Category: Ancient Mysteries

From New Dawn 95 (Mar-Apr 2006)

If you asked them what life was like in prehistoric times, most people would conjure up an image like the famous opening scenes of 2001: Space Odyssey – groups of hairy savages grunting and jumping around, foaming at the mouth with aggression as they bash each over the heads with sticks. We take it for granted that life was much harder then, a battle to survive, with everyone competing to find food, struggling against the elements, men fighting over women, and everyone dying young from disease or malnutrition.

A whole branch of “science” has grown up around this view of the human race’s early history. This is a relatively new discipline of evolutionary psychology, which tries to explain all of the negative sides of human nature as “adaptations” which early people developed because they had some survival value. Evolutionary psychologists explain traits like selfishness and aggression in these terms. Life was such a struggle that only the most selfish and aggressive people survived and passed on their genes. The people with gentle and peaceful genes would have died out, simply because they would have lost out in the survival battle.

Evolutionary psychologists see racism and war as “natural” too. It’s inevitable that different human groups should be hostile to one another, because once upon a time we were all living on the edge of starvation and fighting over limited resources. Any tendency to show sympathy for other groups would have reduced our own group’s survival chances.

But fortunately we don’t have to believe any of this crude nonsense. There is now a massive amount of archaeological and anthropological evidence which suggests this view of the human race’s past is completely false. Life for prehistoric human beings was far less bleak than we might imagine.

Take the view that life was a “struggle to survive.” The evidence suggests that the lives of prehistoric human beings were a lot easier than those of the agricultural peoples who came after them. Until around 8000 BCE, all human beings lived as hunter-gatherers. They survived by hunting wild animals (the man’s job) and foraging for wild plants, nuts, fruit and vegetables (the woman’s job). When anthropologists began to look at how contemporary hunter-gatherers use their time, they were surprised to find that they only spent 12 to 20 hours per week searching for food – between a third and a half of the average modern working week! Because of this, the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins called hunter-gatherers “the original affluent society.” As he noted in his famous paper of that name, for hunter-gatherers, “The food quest is so successful that half the time the people do not seem to know what to do with themselves.”1

Strange though it may sound – the diet of hunter-gatherers was better than many modern peoples’. Apart from the small amount of meat they ate (10-20% of their diet), their diet was practically identical to that of a modern day vegan – no dairy products and a wide variety of fruits, vegetables, roots and nuts, all eaten raw (which nutrition experts tell us is the healthiest way to eat.) This partly explains why skeletons of ancient hunter-gatherers are surprisingly large and robust, and show few signs of degenerative diseases and tooth decay. As the anthropologist Richard Rudgley writes, “We know from what they ate and the condition of their skeletons that the hunting people were, on the whole, in pretty good shape.”2

The hunter-gatherers of Greece and Turkey had an average height of five feet ten inches for men and five feet six for women. But after the advent of agriculture, these had declined to five feet three and five feet one. An archaeological site in the lower Illinois Valley in central USA shows that when people started cultivating maize and switched to a settled lifestyle, there was an increase in infant mortality, stunted growth in adults, and a massive increase in diseases related to malnutrition.

Hunter-gatherers were much less vulnerable to disease than later peoples. In fact, until the advances of modern medicine and hygiene of the 19th and 20th centuries, they may well have suffered less from disease than any other human beings in history. Many of the diseases which we’re now susceptible to only actually arrived when we domesticated animals and started living close to them. Animals transmitted a whole host of diseases to us which we’d never been exposed to before. Pigs and ducks passed the flu on, horses gave us colds, cows gave us the pox and dogs gave us the measles. And later, when dairy products became a part of our diet, we increased our exposure to disease even more through drinking milk, which transmits at least 30 different diseases. In view of this, it’s not surprising that with the coming of agriculture, people’s life spans became shorter.

The transition from a nomadic hunter-gatherer way of life to a settled agricultural one began in the Middle East at around 8000 BCE, spreading into Europe and Asia over the following millennia (and developing independently in some places). Many of the world’s cultures have myths that refer to an earlier time when life was much easier, and human beings were less materialistic and lived in harmony with nature and each other. In ancient Greece and Rome this was known as the Golden Age; in China it was the Age of Perfect Virtue, in India it was the Krita Yuga (Perfect Age); while the Judeo-Christian tradition has the story of the garden of Eden. These myths tell us that, either as a result of a long degeneration or a sudden and dramatic “Fall,” something “went wrong.” Life became much more difficult and full of suffering, and human nature became more corrupt. In Taoist terms, whereas the earliest human beings followed the Way of Heaven and were a part of the natural harmony of the Universe, later human beings became separated from the Tao, and became selfish and calculating.

Many of these myths make clear references to the hunter-gatherer way of life – for example, the Greek historian Hesiod states that during the Golden Age “the fruitful earth bore [human beings] abundant fruit without stint,” while the early Indian text the Vaya Purana states that early human beings “frequented the mountains and seas, and did not dwell in houses” (i.e. they lived a non-sedentary way of life). The garden of Eden story suggests this too. Originally Adam and Eve ate the fruit from the tree of knowledge, until they were forced to leave the garden and forced to “work hard and sweat to make the soil produce anything.” It appears that, at least in part, these myths are a kind of “folk memory” of the pre-agricultural way of life. The agricultural peoples who worked harder and longer, had shorter life spans and suffered from a lot more health problems must have looked at the old hunter-gatherer way of life as a kind of paradise.

