independent of combatant
forces, and protected by international treaty.
Nicholas Roerich was an artist and travelled
extensively through Russia, India, Tibet, and the
United States. He hoped by using a symbol that
represented all cultures no group would feel
excluded from using it. The Banner would have not
one but several meanings, as Nicholas Roerich
himself wrote:
Let us be united - you will ask in what way?
You will agree with me: in the easiest way,
to create a common and sincere language.
Perhaps in Beauty and in Knowledge."
The distinctive Banner is three red circles
surrounded by a larger red circle on a white banner.
The banner is a deep red or magenta color to
symbolize the color of human blood, which is the
same for all peoples. The top circle represents
spirituality and encompasses the truth of all
religions, that we can all unite regardless of our
distinct beliefs. The two circles on the bottom
represent art and science. The circle that surrounds
the three spheres represents culture, the unity of
art, science, and spirituality.
In 1993, Peace Pilgrims José and Lloydine Argüelles
revived awareness of the Roerich Pact by using the
Banner of Peace to represent the aims of the World
Thirteen Moon Calendar Change Peace Movement and the
Planet Art Network. With the strength of its
historic and international validity, the Planet Art
Network has reactivated this symbol, bringing its
message of Peace to the Vatican, the United Nations,
as well as several world leaders, in efforts to
promote global calendar change. Argüelles expanded
Roerich's original motto to read "PAX CULTURA, PAX
BIOSPHERICA", adding an emphasis that we must
protect the Biosphere, the Mother of all Culture.
"Peace through Culture. Peace with the Biosphere."
The symbol for the Banner of Peace can be found in
many cultures and numerous philosophical systems. It
can be found on the coat of arms of the Popes, on
Ethiopian and Coptic antiquities, and stone age
amulets. It also appears on Tibetan rings, Buddhist
banners, the Temple of Heaven in Peking and in the
oldest of Indian symbols, the Chintamani, the sign
of happiness. Found in all cultures, the Banner of
Peace is the perfect symbol to bring all peoples
together in peace.
The Banner of Peace was
exhibited at the 2nd Summit for the Global
Initiative for Departments of Peace held at Royal
Roads University, Victoria in June 2006 Saul Arbess
will bring the banner to the International Day of
Peace Ceremony on September 21 st.
