Endtime Essays, 8 (final)

Beneath the Gaze of the Goatfish

Transpeciation, Telepathy, and the Terma Pattern

Well, up to now, I´ve been pretty restrained (!!??) expressing the imaginative power that keeps me alive, and put me on the glorious planet in the first place, but all that is about to change. On this site, I can only do so much, say, and dare so much. Now, if it strikes your fancy, you are invited to the limit of what I can do, and care to do, in the cybernetic medium.

Dorje Legpa, Nyingma protector of terma teachings.
(Detail of black tanka in mineral pigments, Tibet, 19th C.
Collection of Shelley and Donald Rubin. Demonic Divine,
Serendia Publications, Chicago, 2004)

"Plants don´t grow in cyberspace," says Dale Pendell, with psychoactive species on his mind. But what about myths? (Definition: a myth is a psychoactive story that implants memes in the human mind, generating ritual behavior, non-ordinary insight, and opportunities for expanding our species--specific potential.) Just maybe myths do grow in cyberspace, and just maybe they don´t. I can´t say for sure, but I have a strong hunch that some of those who read these essays, and reflect on them over time, will eventually come to definitive insight on that.

What myths are you going to grow in your minds, my fair-eyed friends, and let flower in your lives? It remains to be seen... for those who can see, who care to see... what myths lead to the planetary connection, or away from it. I´m just a country boy from Maine, dancing through the last days of my mission.

My sense of humanity has gone down the drain,
Behind every beautiful thing there is some kind of pain.
She wrote me a letter, and she wrote it so kind,
She put down in writing what was in her mind.
I just don´t see why I should even care.
It´s not dark yet, but it´s gettin´ there.
- Dylan, "Not Dark Yet," Time Out of Mind

Interactive Pictures

The map of Pegasus from The New Patterns in the Sky by Julius Staal shows theta Pegasi, the southernmost star in the composite, bordering on Aquarius. Staal places it in the right ear of the Winged Horse. I would put this star on the forehead of the Manitou (traditionally, the Waterbearer or Aquarius) , thus giving definition to the head of that figure and integrating it visually with the Pegasus composite. Again, this is not Lash recklessly screwing around with the eternal archetypes: a number of stellographers (constellation designers) in ancient and modern times have merged these figures. Since there are no stars defining the head and shoulders of the Manitou, the nearby stars of Pegasus suggest a merge.

The oldest versions of Mesopotamian sky lore, as well as native-mind lore from as far afield as Native America and Polynesia, tend to favor merges that form the largest composites that can be viewed without scanning.

The peripheral vision of our ancestors was both wider and more well-defined than ours today. The Bushman tribes of the Kalihari desert could see the moons of jupiter with the naked eye. Meaning they could see about four to five times as many stars as we can. With visual depth and definition of such magnitude, indigenous people certainly saw the sky in a different way, and may well have observed larger composites than we are able to view without optical scanning.

Aquarius the Waterbearer is the sole figure in the Zodiac who represents a guide of sorts—perhaps guardian would be a better term—but the theme of inner guidance belongs to the Fishes, if you recall. The theme of Aquarius is symbiotropism: attraction to what allows a species or individual to survive and thrive. The Aquarian figure would then be the one who guards, and dispenses, the symbiotropic cues, i.e., the memes that engender our highest potential as a species. Aquarius and the Fishes are interactive: the Western Fish swims into the "Aquarian waves" streaming from the urn held by the Manitou. This image exemplifies the value of the Zodiac as a graphic readout of directive myths.

In connecting the Manitou-Mesotes with the "inner Christ," I have tried to show that the self-guiding function in the human psyche acts like a supernatural presence that must not be confounded with the savior of Piscean religious dementia. Rather, the "inner guide" is a numinous personification of human instinct. Not a superhuman, salvific agent, and not a messiah, but an inborn force as deeply endowed in our species as the navigational instinct is in other animals such as salmon, whales, sea turtles, swallows, and monarch butterflies.

The above image is a merge of Staal´s graphics for Pegasus and Aquarius. It shows how theta Pegasi, placed in the ear of the flying horse, can as well mark the forehead of the Aquarian Manitou figure. Note that Staal gives Aquarius a head unrelated to the meager visible stars in the composite. He has the Waterbearer turned toward Pegasus and looking up at it, contrary to more common depictions of him looking to one side or the other, either toward the Fishes or the Goatfish. This variation suggests an interactive link between Aquarius and Pegasus, which I regard as instructive—but I propose making this link in a different way.

