#012 Who owns your time owns your mind
I am waking up every day to study and to write about our relationship with time, doesn't matter how busy will be my day about to start (or how tiring was the last one). I do some yoga, write my morning pages, read a few pages of a book – now reading "There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness" by Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli, of small articles he wrote to newspapers, his collection of Japanese kōans, just like our daily temporal letters here – and then I start to write.
I want to share with you how was my process during the beginning of this new cycle. First, I didn't start with a plan... I just started. It was only around Day 5, after a message from a dear friend in London asking about the long-term perspective of a cycle that will end in February 2023, that I created a mind map with the 20 waves of 13 days (20x13, a 260-day cycle) and its keywords as the spine of our ongoing conversation.
Starting from your daily practice is the best way to develop long-term thinking. If you try to plan ahead only by theory without coming to what you can do and is able to do today, you can suffer from what is called "long-termism". Do you know when you see billionaires trying to escape to Mars and announcing buying social media platforms when they could be addressing urgent climate and social issues with their money? THIS is long-termism.
In my work – to research, study, experiment, teach, connect, and consult about other relationships with time – I keep the vision of helping to build the horizons of the next era while addressing the urgencies of the next hour. A friend says that this is to consider our role as a fireperson (putting out fires) and as a visionary (anticipating and making real the preferable futures we want to live in). I focus on that in my temporal experiments. This one is not any different. Do you know how I made to write 2000 words per day until here? Writing 20 words first. Then repeating that 10x times and celebrating. Then repeating the previous process 10x times that and sending it to you.
Trusting the process and the flow, repeating all of it again the next day. And the next day. This is also my main experience and learning with the previous 260-day spins of the Tzolkin I already lived. The catchphrase "It's about the journey, not the destination" finally started to make sense. We develop a different habit not because we reach the end of one big 260-day cycle, but because we lived many small cycles 13-day cycles on it. Precisely, 20 of them. This is what we are talking about when we refer to the fractal quality of time, the proper to repeat a recipe on any scale.
Days, months, years. Beyond holidays, commercial days, your work meetings agenda, and the media agenda setting, we do not have a framework to think of time not as a resource (the famous/infamous "time is money") but as our way of existence in life, our temporality. Some religions try to do that, as also some philosophies. For me, it feels that the Tzolkin, as a quest, sums different lens we can choose to reflect on our time.
“Who owns your time owns your mind. Change your time and you change your mind. Change your mind and you change your world.”.
This is a quote from José Argüelles. He was a Mexican American author and artist. He co-founded the Planet Art Network and the Foundation for the Law of Time. Argüelles lived between January 24, 1939, and March 23, 2011. He is best known for his leading role in organizing The Harmonic Convergence in 1987, for inventing the perpetual Dreamspell calendar in 1990, and for the central role that he played in the emergence of the 2012 phenomenon around the ending of the Mesoamerican 5.125 year cycle known as The Long Count. He felt a call after visiting the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan, Mexico, in 1953 with his father. He dedicated most of his life to studying and experimenting with other relationships with time.
The Harmonic Convergence is the name given to the world's first synchronized global peace meditation, which occurred on August 16–17, 1987. This event also closely coincided with an exceptional alignment of planets in the Solar System. I was born in Belém, a metropolitan city in the Amazon rainforest region of Brazil, on August 1987, some days after the event I had just described. So I start today's letter honoring José Argüelles's work since anything that I am trying to translate here he was doing before I was even born.
As a quick note, The Mesoamerican Long Count calendar ended and restarted on December 21, 2012, when it reached the date 13.0.0.0.0. He was focused on it and passed away the year before. He was the one "closing the cycle". I quit my job to research these sociopolitical movements about change which lead me to study and research time right after that. In an intergenerational approach, we all are the ones responsible to keep the necessary change while new cycles are starting. And today I want to share my learning on using these other guidelines and frameworks. Experimenting with other temporalities. I spent a lot of years mapping and translating the Zeitgeist – a German concept to describe the spirit of our time – but the most important concept here would be in fact the Zeitgeber: what we are using as a compass to make sense of time itself?
Our current zeitgeber is called the Gregorian calendar. It is the calendar used in most of the world, introduced in October 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII as a modification of, and replacement for, the Julian calendar. Just like every calendar, is a human-made convention. But the 12-month approach is not connected to any natural cycle of what a year is. During a solar ring (or a year) we live 13 moon cycles (the word "month" originally being a Moon cycle) of 28 days. Same 7-day week and 52-week a year (52...). The balance The dance between sun and Moon we call cyclical time. Is the time we experience in space, in the matter, or in the 3D perspective, since we observe through the physical/spatial movement of celestial bodies.
The Tzolk'in is the name attributed to the Mayans to the 260-day calendar — or 260 combinations expressed by 20 archetypes (solar seals) in cycles/waves of 13 qualities (galactic tones or cosmic tones) — originated by the Mayan civilization of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. The word Tzolkʼin means “the counting of time”, “counting the days” or even “dividing the days” in Mayan language. It is the central basic cycle of this system prominent time in society and rituals of the ancient and modern Mayas. It is also the aspect of four-dimensional time (4D) or vertical time. We will talk more about it soon.
Today is day 12 of our first cycle, our first round of 13. Cooperation is the word that defines today's tone. To universalize our consciousness and to put into service what we've been learning in our journeys. To crystalize our learning in order to make it available to everyone else. Today is also the beginning of the 12th moon/month of the 13 Moon Calendar. So what about to think how this self-reflection can be present in your routine during the next 28 days?
To your self-reflection:
How can I dedicate myself to the universe?
What I love about my relationship with these cycles is that no one is telling me to do so. I am just choosing to do it. Adding an extra layer of art and poetry into Time. Finding new perspectives and the learning that come with it. Today we are getting to know a little bit more about the solar seal of the Yellow Human. Our choices are really powerful. That's why so many institutions are trying to make us believe we don't have any. Hiding the power of our free will. The archetype of The Wise Person invites us to learn from that kind of knowledge that comes from walking your own journey.
Temporality Lab
Since today is "Cooperation day" in the 13-day cycle, and also the opening of the Moon of cooperation, I would like to invite you to share how was to live this journey with me until here. How did you feel? What did you learn? How do you connect with the purpose of Birth, nurturing a new being we've been observing? And with the journey of the daily kin? I invite you to bring back the 12 questions of self-reflection and try to answer, looking to these two weeks we are together. Then write me. I want to know how we can collaborate with each other during this month and more to come. :)
I could be in a thousand places, but I choose to be here.
Writing with free will, influence, and wisdom.
Gustavo Nogueira de Menezes
NS1.34.12.01, Monday 30 May 2022
Kin 012 Yellow Crystal Human
