Saturday, June 25, 2011

Mayan Teacher Ac Tah's Visit to Boston

On the weekend of May 13-15, spiritual teacher and direct descendant Maya Ac Tah traveled to Boston from his home base in the Yucatan for a series of events in the Boston area. The events were sponsored by the Emergence Project and partners Boston Evolver, the Heartbeat Collective, and the Angel Room. Ac Tah was joined by James and Mai Needham who organized Ac Tah's US tour and friends Pepe and Becky. The theme of these events was "The Time has Come" -- Returning to the Ancient Wisdom.

Ac Tah's talks were fascinating and free ranging. He is well versed in contemporary neuroscience, astronomy, and quantum physics and has a unique capability to speak about the ancient Mayan wisdom in these frameworks when necessary to get a point across. (Interestingly, he's also well versed in the use of social media and carries a Blackberry.) One of his core messages is that "we need both the wisdom of ancestors and modern intelligence."

Another important message related to vibrational frequency. Ac Tah talked about ancient Mayan technologies for maintaining those vibrations on a mass scale (such as the pyramids) as well as the need for all of us to keep our vibrational energy as positive as possible during the time of the Shift. The ultimate goal of this personal spiritual work is to achieve a peaceful state of being on a planetary scale to guide us through the complications and disruptions taking place during the Shift by helping give birth to what Eckhart Tolle calls " a new earth". It's the equivalent on a spiritual level of "many hands make light work".

The Boston leg of the tour began on Friday evening. Ac Tah gave a talk at the Unity Church of God in Somerville, MA. The following day he gave a workshop at the same location. In that session, he taught a special Mayan exercise movement similar to Qigong or the movements found in Carlos Casteneda's Magical Passes.

On Saturday evening we gathered at the Heartbeat Collective in Jamaica Plain. For those unfamiliar, this group, led by Jason Cohen, is involved in many excellent transformational projects. One of these is an event called Forestdance, an annual sacred fire circle experience for reconnecting to the natural world. On Sunday, Ac Tah spoke in Marston Mills, Cape Cod courtesy of our partner Nicki Garner at the Angel Room. The weekend then concluded with a fundraising dinner at Cantina La Mexicana in Somerville.

This work is ongoing and we hope that you will feel empowered in your own way to engage in it by carrying Ac Tah's "messages of light" forward to others and integrating them into your own life.

Sunday, June 12, 2011

A Case of Mayan Misinterpretation: Our Letter to the Boston Globe

In matters related to the Shift, sensationalism still rules the mainstream media. It was quite interesting to see how much publicity was given over to Harold Camping’s May 21 apocalypse prediction while, at the same, the nuanced and thematically complex messages concerning the Mayan calendar are largely glossed over. A case in point was an editorial appearing in the Boston Globe about Camping’s prediction. Here’s what the Globe editorial, written on May 20, said in part: “And if tomorrow proves anticlimactic for Camping’s followers, well, there are other opportunities: The Mayan doomsday arrives, by some calculations, in December of next year." The phrase “Mayan doomsday” of course is inaccurate and misleading. We felt it necessary to send a letter to the Globe in reference to the editorial as follows:

We would like to correct an error appearing in the editorial in last Friday’s Globe referencing a “Mayan doomsday” event. We represent a nonprofit group working in the Boston area and engaged in ongoing research on Mayan culture and history. The idea that the Mayan Calendar predicts some sort of doomsday on December 21, 2012 is a common notion but quite incorrect according to sources within contemporary Mayan culture as well as well-respected scholars who have done significant research on the topic such as John Major Jenkins and Carl Calleman.

Contemporary Mayan interpreters such as Ac Tah (who we recently hosted in Boston) and the Mayan Council of Elders believe, as do many environmental scientists, that our current planetary way of life is unsustainable and threatens to create severe disruptions in an ecosystem that we have unfortunately come to take for granted. They do not believe that it's a foregone conclusion that there will be an event or series of events causing apocalyptic destruction of our planet. Rather they point out that, as a result of becoming out of balance with natural cycles and resources, we find ourselves in a time of crisis and great change requiring an intelligent and coordinated response.

This rather simple empirical observation is borne out by any number of research studies arriving at the same conclusion by scientific means. For example, the work of Lester Brown’s Earthwatch Institute as featured in the movie “Plan B: Mobilizing to Save Civilization” draws very similar conclusions. (Brown’s work was recently highlighted in a PBS special.) We sincerely hope that the Boston Globe will help its readers understand the gravity of our current ecological crisis and the need to seek and find permanent and lasting solutions to it.


The Globe published the letter and an edited version can be seen here. We also were happy to receive a supportive email from Mayan scholar John Major Jenkins noting: “That was a clear and cogent correction…Unfortunately, the avalanche of media misinformation is increasing unabated [making it] virtually impossible to present and rationally discuss the recent breakthroughs in understanding what the ancient Maya believed about 2012.”