Warfare and Social Oppression

There are other significant reasons why these peoples would have seen earlier times as a Golden Age. There is a great deal of evidence suggesting that prehistoric human beings were much less war-like than later peoples. Archaeological studies throughout the world have found hardly any evidence of warfare during the whole of the hunter-gatherer phase of history. There are, in fact, just two indisputable cases of group violence during all of these tens of thousands of years.

A cluster of sites around the Nile Valley show some signs of violence from around 12,000 BCE. The site of Jebel Sahaba, for instance, has a grave containing the bodies of over 50 people who apparently died a violent death. And in south-east Australia, there are some signs of inter-tribal fighting – as well as of other kinds of social violence such as the cranial deformation of children – at several different sites dating from 11,000 and 7000 BCE. Lawrence Keeley’s book War Before Civilisation suggests several other examples of prehistoric violence and warfare, but all of these are dubious, and have been dismissed by other scholars. For example, Keeley sees cut marks on human bones as evidence of cannibalism, when these are more likely to be the result of prehistoric funeral rituals of cleaning bones of their flesh. He also interprets highly abstract and stylised drawings in caves in Australia as depicting battles, when they are open to wide variety of other interpretations. In this way, as the anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson remarks, Keeley’s “rhetoric exceeds his evidence in implying war is old as humanity.”3

The lack of evidence for warfare is striking. There are no signs of violent death, no signs of damage or disruption by warfare, and although many other artefacts have been found, including massive numbers of tools and pots, there is a complete absence of weapons. As Ferguson points out, “it is difficult to understand how war could have been common earlier in each area and remain so invisible.” Archaeologists have discovered over 300 cave prehistoric “art galleries,” not one of which contains depictions of warfare, weapons or warriors. In the words of the anthropologist Richard Gabriel, “For the first ninety-five thousand years after the Homo sapiens Stone age began [until 4000 BCE], there is no evidence that man engaged in war on any level, let alone on a level requiring organised group violence. There is little evidence of any killing at all.”4

There seems to have been equality between the sexes in prehistoric times too. The fact that women provided so much of the tribe’s food strongly suggests they had equal status, since it’s difficult to see how they could have low status while performing such an important economic role. The healthy, open attitude ancient hunter-gatherers had to the human body and to sex – shown by the massive numbers of sexually explicit images and objects archaeologists have discovered – suggests this too, since the oppression of women appears to be closely linked to a sense of alienation from the human body, and a negative attitude to instincts and bodily processes.

Contemporary indigenous peoples are sexually egalitarian too. Before European conquest and colonisation, many of them traced descent and ownership of property through the mother’s rather than the father’s side of the family. And as the anthropologist Tim Ingold notes, in “immediate return” hunter-gatherer societies (that is, societies which live by immediately using any food or other resources they collect, rather than storing them for later use), men have no authority over women. Women usually choose their own marriage partners, decide what work they want to do and work whenever they choose to, and if a marriage breaks down they have custody rights over their children.5

In prehistoric societies there were no status differences between individuals either. There were no different classes or castes, with people who had more power and possessions than others. For archaeologists, the most obvious signs of social inequality are differences in graves, in terms of size, position and the goods which are placed inside them. Later agricultural societies have larger, more central graves for more “important” people, which also have a lot more possessions inside them. Men generally have more “important” graves than women. But the graves of the ancient hunter-gatherers are strikingly uniform, with little or no size differences and little or no grave wealth.

Almost all contemporary hunter-gatherers show a striking absence of any of the characteristics that we associate with social inequality. The anthropologist James Woodburn speaks of the “profound egalitarianism” of immediate-return foraging peoples and emphasises that no other way of human life “permits so great an emphasis on equality.”6 Foraging peoples are also strikingly democratic. Most societies do operate with a leader of some kind, but their power is usually very limited, and they can easily be deposed if the rest of the group aren’t happy with their leadership. People don’t seek to be leaders – in fact if anybody does show signs of a desire for power and wealth they are usually barred from consideration as leaders. And even when a person becomes a leader, they don’t have the right to make decisions on their own. Decisions are made in co-operation with other respected members of the group.

The Ego Explosion

All of this strongly argues against the idea that prehistoric human beings were brutes whose only concern was survival, and whose lives were full of cruelty and conflict, as men competed against each other for status and food and sex. Warfare, social oppression and male domination – and an existence that was “nasty, brutish and short” – belong to a later phase of human history. Evidence from artwork, cemeteries and battle sites suggests there was an “eruption” of these social pathologies during the fourth millennium BCE, starting in the Middle East and central Asia. The root cause of this change seems to have been environmental. Around this time massive areas of land which had been fertile for thousands of years started to turn into desert. This happened all over the Middle East and central Asia, creating the massive belt of arid or desert land which runs across from the Steppes of southern Russia to the Arabian and Iranian deserts. The groups who lived in the area – including the original Indo-Europeans and Semites – were forced to flee and look for new fertile lands, causing massive waves of migrations.

