The Mutant Versus The Machine,
the End of the Iron Age, and the Galactic
Alignment of 2012  

   
Copyright 2004 by Jonathan Zap

     The Equinox party at the Quality House (a communal living situation created
by young anarchists at the outskirts of Boulder, Colorado) was a magical nexus
for me, one of those zones of heightened synchronicity where many threads of the
great tapestry wove together into a pattern recognizable, even revelatory.               
     With a luck that felt almost uncanny, the unpredictable lottery of high
desert weather had produced a glorious winner. The first day of Spring turned
out to be a preview of summer, and the unexpected warmth of evening felt almost
like an enchantment, an invitation into mystery. 
    The Quality House has an improbable location, surrounded by many acres of
open fields at the distant circumference of which were the twinkling lights of
suburban houses and strip malls.  It seemed to be  placed at the center of this
open space as if it were enclosed by an invisible dome creating an oasis of
green  within a suburban landscape.  There was an enormous fire pit, a crater in
the ground that looked like the result of a small asteroid impact.  People were
drumming and dancing around a blazing fire. Next to the fire pit was a barn that
was being used as the  screen for surreal video
projections.  The barn looked like a dream cottage, intricately tie-died in a
vat of electrical colors.  
      Inside the main house I set up to do free I Ching readings and dream
interpretation ( a service which may continue on Thursday evenings there).  One
interesting person after another showed up.  One of a pair of identical twins
told me a dream reflecting the strange  dynamics unique to twin psychology.
Many fascinating moments. Then an eighteen year old male, we'll call him Jeremy,
showed up.  I knew him slightly since we were both regulars at the same coffee
shop, Cafe Sole in South Boulder.
      Jeremy is a philosophy student with a brilliant mind for complex ideas.
We discussed a number of interesting themes, many of which, I later realized,
were directly related to a vortex of meaning and discovery that had already
begun to pull me into its centrifugal spiral.   After establishing some common
ground in ideas, Jeremy related a recurrent dream that had haunted his
childhood.
     He would always find himself at the bottom of a red pit as a gigantic steam
roller (he described it as a "leviathan") would be rolling toward him.
       The dream, which could be contained in a single sentence, had a deceptive
simplicity.  The simplicity  concealed a great density of meaning which would
continue to expand in my mind during the next 24 hours.  At first, however, I
saw the dream as archetypal and straight forward.  A recurrent childhood dream
will often, in my experience, map out the core situation of the dreamer's
incarnation. 
      The dream dramatically portrayed the self versus the collective.  The self
finds itself in a fallen world, a pit, and the collective, far more massive than
the individual, is antagonistic to individual consciousness.  It especially
seeks to flatten what I call "mutants."  Mutants, as I use the term, are
mutagenic individuals, they live outside of approved collective parameters and
are in a state of heightened metamorphosis.  You are more likely to find them among the
young because the pressures of the collective steam roller many mutants into the
approved flattened outline of a person which we call a normal adult.
Particularly strong mutants can continue to grow and metamorphose into
adulthood.  Jeremy was clearly a mutant, his eyes had that iridescent afterglow,
he emanated a large field of self awareness and compassion, and there was about
him the blue and indigo feeling of higher thinking and an older, spiritual
nature. 
    Boulder has the highest per capita occurrence of mutants of any place I've
ever encountered, and the Equinox party was a mutant nexus within Boulder.   But
even in such a mutant intensive environment, Jeremy stood out as unusual.
    I thought I had perfectly comprehended the dream as the most familiar (to me) of
themes-----the mutant versus the machine/collective.   The steamroller, as I
pointed out to Jeremy, is a machine whose exclusive purpose is dimension
reduction.  The job of the steam roller is to take that which is three
dimensional and make it two dimensional.  And this is what the massive inertia
of the collective baseline of consciousness seeks to do to the mutant----to
flatten them into dimensional conformity, to make them part of the asphalt of
flatland, a smooth surface that the big machinery can roll over with as little
friction as possible.  What an appropriate dream to encounter at a party put on
by young anarchists!
