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Raphael 1483-1528, The School (Plato and Aristotle) This is just a visual representation of Socratic Dialogue—it doesn’t mean that John and Jonathan are Plato and Aristotle!
For a much more thorough treatment of Dreamspell that includes most of the following go instead to:
Carnival 2012-A Psychological Study of the 2012 Phenomenon and the 22 Classic Pitfalls and Blind Spots of Esoteric Research
From Jonathan Zap To John M Jenkins
Sent July 23, 2003
. . . By the way, I forget to tell you about my encounters with Dreamspell at the gathering. All of the Dreamspell practitioners I ran into were very receptive when I told them that it was an interesting oracular system but shouldn’t be presented as “Mayan” since it is more an artifact of José than of the Maya or their calender that is still being kept to this day. I directed them to your website and told them about the online book available there. On one occassion though, I ran into a Dreamspell honcho who was trying to make a big impression at the gathering. He got rather irate and said that Dreamspell is based on an authentic “wizard count” that José was initiated into by “Mayan Elders.” and that José has an “obsidian staff.” ( Unless I’ve seen somebody back down a Balrog with their staff that doesn’t seem like much of a credential and I’m always suspicious when I hear talk of “Elders.” A Hopi Elder may often turn out to be someone of vaguely Native American ancestry in their fifties.)
Anyway, in an arrogant tone he said “We already had John Major talked to by sister so and so at the Prophecy Conference in Flagstaff[?]. At the end of the talk John Major admitted that, ‘he was only a man.'” I told him that I thought that was an appropriately humble admission as compared to José—who thinks that he is more than a man, who claims to be the reincarnation of Pacal Votan. The crowd standing around laughed with my closing comment. Is there any validity to this “wizard count”?? —Jonathan
From: “John Major Jenkins”
To: “jonathan zap”
Subject: RE: Dreamspell at the Gathering
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 17:22:45 -0600
You wrote that the Dreamspell honcho said: “We already had John Major talked to by sister so and so at the Prophecy Conference in Flagstaff. At the end of the talk John Major admitted that, ‘he was only a man.'”
That’s odd, is that a fairly specific quote? I’ve never been to a Prophecy Conference and I last passed thru Flagstaff on my motorcycle in 1988.
John
From: jonathan zap [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Thursday, July 24, 2003 5:37 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: RE: Dreamspell at the Gathering
John,
I can’t be sure where the conference was located, according to them, it could have been Portland, Flagstaff, not sure….but there was this specific claim about a conversation a woman had with you instructing you about the validity of the “Wizard Count” that Dreamspell is supposedly based on and that the conversation ended by you admitting that “you were only a man.” Does any part of that ring a bell, or is someone in the Dreamspell world fabricating out of whole cloth? Is there a “Wizard Count”??
Thanks, jonathan
From: “John Major Jenkins”
To: “jonathan zap”
Subject: RE: Dreamspell at the Gathering
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 18:22:26 -0600
Jonathan,
I don’t remember the term “wizard count”, but a letter Arguelles wrote in 1989 reports that he got his count from an artist in central Mexico in the 1970s (not Tony Shearer and not “Mayan Elders”). People hear what they want to hear. I certainly may have said something to the effect that I’m not enlightened, or am only a man, which I would have intended to put into relief Arguelles’s pompous posturings, but I don’t recall being instructed in the wisdom of Arguelles’ ways and then bowing in deference to the revealed High One as the person seems to have implied. There was a woman at the Portland conference who wanted to find some shared space of reconciliation, which of course I’m always open to, and she came from a Dreamspell background. In fact I rewrote my controversial Key to the Dreamspell Agenda essay at her request. At the same conference I was assailed by two 6-foot plus transvestites (or cross-dressers) for my presumption of correcting several astronomical errors in Sri Yukteswar’s book The Holy Science. The West Coast really sucks in many ways, as many people are blind followers out there. It’s not a place where someone promoting clarity and discernment can make much headway. My documentation on the Dreamspell camp, which includes correspondence, essays, etc, now runs thousands of pages. Very little of it is posted on my website; most of it is on my Tzolkin 2 CD-Rom book (see link at http://Alignment2012.com).
