Clearing the Road: Lessons from the Ancient Maya

Robert Sitler

This article is excerpted from the forthcoming book, The Living Maya: Ancient Wisdom in the Era of 2012. 

Maya sometimes use the image of a path or road as a metaphor for human life. When Yukatek Maya ask, "Bix a bel?" (How is your road?), they are not merely inquiring about the conditions on the path you're walking upon, they are asking about your state of being as you walk. Similarly, among Q'anjobal Maya, the title for a spiritual guide is ahbe', "he or she of the road," a person that has developed the capacity to provide reliable direction on one's journey by virtue of their own lifetime experience of "travels." Just as when hiking on narrow Maya footpaths in the forest, in life, it's helpful for the trail ahead to be clear of obstructions. In describing a bit of my own life journey and its many detours, the lessons learned while hiking Maya pathways, and my passage into better comprehension of the year 2012; I hope to remove as many obstacles as I can from the road as I go with the hope that readers might be more inclined to accompany me.

Approaching fruition of the 13th pik  cycle in the ancient Long Count calendar during the highly anticipated year 2012,  some of my fellow New Agers describe Maya  as highly evolved spiritual messengers from a distant constellation. These extraterrestrial Maya come, it is said, to guide an increasingly disoriented humanity at this time of unprecedented socio-environmental crisis. I agree wholeheartedly that Maya ways have much to offer us at this uniquely critical juncture in humanity's Earthly voyage, but my own experience has pointed in precisely the opposite direction for the source of their culture's genius. While I am utterly unqualified to discount Maya connections to spirit beings from other realms, my heartfelt sense is that some of their most valuable Maya guidance for us comes not from distant stars, but from their culture's powerful connections with the physical planet beneath their feet. These eminently practical lessons from the Maya have the potential to "ground" our lives more harmoniously into nature's infinitely complex ways, to broaden our perspectives on human existence and to connect us more substantively with our innate capacity for compassion.

Maya traditions have emerged from the living earth like an ancestral yax te', an ancient kapok tree, more than a hundred generations thick. This ceiba, as it's more commonly known, represents the archetypal Maya World Tree, the horizontal axis of the cosmos with its deep roots drawing life-giving nutrients from the earth and its trunk reaching towards the star-bejeweled heavens above. A multi-millennially enriched cultural sap flows skyward into the tree's divergent ethnic branches.  Each bough grows with its own unique shape and puts forth distinctive blossoms of experientially acquired wisdom. Through reproductive metamorphosis these culturally specific patterns enter into more solid embodiments, the budding fruit that ripen into another living harvest of bronzed Maya babies. The Maya; like Chinese, Persians, Indians and other preeminent world cultures; have a multi-millennial written history and a vast wealth of practical knowledge that can inform modern humanity's cultivation of future generations. Their culture, like the others, has dedicated special attention to proper ripening of human fruit. As we approach completion of the 13th pik cycle in the Maya Long Count calendar, their ancestral tree is loaded with multicolored buds, poised for a season of particularly abundant cultural flowering, a time when Maya wisdom can release its sweet fragrance into the intercontinental winds for all humanity to savor.

Maya wisdom is, of course, in many ways similar to the vast heritage of practical knowledge acquired by ancient peoples worldwide, but what makes Maya stand out among these other global cultural expressions is their relatively large population. Maya make up what is overwhelmingly the largest Native cultural nexus in the entire North American continent. In fact, in the entire New World, only the Kechwa of the South American Andes have a comparably large population. This massive Maya numerical presence has led them into especially intense and sometimes extremely violent confrontations with the invasive tendencies of the non-indigenous world.

More recently, the proximity of the Maya homelands to the United States and the temporary immigration of tens of thousands of Maya into the American working underclass, have recently brought this ancient, truly American, culture into extensive contact with our modern ways. Maya sometimes suffer as a result of this closeness to the United States, so out of concern for their well-being; it behooves us to be more aware of their traditions. Even from a more selfish perspective, a deeper understanding of Maya culture can be vitally helpful to us as well as we stand paused at this major crossroad, pondering the road ahead on humanity's collective journey. The well-worn cultural paths of the Maya provide potential alternative directions for us. At a moment when many of our own cultural guides seem to have led us astray, the paths first trod by the leathery bare feet of the ancient Maya offer proven options still viable after millennia of use.

