By Sarah Taylor

From the get-go, I was part of a love triangle. Not in the conventional sense of an entanglement of lovers, but it was an entanglement nonetheless. And the love itself was entangled.

Sagittarius. Painting by Carlos Cedillo.

I was born into an aristocratic family in north-west England in the early seventies. My father had unexpectedly inherited a ‘title’ from his uncle when he was 18 and living in Africa. The accounts of his life of that time that I managed to draw out of him were sketchy – much like the accounts I received of most of his life, which he avoided relating as much as possible; many of his memories seemed to be imbued with an indescribable amount of pain.

What I do know is that, upon inheriting, the form and content of my father’s life changed markedly and permanently. He went from being a country mouse, to a cat with a rep to protect; he went from bare-back horse-rides to school from his uncle’s farm, to trust funds, fast cars and a fast life. He had been married four times by the time he met my mother, as a VIP passenger on an ocean liner where she worked in the purser’s office. The story goes that he was trying to extricate himself from a tricky situation, homed in on my mother and asked her to be his alibi. My mother has often said that she was swept up in the romance of who he seemed to be. She also said that she felt a deep need to protect him. I think in that moment the contract of my parents’ relationship was sealed.

And so, like all self-respecting aristocrats, after marrying my mother, the next thing on the agenda was to produce an heir. Specifically, a son – daughters did not, and continue not to, inherit titles in the UK. In my mother’s words, she chose to give up her independence as a professional woman – which defined much of who she said she felt herself to be – and become “a baby machine.” She was a mother, but she was not maternal. As much as she loved my father, she had been seduced by the trappings that came with my father’s title, and those trappings started to feel restrictive. There was another part of her dying to live another life. The more it called, the more she threw herself at the trappings, the more trapped she became, the more it died. My father wasn’t killing her: Her choices were doing that all by themselves.

I’ve never asked my mother outright how she felt about becoming pregnant with their first child, but I’m pretty sure both she and my father breathed a collective, if tentative, sigh of relief that they had potentially managed to provide a successor: My father already had two children from a previous marriage – both girls – and perhaps the voices of the trustees were getting a bit more insistent. The pressure from tradition alone would have been ringing loud and clear. My parents also decided that, given the life they led, my mother would need help with childcare, and I have a sense that the childcare became more necessary when I emerged, nine months later. Another girl.

So it was that from birth, my day-to-day care was handed over to a woman called Ovidia: The wife in a couple that my parents employed to tend to childcare, home and garden. I have little or no memories of this time; images are scant and fleeting. But the presence of Ovidia is something that I can still feel today as calm, and warm. I have little doubt that Ovidia was, to my infant self, more like a mother in some ways than my mother was to me. From that day until I was 13 years old, I, then my sister, then my brother (who finally arrived in the mid-’70s) had a succession of surrogate mothers in the form of various nannies and governesses. Some were qualified nursery nurses, others were mothers themselves, and they ran the gamut from fun to staid, involved to detached, loving to cruel. Whatever they turned out to be, one thing was constant – there were always three in the mother-child relationship: Mother, nanny and child. In fact, there were three operative, interconnected love triangles – one for each sibling. We were a motley group of pointed shapes within shapes, moving around, conjoining, and glancing off one another.

Another thing was constant: They all left. If they had been cruel, I rejoiced. If they had been loving, I was bereft.

My experience back then set a deeply ingrained pattern that dictated how I was in relationship to others – whether lovers, family members, friends, colleagues, relative strangers – although it was the people closest to me who experienced it most, and in a more concentrated form.

It was also a process that, until recently, was primarily unconscious. If you’d have asked me at age 23, for example, if I was ‘relationship material’, I would have told you I was a catch. And with conviction. I thought that I came unencumbered by the baggage that my parents carried, and that I’d somehow managed to emerge from my family intact and immune. I definitely remember telling my therapist that my childhood was great, thank you very much, and that I had no idea why I was sitting opposite him. Twice-weekly.

Come age 33, when my first marriage was on the rocks, I was less sure of myself. After years of isolating myself and, quite frankly, alienating most men who showed an interest, I had thrown myself into a relationship wholeheartedly, so wanting to make it work. My then-husband was – is – a good man, but the slow-dawning truth over the 11 years that we were together was that we were kids playing at marriage, still bound up in the narratives of our childhoods. Our illusions could only take us so far. Eleven years, it seemed, was about our limit.

As reality crept in along with the ending, I started to take stock and began to notice something else: That for every person I had either been interested in or involved with, there was a third party, whether that third party was someone else, or – more often – me. My first unrequited childhood crush was years older than I and very much involved with a woman his age. My first viable crush in my late teens hadn’t gotten over his ex. My second left me for his ex. My third fell in love with my friend. Then, in 2004, I left my first husband because my love for a man made me realise that I had been running away from a vital part of myself – my sexuality. He, instead, fell in love…with his ex.

The eternal triangle, it appeared, had not given me up, even as I had tried to run from it.

In 2006, chastened, I decided to go into the dating game. With my eyes open this time! Sure, I was still in love with the man who triggered the end of my first marriage, but I wasn’t going to let a little bit of unfinished business deter me from my new life. I set up a profile on a dating website, and the next day my future husband got in touch with me. Funnily enough, I had already seen his profile and, for several good reasons, had decided not to initiate any contact. In that way, at least, I feel that I was working in my best interests and it was a small but significant step towards making better decisions for myself. It didn’t last though: He emailed me quoting a passage from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land:

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
– But who is that on the other side of you?

It fit with my psychology in such a way that I was hooked, immediately. Hooked back in, more like it. We met. He was charming, intelligent and funny, and there was a part of me that was screaming “No! Don’t do it!”

Then it happened. The same thing that I think happened when my mother met my father; the same thing that happened when I met my first husband. The moment when I signed my contract with him. I could feel it. It was a form of surrender, but not the kind where you “let go and let God.” It was the kind where you let go and let your history dictate the movement of your thoughts, your beliefs, your actions, your feelings. And when I write this I am casting no aspersions on him. Oh no – like my mother, I did this all by myself, and whatever invisible contracts my husband may have signed on his part, he did those by himself too. We are both fully responsible for what we brought into our marriage, and what we didn’t bring into it.

