Theatre of the Mind Podcast Episodes

Mayan Calendar and Transforming Consciouness

Kelly Howell: Welcome, once again, to Theatre of the Mind. Your host, Kelly Howell. Before we start today, I'd just like to take a moment to thank Marcia Thomas for helping me organize all our shows. Her work and dedication has been unbelievable, actually. If you enjoy Theatre of the Mind send your blast of gratitude right now for helping to produce these shows. Thanks. Our show today is with Dr. Carl Johan Calleman on his book "The Mayan Calendar and the Transformation of Consciousness." Dr. Calleman holds a PhD in Physical Biology and has served on an expert on cancer for the World Health Organization. He began his studies on the Mayan calendar in 1979.
His book reveals the Mayan calendar as a spiritual device that provides a greater understanding of the nature of conscious evolution throughout human history. Dr. Calleman, it's an honor to have you on the show today.
Dr. Calleman: Oh, I'm very happy to be with you.
Kelly: And thank you for staying up so late in Sweden to talk with us. Let's start with the beginning, here. What led you to study the Mayan calendar?
Dr. Calleman: My first encounter with the Mayan calendar was in 1979. I went, like some kind of a backpacking tourist, to Mexico. It was kind of natural to visit the pyramids outside of Mexico City. Also, I made this journey down to Yucatan and visited Chichen Itza and some of the major sites there. First of all, I fell in love with the Mayan people, the natives that I met down there. And I also felt very strongly connected to this, as if this was somehow linked to my own path in life, that this was something I would continue to do even though at that point I really didn't know exactly what it would mean.
Already then I had heard about this, that there would be an end to the Mayan calendar. And it sort of appealed to me in the sense that I felt that they are right here. There is something from the mental that we have missed in modern society. There is something about our concept of time that is amiss, that's very mechanical. And this whole idea that there were spiritual eras that is the foundation of the Mayan calendar, that's something that really appealed to me intuitively.
So I did have the feeling that there is a deeper truth here, a deeper understanding of time. That was my first encounter with it. And then it took, probably took another 13 years or something like that until I actually started to try to unravel the meaning of the Mayan calendar: how are we to understand it, how are we to look upon it in a way that makes it meaningful for our own life and the process that humanity goes through.
Once I had actually started to research this, the question is not why was I interested in the Mayan calendar, but I would always throw this question back to other people and say the strange thing is not that I'm interested in it, the strange thing is that so few people have been interested in it. And that is a story that goes back to the whole conquest of the Americas and the destruction of the native culture and so forth that has led to the suppression of this knowledge for about 500 years.
Kelly: The Mayan calendar is a very advanced mathematical system, right?
Dr. Calleman: Yes, it is. Except that I wouldn't want to give people the impression that it's advanced in the since that it's difficult to grasp. It's just that it's something that, to understand it, we need to look at reality in a different way. We have to acknowledge that there may be spiritual archetypes that they symbolized with deities of the gods and goddesses that would create eras, certain inherent spiritual qualities of time. That's the main thing to see, that the calendar is something entirely different compared to the kind of timekeeping that we modern people are essentially using our calendar for.
Kelly: Well, I have so many questions to ask you. You have come up with a theory that has inspired so many people. Your time acceleration theory, and you say that the calendar is fundamentally a time schedule for the evolution of consciousness. How did you come to discover this theory and is there an easy way to explain how it works?
Dr. Calleman: Well, yes. That's kind of two different...
Kelly: Questions.
Dr. Calleman: The first thing that was, if I mentioned already in '79 I had the feeling here, intuitively I felt there is some truth here. And it took a while. And there are also other people that have been working with the calendar around the late '70s that were the first people that started to have a feeling that there is something fundamental here, some truth that we had been missing. And then in the mid'80s came Jose Arguelles book, "The Mayan Factor: The Harmonic Convergence." And that gave many people that were involved in that a sense that there are maybe spiritual truths in our society today that we may understand based on the Mayan calendar.
I have this scientific background. I come from an environment where you have to prove things. You have to look at what is the reality and not just the intuitive. So I started to look at what happened at these shift points that the Mayan calendar spells out. Once I had found some significant things in human history that correlated exactly with these shift points I couldn't stop working on it because so many things became unraveled.
