by John Lash Andaluca February 2007 In the 73rd moon of the end-time from MetaHistory Website Spanish version

Mixing and mingling with the end-time tribes is a strange lot of free-lance wizards on whom one hardly dares to put a name.

Shamans, they are. But shamans of another order, whose lineage extends from the future as much as from the past. These wizards have an imaginative flair, the gift for magical realism (more below). They can be elusive, but they are strangely, disarmingly direct when it comes to imparting the initiatory secrets of their trade.

Exhibiting a paradoxical mix of arrogance and humility, they are fine teachers, although they do not belong to any tradition, school, or educational program. They are generous and ruthless, but also capricious. And in social and spiritual style, they are occasionally brutal. One thing they are not is fashionable, unless you count the occasional personal fetish such as the spiffy mesh tie worn by the gentleman pictured above.

But shamanism, let's face it, is pretty fashionable these days. It is the height of trendiness in some circles. The craze has been building for quite a while. Peter Furst's Flesh of the Gods (published in 1972, right on the far node of the 1972 - 2012 interval) set the standard for anthropological studies that made hallucinogens legitimate, finally overthrowing Eliade's opinion (reconsidered at the end of his life) that the use of

psychoactive plants belongs to the decadent phase of shamanism.

Since Furst, shamanism has become the central subject of anthropology as well as the sacred pastime of the drug culture.

And beyond the counterculture, it has engendered pop obsessions including everything from ayahuasca tourism to communal drumming in the park.

Serpents of Wisdom Conversation on the Plaza in Santa Fe around 1974: "Hey John, have you heard all this talk about shamanism? Some people are saying it's the oldest religion on earth."

"Hmmm. Well, if it's that old, how much longer do they expect it to last?" Shamanism was the radical chic of the 1990s, and coming into the 21th century it seems to be holding strong, but could this be a sunset phenomenon? Do I risk sounding extremely perverse (once again) by posing such a question?

Let me qualify: Could it be that the present ubiquity of the phenomenon - with everybody and his cousin now claiming to be a shaman - might give way to something at once more discreet and more demanding, a shamanic order that does not announce itself as such? This would be the party of Xolotl. In the spirit of magical realism, I will write of the party as if it already exists. The party of Xolotl is definitely an order, not another tribe among the tribes, but the order encompasses and permeates all tribal activities.

Think of the tribes as trees, great many-branched and many-rooted wonders, leafed with countless expressions of personalized creativity and steadied by massive trunks of communal solidarity.

The five families of tribal trees,

Originals Orgiastics Sustainers Evolvers Visioneers,

...represent the emergent human community of the end-time.

Then the hidden shamanic order, the party of wily and elusive crypto-shamans, would be the bone-white angel-hair mesh of underground mycelium in mycorrhizal relationship with the family trees.

Wasson (in Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality): "Since 1885 mycologists have recognized the mycorrhizal relationships between certain species of mushrooms, and certain species of trees..." How convenient that someone noticed. "Be ye wise as serpents and harmless as doves." This adage, attributed to Jesus, may be one of merely three lines in the New Testament that reflect some genuine Gnostic insight.

The other two would be, "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free, " and "If thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light." All three lines play on the same theme: the paranormal faculties (siddhis) of those who master the serpent power, kundalini. I have argued extensively that the gnostikoi of the Pagan Mysteries were kundalini adepts.

They did not control the serpent power - no one does - but allowed themselves to be supple channels for it. They mastered its effects by achieving states of steady concentration free of hallucinations.

This type of concentration, achieved while standing with eyes open, is requisite for observing the Organic Light. One effect of this sublime encounter is a sense of exquisite tenderness, infinite softness, for the luminosity of Sophia's primary substance body is soft.

The Organic Light has a texture comparable to marshmallow. (I originally considered calling it the Mallow Light, and do call it so in certain writings on Gaian biophysics.) Witnessing the Light makes us "gentle as doves." Another effect is that you see truth, you do not merely understand it. In ancient times when cultural and literary conventions followed the educational lead of thetelestai, the Mystery School teachers, the Greek word aletheia used to mean both "truth" and "reality."

