DREAMING AWAKE
6. The Underworld of Sacrifice
I find myself in Mexico, for reasons I can’t explain … and still don’t know. It’s as if a strange, dreamlike trance has brought me here. After leaving Peru, I had planned to stay in San Francisco and the Bay area for some time. But I spent a week feeling completely disconnected, drifting through my new environment, and watching, like a spectator of a film noir, as all my plans for where to stay and what to do came crashing down. I began to feel an uncanny resistance – or not exactly resistance, but more like a sadness in my heart that I could never live in the US again after a 20 year exile – and I just knew I had to leave. I also knew that my life in Europe had come to a close, and I did not want to return – so I was in a weird limbo of uncertainty. I sat on park benches watching people carrying on with life, going deeper into my own feelings of anxiety, until they settled and cleared. I asked in meditation to be shown what my next step is, but didn’t get any answers. So I sat with the silence. The next day two friends from Berlin and one from Romania mentioned Mexico in their messages to me, and there was an ad from Interjet for a flight from SFO to Cancun for $60 that came up several times in my Facebook newsfeed for no reason, which all seemed too strange to be mere coincidence. I decided to take it as the answer I had been waiting for; I booked the flight, and left two days later.
I spent the first couple of weeks in the Mayan riviera, visiting Playa del Carmen, Cozumel island, and Tulum. In Playa, the party scene and hoardes of mostly North American tourists eating, drinking booze and shopping as if the end of the world was coming … were more than I had bargained for. In Cozumel, which is mostly known as a deep-sea diving haven with spectacular coral reefs (first made famous by Jacques Cousteau), the tourism was a little more low key, but it still felt like I was in a US enclave, with McDonalds, KFC, Starbucks, TGIF, and many other chains everywhere in the center of town. Tulum was definitely something different. It has a reputation for “green” resorts that are frequented by NYC fashion jetsetters, but also new agers wanting to connect to Mayan spirituality. Sadly, this turned out to be a desert mirage that faded the closer I approached. It seems the fabled days of Tulum being a laid-back, spiritual haven for hippies living off the grid had vanished long ago. The beach area of expensive resorts felt more like a global DJ party circuit. Mixed with offerings of a global spiritual fare of yoga, breathwork, ecstatic dance, cacao ceremonies, and the local specialty – “Mayan rebirthing ceremonies,” which sounded anything but ancestral, and included temascal, copal, and being wrapped in honey and banana leaves. I met a couple of expats living in Tulum who told me that the “eco” and “green” labels that are omnipresent around town are a marketing gimick, and that in reality the whole beach area is powered by toxic, diesel generators, there is no adequate sewer system so waste is leaking into the drinking water and the ocean, killing off the coral reefs, and the open landfill in the jungle is rotting and contaminating the ecosystem.
I stayed in the center of Tulum town, on the other side of the jungle from the beach resorts, which was quite small, with one main street full of restaurants, bars and shops selling dream catchers, Indian dresses, little buddha statues, native carvings of animals, crystals, palo santo, and Peruvian aqua de florida. I arrived in the middle of big preparations for a water festival in the town square. The festival was a strange hybrid of consumption, with food and beer stands and dance music, mixed with an ecological program. There were two stages built within 100 meters of each other, so the noise carried over from one to the other. On one side there was a huge stage with zumba music and dancers, and an instructor guiding participants below the stage in how to do the dance. After the dance, there was a raffle for prizes. The other small stage was on floor level with the audience, and included a shamanic water ceremony, a drumming group from Brazil with capoiera dancers, poetry readings, and ecological NGOs giving speeches about Pachamama, saving the environment, and the importance of water rights. This second event was in mixed languages, as was the audience; I heard a lot of people walking around speaking English. I struck up a conversation with a nomadic traveler from Germany, who had just come from Palenque – and told me the ruins in the jungle were spectacular, and that the ones in Tulum don’t come close, besides being overrun by tourists. In Palenque, he had stayed in a place called Le Jardin, a spiritual garden of eden halfway between town and the ruins, where people came for ayahuasca ceremonies and other events, and some ended up staying for months. By coincidence, I already knew about it from Miguel, my former partner in organizing retreats in Berlin; Le Jardin was run by a German friend of his, Martin.