With theta Pegasi (336.83 ECL longitude, 7 degrees of the Sign Pisces) for the head star of the Manitou, that composite connects to the Winged Steed via the long splayed L extending from the Pegasus Square. Imagine the Square attached to the head of the Manitou like a cartoon balloon. The writing in the balloon is what occupies the mind of the Manitou: the phylogenetic record of humanity, or the inventory of symbiotropic cues, if you will. Remember that the Manitou is not a messianic figure or guru, but a supernatural reflection of human instinct that acts like an intrapsychic agent. This unique Zodiacal figure embodies the wisdom of our instincts. It can manifest in a humanoid male form, such as the classical Manitou or spirit of the wilderness, ancestral guides, deific forms (yidams), numinous female figures (dakinis, tutelary witches), and power animals.

I have suggested that the Manitou be regarded as "the matrix of animal powers." Equating the Manitou with the Gnostic Mesotes, I propose that the "Inner Christ" or "Etheric Christ" is a healing and mediating power that pervades the biosphere, rather than the mystical manifestation of a extraterrestrial savior believed to have incarnated in the man Jesus, or in any man, ever. Almost inevitably, those who encounter this entity encrust it with a pregiven set of salvationist beliefs. It is by no means easy to discharge such projections and see this figure differently. The mere challenge to such projections arouses huge resistance, so deeply rooted is our pathological dependence on a cosmic redeemer.

On this site and in Not in His Image, I have argued that Gnostic writings, once divested of the Christian overlay, provide a view of the Christos-generated Mesotes that can stand independent of the Biblical Christ and its esoteric variants. My formulation of Aquarius-Manitou, and its correlation to the Gnostic Mesotes, have been about thirty-five years in the making. It is a challenging proposition, and some of you may wish I would just get off it. Okay, okay. But reclaiming the Mesotes encounter from salvationism and framing it in the Sophianic vision of the earth is a correction that must be made, if only to provide an option for mystics of the future.

As I said in a recent exchange on Reality Sandwich: You cannot have the male avatar redemption myth and living Sophianic mysticism on the same planet.

Imaginative Leap

In Greco-Latin myth, Pegasus leaps from the Hippocrene Spring, the fountain of the horse, a place sacred to Apollo and the Muses. The spring was said to be produced when the hoof of the magical animal struck a rock at the moment the horse took flight. This is a mythological image of human imagination taking flight from its tellurian, earthbound roots, its leap made possible by the support the rock provides. Interestingly, the motif of a magic spring in Pegasus lore links that constellation to the same theme in indigenous lore on the Manitou.

Pegasus represents the power of imagination, the luminous epinoia of the Sophia myth. The Winged Steed takes an imaginative leap, but not merely into the wild blue yonder. Imagination gone off its rocker is not the message here. Recall the alchemical rule, cited in The Promise of a Lonely Planet, Part One:

In all thine operations, let the Work be guided by nature, according to the slow progression of metals in the bowels of the Earth. And in thine efforts, be guided in all ways by the true and not the fantastic imagination.

The leap of Pegasus is not a flight of fancy. The mark of the true imagination is that it charts pathways toward new experience, it does not present fantasy in place of experience. Imagination defines novelty, opening the way to free-form creative experimentation, and it also preserves the wisdom of our instincts. Imagination is profoundly convervative, yet it allows for, and supports, the most radical breakthroughs into untapped potential. The picture of the Pegasus Square attached to the forehead of the Manitou carries a lesson: imagination is the faculty by which we access the phylogenetic record of our species. This record is a register of what the human species has experienced over the long-term, a chronicle of evolutionary trial-and-error, revelation, adaptation, trauma, setback, recovery, and more.

But destiny is not written once and for all in the Pegasus Square. The phylogenetic record is continually being written, and rewritten, revised. The purpose of accessing the record is not merely to know the past, but to fathom the present, and see how the future can be realized in optimal expressions of human potential. Inscribed in the Tablet are an array of timeless impulses, self-recycling memes, perpetually reenacted in the course of time.

Imagination is a visionary power that allows us to recall (recapitulate) the key moments of human evolution and reinitiate the directive impulses, i.e.,act on what the species has learned at the optimum level of self-actualization. The Manitou is a eupsychian figure, to borrow a term from Abraham Maslow, the radical psychologist who emphasized self-actualization and peak experience: eu-psyche, the salubrity of the soul.

I expect the nature of imagination to become a hot topic in the final approach to the Mayan Endtime, but this issue has already been percolating for a long time. Beginning around 1785, certain members of the Romantic movement claimed that imagination is a visionary power, and assigned to it the supreme religious value—Novalis, William Blake, and S. T. Coleridge, to mention three examples among dozens. But the Romantics (many of whom used psychoactive plants such as opium and hashish) were unable to explain how this power operates, or what its evolutionary role might be. These unresolved issues were inherited by the generation of the 1960s. (See Natural Supernaturalism by A. M. Abrams on the unsolved problems of Romanticism.)