I would just go on and on, and to my amazement see that here we have actually a sort of a thought structure, a calendar that describes all of this creation and all of its unfoldment and how it's developing and evolving with time.
Kelly: Your book is very compelling in that you give historical examples and correlations of how the calendar has mapped evolution thus far. Maybe a way for people to be introduced to this would be to give us some examples of your discoveries and how we've gone through time and how the calendar has directly mapped that evolution.
Dr. Calleman: Well, yeah. I think one example that very easily comes to the mind is the evolution of our modern ways of communicating; using different forms of telecommunications. Which is basically going from the very earliest forms of a telegraph, to the modern Internet connections that embraces almost the whole planet. And that was one of the questions. I wanted to look at how was the planet developing into this global brain, you might say, where all or most of the different peoples of the world became connected by these nerve threads, you might say, or the telecommunications have provided.
When I did so, I could easily see that it was sort of a pulsewise development. Energy by energy had developed these means of communications from the very early seed in the mid eighteenth century of an idea of how to make a telegraph, and then step by step, more and more advanced forms, like optical telegraph, electrical telegraph, radio... No, sorry, telephone, radio, television, and eventually the Internet. You could track this evolution, going from the seed until the fulfillment of the mature fruit, which is today's very developed global computer network that many of us are using.
And this sort of showed, in an amazing way, how these energies that the Maya had been describing 1, 000 years ago actually was very directly applicable to an aspect of modern reality, that it's hard to explain with anything else than that we, as human beings, are somehow influenced by inspiring process. Inspiring spiritual archetypes, that have led us to make new inventions in a stepwise manner, according to the Mayan calendar.
Kelly: Now, the calendar maps what you call, or what scholars on the subject call, the Great Cycle which began 5, 000 some odd years ago. What was going on in the world then that correlated to the Mayan calendar?
Dr. Calleman: Yeah, that's a very interesting thing. What is most known, as you're saying, is what is called the Great Cycle, or the Long Count, which is a period of about, to be exact, 5,125 years. The interesting thing is that this long development, this era called the Great Cycle, it takes its beginning at what we call the Dawn of History. In other words, it takes its beginning at the time when the Egyptians and the Sumerians were starting to build the first pyramids, when they started to create kingdoms, organized nations. When people in these first civilizations started to write, when they started to use metals. And all of these changes amounts to what historians, for a long time, have been talking about as the Dawn of History.
And these changes that took place about 5,000 years ago, it's always baffled historians how suddenly they seem to have come about. There's not a lot of preearly forms of writing, for instance. It just emerges very quickly, very sharply.
And it so happens then, that it emerges at a time which coincidences with the beginning of this Mayan Great Cycle, which is the cycle then that to the Maya meant an enormous amount. It meant that that was the cycle that they used to date all the pyramids, and all the buildings that they were building in their temple cities.
It is like the Maya, then, by dating the pyramids according to this Great Cycle, this is like if they wanted to relate their own buildings, their own culture, to this larger process of evolution that started 5,000 years ago.
And you may also shift it's not only the positive changes, the new nations and so forth that came about at that time. But it's also a lot of things that many others would regard in a more negative way that happened at that time. It's sort of the dualist mind that comes out, a patriarchal society, it's a time of organized warfare, and it's a time of class subjugation in many things. This is history starting 5,000 years ago.
And by using the Mayan calendar as a means of understanding this, we can also understand what is behind this. That there was a shift coming actually from the Cosmos, from resonance with the cosmic plan actually, that brought about a new mind. Actually, in many ways a dualist mind, but also a mind that was much more technically advanced, and brought these big changes 5,000 years ago. So the Mayan calendar is like a description of the history of the human mind.
Kelly: We're quickly coming to the end of nine Creation Cycles that have spanned these last 5, 000 years, is that right?
Dr. Calleman: Well, I would say that the nine cycles, they actually... The Great Cycle is one of these nine cycles. And the longest of all these nine cycles these nine underworlds, as the Maya would call them would go back even to the time of the Big Bang, the initial creation of this universe. And so in this sense, the Mayan calendar, I really want to emphasize, is not like an astronomical calendar that is specifically linked to our own solar system. I would say that this is one of the most important things that makes the Mayan calendar different from all the other calendars of the planet. I would say that almost all other calendars, they are related to the particular rhythms of astronomical cycles: of the sun, and the moon, and the earth, and how they are related.