I confess that when I first began to hear about the 2012 date, I couldn't help but smile at some of the outrageous claims and outlandish speculation coming from a few of my fellow New Age spiritual seekers. However, as I've delved deeper into the subject and learned from wiser souls, I now find myself far less inclined to dismiss the 2012 phenomenon as I once did, as merely baseless assertions fed by media hype. I was genuinely amazed to learn, for example, that Maya astronomers were so brilliant that they apparently had the capability to set up their 13 pik cycle of 1,872,000 days with a zero date on a solar zenith passage over five thousand years ago and project accurately ahead to a closing date on a winter solstice in 2012, an astounding intellectual achievement for a pre-industrial culture and seeming proof that the Long Count was established with astonishing forethought. Furthermore, just as 2012 ideology tells us, Maya have described human evolution in terms of our advancement through sequential world ages.

According to Maya mythology, each age's stage of humanity was mercilessly terminated by divinely inspired catastrophes before a more evolved and properly respectful being could be created. Since ancient Maya hieroglyphic texts consistently associate the beginning of the 13 pik cycle in the Long Count with cosmic creation, couldn't the end of this massive cycle of time also imply the end of an age and its destruction? In Maya myth, the creator beings' previous experiments in making proper human beings failed due to people's lack of capacity for reverence. We six billion humans are now witnessing a form of cataclysmic environmental destruction on Earth brought about by our collective lack of respect for nature's ways. The similarity between this tragic situation and the mythological destruction of prior human generations in Maya lore is compelling.

So when people ask, "what will happen in 2012?," I have no clear answer. I feel certain that ancient Maya were aware of dimensions of the human experience that we moderns can no longer even imagine due to our culturally specific blinders. How much can we really know with certainty about the cosmos from within these narrow limits of our subconsciously developed mental parameters? Might there actually be spiritual entities who are taking this opportunity to facilitate a collective enhancement of human awareness? Who among us can even begin to understand the unseen macro-cycles that integrate the fathomless universe? Our current best "scientific" guess is that we are hurling at incalculable speeds through incomprehensively vast space with but a glimmer of knowledge as to who we are or where we are going. In this limitless all-directional cosmic context, we humans are ill-prepared for saying much definitive about very much at all, much less about such extraordinarily esoteric concepts as world ages and the evolution of consciousness.

Instead of solid answers, more questions arise. Might the recent "return" of the Long Count calendar into human awareness, after an absence of many centuries, be an archetypal alarm clock ringing in from the collective unconscious? Might personal mythologies about the Maya and 2012 developed by New Age mystics take on a life of their own and coalesce into real change on a societal scale through processes of self-fulfilling prophecy? Is 2012 merely an ingenious New Age marketing scheme or is it a subtle tipping point in humanity's collective consciousness towards heightened spiritual illumination?  I really don't know.

I sincerely doubt there will be any peak moment of terrestrial catastrophe in connection with the passing of 13 pik. My best guess is that our Earthen orb will make its daily spin on its axis just as on any other Friday on early 21st-century planet Earth, with all its normal horrific and awe-inspiring share of natural disasters, warfare, environmental degradation, personal and societal breakthroughs and breakdowns. For those not looking for any deeper meaning, the day will likely come and go as a less substantively informed version of the Y2K non-event with its survivalist excitement over potential millennial computer glitches. Yet even as I remind myself of our vast cosmic framework and urge you not to worry in the least about disaster scenarios linked to 2012, I still feel compelled to scream out a warning about the all-too-real global catastrophes of ecological and societal disintegration that are occurring as you read this very sentence.

As 2012 approaches we find ourselves increasingly disconnected from nature's patterns, ever-more insensitive to our collective assault on complex and fragile ecosystems about which we humans have but a glimmer of understanding. Species are disappearing at rates unknown since the mass extinction event that killed off the dinosaurs over sixty million years ago. One hundred million tons of plastic trash currently spin in the North Pacific Gyre and through photo-degradation will eventually pass into the tissue of marine wildlife in molecular-sized particles. There is now no place on our planet untouched by the chemical bi-products of our disintegrated lifestyles. Such contaminants now produce some 40% of human deaths worldwide.

