THE PROPHECY INSIDE OF YOU

2012 has come and gone. The Age of Aquarius has become a footnote, Nostradamus has been all but forgotten, and Y2K has become a punchline. While we can hardly go a week without hearing about a new asteroid barreling towards the Earth or a preacher whipping up fear with biblical predictions of armageddon, thousands of other asteroids and predictions have vanished behind us into the pages of history, and we are still here. 

It would easy to become numb from the unending river of crisis and tragedy we are exposed to every day, even as new ages, promised saviors, and doomsdays all crumble into history.  It would be easy to medicate and distract ourselves with the deluge of unending entertainment streaming towards us, or perhaps to pin our hope on the next magical alignment of the planets and stars ... 

Or, we can accept the invitation that every prophecy from the beginning of time has offered us ... the call to become prophets ourselves.

Prophecy is not a prediction for the future written in stone or parchment; it is a spiritual revelation inviting us to bring ourselves into harmony with the deepest & most powerful forces of evolution in our world, & in our own hearts, and to take responsibility for living those truths in the world. Prophecy is the end of history, & the beginning of Presence.

We live in a time of tremendous transformation, and it is natural for our minds to seek to understand, predict, and create coping strategies to deal with these changes. This is not the function of prophecy, however. Prophecy does not tell us what will happen; true prophecy in any spiritual tradition invites us to become the change in the world. We can see this one in the Old Testament in a beautiful story of the Prophet Jonah. When God came to Jonah and asked him to deliver a prophecy to the city of Nineveh, a prophecy of complete destruction, the ruler of that city issued a proclamation to all of his people commanding them to stop everything they were doing, to cover themselves with sack cloth and ashes, to press themselves close to the earth, and to repent, to turn them from the ways they were living their lives, and to rise up in a new way of being. The story tells us that God's spared the city because they were willing to become the change the prophecy spoke of.

In the ancient pyramid City of Teotihuacan, their prophecies told them that every government institution Temple and home needs to be renewed, just as the days and seasons and years renewed themselves. As a result the entire culture transformed itself every 52 years when the sun and the inner planets of the solar system stood in the same place at the sky. Every household utensil, every ritual item, every ceremony in the law was composted and renewed every 52 years, as they buried every major Temple beneath the construction of a new temple, serving an even greater vision. Then after 486 years, the amount of time it takes all of the planets and the sun to return to their same places in the sky, the great city of Teotihuacan was itself burned to the ground as his people shifted to an entirely new way of living. They did not look to the skies for transformation; they looked to them for an invitation to become the living embodiment of the prophecy.

I had a wonderful reminder of this ancient truth to when I was visiting this sacred temple of Aramu Muru in Peru, where an entire cliff face has been carved flat with two great columns carved into the stone on either side and the great stone doorway carved in the middle. There are many stories of the ancient prophet who passed through the cliff face into another dimension carrying the great Sun disc from the Incan empire, and the people who have had profound visions of other realms when they meditated in the doorway. The prophecies say that in these times he will return to our world with the Sun disc bringing it forth from the rock.

I knelt there with my face pressed of the stone sinking deep into the silent spaciousness of my own true being, when a single thought passed through my mind. It would be so nice if you would open, I thought. And then a deep clear voice whispered back to me. It would be wonderful if you would open. I shook with laughter and walked away, having received the greatest invitation from this holy place.

Where is the invitation I am speaking of? Many people look to the skies and see extraordinary movements of the stars and planets as that invitation. Many people interpret conjunctions of the Pleiades and the Sun, at a configuration of the planets and equal distances around the Sun, the conjunction of the Sun with the galactic center, and many other compelling synchronicities as important signs calling us to transform. Others see the transformations our planet is moving through environmentally as another kind of invitation to change how we live. Still others look to the prophecies and calendrical cycles of ancient wisdom traditions for that invitation.

In my experience, these are fascinating metaphors and myths that stir the depths of our imaginations, but they are only reflections of the true invitation: the one that so many of us are hearing in own hearts, and feeling in every area of our lives. It is this inner invitation that leads us to seek in the sky for confirmation from the stars, the changing ecosystem, and the ancient wisdom keepers. What we discover when we truly look into these beautiful metaphors and myths, is that they all point us back to the place the invitation began: to our own hearts and to the change that has already begun deep within.

One of the most beautiful prophecies for our time comes from the ancient Andean wisdom keepers. Their prophecies speak of a coming time in Human history called the Taripay Pacha, the age of meeting ourselves again, when the entire human race will go through an initiation that was once reserved for only the most profoundly evolved Mystics and shamans. They call this the fourth initiation of human evolution, the opening of the spiritual heart, a time when we will abandon the constant quest for power over our worlds, because we deeply experience ourselves as our world. Their prophecies say that in this time 12 people will come together in the sacred temples of the Andes to be the first human beings to experience the fifth level of initiation, the opening of the spiritual eye. These people will recognize each other with a clear vision of the spiritual I and will share the capacity to heal all illness and suffering. Among these 12 healers, two people, one man and one woman will begin to glow with a light from within as they become the first to human beings to experience the seventh of initiation, the lighting of the spiritual sun.

