José Argüelles and the Great Calendar Change

According to the Mayan Prophesies, the meaning of 2012 is that we are supposed to go back to where we were at the beginning, in the sense that we should be back living in the cycles of nature. ... The first step is to have a massive calendar change, where we put ourselves back in a natural timing frequency.

— José Argüelles

José Argüelles been called "the High Priest of the New Age." And at present, his single, clear message is that if humanity is to survive, we must change our way of perceiving time. Our Gregorian calendar leads us into irregular, destabilizing, mechanized ways of thinking. We need to return to a natural sense of time, and that means the Mayan-inspired harmonic, holistic Thirteen-Moon Twenty-eight Day calendar.

With war, poverty, and oppressive governments doing their best to draw our planet downward to destruction, how can something so simple as calendrical reform make a difference?

To begin with, if the world clamors for this reform to the extent that it actually happens, it follows that a great deal of the work will already have been done. Calendar reform cannot happen in an uncaring world.

But why should the people mobilize behind José and his improbable campaign?

After speaking at length with him, I came up with an analogy I'd like to share with you for how our time system "throws us off balance," both as individuals and as nations:

When I was in high school, I joined a rowing team and was picked to "stroke" the novice eight. The stroke sits in front and sets the pace for the other seven rowers.

In our first competition, on a hot June morning, we leapt ahead at the start and I focused completely on the cadence of the rowing — the acceleration as the oars swept through the water, the glide and recovery, the slight pause and click of oars in the oarlocks as the eight blades turned, as one, to catch the water again.

Midway through the race, I saw that we were falling behind. "Power ten!" I told the coxswain, and picked up the pace as she barked out the count. We gained a little on the other boats, but only temporarily.

"Power twenty!" I picked up the pace again, straining against the oar, willing us forward. But my team wasn't keeping up. Instead of surging forward at the beginning of the stroke, the boat was jarred as oars caught the water late and slipped further behind. I rowed faster, and all synchronicity disappeared. The oars clacked as they collided. Furiously, we churned the water and thrashed to the finish line in complete disarray.

"What happened?!" our coach shouted to me as we slid in to the dock. I was speechless, but he knew. "If someone isn't keeping up," he told me, "you have to slow the pace. You have to pull together."

Fast forward to the United States of America — young, strong, talented, and setting the pace for a bigger team called humanity. We are well into the globalization race, and, wouldn't you know?, the world isn't keeping up. All synchronicity has disappeared, and we are in trouble. We are at risk of capsizing the boat.

What happened?

The end of civilization

The Mayans indicate that the Great Cycle began in 3113 BCE and ends in 2012 CE — a period of human history referred to as "civilization," from the Latin word civitas that means "living in cities."

The first city, Uruk (a cognate of Iraq), came into existence about that time.

Where civilization began is where civilization ends. Civilization was an experiment that in its last days turned into what we call the technosphere: technology and all its support systems. They straddle the biosphere, the living texture of the planet, and actually eat it up, like a cancer, in order to maintain the processes of what used to be civilization. Civilization is producing more waste than it can get rid of, and consuming more resources than it can resupply. Combine technocracy with an exponential population explosion and we have a disastrous situation.

— José Argüelles

It was also circa 3113 BCE, the beginning of the Mayan's "Great Cycle," that the Babylonians decided to lay out time on a flat disk called the clock, thereby modeling time as a subsidiary to space.

Now, today, civilization has come to an end, José said. "The terrorists have the upper hand. You know what it's like to go through the airports, everyone is treated like a criminal or a potential terrorist. On 9/11, when the Twin Towers came down, civilization ended."

It follows that if we want to survive, we have to pull together, bring ourselves back into harmony with nature. And for that to happen, according to José, we need to stop trying to align ourselves to the Gregorian calendar — a mental concept of arranging time — and go back to aligning ourselves with the true cycles of the sun and moon.

Why should we listen to José?

Who is José Argüelles, that he should be attempting a world change of this magnitude?

As far back as 1970, he helped to institute Earth Day. And if you remember the Harmonic Convergence in 1987, that's probably because of José's efforts to bring the Convergence to public awareness.

And recently, a group of Mayan elders dubbed him the Valum Votan, Closer of the Cycle. They are referring to the five-thousand-year cycle of civilization spoken of by the Mayans, a cycle that is due to come to a close, according to Mayan time science, in 2012 CE — only ten short years from now.