We seem equally oblivious to the generalized abuse of our own bodies, "super-sizing" ourselves into unprecedented extremes of physical and psychological degeneration. In the United States we have, on average, over one hundred foreign chemicals storied in our bodies  and increasingly we add to the mix by forcing our children on to psychiatric drugs to help them cope with the incoherency and superficiality of the world we've created for them. Human-made hormone-mimicking contaminants now produce sexual mutations in a growing number of species, from bass to alligators; and we are finding that they adversely affect the human fetus as well. These are only a few salient examples of a planetary crisis in which we're only capable of perceiving the most apparent destruction.

Regardless of what one thinks about 2012 and the Maya calendar, if we do not change humanity's direction, the unprecedented human-induced environmental changes on our planet will become even more catastrophic. There is no question that humanity has reached a crossroads. The natural world bestowed upon us by infinitely complex processes of creation, in many very real ways, is actually ending. The coincidence between this ubiquitous environmental ruin and the world age philosophy embedded in both Maya myth and 2012 ideology is irresistibly suggestive. According to Maya, each world age comes to fruition with apocalyptic disaster in order to create more evolved forms. The earliest attempts at creation yielded the animals of the planet. The next human was made from mud but quickly dissolved. Then came people made from wood who were eventually destroyed by floods and who even had their own tools turn against them (Sound familiar?). The current age's human beings were fashioned by the Maya creator beings from corn  ground by the mythical divine Mother herself. It may indeed be time for the creators to fashion even more refined beings than we people of corn, ones more capable of living in better harmony with the complex patterns of the natural planet and ones more appreciative of role in this vast cosmos.

As we witness nature's fabric being torn, societal bonds undone, and individual human threads come loose; my mind recalls Maya weavers I've known as they patiently kneel on their earthen patios, nimbly tie together broken threads on their back strap looms and then reintegrate the astutely repaired strands back into the larger fabric. The Maya cultural paradigm tends toward keeping things whole; be it a community, the natural world, or the cloth of a woman's intricately brocaded blouse. Traditional Maya have a remarkably sturdy cultural fabric that has endured societal collapse and hundreds of years of often violent oppression in their own land under the descendants of the European invaders. It is woven with practical sensibilities learned from thousands of years of deliberately intensive interactions with the tropical ecosystems of their Middle American homelands. As with many indigenous peoples around the world, Maya intimacy with the realm of plants, animals and other life that sustains them, can lead to a profound awareness of their integrity with what they sometimes refer to as their "Mother," nature herself. They truly "get" that we humans are, at least from one very real perspective, simply another animal. We all suckle in Mother Earth's mountainous arms, wrapped in the "fabric" of her forests, nourishing ourselves with her life-giving waters.

The genuine sense of familiarity that some traditional Maya have with the earth occurs simultaneously with a broadly shared capacity for compassion fostered through deliberate nurturing of their infants, ingenious childrearing practices based on modeling of parental behavior, and the intentional cultivation of community awareness. As a consequence of these time-proven patterns of behavior, many Maya, at least those not already caught up in our globalized commercial "culture," still experience potent psychological bonds with one another almost impossible for those of us caught up in the distractions of our commercially oriented lives to imagine. In many cases they also share an experiential awareness of their oneness with the natural world around them. The hard-earned lessons that produce these more integrated states of consciousness are Maya culture's sacred offering to humanity even though, given the Maya love of humility, I doubt many of them would ever make such a claim.

As 13 Pik and the much-heralded year 2012 approach, Maya pathways potentially provide at least potential directions for beginning to mitigate and heal the severe and sometimes irreparable damage we have done to our home planet and the equally harsh physical and psychological wounds we have inflicted upon our children and ourselves. Their traditions do not beacon us skyward to learn from enlightened messengers in the heavens. Instead the call us to place our feet firmly upon the life-giving earth, to light-heartedly pick up our individual life's cargo of burdens and blessings, and then set out in earnest on the ancient trails first laid out by the ancestral Mam  millennia ago and still traveled by millions of Maya in the 21st century.

