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- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Valley&State Backpage O&E Sports Archives Classifieds Faith&Beliefs Obituaries Revels July 30, 2004 I'll Shut Up - Right After This The end of the world - a good thing We're sitting in his art gallery at Fourth and A talking about the end of the world as know it, which is due in eight years, says Jose Arguelles. It's a good thing, the coming era of peace, creativity, higher consciousness, harmony with nature, but, he says, it's not going to be pretty - the transition to it. Lines will get longer, traffic thicker, relationships harder, bureaucracies slower, cash flow testier - actually, you may have noticed these already happening - as the institutions we've created in 5,000 years of civilization implode. Why am I not surprised to hear this? You hear it at parties, if people have had enough wine to loosen up and get down. You hear it from friends. You hear it from that still, small voice inside. Argeulles won fame for bringing us the 1987 Harmonic Convergence, an event that opened the last 25 years of our old and unsustainable ways of war, social injustice, economic exploitation and general rape of the planet - all this being foretold by planetary and galactic cycles in the Mayan calendar. He's a thoughtful and likeable guy, slow-spoken, an art professor educated at prestigious University of Chicago, taught at Princeton and UC Davis, where he started the Whole Earth Festival, which is still going. His art, painted on doors, shows he's no stranger to the psychedelic mind. And he's no stranger to Ashland. Like many voices of the new age, he lives here now. Why? This is where the energy is, the thought, the transformation, the people changing the world by working on themselves. Which is nice. You can feel it. You can also feel the cost of housing changing by the minute, so that only rich conscious people will end up here, which is a contradiction because once you start segregating people by wealth, you start losing the conscious, explorative, growing edge - unless we start letting the conscious poor live in our garages, which indeed we are, if the dozens of people last week at city council are any indication - complaining about the explosion of accessory units, which for many is the only affordable way to be here. But that's part of the plan. We're going to be living a lot simpler and being a lot happier inside. Meanwhile, the old ways are getting harder and that includes paying more and more to live in a place you think is special. But it's not special here. Actually, every place is special, because no matter where you go, there you are, which is another way of saying you're a hologram of the whole she-bang, a.k.a. the Universe. And that, if I hear Jose and lots of others correctly (including that still, small voice) is what it's all about - and what we're doing is shifting up to a new kind of consciousness. It's internal and individual. The old way is about altering externals, making programs, building dams, changing rulers and fixing other nations by destroying them so we can 'splain freedom and democracy to 'em. Meanwhile, until the new era, starting Dec. 21, 2012, what do we do? Well, you can have a long series of nice days by learning what Jose calls mental manners - you meditate a lot, witnessing the fear- and greed-driven, internal, conditioned mindstuff that created this mess. You look at reality as neutral. Nothing that happens is good or bad, it's all lessons. You don't blame, polarize or even imagine that you're "right." You're not. If you're right, you can't learn. If you can't learn, you can't evolve. If you don't evolve, you're going to be a casualty of the cosmic crunch, the nexus to the next level in 2012, where you could be having a lot of fun painting, cooking, feasting, dancing, making music, playing with the kids, studying wisdom and being part of a harmonious, peace-n-love global community to come. Should we believe all this? Well, it's not a lot harder to buy than WMD, prison torture, 900 dead American soldiers, massive deficits, tax cuts for the rich, cutting meds for seniors, $100,000 college educations and pretending Florida was a red state. Let's let the Universe decide. Last Saturday evening, Jose was celebrating the change to the new 13-moon calendar (364 days), plus a Day Out of Time, July 24, which is why he was holding this big celebration at Ashland Hills. It didn't rain frogs, but basically out of the 100-degree blue, the heavens gush thunder, lighting and torrents of rain, knocking out our town's power. After that, lots of people threw money at his cause - we love our gurus here! - took a deep breath and started thinking about all the fun they're going to have, not in 2013, but starting right now. John Darling is and Ashland writer and counselor. Contact him at [email protected]. DailyTidings.com Home Page Valley&State | Backpage | O&E | Sports | Archives | Weather | Classifieds Columnists | Faith&Beliefs | Obituaries | Revels | Subscribe | Contact Us Copyright 2004 Ashland Daily Tidings and Ottaway Newspapers All Rights Reserved Click Here Site Search: .:Advertisements:. RESOURCES - Mail Tribune News - ODOT Road Cams