What I didn’t bring into my marriages was the whole of me. How could I? I didn’t even know there was a part missing. It was the part that was used to withholding because there was always someone else, and I didn’t feel safe, and someone would always leave. So I left – Little Ms. Pre-Emptive Strike. Rather than leaving physically, I vacated my body by padding it out with fat, dressing it down so that I became all but invisible, hiding my femininity so that I wouldn’t be noticed, let alone viewed as attractive. I didn’t do attraction; I did repulsion – right back to my pattern of yore. In turn, I chose partners who repelled me. But all they were doing was mirroring back to me the belief I wouldn’t acknowledge, which was born the moment that I came into this world with a vagina and not a penis: A part of me was missing. How’s that for the idea that I wasn’t able to bring all of myself into relationships?

Yet, in spite of this, quietly but insistently – and getting less quiet and more insistent over the years – I could feel something calling to me. I had no idea how to get to it. It was encased in a membrane that was at once paper-thin and impenetrable. Or maybe I was the one encased in a membrane; perhaps I was the one who was impenetrable. I felt the frustration of being able to sense another world that was out of reach. I realised that world was me.

I decided to start changing things in a more aware fashion – to push boundaries and shift myself out of the mould of domesticity, normality and convention that I had tried, and failed, to fit into. I decided to question my attitude to parts of myself that I had either taken for granted or ignored. In short, in practical terms, if I had been unconsciously creating threesomes in my relationships, this time I was going to create them consciously.

Last year, after a suitable period of separation from my second husband, I joined another dating site. I was equipped with a modicum of insight – another five years in therapy was enough to make a difference – and a more mature ability to work with my intuition. The next two-and-a-half months were a beautiful storm. I initiated contact with a man who turned out to be a soul mate in the most meaningful sense I can give to the term. We decided to embark on a polyamorous relationship and see where it took us, beginners that we both were. I remember saying to him, “Expect the unexpected.” I thought I’d covered all the bases so that even the unexpected wouldn’t take me by surprise.

Ten weeks later, he was gone. He had met someone else and our plans lay in tatters at my feet. I brush over this in one sentence as if it meant no great thing, but I was devastated. I’m still not sure what happened, and I don’t have the ability or the right to account for his side of the story. However, this much I think I do understand at the point where the past and the present meet:

We either play out our patterns unconsciously or consciously, but it’s when we do it consciously that we have the greatest opportunity to change them. In his book Bringers of the Light, Neale Donald Walsch cites the following principle:

As soon as you decide who and what you are, everything unlike it will come into the space. …

Thus, we can see these ‘opposites’ as a sure sign that we are on the journey of transformation. These negative-opposites are only temporary, and their purpose is to heal forever any negative feeling that we had about the outer-experience of our life.

So who is it that I am, and what is it that I really want? If I’m choosing my experiences in order to define these things – and I believe that I am – better, then, I have some awareness of the choices I’m making and why. Is polyamory a logical step in a string of eternal triangles that started from birth? If so, do I want to change the pattern, or do I want to make it mine? I’m still working that one out.

What I did find out in the bitter-sweet aftermath of last year was that I was capable of feeling a depth of love that I hadn’t considered possible. I’d always had intellectual notions of what love between two adults was, but it was only when it brought me to my knees (sometimes in the most delicious ways) that I understood that there was no way of planning for anything, no way of controlling anything any more.

I also found out that I still didn’t believe that I deserved that love. The child born a girl and not a boy waged an unconscious battle with love at every opportunity. Vulnerability felt like a blow-torch to my skin. Opening myself to someone felt like annihilation. I was still my parents’ daughter.

I spoke about that “moment of contract” in my parents’ relationship and in both my marriages. That moment presented itself to me in the relationship with my soul mate too. In a heartbeat, in a conversation with him one night, I felt the inertia of ancestry pulling me into doing something because it was “the done thing to do” – namely, to put aside my own emerging sense of who I was in order to toe the family line. I would have done anything, been anyone, for him. This, by the way, had absolutely nothing to do with what he was asking of me. It was my conditioning, my generational and genetic makeup kicking in like a time bomb. Why? Because I wasn’t lovable for who I was, but for who I should have been.

In that heartbeat, however, I felt that contract flying at me, and I named it to myself: “Oh, there you are. I know what you are!” It passed me by. Thank the gods, it did. I felt the release and, perhaps not unconnected, the relationship ended soon afterward. Maybe it needed to fall away in part because of that – the structure as we had made it could no longer hold the two people inside it. In tarot, structures that no longer serve us and which must fall to make space for the new are the realm of The Tower card. In the Mayan Tarot, The Tower is called “The Released Man.” This makes profound sense to me. Only once we have been set free can we reconnect with our true selves, and by extension each other, in the next card, The Star.

And so, it is 2012, and I am completing and starting another cycle in a year that, in the Mayan calendar at least, marks the ending and beginning of a cycle that is far greater than one lifetime. Perhaps I can take a leaf out of its book, stand back, and see the larger picture: Who cares if it’s onesomes, twosomes, threesomes, foursomes or moresomes? Who cares whether our behaviour comes from an origin of security or dysfunction? Isn’t that all beside the point? Isn’t the point that we connect at all? That we are prepared to have an encounter with love that cannot be conducted on our limited terms. That we meet with something that we are not able to rein in and hold to our accounting. And that when we do so, we do it fearlessly and with the acceptance that we may, indeed, fall on our arses? Hell, we might even get hurt. And to that statement I say: So what? So what if it hurts? Maybe we need to break a few shells and shatter a few illusions – the ones that keep us trapped inside the story of our past, of our parents, of the things that we have held on to because we never thought to question whether they were ours in the first place. Here’s to fissures, cracks and ruptures in the crust of acquiescence and acceptability.

So this year, I wish us freedom. Freedom from limiting beliefs, freedom to explore, discover and express who it is that we are. Most of all, I wish us freedom to love – ourselves and others – shamelessly, courageously, fully prepared to risk ourselves for it. Love liberated; love unentangled. That, to me, is an adventure worth having.