But the way I look upon the Mayan calendar, it is actually something that is much bigger. It is sort of a calendar of the entire cosmos. It is one that includes the whole galaxies, and I think that's something I really want to emphasize. But then it's like these nine fundamental processes that they call underworlds, each one of which is a development of a specific level of consciousness. Each of these is developed according to a rhythm of its own.
So it is like all of creation that we are now coming to some kind of a completion of, some kind of a fulfillment, some kind of a overview of it all, each of these are developed according to a rhythm of its own. Initially the rhythm was based on time cycles that were immensely long, with our own standards. They were like one and a quarter billion years long.
But then as creation has progressed, new such cycles have been activated on top of the older ones. So with each of these new processes that are activated, it's developing according to a rhythm that is higher than previously. So every time we climb to a new level of the cosmic pyramid, you might say, there is a speed up of the rhythm of evolution, of 20fold speedup. This sort of creates this, the vast amount of phenomena coming into existence, especially if you just look on the most recent time in our past.
For instance, we see how the world has changed in maybe 10 or 20 years based on the computerization of life. But if you look in the big span and you would compare all of the history of the universe to, like a year, what is happening now, of these 10 or 20 years with the enormous change that they brought to human society, that's like the very few last seconds before midnight of New Year's, something like that.
All of this comes from this climb to more and more rapidly developing levels of consciousness that changes life in the Universe.
Kelly: You say in your book that the new, accelerated frequencies is this rapid change that we're going through now, are activating consciousness. Specifically you wrote about the right hemispheres of our brains.
Dr. Calleman: Yeah.
Kelly: So where are these frequencies coming from?
Dr. Calleman: Where are they coming from? I would say that they are... The best way of... I think we would then need to talk about the...
Kelly: The World Tree.
Dr. Calleman: The World Tree. This is something that, to modern people, most modern people don't relate to a World Tree. It sounds like an old, archaic myth or something like that. What is surprising about this World Tree is that when we go back in time, maybe a thousand years, and certainly several thousand years, we will find that people more or less all over the world would base their cosmology on the World Tree. The World Tree would place a central role in cosmologies. To give you a few examples, we have in the first book of the Bible, we have the Tree of Life as the center of the drama of Adam and Eve and creation and the expulsion from the Garden of Eden and so forth. From my own background, the Viking cosmology that has been described in the Icelander sagas and so forth, they had this view of a huge World Tree, a big ash that they called Yggdrasil that was bigger than the whole heaven and all earth. Like the biggest thing in the whole cosmos.
So did the Maya, for instance. They also had the World Tree in the central role in their cosmology. Really, the way they looked upon their calendar was that the calendar were to describe shifts in the vibrations of the World Tree. The World Tree was also like the Medicine Wheel that the North American Indians are sometimes using for ceremonies where there is sort of a tree structure in the middle of four graphical directions, that each have a certain kind of spiritual quality associated with it.
So it is a big structure. It's not like a physical structure. It's just, you might say, a creative principal that exists at many levels in a universe which is pulsing out new frequencies, new energies according to a special rhythm. And it is this, these frequencies, these energies, that it seems are behind all evolution.
The World Tree is a central thing. It's like the Maya calendar cannot really be conceived without having some grasp of the World Tree. We have, for a couple of hundred years we have looked upon the world through a more technical way compared to the ancient myths of the ancient peoples.
But now it is, as you're saying, we're coming back to unification of these things. So we're starting to understand it in the scientific language, we're starting to understand what the ancients actually meant by such a concept as the World Tree.
In many ways we are in a position where we can really have a much better understanding of the Mayan calendar than the ancient Maya ever had. That's one of the, I've said that before.
Kelly: That's a beautiful thing. I like that.
Dr. Calleman: Yes. And we shouldn't dismiss all the knowledge that has been coming from our science over such a long time. We should, I think, not make it into a sterile, technical thing, this knowledge. But try to unify it with a cosmic vision that sees that there is intelligence in the universe and there are processes that are guiding us that are spiritual beings.
Kelly: Well, January 5, 1999, was when the galactic underworld began, right?
Dr. Calleman: Yes.
