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.
