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Wednesday, February 25........Palenque, Mexico
Too much has been happening for me to write about it all. For three weeks I have been getting further and further behind in writing these notes. Now I am so far behind that I cannot catch up. I hope to one day find a sacred places whose deity is a god or goddess of writing. I will ask that a miracle be given me in the realm of writing........Please, let me have the ability to write well and more (much more!) quickly. I am a slow and immature writer and current life events are making it difficult for me to write of my travels as fully and nicely as I would like.
So, I will not go into any detail about my tough climb up Cerro Tlaloc, mountain abode of the ancient Mesoamerican god of rain. A barren peak, 4105 meters, storming, cold, very windy, lost way coming down, night falls, long walk through dark forest, finding a town, but no hotel rooms, late bus to another place, the town of St. Martin, still no rooms, later a prostitute is finished with her room and gives it to me, such a sweet day. And, I will not write of Cholula, site of the largest of all Mesoamerican pyramids and 39 churches marking secondary shrines around the sprawling ancient city. I must skip ahead to where I am now, in Palenque. Soon I will leave Mexico for Guatemala and it is time that I put the first installment of these writings on my web site. In a month or two I will add more notes, but now I must finish what I have written, give it a bit of polishing, and set it free to be read.
Over the years of showing my sacred site photographs to large numbers of people I have often heard it said that I have been to many places having "great views." The type of views that you find on the covers of glossy tourist brochures and National Geographic magazine. Places where you simply want to sit for a few hours and do nothing much more than gaze at the beauty before you. The Maya ruins of Palenque are such a place.
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The tomb of Pacal
Votan, the Temple of the Inscriptions
Palenque, Mexico.
Vast, mysterious and enchanting, the ruined city of Palenque is considered to be the most beautifully conceived of the Mayan city-states and one of the loveliest archaeological sites in the world. Its geographic setting is splendid beyond words. Nestled amidst steep and thickly forested hills, the ruins are frequently shrouded in lacy mists. A rushing brook meanders through the city center and from the temple summits there are stupendous views over an immense coastal plain. Here and there, piercing the dark green forests, soar great pyramids, towers and sprawling temple complexes. In its period of cultural florescence however, Palenque was even more beautiful, for then its limestone buildings were coated with white plaster and painted in a rainbow of pastel hues. These fabulous ruins were so hidden in the jungles that their existence was unknown until 1773. Even then, Palenque was discovered and lost several times until 1841 when the explorers Stephens and Catherwood arrived and described it in detail.
Scattered pottery shards show that the site was occupied from as early as 300 BC, but most of the buildings were constructed between the 7th and 10th centuries AD. Then, mysteriously, the great city was abandoned and reclaimed by the inexorable claws of the jungle. Even the Mayan name of the city was lost, and the ruins received their current name from the nearby village of Santo Domingo de Palenque. While the ruins have received some of the most extensive excavation and reconstruction efforts of any of the Mayan sites, only 34 structures have been opened of an estimated 500 that are scattered around the area. As one wanders through the ruins or gazes from atop the tall buildings, small hills are seen everywhere about the site. These are not hills however, but Mayan structures long overgrown with jungle.
Eight years ago, when first I visited Palenque, I spent many hours sitting quietly in different vantage points around the beautiful site. The Temple of the Inscriptions, the observatory, and the Temple of the Foliated Cross are among my favorite. Returning to these places years later, I again find that they evoke in me the most extraordinary mental states. Without exerting any effort I am transported into and between meditative, visionary, and precognitive states of awareness. By this I mean that my mind is alternately free of thoughts and images, filled with images of the living site 1000 years ago, or informed by pictures of things soon to come. When such experiences first began to happen to me at the sacred sites, in 1984 when I began my studies, I was astonished. Then, with the passing of years, I read many stories of sacred sites having been the places where the great prophets and sages experienced various types of religious experience. I slowly gathered enough mytho-historical information and personal experience to understand that a crucial (though unsuspected) element in the majority of exalted spiritual awakenings and visionary experiences was the power of place. Certain places had been observed to cause specific - otherwise rarely attained - mental states in sensitive human visitors.
I feel it is extremely important that this information be communicated with many people around the world. If more people will visit the sacred sites, connecting with the spirits, powers, and teachings of the sites, there will be a corresponding increase in the amplification of consciousness and earth awareness in the world. As more people tune into and receive teachings from the spirits of the earth, more of those teachings will percolate through human culture and its institutions. One of the many results will be that humankind will then "walk more gently upon the earth." Knowing of our connection to the living earth, knowing of the interdependence of all living things, we humans will increasingly interact with our surroundings in a more harmonious and sustainable way.
Maya ruins of Palenque, Mexico
While at Palenque this time I had the opportunity to present my slide show to a few dozen archaeologists, architects, and surveyors involved in a new and precise mapping of the ruins. During the slide show I sought to communicate the deeper significance of what is really available at Palenque and other places like it. Over the years of photographing ancient sites I have found there to be a romanticized notion about the level of consciousness, even intelligence, of archaeologists. While they are certainly good people, for the most part they may be compared to horses with blinders on their eyes. Most archaeologists, trained and programmed by the often narrow-minded assumptions of the conservative university establishment, rarely grasp the deeper, spiritual significance of the ancient religious sites they excavate. Ruins are reconstructed with precision and care, and academic journals and Ph.D. dissertations are written, but seldom do these scientists tap into the mythic, energetic, and spiritual qualities of the sites. I spoke with intense passion about the need to transcend one’s normal way of looking at things in order to penetrate into the true mysteries of the Maya past. The Maya, and numerous other ancient cultures, hold much knowledge and wisdom that could be of use to contemporary humans in these current times of social confusion and environmental disintegration. Speaking to the veteran archaeologists and their eager students, I urged them to seek for the deeper truths and, finding these, communicate them clearly and simply to the world.