13 Pik: December 21, 2012

No one really knows, of course, if any extraordinary events will occur in the portentous year 2012, but human curiosity combined with easy access to electronic communication has led to a lively and multidimensional worldwide social movement surrounding the date, the so-called 2012 phenomenon.  Just as in the period leading up to Y2K, there is already an astonishing volume of attention to the 2012 date on the Internet in dozens of languages. A recent Google search combining the terms "Maya" and "2012" yielded more than two million references. Simultaneously, a rapidly growing number of books, videos, workshops and Internet communities speculate wildly as to the underlying meaning of the 2012 and what transformative events might take place.

Since José Argüelles first brought my attention to the 2012 date in 1978 with publication of The Mayan Factor: Path Beyond Technology, the 2012 phenomenon has expanded exponentially, in spite of the fact that few of us have had the chance to investigate its content with critical awareness.
The ancient Maya probably called this special day "13 pik"  (pronounced "peek"). The term refers to the current cycle of 144,000 days in the Maya Long Count, one of three principle calendars used by the ancient Maya during the so-called Classic Period of their culture (roughly 250-900 CE). This calendar, which fell into disuse among the Maya many centuries ago, is similar to our own Gregorian calendar in that it counts forward from a fixed "zero" date. For the ancient Maya, this "start" date was August 11, 3114 B.C.E.  and they associated it consistently with myths concerning cosmic creation.

Counting forward from that "zero" date in the Long Count, days, known individually as k'in, were grouped into units of twenty called winik by the ancients. Eighteen of these twenty-day winik units formed a larger unit of 360 days equal to an approximate year known to the ancient Maya as a haab and to modern researchers as a tun. Twenty of these approximate years formed a still larger unit of 7200 days called a k'atun (the ancient name may have been winikhaab).

We know from the hieroglyphs that k'atun endings were commonly celebrated by the ancient Maya and the numerous Chilam Balam texts from the Yucatan show that the importance of the k'atun continued, in what Maya called the may count, through the entirety of Spanish colonial rule. The ancient Maya combined twenty k'atun periods to form the pik, a cycle of 144,000 days or approximately 394 years. Maya counting of pik cycles gradually faded, along with use of the Long Count and hieroglyphic writing, after the Classic Period but scattered clandestine usage of these ancient cultural features probably extended into, and even through, the colonial period. The word baktun was invented early in the 20th century by archeologists who had still not deciphered the ancient writing system and so were unaware of the original word. It is also the term now adopted by many contemporary Maya from the Guatemalan highlands for referring to the 2012 date. We currently are in the final years of the 13th baktun, or as the ancients said, oxlahun pik.

Given the profound significance of the number 13 in Maya culture and the date's explicit appearance in the hieroglyphs on Monument 6 from Tortuguero, Mexico, it appears that the ancient Maya viewed a sequence of 13 piks as forming a still larger cycle of 1,872,000 days (more than 5,125 years) that some investigators refer to as the "Great Cycle." While there is legitimate scholarly debate concerning the exact day that will mark this cycle's end, I find myself siding wholeheartedly with the few Maya I know who are familiar with the 2012 date and who all prefer December 21st  because it comes on the day 4 Ahaw in their 260-day Maya ritual calendar. We have known since the 19th century that the Great Cycle began on a day associated by the ancient Maya with cosmic creation on 4 Ahaw. Since this 1,872,000 day cycle is divisible by 260, the passage of 13 piks must bring us once again to another 4 Ahaw day. The December 21st date finds confirmation in the aforementioned

Tortuguero text, the one and only reference to the 2012 date in the entirety of ancient Maya history. This seventh-century stone monument states unambiguously that the "thirteenth pik will be finished (on) 4 Ahaw, the third of K'ank'in. " The December 21st/4 Ahaw date also turns out to be the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere. I first saw this as an interesting coincidence, since solstices seems to have minimal importance in the ancient glyphs. But I then recalled that 13 pik cycle's "zero" date over 5,000 years ago occurred on a solar zenith passage at the latitude where the calendar was probably invented and I find myself unable to set aside such a remarkable mathematical and astronomical accomplishment as mere chance. Scholars have long suggested that the tzolkin calendar was developed based on the time between solar zeniths in the Mesoamerican tropics, in particular the 260 gap between the August and May zeniths at 15˚ north latitude in the area where the Maya calendars were likely invented. In establishing their Long Count calendar "zero" date on the August 11, 3114 BCE solar zenith passage, the ancients also imbedded their tzolkin ritual cycle which comes full circle 260 days later on the spring solar zenith passage.

