Authors: Shirley MacLaine
When I traveled to Mayan country (Yucatán peninsula, Guatemala, Honduras, and Belize), I asked the present-day Mayans about their ancestors. They said they came suddenly with an advanced technology and left suddenly, abandoning their greatest cities during the ninth century
AD
.
The most valuable and sophisticated object they left behind was a calendar which calculated cosmic cycles and time. The calendar
tracked galactic time and movements of the stars. In addition to that, the calendar tracks the celestial alignment of the Earth’s solar system, our sun, and our Earth in relation to the center of our galaxy—an event that will not happen again for another
26
,
000
years.
I found these facts to be disturbing, intriguing, and certainly worthy of taking seriously where human behavior and consciousness are concerned. When I questioned the Mayan descendants about their ancestors, they said things like, “Our ancestors were timekeepers who one day left their temples and pyramids and walked into the jungle and vanished, returning to the place where they came from.” They told me, “They knew something important in their time which we are just beginning to learn in ours.” They didn’t know what “the end of time” meant; that was the part of the ancestors’ wisdom that wasn’t left. Whenever I asked whether the Mayan wisdom was based on the need for us to know our true selves better, they didn’t know what I was talking about. They only knew that everything was moving too fast for them.
In my conversations with Stephen Hawking, he said that the speed with which our computers are performing will soon surpass the capacity of the human brain. The computers will become ultra-intelligent thinking machines capable of much more than our brains are capable of. He questioned whether humans would then be obsolete and machines would then be the vanguard of evolution. Would humanity then have reached the end of its evolutionary journey?
I loved my talks with Hawking. We met because at one point we had the same editor in our literary lives. When he came to America I hosted a few parties for him. And when I visited him at Cambridge outside of London, he told me he could quite possibly be the reincarnation of Isaac Newton. He was born on the same date that Newton died, a hundred years later or so and, of course, he holds the Isaac Newton Chair at Cambridge. On the walls of his office at Cambridge, side by side, hung pictures of Albert Einstein and Marilyn Monroe. “Each,” he said, “had beautiful curves pertaining to the universe.”
It was moving for me to watch him fall in love with his nurse, divorce his wife Jane, and go through the soap opera of his life while he was confined to his wheelchair and could barely move at all. He moved around the streets of Cambridge in his wheelchair at speeds more akin to the Indianapolis
500
and laughed all the way.
We talked about the difference between information and intelligence. At the rate of speed of the information age, the growth rate of human knowledge will be reaching its own maximum. But knowledge is not the goal—wisdom is. Wisdom determines how the knowledge is used.
I’m glad to see his
Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking
is questioning extraterrestrial presence. He says his mathematical brain says there must be extraterrestrial intelligence out there. He just hopes they come in peace.
And
he speculates they might already be here.
Hawking didn’t say we are a half-awake species. I am saying it. We go about our lives, our work, our shopping, our raising of children, in half-trance. We don’t know what to do about the speed of life and information that we can’t keep up with. We don’t even know we can’t keep up. We just feel it. More and more of us are asking “Who am I?” “Why am I here?” “What did I come for?” “What can I do about anything?” We derive our identity by the knowledge of our name, our job, our social security number, our address, our gender, our political and religious beliefs, our education, and our social status. But who are we really?
We are half-awake as to who we are, who we aren’t, and even what our needs would be if they could be fulfilled.
I believe what we are facing in the world is a crisis of an enlightened identity. What are the roots of our human greed, our fear, our need to control weather, our capacity for abuse, our desecration of the planet and ourselves? We have sophisticated information-gathering skills and no notion how to use those skills for our happiness.
This is why people like me write books about the questionings of our true selves, where we might have come from, if we are alone in the universe, and if we are living out the laws of cause and effect. What were the ancient civilizations that we might have lived among? Did we destroy ourselves then as we seem to be doing now? How can anyone who is awake not ask these questions? That is why we don’t have a sense of “I”-ness. The more “I”-ness we touch, the deeper is our sense of ease.
Yes, I have enough money, which is, unfortunately, a requirement for “ease” these days. But such a state of ease has led me to deeper questions about our addiction to materialism and more money than we need. I remember John Paul Getty’s remark when he was asked if he had made enough money. He said, “Not yet.” He was the richest man in the world at the time, with a face that looked poverty-stricken.
Why do we look for outside and external stimulation and acquisitions to make ourselves happy? A new car, a new dress, jewelry, etc. I feel it’s because we don’t feel we have enough on the inside. I remember a strange state of mind I got into while walking the Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage. I was hurting all over from bleeding blisters, the cruel sun, the aches and pains of walking twenty miles a day. I tried to find the enlightened fulfillment inside, but I found that if I concentrated on the purse I wanted to buy at a very expensive store when I returned to Madrid, I felt better. I counted the inside pockets of the purse, I felt the soft leather, I imagined where I’d wear it. I was in that state for a few hours until I realized I was trying to find comfort in the external outside world while my trust and faith in my internal self went unexamined. From then on, I asked for help from my own internal higher self. The walk became easier and I found I was connecting to some past lives I had experienced in that part of the world, which I think was one of the reasons I decided to make the pilgrimage in the first place.
We are now what we have been before, as well as what
we will be. I began to understand more fully the emotional addiction I, and others, have for “things.” Simply put, material things are a replacement for the true self we haven’t yet touched within ourselves. The Buddhists speak of non-attachment, which is different than detachment. I was beginning to see the difference. Our attachment to so many things makes us forget why we are here and what we are supposed to be learning about ourselves.
