The 2012 Story

levels of the human being, each of which corresponds to energy centers residing along the spine called chakras. These five levels process increasingly subtle information from the physical environment as they ascend upward (earth, water, air, fire, space). Above them, two more chakras exist. The sixth is associated with the so-called third eye. When this center, or subtle sense faculty, is opened, consciousness is able to transcend, or integrate, dualities. Conflict generated by the interplay of dualities in the world can be “seen through.” People in this mode tend to not became entangled and limited by identifying themselves with only half of reality. There are plenty of people in the world today who can access this level of consciousness, though it is not a perspective that factors into the values of modern politics and trans-national economies. Many ancient cultures were informed, in their philosophies and religions, by this nondual perception of the world.

A sacred science acknowledges the highest level of consciousness (the subtlest level) as the most real, while a profane science denies that level’s relevance and validity because it belongs to a nonmaterial domain. Profane science will say it is ambiguous because it is “subjective.” Here we find another distinction between profane science and sacred science (or Perennial Philosophy): Modern science is inverted in relation to sacred science. In the profane desacralized view of modern science, physical matter is the most real, the only part of the universe that can be analyzed and tested with consistent results. In a sacred science the subtler higher levels of consciousness are more real. This is not a matter of one opinion versus another opinion; it is a question of a more complete cosmology (a more sophisticated ontological understanding of reality) versus a less complete cosmology that is true only within a relatively narrow subsection of the big picture. Science values and hones in on precision, whereas sacred science zooms out for the big picture, with com prehensiveness (and comprehension) as the goal. The more subtle and spiritualized that consciousness gets, the more it can embrace and interpenetrate lower levels, denser domains, of the universe. In this way, a comprehensive grasp of the whole can be realized.

On a scale of progressive rarefication from material to spiritual, Tibetan and Hindu sacred science identifies five sheaths or levels of human consciousness. Lama Anagorika Govinda explained this doctrine in his profound book Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism. In this scenario, the five levels of consciousness crystallize around our innermost core, the Divine Ground, which is itself immaterial. Each successive sheath is denser than the last. From highest to lowest the five levels are: the inspiration body, the depth-consciousness body, the thought body, the pranic (breath) body, and finally the physical body. The inspiration body is nourished by joy, or ecstasy. It is the subtlest of the sheaths and therefore penetrates all the others. In other words, the sheaths are not separate levels, building consecutively around a solid nucleus, but rather have the nature of interpenetrating forms of energy. The densest, like large pebbles in a sand sifter, cannot occupy the same space as the subtler levels. So, too, the limited worldview of science, informed and defined by the faculties of physical sense perception, cannot penetrate into the subtle domains perceived with the subtle faculties. In fact, the subtle faculties are likely to be obscured by the exclusive focus of the grosser faculties on material sense perception. Not so the other way around, however. When the consciousness shifts to awaken the inner faculties of subtle sense perception, the outer world doesn’t simply disappear. Why? Because the inner sense perceptions embrace the data received by lower physical impressions, but places them in a larger, more inclusive, context. This is, essentially, what sacred science offers to a world hoodwinked by profane science—a larger, whole, perspective. As long as we identify ourselves with denser aspects of our totality, then we are subject to the laws of matter.

Why is this relevant to the Maya calendar? Quite simply, the doctrine of World Ages is a version of this same doctrine. Each successive World Age brings about a more perfect reflection of divinity within humanity. As it says in The Popol Vuh, humanity is transformed at each successive level, or Age, to more fully honor the spiritual being of the creator, Heart of Heaven. Comparative mythologists, such as Joseph Campbell, are adept at seeing beyond the culture-specific garb and terminology, to identify the universal ideas that link seemingly diverse doctrines from around the world. The World Ages of Mesoamerican cosmology are spatiotemporal versions of the ancient Oriental sacred science of the five spiritual centers of the human microcosm. Implicit in this doctrine is the recognition that this microcosm is a miniature reflection of the macrocosm.