The next day I decided to leave Tulum, taking an overnight bus to Palenque. The internet was not working in the bus station when I arrived, so I couldn’t browse for places to stay, but the owner of a tour service next door recommended two small B&B houses across the road in La Canada, a quiet neighborhood in the jungle, away from the town center, which is full of shops, restaurants, hotels and banks. I ended up staying in the first place I saw, run by Elvira, a Russian woman in her 30s, with an adorable 2 year old girl – she had just split up with her Mexican partner, and suddenly found herself a single mother, and also having to run the business on her own. I felt an immediate connection to her, like something was bringing us together, and I think she did as well, as she went out of her way to make me feel welcome and part of the family. I fell in love with the spectacular garden, which led directly into the jungle. In the mornings, having breakfast outside with Elvira and her daughter, we watched monkeys, and colorful birds, and gigantic 2 meter iguanas parading in front of us. The house cat was hissing, guarding us against the iguanas. The heat and the mosquitoes were worse than anything I had experienced – anywhere, and going out each day was like being in a liquid sauna, so I ended up staying only 4 days to explore the town, the ruins, and the nearby waterfalls. Miguel’s German friend was not in town, so I never arrived in the garden of eden.
There are many mysteries surrounding the ruins of Palenque, starting with its dating, which is estimated to have started around 200BC and collapsed around 800AD, with a population that seemed to vanish overnight. But many dispute the dating, claiming that the large blocks at the base of some of the buildings don’t fit Mayan style and stone masonry, and seem to be much older, and more sophisticated technologically. There is also a controversy surrounding Palenque’s function – whether it was a necropolis (a site consecrated to the secrets of death and the underworld), in contrast to other Mayan city-states. The Temple of Inscriptions, which contains the tomb of its last king, Pakal, is closed and off limits to visitors. The skeleton of Pakal was never carbon dated, and some writers speculate that it is not Pakal who is buried in the tomb, but that the tombstone depicts an earlier god-like figure, who had traveled to the stars not up a magical tree but in the cockpit of a spaceship.
The first part of my journey through the ruins was an ordinary and haphazard wandering of a typical tourist among the crowd, marvelling at the structures and taking pictures. The second part was a mystical experience that began with entering a portal to an enchanted forest with a secret door to the underworld, an encounter with the tree of life, and climbing an interminable stairway that brought me to an understanding of the wheel of karma. The ruins have one central square with the Palace and the Temple of Inscriptions (the burial pyramid for Pakal), and a secondary square called the Plaza of the Cross with the main temples that were used for religious rituals. These are the two places most visited by tourists. There are many smaller ruins in the Cascade area, and more remote ones in the jungle, which have only been partially cleared and restored. A guide I met at the entrance told me that more than 50 percent of the ruins are really hidden in the deep jungle rather than in the main archaelogical park where I was, and that tourists can only go there with local guides, because nothing is marked and there is a danger of getting lost. And of encounters with wild animals.
I went through the Palace and Temple of Inscriptions quickly; there was not much I found interesting, except the underground passageway full of doorways with a triangular structure. And a courtyard, which was used for playing a special ballgame – a life and death tournament enacted before royalty; the players were other tribes captured in battle, and the losers were sacrificed. The path leading from the Palace area to the Plaza of the Cross was lined with several improvised souvenir areas, but the vendors were not aggressive in advertising their wares. Most were just sitting nearby enjoying food, or resting in shaded areas out of the direct sun. There were 3 buildings in the Plaza of the Cross, the Temple of the Sun, the Temple of the Cross, which was used as a kind of temescal in ancient times, and the Temple of the Foliated Cross right across from the Temple of the Sun. This triad is considered the most important temple space, consecrated to the gods, and used for rituals.