This is the norm in some Gnostic writings, and the same sense occurs in Plato. What is ultimately true is Reality itself. Only Truth is real.

Beholding the Organic Light, "ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free," because in the omnipresent soft luminosity you see the Suchness, the primordial Void that is Shunyata, not emptiness but a fullness, a self-radiant plenum in which the truth of every possible thought, emotion, and perception reaches pure and paramount ripeness, and reaches it, and reaches it.... "Ripeness is all," Goethe said, he who was used to contemplating nature "intensively" to observe what happens within the senses, rather than merely what the senses present as an external, seemingly finished product.

The Organic Light is rich in content: a well of living information, a fountainhead of boundless, self-articulating intelligence. Asian traditions call the realization it affords sabija samadhi, "perfect concentration with seed," contrasted to nirbija samadhi, "concentration without seed."

In The Seeker's Handbook (1991), I explained that the first is knowing nothing through knowing everything, and the second is knowing everything through knowing nothing. It's fun to have options.. Such matters would be - will be - routine tradecraft for the party of Xolotl, the technicians of the sacred who move surreptitiously among the end-time tribes. Technicians, they are. But they may often appear as poets, novelists, dancers, musicians, herbalists, body-workers, stone-workers, animal-keepers, and simple artisans who do not openly disclose their adept status.

There is a harlequin aspect to the dog-headed end-time guides, although some of them are somber, prone to

dress in black and wear silver and coral ornaments, like Silvio Manuel. Some of them sit modestly aside, grinning in the dark. Xolotl is dog-headed because in occult jargon that animal represents clairaudience, hearing in the canine frequencies.

The party of Xolotl have various occult faculties, but most notably the capacity to hear subvocally - hear and transmit.

Jean Delville's drawing of Parsifal was done around 1885 at the height of the Occult Revival in Europe.

Delville was associated with the "20" and the Rose + Croix, artistic movements permeated with esotericism. In this above stylized image, he depicts the secret of the dog-headed clairaudience: the eustacian tubes, columns of air that work like antennae to mediate frequencies beyond the range of normal hearing. He shows the columns shooting down from Parsifal's ears, and around the head, the horns of clairvoyance, another set of antennae but receptive to light rather than sound, particularly the soft, lunar Organic Light. Delville wanted to depict Parsifal as the example of the trained initiate able to send and receive clairvoyantly and clairaudiently.

He could as well have been representing one of Xolotl's crew. The serpent current in the spine bends like a fiddlehead fern into a three-forked knot of warm fire in the soma chakra, a psychosomatic center beneath the heart, known only to siddhas and excluded from the usual model of the chakras. Delville represents it symbolically by the Hebrew letter Shin, "divine fire." The party of Xolotl may appear cold, aloof and austere, even threatening.

But to know these wizards intimately is to touch the secret candor (warmth) they embody, inflected in sexual flair and erotic finesse. The serpents of wisdom move among the end-time tribes like - well, like soft, feathery serpents. They slither among categories and terms, evading and subverting cultural codes and memes, but they are clear and explicit in their syntax.

Their muse is language itself, the consummate whore and ultimate shapeshifter.

Shock Therapy There is a close parallel between Xolotl and Kali.

Consider the way Kali is depicted in her role of Tripurasundari, destroyer of the three worlds at the end of Kali Yuga, when civilization goes down in fire and flood: naked, adorned with a necklace of severed heads, drinking blood and eating carrion, she dances ecstatically on the body of the inert Shiva, her consort.

This is a mythic image of anesthetic shock, the kind that comes over humanity as it faces extinction by natural catastrophes, as well as by psychological catastrophes, the breakdown of ordinary life, the shattering of paradigms, the loss of all expectations, the immolation of faith, and the end of all hope.