We are in a state of separation between spirit and matter, between our very souls and materialism. We are half-awake with our toys and technology. We don’t hear our souls crying to be recognized as part of creation so we will wake up. The world we have made and live in does not bear witness to the divine. It bears witness to our greed, our delusions of power, and to the righteousness of religion. We kill for the determination of our own religious power. We kill for the individual’s democratic right to plunder the Earth as we separate ourselves more and more from the Earth’s divinity. We live separate from our true selves.
Will the cosmic alignment of
2012
force us magnetically to realign with why we are here? Will its effect on our consciousness bring about the enlightenment we don’t even realize is missing? Perhaps galactic nature itself will force us to wake up or die of the separation from ourselves.
The ancients promised that the Earth as a living being would wake us to sing. Perhaps the alignment is how it will happen.
T
he Mayan science is based on frequencies of vibrationary resonance. Our science is based on matter. Our scientists say that matter is the only provable reality. With the advances in our modern science though, our scientists are coming around to understanding what the Mayans meant when they claimed that all reality is constructed of different levels of vibrational frequency. Up to now, scientists have claimed reality could be detected by our senses. They are now bowing to the possibility that there may be other realities that we cannot discern through our senses, that there may be coexisting parallel realities going on.
We, as human beings, are in resonance with our planet, as are the trees, nature, and animals. When these resonances are disturbed, so are we. We know our planet is a living, evolving organism. If we have created an imbalance through our depletion of natural resources and toxic pollution into our environment, then we must wake up to what that actually
means. The
2012
alignment should take place with an Earth in balance, not an Earth out of balance.
I believe that there are other beings of intelligence in the universe, waiting and observing how we will handle this
2012
alignment. These beings are of a more advanced vibrational frequency and are waiting to be acknowledged by humans so that they can help us wake up before it is too late. They are hoping for what they call a “galactic synchronization.” They know that
2012
is a major evolutionary shift. If we acknowledge them and work with them, we would all become part of a galactic civilization. The age of Universal Being Kind will begin.
I do not believe there are “evil” aliens. Producers make a lot of money on screen and in television through such an idea though, because fear makes money. The “good” alien would challenge us to be better ourselves, and we are not up to that kind of challenge right now. We are obsessed with evil, fear, protection, and the entitlement of being looked after. Abdicating self-responsibility is our middle name. We want the government, the church, and our “system” to take care of us. We don’t have
50
states here in America, we have
51
—the latest being the state of Denial.
I am over being taken care of. I am going to take care of myself by asking questions and studying anything I can that is innovative and makes sense to me in this new world of alignment. According to some scientists, our brains have an unbounded talent for creativity, promising that we can
become whatever we imagine. Each brain is already capable of a greater number of associations than the number of atoms in the universe! And there is strong evidence that the holographic (nonlinear) universe acts as an interconnected mind to which each human being has direct access. More and more people are developing their clairvoyance, telepathy, and remote viewing. The reality of humanity’s interconnected thought field is astonishing.
Some of the new children being born are evidencing advanced mental and emotional capabilities that will probably be commonplace in all of humanity. I believe there will be widespread acceptance of spiritual intelligence which will include the recognition of past lives. I believe we will finally recognize nonphysical beings: angels and other celestial intelligences that are not embodied. In every culture on Earth there are stories of unusual experiences and enlightening contacts with beings that weren’t physical.
Perhaps the
2012
alignment will lead us to a universal spirituality where deception and fear are no longer necessary. Perhaps our brand of manipulative politics will be replaced with a spiritual politics where every business will be environmentally and socially responsible. As Albert Einstein once said, “You can’t solve a problem from the same level of consciousness that created the problem.”
Our consciousness is the problem.
B
ecause I am an impatient person, and because I’m usually ten years ahead of the curve on many things, I have made a study of time in an effort to have more patience.
So far, Terry has been my most profound teacher where consciousness and time are concerned. She doesn’t just relate to time in terms of when it’s time to eat or go out. She has a sensitive calculator that is attached to her consciousness about other people’s feelings. Once on a plane trip across country, she sat next to a woman with her paw on the woman’s heart for five hours. At arrival, the woman told me that her daughter was dying and she was in a terrible state of depression. She said the energy from Terry’s paw helped her.
I’m beginning to feel the “time of nature” now. I guess it takes ageing to do that. Living in New Mexico has helped to make me more patient. When I make an appointment for
2
:
00
on Tuesday, I’m learning not to get too upset when the person
I’ve hired shows up at
2
:
00
on Thursday instead. They are “on time,” they say. There is a general deterioration in work ethic when time is money and
mañana
the rule of the day.
But sometimes when I’m involved in a project with other people and the sun is shining and the fish are jumping, I can’t blame them for going fishing instead. There doesn’t seem to be an acceleration of time or activity or much of anything in New Mexico.
Elsewhere is another story. People (particularly young people) are talking so fast, words tumbling over words, that they are impossible to understand. I am a stickler for enunciation, and I’ll just stop them midsentence and tell them to go take some lessons in elocution and come back to tell me their story when they’ve learned how to care about whether they are being understood. The minds of people are going so fast their mouths can’t keep up. This is a real problem with flight attendants on airplanes, assistants who answer phones for businesspeople, and machines that give you directions.