By Eric Francis

“I look out across the slumbering sea of humanity, and I whisper these words in the night. And I know that I address a great being sleeping still in ignorance of itself. I know that if the wild winter winds of your communication systems send tatters or fragments of this message echoing in the darkness, it will still be to the unconscious that I speak. For the conscious have seen the sky start to brighten in the East and have felt the warming spring of eternal life begin to thaw the hardness of their preconceptions.”

— The Starseed Transmissions

Cauac Uranus. Art by Carol McCloud

An Unexpected Party

When I participated in the Harmonic Convergence in August 1987, it was the first time I had heard of 2012. I was living in a spiritual community called Miracle Manor, with 11 other adults doing A Course in Miracles. The Course is a yearlong self-study program. On one level, the most obvious, it is about spiritual psychology. On another it’s an explanation of Christianity. You could look at it as an introduction to healing method — it is literally about training the mind to be open to miracles and to be a facilitator for healing (same idea). In the Course there are no references to groups, meetings, organizations or communities, though there are or at least were a number of them; one formed in 1985. I moved there in the beginning of the second of two years that the place existed.

Jose Arguelles had just published The Mayan Factor, and we knew that the Harmonic Convergence had something to do with preparations for 2012. Arguelles had indeed planned this as the commencement of the final countdown till winter solstice 2012, by all reports the long count date 13.0.0.0.0.

At that point 2000 seemed like it was so far off that it would never come; 2012 was so remote there was little point thinking about it, but we were. For the record, it was nearly as mysterious then as it is now: mysterious and obvious.

Though the scientific and historical details leading to the creation of the Harmonic Convergence were a bit cryptic, there was no question that it was happening. Intuitively we understood we were taking part in something worthwhile and of global significance, dedicated to shifting the vibration of the planet. This was all happening at the height of the New Age. I would describe the New Age as a kind of subculture spiritualist current in society, with many odd little quirks, nearly all of which were new to me. New Agey has become a kind of insult, though for all its kitsch some excellent books have passed through this section of the library.

I can trace my actual inquiry, my time on the path, back to high school, when I started on a book called Notes to Myself by Hugh Prather.

Until I arrived at Miracle Manor, I had spent most of my creative energy doing political journalism, writing political campaigns and experimenting with sex. I learned to be an editor, designer and photographer pretty young. But I was always curious about ‘the other side’ of the mind.

My drug tendencies were pot and acid, and my early tripping journey (in high school) was intermingled with my book choices. One of my favorites was The Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment by Thaddeus Golas. I viewed my excursions into psychedelia as being about raising inner awareness; that is, learning about myself. That was my intention, and that was what it felt like I was doing, though at times I had my doubts. But at the heart of the journey was self-discovery; self-actualization. I was on a path of considering my relationship to existence, and I remain on that journey.

Beginning the Course on my own in the spring of 1986 was a turning point for me, a commitment to a new level of training and dedication to the work. I started to open up in new ways, and it happened pretty quickly. When I heard that I might be able to live in Miracle Manor, that seemed like the obvious thing to do. So I reached out and, after some discussion, I was able to create a space there for me and my then-girlfriend Ginger.

I describe Miracle Manor as boot camp for pro mystics, proto healers and hardcore seekers. We exchanged a fairly amazing amount of information (I learned a lot about cooking, among other things). As well, the place was one long confrontation with family dynamics, interpersonal dynamics and a number of people with many different orientations and spiritual traditions getting together in a chaotic and barely functional place. Some people felt it was their role to be at their best. Others took the opportunity to be their most controlling, so to be sure, there were plenty of occasions to practice the central teaching of the Course, which is forgiveness.

Our supposed goal as a community was to complete the Course in one year, from Sept. 1, 1986 to Aug. 31, 1987. I am not sure when during that year the Harmonic Convergence first came up as a topic, though it was probably in June or July, toward the end. The setup was: we had a facility. Miracle Manor was located on the grounds of a former convent near New York City, on 6 acres of land, with a river, the Raritan, running through the backyard. We had a huge event room and a chapel and a community kitchen — and grounds. We had a gazebo on the river that was just a portal to the moment. We each had a private room, the ones the nuns used to live in. There were a couple of extra dorm rooms with bunk beds that could accommodate about 10 extra people. It was the perfect place for a big event. But we had no event planned.

The Holistic Health Association of the Princeton Area (HHAPA) had an event planned but no place to hold it. How HHAPA and our crew got together was typical of everything that happened at Miracle Manor: it felt like a miracle, which is another way of saying beautiful synchronicity. These happened so frequently and so dependably at Miracle Manor that we learned to count on them as a way of life — and that was the precise purpose of A Course in Miracles. Basically, their event incarnated in our facility. We had no part in the organizing and leadership; I guess we invited our mailing list. But basically HHAPA ran the show, and it was nice.

I remember very little about the preparations. We often hosted events at Miracle Manor, and for a while anyway, this seemed like any other, perhaps a little more elaborate and important. We did some cleaning and rearranging with the growing sense that something significant was happening. Without openly stating what that was, we all understood. The exact event was set for noon Greenwich Mean Time on Aug. 16, 1987, which translated to 7 am New Jersey time. Using a precise time was so that a global meditation for world peace could be coordinated — remember, without the benefit of the Internet. The word email didn’t exist. There was no Facebook page for the event. The only worldly forms of communication were face-to-face yakking, mail or telephone. In a pinch you could send a telegram.

As for how we lived at that moment: in the same building, eating on different schedules. Neither did Miracle Manor have much in the way of coordinated Course classes or study groups, but there were occasional hot ones. It was more like a general immersion in New Age philosophy and practice, following family dynamics that typically emerge in group therapy. I did the Course work (in the theoretical sense, working with the three books and the mind training exercises) mostly on my own, and was rigorous in my studies and meditation.