This environmental disaster seems to have changed the psyche of these peoples. Whereas before they had been peaceful and egalitarian, now they became aggressive, hierarchical and patriarchal. Over the following centuries they spread over Europe, the Middle East and Asia, killing and conquering the peaceful “Old World” peoples they came across, including the civilisation of Old Europe (which was reconstructed by the archaeologist Marija Gimbutas). By 500 BCE, these peoples had more or less completely conquered the whole of Eurasia, leaving only a few indigenous peoples such as the Laplanders of Scandinavia, the tribal peoples of Siberia, and the indigenous peoples of the forests and hills of India. In mainland Europe the only surviving non-Indo-European indigenous peoples were the Basque people of northern Spain (who amazingly still survive today) and the Etruscans of Italy, who were soon to be wiped out by the Romans.

In my book The Fall, I try to explain how these people were (and are) different from the peaceful peoples who came before them. My theory is that the environmental catastrophe (the drying up of their fertile lands) caused an “Ego Explosion.” These peoples developed a stronger and sharper sense of identity, or of individuality, which made them feel more separate to nature and to other people, and more liable to be aggressive and to lust after power and status. We – modern day Eurasians – are the descendents of these peoples, and we have inherited their strong sense of ego. This is still the main difference between us and indigenous “unfallen” peoples such as the Native Americans, Australian Aborigines and the peoples of Oceania, and the reason why they have a much more respectful attitude to nature than us, and a more spiritual vision of the Universe. Our strong sense of ego “walls us off” from other people and nature, makes us unable to sense the alive-ness of the world around us, and may ultimately be responsible for our extinction as a species.

However, there are some signs that, as a culture, we are slowly transcending the “fallen” psyche, and going beyond our ego-separateness. Over the last 300 years or so, there has been a new spirit of empathy growing, which has led to less cruel treatment of children and animals, less severe punishments for criminals, the women’s movement, the abolition of slavery, the socialist movement, a new respect for nature, a more open and healthy attitude to sex and the human body and so on. And there has been a new sense of the sacred and of the possibility of self-transcendence, which has led to a massive upsurge of interest in esoteric/spiritual philosophies and practices like paganism, shamanism, Buddhism, meditation and so on.

There are signs that we are reconnecting with nature, regaining our sense of the aliveness of the world and of the hidden mysteries of the cosmos. The characteristics of the prehistoric golden age may be slowly re-emerging. The only question is whether there is enough time left for these characteristics to emerge fully, before the old “fallen” psyche leads us to self-destruction.

The idea that human history is a gradual but continual progression – starting from a state of savagery, with generations slowly making technological and social advances and passing these down, and leading to the pinnacle of western European civilisation – is a leftover from the Victorian era, part of the same colonial mentality which saw “primitive” indigenous peoples as subhumans who could be justifiably conquered and killed. Rather than a progression, the last 6000 years of war, oppression, misery and hardship are the result of a painful degeneration from an earlier, healthier state. We may finally be moving forward now – but only in the sense of turning a full circle, and rekindling glimmers of ancient harmony.

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Footnotes:

1. Sahlins, M. (1972). Stone Age Economics. New York: Aldine de Gruyter,. p.36.

2. Rudgley, R. (2000). Secrets of the Stone Age. London: Random House, p. 36.

3. Ferguson, R.B. (2000). ‘The Causes and Origins of Primitive Warfare.’ Anthropological Quarterly, 73.3, 159-164, p.159.

4. Gabriel, R. (1990). The Culture of War: Invention and Early Development. New York: Greenwood Press, p. 21.

5. Ingold, T., Riches, D. & Woodburn, J. (Eds.). (1988). Hunters and Gatherers, Volume 2: Property, Power and Ideology. Oxford: Berg.

6. Woodburn, J. (1982). ‘Egalitarian Societies.’ Man, 17, 431-51, p.432.

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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This article was published in New Dawn 75 (Nov-Dec 2002)

Editor’s Note: Dr. José Argüelles passed away in 2011. 

It doesn’t take a crystal ball to discern that ours is a chaotically dysfunctional world. To point the way toward a solution does, however, require someone with a sense of vision that transcends the present-day labyrinth of commercialised and egotistical dead ends. A visionary is simply someone who can see beyond these ordinary confines, and a prophet is someone who can read the “writing on the wall” that most people pass by without ever looking up to notice. Dr. José Argüelles (1939-2011), aka Valum Votan, is both a visionary and a prophet.

Argüelles began working as an art historian and artist in the late 1960s, and his creative sensibilities contributed greatly to an ability to peer through the veils of maya that opaquely shroud the modern realm. But alongside an artistic outlook, he also bears the mind of a scientist – just not the type of narrow-minded positivistic scientist that has come to exemplify the term in the West. Argüelles is a “whole-systems scientist,” and here again visionary skills come into play. In order to understand the complexity of life on Earth, and to recognise the deleterious factors that have put the entire biosphere in increasing jeopardy, the old reductionism and scientism of the West must be abandoned in favour of a more all-encompassing knowledge.

As the following interview demonstrates, José Argüelles has always welcomed new experiences. He and his wife Lloydine have travelled the globe to share their insights, always on the frontlines of the effort to expand consciousness and awareness. And among many other achievements, Argüelles is also the author of a series of seminal works, the most well-known of which is probably The Mayan Factor: Path Beyond Technology (1987). It was here that he first revealed the understandings he gleaned from a deep study of Mayan time science.

His latest endeavour, Time and the Technosphere: The Law of Time in Human Affairs (2002), may be his most crucial. In it, Argüelles looks at recent human events and worldwide developments from his whole-systems vantage point. With the courage to face an apocalyptic diagnosis, he offers evidence that the Earth has come to be dominated by the “technosphere,” an envelope of inhuman mechanisation that practically has a mind of its own and has us careening toward a cataclysmic future.