The R-Word

The Goatfish is a small dim constellation located to the right (West) of the Manitou. The composite occupies about 23 degrees on the ecliptic: from 3 to 25 of the sign Aquarius, where the sun transits from January 24 to February 15. Again, that awful conundrum of signs and constellations! But we are reading the Stellar Zodiac here, othe real-sky composites, and we can ignore the starless astrological format. As explained in Quest for the Zodiac, the Star Zodiac is a register of phylogenetic lessons. The constellations do not denote personality types and personal psychological complexes. They display the record of evolutionary learning, an ever-recycling inventory of talents and skills.

To read the Star Zodiac is to look deeply into the inborn genius of the human species, but this investigation requires a full-frame or panoramic view of the wisdom inherent to all living species.

The Zodiac display is highly self-referential. Figures in the Zodiac decribe the principle functions of phylogenesis, evolutionary learning. The Manitou, equated to the Gnostic Mesotes, represents the all-species connection. There is no figure in the Zodiac that represents human divinity or humanity in isolation from, and superior to, other animals. That lesson is not in the stars. It comes from a human agenda, purely.

The Zodiacal figures are interactive, around the display. Discovering these interactions, we build a story of the learning experience of our species. The Manitou reaches out to his left, one arm extending toward the Goatfish. The stars on the arm in the Aquarius composite actually extend over the composite of Capricornus, the Goatfish. What are we to make of this imagery?

In the previous essay, I proposed the rather daunting term transpeciation for the way that Gaia carries over certain evolutionary impulses from one cycle to the next, especially when there is extinction. Call these impulses seeds of evolution, if you will. Consistent with the Biblical legend of Noah and the Flood (copied from far older Babylonian sources), the precious seeds of future evolution are preserved in an ark, a sealed vessel. The image of the Goatfish appears on calender stone and cylinder seals from 3000 BCE, with an ark placed on the back of the hybrid animal.

The ark of the Goatfish is Gaia´s vehicle for carrying selected evolutionary potentials through time, especially after an extinction. The Cambrian explosian followed a massive extinction in which 95 percent of all life on earth was extinguished—or put into suspended animation? When Gaia pleased to do so, she resurrected vast numbers of these species. They did not re-evolve from a primitive state but re-appeared fully formed, functional, ready to take up where they left off.

One can only wonder if Gaia is capable of performing the same miracle with the human species.

Transpeciation—pictured in the Goatfish—is the last neologism I am going to introduce on this site. This term poses an entirely new conception of what happens after death, both to individuals and the human species at large. I have written these essays under the signal of jupiter in Mother Scorpion, taking my cues from that diamantine constellation. "Mother Scorpion guards the path of rebirth: 'at the end of the Milky Way, where she receives the souls of the dead, and from her, represented as a mother with many breasts, at which children take suck, come the souls of the newborn." This language suggests a transmutational concept of immortality rooted in Gaia´s life cycles, totally independent of the fictional promise of a father god who, so his white, male, bearded emissaries tell us, will reward us with eternal life if we obey HIS rules.

Gaia-Sophia does not reward or punish, but she may select those who follow her ways, so that her ways can be preserved. We reappear in different cycles of her life-story, depending on how we embody the wisdom by which She lives through us.

I am convinced that Gaia effectuates rebirth for the genomic potential of the species, but not for individual human beings possessed of single-self identity. Yet I would add, pushing your imagination to the limit, that in the case of the human species Gaia does so by reconfiguring that potential in personal matrices, so that particular people appear to reincarnate, when in fact it is the memories of those people that recur and take form in entirely new individuals. Hence we come at last to the R-word: reincarnation. But that would have to be the topic of another series of articles!

Contemplating the image of the Goatfish, we may intuit how Gaia brings selected species through an extinction event. This may be the supreme insight of the 2012 Endtime. For me personally, it is the supreme insight of a lifetime. Quest for the Zodiac explains an aspect of this process in terms of phylogenetic transfer from the genome to an individual—the endowment, as I call it. Your endowment is your share in the evolutionary genius of humanity. The endowment is shown by the natal pattern of planets in the visible constellations, not the astrological signs.

Left-Handed Wisdom

Almost everyone who reads these pages has heard of Tantra long before coming to metahistory.org. Tantra is defined in popular terms as a kind of sexual yoga or self-empowerment technique. In scholarly terms, Tantra (both Buddhist and Tibetan) is a body of metaphysical teachings with complex practices for realization of the ultimate reality, the foundation awareness, called Rigpa in Tibetan and Parasamvit in Sanskrit. Originally introduced in the West through the Indo-European philologist Sir William Jones (1746 - 1794), the word Tantra came into use tainted with sinister connotations of black magic. It was said to represent a "left-handed path" of evil practices. As it turns out, the Tantras contain the highest metaphysical teachings of Asia, more sophisticated than Vedanta. Tantra is not the worst of Asian mystical wisdom, a left-handed aberration, but the best, the most advanced teaching. (Of course, this is just my opinion.)