I was fascinated by the Temple of the Foliated Cross, which is dedicated to a god of agriculture and corn, according to the official story on the inscription plate outside. But this is not what I saw by looking at it, or what I felt, experiencing it from the inside. Its symbolism is a precise, inverted mirror of the Sun Temple, and I felt it to be a very female, mother earth space, cavernous, built on a hilly mound of earth (without the typical stairs of the other temples) and surrounded by a canopy of trees – in contrast to the Sun Temple which is in a flat clearing and not covered by vegetation. I had seen the Temple of the Sun and Foliated Cross as a couple, and completely ignored the third building in the compound. But there was an obvious triad structure to everything in this plaza, not just in the 3 main buildings, but in the triptych doorways of each building, and there was also a mural inside each structure which depicted 3 figures, one large figure the middle and two smaller figures on the side, which were guarding and protecting it.
After exiting the Plaza of the Cross, I was drawn to a small structure at the edge of the central space of the ruins, where I paused to take a rest after climbing the steep stairs of the pyramids … and before beginning my descent to the unfamiliar, jungle structures. The small building was completely unspectacular, with a straw roof and an open space without walls containing a single, flat sculpture carved on a circular, whitewashed rock. It was of a woman with a veil and some kind of ceremonial jewelery, balancing two staffs – the polarities of positive and negative, good and evil – one in each hand. It was only at the end of my journey, when I ended up inside the museum, that I understood this was in fact a sculpture of the mysterious Red Queen of Palenque – it is unknown if this was Pakal’s mother or another member of the royal family, only that she had some kind of temple priestess function. The iconography of a veiled priestess holding two opposing staffs is common to many other cultures, and has parallels in Egyptian symbolism. It is also the High Priestess card of the Tarot.
One journey ended here, at this halfway mark – the journey on the surface of things, of appearances. I could say that before this point, nothing interesting happened, and I was just a tourist among others visiting some old ruins just because they were well-known, without seeing any real significance of my trip. And after this point everything changed, and I began a journey into another dimension, which turned out to be into my collective consciousness or ancestral memory. The second journey began with a passage through a rectangular stone portal at the bridge over the river, which was leading to the Cascade Group of ruins. When I stepped across the bridge, it was as if time slowed down and I entered another reality, feeling like I was floating rather than walking. After crossing the bridge, I walked past a group of tourists, including many school children; these were the last people I saw for the next two or three hours, during which I was completely alone in a landscape of ruins in the jungle. After crossing the river, instead of taking the path to the Cascade group of ruins where the other tourists were headed, I followed a small, unmarked path, with a steep upward climb through trees and bushes. There was a broken barricade sign thrown on the ground but not actually barring the way – I did not know if it meant the path was off limits, but I felt something compelling me to keep going anyway.
After a long climb, I came upon a large clearing in the middle of the jungle forest, and had the strangest feeling of deja-vu. Of having been here before. The “before” was really the secret garden I had seen in of some of my dreams and imaginings. And I knew that inside this secret garden, I would stumble on magic trees with great powers, like in fairy tales. I came to another clearing with two enormously tall trees in the middle, a pair. I touched them and sat on the ground next to them, and listened to the leaves rustling and falling, which seemed to descend to the ground in slow motion. It was a feeling of being in another world of utter stillness, or perhaps in a parallel dimension that had blanketed my ordinary reality; the feeling was eerie, and beautiful, and undescribable. I realized the two trees were guarding a doorway that went deep into the earth, into the underworld. It was barred by an iron gate with a padlock. I went close to it and looked inside through the bars and could see a long tunnel that descended into pitch darkness.
I lay down in front of this portal to meditate, under the shade of the two guardian trees, and asked to see what was behind the locked gate. In my vision, I saw a long tunnel that had nine doorways or portals, four on each side and one directly in front at the end of the passageway. I only understood the full significance of this journey when I went inside the museum at the end of my trip, and saw that Pakal’s tomb was presided over by 9 Lords of the Underworld, each guarding a different door (or dimension) of the bardo journey of the afterlife. In my visionary meditation, I was only allowed to enter the first doorway on the left, where I met a veiled figure, who said he was the Lord of Karma. I asked if he had a message for me, and he said the message can only come upon the completion of the journey. After he walked away, I walked back into the tunnel and tried to enter the other 8 doors, but there was a kind of curtain of light, or a thin, cascading veil that blocked my access to the other doors.
