XIBALBA, A Journey

It’s extraordinary how the ancient Mayans were able to know very different kinds of time, not just linear time that we are familiar with that flies like an arrow. They knew circular time, cycles of time that go back to 16.4 billion years ago. We would like to invite you to join Alberto Villoldo in a Conference Call that leads you to the end date of the Mayan Calendar and to the birthing pangs of the new beginning of another Mayan Calendar which is a resetting of time itself. We are coming into a period that all the prophecies of the Americas have described as a time of great upheaval, tremendous upheaval, and of the need for agents of change, for agents of transformation, for men and women who are willing to step up and make a difference.

In this article on Xibalba, Alberto Villoldo, a medical anthropologist, who is speaking here about the end of the Mayan Calendar and the pangs of birthing a new beginning in 2013, left the world of academics, for the South-American rainforest 25 years ago. He apprenticed to Incan and Mayan Shamans from that day on. At the time of his Initiation, Alberto was instructed to bring their wisdom and their prophecies out into the world. He studied the codes for the new human called the Munay-Ki Rites. These rites form a body of information that could make a difference as we find our way to 2012, end of the Mayan Calendar. But we will not discuss it here as of now. We are yet to know why we are in this terrible time of darkness, and why we have to cast away fear, for what we fear controls us.

We are here to learn that we are into a time full of opportunity, we speak of a time of great choice, and about the people who do not make the right choice, about the people who refuse to choose as people who will go through tremendous suffering and if consumed by it will have cause to despair. This can be avoided if we discard our willful ignorance and learn from the wisdom and insight of the indigenous Mesoamerican seers have about these times we are living in. So that we are not bewildered, do not get caught in the storm, so that we can seize the opportunities that are presented to us and find refuge, safety, well being and tremendous possibilities for growth for ourselves and our families. Alberto Villoldo the medical anthropologist turned shaman for 25 years living in the Andes now asks us to take note how optimistic the Apache Elders and prophecy keepers were feeling during this tremendous time of gloom. They speak about a great time of opportunity of renewal, a time of quantum leaping, of miraculously transcending a time of darkness called Xibalba,which is our journey through the underworld that we – humanity as a whole, has been traversing over the centuries.

In symbolical language, Xibalba was associated with a dark place in heaven, a place where there is no light. It was called the Place of Fear, the Place of Death, and it was ruled by 12 lords of death. It was an extraordinary city, an extraordinary place, there were landscaped gardens, there were temples, there were palaces. (Aside) Aren’t you familiar with these extraordinary temples and palaces surrounded by vast, landscaped gardens and splendid golf courses and beach resorts with alluring spas in our ultra modern world of condotels and high rise buildings here and abroad ? There were 6 temples for example, that you were to pass through and where you were tested. There was the House of Darkness, the House of Cold, there was the House of Heat, there was the House of Hungry Jaguars, there was the House of Razors, and there was the House of Bats. Each of these Houses had to be visited, you had to pass through and meet the challenges of these houses successfully and not to be seduced and consumed and destroyed by them.

Through the House of Darkness, a time of darkness that we have lived in historically, that humanity spent hundreds of years in during the Dark Ages, and that we are living through at this time, as well. Now, remember that the Mayans (as well as the Hopi Indians, the Incans and Aztecs) understood that time was linear, but that there was another time that looped back into itself and did the figure 8, and cartwheels, and where things occurred simultaneously and concurrently (we call synchronicity, and in our astrological charts Chiros time, or God’s time as represented by planet Chiron the wounded healer discovered only in 1977).

So each one of these Houses represent tests that humanity and individually, had to overcome. These were the tests of illness, of disease, of bats, the House of Blades, of razors and blades and swords, which is the House of violence, of war we find ourselves and the planet in. The House of the hungry Jaguars represents greed, the seduction of greed, that maybe if only I can do the next deal or sell the next project, which is wonderful, terrific, but when we are caught in the grip of greed that is so infectious in our time, we succumb to one of the lords of death.

The House of Heat, the world is heating up, we are facing this globally. But personally the House of Heat had to do with purification. Could you stand the heat? Were you able to purify, to detox, to eliminate the poisons that live within you?

The House of Cold was the house where communication between people broke down, where people spoke to each other but did not understand each other. This is the dilemma we face in the world today and we see it sometimes with our partners, or spouses and children, as though we are speaking different languages, and we grow cold internally. We had to be victorious in each one of these challenges, and not lose sight of what we came to do.

So Xibalba is in a symbolic sense, a place of great learning, though it was identified with the underworld, with the collective unconscious. The lessons were unavoidable. Everybody had to go through these tests. The journey through Xibalba required that we cross several rivers, whether to get in or get out of this realm of death. This is the realm that we are living in today, we are living in a world of death and suffering. The river that you had to cross first was the river of scorpions. Then there was the river of blood, which represents wars, all of the violence we are experiencing in the world. Then there was the river of pus, which represents illness, disease and plagues. And when we look back we remember where we were tested and failed; seduced by everything that stroke our ego, and that we had to learn through the most difficult way, then deciding of course never to learn that way again, until it happened the next time.

We had to be successful in our journey through this dark period, particularly now that the Mayan calendar signals that we are entering the 5th Night of the Galactic Cycle (this was last year 2008) entering the 6th year or Sixth Day of the Galactic cycle (2009). In the Popul Vol, bible of the Mayans it is said that when we are successful in our journey we come to the House of the Lords of Xibalba, to a great hall, and we come to look at the Lords themselves, which were described as demons, but that existed as demons only because fear lived within us. Surrounding them would be other Lords, but some of them would be mannequins, dolls, and if you confuse one of those for the real Lords, then you had to pay, you were punished for being seduced and confused. For whatever it is that we feared most, that’s how they would appear to us.

So the story of Xibalba is the story of the ancient rulers of humanity, the ancient rulers of the world. Not of the Earth, because the Earth is our planet, as differentiated from the world which is a human construct that has streets and roads and the Internet and malls and telephones, fast food, and the belief systems, and commercials and advertising. That’s the world, that’s the distinctly human world ruled by the lords that have dominated it for this extraordinarily long period of time, speaks Alberto Villoldo in his Conference Call, and here he extols the shamans who strove to break free of their dominion.

According to lore, the Mayan twins who were the hero twins of the Mayan story of creation, had to defeat these lords of Death because all the human priests offered human sacrifice and they changed the beliefs of the people that the Spirit did not want to be fed human hearts, human flesh or human blood, or sending our best and finest young men in ridiculous wars that cannot be won. The Lords of Death no longer required sacrifice. We now could pay homage to the Lords of life that we could break free from the call to death itself.

Our task today is to break free from the grip of the Lords of Xibalba, to emerge victorious and renewed. Because the other side of Xibalba or what was at the very heart of it lay all of the purest and most fertile and richest energy of creation, which was that life force that grew in the corn, in the squash and in the pumpkin and in the vegetables. Once we are able to clean up our own unconscious, clean up the baggage of history that has infiltrated our subconscious mind, then we conquer the lords of death. We do so, in effect by dying to our old self and becoming a new human we begin to see that there is no such thing as death.

We are all being initiated today into beingness. There is a part of all of us that is going through death, of how we viewed the world, of how we viewed relationships, of how we viewed our children. It’s about waking up from the age of lies and the land of lies that we have been living in and convinced ourselves of and believed in, and to waking up to the clarity of vision to enable us to see truth even in the midst of chaos and confusion. Not only to see truth but to become truth to practice truth so that everything we speak is truthful, everything we are is truth, and when you do that then you discover the power of emerging in glory from Xibalba. You have broken out of the hall of mirrors, out of the great illusion.