Wednesday, November 11, 2009

A New Timepeace


Bending and Mending Time

© 1995-2009
by Joyce Mason
All Rights Reserved

There are many ways people handle the artificial construct we humans have created to organize ourselves—linear time. While the Great Kreskin bends spoons with his psychic powers, I bend time. I pack more into an hour than most people do in a day. Then there are laid-back types who would rather do as little as possible and put off until tomorrow anything that doesn’t have to be done today.

On the opposite end of stretching every hour beyond its limit is psychiatrist Carl Jung’s principle of synchronicity or meaningful coincidence. Synchronicity has nothing to do with squeezing the last second out of each hour you are living, therefore exercising control over it. Synchronicity is being at the right place at the right time—ignoring linear time altogether and simply being present, living your life, and minding your own business.

When we step out of linear time, we are in the realm of the gods and all the beings or forces that can create miracles.

In order to bring you just the right “coincidence,” these “people” can’t be bothered with clocks and calendars. They’re too confining.

My friends call me the Queen of Synchronicity. My stories are so fantastic; you’d think I made them up. Since I both stretch time and ignore it, I play both ends of the opposition between linear time and perfect timing. If this sounds like doublespeak and a bit confusing, think about how all great truths have some element of paradox. We need time so we can make the most of our experience on the planet, to bring ourselves together often and long enough (and at regular intervals) to accomplish certain things. But real magic can only happen if we step out of time...

...and you guessed it. Today’s world demands that we learn to do both.

Cracking Clocks & Calendars: Saturn, Chiron, and Time

You can say good-bye to time as we knew it. In the 1980s and ‘90s, we kept hearing about a paradigm shift, that time would accelerate. You’re not just imagining it, if you feel like you’re about to take the leap into warp speed and hyperspace. What in the world is going on? It’s something outer-planetary, but before we can make that jump to the trans-Saturnian planets, let’s start with Saturn itself, the ruler of earth, order, clocks—and endings.

Traditionally, Saturn rules time. Culturally, we know Chronos (Saturn) as Father Time bringing out the old year. He is in charge of calendars, watches, and clock-watching. The image that leaps to mind for me is from the wonderful adult fairy tale The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. In that book the Prince, a naive boy from asteroid B-612, is perplexed in his space travels by a planet full of accountants where all they do is live by the second hand of their stopwatches, obsessing over efficiencies, thinking all this is terribly important. (To the boy, who just doesn’t get it, things like love and friendship are what counts). The parody isn’t even thinly disguised. We know which planet he was on!

One of the most brilliant and mind-boggling book I have ever read is Barbara Hand Clow’s, Chiron: Rainbow Bridge Between the Inner and Outer Planets. [1] If Chiron is the bridge between Saturn (time) and what’s beyond it, we need to know Chiron’s relationship to time itself in order to understand what’s going on with this speed-up we have begun to experience since Chiron’s discovery in 1977.

“Chiron...explicitly focuses into Saturnian time higher dimensions ruled by Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto,” [2] according to Barbara Clow. Further, she introduces the concept of Chirotic time—being out of linear time—and states that Chiron rules synchronicity. In other words, to bring multi-dimensional consciousness down to earth—channeling, cosmic advice and direction, inspiration from beyond the limits of our own minds—we must be run (not walk!) out of time. We have to slip between the cracks of the clock.

We are running out of time. In 1995, theologian and cosmologist Matthew Fox said scientists calculated that “our ecological crisis will be irreversible if we don’t change the down-spiraling pattern within the next 16 years.” [3] Timing is scary stuff.

When asked how we can circumvent global disaster, Fox said the shortcut to healing the Earth is through ritual.

The shortcut to healing the Earth is through ritual.


Ritual involves taking time to honor the sacred—to honor turning-points (also connected with Chiron [4]) such as solstices, equinoxes, the Sabbath, and planetary ingresses, as well as personal turning points like birth, death, and everything in-between (Solar Returns, “coming of age,” marriage, divorce, and menopause). Time brings us together, but within a sacred ceremonial circle, time as we know it ceases to exist. It becomes Chirotic time, where we relinquish being controlled by clocks and calendars to let in other realities. In myth, Chiron was abandoned by his Father, Chronos (Saturn), so to tap into the great teacher/healer archetype that Chiron represents within each of us, we must let Kronos leave. We must become “time orphans.”