But despite the bleak circumstances we now find ourselves in, Argüelles’s message is one of hope. The shattering “Inevitable Event” of September 11th, 2001 – seen almost simultaneously by a vast section of the world’s population via high-speed electronic media – represented a rupturing of the technospheric bubble, and therefore an opportunity for humans to establish a genuine alternative paradigm on a global scale. This is where the World Thirteen Moon Calendar Change Peace Movement steps in, offering a vision and a model for a new time.

As Argüelles persuasively argues, it is largely dissynchronous timing standards that have kept human beings off-balance and alienated from the natural cycles of the Earth they inhabit. The worst culprit is the Gregorian calendar, and by extension the “12:60 frequency” that it fosters – together these have become, in essence, the inescapable time clock of globalist capitalism. But is there really no escape? Through the medium of his work, and through the example of a life artistically lived, Argüelles points the way to a new beginning. The choice is in our hands, and now it is truly a question of time.
– Michael Moynihan

Michael: The best description for you and your work might be that of a “visionary.” When and how did you first realise that your interpretation of larger events was something you felt compelled to communicate to others?

José: I always knew I was an “outsider,” to use Colin Wilson’s phrase. But it wasn’t until after I experimented with LSD that I realised I was a visionary. That was back in 1965 and 1966. I then felt compelled to express myself, first in painting. I did a series of paintings which came to be known as “The Doors of Perception” (Humphrey Osmond himself, who coined the word psychedelic, gave those paintings that name). But I saw that as fantastic as painting was, it was a limited medium in terms of audience. And besides, visionary artists – really visionary artists – don’t usually get much exposure in their time. Especially me – I made it a point of never signing my painting because I felt I was simply the channel, the cosmic ballpoint pen, drawing down the visionary flow from the cosmic realm of endless archetypal form. And I also wanted to get away from all this individualistic ego trip of modern art and artists. “Ownerless in the ownerless land of vision,” I used to say to characterise my attitude.

Because of this I also knew that I would have to tackle the medium of the written word to get out my message. My vision and message were always very simple. History is a fall from grace. We are at the end of time and the end of history. Therefore a renewal of vision, the Great Return, the creation of the Great Work of the Art of Harmony must be reestablished in order to save fallen humanity from the graceless state of merciless materialism and the fragmented exhaustion of the profane order of mechanised history. By the time I was 28 or so I felt very compelled to get out this message. I envisioned a monumental work dealing with this issue to be entitled Art at the Dawn of a New Magic. I also knew my trip was so far out that the only way I could establish credibility was to get a Ph.D. So I did. My thesis was turned into a book, my first book, Charles Henry and the Formation of a Psychophysical Aesthetic (1972). Sounds pretty academic, but look at the very first words in my very first book, and you’ll see the theme from which I have never veered: “Many are the attempts that are made and the words that are spoken with regard to the age-old ideal of harmony: the union of all faculties, of all senses, of all knowledge. The highest dreamers would proclaim that the true art and science are one…”

Michael: Could you tell us a bit about Charles Henry and what drew you to him and his ideas?

José: Charles Henry was a French psychomathematician born in 1859 and who died in 1926. During the 1880s his ideas of a “scientific aesthetic” were a great influence on what came to be known as the post-impressionist painters, especially the pointillist Georges Seurat. That is actually how I came to discover Charles Henry, when I was in Paris doing my Ph.D. research on neo-impressionism in 1965 and ’66. I discovered LSD at the same time, and as I read some of Charles Henry’s later works, I thought his theories on sense impressions, perceptions and consciousness confirmed my psychedelic experiences. After the LSD I found the art history neo-impressionist stuff a bit tedious, and so I decided I would forget it and paint instead. But something about Charles Henry intrigued me.

I decided to delve into him a bit further, and decided that I would get my Ph.D. after all, but my thesis would be on this enigmatic, little-known explorer of consciousness, Charles Henry. I had the feeling that he was a special type of incarnation, like a French reborn sufi-saint or some kind of bodhisattva who was carrying on the tradition of the “invisible college” and St. Germain, setting out a bunch of clues that only I could decipher and decode. His last works were on the nature of consciousness, specifically “Post-mortem survival and the Nature of Consciousness,” in which he wrote: “Death is but a physiochemical change. It is only after death that I will truly begin to amuse myself.” I also found it interesting that he was talking about synergy and synergetics well before Bucky Fuller, a fact I brought to Fuller’s attention in some correspondence with him in 1969. That was a good thing because Bucky answered back and agreed that it must have been Charles Henry’s post-mortem synergetic thought form that he received in 1927, when the idea of synergetics first came to him. That connection was very fruitful, because Bucky also suggested to me the idea of a psi bank around the Earth in which all of the ideas and thoughts of all the ages keep recirculating. I knew he was right. Anyway, that gives you some idea of Charles Henry and my process.

Michael: Given your non-materialistic outlook, was entering the academy to obtain your Ph.D. a bit like diving into the belly of the beast?