Meanwhile, the daily immersion included Edgar Cayce, the idea of Earth changes, various entities from Ramtha to Seth. Some people were channels; some were into angels; some were into crystals — I mean really into crystals. Others were into the space brothers and one liked to hang out on the Mothership. One woman could hear plants talking; she was a plant communicator. One contingent was devotees of the guru Hilda at St. John the Divine in New York City. There was lots of talk about the possibility of a forthcoming Tribulation Period: a time of major global trials, chaos and collapse (which at the time, based on the stability of the U.S., seemed like an odd proposition). I was exposed to all of these ideas and many more, taking it all in. Little of this was my cup of tea, but I was curious enough to take a lot in.

While I lived at Miracle Manor, I worked as a newspaper reporter for a paper in Warren, a town about half an hour away. There, I was solidly grounded in things like zoning laws, the Planning Board and the Sewerage Authority.

I had been hired for my first reporting job by Flo Higgins, the long-time editor of a gritty little newspaper called the Echoes-Sentinel. Flo, as it worked out, was an astrologer, and I was given the desk right where the astrology calendar hung on the wall. I had no prior interest in astrology; there was just this half-crazed editor in my life who owned a New Age bookstore called Aquarius Rising Books, and who cast my natal chart for me and sparked my curiosity in things like tarot cards and runes. Flo handed me a lit match.

Despite having little knowledge of astrology, I remember looking at the astrology calendar over my desk to see if there was anything I could decipher about the meaning of the Harmonic Convergence. I could see there were a lot of triangles a few days before the 16th, which turned out to be the Moon making trines to a number of planets gathered in the fire signs. I’m still unclear how much Western astrology went into planning the Harmonic Convergence; this seems to have been an event based more on the Mayan calendar than on the Western zodiac. Nobody seemed to understand the Mayan calendar; since then I’ve only met a few people who do. But to me, with no knowledge of astrology, all those trines seemed significant, or at least unusual. As I looked at them, contemplating their meaning, they seemed to represent a gateway.

In the background of it all was a 2012 theme, but it seemed so far off in 1987 that it was hardly possible to draw a real connection. But we knew that it had something to do with Earth changes, indeed with mitigating Earth changes, and I personally understood the theme to be about laying an energetic foundation that would help the world avert nuclear war. Remember that at the time the Cold War was still a memory and a presence. The Berlin Wall would still be around for two more years. There was still the Eastern Bloc and the Iron Curtain and the USSR, which made up the basis of geopolitics.

An Unexpected Telephone Call

One evening about a week before the Harmonic Convergence, I was sitting in my room with my friend Dan. We had the same warped sense of humor and we had this idea to do a mock newspaper called the New Age News / Tribulation Tribune. There was a kind of ongoing debate among us seekers about what was coming: an age of enlightenment and peace and harmony (the widely prophesized dawn of the New Age), or a big mess: the Tribulation Period (first mentioned by that name in Matthew), where everything was quickly going to hell in a hand-basket, the world’s systems would collapse and continents would skate around, rearranging all the zip codes.

We were laughing ourselves silly, working on an ad for the office of Dr. Imyour Friend (I’m your doctor, and I’m your friend) when my housemate Vicki came into my room with the portable phone. As she handed it to me, it had the distinct aura of death.

In the approximately two seconds between seeing her in my doorway and putting the phone to my ear, I thought: my grandmother has cancer, but it’s too soon for her to die. I wonder who it could be. I learned one second later that it was my grandfather (her husband) who had just shot himself in the head. This was days before the Harmonic Convergence, right in the approach of all those trines. I thought: he couldn’t make it through the threshold.

In my notebook that night, I wrote, “The first thing I’ve heard is that his chosen death stands as a reminder of the outcome of a thought system he practiced long before today.”

I will spare too many details except to say that he was a troubled, authentically hateful, and to be fair, deeply wounded person who had been a recipient of and a source of psychological abuse and an unknown degree of sexual abuse in the family. Among the living, he was reviled by everyone but his brother. I dare say he did plenty to deserve it. When my grandmother got cancer and he suddenly had to take care of her, this was a lot to expect of him. After two recent prior attempts at taking his life, which involved running the car in the garage (a Nissan, which apparently didn’t spew out enough toxins to kill a person), he finally went down into the basement and, with one bullet in the chamber of a small-calibre semi-automatic pistol, shot himself in the temple.

The police said this was unusual. Though it’s impossible to fire a second shot if you hit your head the first time, most people load a full clip. He was fully ambidextrous. He used his right hand (masculine side) and entered through the feminine side of his brain.

As it worked out, the funeral was going to coincide precisely with the Harmonic Convergence event. Because he had been shot, the police kept the body a few extra days to do a murder investigation. After concluding that he and not someone else had indeed done the deed, they released his body to the funeral home. The first night of the wake was Saturday, Aug. 15, 1987 — the eve of the Convergence. The second night was Aug. 16, the day of, and the burial was Monday morning, Aug. 17. The timing seemed astonishing: he would be getting a global send-off.

It’s Only Change

At the time this happened, my brother was in the Army. He has a knack for one thing, really, which is getting in serious trouble. At the moment I got the phone call, he was sitting in the stockade in Fort Carson, CO, for having gone AWOL, apparently because he figured that would get him kicked out. He was about to get a general discharge when the Army expedited his papers so he could go to the funeral. Thus, my brother attended the Harmonic Convergence at Miracle Manor. He, my girlfriend Ginger and I spent the weekend shuttling between the two events.

When we returned from the wake on Saturday night, Miracle Manor was transformed. It was usually a sleepy, quiet, convent-like place. Now it was thriving with activity and motion and purpose and, moreover, with energy. This, late at night: all the better. The grounds, the rooms, the corridors, were vibrating. With the exception of our private rooms, HHAPA had taken over our facility; we were there to help if necessary, and we had minor roles, but they were the ones officiating, organizing, orchestrating. An altar was set up in the event room on the first floor, with a huge timpani drum. About 40 of their people were around. They were planning an all-night vigil. It was now just hours away from the Convergence.

We knew that we were among many, many spiritual communities around the world that were participating in this moment. Up until that time we had not talked openly about the significance of the Convergence, and as an event, it sprung itself on us. But walking into that space, into my home, was like standing in a portal, connected to everywhere else that this event was being celebrated, from Mount Shasta to Stonehenge. The sense of global connection was palpable.