This is how we must learn to live in order to survive—and to have a future. Now I am going to use another”c” word (besides clocks and calendars) that makes some people cringe—and that’s channeling. If you think people are hokey who bring in entities from the beyond, I invite you to retain your skepticism, while at the same time, opening your mind to the concept that there’s more than one style of channeling. In the movie, Oh God!, George Burns as the Divine One says, “I don’t do miracles. They’re too flashy.” Professional channelers may be too flashy for you, and as Gertrude Stein said, “Style is everything.” Beyond making divine direction too “Hollywood,” anyone can have a personal link to All That Is, or any particular part of It, including your own Higher Self. Channeling has nothing to do with drawing crowds. That’s simply one style of delivery.

To tap into the great teacher/healer archetype that Chiron represents … we must become “time orphans.”



The act of opening to information beyond the physical is what Chirotic consciousness and being “in a state of Chiros” is all about. What I’m really talking about in this article is akin to learning the e-mail address of God/Goddess/All That Is (however you perceive heavenly help and helpers) and having a personal pipeline to Them any time you want. Who would argue the need for divine direction any time, but especially in these times? (Or the relevance of Chiron as a bridge between Heaven and Earth?)


Why Time and Perfect Timing Are Opposites

Saturn, which rules time and everything to do with it, is the planet of control. To bring in information—to channel it—requires surrender and a very open mind. Same goes for bringing in meaningful coincidences and experiences (synchronicity). Some people learn to do this for 20-30 minutes at a time in meditation, or perhaps create an altered state of consciousness while running; however, what I am talking about (here’s your Future Shock) is living in this consciousness most of the time.

I do not advocate throwing out Saturn and all our timepieces, right this minute, in favor of something totally new. Chiron rules evolution—organic change that happens a step at a time. As the leading planet in Time Evolution, Chiron is the bridge between Old (Saturn) and New (Uranus), between that which is stuck and unchanging and that which is revolutionary. Chiron’s role, in time and all things, is to help us synthesize the opposites within us. Barbara Hand Clow connects Chiron with the point in the brain where both sides merge—the corpus collosum. In that physiological midpoint, we weave the countless polarities within us: masculine/feminine, light/dark, old/new, and time/timelessness.

Going from the personal to the planetary, perhaps you remember talk, around the Harmonic Convergence, that from that day forward, time would speed up. José Argüelles is the Father of the Harmonic Convergence, where people did exactly what Matthew Fox prescribes—ceremonies at sacred sites to heal the earth. Argüelles described the August 1987 event as the “corpus collosum of history,” leading us to “the Armageddon Bypass.” If we’re lucky, the Chirotic chain reaction set up at those sites is like a time-release capsule of light that will cause a continuous chain reaction of healing. It started in time, but the effect is not linear at all. It went way beyond what happened that weekend, maybe even this lifetime.

We can learn and be healed (mythical Chiron’s main jobs were astrologer, teacher and healer) in direct proportion to our ability to get out of our own way and let information come through us. Good channels are only as good as they can surrender to being a conduit. This is not an ego trip. Good readers are good because they put aside their ego and let the information come through them. It is the epitome of open-mindedness. Because humor is healing, I share the crazy things I channel, as they alight, sent by (I am sure) many muses that enjoy playing with my mind. To have synchronicity—to know things—to get good cosmic direction—takes “cannelloni consciousness.” You know, that big tube-shaped pasta, open on both ends. It takes a big macaroni mind, where one end opens to the cosmic and divine (the outer planets) and the other end opens to our Saturn-bound minds and bodies, here on earth. Chiron is the pasta planet—the tube-shaped noodle in our “noodle.”

Saturn/Chiron Opposition and Chiron’s Perihelion

For over a decade, Saturn and Chiron opposed each other in the sky as a prelude to Chiron’s perihelion on Valentine’s Day 1996. This pair of phenomena—the Saturn/Chiron opposition and Chiron’s pass closest to earth—brought time down to earth in a whole new way. Time and Timelessness danced, each stretching itself to its farthest point on the continuum away from the other. We found ourselves living in a new world where time was concerned. The Internet was starting to catch on. One month, a few cutting-edge friends had e-mail, and within a few mere months, “being online” caught on like wildfire.

Time and technology were mating at warp speed! Soon our lives were overtaken by voice mail, faxes and e-mail. Communications that used to take days or hours now take minutes. We can virtually talk to anyone around the world, just like that link-up to God/ Goddess/All That Is, I keep claiming anyone can do. With telecommuting catching on, we have traded Saturn time-clock punching for a more independent, Uranian style of blending home and work—which is potentially Chironic for its balance (and synthesis of the best of old and new). We have clocks everywhere. We keep stretching time—doing more. We save even more time, taking classes on the Internet and shopping there more often than real malls. (Who has time?)