The point of the Thirteen Moon Calendar Change Peace Movement is to return all of humanity to the natural 13:20 timing frequency before it is too late. The Thirteen Moon Calendar is the perfect instrument for this task, and is prophetically ordained to synchronize on the July 26 date. There are powerful agents who do not wish to see the Thirteen Moon Calendar Change Peace Movement succeed. The continuing controversy over starting dates perpetrated by the Neo- Mayanists only plays into the hands of these agents.

Whether we are Neo-Mayanists or followers of the Thirteen-Moon Calendar, we have much more in common than not. Let us come together on this one common point of July 26 and peacefully take the rest of the world with us. We are too few in number to bog down in divisiveness at this critical time. Once we have succeeded in placing humanity in the correct timing frequency with the correct calendar, we can work out our minor differences. In Lake'ch!

— José Argüelles
see José Argüelles Speaks Out

José has invested his life in decoding, both academically and mystically, the secrets of the Mayan calendar. Any question you might ask about the Mayan calendar has already been answered in detail in one or another of his many books. And he has recently stepped up the pace, because he feels that a new public calendar must be instituted worldwide by 2004 if we are to bring planet Earth back into alignment.

His lectures about the calendar sound rhetorical — maybe because he has repeated them so many times, or maybe because he can't hope to compress a lifetime of work into two hours.

So how does he hope to get the message across?

It's straightforward, he told me, because we already know the message. "I think it's in our DNA," he said. "We are, already, synchronous beings. We just have to get back in step. It's an energy thing, but we need to bring our minds along, too."

The new calendar

The proposed calendar has thirteen months of twenty-eight days, plus one day "out of time" for forgiveness and celebration. Twenty-eight days is the mean lunar cycle, and 28 x 13 + 1 = 365, the solar cycle.

Variations of this harmonic solar/lunar calendar have been found in all cultures.

Beginning in the late 1500s, in order to control their empires, European conquerors imposed our current Gregorian calendar and the newly perfected mechanical clock. The industrial revolution that followed created the technosphere.

Time, the Fourth Dimension, is inclusive of and greater than Third Dimensional space. Time is the coordination of the Third Dimension. The Law of Time — Energy factored by Time = Art — supersedes the Theory of Relativity.

Re-harmonizing ourselves with the cosmos will result in the formation of the noosphere, the earth's mental envelope, with implicit telepathic awareness for humanity.

— José Argüelles

How can changing the calendar solve global warming, poverty, disease, unemployment, and war?

José doesn't claim that it can. He only points out that, to avert our current collision course with disaster and survive the coming transition, humanity must put itself back in alignment with natural cycles. And only an harmonic concept of time will make such alignment possible.

Early last March, I was down in Teotihuacan, Mexico, thinking that we were planning a ceremony for people in our movement. As it turned out, someone tipped off a group of indigenous elders there, and the indigenous elders said, "No, no. We have to do a ceremony for José Argüelles."

So on top of the Pyramid of the Sun, 49 years after I had had a vision there that I was supposed to do something like this, these elders honored me for being the Closer of the Cycle — which means I'm the guy who's supposed to get us to 2012. They said that I would be using a knowledge based on what they had, but that it would be a new form — and that I was that person.

It was a massive ceremony. It was very moving. I was marching with seven or eight hundred people down the Avenue of the Dead, after the Pyramid of the Moon, and back to the Pyramid of the Sun. I was with these nine elders, and they were really shamanic guys. This one had a staff with a crystal, and he was pressing it into my third eye, and saying, "Give us all your names. This is for real."

And they took me up to the top of the Pyramid of the Sun and gave me this really incredible-looking staff with an obsidian-tipped knife on it and an onyx sphere at the other end of it, and all this other stuff. They said, "You're the Closer of the Cycle."

— José Argüelles

We will change the calendar, José said, because "we will be so sick and revolted by what's going to be happening in the next year and a half." Then, he said, "our critical challenge for the remaining eight years of the cycle will be to prepare ourselves to begin again.".

José Argüelles, Ph.D., works full time on behalf of the World Thirteen-Moon Calendar Change Peace Movement and is president of the Foundation for the Law of Time. He is the author of numerous works including Time and the Technosphere: The Law of Time in Human Affairs, The Mayan Factor, Earth Ascending, and Surfers of the Zuvuya.

Called the High Priest of the New Age, he was one of the founders of Earth Day in 1970, and brought us awareness of the Harmonic Convergence in 1987.

To download a Thirteen-Moon calendar for your computer desktop, go to mayan.tzolkin.com/dreamsp/download/download.htm.