After leaving the clearing with the two trees guarding the portal to the underworld, I ascended uphill on some stairs and came across a decomposed ruin. All the ruins in this part of the jungle had broken, crumbling walls covered in vegetation, in contrast to the main ruins of the Palace and Temple, which were clean and more pristine. It felt much older than the rest. This ruin was an elaborate monument to one towering tree. There was a courtyard with stone pillars set in a straight line that all pointed to the tree in a procession, as if the tree itself was the altar, or the focal point, to which everything was leading. I understood this was the sacred tree of life. Or the tree of the world. I felt it held important secrets, but I did not know how to decipher them. There was a mural before the tree, with a figure of Pakal again – but what drew my attention was a small figure in the upper right corner, that was crouched in a position that looked simultaneously like a fetus in a womb and like a mother laying on her back giving birth to the world. The tree was surrounded by carved rocks, elevated on a pedestal, with its huge roots breaking through the stones. I felt an intuitive nudge to climb up the stones and go around to the backside of the tree. I collected three small green plants that were growing out of this tree, roots and all, which I understood I had to give to Elvira (the owner of the B&B where I was staying), so that she could plant them in her garden as an initiation into a new cycle of life. I also collected three acorn-like seeds, which I felt I had to take with me, even if I didn’t understand what to do with them.
I continued my path deeper into the jungle, to the third magical spot in my journey. This was a half-demolished structure, with stairs leading up to a ceremonial flat space. There was mural at the stairs, which looked like the magician of the Tarot, with one hand pointed upwards toward the heavens and the other down to earth. The hand that was pointed down looked like it had a weapon, and the one pointed upward looked like it was holding a cup up to the sky. The temple space was covered with a roof, but open on the sides. There was a large, square, stone altar in the middle, slightly off center. I thought the square was some kind of meditation stone or portal, and lay down on it to meditate and ask why it chose me, what the meaning of the place was. After an initial feeling of stillness and well being, and of floating in a pool of water that turned into a cloud of light, the energy suddenly shifted and I began to feel a painful tingling in my body, especially in the arms and legs. I had a vision of blood, of animals with their throats cut, of people laying on the same stone, and having their hearts cut out, of blood flowing down into the earth, into the ground water below, and seeping into the oceans. I felt almost nauseous with revulsion, as if my body was dry heaving, and had an urgent impulse to leave, to run away from this place. But something told me I needed to stay. I kept breathing through the intense discomfort I was feeling. I understood that for some reason I felt a connection to this place, to Palenque and its Mayan history, that it formed part of my collective memory. I asked for guidance, wondering if I had been led here because I needed to release something from a past life.
I heard the voice of my father guiding me: “Do not get lost in stories of past incarnations on earth, they are a trap keeping you stuck in history. What you are clearing when you purge something painful in your own consciousness is a collective cloud of thought-forms that keeps humanity in bondage. By transforming your own darkness, you change the composition of the whole cloud. You are here because you had a glimpse of a recognition, which you wanted to push away in fear and hide in a blanket of obscurity. There is a very thin line between the beauty of celebrations of the threads of love holding the spiderweb of existence together by people praising the earth and mountains as their holy family … and the unspeakable horror of sacrifice. Sacrifice is a misunderstanding of giving and receiving as one; it is a failure to see the world through the eyes of unity. It upholds a belief in separation, in love as something limited and small, that must be given in fragmented pieces and withheld, unless there is something offered in return. This belief is the foundation of your world of appearances – that one must loose in order for another to gain. In reality, from a perspective beyond the veil of duality, there is no sacrifice needed or accepted. No one looses, and everyone gains through giving. You already know this in your heart, which speaks to you in a language of silence.”