José: Well, kind of. But I knew that it was my survival. I got my B.A. degree from the University of Chicago as well, and found out that all I could do was get a job as an insurance salesman. That really didn’t cut it for me. I knew I was made for other things. That was back in 1961. I seesawed between being a full-blown beatnik on the road or going back to school. So I ended up going back to the University of Chicago for a degree in art history. I had to be on good behaviour because I had actually been thrown out of the undergraduate program in 1960 for being a full-blown beatnik, accused of being the ringleader of a pot-smoking set of thugs meant to undermine the freshman women. But in this life you have to experience everything and academia was part of that experience. As William Blake put it, “The road to the palace of wisdom is paved with excess.” I was as good an academic as I was a beatnik, in fact I really excelled. But I knew by my inner guidance, it was but a means to an end – discipline, for sure, to keep my many-levelled mind on track, and credibility for something I knew not yet what.

Michael: Getting back to the subject of your early paintings, some people will be familiar with them due to their appearance in your book Mandala. How would you characterise the relationship between your own artistic endeavours and these traditional forms? Did one inform directly the other?

José: Actually the mandala principle seemed to be a very natural and inevitable consequence of the psychedelic experience, affirmed for me by my studies of Charles Henry and my free-form exploration at that time of Tibetan mysticism. I never thought of the mandala form as particularly traditional, but instead rather timeless. I thought of using the Doors of Perception and other large mandala-style paintings to create an actual environment where someone could sit and experience this timelessness, get lifted from their ego and see the white light. In 1971, when I finally met a real Tibetan, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who ended up being my friend and teacher for the next sixteen years, he took a good look at my paintings, and with a sly grin looked at me and said, “I see you already know all about tantra.” I think tradition is good if it gets you to that place of timelessness and self-transcendence. That’s what Trungpa meant by his comment. There are many ways to get to the same place. But you should also know I stopped painting mandalas around 1973. I started to do one, and I said to myself, “What does the world need with another gimmick?” I didn’t paint like that again for almost another 20 years, though I have done a lot of other artistic things.

Michael: From a few of the comments you’ve been making, I get the feeling you don’t place any great emphasis on the modern obsession with “originality” and novelty, which fuels so much of the commercial art world.

José: No, I don’t. Modernist “originality” is a fall from the sacred into the profane, the exaltation of ego. There is a true originality, but that is what is usually called revelation. That is, revelation that is genuine and is meant to light a new path for a fallen humanity. I think the true artist is meant to be a creative channel and not an inventor of cheap tricks or clever mannerisms.

Michael: Chogyam Trunga is well known as one of the first people to bring Tibetan Buddhist teachings to a contemporary Western audience. In your mind, what are some of the most important aspects of his legacy?

José: Trungpa Rinpoche was a truly interesting human being. As much as he was a teacher of the way of “crazy wisdom,” he was also an artist at heart. His two greatest legacies were his emphasis of mindfulness training and his vision of dharma art – art as everyday life, but an everyday life in which the sacred is the normative experience. Here we can define the sacred as being the sense of awe that breaks your heart, that touches and moves you mysteriously and poignantly even though and maybe just because it is an ordinary experience of reality. But you cannot have dharma art without mindfulness training, meditation without an object. So art is how you organise your life moment-to-moment with an all-consuming awareness or sense of mindfulness. Take nothing for granted. Elegance and a simple sense of ceremony transform your everyday environment and place you in cosmic harmony – dharma art is the ceaseless expression of the universal norm of existence.

Michael: As part of living a creative existence outside the workaday world, you and Lloydine spent years travelling the globe and interacting with people to share your visions and ideas. Surely this was also part of your own fulfillment of “dharma art.” What lessons did you learn from the experience?

José: Yes, for over a decade beginning late in 1991, we have been galactic peace mercenaries bringing the message of the new time, a message of peace through time. We were “commanded” to take the tools and research of our investigation into the natural timing frequency as represented by the Mayan calendar to all the peoples of the world. We did this essentially without any visible means of support. And we did this always without asking for monetary recompense for delivering our message that the old time was over, and that a new time is already prepared. In this way when we said our message was the truth we were not compromising it by asking for money.

The truth cannot be bought or sold, and we stuck to this premise. It took us on a mighty trail of adventures, too. We had some patrons from time to time give us support. But we had to go places where we had never been. We had to go Berlin and Russia after the end of the Cold War, we had to travel throughout Latin America. We were in South Africa and Egypt, India, Hong Kong and Japan. Much of the time we spent living with the people who shared with us their lives, their food, their dwellings. Our dharma art and mindfulness training was our survival. It allowed us to blend in and participate fully in the various cultures as if we were natives. It was also really helpful not to ask for anything. It doesn’t do you any good to be a fussy vegetarian in a culture that survives harsh winters on mutton. Our task was to see if people from different cultures could not only understand our message, but act on it as well. In the presentation of our message, art was of supreme value.

I always play my flute, and together we do a prayer to the seven directions that is a simple ceremonial piece of art. We also always present the banner of peace to show that we are emissaries of peace through culture and that we are to demonstrate a new positively constructive approach to peace. We found that people generally respond very positively to this kind of approach. As a result we have been privileged to have many, many cultural experiences that even natives of some countries rarely have. For instance, we were taken deep inside the Ise shrine in Japan as special guests, and attended a special performance of bugaku(ancient court music and dance). I was even able to play my flute – a Japanese Shakuhachi – in the ceremonial grounds, which is usually not allowed even for Japanese. You see, when you practice living art as everyday life, it creates a path of genuineness and gentleness which people are often very willing to accommodate.