Today we are on the verge of witnessing a collective manifestation of what Stan Grof calls "spiritual emergencies."

His recent book, When the Impossible Happens, presents a vivid inventory of such emergencies.

Newari style thanka, Katmandu, 1999 Shamanism and Tantra in the Himalayas Muller-Ebeling, Ratsch et al.

In an unparalleled career spanning fifty years, commencing with clinical observation of thousands of LSD sessions, including his own, Grof has shown that traumatic experiences normally dismissed as due to "mental breakdown" or "mental illness" are actually opportunities to break through into non-ordinary reality and acquire paranormal perception.

The 2012 end-time marks a global pandemic of such opportunities.

It signals a world gone mad, with millions of crazed and helpless people stunned by the loss of their habits of living and terrified on a daily basis by the scale and severity of geophysical changes.

Imagine the look of dumbfounded horror on the faces of people helplessly caught in catastrophic geophyical changes such as the sudden rise of sea levels, earthquakes, and violent storms: this is the expression of Xolotl, blank-eyed and aghast. The red mouth recalls the bloody grin of Kali. The head is a skull, like the face of a shaman who turns magically into a skeleton, and the elaborate ears suggest the dog-like powers of hypertonicity.

On his torso, Xolotl has a kind of armor-plating, an insectoid or armadillo belly, but there are two round holes (for burning incense) in the place of the soma chakra and the solar plexus: heart and guts traumatically pierced by the awesome spectacle of mass-scale destruction. Yet this horrendous trauma has another face, as Grof has taught for so many years: physical and psychosomatic traumas present a shock course in the acquisition of paranormal abilities.

When ordinary reality crumbles before our eyes, non-ordinary reality dawns. Quetzalcoatl has two brothers.

One is the competing shaman, Tezcatlipoca, Lord of the Smoking Mirror. The other is his twin brother, Xolotl.

Aztec statuary depicts the two deities Quetzalcoatl and Xolotl back to back, joined into a single, Janus-faced entity. The vast spiritual emergency to be undergone by the human species in ever-increasing numbers, with natural disasters, social violence, and outright madness escalating up to and beyond 2012, will open the seals of paranormal faculties and burst the floodgates of non-ordinary reality.

As the world humans have made comes apart in convulsions of fire and flood, a world will arise anew, but first within human perception, because seeing the Next World comes with traumatic extrapolation of the senses toward non-ordinary reality, in the very moment we behold the destruction of the existing world. The 2012 end-time will bring physical destruction on an unimaginable scale - this is not a prophecy but a common sense inference based on observable events and data, such as the meltdown rate of the Greenland ice-shelf (dystropic feedback). It entails a total planetary makeover in parallel with a visionary awakening and plunge into altered states and paranormal perception, a shift into evolutional anomaly and shamanic magic.

The scale of natural law will be reversed: instead of survival depending upon everyone's conformity to consensus reality, it will depend on some individuals entering and navigating the realms of non-ordinary reality. Some evidence of this shift from normal to paranormal can be seen in traces of human activity through previous extinctions. The painted caves of Southern France and the northern coast of Spain, such as Lascaux andAltamira, date from the close of the Upper Paleolithic and deglaciation of Europe around 9,500 BCE.

Archeologists estimate that these extensive paintings range from 22,000-9,000 BCE, indicating that a good deal of this artistic activity (thought to be closely related to shamanic visionary states) occurred while some groups of hardy folk were living through the last Ice Age. But in December 1994, a remarkable discovery was made in the Ardeche region of south central France. The Chauvet Cave displays art work that is not only 15,000 years older than Lascaux and Altamira, it isartistically and esthetically more finished, more sophisticated. This discovery proved that cave painting in more remote times was, both in technique and representation, more evolved than the art that survived from

the close of the Paleolithic Era.

It suggests that access to non-ordinary perception, including shamanic rapport with animal powers ubiquitously depicted in those caves, and the gender balance suggested by erotic markings and goddess effigies, declined from a peak that may be identified temporally as the crisis point of extinction going into the last Ice Age.