    I compared Jeremy's position in the dream to the young man in Tianamen
Square standing in front of the tank.  I pointed out a favorite saying in
present day Totalitarian China: "The nail which stands out, gets pounded down."
I concluded by pointing out to Jeremy that he should not perceive himself as a
victim in this situation, that he should accept incarnation into this fallen
world as something he signed on for to develop his awareness---boot camp for the
soul.  But he also deserved much compassion from himself because he was really
up against it in this lifetime.
    Feeling I had satisfactorily interpreted this dream I let Jeremy get back to
the party while I got to the next person patiently waiting to work on their
dreams.  One person after another showed up for dream interpretation or I Ching.
Inevitably I hit walls of exhaustion with this, as an introvert I can take only
so much of the intensity of contact with another's psyche in these consultations
before I become burned out and have to get up and walk around and regain my
equilibrium.  These were also my opportunities to experience the Equinox party
which impressed me with its positive vibe and mutant intensiveness.  I've been
to many Boulder parties, and even the better ones seem to attract a sizeable
number of those hungry ghost types you often see lurking around Penny Lane (a
Boulder coffee shop).  The sort that always have dark circles under their eyes
and the sulky feeling of a vampire indulging self pity because it hasn't fed in
a while. Much less of that type than usual, and more of the brighter, happening
type of people.  Had an interesting talk at the bar with a cross-dresser about
androgyny.  Everyone so friendly and approachable, and even after nine years of
Boulder that still amazes me having grown up in New York City.   It was getting
close to dawn and the energy was still vibrant.
Around 5am  one of the most perpetual of Boulder's hungry ghosts, I noticed,
had appeared and seemed to linger at the edges of the party absorbing energy.
Flashes of memory of the Eighties club scene in New York and the intense,
surreal vampires I encountered there.  The vampires from that scene would eat
these languid Boulder vampires for breakfast.  The arrival of trustafarian blood
suckers was my departure signal and I retreated to my 18' RV home parked in a
grassy field outside the Quality House.
      The next day I found that of all the dreams and interesting encounters of
the Equinox, it was Jeremy's dream that kept replaying in my mind.  I labeled
the dream, "The Mutant versus the Machine."
    Later that afternoon I found myself in a machine, an ancient brown bomber of
a Seventies Saab, hurtling down I-25.  The Saab had a missing gas cap, and gas
fumes blasted in with what passes for air on I-25.  I was sitting in the back
seat feeling that the Saab might be a literal bomb, and that my life might end
in a fireball of gasoline and Swedish car parts.
      The Mutant versus the Machine Dream amplified itself in my mind.  I was in
the Red Pit, the redness seemed like the redness of the Red Planet, Mars, but
the air smelled industrial---an atmosphere of gasoline and burnt rubber.  The
pit was a giant crater, perhaps  ground zero  of a nuclear detonation in the
desert.  Near the center of the pit was a young mutant boy, pale, perhaps naked,
he couldn't be seen clearly because there was  a distortion of visual field
around him, shimmering energy, like heat ripples above hot asphalt, surrounded
him. I could feel him staring with horror at the mechanical leviathan rolling up
to the edge of the crater.  It was all steel and tractor yellow, part
steamroller, bulldozer, tank, but titanic in size, able to eclipse the desert
sun.  The mutant's energy intensified with horror of this machine that sought
his flatness.  A silent scream was forming in him, ready to burst, and the
psionic energy shimmering around him suddenly intensified like the flickering of
a candle flame become the metal vaporizing jet of an acetylene torch.  The form
of the mutant boy--large-eyed and pale--- appeared blurred and prismatic within the
fiercely rippling corona of energy. A scream erupted, it was not an acoustical
scream, it was a scream of will and mutant psionic energy, a scream to shatter
dimensions.  In  a moment the mechanical titan was pulverized into a smoky dust
that vaporized before it even hit the ground. Fissures were forming in the red
ground, giant crevasses cracked open, tectonic plates in massive collision, the
red planet about to explode into dust...