Michael: Somewhere along the way you encountered the work of Nicholas Roerich, the Russian painter, poet, and traveller into the Himalayas. When did you become aware of him?

José: Back in 1967 when I was teaching art history at Princeton, I was looking for signs of Tibetan art wherever I could find them in New York City. And I found that one of the places was the Roerich Museum on the upper West Side. I liked his paintings and read about him, becoming aware that he was an early explorer of Tibet. I realised what an interesting artist he was, having designed the stage sets for Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and then gone on his various pilgrimages.

Michael: Julius Evola once wrote that Roerich’s images convey a spirit capable of awakening a “primordial and powerful sensation that has been buried in the subconscious due to the restless and prisonlike life of the modern Western world.” What meanings did his paintings evoke for you?

José: Sacred awe and visionary splendour. A universalism of cultural or spiritual values as well. His writings on art show that he was seeking to restore the sense of the sacred to the modern world. I became aware of his work with the Banner of Peace sometime not too long after that. Roerich’s idea of peace through culture I found of enormous value and easy to integrate into my perceptions of the purpose of dharma art. Trungpa used to say, “The artist has tremendous power to change the world.” But how? The Banner of Peace seemed to provide a way of making a change by promoting a broad scale revolution of cultural values.

So it was that early 1980s, my wife Lloydine and I decided to resurrect the idea of peace through culture, especially the Banner of Peace. In 1983 we incorporated it into our creation of the Planet Art Network (PAN). The original idea of the PAN was to create a network of artists – creative thinkers of every kind – who would become a force for creative non-political change in the world, or who would show the world that change can be attained through creative means and that political change could be superseded by something far more inspiring. However, the principle notion of Planet Art is that the Earth itself is a work of art, and that the next evolutionary wave of art – beyond modernism – would be the realisation and fulfillment of the Earth as a work of art.

In the 1990s when we became totally involved in the Thirteen Moon Calendar Change Peace Movement, we moved the Banner of Peace and the Peace through Cultural initiative into the forefront of our peace plan. The Banner of Peace is now one of the official emblems of this Movement. Intended to protect cultural monuments in times of war, we now view the Banner of Peace as the symbol meant to protect the biosphere, the cradle of culture currently very seriously threatened by the war of globalisation.

Michael: The difference between artists and politicians seems fundamental. Generally two artists can mutually respect one another and find common ground beyond whatever differences they may have. But people who are driven by or infused with materialistic political ideologies become like automatons, unable to acknowledge anything that doesn’t fit into their “correct” worldview. Not surprisingly, most artists want nothing to do with politicians – even less so since the latter are beholden to money values rather than creative values. How do you see a chance for creative values to take precedence in the world, given these circumstances?

José: First of all we must see a further breaking down of all values and institutional structures which will continue to diminish the credibility in the way we have been doing things as a species. This process is already occurring and manifests as the increasing social, political and military-terroristic chaos so rampant in the world today. When people talk about the end times, well these are the end times. But it is only the end of the corrupted world, the end of the world as we know it, and to paraphrase R.E.M., we feel fine. Why? Because this means that a new world is already being born, a world which will inevitably and of necessity see a radical pole shift in values. If the predominant value of the corrupt world is “time is money,” supported by ruthless military supported monetary politics, then the new value system will be characterised by “time is art.” It is the difference between a value system stressing quantity of material abundance and a value system emphasising spiritual and aesthetic quality as the standard of life. This change is already in the evolutionary program of the biosphere, the evolving system of life on earth.

We have reached a critical stage in which we are faced with planetary suicide – genocide – or planetary renewal. The system of life on Earth can only go in the direction of planetary renewal which means a total change in direction and way of life of humanity. This is already being prepared for and the first step will be a change in the timing frequency by which the human species governs itself. Currently the dominant order is governed by an anachronistic, irrational and irregular timing device, the Gregorian calendar, which has had and continues to have a debilitating effect on the mind and moral sensibility of the species. Combined with the mechanisation of time through the clock, and the worship of money as the be-all and end-all of existence, this has created an out-of-control species no longer in tune with nature or the natural order. Once this change of timing frequency is made and the species is returned to the harmonic order of natural time, artistic and cultural values will very soon supersede the witless determinism of monetary politics. Do not doubt it: the sentiment and comprehension for making this change, as well as the instrument for implementing this change – the 13 Moon/28-day calendar – are now a growing force throughout the world.

Michael: Recently you travelled to the Altai region, where Roerich had explored three-quarters of a century ago. What brought you there, and what significance does a remote place such as Altai have for an increasingly globalised world?

José: Actually we had received an official invitation from the government of Altai to be special guests and to share our message with the people. When The Mayan Factor was published in Russian, it reached the hands of some shamans in Altai – it is an autonomous republic, member of the Russian federation, with only 205,000 people on 92,000 square kilometres. Anyway, between the shamans and contacts that had already been made through official representatives of Altai government in one of our more recent trips to Russia, we were then ready to visit. We found it an interesting opportunity because our trip was timed precisely 75 years after the Roerichs had passed through Altai on their famous expedition Altai-Himalaya, 1926-28. In fact we visited the Roerich Museum, the house where Roerich had stayed, facing Mt. Belukha, the highest mountain in the Russian Federation, precisely on the day he had first arrived there 75 years earlier.