I had indeed glimpsed this thin line in Peru. Although Manuel spoke of ayni as a gift of love, given freely to say thank you for the love and care received from Pachamama and the mountains, as a way to bless them … I heard other indigenous people say that they had lapsed in their rituals or made some mistake and that they had to make a sacrifice because Pachamama was angry. I preferred to ignore this shadow of cognitive dissonance when it surfaced. But I could now see its lesson: when fear creeps into the act of giving, the reciprocity of keeping the world in balance is easily perverted into sacrifice. This had been the disquieting thought in the back of my mind when foreign people were uncritically celebrating the wisdom, spiritual purity and benevolence of the Inca ancestors. It is well known that the Inca made offerings not only of flowers and coca leaves, but of animals, and of humans, if they sought something enormous from the nature spirits. Behind this shift, there must have entered some belief of wrong doing or transgression, which required bargaining with the gods, or mother earth and other protector spirits, by making payment in the form of sacrifice. Then ayni is no longer an extension of love, a form of giving and receiving as a flow that keps the web in harmony; it becomes a payment to right a wrong or to seek a special favour, to assure getting love and protection from the great beings. This had been my resistance, or perhaps a subtle warning – to not idealize archaic spirituality as a panacea for the contemporary ills of the world in which we find ourselves. The Inca, as well as the Maya, for all their wisdom, technological ingenuity, and ability to decipher the secrets of the universe … were also cultures of conquest, war and sacrifice. Maybe that had been their karmic undoing.
As I released the constriction I was feeling, and sank more deeply into my breath, listening to the sound of my heartbeat, I heard my father’s voice again: “You think of sacrifice as a primitive aberration that has vanished from your civilized world. It is only its dark signs of cruelty that have changed. Today humans no longer sacrifice each other by tearing out their hearts and offering blood to the gods, but the cult of sacrifice remains the foundation of your world and all your relations. This is why you have been brought here by reasons that seem mysterious to you. Here you see a mirror not of your vanished past, but of the karmic knot that continues to guide your present, until you are able to see its absurdity in all its horror and be done with it. Until then the wheel of karma will keep turning. You were led here to receive this message: to move forward, out of the past, you must purge the remnants of sacrifice from your consciousness, and from your life. You can only do this when you stop believing in fear and lack, and in the conditions that keep love chained to terror. You know that when you truly love, whenever you feel your own love flowing boundlessly for me, or for anyone else, it is something that elevates you on its wings. You are giving to yourself from your own unlimited wellspring. There is no loss. There is no bargaining. And there is no demand for any return. To purge the consciousness of sacrifice, you must keep this truth of love awakened in your heart.”
I was filled with a flood of visions moving in fast rewind through my past. I saw how in all my romantic relationships there had been an unspoken fear that something was wrong and flawed about me, and how I believed that to receive love I must sacrifice something of myself that I considered precious. The more precious, the bigger my loss, the more my lovers were indebted, imprisoned by my gift. In an indirect way, my guilt was transferred to their guilt, and my sacrifice demanded a bigger sacrifice from them. I saw the cycle going around and around, in an insane loop, and extending to family, friends, and other relationships. This loop affected how I gave of myself to others as a teacher. I didn’t freely give what I had – my talents, unique gifts and knowledge – because I thought of it as a loss. I realized how everytime I charged money, I was unconsciously affirming my gift to be a sacrifice, a loss of time and energy and special resources. And since others received something they lacked through the exchange, they had to pay for my sacrifice. The few times I had worked by donation, I felt a nagging fear that if I gave without making a demand, I could get cheated, that something could be stolen from me. The absurdity of this way of relating to others hit me with full force, and I felt a painful knot throbbing in my solar plexus, and then moving into my heart and releasing. I felt the sadness of the lesson welling up in tears – I had failed to see all those relationships from the perspective of love. The wisdom of my heart knew that giving my love and attention, and sharing what I had learned to help others, was my own richness and reward. The feeling that through giving I was loosing something had been an illusion, a skewed vision through a dark looking glass. In truth, by extending care to others I expanded my own love, and integrated whatever I was teaching more deeply. It had been insanity to demand ransom for what I myself was benefiting from. It was born out of a lack of trust in the benevolent grace of the spiderweb of life. When I had chosen to give with stinginess, by bargains and demands, I was suppressing the flow of love and influencing what came back to me. And inevitably perpetuating my own suffering.