From: jonathan zap [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Thursday, July 24, 2003 6:27 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: RE: Dreamspell at the Gathering
John,
—-Jonathan
From: “John Major Jenkins”
To: “jonathan zap”
Subject: RE: Dreamspell at the Gathering
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 20:33:20 -0600
Yes, it’s a Catch-22. And the Dreamspell virus is pretty pervasive in that it’s invaded the culture at large—many people first hear-tell of the Mayan calendar through the Arguelles material, or someone telling them about it, and as a result I have to deal with layers of falsity and illusion. As a conference speaker it’s quite daunting and as 2012 approaches I only see deeper levels of popularized distortion around the 2012 theme. I’ve learned to discern and accept much of this as creative exegesis on the end-time archetype and other metaphysical themes, which is fine, but the unique thing about the Arguelles camp is the presumption of revealed truth and the cultic adulation of Arg himself —it is, as you say, a kind of uncompromising fundamentalism.
Every victory I’ve made in defending the authentic tradition, such as simply promoting the fact that it still exists, has been accepted and incorporated into Dreamspell dogma as if it was always there, and in some cases as if Arguelles himself always said as much. For example, now Arguelles is very careful to distinguish his Dreamspell count from the traditional “Quiché Maya” daycount, a proviso you never would have found in his literature prior to my much-criticized “Key to the Dreamspell Agenda” essay of late-1995. His is a carefully presented public relations exercise that obscures the source of that clarification—which is telling of his narcissistic attitude. He makes it seem like he’s always made that distinction, when in fact he pompously touted his system as “the” Maya calendar and asserted (wrongly) throughout the early 1990s that no authentic tradition survived today. I’ve received emails from close colleagues and former friends of Arguelles, mostly unsolicited, who have said things that make me feel justified in my criticism of his work, but I don’t broadcast those exchanges as they are of a personal nature. In the end, it’s not a question of impuning the man (or reincarnated Mayan king or whatever he is), but of simply making a sober examination of the efficacy of his system. Shouldn’t every new philosophical system or model be tested? This I’ve done time and time again, with little effect. For example, I was asked to write something for a Dreamspell email list last November. I compose “Following Dreamspell” off the top of my head (http://Alignment2012.com/following.html), which someone on the list responded to obliquely with wan reiterations of old Dreamspell apologetics.
From: jonathan zap [[email protected]]
Sent: Friday, July 25, 2003 12:32 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: RE: Dreamspell at the Gathering
I suspect that what you are experiencing with the Dreamspell virus may be a classic case of a much larger phenomenon that stretches back into thousands of years of history. There seems to be a mechanism in the collecitive unconscious that has a kind of immunological response to a breech in the inner eye. When a seed crystal of new consciousness emerges, some sort of cultural memes or control systems or false prophets or all of the aboves arise to congeal over it. In some case they will “kundebuffer” it (if I am applying that Gurdjieffian term correctly) and take some potent truth and turn it 180 degrees from its intentionality of origin. The most obvious case is Jesus spreading an egalitarian, pacifist message of turning the other cheek, the meek shall inherit the earth, and this gets kundebuffered into: Onward Chrisitan Soldiers.
In a very close time proximity to your breakthrough insights into what the Maya have to tell us about the cycle we are in, there is a counter measure generated from the collective, in response to it or in prescient anticipation of it, and now this sticky, congealing evil spell (dream spell—the name almost gives away its black magic aspect) is spun around this breach into forbidden seeing. Almost like the flak of aluminum fragments dropped by figher planes to confuse enemy radar, fragments of dream spell, like ribbons of rainbow-hued mylar from discarded candy wrappers, pervade the collective radar, obscuring the much less amplified, but precise signal that your insights and writings are trying to broadcast to the collective. Doesn’t it seem like something out there wants people under a spell, wants them asleep and dreaming as they come sweeping en masse into the cycle of accelerating change?