HHAPA turned out to be run by people involved with the Sufi tradition, and they understood meditation and ritual. Many were in traditional Sufi garb. People were moving swiftly around, arranging the place, making food, and I have no idea what else. We took a little tour of the preparations and collapsed into bed. The only reason we slept was because we were so exhausted from the trip to Brooklyn for my grandfather’s wake.

We set an alarm clock for 6 am, which meant we probably got about five hours of sleep. I remember pulling on some shorts and a t-shirt and padding downstairs barefoot with Ginger and my brother for the sunrise meditation. If there had been an energy portal obvious the night before, now it was open wide. I slipped into conscious meditation, and we joined the circle that was forming. The timpani was being struck about once every three seconds, providing a foundation rhythm that had been going most of the night and would continue all day. There was a chant being played on the sound system.

It was children singing, over and over:

Opening doors, closing doors
I’m not afraid, it’s only change

Opening doors, closing doors
I’m not afraid, it’s only change

This put the whole experience into context. Though it was not easy to say what the Harmonic Convergence was, if it meant anything clearly it was about change; it was about focus on constructive, creative change; it was about unifying the world in some way, and raising the vibration of the planet. I did not stop to wonder whether this was possible; it merely seemed necessary, and it was simply what we were doing. The next few hours are a blur. I only have memory fragments. But the feeling I have is that we were crossing a kind of threshold in time, and subtly entering another dimension, or more like another dimension was washing over us.

On one level it seemed we were making a choice, to go in a certain direction: we had come to the branching of the road, where it is not possible to go straight ahead. One must go one way or the other, and we were choosing the one obvious way.

By mid-morning, hundreds of people were converging on our community. The newspapers had picked up on the Harmonic Convergence story in the previous few days, so many people had heard about it by then. We were holding the only big event in our region, and somehow a lot of people found out what we were doing and showed up from everywhere. We made the front page of the Newark Star-Ledger the next day, which described the line of 200 cars waiting to park on our little convent grounds.

After the sunrise meditation was over, the place had a festive quality, with people everywhere and a sense of excitement and change. And, in a little while we had to put on proper dress clothes and attend the last night of my grandfather’s wake. I can tell you I would have rather stayed at Miracle Manor that day, and I can also tell you that it seemed oddly apropos that we would be going to his funeral. One of the authentic members of the old guard, someone who did a fine job anchoring fear down to the planet, had jumped off right before this dimensional opening happened.

When we got back Sunday night, things had settled down considerably at Miracle Manor. In a surprise turn of events, we learned that Mario, our landlord and the originator of many dramas throughout the year, was throwing us out. He was the kind of guy who would do that two weeks before the lease was up. Another devotee of the religion of fear, apparently he was having his own version of not being able to make it into the next dimension. A strange twist was that in the chaos of the Convergence celebration, my girlfriend Ginger had supposedly left a file cabinet in the wrong place, and that was the ‘reason’ the whole community was being evicted. It seemed so strange as to verge on funny.

The next morning, Monday morning, was the funeral. We drove to Brooklyn, still flushed with the energy of the Harmonic Convergence. All my relatives from that side of the family are buried in the Bronx, which is well over an hour away. I am still reminded of that day every time I cross the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge. I am not sure how I would have felt had I only attended the Convergence ritual that weekend, but attending the funeral for the patriarch of paranoia made the point indelibly.

An Artifact

Here are my notes from the morning of Sunday, Aug. 16, 1987:

Meditated through the world-joining from sunrise to 8:15 am, and then we sang for over an hour and something really just started pouring me all over the place. Tears of joy went on and on and on, and we sang and held hands and knew we were helping, knew that the best of our hopes was real, knew that God the Creator had co-authored the whole thing with us.

Now the road stretches gently before us. Now will the way be different because at the point of separation we took the only way to life. It seems now that the way of fear will never tempt me again fully. Never lure me into its grip, or its sleep.

The 25-Year Span

We all moved on from Miracle Manor. I took an apartment with Ginger in Plainfield, about a half an hour away, and continued working for Flo Higgins for a while, then moved on to a more challenging job doing business journalism. As the years have unfolded, I’ve appreciated my experience there more and more. In my first year after university, I invested my energy in putting down a solid spiritual foundation, and had been exposed to many ideas and experiences that I might have missed otherwise. I had no idea what direction my life would take. However, I recognized my writing talent to some degree, and a psychic who came to visit us and gave me my first reading told me that I would be involved with international networking.

As history developed over the coming years, including the end of the Cold War, the democracy movement in China and many other events, I kept thinking back to the Harmonic Convergence as a reference point. I began to see it as a light anchor that we had dropped into consciousness and the Earth, which had helped us avoid many of the worst possibilities that could come with life on a militarized planet.

I didn’t hear the term 25-year span till the other night when I was talking with my friend Heather Fae Speaker about 2012. I met Heather three years ago as a model for my Book of Blue project. She’s become one of my closest friends and spiritual confidants in that time. Despite having done her chart, I somehow neglected to notice that she was born the weekend of the Harmonic Convergence. That, she said, was the beginning of the 25-year span from 1987 to 2012. I was astonished. I remembered that weekend vividly, as it was one of the strangest, most beautiful times in my life. And she was born in those very days: a living representative of the energy.

The image that came to mind was that she was born at one end of a light bridge, which spanned from one Harmonic Convergence to the next: the one on Dec. 21, 2012. But she had little knowledge of the first Convergence or what happened that weekend. I told her some of the stories, and told her that she was born in what may have been the largest, most focused, most sincere global meditation for peace in the history of the world. Now we are approaching the other end of that span — the 2012 side.

In these years, the pace of history has accelerated. At Miracle Manor, we were calling it celestial speedup. Earth changes, a common topic of conversation there, certainly seem to have begun, and we don’t know quite where history is leading. But we know we’ve reached another crux point, represented by the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction in Aries, and the collection of planets around the cardinal cross and Aries Point. This, as you will read in later chapters, is one of the key astrological pieces of the 2012 puzzle coming into place, and we can assume that history is reflecting that.

