A Gnostic Dream of 2012

© 2005 by Jonathan Zap

The following dream about 2012 was reported to me by a young woman who originally contacted me because of her interest in androgyny. She had recorded the dream in her journal a few months before becoming acquainted with my work. I was standing on the stoop of the house I grew up in with Kurt Cobain, and we were talking like old friends. I asked him, “What’s going to happen in 2012?” And he said “Nothing.” Then, he took me somewhere where we saw a monument, an overhead view as if we were flying above it.

I thought the monument had something to do with Kurt. Then he showed me people making a time capsule. The time capsule was a huge concrete cylinder, and people were putting tee-shirts in it. The tee-shirts had slogans on them. Finally, I saw Kurt’s face morph into the face of Jesus, and then Jesus’ face morphed into the face of a black man. And this black man was preaching to a group of people. And I realized that Jesus speaks through many different types of people. The dreamer had previously described Kurt Cobain as someone she considered an androgyne.

The K C figure appears as psychopomp, or soul guide, a mercurial shape-shifting Christ. KC/JC seems to be a manifestation of the dreamer’s higher self, an inner androgyne, and that’s why they talk like “old friends” on “the stoop of the house I grew up in.” KC tells her that “nothing” will happen in 2012.

There are many layers to this statement about 2012. One layer may be a suggestion to stop counting down to eschaton or end of time, because that only binds you to linear time and keeps you from the dimension of eternity. This relates to discussions I’ve had with Mayan Scholar, John Major Jenkins, who describes 2012 as “the center of time, not the end of time.” Looking toward a particular date for a Rapture or transcendent event, or even for a longed for vacation, keeps you imprisoned by linear time.

Several centuries ago, Meister Eckart expressed the timeless wisdom of the Perennial Philosophy: Time is what keeps the light from reaching us. There is no greater obstacle to God than time. And not only time but temporalities, not only temporal things but temporal affections; not only temporal affections but the very taint and smell of time. According to Jenkins, 2012 may mark a time when our perception of linear time gives way to an awareness of eternity. When you are aware of eternity, “nothing happens,” because everything has already happened. Your awareness shifts from doings and happenings to timeless being.

If you are expecting 2012 to be a fire works of earth changes and big happenings you may be in for a Y2K-like anticlimax.

So far, every eschaton prophecy ever made has resulted in a disconfirmation. And KC, who in the waking life is a dead celebrity, but in the dreamtime is alive and in the world of her childhood, has obviously transcended linear time. Another layer of KC’s statement that “nothing happens” in 2012 is the aspect of nothing as no-thing and as a state of nothingness. Jenkins, in his books, Maya Cosmogenesis 2012 and Galactic Alignment, makes the case that 2012 was a date recognized by the Maya as the time of a rare astronomical alignment, the time when we align with the center of our galaxy. At the center of our galaxy, as in the center of many galaxies, there is believed to be a black hole, a no-thing, and when things cross the event horizon into this singularity their thingness is irrealized. Epigraphers have translated a Mayan hieroglyph related to galactic alignment as “black hole.” Jenkins documents this here.
Galactic alignment was recognized by a number of cultures (the Maya, the Egyptians, the ancient Hindus, the Western Alchemists) as a time marker of when the era of densification, of ever more immersion into things (materialism, industrialism, consumerism) gives way to a Golden Age where spiritual light replaces the density of thingism. Then it seems as if KC takes her out of her body and they fly above a monument, getting an overhead view of it. This immediately reminded me of the Great Cross of Hendae which Jay Weidner has studied so extensively—-which can be found here. According to Weidner, and a mysterious figure named Fulcanelli, this stone monument is a time capsule in several senses, it is a time capsule preserving the alchemical knowledge of alchemical stone masons, and it is also a time marker locating the galactic alignment of 2012 as the “end of time,” the time when the Iron Age or Kali Yuga ends, and a new Golden Age begins.

To read something I wrote last year on Jay Weidner, the precession of the ages, 2012 and the Tolkien mythology see : The Mutant Versus The Machine, the End of the Iron Age, and the Galactic Alignment of 2012 The dreamer says that she thought the monument had something to do with KC, who later in the dream becomes JC, whose symbol is the Cross. This creates still another correlation to the Great Cross of Hendae. Since the dreamer is taken out of her body to do a fly over of the monument, it may suggest her dreaming psyche associating 2012 as a time of flying free in her spirit body and being released from the limits of corporeality (the dreamer had previously related her many dissatisfactions with her corporeal existence).