The sinister connotations of Tantra arose from the misunderstanding about the notorious secrecy of those teachings, as if anything done in secret is likely to be malicious. Herein lies a tale pertinent to the Endtime. When I first heard of Tantra years back in India, I was given to understand that the historical Buddha, Shakyamuni, who lived around 550 BCE, had foreseen humanity´s complete spiritual disorientation in the far future, i.e., at the end of Kali Yuga. In view of this future problem, Shakyamuni held back certain teachings to be released in the "Dark Age" when humanity would need them desperately. Another version of this legend says that he imparted the Tantric teachings to certain disciples who preserved them by secret transmission, waiting for the right moment to bring them into to the world.

Tantra is the last-ditch spiritual rescue remedy of Kali Yuga.

Tibetan Buddhism presents the same theme of selectively reserved teachings in the legend of Padma Sambhava, a shaman and wizard thought to have lived in the 8th Century in India and Tibet. Guru Rimpoche, as he is called, was said to have hidden secret teachings called termas, with clear foreknowledge of when they would be discovered—in some cases by the reincarnations of his students and apprentices. A terma is a time-release instruction to be accessed in the last phase of Kali Yuga. Terma means "hidden treasure," and those who discover such treasures are called "tertons, treasure-finders."

September 1987

Information on terms and tertons was carefully guarded in the Tibetan Buddhist circles, especially by the Nyingma Pa, the old school closely related to indigenous Bon Po shamanism of Nepal. But in 1986 Tulku Thondup published Hidden Teachings of Tibet, the first written public disclosure of the secret terma tradition. (The author was sponsored by the Buddhayana Foundation set up by Michael Baldwin, co-founder of the Marion Institute, the sponsor of this site and futureprimitive.org.) Interestingly, Hidden Teachings of Tibet appeared just a year before Wisdom of Our Ancestors by Dhyani Yhawoo who describes a close parallel to termas in the Cherokee tradition. She is in fact a terton of Native American roots.

In conversation with Tulku Thondup in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2002, I asked the venerable scholar if tertons might appear in other traditions than the Nyingma Pa. He said that certainly they could, but theirs would have to be evaluated in some manner, according to some criteria, just as they do in the Nyingma school.

Draghla Gonpo, dangerous protector of treasure texts.
Tibetan painting, Gadri style, 19th Century.
Collection of Shelley and Donald Rubin.

1987 was the year of the "Harmonic Convergence" and the Quetzalcoatl craze instigated by Jose Arguelles, author of The Mayan Factor. In August 1987, when the convergence was predicted to happen under a certain astrological configuration, I was in Santa Fe, New Mexico, deep in conversation with Joanna Harcourt-Smith, whom I had met a few months earlier. As an astrologer and skywatcher, I was puzzled by all the hype. There was nothing in the least remarkable about the celestial pattern of August 1987. In discussions at the time, I insisted (as does John Major Jenkins in his current writings on 2012) that astrological constructs such as a "grand trine in Fire Signs" cannot be used to read precessional timing and other diachronic patterns in history. For that, you use the Star Zodiac, not the Sign Zodiac.

I was out of the scene, as usual, in 1987. During most of my life, for that matter. My writing style (though not, apparently, my speaking style) and my ability to resonate with contemporary memes has certainly suffered from my rude, cantankerous, stand-offish posturing, a sure sign of Gnostic arrogance. On the other hand, my disengagement allowed me to focus my mind in other ways, sometimes with surprizing results.

In September 1987, I was cruising around Saddle River, New Jersey, and Spring Valley, New York, where I gave a weekend seminar entitled "Christos and Sophia: A Gnostic Romance" for an Anthroposophical group. The early autumn sky was clear in New England, and the woods were lusciously inviting at night, reminding me of my native Maine. Observing the moon, I noticed how it stood high in the sky on September 16, when it was in the sign Gemini—in the real-sky picture, this put it in the horns of the Bull. I realized that I was observing the extreme northern lunar standstill, something that occurs every 18.6 years following the cycle of the lunar nodes.

Lunar standstills were of great interest to our ancestors. All around the world, megalithic sites such as Callanish in the Hebrides are aligned to the lunar standstill. The sight of the moon so high is visually striking, but it also has a use in calculation. 18.6 years is close to one fourth of the mean rate of 72 years for one degree of precession in the Zodiac. This means that you have four opportunities in every 72 years to observe a distinct visual event that can be aligned to earthworks and marking stones for future reference. Observation of the lunar standstill was a key technique for monitoring precession and factoring it down to smaller increments of time.

Observing the lunar standstill of September 1987 (recently repeated in November 2004), I caught something remarkable out of the corner of my eye: jupiter in retrograde on the border between the Fishes and the Ram. With the sun going down in the Lion, as it always does in early September, the Manitou rose at sunset and jupiter was conspicuous from about 9 pm onward, rising in the East. On the 15th the waning crescent of the moon culminated at dawn, at the northern lunar standstill in the horns of the Bull, with jupiter still visible off to the right, low in the western sky.