As I write, the oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico is still running out of control, and everyone agrees this is the worst environmental disaster in the world. Global tensions are high, in the Middle East and the Korean peninsula. Climate-change is a household term and we wonder about the impacts of the ice caps melting. Floods, tornadoes, major earthquakes and tsunamis seem commonplace. [As I edit some seasons after the original writing, the nuclear reactors are still smoldering in Japan and a radiation plume is spreading around the world. And the ‘allies’ have begun a new war in the Middle East, against Libya.] Xenophobia is running at an all-time high in the United States. World economies are on the brink of chaos, though this is not talked about openly and any real discussion of the world economy is eclipsed by the oil spill. We have no idea where these events will lead, though it seems obvious that they are building toward a peak as we approach the other end of the span, and that many individual cells in the planetary body are being called to awakening.

I cannot say that I fully understand the idea of 2012 or its implications. I have perceived it mainly as a focal point in a visioning process. As I have come to understand the Western astrology, it certainly seems to fit the theme of the Mayan astrology, which is about the end of the 13th baktun, a 5,125-year span (that is, of 13 baktuns, together comprising a piktun) that began in 3113 AD. You will read several different accounts of this in the following essays.

Though I can’t say concretely what 2012 is, I’ve been thinking about it and writing about it for a long time — all the while, working with the process of creating what it can be, and describing a version of events that is not focused on external cataclysm. The rest of this e-book consists of everything I’ve written about 2012 and related subjects, going as far back as we could research, and extending to a few weeks before publication. This includes articles about convergence points along the 25-year span that do not directly reference 2012 but which, looking in hindsight, are obviously related (such as some materials about Sept. 11, 2001).

I’m leaving the articles as originally written except for correcting obvious typing errors, obvious factual errors, and adding some inline comments [in brackets] that make what I consider necessary corrections. Each article has a brief introduction that explains its context and, if necessary, my thoughts about where the ideas fit into the larger scheme. This book is not intended to give a ‘definitive meaning’ of 2012. What I hope to offer are seeds of understanding that may help you see a historical pattern, notice where you fit into it, and choose consciously how to respond.

— Kingston, New York, June 5, 2010; revised March 21, 2011.

8. LAMAT. (Star) The Mayan star (June 3, 2010 in the traditional count; June 5, 2010 in some alternative counts). This step is basically about learning to love. You develop a tolerance and a compassion for yourself and others. The ability to love yourself is very important in attaining wisdom, and it is perfected here. You begin to feel a profound sense of your own value and a love for yourself exactly as you are. You evolve this self-love into a deep love for humanity and a love and caring for Planet Earth. Meditating with this glyph will help you remember and hold the vibration for unconditional love. The solar glyph painting Lamat portrays with colors our coming forth into being from love when we awake, creating our bodies out of light, then our return back to love, which we all do each time we fall asleep. Lamat is the symbolic portrayal that love is what we are.

by Adrienne Elise PDHom(uk)

“There has never been a year in your life, nor will there ever be, like the one we are approaching.” Eric Francis

Scorpio. Painting by Carlos Cedillo.

2012 is a year ripe with change. How do we know? Is it because the Mayan baktun coincidentally ends on the solstice? Is it because doomsday theorists are always looking for a new hype? Is it because it is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius?

On June 5th, 2012, the earth and the sun and Venus will be precisely aligned. Venus will be able to be seen crossing over the sun as a visible black dot. These exact conjunctions come in pairs separated by 8 years, the last one happening in 1984. The next time this happens won’t be until 2117. Not much is known about the effect of this astrological event, but the Venus transit of November 1630 was followed by a plague of disease that wiped out 16,000 Venetians.

In late June 2012, planets Uranus and Pluto form an exact 90-degree square angle. Uranus and Pluto are outer, slow-moving planets, and aspects between them are rare and long-lasting. We are already feeling the effects of this aspect and we will continue to feel it through 2015. A conjunction of these planets happened in the mid-1960s and was said to have spurred the hippie, love, anti-war, revolutionary change that happened during that era. Astrologers call aspects, or angular relationships, between these two planets ‘revolutionary.’ They mark a time where things that seemed they could never change, do change, and faster than imaginable.

These two astrological events of 2012 speak of ‘health’ and ‘revolution.’ 2012 marks an opportunity for a ‘healing revolution.’ It reminds me, metaphorically, of a homeopathic ‘healing crisis’. In homeopathic treatment, movement toward health is stimulated by a correctly chosen homeopathic remedy. Sometimes for a short time after a remedy, symptoms can intensify before they improve. Sometimes symptoms from the past can reappear before harmonizing into health.

I tell my homeopathic clients this: The key to a homeopathic ‘aggravation’ or ‘healing crisis’ is movement. You may be feeling strong symptoms, but with the vitality of the remedy behind you, the symptoms are sure to quickly change, moving you right through it, taking you to the next place. It could look like a couple hours of feeling down and an opportunity for emotional release, or maybe the returning pain of an old injury that is now having the opportunity to heal in the right way. Whatever it is, it is in movement. It is in flux, it is change, it is healing. What you are feeling in the moment won’t last long. You are not getting sicker, you are in fact getting healthier!

We are living in a time of crisis. It is everywhere and hard to deny. People are feeling squeezed financially, politically and spiritually. This is right in alignment with the rare astrological events of 2012. It is a very important year for all of us. Eric Francis, Astrologer (planetwaves.net), describes it as “like nothing we have ever experienced.” But the question is…Is it a healing ‘crisis’, or is it a healing ‘opportunity’? That all depends on how you decide you would like it to be. For those of us that are lucky enough to continue through life unaffected, blinders securely fashioned that hide the reality of the chaos, confusion and crisis around us, the choice may be to do nothing. But most of us more aware beings will not have a choice in whether or not to take notice. The conscious landscape around us is vastly changing as our physical hereditary body structure, as well as the social and political structures of the past, are shaken to their core.