Set between Khazakstan, China, Mongolia and Russia, Altai is an amazing piece of territory. There really is only one city, if you can call it that, Gorno-Altaisk, and once you leave that place, you enter a country that you didn’t think existed anymore on this planet. Endless valleys with wild horses roaming freely as if it were still 30,000 years ago. We visited shaman elders and little villages that are literally off both the beaten and the unbeaten paths. People were always already waiting for us. They knew who we were. And they shared with us many interesting aspects or facets of their history, a history that traces back to the stars.

Some of the shamans felt the cosmology of The Mayan Factor confirmed or was even identical to their cosmology. But they were also feeling the pressures of the globalised world. A highway from China to Russia was in the works when we were there. We were in strong support of the government declaring the entire region a biospheric reserve. The thinking there is already advanced in this direction.

We proposed the establishment of an International Foundation for Peace through Culture that would help establish Altai as a biospheric reserve, preserving the land and the culture in its entirety, and providing a world model for other cultures or peoples who wished to learn from this model. We presented this idea to the national Parliament and we know that it is still being discussed. It is interesting that among some of the shamans and locals, Roerich is not greatly liked. They feel that he was exploiting the people and the culture. And we have experienced some of that too, though we are still in communication through our representative there with key elders. Even now, the people of Altai are in the struggle between preservation of traditional values and the encroaching technosphere.

But of all the places I have been, Altai is the most magical and incredible. It is truly another world, a doorway into timelessness. And I was very fortunate to have met so many of the holders of the ancient culture. One shaman, Anton Yudanov, gave me a topshure – a two-stringed fretless Siberian guitar – which I have treasured and learned how to play, singing spontaneously my own forms or versions of shaman rock and shaman blues. I truly pray that Altai will be preserved and stand as a model for the rest of the world as culture living in harmony with the biosphere.

Michael: You’ve spoken of spiritual convergences there that indicate a “sign of the coming of Shambhala.” Can you elaborate on what you mean by this?

José: Altai prides itself on the fact that Islam, Christianity and Buddhism all exist there side by side. One shaman we visited showed us a diagram in which the three religions are represented by signs from playing cards – Christianity, clubs; Islam, hearts, and Buddhism spades. Next to these three signs are two diamonds. These represent the old and the new shamanism of Altai. The new shamanism is called Ak Burkhan or the white faith and though it was introduced over two hundred and fifty years ago, it only became official in 1904. Through Ak Burkhan the prophecies of Shambhala or Belevodye, the White Land, are maintained. The spiritual convergence of Buddhism, Islam and Christianity is certainly one of the signs of the coming of Shambhala.

Trungpa Rinpoche, as you know, also taught much about Shambhala, which can also be said to represent a spiritual harmony of the different traditions of the world religions. In Altai, however, there is no question that the native religion, Ak Burkhan, is a great factor in creating a sense of harmony with the land, as well as a spiritual harmony. At different points in our visit to Altai witnessing the dancing and the throat singing to the accompaniment of the topshure, it felt like the living culture of Shambhala was still shining through.

Michael: Certainly the culture of Shambhala does not operate according to Gregorian time, or what you call the “12:60 frequency.” A major theme of your new book Time and the Technosphere concerns the discovery of the Law of Time. Can you briefly expound upon what this means?

José: The Law of Time is a fundamental law, like that of gravity. And just as no one knew about that law until Newton discovered it, so it is with the Law of Time. That also means that the Law of Time, like gravity, has always operated – it is fundamental to the universe. We just didn’t know about it until now. I wouldn’t have known about it if I hadn’t delved so deeply into the mathematics behind the Mayan calendar. To test it out, Lloydine and I began to live the cycles of that calendar: 13-day cycles, 20-day cycles, 52-day cycles. That changes your life. We had begun doing that before the Harmonic Convergence in 1987, and continued doing that in the years just after. Then, as destiny would have it, we found ourselves in Geneva, Switzerland one cold and dreary Sunday – December 10, 1989, to be precise. To entertain ourselves we decided to take a busman’s holiday and visit the Museum of Time. After two or so hours looking at one archaic proto-clock after another, leading from the cuckoo up to the pendulum clock and then on down to digital quartz and cessium timepieces, we had a grand “Aha!” This place should be renamed the Museum of Mechanised Time! Because we had been living the Mayan cycles we had a contrast, both experientially and mathematically, by which to evaluate what we were experiencing in this Museum.

We knew immediately that there are two timing frequencies. The natural one codified by the Maya we understood to be the frequency 13:20; the artificial one canonised in this museum we knew to be the 12:60 – the irregular 12-month calendar and artificial, mechanised 60-minute hour. We understood that the combination of these two timing standards unconsciously accepted by the human species established an artificial timing frequency which regulates the human race today in virtually every aspect of its existence. Since time is fundamentally of the mind, this 12:60 frequency has produced a species whose system of operations is a mechanised irregularity. And since a calendar is the macroprogram that governs a people or a culture, this means that all of these mechanised irregularities are programmed into that calendar. No wonder there are so many problems and no solutions! Change the calendar and you’ll change the program.