We have to be careful here not to fall prey to false conceptual opposites. Descartes’s error was to apply mathematical plus-and-minus values to nature, resulting in the separation of mind and body, or spirit and matter, into unrelated oppositional domains. The error has cascaded into a sanctioned and institutionalized misconception of the spiritual domain’s relationship with the material plane. The relationship between the two conceptual domains of matter and spirit is not one of rigid dualities set apart and reflecting each other as in a mirror. Instead, one must imagine a vertical conduit running from material manifestation at the base up through increasingly refined levels to unconditioned, nonmaterial spiritual essence. Each successive level moving upward transcends the level immediately preceding it. Transcendence, however, is not to be thought of as being “above” in a separating sense. Transcendence is inclusive of that which it transcends.

The ultimate level of pure spiritual consciousness thus embraces the more material domains of the universe. It is, by definition, unconditioned, limitless, unbounded, timeless, infinite, and eternal. It is, after all, the unmanifest ground state from which the material world of appearances springs, which is a realm in which everything that arises must eventually pass out of being-ness and back into the infinite source, like clouds disappearing back into the underlying blue sky from which they were born.

THE PRE/TRANS FALLACY

There is another way of thinking about the many levels of consciousness. Three stages of psychological development can be identified, and are particularly useful for clarifying the problems that the modern mind-set has with the ideas so central to the Perennial Philosophy. The three stages can also be thought of as states of consciousness, and they are: prerational, rational, and transrational. Nietzsche, in his essay called “On Scholars,” presented this idea allegorically. The prerational state is analogous to that of babies, who have not yet learned to process reality in a linear, sequential fashion. Their immersion in the unitary ocean of feeling is a kind of blissful oneness, but it is bereft of the ego sense through which external data can be related to a sense of individual identity. This categorizing and processing of external reality is the province of the rational stage, which requires a more or less concisely formulated ego with which external data can be measured, analyzed, and rationally categorized. This second state is inherently limited by the dualist framework that it requires—an observer and the observed. The being has fallen out of oneness, out of paradise. The unconscious unity of the prerational state has achieved a conscious relationship with the objects of sense perception, predicated on the fiction of the ego. The ego is a good thing, a natural development. As Terence McKenna used to say, we need the ego, otherwise we’d be likely to put food in the wrong mouth. The third stage is a logical development that leads beyond logic. It is the transrational position, or state, that perceives ego within a larger field of a unitary whole. It’s not that the ego is annihilated (that would be a return to the prerational state), but that the ego is transcended, is placed in a nondual relationship with, well, everything else—nature, the world, other egos.

In terms of psychological development, the transrational state perceives connections between “things” that are not contingent upon the cause-and-effect framework utilized by rational processing. We might say that the rational state is logical, while the transrational state is analogical. An analogy made between, say, the form of a river delta viewed from above and lung alveoli takes on great meaning. Though labeled a mere poetic metaphor by the rational mind, to the transrational mind such a parallel reveals an underlying universal ordering principle that is there, exists, is evident to the perception, but cannot be explained by good old-fashioned Newtonian science.

It’s not simply that geological erosion and tissue formation are governed by the same mathematical laws, but that different orders or domains of reality are united by a common principle, as in “as above, so below.” The critical key here is that the transrational position includes the rational position— transcendence includes that which it transcends. It should not be a threat to the rational mind, because it is the logical higher viewpoint in the rational mind’s development. Thus, meta-physics (metaphysics), as the term itself suggests, is the larger cosmological viewpoint of which physics is merely a small subset.

This three-part model should make sense, especially to the rational mind, but unfortunately a confusing fallacy is all too common. Philosopher Ken Wilber calls it the “Pre/Trans Fallacy” and explains:

The essence of the pre/trans fallacy is itself fairly simple: since both prerational states and transrational states are, in their own ways, nonrational, they appear similar or even identical to the untutored eye. And once pre