The 2012 astrology is like getting a dose of a high-potency homeopathic remedy. And it might feel like things are getting worse, but they are actually trying to release, heal and express, so that things can get better. We are moving and changing. It is a dynamic time. That is the key to sanity in 2012. Don’t get attached to where you are in the process, because the process itself is essentially about change. It is like the saying in Montana, ‘If you don’t like the weather, just wait five minutes and it will be different’. Our lives will be full of movement in this time of rapid transformation, IF you can let it happen. Don’t get attached to where you are now. You are in process, you are changing. Let the old fall away and welcome the new, more healthy picture. Find the tools and support and creative projects that can help you to stay grounded and harmonized through the changes.

Most of us are sentimentally attached to our various sicknesses, whether they be expressed through symptoms in the physical body or mental/emotional sphere. We are so used to them, they start to define us. How else would you describe the common phenomenon of modern diagnosis of mental illness: “I am bi-polar.” It’s not that you simply have a disease, you are that disease, at least in the programmed belief system of Western medicine. ‘I am _name your disease_’ is a statement that, on the one hand, defines a person, and on the other hand, indicates that it is a condition that is not expected to change anytime soon, if ever.

Our attachment to our illnesses, physical and mental, make it seem like they will never change. And in fact, the Western medical system is very invested in us continuing to believe such rubbish. They are holding hands with the pharmaceutical industry that wants to keep us believing that we need to be on those drugs now, and for the rest of our life. But with the 2012 healing revolution…change is here. And even the dis-ease that defines us, that we have been programmed to think can never change, will begin to change, whether we like it or not.

2012 is marking a period of accelerated change, just like the body after a well-indicated high-potency homeopathic remedy. It is up to us to decide how to make the most of it. But the spectator part of the game is near over. Very few of us will be able to maintain our comforting attachment to illness and dis-ease. Our world is getting shaken up. The good news is that the physical, emotional and spiritual healing done by individuals in their own life will positively affect the rest of the world, like an infinitesimal homeopathic dose. Personal healing is global healing because of the increasing interconnectedness spurred by the growing collective consciousness in our new Age of Aquarius. It is time to transform this era of a personal and global ‘healing crisis’ into a personal and global ‘healing opportunity.’ 2012 sounds like the perfect time for A Healing Revolution.

Adrienne Elise, founder of the Intuitive Empowerment Institute, is a Waldorf-Trained Teacher, Classical Homeopath, and Intuitive Reader, having completed over four years of training based on the BPI (Berkeley Psychic Institute) model with the MT Center for Psychic Studies and Intuitive Way of Walnut Creek, CA. Adrienne completed her Waldorf training at the Eugene Waldorf Teacher Training School in 1995. She is certified with an Advanced Practitioner Diploma from the School of Homeopathy, Devon, UK, an internationally accredited four-year program. Adrienne has a private practice in Missoula, Montana: ‘Freedom Homeopathy’ (freedomhomeopathy.com), also the home of the Intuitive Empowerment Institute (intuitiveempowerment.com). Adrienne Elise is a singer/songwriter. You can check out her music at adrienneelise.com.

By Eric Francis

The Milky Way. Photo by Anthony Ayiomamitis.

Lately I am hearing the discussion about 2012 happen just about every day. The concept of this being an important year was introduced to popular culture by Jose Arguelles at the time of the Harmonic Convergence in 1987. His work is inspired by Mayan astrology, and in that system we experience a turnover in the calendar, which – so far as I have been able to discern, from the best source I have – reaches the date 13.0.0.0.0 on Dec. 21, 2012.

That 13 at the front tells us that on the winter solstice of 2012, the 13th baktun will have ended. A baktun is 5,125 years and five of them represent a “great cycle” – the precessional cycle of about 26,000 years. (Our scientists still cannot calculate an exact length of one precessional cycle.) This is one full wobble of the Earth’s axis, which makes the backdrop of the cosmos seem to slide along and which causes the astrological ages to change.

When you hear about the “Age of Aquarius” that is a reference to precessional movement. There are no exact dates when the astrological ages begin and end (though it’s pretty clear from the early Christian iconography that we were in the Age of Pisces at the time of the presumed birth of Jesus/Joshua). Generally when people talk about an astrological age, they are making reference to the position of the Sun on the first day of spring in the Northern Hemisphere. This will come about one day earlier every 70 years. However, a Mayan scholar and philosopher named John Major Jenkins has proposed that what we need to be looking at if we want to understand the Mayan system is not the first day of spring but rather the first day of winter – the position of the Sun at the Winter Solstice. That would be the position of the Sun on the first day of Capricorn, which incidentally is where Pluto is hanging out lately.

When you look at that, you find that it aligns closely with the center of our galaxy, and this, he says, is where we need to be getting our information. Because of the Earth’s wobble, that position is retrograding toward the Galactic Center and in particular the dark band at the center of the galaxy, which is known to some modern-day Mayan thinkers as the Road to Xibalba. It is the mythical opening to another dimension, the Mayan underworld; and the symbolism is distinctly yonic in nature. Cave systems in Belize and Guatemala have also been referred to as the entrance to Xibalba, though one physical expression referred to by K’iche’ peoples is the dark rift which is visible in the Milky Way.

Let’s set aside the Mayan symbolism for now and consider the Western astrology on the road to 2012. As of June 1, 2009 we are exactly 1,300 days from the winter solstice of 2012. During that time we experience many significant changes. For example, Uranus, Neptune and Chiron all change signs. We recently experienced the sign change of Pluto, which transited from Sagittarius to Capricorn (where it will remain until about 2023). As the other outer planets follow suit, our perception of the world will shift again and again with each of the transits.

Then there exist a wide diversity of aspects that tell the story. The most significant of which is occurring right now, as you read this: Chiron conjunct Neptune in Aquarius. Jupiter also happens to be in the mix and even through June these planets are within one degree. Through the month of June they remain in an exact conjunction. My sense is that this is astrology that will shape our time in history. More to the point, it is helping open up a new dimension of reality wherein we have increased creative authority over our lives. And we can, together, create a space where we can meet in psychic space and physical space and restructure our patterns of social interaction.

When we talk about the need for humanity to get free of its current moribund spiral descent into fear and self-repression, materialism and darkness, opening up such a living space, and recreating our relational patterns, is essential.