These prophecies are especially powerful for me because of their profound resonance with the teachings of the ancient Toltec masters in Teotihuacan. Instead of initiations, the Toltec tradition speaks of "dreams," or levels of consciousness and evolution. The Toltec Seers derived these prophecies from observing the complementary processes of their own personal evolution, the collective evolution of humanity, and the shifts in the emanations of our sun. With each shift of consciousness in an individual, a new possibility is reinforced for the entire species; and as the species embraces that possibility, The quality of light emanating from the sun shifts, prompting another evolutionary leap in matter.

The Toltec seers can see that, in the First Dream, we are living our lives in the way that we were programmed, following the dictates of all the beliefs we were given as children. In the Second Dream, we become aware of how these old beliefs are limiting and poisoning our happiness, but we have no power to change our programming. In the Third Dream, we begin to question these beliefs and reprogram ourselves with beliefs that more accurately reflects the beauty and blessing of this world. We are working to take our power back from the old program and to acquire power to create our new dream.

In the Fourth Dream, corresponding to the fourth initiation of the Inca, we have won the war against our old beliefs, and we are living in heaven on earth, immune to the fear and judgment of the human dream around us. In the old Toltec mythologies, this was symbolized by images of human sacrifice. As with many powerful symbols this one was later distorted by those seeking to secure their own power and control. Originally however, the ancient initiates understood that the image of polluting our hearts from our chests really symbolizes the act of taking our hearts back from the old identity, the self image, which has ruled our lives so far. Once our hearts are free from the tyrannical self image that battered and abused them for so many years, we can offer our hearts to the Sun, to the source of life itself for healing and renewal. This is the same spiritual truth offered in the ancient Incan prophecies, in the story of Aramu Muru: the Sun disc is our own heart, and the stone is the heavy burden of history, hope and belief that makes up a human identity.

In the Fifth Dream, corresponding to the fifth initiation of the Inca, we begin to experience ourselves as the world around us; our individual soul merges with the soul of the world. We begin to experience the earth as one living being, and we began to live our lives with a deep and satisfying feeling of connection. We see things as they truly are, with open eyes and open hearts when we can see the world as it is truly, restored and whole, our very presence lifts those around us into states of healing and wholeness.

I cannot speak deeply from my own experience of the Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Dreams, because I have experienced them only in fleeting glimpses through the grace of my elders. I can only speak from the teachings they have shared with me, and my own momentary glimpses. In the Sixth Dream, corresponding to sixth initiation of the Inca, I have been told that our souls expand even further to merge with the soul of the Sun. We begin to shine from within, and to illuminate everything around us. In the Seventh and Eighth Dreams, levels of consciousness and evolution beyond even the reach of the Incan prophecies, we merge with the soul of light itself, and then with the very force of life that creates, sustains, and renews everything.

In these, the deepest teachings and prophecies of the Incan and Toltec traditions, the only "earth changes" are changes in what is possible for us as individuals and as a species. The earth and all of its inhabitants have been in a continuous process of change from the beginning; "stability," "balance," and "equilibrium" have always been an illusion of consciousness produced by a dreaming mind trying to achieve a sense of permanence and separateness, in a world where these do not exist.

That being said, our desperate attempts to achieve permanence and separateness are ironically triggering an extraordinary acceleration of our consciousness, and of the planet's evolutionary process. We cannot continue to exist as a species of dreaming minds, or as an individual mind, in our current form. Each of us will evolve, or we will fail to adapt -- and if we fail to adapt, we will be recycled. Awareness will continue -- nothing is lost in recycling, of course -- but the particular masterpiece of art that is your dreaming mind will cease to exist.

It is this great act of evolution, individual and collective, that all of our prophecies speak of. They invite us to see what we are doing to ourselves and our world and develop a more adaptive belief system. They invite us to develop the habit of letting go of all our beliefs, so we can respond at the speed of life. We can drop all identification, recover the integrity of an undefended heart, see the world nakedly, and become a moment-to-moment expression of the infinite force of Life itself.

This is not a small thing to ask of ourselves, of course -- it is the greatest adventure of all. It is the true human sacrifice, the harrowing of hell, the alchemist's quest and the artist's greatest masterpiece. And it all begins the moment we recognize that the great mythologies of earth change, evolution, revolution and revelation do not refer to something outside ourselves that threatens us -- they are all invitations to become the change we're looking for, and instruction manuals on what must change.

Are you willing to become  the living embodiment of prophecy? Listen ... there is one written inside you waiting to be lived into being. It is your destiny.

Deep peace to you,
Hunter