Kelly: OK. So maybe we could just talk about that and where we're going from here in the next four years. It's obviously having huge impact on individual and collective consciousness, and you've been studying this. I'd love to hear what you have to say about it.
Dr. Calleman: Yes, that's true. What happened, then, as you're saying, January 5, 1999, we sort of started on a new terrace of the cosmic pyramid, we climbed up another one of these nine levels. And so we came up on the eighth level. Now there's still one more to go, which will be activated in the year 2011. But this one was the eighth level and it brought with it a shift in how to perceive reality in the sense that it's been a time that has favored the right brain half with the intuitive abilities of the human mind, feminine aspects of reality if you like.
This is really something that serves to create a balance on a global scale because as I mentioned earlier, this great cycle that had started 5000 years ago, in a sense it created a world of imbalance, koyaanisqatsi, as the Hopi would call it. A world that very much emphasized the left brain half, which is the more rational brain half, the more technical, mathematical brain half.
It seems that what is behind this activation of the galactic underworld is this need to create on a global scale a balance of these two aspects of the human being that we may refer to as the intuitive and the rational mind.
It's also a time that serves to create a kind of a balance on a global scale where this great cycle essentially created a world that was dominated very much from the Western hemisphere, which is really like the left brain half of the global brain, if you like. So what we have been seeing, at least in an economical sense during this whole galactic underworld is a strengthening of the Eastern hemisphere in very significant regards.
So it's all about creating a kind of balance between the hemispheres, whether you're looking at the hemispheres as the hemispheres of the human mind or the hemispheres of the planet, the east and west.
Kelly: We're having a crosspollination happening now. We're having a hemispheric synchronation going on globally. It's interesting. Your whole theory is just fascinating.
Dr. Calleman: We are like part of this global brain that includes all of humanity. But at the same time, not everyone is affected to the same degree. It's a whole range of effects of this shift that takes place. So there are some people that are becoming superintuitive, as well as there are still people that are almost completely unaffected by these new energies. So it's a whole range in the way that people are affected by them. But it's, in the large scale, it is a collective process of change.
Kelly: You said the galactic underworld really started a whole development of intuition and telepathy, repatterning consciousness.
Dr. Calleman: Yeah. And then you might say increased synchronicity among people. People, at the very least, people are now becoming much more aware of the synchronicities that are happening in their lives, which is just really a kind of evidence that we are part of the same process. If we're not part of the process jointly that is developing according to a rapid rhythm of new spiritual energies coming in, then we would not be experiencing these kind of synchronicities. That is certainly something that has increased very dramatically. If you go back 50 years in time, or I should say 60 years in time, hardly anyone would talk about the phenomenon of synchronicity. But now it's a reality to many, many people.
Kelly: And I'm seeing that a lot of people are having huge growth leaps in terms of just coming to a place of healing within themselves about whatever issues have gone on in their lives with their parents or whatever. That there is an opportunity to perhaps clear through karma more quickly now because of the accelerated frequencies, is that true?
Dr. Calleman: I would say so. It has a little bit to do with different perceptions of time. It's like earlier, people would be, in the great cycle, in this 5,0000 year period, people would be very much into linear time thinking. Very much into cause and effect. And people would be very stuck in views that something may be in their path, that could be like something that happened in very early childhood that caused their current situation, as if there was a straight line going from that event to their reality of the current time. As we've entered this galactic underworld, it's a new perception of time. It is more about moment. Time is perceived more as moment by moment by moment. And that frees us up to not necessarily look upon things in our past as having caused anything that we may lament at the current time. It opens up a freedom to look upon, detach or link to any events in our past. So there is this freedom to be in the present moment that allows for a higher degree of healing.
That's one way of looking at it. So healing, as you're mentioning now, of course there are new techniques and new things coming in to bring it about. But it's also because we are not that stuck in the linear perception of time.
Kelly: Well, time is definitely doing strange things. I thought it was because I was getting older. [laughs]
Dr. Calleman: Yes.
Kelly: But it's happening for younger people, too, huh?
Dr. Calleman: Yes. Absolutely.
Kelly: We can accomplish so much in such a short period of time. But then when I look back, a month ago seems like a year ago. So it has this kind of strange, morphic, changing quality.
