Carl Johan Calleman
My Story (or at least part of it)
I was born in Stockholm, Sweden in 1950 and grew up there too. In addition to the normal enjoyment of playing soccer I liked chess and mathematical problems but also had a passion for history as I spent much time creating time lines for historical processes, which certainly at the time seemed hard for anyone to explain. I even contemplated why civilization had arisen 5100 years ago.
Over all I was pretty confused about my goals in life until I was in my early 30’s, when two different experiences gave it a more clear direction. One was the backpacking trip I made in 1979 to Mexico and Guatemala, which would become life-altering as I would get to see first hand the pyramid cities of Teotihuacan and Chichen-Itza and also had my first contacts with Mayans. It seemed they saw something more in me than I did myself. Were they signaling something to me, by inexplicably giving me small little gifts? While in Mexico I also for the first time familiarized myself with some of the specifics of the Mayan calendar; to my surprise I read in Michael Coe’s book The Maya that the calendar of this ancient people was about to come to an end in 2011. This was long before interest in the Maya had began to grow in spiritual communities in the modern world and of course it seemed like an enigma that a calendar would come to an end. Michael Coe even suggested that this could be the end of the world. While fortunately this later turned out not to be true, and I would later fight against such apocalyptic notions, it is noteworthy that the origin of this idea was a respected Mayanist at Yale University.
Regardless, I felt spiritually at home in Mexico and the trip convinced me that my life’s mission or purpose was profoundly linked to the ancient peoples that had built pyramid cities there. But exactly how I did not yet understand and it should be added that at the time practically nothing was known about the deeper meaning of the Mayan calendar. For instance, as I asked my tour guide at Chichen-Itza why the beginning of the Long Count calendar had been set at 3114 BC, his answer was that this was just based on a myth and had no real meaning. Considering that I had already studied a lot of history and knew that this corresponded well with the time of rise of civilization on our planet and my intuition told me that the Mayan calendar carried a deep truth I did not buy into his explanation. Yet, at the time I did not have enough knowledge to present an alternative explanation.
The second life-altering experience I had in my early thirties was that I participated in Werner Erhard’s Est-training in 1984, which in a hard-to-explain way propelled me into action and redesign my life. As a result I suddenly went from living day by day, with no clear direction for the future to create a new focus for my life. At the time, I was since several years a graduate student of Physical Biology to Professor Lars Ehrenberg, a member of the Nobel committees in Stockholm. I was then largely living my life in the university laboratories and had been dragging my feet about graduating. Certainly, I enjoyed being trained as a chemist and applying this knowledge to develop techniques that could be useful in cancer research, but there was also something else that called me. Essentially, the Est training brought me not only to complete my doctoral degree, but also to take on a research position in Seattle where I arrived in 1986.
This move exposed me to a number of new influences also outside the University of Washington. For one thing travel down to the Mayan sites in Mexico became much easier. I would go down there not really knowing what I was looking for, but with a certainty that there was something in the old temple sites that I needed in order to develop my particular mission. I would meditate on the top of rarely visited pyramids and spend days on end just sitting in the crypt of the Temple of Inscriptions in Palenque, just absorbing whatever information was embedded in the stones. José Argüelles had then already published his book The Mayan Factor, which really conveyed to me that my attraction to the Maya, was not just archeological, but had an important spiritual meaning as well. This time was somewhat of a heyday for the New Age movement in the United States and while the understanding of the Mayan calendar was not far from clear at the time, there certainly was an openness to new ways of thinking that would be necessary for fully understanding the big picture of the evolution of the universe. I sensed that the Mayan calendar would have to be the foundation for such a new paradigm.
Yet, I continued as a Senior Researcher at the University of Washington developing a toxicological project sponsored by the EPA until 1993. Despite having qualified this as one of the most productive projects they had on record, a promised grant that would have allowed me to continue and broaden the study into the causes of human cancer did not come forth. I then spent a year in Sweden somewhat vacillating between continuing academic research in some other form (which would be financially more secure) or taking the risk see where research into the Mayan calendar would take me. At this time I was however overwhelmed by new insights into the meaning of the Mayan calendar that were uniquely my own and so I decided to follow what I experienced as my true calling in life and left my life as a career scientist in toxicology. The three years that followed might have been the most intellectually productive in my life as almost all phenomena I encountered could be seen in a new light based on the Mayan calendar. It would however not be until 2009, when The Purposeful Universe was published that my scientific background in biology came back into use, and even more strongly so with Quantum Science of Psychedelics in 2020. Yet, especially the graduate studies in Stockholm had provided me with a very good training in scientific thinking and not the least understanding the code of ethics at a high level of science. This had provided a necessary foundation for the work that I would come to do regarding the Mayan calendar.