Skymap from Erlewine, Astrophysical Directions (1977). The eastern
Fish leaps up from the ecliptic toward the Fallen Woman, Andromeda.
Jupiter at the border between Fishes and Ram (Pisces and Aries) is
precisely aligned to M31, the external galaxy visible to the naked eye
when we look through the Andromeda composite. The final quarter
moon is high in the horns of the Bull, at extreme northern lunar standstill,
a position that occurs in a cycle of 18.6 years.

Dwelling on this sight, and divining it, you might say, I realized that this particular lunar standstill was extremely rare, because it happened when jupiter was aligned to Andromeda, the galaxy in the constellation of that name. The ecliptic longitude of the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) is 27.85 or 28 degrees of the Sign Aries. An ecliptic "ley-line" from jupiter´s position in September 1978 runs directly to M31. The head star of the Andromeda constellation, Alpharetz, marks the upper left corner of the Pegasus Square.

The constellation of Andromeda (Staal), the Fallen Woman. The eastern or vertical Fish extends into the boundaries of this composite, as if it were leaping upward toward this figure. This depiction places the external galaxy M31 on the chain attached to Andromeda's waist. This composite is primary in the sequence of 18 galactic constellations that display the Sophia myth.

Jupiter in the Fishes aligned to the Andromeda Galaxy was the leading signal of that moment. Jupiter retrograding past Antares in the heart of the Scorpion is the signal under which I have been writing these 2012 essays.

The Terma Pattern

Even if the ultimate mystical experience is beyond time, mysticism itself has a history, just as does any religion.
- John Myrdhin Reynolds, The Golden Letters

So, in September 1987 I was deeply intrigued by the coincidence of jupiter aligned to M31, the Andromeda Galaxy, which happens every 12 years (11.86 to be precise), and the cycle of the lunar standstill, every 18.6 years, but I did not put those two figures together until years later when I was investigating the Dendera Zodiac. Like many others who have studied that artifact, I was puzzled by the two overlapping circles that form the infrastructure of the Dendera layout. Measurements on their common radius suggest that the golden ratio 1/.618 had been factored into their juxtaposition. Of course, many ancient and sacred monuments and artifacts incorporate the golden radio, or phi ratio, the most famous element of sacred geometry. The phi ratio occurs in the Fibonnaci series, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, generated by adding each two numbers in the sequence to get the succeeding number. The Fibonnaci series is a fractal progression, demonstrating an endless pattern of self-similar quantities at different magnitudes.

Geometrical examples of the 1/.618 or 1/1.618 ratio are endless, but all of them involve spatial designs, and the structure of the DZ is about patterns in time, not space.

Suddenly, leaning over my latest draft of the DZ, it dawned on me that I had never bothered to compute the golden radio in temporal terms, to determine what might be imagined as the modulus of the fractal patterning of time. Simple arithmetic shows that .618 of 360, the ideal time-space modulus, is 222.48. Upon seeing this figure, my mind skipped like the needle of an old phonograph jumping a groove on a vinyl record. I recognized that the cycle of jupiter, 11.86 years, and the cycle of the lunar standstill, 18.6 years, multiplied together, give 220.6, a mere .008 percent variance from 222.48. In other words, the golden ratio of 360, the standard modulus of all space-time measures, is almost exactly the product of the periods of jupiter and the lunar nodes.

So what?, you might ask. Well, I asked myself the same question. (I often do! I may come off as cock-sure at times, but there is no more rigorous critic of my opinions than myself. Rather than challenge my confidence and contest my views, would anyone care to join me in my self-critique? It´s lonely in there.) There is no real cosmological sense in the product of these two periods, for they do not mesh in real-sky dynamics, yet I knew I was on to something fabulous, a hidden pattern in time. I decided on a mean figure of 224, using 12 years flat for the cycle of jupiter, because 12 is another modulus that pervades time-space measures. Jupiter gives the normative measure of the Zodiac because it takes 12 years to go around the full circle. 12 X 18.6 = 223.2. But what phenomenon, event, or pattern of events, could be timed to this odd figure of 224 years?

I scanned back to September 1987 when I had observed the coincidence of the lunar standstill with the alignment of jupiter to the Andromeda Galaxy. Such an extraordinary moment. What if I subtracted 244 years from that date? This gives 1743, which did not look too promising—except for a seemingly remote allusion. While working on the Dendera Zodiac at that time, I was reading Hidden Teachings of Tibet. There I learned about an early and remarkable example of the terma phenomenon, the Long Chen Nyingthig, a massive download of secret instructions received by the terton, Jigmed Lingpa (1730-1798).