In other words, the few survivors of the last minor extinction event were traumatized into altered states of perception and entered non-ordinary reality in ways that allowed them to survive by magical-shamanic practices, evident in the art of these caves.

They survived by practical skills, of course, but I would argue that their practical skills were, for the most part, acquired magically.

Learning from the animals how to live, choose food, find water, learning from the moon and stars how to formally order their activities and transmit their generational experience in long-term narratives, and so forth - are not abilities that can be gained through trial and error alone. They require, and reflect, magical enhancement. What if, in the long run, the survival capacity of our species depends on supernatural experiences?

This may be a good question to ponder throughout the 2012 end-time.

Gaian Mercy For those who lived through the Ice Age, practical and magical skills were complementary.

But these skills declined slowly over many millennia, and split apart. Hence early Neolithic cave relics and rock art are markedly inferior to what preceded them in the Paleolithic. We did not evolve from grunting, hairy cave people who hacked out stone implements: we evolved from handicapped cave people who themselves were degenerate heirs of far more skilled, sophisticated primitives.

And these skilled, sophisticated primitives were themselves the diaspora of civilizations destroyed by a combination of natural and human-made factors. The mark of such civilizations was high attainment of social order and technological accomplishment at the expense of the dissociation of the magical and practical faculties which, working together, comprise the dual psychosomatic endowment of the human species. We lose our survival sense as access to non-ordinary reality becomes less and less common, and even comes to be rejected entirely. This, I would propose, is a peculiar evolutionary rule of the human species. Time and time again, Stan Grof brings attention to the baffling yet widely accepted denial of the healing, lifedirecting value of non-ordinary experience. As we come forward in history, paranormal perception and altered states of cognition are not only dismissed by science (although previously they engendered science) and rejected by religion (although previously they informed religion), they are deemed anathema in society worldwide, if not dismissed as pure silliness.

What is to be made of this situation? Why in our time in history is it ridiculous and unacceptable to have or confess to having experiences of non-ordinary reality?

Ask the party of Xolotl.

They will say this: Behold the face the dark twin of Quetzalcoatl and see there the expression of our own petrified horror as we enter the endgame of civilization. (And hey, did the Aztecs know something about the endgame of civilization!). See the dumbfounded terror of what's to come, when millions of people realize they cannot face the makeover of the planet because they have denied those very faculties that would equip them for "spiritual emergencies" of the magnitude now beginning to overtake us. But see, also, how you can awaken to the shamanic survival power of human imagination, and access our inborn gifts for magic, mutation, and transmigration. Recall Kali dancing orgiastically astride the inert Shiva. Here is an image of collective anesthesia, Gaia's merciful way of allowing people en masse to desensitize themselves when the moment for Her cosmetic makeover arrives, so that they will be too stupefied to suffer from horrific death, bodily injury, trauma and loss.

Gaia exhibits the same law of mercy throughout the animal kingdom where, for instance, the gazelle brought down by the cheetah does not suffer the horror of being eaten alive, but undergoes a shift of consciousness and bodily sensation due to specific chemicals released by the mortal strike, the lethal bite, chemicals that

activate a trance state of blissful anesthesia.

We have all seen this happen with cats and mice, with the mouse clearly in an altered state. Humans who have survived attacks by lions, tigers, and grizzlies report how they are plunged into a semi-comatose state of bliss. They do not feel the pain of being mauled to near-death, but are caught up in a state of ecstatic anesthesia. The inert Shiva depicts the fate Gaia has prepared for the vast majority of the human species leading into the extinction now underway - but not just that.

Shiva is also the autochthonous god of the wilderness, long worshipped by hunters and shamanic tribes in Dravidia, Southern India, the land of the sacred cobra. Shiva is the honored deity of siddha yoga, the tradition in which Stan and Christina Grof were intimately involved for many years. Lord Shiva is the master of animal powers and the patron saint of those who acquire paranormal faculties, siddhis.