It is important to point out that this so-called Great Cycle was only a minor component within far larger periods of time that theoretically extended infinitely backwards and forward in time using a system of exponentially increasing temporal cycles without beginning or end. Contrary to what some say about the date, no Maya calendar "ends" on 13 pik. The day merely marks the close of a large time cycle. This and the various other Maya measurements of time are perpetual in nature, just like our own Gregorian calendar.

When examining the rapidly growing and evolving cultural phenomenon surrounding the 13 pik date, one cannot help admire the consistency of altruistic attitudes among participants. Even those making the most outrageous and baseless claims seem committed to a more sustainable and healthy relationship to our natural environment and to more enlightened ways of being human. While fully appreciating that commitment, it must also be pointed out that little content in the 2012 phenomenon has much substantive basis in the Maya world. Apart from the recent publication by Maya novelist Gaspar González on 2012, nearly all writings on the subject of 2012 have been written by non-Maya who have little experiential familiarity with the Maya world .
Since most of what we hear and read concerning the Maya in the 2012 phenomenon and about the 13 pik date comes to us from sources outside the Maya world; if we hope to gain a better-informed appreciation of the year's potential significance, we must first look to the Maya themselves for answers. Ancient hieroglyphic texts and codices, the Popol Vuh, the Books of the Chilam Balam and the works of contemporary Maya are our best resources. The living voices of today's Maya connect us directly to the human "frequency" of the Maya world and their words can inspire new appreciation for their rich heritage. I, of course, cannot speak for the Maya; my sense is that many of them understand me far better than I do their world. I can merely describe my personal perspectives on this remarkable cultural current and share how Maya people have shaped my life.

My Own Road 

My own initial experiences with Maya culture came as I entered adulthood. The previous several years had been tumultuous; but they came after what, in retrospect, was a remarkably fortunate upbringing. Nearly my entire childhood took place in Kent, a small town with a large university in northeast Ohio. Living near the end of a dead end street, my friends and I had ready access to our favorite pond, climbing trees with handholds I still remember clearly, a massive boulder left for us during the last ice age by receding glaciers, and a particularly abundant blackberry patch. My father was a geology professor and dean at Kent State University. He planned his research well; taking me along with my mother and two sisters for extended periods of travel abroad to study stream sedimentation, one time camping for two months in gorgeous remote valleys in the eastern Pyrenees of Cataluña.

On another such trip at age 13, while in Czechoslovakia for my father to present a paper at an international geological conference, we witnessed the 1968 Soviet Invasion put an end to the buds of Prague Spring. I vividly remember all the international visitors who were staying in our hillside campground huddled in the basement of the small restaurant watching tracer bullets streak across the night sky overhead from down below in the city as we listened in silence to the thunderous rumble of the tanks pouring into town to quell any potential resistance from Czech nationalists. At first, the deafening roar of the MIGs ripping through the sky only hundreds of feet above our heads along with all the other amazing new sights was enthralling for a male teenager. Only when I heard the desperate screams of an old woman whose son had just been shot for taking photographs did my fascination instantly disappear and turn to horror. Less than two years later, the infamous May 4th shootings took place just several hundred yards from my high school in Kent. Armed National Guard troops patrolled our little street and words like "they should have killed more" in the mouths of local townspeople stung in my ears. Seeing brute violence from both the political left in Prague and from the right in Kent left me politically radicalized in the sense of searching for root causes and solutions rather than adhering to any fixed ideology.