The Mayan calendar cycles summarised by the mathematical ratio 13:20 we understood to represent the natural timing frequency which is the universal factor of synchronisation. Yes, the chief quality of natural time is synchronisation! That is why the ancient Maya operated with as many as seventeen different calendars. We are all fascinated by synchronicity, which is an anomaly only because we live a life of mechanised irregularities. But in the natural order of time, synchronicity is the norm. This also defines a whole order of reality, the synchronic order. This is fundamentally the fourth dimensional order of reality which regulates the third dimensional plane of existence. But we have a hard time dealing with this or knowing about it because our minds are so conditioned to artificial time which is linear and anything but synchronic. You can see what a dilemma this is. For this reason we immediately understood as well that to get the human race back on course, the first step would be to change the calendar, to replace it with a calendar of perfect harmony so the human race could straighten its mind out again. The means for doing that is the absolute perfection of the Thirteen Moon 28-day Calendar – 364 days 52 perfect weeks, plus a 365th Day Out of Time for forgiveness, and to give expression to “time is art.” Celebrated on old Gregorian July 25, this past year alone more than 500 Day Out of Time celebrations occurred planet-wide.

That gets us to the other aspect of the Law of Time, and that is its formulation: T(E) = Art, energy factored by time equals art. That is to say, because time is the universal factor of synchronization – the ratio constant 13:20 – everything participates in a natural elegance. There is no such thing as an ugly sunset. Spiders and scorpions have their aesthetic elegance. Beauty is the basic norm of the universe. That gets us back to that dharma art thing. Only modern man has lost this innate artistic sensibility and prefers three-legged pink poodles to the real thing. Artificial time deforms the mind; mechanisation dehumanises it. Art and beauty really will save the world, but only if humanity returns to living in the perfect harmony of the Thirteen Moon Calendar and thus becomes synchronised again with the whole of the universal order of the cosmos. Then art as everyday life will be natural and inevitable – how can harmony do anything but enhance itself and produce more harmony? This is the point of what we call the Great Calendar Change of 2004 – July 26, 2004, to be precise. People get ready, there’s a new time a-coming… it is humanity’s last best hope, the untried solution: get a new calendar.

Michael: There are apocalyptic warning signs all around us – a glance at a daily paper will confirm that. You don’t shy away from the reality of our precarious situation, yet you also offer a message of hope. How can people rise above the sort of nihilistic, numbed state that the powers-that-be seem to want everyone to remain in?

José: Well, most people have a hard time accepting that it really is the end times, that they are living in the middle of the apocalypse. That’s why they are numbed-out and that is what keeps them numbed-out. They don’t want to face it, and certainly the media isn’t going to tell them to face it. Instead the media thrives on fear and violence and so the whole syndrome is self-perpetuated. From the point of view of the Law of Time this is the inevitable conclusion to absolute entrainment in an erroneous timing frequency which only produces increasingly dissynchronous states of mind. People have to understand this fundamental point. Because when you do, you also realise there is a solution, a radical fundamental change. Yes, so radical that it will end history. But if we don’t end history, history will end us.

Ever since 1990 when we realised that the calendar change was the only solution, the first step toward getting out of an otherwise “geocidal” dead end, we have been promoting this change. At first it was very difficult. People would say, “How can a calendar have an effect on my mind?” or, “How could changing the calendar change anything?” or, “We tried that already.” Not really. The first calendar change movement that was promoted by the League of Nations did not succeed – it floundered on the Day Out of Time issue, which we have now proven to be a day of universal harmony – so that means we never really tried the calendar change as a solution. People have to understand that the Gregorian calendar is the world’s most insidious dogma, that this calendar is a tool of the Vatican, and that therefore, the Vatican maintains mind control over the human species with this calendar. And everybody knows that it is irregular and irrational as well – so why still follow it?

By 1993 we knew we had to get serious with promoting the Thirteen Moon Calendar, and so we gave birth to the World Thirteen Moon Calendar Change Peace Movement. We saw the calendar change as the perfect opportunity to declare world peace, call for a universal cease fire, begin a disarmament process and also call for a work stoppage so as a species we could begin to shift priorities. My optimism comes from the fact that in less than a decade the use of the Thirteen Moon Calendar has spread to some 54 countries and the Day Out of Time has become very widespread as a Planetary Festival of Peace and Culture. The previous calendar change movement was a top-down thing. We knew that our efforts had to be a people’s revolution. Bob Marley sings, “It takes a revolution to make a solution,” and that’s so true. If enough people from many different countries and cultures are already following this calendar, then when we got to the point of notifying the world leadership it will be backed up by the people. Not that we haven’t already presented this to the U.N., the Vatican, and many other top leaders. But that has been a matter of course. If we hadn’t done that we wouldn’t be doing our jobs. Of course the Vatican chose to conceal our information and ultimately ignore it. Kofi Annan, however, did give us a positive letter of support. But of course, no one wants to take personal responsibility. So we say, that’s OK, show us a better, more comprehensive solution. We are ready anyway, and everyone who knows that this is real and true is getting ready to say goodbye to the Gregorian calendar and its self-fulfilling apocalypse in 2004 and walk right into a time of peace and harmony. If the rest of the world wants to join, it is an open invitation. Leave the old time and enter the new time. It is the only sure way to rise above the numbed-out nihilism of the decade without a name. Besides, the Mayan prophecy says that 2012 is the end of the cycle, and if we want to get there in one piece, we have to shift gears now. Believe it or not, to paraphrase Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, I know we will “get back to the garden.”

By the way, all of this calendar change activity is also a Mayan prophecy. In that regard, I am nothing but a messenger, and as a messenger, my name is Valum Votan, Closer of the Cycle. I would be avoiding my responsibility if I didn’t mention that. Thanks for the opportunity. I hope you have found this to be an interesting interview.

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