His sleeping form represents the "general anesthesia" of humanity, yes, but also the occult or sleeping powers of the self-selecting few who will face the end-time with heightened perception, empowered by a magical intention to survive.

Poor Carlitos The party of Xolotl is the party of the Nahual. So what on earth is the party of the Nahual? Well, it's kind of a motif in a long novel, a serial novel.... Conversation on the Plaza in Santa Fe, circa 1989: "John, did you hear this shit: people are saying that Castaneda invented don Juan. He just made up everything in those books of his."

"Hmmm. I wouldn't be surprised if Castaneda did invent don Juan. What I wonder about is, who invented Castaneda?" Poor Carlitos.

Idolized by millions, his books published in twenty languages, his adventures the inspiration for a huge cult movement lasting over 30 years, Castaneda saw his secrecy violated, his personal history smeared in the face of the general public, his human foibles exposed, and his writings dismissed as phony shamanism, the invention of a schizophrenic poseur.

Yet no matter what you may think of Castaneda, the magic he sowed in our minds is real. Poor Carlitos was in the party of Xolotl, a creative genius and genuine end-time seer. I often wonder why, among all that is said about him, and since his death, predominantly against him, no one has remarked that the ten books he wrote - The Teachings of don Juan, A Separate Reality, Journey to Ixtlan, Tales of Power, The Second Ring of Power, The Eagle's Gift, The Power of Silence, The Art of Dreaming, Magical Passes, The Active Side of Infinity - present a serial novel, a unitary masterpiece of magical realism. I am astounded that no one has yet made this observation.

Magical realism is the genre of fiction, mainly from Central and South America, associated with names such as Miguel Angel Asturias, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Julio Cortazar, but equally so with European writers such as Hermann Hesse and Italo Calvino. (I exclude the sophomoric mysticism of Brazilian Paolo Coehlo, an obvious stooge of the Catholic Church disguised in Sufi wool.)

Castaneda would not, I think, be unhappy among this company, where he certainly deserves a place.

The incomparable genius of Castaneda lies in how he got so many of us involved in his feat of magical realism, as participants and not merely readers, and how his fiction (if such it was) included so much shamanic lore that is durable, testable, and veracious. Magical realism is a guiding device of the party of Xolotl, some of whom write it, while others interpret and instill it.

It is not merely a literary genre, it is an occult medium for narrative entrainment. In the hands of able tricksters, the "master narrative" is not a totalitarian scheme with closure, but a grounding and framing device, an heuristic and hermeneutic tool of immense suppleness. The members of the party are deeply versed in literature and literary trends. Adepts of lucid syntax, they are well-read, critically and eclectically minded alchemists of the Word, like Dale Pendell.

Magic realism is their natural mode of discourse. Probably the inceptive work in this genre was Don Quixote by Cervantes. Or was it Don Quixolotl? Anyway, this novel, generally taken to be disenchanting satire of

chivalry, was written right after the Conquest of Mexico, and there is a significant parallel here. Allow me to elaborate. We all know the extraordinary story of Montezuma and Cortez, and the downfall of the Aztecs. What no one knows is how the bloody Aztecs got to be there in the first place.

Their arrival in central Mexico around 1250 is one of the more enigmatic events in world history. Something weird happened when this scruffy, bellicose tribe marched into the Valley of the Moon and overthrew Toltec civilization, only to be overthrown themselves less than 300 years later, at which point in time they were annihilating themselves due to ritual ingestion of toxic doses of the royal addiction, chocolotl; hence their aberrant and psychotic behavior. Now, the curious thing is, the party of the Xolotl descends from the Toltec sorcerers who went into oblivion with the arrival of the Aztecs around 1250 CE. Readers of Castaneda will know that don Juan also attributed his lineage to the Toltecs, but insisted that the new sorcerers be distinguished from their ancient forebears.

