Ancient
Spiritual Technologies
By John Major Jenkins
(bio | web)
author of Maya Cosmogenesis 2012
reprinted from Psychic Reader Newspaper, July 3, 2001
The ancient Mayan civilization understood the universal principles
that create and sustain the world. These "first principles"
underlie the physical laws that modern science has partially mastered
and used to create technological miracles, but the first principles
of Mayan sacred science embraced a much larger universe in which human
beings were seen to be multidimensional and capable of traveling beyond
time and space, beyond the confines that limit modern science with
its "laws" that are valid only in the physical three-dimensional
plane. But human beings, with our capacity for supra-sensory spiritual
vision, are more than three-dimensional.
We are amazed by the ancient Maya and their baffling, complicated
calendar science, and how they built their huge stone cities without
using beasts of burden. Writer Colin Wilson chastises them for creating
toys with little wheels while failing to build wagons and harness
animals into slavery for the benefit of hauling stones. We sift through
their documents, carvings, and fragmented traditions looking for something
that our modern mentality can grab hold of and appreciate. We look
for a bolt, or a gear, or something that would prove to us that the
Maya did indeed have a civilization. We have been indoctrinated into
a materialistic mindset, and even among more open minded and conscious
seekers our biases run deep. We should beware of examining ancient
cultures with physics-colored glasses. Perhaps we are being ethnocentric
in looking for evidence of what our own culture values. Perhaps the
value of ancient civilizations lies not in a hope that they, at times,
struggled up to the same technological level that we recognize as
evidence of being civilized. Perhaps for the Maya, as with the Kogi
or the Australian aborigines, material technology was briefly flirted
with, recognized as an ego-dominated deathtrap, and was quickly abandoned
to pursue the higher yearnings of the human spirit in realms that
we might call metaphysical, imaginal, or shamanic. Here among the
ruins, perhaps, lies an inner technology of personal transformation
that our civilization lost long ago, leaving us cast adrift in a reduced
world ruled by matter, machines, and marketing gimmicks peddling pre-fab
paradigms. And perhaps this is what we seek in looking for artifacts
among the debris of ancient civilizations.
The ancient Vedic civilization is not particularly celebrated for
material achievements and yet, like the Maya, they enjoyed a sophisticated
understanding of celestial cycles as well as a deep understanding
of human spirituality. In fact, the Hindu-Vedic sages mastered magical
techniques or siddhis with which their consciousness could be projected
into animals, inanimate objects (which also contained a soul), and
into distant times and places. We can only hope that someday we might
be able to create a cultural context in which human beings might once
again cultivate this kind of "inner" technology. In the
light these achievements, the so-called "miracle" of television
appears to be an unnecessary joke, useful only to those whose consciousness
has been seriously downsized.
Modern historical investigation continues to push back the dating
of the origins of civilizations and the advent of material technologies.
And we may be able to identify hardware technology inside the Great
Pyramid of Egypt, Stonehenge, and at other perplexing ancient sites.
However, that doesn’t deny the deeper metaphysical significance
of, for example, the Great Pyramid, as intended by its builders. The
arguments of modern independent researchers for advanced technology
in ancient times is important, as it increases respect for these ancient
cultures among those who value these kinds of achievements, but it
somewhat misses the point: It’s like celebrating Einstein for
working in a patent office. The problem is similar to the quest for
lost Atlantis or the Himalayan Shambala that disappeared into the
shadows as humanity descended into an increasingly dense and materialistic
age. It’s not that Atlantis or Shambala lies hidden in some remote
valley or underwater grave. The point is that humanity has forgotten
how to be in that place where Atlantis / Shambala did and always will
reside. These clarifications form a significant part of my next book,
Ancient Gnosis and the Galaxy, to be published with Inner Traditions
International in 2002. Here’s an advance excerpt:
The Primordial Tradition is a state of mind rather than a distant
Golden Age or ancient location. As a state of mind, the Primordial
Tradition is accessible to any person or culture, at any time or
place, without the aid of direct transmission through lineage or
Atlantean antecedent. The current pop-culture quest to trace fragments
of compelling "evidence" back to some Atlantean Ur-civilization
misses the point, and is evidence of the over-literal preoccupations
of Western "modern" consciousness. An incredibly low-minded
manifestation of this is the mass-media’s treatment of Maya
and Egyptian archaeology, revealing an inability to see anything
beyond treasure hunting, gold artifacts, and scary mummies. The
deeper truth of our search for lost "artifacts" is our
desire to make visible a knowledge or mindset which is more comprehensive
and fulfilling. As with Shambala, which faded into invisibility
as humanity lost the ability to see it, the Primordial Tradition
fades but reemerges in places conducive to discovering and appreciating
its profound depth and wisdom. This explains the ancient Maya's
isolation and independent genius which nevertheless had tapped into
the same doctrines also found in ancient Vedic and Egyptian cosmology.
Trans-oceanic voyages are not required for this simultaneous non-local
emergence.
We may find engines in the sands of Egypt, computers in the jungles
of Guatemala, and gears in Paleolithic encrustations of lava, and
this may—indeed, should—create awe and wonder among scientists
and the interested public in general. But it shouldn’t distract
us from laying aside our own civilization’s faulty assumptions
to truly learn from the high metaphysical teachings offered by ancient
civilizations, including the Egyptian, Vedic, and Mayan.
My work, as published in Maya Cosmogenesis 2012 (Bear & Company,
1998), has been to reconstruct ancient Mayan cosmology, to sift through
the millennia of encrusted ideas, sorting through layers of garbage,
to emerge with an understanding of what they considered to be important.
For the most part they didn’t care about wheels, calendar gears
as envisioned by modern scholars, or anything close to a material
technology. But they were clairvoyant engineers of time travel and
architects of hyper-dimensional wormholes in space-time. They were
masters of the structure of the universe and they were astronomer-mathematicians
who could perceive and calculate the timetables of human unfolding.
All this without ironworks, telescopes, microwave ovens, light bulbs,
or re-sealable plastic bags. The greatest achievement of the Maya,
and the greatest knowledge their living representatives can offer
us today, is in the field of spiritual technology, so that we can
developing or rediscover our full human potential.