Both my elementary and secondary education took place in the highly enriched environment of the Kent State University School, a tuition-free laboratory school for the training of teachers and educational experimentation and most of my fellow friends and students were faculty children. As part of this truly extraordinary instruction, we were discussing the writings of Malcolm X and international affairs with enthusiastic and politically savvy university graduate students. We listened to the genius of Miles Davis in the school library and joined our teachers in anti-Vietnam war protests along the small street in front of the school. I flourished in this super-stimulating environment and was always a straight-A student. Meanwhile, I was repeatedly stunned when childhood heroes were killed by assassins. Nearly every weekday evening, I was riveted to the screen by the nightly news scenes of battle from Southeast Asia and in America's burning cities. As I moved on to university studies at Kent State University, our family began to disintegrate. My father and I became deeply estranged, taking radically opposite sides in a rapidly widening generation gap. Within a two year period starting when I was in 11th grade, my father's affair was discovered; my parents went through an anguishing divorce, my father was remarried, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and then died an excruciatingly painful death. Some of my clearest memories of these sad times are of driving him to his pointless and nauseating chemotherapy treatments as he sat next to me in sullen despair.

Fortunately, my exposure to psychoactive substances came in the midst of this family and societal turmoil, providing direly needed insights and a broader, far healthier perspective. I was exposed to marijuana far later than most kids in Kent, a town where some 20,000 university students formed a majority population and shaped local culture. Marijuana, in my case, just as the anti-pot literature warned, proved to indeed be a gateway drug. Thankfully, it led me to eventually experiment with LSD, psilocybin and mescaline, and I am eternally grateful for the experiences they provided, the innumerable delusion devastating and humbling insights, the liberation of remorse, and the countless unexpected blessings that have ensued as a result. By the time I arrived in southeast Mexico in February of 1977, I had already experience perhaps 20 substantive, "down on the ground" trips with LSD, mushrooms and peyote; but I had not even inkling of the far more radically transformative breakthroughs that were still waiting for their precise karmic moment to inform my being.

For those readers directly familiar with these substances, no further explanations are needed. For others, I must make clear that LSD, psilocybin, mescaline and similar psychoactive agents are not "drugs" in the sense that they numb a person to pain or provide a psychological escape. Very much to the contrary, they quickly dissolve the psychological buffers we have internalized that keep us shielded from unprocessed trauma and internalized fears. The so-called "bad trip" associated with ingestion of these substances is nothing more than a person suddenly becoming far more aware of the emotional and mental baggage they have left unattended. In general, we moderns prefer to avoid having to face such issues. Has no one noticed that there is no peyote addition problem, no LSD or mushroom rehabilitation programs? Not only are these substances completely non-addictive, the experiences they facilitate are not typically comfortable, pleasant, or relaxing. Very much to the contrary, they often feel traumatic, gut-wrenching (sometimes literally), world view-shattering, and overpowering; not what most people desire in our cultural paradigm focused on pleasure, ease and comfort.

Numerous Mesoamerican peoples have used these psyche-illuminating substances as part of their cultural practices. There are several Native groups in Mexico for example that still ingest peyote or various psilocybin-bearing mushrooms. Ironically, for Americans used to associating mind-altering substances with social degeneration, the Huichol, Cora, Mazatec and other peoples who use these substances are also some of the most cohesive, environmentally sustainable and self-sufficient societies in our continent. The archeological record suggests that the ancient Maya also employed psychoactive mushrooms since they left behind hundreds of stone mushroom figures. Not surprising, for those familiar with the consciousness-enhancing effects of psilocybin, these mushroom stones were found at the very same early Maya sites where the culture's greatest advances took place.

Further reinforcing the positive role of so-called hallucinogens in Maya culture, images of the DMT-producing cane toad (bufo marinus) were found at the early site of Izapa, in place closely linked to development of their intricate calendar traditions.

While the use of such substances certainly cannot guarantee any substantive positive change, much less an inner awakening, in my own case, they were an indispensable catalyst for recreating my life. The Ohio woods and fields of my childhood had been bulldozed. Watching my father die had provided a virtual preview of my own mortality, pushing me to explore life in earnest. I had witnessed political madness from both the left and the right, pushing me to search deeper for direction.  I had read the first books of Carlos Castaneda and was intrigued by the tales of his exploits with Don Juan. I had been blessed with a truly beautiful and loving girlfriend and the lessons from psychoactive allies had shown both of us that life had far more to offer than our culture had led us to believe. Without knowing it, life's circumstances had swept the road clear in front of us and now it was time to start our journey. We loaded up our packs for three months of adventure in the backcountry of Mexico without even a clue that our lives were about to be permanently and radically transformed.