Saturn/Chiron Opposition: Time and Timelessness danced, each stretching itself to its farthest point on the continuum away from the other.

For a second time in recent history, Saturn opposed Chiron in 2003-04. By then the technological and resultant time changes that had begun in the mid-‘90s had quickened in more ways than one. The Speed-Up had become both the upside and the downside of the Communications Revolution. The better the tools, the more messages waiting, the more work we get done—the more work we make, because we have time for it.

Feel like your head is going to burst? If we don’t learn to get off the linear time merry-go-round and regain respect for life and its seasons, including a lot more downtime, we’re going to have a collective nervous breakdown. What we need to do is shrink our workweek and realize that there’s only so much any one person should do in a given time span, and that replenishment keeps workers fresh and creative, and their lives in balance. The prescription was in the sky as these changes went from breakthrough to commonplace (Saturn opposite Chiron). We, too, need to learn to do the dance between Time and Timelessness.

On the practical level, we would virtually solve our unemployment problems in the US if everyone worked four instead of five days a week. It would take some adjustments and re-evaluation of priorities to live on 80 percent of our salaries, but with the 20 percent leftover, there would be money to hire those out of work. The financial loss is really a myth. Calculate your costs to go to work each day, along with the money you could save with the extra eight hours—clipping coupons, calling around for the best price before your chronic time crunch causes you to buy things quickly, for convenience. You’d have more time to cook instead of that expensive habit, eating out. What if we each spent that day in nature? Playing? Imagine the clear-headedness you’d get by stepping off the treadmill and being close to the Earth, and the new respect you’d gain for Her and knowledge about how to do your part to ensure the “Armageddon Bypass.” (Think of the new and improved decisions you’d make, relinquishing the spur of the moment.) Our Protestant work ethic is responsible for the sad fact that Americans take fewer days off than virtually any other civilized country. If you are dying for a vacation, you’re probably right (the health implications of what we are doing to ourselves are frightening. Just think of the thing we have too many of and what’s the root of the word deadlines).

As Chiron reached its February 14, 1996 perihelion, we reached the climax of the time acceleration on Valentine’s Day. In its highly elliptical orbit, Chiron comes closest to the Sun in the sign of Libra, where it sojourns only 15 months. This event happens, roughly, only every 50 years—ironically, last time, when the United Nations was formed as a means for global peacemaking. On the 50th anniversary of the UN, it was time to make peace with time itself...

“A Culture of Peace through a Calendar of Peace”

...or so José Argüelles believes—the creator of that Ritual in Time to Save the Earth (Harmonic Convergence), co-founder of the first Earth Day, and the researcher who decoded the mysterious Mayan calendar system and the galactic nature of the Mayans’ reckoning of time (The Mayan Factor). In 1992, Argüelles, with his wife Lloydine, created Dreamspell: The Journey of Timeship Earth 2013. It contains the proofs and mathematics of using fourth-dimensional time, utilizing the root knowledge of the Mayans combined with information from the future. They are offering a completely new concept of time to benefit the biosphere and humankind. [5]

The Dreamspell Calendar is an alternative time-keeping device, in place of the unnatural Gregorian calendar. Based on a timing frequency, aligned with the cycles of nature and the galaxy, Dreamspell works as a 13-Moon, 28-day Solar calendar. Its proponents claim it enables us to tap into the solar and galactic frequencies of fourth-dimensional time, the same channels for tuning into déjà vue, synchronicity, and telepathy. Argüelles explains the time/timelessness puzzle this way: “Telepathy has everything to do with being synchronized in time which is, paradoxically at the same time, being synchronized in timelessness. That’s why telepathy can work so fast.”

Argüelles says, “Timelessness is all there is. It’s what we mean by the ever present here and now.” [6] He took his campaign to the UN to convert the world to the new calendar on its 50-year anniversary of the world peacekeeping organization—on the UN’s first Chiron Return. Not only is that timing synchronistic, but just about the time Chiron (timelessness), finished its long opposition with Saturn (time), Argüelles and his supporters were burning their calendars in a commitment to moving into the new time consciousness. In the Mayan prophecies, July 25, 1995, began a new holtun. A holtun is a 5-year cycle in which a planetary shift is expected to take place. He considered events around that time—Waco, Oklahoma City, the OJ trial, and the war in Bosnia--all to be the products of a techno reality where machines run rampant, wars continue, and we have a complete inability to control them. From his viewpoint, he Gregorian calendar promotes a mechanical, false time that is killing us.