     The dream seemed to surround me like a Red Pit, wouldn't let me out. It came
at me insistently  like the gasoline vapors and the blasts of I-25 air. Seeking
to divert my attention, I pulled out my handheld wireless computer gadget
looking for something to read.  Some months before, my friend John Jenkins, who
writes books about the Maya, had sent me a link to something Jay Weidner and
Sharon Rose had written entitled Tolkein and the End of Time
(sacredmysteries.com/jaytolkien for reasons of brevity, I will refer to Weidner
and Rose collectively as "Jay." ) John knew I was working on a new Tolkien study
entitled, Casting Precious into the Cracks of Doom.  Jay writes about alchemy
and a few years ago I had corresponded with him briefly about a fascinating
piece he had written about Stanley Kubrick's 2001, a film I had studied and
written about in the late Seventies.  I knew that whatever Jay had written was
probably full of insights, and even though this was so directly  related to what
I was writing, I had procrastinated on reading it for months.  Now that my
life seemed ready to end in an explosion of petroleum vapors I decided it was
time to stop putting it off.
         I began to read on the tiny computer screen in the back of the Saab and
found stunning relevance to the dream that was haunting me.
    Jay superimposed the end of an age story (which is the ring trilogy) onto the
Perennial Philosophy and cycle of four ages described by so many ancient mystery
traditions.  John Jenkins had written about this cycle of ages in his book,
Galactic Alignment, and we had talked about it some time ago, but the details
were blurred in my mind. According to the Maya, the Western Alchemists and the
ancient Hindus, there are four great cycles or ages each of which lasts for about
six thousand years.  In the first age there is the greatest connection to
spiritual light, but that light diminishes by one fourth until we get to the
fourth age, our present age, the period we today refer to as history.  The
Hindus referred to these ages as Yugas, and our present age of darkness is
called the Kali Yuga.    Each age is symbolically associated with a metal.   The
Satya Yuga is the Golden Age, the Treta Yuga is the Silver Age, the Dvapara Yuga
is the Bronze age and the Kali Yuga is the Iron Age.  Jay wrote, "According to
ancient lore the Iron Age is an Age where the world turns to steel, black magic
becomes religion and Men lust for  control and dominion over both human beings
and the very earth itself."
    The galactic alignment that the Maya correctly identified with the
approximate zone around 2012 is not the signal of the end of the world, but the
end of the Iron Age, the end of the cycle of four ages, an end date beyond which
they didn't care to continue their long count calendar, but which may also mark
the beginning of a new Golden Age.
    New connections, an emergent pattern in the great tapestry began to coalesce
in my mind.   The Red Pit, the Red Planet.  The Red Planet is red for the same
reason blood is red---iron.  A red pit is a pit of iron oxide.  And what
threatens to flatten the mutant in this iron pit?  A titanic machine of iron and
steel (steel merely the modern alloy of iron).   This recurrent dream showed
Jeremy's incarnational position and that of all mutants living in this
time---facing down the machine in the red pit of the Iron Age, like the young man
facing down the tank in Red China.  This dream, brought to me in a party of
young anarchists, was a harbinger of the end of the Iron Age.
     A song came over the Saab's radio, an old, old U2 song from back in the
day, back in the day when this brown bomber was still a gleam in the eye of a
Swedish engineer,   "....All is quiet on New Year's day...Under a blood red
sky....we can break free....we can be one...I will begin again...the time is
right...this is the Golden Age..."  The fragments of U2 I caught through the
blasts of I-25 air were stunning synchronicities. 
      I wondered if maybe the Saab had already combusted into a fire ball, my
body consumed in a  Swedish automotive inferno, and lost in some bardot I was
getting messages of a new cycle of time occurring under a blood red sun and the
approach of a Golden Age over a car radio that existed only in my disembodied
imagination. 
     If this was true, there wasn't much I could do about it, so I kept reading.
(Oh my God, the same U2 song is now playing in Cafe Sole two weeks later as I
write this----maybe this is just a bardot, an afterlife Saab story I'm trapped in!)