I was remarkable, I thought, that the terma discovery process was historically datable. Mysticism has a history, as J. M. Reynolds astutely observed. Just think: telepathy through time has a chronological aspect! I wondered how far I could go in tracking this historically recorded but semi-magical phenomenon. Jigmed Lingpa received the transmission of the heart essence teachings in August, 1765. (Grateful acknowledgement to Harold Talbott of the Buddhayana Foundation, who informed me of the Long Chen Nyigthig when we first met in Marion in November, 1998.) 1765 is 22 years later than the nodal date 1743, but 22 is close to 18.6. I wondered what kind of pattern I would get by computing 12 cycles of 18.6 years going back from September 1987.

What I found when I did this simple computation made was arresting. Computing 18.6-year increments from 1987.75 (September 1987) brings you to June 1764 for the 12th interval, a closer calculation than you get by subtracting 244 from 1987. This date falls close to the recorded date of the Long Chen Nyingthig. What´s more, I found that almost all the recorded instances of terma transmission fall on or around the nodal moments in this sequence. This is the Terma Pattern, the historical sequence that reflects the telepathic disclosure of secret teachings for Kali Yuga.

Feedback on this passage.

Detail of a sky map based on a celestial globe, showing Andromeda,
the Fallen Woman, the Fishes, Pegasus, and Aquarius. The figures
are drawn as if seen from outer space, looking in toward the earth.
Celestial Atlas, Amsterdam, 1745.

The Current Microcycle

I won´t go into details and examples, because, obviously, that would require too much exposition, but I will say that my studies so far suggest that we can trace the terma process relatively closely within the 244-year timeframe. I noted that the 18.6-year interval helps to factor long-term precession into microcycles. I have found that you can focus even closer on the timing of the terma revelations by using half-cycles of 9.3 years. Track ahead in half-cycles from September 1987 and you get a tight progression:

September 1987 - February 1997 - April 2006 - August 2015

This is the microcycle of the Terma Pattern currently underway. It shows the most likely moments for telepathic transmission of termas, but not just that. Remember that 18.6 factors into the 72-year period of precession. In effect, this progression also shows the incremental release of precessional change in the short term. 72 years, an entire human lifetime, is one degree of precession in the Zodiac. Confined to this timeframe, it is hard to imagine how an individual could participate in long-range evolutionary lessons reflected in the constellations and Zodiacal Ages. But factor 72 into four 18.6-year intervals, you come down to microcycles well within the range of individual lived events. It would appear that the Terma Pattern shows two factors: transmission of "mind-mandate" instructions (Nyingma tradition) and maturation of phylogenetic lessons reflected in the Zodiacal mythemes (the Lashian twist).

Remember, also, that September 1987 is unique because at that moment the alignment of jupiter to Andromeda coincided with the lunar standstill. You will have to look far and wide in celestial events to see when this coincidence happened previously, if it ever did.

The coincidence is remarkable: note that .618 of 18.6 (lunar node cycle) is 11.49, close to 11.86 years for the cycle of jupiter. In other words, the lunar nodal cycle is to the jupiter cycle as 1 to .618, roughly. The two cycles factored together exhibit the phi ratio of fractal progression. Here some readers will groan and protest, claiming that I am merely fiddling loosely with the numbers. But let me tell you this, my fair-eyed friends, there is no precise computation in cosmic timing. Planetary and stellar cycles do not factor out with exactitude, unless you are in math class with the nerdy foster children of the Archons. Precision calculation is a male-mind fixation. In my life, I never met a woman who liked the esoteric numbers game.

The planetary system is flexible, allowing imprecision, abberation, near-miss reiterations, and sneaking novelty. In fact, the precise figure 11.86 is only the one way to compute the orbital period of jupiter. Its observable period varies due to retrogradation for five months each year (as you can now observe happening in the Scorpion). There is enough flexibility in the cycle to allow that the mean period of 11.86 years approximates to 11.49 in one direction, and overshoots 11.86 in another. These things you learn by paying attention to the sky and living through the cycles over time.

Five Conditions

I use the moment September 1987 to gear the Terma Pattern into the frame of historical time. Of the four stars that define the Tablet of Destiny, the brightest is on the upper left, Alpharetz, which is also the head star of the constellation of Andromeda, the Fallen Woman. The precessional date for Alpharetz, 975 CE, indicates the culmination of the Grail Quest, but also the timing of the Quetzalcoatl legend (as explained in The Tablet of Destiny).

In view of this pattern, I strongly sense that significant termas will emerge, not in 2012 exactly, but a little later in 2015. From my study of the Terma Pattern so far, I reckon that transmissions occur in experiences of intense lucidity or spontaneous revelation close to the nodal moments, although they are also prepared or glimpsed in the time around these moments. To fit the Pattern, the window of time around a terma revelation cannot be more than 18.6 months, or as little as 9 months before and after a dated nodal moment. I am convinced that upon close study of this phenomenon the timing will resolve to closer margins rather than wider ones.