Timelessness is all there is. It’s what we mean by the ever present here and now. ~ Jose Argüelles

“The biosphere is in red alert,” according to Argüelles, who believes the Gregorian calendar is connected to the concept “time is money.” We have to realize instead, “time is art,” so we can begin operating creatively and as one toward global social change. “We can actually take our lives back on this planet and put them into a much more benevolent, harmonious form.” It makes perfect sense that this would require being in touch with, in tune with, and in sync with nature. The Dreamspell advocates call this “living the rainbow.” (Chiron as the rainbow bridge.) [7]

Taking Your Time

I am both obsessed with, defiant of, and sick of clocks and calendars. Lately, I am more and more resentful of Saturn’s time limits. Like any person with a strong pull on her personal planets by the trans-Saturnians,


I feel evolutionary change ahead of many others, where I live (and lately in the pit of my stomach as my stress level rises from “too much to do” and playing Beat the Clock around the clock).

How’s your relationship with time? Is it time to rethink
 it?


I know something has to give, and I don’t want it to be me. I have this image of a paddleball, being whirled above someone’s head. (Could that someone be Chronos?). Each of us is like the rubber ball on the end of the elastic string, whirling faster and faster, until finally, we break off into a new orbit—one I pray goes slower. (Sometimes I think this is the real purpose of the time marathon, to break the time barrier and leap into less hyperspace!)

In Sedona, Arizona, where I spent many a Solar Return, Chirotic time is the normal state. In Rainbow Bridge, Barbara Clow connects Chiron with spiraling energy, so perhaps the well-known vortexes of invisible swirling energy (that put Sedona on the map) make it so Chirotic—so timeless. I bend time there better than any place I go. A day seems like a week.


When “something told me” to go to Sedona for my birthday in 1993, I knew there was more to it than avoiding a Solar Return chart that was too 12th-house for my taste. After years of experience, I trusted I should just go, and the reasons would come forth, in their own time. The opportunity came up to write about Time just before I left, long after my reservations were made. It seemed important to see my friend, practical mystic Kadea Megara, who had recently begun to work with José Argüelles on promoting the 13-Moon calendar. (My watch was broken, and apparently, I found out, so was my calendar.)

Writing this article really got to me, in ways I have only hinted. For one thing, I convinced myself to drop my time base at my day job, sooner than later (before I drop myself). Now I am wearing a new and improved timepiece less often, and have both the Dreamspell and Celestial Influences calendars on my wall. I’m working on weaving the opposites—in my own way, trying to rectify the long Chiron/Saturn opposition that is still struggling within me—trying to make my own peace with Time. Chiron is winning...

Ultimately, out of the ashes of our burnout, synchronicity will rise as our truth. According to the Celestine Prophecy, that’s the sign of the times—and for many of us, of the new time. [8]

~~~

Author’s Update: Since writing the original version of this article in 1996, I have retired from my long government career. I sleep until I wake up most days, and I have reduced my watch wearing habit by at least 50 percent. Someone also wrote a book that makes a great PS to this article in its title, Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now.


NOTES

[1] Clow, Barbara Hand. Chiron: Rainbow Bridge Between the Inner and Outer Planets (Llewellyn: 1987).

[2] Ibid., p. 2.

[3] “Reinventing Work,” lecture by Matthew Fox, July 1995 in Sacramento, Calif., sponsored by Evolving Times.

[4] Brooks, Chris. Midpoint Keys to Chiron (AFA: 1992), p. 5-6.

[5] “The Return to Natural Time,” an interview with Dr. José and Lloydine Argüelles, The Planetary Wavespell newsletter, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Electric Moon 1995), pp 1-3.

[6] Ibid.

[7] For information on ordering Dreamspell calendars visit http://www.13moon.com/.

[8] Redfield, James, The Celestine Prophecy (Satori Publishing: 1993). On p. 15, describing the prophetic manuscript, the subject of this book, one of the characters states: “The First Insight occurs when we become conscious of the coincidences in our lives.”


Photo Credits (top): Twisted time © photobar - Fotolia.com; “How’s Your Relationship with Time?,” Soul Collage card created by Joyce, called Blind Trust.


The original version of this article was published in The Mountain Astrologer, Feb/Mar 1996

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