Aquarius, where this conjunction is taking place, is the sign of both mental and social patterns. Neptune, which has been there for a decade, has melted away the structure of our old patterns, though for many introducing a layer of pure fantasy, media haze and drug haze that makes it impossible to see reality. Chiron focuses Neptune energy, at once applying it precisely and providing an antidote, if necessary. Chiron is like a utility that helps us work with the energy of the outer planets.

Its conjunction to Neptune draws in and clarifies Neptune energy like a laser, which can be applied to awareness, to healing and to creative endeavors. Jupiter adds a wisdom factor, the quality of expansion and a global theme.

This aspect is big, and it is rare that we actually get to live through astrology consciously as it shapes our generation. Such is one of the powers granted by the Internet, and I am certain that the Net is one of the most important platforms for the changes we are witnessing. Yet what I am really describing is an entirely natural network in consciousness that is opening up and that we can access. I described this recently as a phenomenon of 6th dimensional morphogenetic fields in my weekly magazine.

This aspect holds well into 2010 and is a threshold to what follows next, leading to the first full-on 2012 astrology, which occurs in June 2012: the Venus transit of the Sun, and Uranus square Pluto. The Venus event is a precise conjunction to the disk of the Sun, a rare event the Mayans revered. Uranus square Pluto is astrology that says liberation and revolution like nothing we have seen since the mid-1960s.

While there is a lot of noteworthy astrology on the way to 2012, that is the year that the really interesting movement begins. However, I can assure those who wish to participate in the strange, the new and the unworldly will find plenty of intrigue and growth opportunities as these aspects unfold on the road to Xibalba.

All in all, what we need to give up is our attachment to our fears, our defenses and inert fantasies. We don’t need to give these things up all at once – the place to start is with our commitment to them. What I am saying here is that the reason we tend to have so much negativity in our lives is because we’re attached to it. That doesn’t mean we want it, but it does mean we tend to cling to it like it was some precious thing to be proud of, rather than something to let go of and embrace the framework of the next phase of reality.

One other crucial quality we must embrace is the feminine side of our brains, meaning our body and our consciousness. I don’t mean gender bending, but rather a true encounter and integration with the biophilic (sensitive to all of life) quality that is distinctly female. I would propose that this is something essential particularly for women; through this process they can bring in their natural healing gifts and allow them to flourish.

The following is an abbreviated list of events between now and 2012. More examples are available at PlanetWaves.net.

Chariklo square Chiron (2009-2012).

These are two very small, meaningful planets orbiting our Sun in the relatively new centaur class. They are currently in a square (90-degree) aspect. This aspect repeats in seven separate events between now and 2012, and as such is a constant companion along the way. The square is currently from Scorpio to Aquarius. It will gradually shift to an aspect between Sagittarius to Pisces.

The Milky Way near Cygnus showing the lane of the Dark Rift which the Maya called the Xibalba or Black Road.

In mythology, Chiron and Chariklo were consorts; she was a nymph and the wife of the famous surgeon, healer and mentor. Their story contains none of the philandering, mockery and hubris that is so common to the Greek myths. Yet they endure the many pains of the world and endure the flaws of both humanity and the gods. Chiron is about healing processes that benefit from or demand the raising of awareness and a humble approach to life, as tempered by awareness of both mortality and immortality.

In a square aspect, they are here to help us work out a dynamic in our relationships that is held internally. Our issues with fear, abandonment, psychic pain, physical sickness, inferiority and jealousy are all internally mediated. Chariklo’s presence is calling us to be present for our own healing process. She is holding devoted space for us to make peace with our dualistic human/animal nature, and to gradually integrate the two without judgment.

Saturn square Pluto (2009-2010).

In November, Saturn transits from Virgo to Libra. Once there, it will begin a series of three squares to Pluto in Capricorn. This will take place in aspect to the Aries Point, that is, the first degree of Aries, which magnifies the connection between the personal and the political. When Saturn and Pluto get together, the results can range from violence to a conservative backlash against our inherent freedom as humans.

In 2001, we experienced the opposition of Saturn and Pluto and we all saw the results, which lasted for the ensuing decade and created damage we are still dealing with. Indeed, we will for a long time. We now have an opportunity to see how our own obsession with fear and suppressing our life force contributed to the catastrophic aftermath of the Sept. 11 incident.

People who fancy themselves ‘conservative’ will have a chance to see the fear that is at the core of that ideology. Those who fancy themselves ‘liberal’ will have an opportunity to apply structure and discipline to their lives in the way that is essential to existing in an actual state of freedom. Through this aspect we will all have a significant opportunity to assess our relationship to fear. We will get to bear personal witness to the idea that trust is the key to love.

Chiron and Neptune enter Pisces (2010-2012).

Both planets are now at the end of long passages through Aquarius, in a conjunction. As this conjunction separates, Chiron will lead the way into Pisces, beginning in 2010. Neptune will follow over the next two years (slow planets take a while to go into a new sign, usually retrograding back into the prior sign once.) In effect this is one transit and represents the full activation of Pisces energy.

We are accustomed to all the toxic forms of Pisces, from violent films to television advertising to wanton consumption of alcohol to every mood-altering pharmaceutical to spill out of corporate laboratories by the train carload. We obsess with status, fashion, appearance, glamour and living fantasy lives. Then to this we try to add a little sprinkling of ‘spiritual’ as if that would magically open the way to God.

Neptune is the modern ruler of Pisces. Its presence there will refresh the spiritual waters, flooding through both society and consciousness with revitalizing life. Chiron will make us aware of how toxic our ways of living and thinking are, and introduce – often poignantly – awareness of how we need to feel our emotions, our bodies and our souls.

Uranus enters Aries (2010-2011).

The mighty liberator Uranus, the planet of foresight, technological advancement, innovation and revolution, will personally cross the Aries Point three times starting in 2010, ending up in Aries to stay for seven years in 2011. If we are looking for a tipping point where the signs of change are inevitable, and this odd thing known as ‘the public’ actually wakes up, this is the event. On the personal level, this aspect says we have to think of ourselves differently. The real evolution is not a news event but an awakening of who we think we are. But we don’t need to wait around – this awakening is happening right now, just when we least expect it.