One might like to know how termas are received. I call this process transception—rats, another damned neologism! I define transception as reception through the receiver of what is transmitted telepathically. (Nyingma teachings use the word transcription for receiving termas.) To transceive a terma requires five conditions: 1, a high level of dhyana or concentration, 2, anticipation of the timing, 3, the right conditions for clairaudient reception, 4, a clear and long-standing relation to the demonic guardians, and 5, a leading question. The factor of timing is crucial: you steer your way slowly into the moment when the terma will emerge in your mind, and you will be poised to receive it. The conditions for transception are a place of retreat, inner tranquillity, and removal from distractions, although this is the least rigorous of the four factors.

The leading question (Grail motif) is the sacred offering of ye-shes, "pristine cognition," that you bring to the experience. This must be your finest thought, your most cogent and beautifully phrased idea, stated in elegant syntax. You offer the ye-shes sub-vocally, holding it as if it were a liquescent jewel on your tongue, but without pronouncing it aloud. The ye-shes is the subliminal key that unlocks the terma, and upon transmission, it becomes the key for communicating it.

You can transceive a terma, and you can also channel a lot of crap. Determining the difference is the task of specialists, the party of Xolotl. In Hidden Teachings of Tibet, Tulku Thondup explains the traditional evaluation process that was practiced in Tibet until recent times. We are left with the question of how to work out guidelines and criteria for evaluating such downloads. I leave it to you, my fair-eyed friends!!

Apparently, hundreds of termas have been received since the initial breakthrough of the Long Chen Thingthig. The Tibetans are holding their cards close to their purple robes. Few of these texts have been translated. I hear from a Nyingma source that the termas so far received do not, for the most part, contain high metaphysical teachings and lofty messages for humankind. Rather, they seem to be arcane instructions for casting spells, performing sorcery, and divining.

It fits, if you ask me. This is precisely the kind of knowledge preserved for Kali Yuga, and answering to the challenges of the time. I understand there are termas explaining how to make a lethal kill by magic, with a special clause in the Bodhisattva teaching that allows murder without karmic consequences. I can´t wait to get my hands on that one. There is, in fact, an apocryphal legend about the Buddha in one lifetime killing some people to protect others, as heroes and heroines have done all through the ages.

Decoding Ourselves

The events of the winter solstice 2012 will transpire under the gaze of the Goatfish. Graphic interactivity pertains from the Fishes to the Manitou and on to the Goatfish, but then there is an unusual feature, an empty space in the Zodiacal band:

The Goatfish (Carpicornus on astrronomical maps) is a sly, elusive constellation. I am looking at it right now, or I was a minute ago, standing on the terrace outside this room. The composite is a faint imprint distinguished by the tight formation of the paired horn stars, the Algedi, and the multiple Dabi, in the eye. This odd animal seems in some viewings to have a wistful expression. Its form is so ethereal that its suggests a wind sock floating in the void. Its gaze is remote, detached, operating over a long distance. This impression is emphasized by the way the Goatfish looks down into the abyss of the empty space, a span of 13 degrees (roughly 18 Capricorn to 1 Aquarius).

I call this space vacant of stars the limbo of lost humanity.

In December 2012 mars will be in 28 degrees of the sign Capricorn, i the empty space right under the head of the Goatfish. The sun will be at the winter solstice above the sting of the Scorpion, with pluto nearby, in the forearms of the Archer. The moon will be in the sign Aries, close to the Ram-Fishes boundary. The Goatfish will descend right after sunset, as if making a slow plunge into the empty space. Around midnight on the solstice day, the waning moon in the west will signal the Andromeda connection, as jupiter did in September 1987.

All this is divination, skyreading.

All in all, there is nothing especially remarkable about the celestial pattern of December 21, 2012. I would point out, however, that jupiter in the eye of the Bull (9 Gemini) will stand opposite to venus (8 Sagittarius) close to Antares. I have developed a lot of my argument about 2012 on the theme of Kali Yuga. Well, there it is again: Antares-Aldebaran, the structural axis of the entire Zodiac, defines the timing of Kali Yuga in precessional terms.

In my writings on 2012 so far, I have warned that we ought not attribute to the Maya foreknowledge or predictive power they did not have. What we make of their calendar and its end-date is the product of our imagination, not theirs. We do not know how the Aztecs or Maya viewed the 2012 Endtime, but then we don´t need to know. The calendric system they invented comes down to us as a mythological construct to be reworked according to our mindset today, in the setting of our times, with the planet undergoing dramatic changes. We do not have to believe that the natives of MesoAmerica predicted the present changes, and calculated a calendar to warn us of a catastrophic shift. And so what if they did? Such a feat of prediction (extremely improbable, in my view) says little about them, and less about us. I doubt that either the Maya or the Aztecs had a global vision able to encompass the world situation today, altough they certainly did have a cosmic perspective that linked their small, enclosed, regional cultures to a higher dimension.