Next KC shows her people making a time capsule. The time capsule is a concrete cylinder, an object of high density and weight. Whatever is put in a time capsule immediately becomes an artifact of the past, of what is passing. The time capsule is prepared after passing a monument that marks the end of the cycle of densification. What the people are putting into the time capsule are t-shirts bearing slogans. T-shirts are an industrial age, non-individual, mass-produced article of clothing, a man-made outer skin easily shed. What are on the t-shirts are slogans, and slogans are typically clichés created by advertisers or political propagandists. The etymology of slogan is interesting, it is derived from an early 16th century Gaelic word “sluagh-gharim.” “Sluagh” means “army” and “gairm” means “cry” so it was originally a battle cry. Militarism is being put into the capsule as an artifact of the past. The sloganed t-shirts are an obsolescent skin being molted. They are artifacts of militarism, industrialism, propaganda, advertising, commercialism, mechanical thinking and mechanical, manipulative communication.

The day I received the dream via email, I was busily preparing for a documentary that was being video taped the following morning entitled, A Logos Beheld—Visual Communication, Virtual Reality and the Evolutionary Event Horizon. When I received the email I had Leonard Shlain’s book, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess , open in front of me. The documentary is about work I began in 1977, when I was nineteen years old, related to a theory that verbal and alphabet based communication had reached an evolutionary cul-de-sac and were going to be replaced by a visual modality of communication and gnosis. (see http://alignment2012.com/capsule5.html)

I had just been writing about Terence McKenna’s discussion of octopi—- cephalopods that communicate by altering colors and visual characteristics of their skin. As McKenna put it, “they wear their language on their skin.” Having finished the section on the octopi, the emailed dream arrived as I was writing a section on The Alphabet Versus the Goddess , a thoroughly researched and elegantly written book that provides voluminous evidence that the cycle of time we call history, characterized by dominator societies, slogans and battle cries, was triggered by the invention of alphabets, which caused the left hemisphere of the brain to become dominant. The left hemisphere of the brain is connected with text, linearity in thought and time perception, hierarchy, and dominance. The spread of television, movies, and especially computers, is radically shifting our hemispheric dominance toward the right hemisphere which is visual, holistic, archetypally feminine, and aware of time as circular. This hemispheric shift may correlate to a whole new cycle or era.

What’s put in the time capsule are the sloganed t-shirts, the moltings of our mechanical, alphabetical and militaristic thinking and communicating. Once we have put our alphabetical skin into the past, into the time capsule, we see an octopi-like emergence of visual communication and plasticity, a visual skin of communication, which transcends ethnic barriers as the dreamer’s androgynous higher self morphs into Jesus and then a black man. Philo Judeas, an Alexandrian Jew from 25 BC, a contemporary of Chrirst, said that we would have reached something like what Teilhard de Chardin called the Omega Point when the Logos, the voice of God, was beheld instead of heard. As I have written in my study of androgyny and the Tolkien mythology: Casting Precious Into the Cracks of Doom—Androgyny, Alchemy, Evolution and the One Ring the ultimate external manifestation of the androgyne is the changeling or shape-shifter capable of a visual logos, an outer presentation that synchronizes with inner linguistic intentionality.

The Gnostic Christians, who were destroyed by the text-wielding Orthodox Christians, conceived of Christ as androgynous and changeling. June Singer writes in her book Androgyny, the Opposites Within : “Another Gnostic conceptualization of the Son of Man is that he is Aipolos, the pole (also a pun on the Greek word for goat herd, the one who must turn in all directions).This figure is symbolized by Mercurius, the ever-elusive trickster who is of essence but whom one cannot grasp; also Proteus, the shape shifter, in whom every quality exists in potentia. The Jesus of this dream is Gnostic in another way. He is not the outside savior conceived by Orthodox Chrisitans, but a Gnostic inner Jesus, her dream character whom she talks to as a very old friend, the other side of herself.”

In the recently discovered Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says: “He who will drink from my mouth will become like me. I myself shall become he, and the things that are hidden will be revealed to him.” At the end of the dream she realizes that Christ Consciousness can appear in many people. In the age of densification the divine was externalized, and there was the search for the Chalice as object, the One Ring, the beloved of romantic infatuation (See Stop the Hottie! ) and Jesus misconceived as outside savior. In Casting Precious Into the Cracks of Doom… I talk about the mislocation of the Godhead that has characterized the passing age. From the point of view of the dream, 2012 signifies the return of gnosis, the molting of the alphabetical, militaristic, slogan-skin and the emergence of androgynous, protean, Christ consciousness.