     As I continued to read I found Jay discussing Tolkien's hatred of the
machine age.   This I already knew.  Once an interviewer made the mistake of
asking Tolkien, "What makes you tick?" Tolkien responded dryly,  "I don't tick,
because I'm not a machine."  In  letters written during World War II to his son
Christopher, an RAF pilot, he despaired of the need to use "Mordor gadgets to defeat Mordor" and
the hopelessness of using "Sauron's magic to defeat Sauron."  Whatever side won
"the war of the machines," the real winner, Tolkien wrote, would be the machine.
Throughout his life, repeated again and again in his letters, Tolkien described
our world as a "fallen world." He recognized that this is a time when the more
spiritual magic of the elves had given way to the dense, material magic of
technology.  Tolkien, and his son Michael, had recurrent dreams of  Atlantis,
"Of all the mythical or 'archetypal' images this is the one most deeply seated
in my imagination, and for many years I had a recurrent Atlantis dream: the
stupendous and ineluctable wave advancing from the Sea or over the land,
sometimes dark, sometimes green and sunlit."
In the Tolkien mythology, as described in the Simarillion, the Golden Age of
Atlantis is related to the Second Age which involves the rise and fall of
Numenor.  As we pass through Tolkien's ages there is a darkening, densification
and externalization of inner spiritual magic.  Jay quotes Tolkien,
"all use of external plans or devices (apparatus) instead of developments of
these inherent inner powers or talents - or even the use of these talents with
the corrupted motive of dominating; bulldozing the real world, or coercing other
wills."   "...bulldozing the real world..."   This seemed another staggering
synchronicity, the bull dozer the symbolic synonym of the steamroller in the
dream.
     As Jay points out, the symbolic metals of the four ages---gold, silver,
bronze, iron---gain molecular density as they move from gold to iron.  The Iron
Age is one of dense materialism and lost contact with the spiritual realm----an
age when someone will work long, monotonous hours at a job to make payments on a
giant SUV.
      But, here at the end of the Iron Age, some trends of densification are
giving way to spirit effusing even the black magic of the machine.
Synchronistically, this subject came up in the talk with Jeremy that preceded
the dream.  I pointed out to him that in the last twenty years or so as the
value of America's industrial output has tripled, its physical weight has halved
as we make less pig iron, and more pixels, vanishingly small computer chips and
intellectual property in the form of zeros and ones.  Even our machines are
becoming etherialized.
     And as I've pointed out in discussions with John Jenkins, as we align with
the galactic center we are also aligning with the black hole at its center, a
place where matter is irrealized,  space and time disappear and a possible
portal into another dimension opens up.  This zone of alignment is a window of
opportunity to dissolve our identifications, perhaps even to irrealize our
bondage to matter.
     Jay pointed out a connection Tolkien makes obvious in his letters----that
the one ring and the machine define the same densification and externalizing of
magic.  The One Ring, made of the most impervious of metals, gets heavier as Frodo
brings it closer to Mt. Doom. 
     As I've written in Casting Precious into the Cracks of Doom,  Mt. Doom has
a connection to the black hole, it is a place aligned with at the end of an age,
a place to cast down the black magic, a place where it can be irrealized,
returned to the Alchemist's prima materia from which it was forged.
     ----For more on how to do this as an individual mutant please read my
upcoming Tolkien study.---
    Since the Equinox, the synchronicities related to the galactic alignment
have continued and John Jenkins and I have been presented by some very talented
people with an opportunity to collaborate on a documentary (the basic idea of
which we discussed years ago) tentatively entitled, A Conversation about the End
of Time.  We plan to travel to Mayan ruins in September to get some footage.
This unexpected collaboration has taken the message of the dream and integrated
it into my life.
     As the James Joyce character Stephen Deadelus has said, "History is the
nightmare from which I am trying to awaken."  The galactic alignment, which we
are in right now (don't wait for 2012!) is the chance for us collectively, but
especially for us as individual mutants, to awaken from the long, long nightmare
of history.
    
To see more writings by Jonathan Zap and John Jenkins go to alignment2012.com