The party of Xolotl is the outgrowth of the underground dissemination of the lost Toltec wisdom, raised to a higher octave and transplanted into the present by a retrograde magic operating from the future. This is how the Toltec adepts, past masters of serpent wisdom in MesoAmerica, worked out their survival - their transmigration in time, if you will. An elaborate technique, to say the least.

But the old sorcerers were exceedingly intricate in their ways, as don Juan astutely noted. The party of Xolotl associated with the nagual Julian and other preceptors of Castaneda's lineage came out of oblivion sometime around 1740, if I recall correctly. The party of Xolotl who are intimately involved with facing the 2012 end-time emerged somewhat later, around 1850, the time Hermann Melville was writing Moby Dick.

Curiously, Melville is not usually included in the school of magical realism, but he surely ought to be. He may be regarded as the patron saint of the party in literary terms. Mardi is a flawed masterpiece of magical realism in which Melville tried to channel some erotic projections mixed with end-time visions set in Oceania.

The spiritual crisis he underwent while writing Moby Dick is typical of the "spiritual emergencies" recounted by Grof. In Melville's intense psychological trauma, undergone in hermetic solitude, we can see the birth pangs of the party of Xolotl that now move among the end-time tribes in America. Imaginatively speaking, the White Whale could be the Greenland ice-shelf.

Maya Blue Face In The Eagle's Gift, Castaneda presented his vision of the nahual's party, comprised of eight men and eight women, forming a line with arms linked in a DNA-like braid.

Imagine a line of dancers in a kundalini conga. Don Juan said this was the form of the Plumed Serpent that allowed the party to transit as a unit to the other side. To some minds, this image will suggest dematerialization, recalling the claim of Arguelles that in the 2012 end-time some people attuned to the right frequencies of awareness could be swept into another dimension on a cosmic beam emanating from the center of the galaxy.

But is this literary image of Castaneda compatible with such a literal notion of off-planet transport? I have been asked on more than on occasion if the cosmic beam theory found in Argelles' writings, and, in a different version, in the cataclysmic astrophysics of Paul LaViolette, relates to the fall of the Aeon Sophia from the Pleroma, the galactic core. As a mythological motif, the fall of the Goddess is unique and cannot be associated with "the fall of humanity," a notion refuted in Sethian Gnosticism.

Since humanity does not fall from a divine state, there is no need to return to the divine source. Pagan, nonand pre-Christian Gnosis set the aim of realizing divinity here and now on earth, in the realm of the senses, by a direct encounter with the indwelling goddess, Sophia. Wisdom is her name, diversity is her game, and novelty is the key to the importance of humanity in Her Dreaming, the imagination of the earth.

Escape from the planet by dematerialization or miraculous transport is not the option here, but knowing first hand the presence of the Nahual in this world always is. The Nahual is the Unknown, the Otherworld, the other side of what we know via the mind and senses in their ordinary modalities. The nahual, non-capitalized, is the member of the party of Xolotl who on any occasion points to the Unknown, sees it first, divines its effects, or otherwise indicates its presence to the party. (In Pagan Mysteries at Eleusis and elsewhere, the nahual was called the hierophant.)

This person is immediately recognized by the others as the nahual for that occasion. Sometimes the nahual is identified by the oracle of rubbed charcoal. The sound of small cubes of burnt wood grated together gently in

the palm signals the hypertonic hearing that points, like a hunting dog, to the looming presence of the Nahual. The Nahual is not exactly the presence of the Aeon Sophia in her primary substance body, the epiphany of the Organic Light. It is the presence of the boundless cosmic reality, the truth of Shunyata, that looms behind the Light. In that soft wellspring of shadowless luminosity, everything is knowable, but the Unknown looms over the knowable, and within the Unknown looms the Unknowable.

Castaneda carefully made this distinction between the Unknown and the Unknowable, explaining that the former is inexhaustible, there being always infinitely more to know, but we cannot even know if the Unknowable is infinite or finite! (Vedanta and Kashmiri Shaivism make similar distinctions.) There is enormous salubrity in the Organic Light.