Also, what I was hinting at yesterday, is that this kundebuffer attack has a very central and significant aspect embedded in it—toxic narcissism. Narcissism seems like a key virus putting a ceiling on a whole generation of potential mutants (this is apparently the idea behind Boomeritis). José’s narcissism is apparently so extreme, so over the top, that he seems to be possessed by this virus, a psychic scarecrow doing the bidding of the mind parasites or some other unseen counter-revolutionary force. Also what I’ve noticed about Dreamspell, what makes it so virulently contagious, is that everyone gets a self description from it that is so fantastically complimentary, so glowing with cosmic superlatives (everyone seems to be something like a purple-cosmic-world-bridger-silver-wizard, but there are no fuzz-headed-hairless-carnivore types in the deck) that it is like super-sticky fly paper for the narcissistic personality type, the personality type of our age. As a slowly recovering narcissistic personality type myself I have noted that you are, for this age, and especially for someone doing ground breaking work, remarkably unnarcissistic and humble and this also adds to the authenticity of your work (but also, alas, diminishes its marketability because there is a demand out there you have long experienced—especially from radio hosts—for glamorous can-you-top-this prophetic claims, etc.). So you and José, your work and Dreamspell, are a kind of bonded pair, like mutagen and antibody. Your dealings with this immunological attack may require more unpredictable and varied strategies since your interactions with its opponents may actually serve the purpose of draining your time and energy, of causing you to try and pull your way out of a Chinese finger trap. It may be more energetically efficient for you to ignore them more, keep doing what you do and know that there will probably inevitably be numerically fewer, but far more potent minds drawn toward your signal versus theirs.
It is almost a compliment to your work, and its potentially mutagenic (transformative) power, that it is encountering such a powerful anti-field. One strategy, which I am trying to employ, is to direct conscious investigative awareness into the source of the immunological responses and into understanding how they operate. To the virus itself, awareness of what’s going on is a feared mutagen, and that’s why so much energy must be invested in weaving dreamspells to keep the collective asleep.
There is no point in trying to have socratic dialogues with brittle, possessed narcissists who are as dangerous to try to awaken as sleepwalkers proverbially are. Those who prefer to eat the imaginary steak, who prefer to be in the dreamspell, will be, one way or another. It is more energetically efficent to concentrate our help on those who have their own will to awaken.
Peace, Jonathan
The Integration of the Toltec-Aztec and Mayan Calendars
In a 1989 letter to an astrologer who asked Jose about his source for his daycount, Jose responded that he derived it from the work of a Mexican artist working in the 1970s. Jose wrote that it was important to synchronize the year-bearers with July 26 to make it work, as that was New Years Day in Yucatan. One task which led to Harmonic Convergence in 1987 was apparently to synchronize the Calendar Round with the Long Count; thus the ending of the Toltec Fifth Sun (rooted in the New Fire ceremony timed by Calendar Round endings) with the Long Count 2012 end-date (a Maya invention). This goal echoes the rift in the Mesoamerican psyche that I pointed out in my book, which was based upon two different ways of tracking the future precession-defined World Age shift. In identifying the underlying precessional astronomy of the New Fire ceremony and the Long Count calendar, I was led to identify and explain why Chichen Itza was the place where this rift in Mesoamerican World Age calendars was reconciled. The reconciliation occurred in the 9th century A.D., when both the Toltec and Maya systems were unified at the latitude of Chichen, thereby both agreeing that the early 21st century would be the time of the future World Age shift. Mythologically, it would be the time of Quetzalcoatl’s return (a Toltec idea) as well as the rebirth of One Hunahpu (a Mayan idea). José may have had the correct goal in mind, but his conclusions are inaccurate and the need to instate a new tzolkin calendar placement is, in my opinion, unnecessary.
And yes, the info comes direct from a letter Arg wrote to an astrologer friend of mine who had discreetly and persistently queried Arg on the source of his daycount. I have a copy of the original letter. So the “wizard count” interpretation is just another in a long series of apocrapfull spins.
Finally, I can’t say enough how clear and concise and totally on-target your last email was—it’s very heartening to know that someone else has the discernment muscle fully functioning – thank you!
John