Dr. Calleman: Yes, yes. I'm sure there are so many people that are listening to this that can relate to what you're saying, that what happened a month ago feels like a year ago. It's just not the current reality, because the energies are coming in at such a speed that what was a month ago, is not really that relevant for the present moment.
Kelly: Do you feel that we're being pushed more into the present moment by these frequencies?
Dr. Calleman: Yes. I think that is exactly what is happening. It comes to mind to me, what is said in the Book of Revelations/ It's one of the last chapters, the Book of Revelation where it talks about the past will no longer be. I think that's a direct quote from the Book of Revelation. This sort is what is happening. Whatever happened in the past, it goes away much more quickly. So it's interesting to see that there is some kind of a resonance between what the Mayan calendar says and what the Book of Revelation says in this regard.
Kelly: So what we're really doing is moving towards a nondualistic state of consciousness where we're totally in the present moment?
Dr. Calleman: Yes. That's how I understand the cosmic plan and the Mayan calendar. That we will not be under the influence of past energies in the same sense. And that is the same thing as saying that we are brought to the present moment. I also perceive it that we will be living moment by moment by moment rather than according to the timeline which we have. When we were young, you and I, I'm sure we had this idea that life ahead was like some kind of a line, some kind of a time line where there were markers for the kind of things that we would go through in life. But I think that time line may come to an end, or at least it will not dominate us. That will create a completely new opening to a new way of crafting life that is almost incomprehensible at the present time.
Kelly: And so much stress today is caused by that time line, deadlines. All that. It all has to happen by next week or tomorrow, or whenever. So you think that's going to completely disappear?
Dr. Calleman: Whenever you say completely, it will probably be wrong. But it's something that I think will be relegated to a lesser role. I do believe that we will be sort of standing on everything that evolution, at that point, will have brought to us. So I don't think there will be a time where we will perceive ourselves as starting over. It's just that we will be, I think we will be continuing, but we will be continuing from a different frame of consciousness, from a different perception of reality. That's basically how I see it.
Kelly: Why do you think the calendar ends when it does?
Dr. Calleman: Well, I think that's really a question to ask God. That's how I look upon it. In other words, why did God design the creation in this way? And I think it was designed in this way because we were meant to come to some kind of an insight, to come to some kind of a unification, some kind of a state of oneness. I think this is sort of the whole idea behind creation as I can understand it. It's a very profound question. But I think it's a plan for all of the universe, including our own galaxy, including our own planet, here on Earth. This plan is meant to come to some kind of an insight to see the world without the separating boundaries that we have been, up until now. And I think that's really what life is all about in the sense that I think that's how the Devine has structured creation in order for us to come to that point.
Kelly: Do you have any seminars or lectures coming up in the United States?
Dr. Calleman: It's not really planned. I will be going to Seattle in a couple of days, but really I haven't planned any talks or anything like that at this point. Part of what I will be doing is that I will be working on a documentary film that has started to be produced in Vancouver in Canada, actually. Another thing that I will be doing is to start writing, I've already started, I might say, on a new book, one that will be specifically be addressing the question of biological evolution. In other words, how did we, biologically, become the kind of beings that we are. And something I hope and think will have great consequences for the way we look at medicine and healing practices and all these kind of things.
But it will all be based on the background of the Mayan calendar, because the way I look upon it, there's no way, actually, to get a holistic understanding of our world without having the Mayan calendar as a background.
Kelly: What's your website?
Dr. Calleman: My website is Calleman.com. So it's Calleman.com.
Kelly: Carl, it's been wonderful having you on the show. I hope we get to have another chat, since I bought this calling card to Sweden. I have 4,000 minutes I can use.
Dr. Calleman: Yes, yes. Thank you very much. I've been very pleased to be part of it, and I really enjoyed this.
Kelly: Well, thank you so much. Dr. Carl Johan Calleman's website is Calleman.com. That's Calleman.com. Our next show is with author Daniel Pinchbeck. In his book, "2012," Daniel take the role of a modern shaman and embarks on a kaleidoscopic, paradigmshifting journey that revolves around 2012. It's going to be good, so stay tuned. Please check out my new website, Theatreofthemind.com. Come by, say hi, leave a comment. You know how I love them.
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Thanks for listening, everybody. Until next time, be well.
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