Even a momentary glimpse of it bestows eternal youth and ineffable wisdom: "Never was a man in such pain but from that day he beholds the Stone, he cannot die in the week that follows immediately after. Nor will his complexion ever decline... If that person saw the Stone for two hundred years, his hair would never turn gray. Such power does the Stone bestow that flesh and bone immediately acquire youth." So is the Grail described in Arthurian legend (Parzival, Ch. 9).

The Organic Light is a wellspring of healing power. In the 2012 end-time and after, Gaia will heal herself with catastrophic changes, but many other miraculous healings will occur as the geophysical shift unfolds. In the tradition of siddha yoga followed by the Grofs, the appearance of Blue Person is highly auspicious. People see the Person, or sometimes the Blue Pearl, spontaneously in altered states. The traditional depiction of Krishna with blue skin points to this mystical experience. The 2012 end-time may portend sightings of Blue Person on an unprecedented scale.

The Nahual associated with the Organic Light is a place one can look into, and go into if you have the adequate stealth, but some entities, including human beings or humanoid forms such as Blue Person, inhabit it permanently.

Among these are the Maya Blue Face, a tight clan of diviners and healers who continually "make the rounds" to the galactic center and back.

They are the Lords of Palenque, allies of P. azurescens, the most potent of psilocybin mushrooms (above). Azura: blue face.

They are the Asuras of Hindu-Persian mythology, traditionally portrayed as fearsome sorcerers and gorgon-like monsters to veil their true identity and protect their benevolent mission from snoops and sidewinders. The flesh of the Maya Blue Face is like clay, soft and porous, its color fluctuating from greyish blue to rich, dark azure. Their faces show the profile of local royalty depicted in the murals of the Classical Maya: sloped forehead, oval eyes, wide rounded nose like a fat slice of melon, long ears. Most distinctively, they bear on their cheeks the teardrop marking of the highest shamanic skill, predation, which is also the source of the deepest healing of which humans are capable.

Blue Face shamans are warriors gifted with lethal and baffling abilities, powers for killing and torture, and flesh-eating savvy. They acquired the supreme skill through a millennial pact with the great predator cats, the jaguar and puma, who also have teardrop markings.

Linda Tucker discovered the same symbiotic link between prey and predator among the White Lions of Timbavati.

The Zulu Lion shaman Credo Mutwa explained the link to her, connecting the lion to celestial patterns. The connection is pan-terrestrial, but the Maya Blue Face are special agents of the periodic return to the celestial center.

They know the spidery tracks to the galactic core and out again into the spiraling arms. To see the teardrop markings of the Maya Blue Face is one of the most poignant experiences of planetary mysticism, for the tattooed shapes send a message that is eternally true, at once infinitely sad and infinitely hopeful: only those who know how to kill magically can resurrect the human species from extinction.

The Blue Face shamans do not enact predation, but they use the feline savvy of the great predatory species to guide and heal whomever they encounter on their rounds.

Emanating the deliciously feral presence of the big hunting cats, they are benign and serene, the timehonored elders of the party of Xolotl.

Children of Novelty The 2012 end-time is a global event, encompassing the entire planet and all its inhabitants.

Geophysically, it seems to have kicked off in Asia, in Iran, Thailand and Sumatra. But the Western world, the Americas, is the place where it will be dramatically defined. There the younger generation are already deeply involved in the next evolutionary breakthrough, because the ground for a forward leap has been prepared in the Americas by the party of Xolotl since the 13th Century when the Toltec adepts went underground.

Many members of the five end-time tribes have party connections. The work of Xolotl adepts depends on their reception by the tribes. They are not self-proclaimed prophets, but sly masters of divination. Not guides, but guardians of the directive gnosis. Not messiahs, but no-nonsense mystics as able to navigate the apocalypse as to row a canoe. The return of Xolotl will come to expression in the West in lavish and outrageous fashion. The Orgiastics are the Dionysion avant garde for this revelation.

