'It's like a big lightbulb switches on'
BY BILLY COX
Source: www.heraldtribune.com

In the late Cold War era, before the dawn of the World Wide Web, the Harmonic Convergence generated sociological magnetic fields from Stonehenge to Myakka River State Park.

On Aug. 16-17, 1987, across mountaintops, seashores and flatlands, untold numbers of Earthlings found themselves drawn like iron filings to pray, dance, meditate, sing and emit good vibes to promote global harmony.

The catalyst was a New Age author named Jose Arguelles, whose ruminations on American Indian cosmology became a bestseller in "The Mayan Factor."

Within a few years, seismic shifts were recorded. The Iran-Iraq war ended. The Russian army withdrew from Afghanistan. Apartheid disintegrated in South Africa. The Berlin Wall fell. The Soviet Union collapsed.

Even the cynics who dismissed the event as the "moronic convergence" were caught flat-footed by these rapid realignments of power.

So what happened to all those high hopes?

Nearly six years after suicide jetliners brought down the World Trade Center, two wars are leeching blood, treasure and stature from the United States; terrorism fueled by religious fundamentalism is accelerating; Russia is reverting to authoritarian rule and polar icecaps are contracting beneath runaway greenhouse gases.

"We saw the light then, but there was also the other side," says Zan Benham, of Sarasota. "Dark pushes the light. It's kind of like a wound; before it can heal, it has to come to the fore. Before the Earth can be restored, the clutter has to be cleaned out first."

Benham, a certified hypnotherapist, counselor and Reiki master, is undeterred by the grim headlines now splattering across the news. As the 20-year anniversary of the Harmonic Convergence approaches, she and half a dozen like-minded optimists have converged once more to contemplate what they insist was a glimpse of the future.

The venue is the home of artist Jo Mooy. She publishes an online, metaphysical newsletter called "StarSoundings Journal," which offers periodic updates on local, esoteric goings-on (new moon meditations, healing classes), celestial conjunctions (meteor showers, lunar eclipses) and testimonials about how the universe responds proportionately to appeals for guidance.

One of her colorful silk Mandalas -- a sacred circle in Sanskrit -- is draped over the living room TV screen like a funeral shroud. Mooy enjoys watching the occasional documentary on the tube, but is wary of the medium's potential for distraction.

"I just don't want that big box coming into the house," she says. "To me, it's just an electronical device."

Today's agenda is not merely the Harmonic Convergence, but its larger context -- the ancient Maya calendar, and its imminent conclusion, on or about Dec. 21, 2012. The onset of 2012 is spawning a cottage industry of books and forecasts, from transcendence to meltdowns reminiscent of the Y2K buzz.

In a recent edition of The New York Times, Arguelles predicted "the post-2012 world will be a world of universal telepathy." In "Apocalypse 2012," Lawrence E. Joseph outlines the collapse of civilization beneath the weight of war, superstorms, and other natural disasters. John Major Jenkins, author of "Maya Cosmogenesis 2012: The True Meaning of the Maya Calendar End Date" anticipates "transformation and renewal."

Fueling the debate are the Maya "world age cycles." These are a complex but elegant series of repetitive, nonlinear stanzas of time calculated during the supremacy of a civilization whose own cities had been emptied, as if by plague, when Spanish conquistadors marched through them in the 16th century. The current Maya world age cycle, calculated to have begun in 3114 B.C., will have run its 5,126-year course five years from now.

The pre-Columbian mathematicians were silent on the ramifications, but at Mooy's place, the gathered prefer to accent the positive.

Norma Martin -- like Benham, a Reiki healer -- says the Harmonic Convergence was simply the most publicized aspect of the 25-year countdown to the end of the world age cycle.

For instance, on Jan. 11, 1992, at 11:11 a.m., Martin invited the public to wear white and hook up at a sacred dance circle in east Sarasota. It was called the 11:11 Planetary Activation, an event designed "to bring us into higher dimensional consciousness," according to Martin, and expedite telepathic communication.

"Oh, it went on for a long time," says Martin, adding that more than 100 people showed up. "Some stayed until midnight. I never expected such a turnout."

The doorway for accessing that energy, according to proponents at www.nvisible.com, will close on Nov. 11, 2011. But even more opportunities may present themselves between now and then.

On July 17, United Church of Sarasota hosted an hour-long "Fire the Grid" communion, part of a coordinated, worldwide effort to foster planetary healing by plugging into meditative energy nodes.

"The Earth has a grid system that looks like a huge spider web stretched across lay lines, or energy lines," says Unity co-pastor Dorothy Ann Jackson. "This energy has a vibration, and vibration has a frequency. In your mind, you send out a signal and draw everything that's on that particular frequency.

"Whenever huge groups of people come together, you can put out a positive wave of vibration that reaches a peak. There's a plateau, then an ebb, and then another flow. What you think is projected out there."

Mooy's guests are in harmony about this point, too: Sarasota is a key vector on that grid. Maybe it has something to do with the quartz crystal sand at Siesta Key. It is where they often go to meditate.

"Crystals are transmitters as well as receivers," says Rose Lettiere, a Sarasota feng shui consultant. "They hold thought, they form energy, they talk. They feed us what we feed it. And when we have a collection of like-minded souls or beings gathered for the same purpose, it's like a big lightbulb switches on."

In fact, Mooy says Dec. 21, 2012, is not so much a date as a consciousness whose arrival will be as smooth or as rocky as individual preparations for it. Despite the apparent chaos in the world, she says the conditions for uniting its inhabitants behind a turnaround are considerably better than in 1987.

"New technology has become available, and that's the Internet," Mooy says. "People found out about the Harmonic Convergence through flyers and word of mouth. We are much more connected today through technology.

"We are the vanguard of that new human that we will become."