Behind these misperceptions of sacrifice was the disrespect of utilitarianism. As ancient cultures sacrificed people, seeing the blood offering as a means to gain favor from the gods, we continue to treat people not as sacred beings in their own right, but calculating how they are useful to fulfill a narrow agenda. The difference is only a matter of degree. This wounds us because ultimately we disrespect ourselves by instrumentalizing others. I understood how this chain informs our relationships to all beings – people, animals, plants, and the earth herself – which are not seen with love, as our extensions and our loving family, but as resources to be exploited. This was the source of the grief I felt on this trip in witnessing how the tourist industry has devastated the Mayan riviera. And the grief felt by so many on a larger scale, in witnessing how humans are devastating the earth. This sacrifice on a planetary scale fails to see the true meaning of reciprocity – that when one gains, we all do; and when one looses the loss is collective. There is no separation in the spiderweb of life. We share in the collective madness of a system that has sacrificed the whole world to uphold an illusion. This is indeed an underworld of darkness and fear, but one that we have created. We may be starting to see through its illusion as an insight, but choosing to live differently, to uproot it from our lives in a practical way is much more difficult – because it is pervasive and insidious in ways we do not realize, which go much beyond the ecology of the planet. To the ecology of all our relationships.
I continued to sit in the sacrificial temple for a long time, feeling a great deal of sadness but also a new found hope. I understood what had to change in my own life, even if I didn’t know how to do it. After leaving the temple, I made my way back to the large clearing, which I had first come to before the secret garden with the gate to the underworld. When I had first stepped into the open clearing of the forest, I had seen a long staircase to the left that kept going up and up and up, and I felt daunted at the idea of having to climb it because it seemed endless. So I ignored it. But it now became inevitable – I knew I had to make the long climb into the unknown as a kind of initiation. And that all I needed to do was not look up towards the future, but simply look at each step as I was climbing, and focus only on the present moment. I felt my father’s presence alongside me, whispering “one step, and one more step, and one more step, and one more step.” When I finally reached the top, completely exhausted, I was utterly shocked. Dumbfounded. I was back at the same place at which I began my other worldly journey – the temple with the straw roof and the sculpture of the veiled priestess balancing the two staffs.
I understood in a flash that this had been a seemingly circular journey, with the absurdity of taking a very long and convoluted path to come again to the beginning. This journey was mirroring the seeming circularity of karma. The karmic wheel is in fact not a circle, but a spiral. And I had not “returned” to the same point again, but to a point of indescribable singularity. What seemed like the same thing was now experienced from a completely different perspective, which allowed me to step beyond it. To let it go. And that is what karma really means – we keep repeating what seems like an insane circle, but in fact each time we repeat it, we climb a little bit higher, until it all adds up to a different understanding that finally allows us to transcend the entire loop. In its transcendence, we understand that karma doesn’t exist, that it’s an illusion we create. It was at this point that the message I had received from the Lord of Karma in the portal to the underworld became clear. It is impossible to ask for the meaning to be revealed at the beginning. We have to take the long, convoluted journey to discover it. But in truth, it is a journey without distance. We have been there all along.
I knew I had to retrace and repeat all my previous steps through the ruins, but now from this altered perspective, and with full attention to the sacredness of the present moment (and without a camera). In retracing my steps, I received a different insight from each of the monuments and temples I had previously visited. The first time I had seen them through the eyes of a tourist with no special focus or intent, engaging in a distracted activity that remained on the surface of things, in the world of appearances. The second time I stepped inside the same structures, I understood that each had a special message for me, if only I was willing to be open enough to really listen. I understood this as an allegory of how I had journeyed through life itself. And that I was now doing it differently. When I returned to the same bridge crossing the river the second time, I knew I had to ignore the no trespassing sign, and to bathe myself as a rite of purification. As a way of bringing the journey to completion. It was a sacred initiation – a declaration that I was now willing to let go of the karma of the past – of the misperception of love as sacrifice that had permeated my life and kept my heart in chains. And that I was willing to begin again, with new eyes.
* This is a chapter in an ongoing book of travel memoirs. You can see all the contents, which I am updating regularly, at: https://profanelight.wordpress.com/dreaming-awake/*
Profane Light 