The calculations for the Endtime are difficult, and the symbology of the calendars is obscure to the point of being impenetrable. But then, what if it is not some foreordained message encoded in the calendar that we now seek? What if it is a revelation in our own minds? Isn´t the Maya-Aztec inheritance just a pretext for decoding ourselves? I think that revelations will indeed come into definition in the Endtime, mainly through termas transceived in the years ahead, with peak bursts of activity at the nodal moments of the Terma Pattern. I also think that the secrets of transpeciation and phylogenetic transfer, and the transit of our species through the next extinction, will come to be understood more fully through these mysterious telepathic downloads.

Getch Devanque

The question remains, How are the non-traditional (i.e., non-Tibetan) termas to be evaluated? Well, I must leave this problem for others to solve, but I have two suggestions. First, the instructions received can be assessed, and applied, in the frame of a directive planetary myth. As far as I know there is only one such integral and comprehensive narrative on the planet: the Sophia myth of the Pagan Mysteries. By integral, I mean that this narrative grounds and interweaves all other local, regional myths. By comprehensive, I mean that it recounts the extraplanetary history of the earth, as well as Sophia´s "correction" and humanity´s connection to the Pleroma, the galactic center. If the instructions and inspirations coming to us through termas complement this story, then we might have a real opportunity for entering Gaia´s way as coevolutionary agents.

Recall—if you have any patience left—that I use September 1987 to gear the Terma Pattern into historical time, so that "mysticism itself has a history." The jupiter signal of September 1987 was aligned to Andromeda, M31, our parallel galaxy. Located at 2.2 million light-years from earth, M31 is the most distant object visible to the naked eye. It is massive lenticular spiral, the mirror image of our home galaxy, but about a third larger and more populous with stars. I have long suspected that the porosity of matter in Andromeda is about 9 times lighter than that in our galaxy. Recent high-resolution photos appear to confirm this information.

High-porosity: imagine that you are seeing material forms as if they were coral, so that you see the pores accentuated, and objects (including the human body) appear to be porous to the medium in which they exist.

The fallen woman motif of Andromeda is a cognate of the Gnostic myth of the fallen goddess, Sophia. Andromeda means "she who guards humanity." I seem to recall noting somewhere in these essays that the Sophia myth is not recorded in the thirteen constellations of the Star Zodiac—except for the composite of Virgo-Isis, clearly a Sophianic figure. The Zodiac does not display the story of the Divine Sophia, but another celestial sequence does: the eighteen composites that lie in the Milky Way, including Andromeda itself. I.e., the galactic constellations.

The Terma Pattern is geared historically to the 10th Century and the Parzival story, as well as to the Quetzalcoatl legend: the timing of Alpharetz, 975 CE. But equally so, the Terma Pattern is constellated in mythic terms with Andromeda. Both the external galaxy M31 and the story of the fallen woman will, I imagine, figure into the termas received in the immediate future. Hence, I would expect that forthcoming termas can be evaluated against the eighteen themes (or "abstract cores," as Castaneda called them) in the galactic narrative of Sophia.

Which is about as arcane and convoluted as it gets, I guess. On the other hand, the complex strands of myth may be the filaments that weave our individual lives into the Mystery of Life.

So enter by the living dream the secret
ever so, a glimmer on a sea of waving grain,
this grammar threaded double in the seam....

As a second means of verification, I propose a little-known method of divining through the horns of a white kid goat. This method originally belonged to the repertoire of Bon shamanism, but over time it got lost (as magic tends to do), only to be rediscovered—of all places—in Flanders in eastern Belgium. During a year at the end of the 20th century, a white kid was born, rather like a goat tulku, of rare Saanen stock. Well, rare anyway for the flatlands of Flanders. The resident shaman, who had long ago shapeshifted in a Flemish workhorse, advised me that the goat was called Getch Devanque in a weird French-Flemish dialect. The name means "radiant kid," or "glittering kid."

Due to the wide separation of its ears, the Getch Devanque can facilitate the divination required to check the validity of non-traditional termas.

Lucky boy that I am, I had the opportunity to do some divining with the Getch Devanque when I was working on Dendera Decoded and reading The Hidden Teachings of Tibet. This helped me tremendously to evaluate the arcane materials I was exploring. Below is a photo demonstrating the best position to assume for divining between the ears of a white kid goat.

At twilight in May
the white kid stands
skinny-legged
under a hazy half moon.
She nudges my arm
with a freckled nose,
the faint scent of spring onions
on her breath.

Conclusion of the Endtime essays.
jll: 17 July 2007 Andalucia