So what was it that overwhelmed me with new insights only in 1993? Since I had been aware of the potential of the Mayan calendar, and sensed that it was part of my particular mission ever since 1979 I had already at earlier points in time attempted to start writing about it. Yet, what came out of me before 1993 was essentially summaries of what other people had been thinking and did not authentically come from myself. In 1992 this however shifted, as I believe myself because of a cosmic quantum shift that allowed a new way of thinking regarding the Mayan calendar. Only after this quantum shift had taken place did I myself become a conduit for a new understanding of the Mayan calendar. Being Swedish was not irrelevant for this given that we are living on a four (or even eight-partitioned) planet where the geographical directions in which people live strongly influence what kind of ideas – religious or scientific – that people may embrace. People in the West did not think in the same way as people in the East and as I came to understand Sweden was located in between the two. At one point it also dawned upon me that some of the most significant events in Swedish history had been precipitated by shifts in the Mayan calendar. This was a decisive insight since it made me realize that the Mayan calendar system was not a local phenomenon only of relevance to people in Central America, but actually applied to the entire planet. Moreover, if this calendar had been lost this could be quite consequential for the future of humanity.
It almost goes without saying that there is no academic institution anywhere that would be willing to harbor studies into the Mayan calendar under the assumption that this was true and so by abandoning my scientific career in the hard sciences I took a great risk. But it was really a choice for me whether I would do what I came here to do or if I would focus on my financial security and I chose the former. Maybe someone would think that there are many anthropological and archeological academic departments that study the Maya in the world, but not only did I not have a degree in any such discipline, but more importantly, in such departments it was always assumed that the Mayan calendar did not have any greater value than other calendars. Since I was convinced that the Mayan calendar was true and would lead to a profound reevaluation of our entire view of the evolution of the universe, it was obvious that no university would provide a home for the development of such a theory, which would be inconsistent with the very foundation of modern science. If the Mayan calendar was to be studied within the established scholarly framework you would instead have to take as your point of departure that we today knew better than the ancient Maya, and I obviously did not share such a view. Holistic science may not be explicitly barred from the modern university system, but in practice it functions so that if the holistic science has such a high quality as to threaten a whole range of disciplines it would not find any support from any grant-awarding agencies and still today this remains true.
Nonetheless, as with every year we came closer to the year 2012 (Michael Coe had actually written 2011 in his book, which I concluded was the correct year for the shift) there was an increased interest in the Mayan calendar around the world, and so I continued to write books, lecture and hold courses in twenty-five different countries. These activities also put me in contact first with Mayan elder Hunbatz Men who invited me to a conference in Merida Yucatan about the calendar and later I connected with Don Alejandro Oxlaj, the head of the council of elders in Guatemala, whom I filmed (in 2006, in India actually) so that he for the first time was given the opportunity to present his views to a Western audience. In addition, in this time period up until 2011 I wrote three new books based on the Mayan calendar.
Of course the time of the shift that I had given – October 28, 2011 – and that which the majority of people believed – December 21, 2011 – became somewhat of testing grounds for the respective theories about the Mayan calendar that we had promoted. The year 2011, at least from the time of activation of the Ninth Wave, March 9, 2011 did indeed seem to carry a wave of protests throughout the world against the kind of dominance that was upheld in the world by banksters and dictators notably through the occupy movement and the Arab Spring, which at least initially carried strong messages of oneness. This was totally in accordance with the expectations that I had expressed earlier. Yet, what I had not foreseen was that after the shift in October of 2011 the protests started to fade away so that the year 2012 became very uneventful. On December 21, 2012 that according to most popular theories about the Mayan calendar was the day when the whole world would change, nothing happened which was what I had been saying all along. In fact, the whole idea of an energy shift on December 21, 2012 was based on two assumptions: 1/ that the Mayan calendar was based on the 26,000 year long so called precession of the equinoxes and 2/ there would be a galactic alignment on Dec 21, 2012. Neither of these assumptions however had any support in any ancient Mayan text and they had in fact been made up to cater to the expectations of modern people.
Not surprisingly following the shift in 2011 (or 2012) there was a marked decline in interest in the Mayan calendar, which many concluded lacked any predictive or prophetic value. Those that had advocated December 21, 2012 simply ignored the fact that nothing had happened on this particular day and to my knowledge no one provided any thorough self-criticism or tried to explain where they had gone wrong. According to a sound scientific code of ethics this would have been the right thing to do. On my own part, I in The Global Mind and the Rise of Civilization provided a partial self-criticism. It was only partial because all of the explanations I had given to the past of the humanity still seemed to be correct, and some have been proven. Yet, I should admit that before October 28, I had given an overly positive view of what would happen after that date and thought that the Ninth Wave would have fully manifested its power before this. What I had not realized was that the waves would simply continue after this shift date and lead into a reality determined by a complex quantum field that did not lend itself as easily to prediction as it had been in the past. Hence, my theories required refinement.
This partial self-criticism thus opened up for a new understanding of the evolution of the world and the three books I have written after the shift in October of 2011 have all been based on those insights. These three books, The Global Mind and the Rise of Civilization, The Nine Waves of Creation and Quantum Science of Psychedelics, have all been based on quantum theory. I have come to realize that this is what the Mayan calendar is based on and makes it unique (in contrast to astrology which is based on Newtonian physics). Overall, it would however take until the dramatic changes in 2020, with the Corona Virus and Black Lives Matter that a larger number of people again would take an interest in the Mayan calendar system. Adding to this interest has also been that I have started to collaborate with Patricia Albere (and the Evolutionary Collective) who has developed practical processes to support people in taking the quantum leap to the We-ness and of the Ninth Wave.
Carl Johan Calleman
Truchas, NM, 5 Chuen
1st day of the 95th day of the Ninth Wave, June 13, 2020.