The 2012 end-time signals a spiritual emergency of the entire human species. The other plant and animal species going extinct by the hundreds each day are preparing us for this, previewing the experience, in some sense preparing us for it.

Kali's apocalyptic dance represents the catastrophic situation to which the party of Xolotl will apply their occult skills, but in a highly selective manner. There are only two responses to extinction: anesthetic denial or sudden awakening of non-ordinary states. The face of Xolotl mirrors both to us, as explained above. Stan Grof's When the Impossible Happens (2006) could be regarded as a survival handbook for the end-time.

It contains no prophecy or speculation, but presents a rich inventory of non-ordinary experience:

extrasensory perception telepathy out-of-body transport astral projection precognition clairvoyance psychometry materialization and dematerialization near-death experiences after-death survival and communication with the dead lucid dreaming channeling rebirthing holotropic states alien contact synchronicities reincarnational memory peaceful and wrathful deities

naked awareness of the Clear Light of the Void spontaneous kundalini awakening with kriyas remote viewing healing anomalies conscious access to genetic and phylogenetic codes visionary teachings and cosmic epiphanies verifiable psychic feats such as picturing places one has never been in this life and speaking in unknown tongues

Grof writes: It is clear there is no plausible explanation for these phenomena within the conceptual framework of mainstream psychiatry and psychology... They represent a formidable conceptual challenge for traditional science, and they have a paradigm-breaking potential. (When the Impossible Happens, p.165) Precisely so: experiences such as these, rather than any amount of social argument or scientific proof or messianic persuasion, will shatter the blind paradigms that bind us to the self-destructive behavior now escalating toward the 2012 end-time. To Grof's impressive inventory I would add ISP (infrasensory perception) and bilocation (often attained or anticipated in lucid dreaming), involving the plasmic double.

ISP, the complement to ESP, is infrasensory perception: seeing in participation what unfolds intensively within the senses, not merely what they reveal in the outer world, seemingly independent of the observer. Bilocation is physical embodiment in two places at once, fully and simultaneously conscious of both places and both bodies - perhaps the paramount thrill in the cosmos.

The hilarious antics of don Genaro illustrate some of the wilder possibilities of bilocation for cosmic clowning.

Grof's account of his bilocation ("Temptations in a Non-Local Universe: Failed Experiment in Astral Projection") provides sobering and cautionary insight into the pitfalls and aberrations of this most occult of occult phenomena. All the anomalous experiences Grof describes are relevant to the end-time, but most particularly the NDE. The 6th extinction will be a near-death experience for the entire human species. This is Gaia's way to operate the

higher mutation codes and affect transpeciation, consistent with her divine purposes. She is capable of resurrecting any species - on evidence for this claim, investigate the Cambrian explosion and the Maya Blue Face are uniquely complicit in how she does so.

In the NDE people are drawn into a tunnel of the Organic Light via a particular channel that leads to the Treasury of Lights described in the non-NHL (Nag Hammadi Library) Gnostic texts, the Books of Jeu and thePistis Sophia.

Some will go the entire route and expire, others will return, endowed with transmigratory secrets. Such secrets cannot be applied without intimate parallel knowledge of nature, especially reproduction in the plant kingdom and cultivation of fungal spores. (Amanita witch with her animal familiar, a fox.) In Brahmanical teachings pirated by Madame Blavatsky and upscaled by Dane Rudhyar, members of the endtime tribes who manage transmigration are called the shishta, "seed people."

They are in a literal sense people who preserve and disseminate seeds, like Dominique Guillet, founder of Seeds of Kokopelli. In another sense, the shishta carry forward in time the seeds of culture, mainly symbolic

systems, math, music, and languages, insuring their continuity through the precarious passage of extinction. The shishta are the ultimate survivalists and children of novelty. New tricks require new trickters.

These vital young warrior-lovers are the beneficiaries of magic and initiation in the end-time, the spiritual offspring of impeccable parents, dreamers and stalkers in the party of Xolotl.

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