Episode 92 - Robert Sitler guest – 1 of 7 On the Road of “2012 NOW – Empowering the Transformation”

Transcript

“Duncan Campbell, I heard about your podcast a few months ago, and have been deeply listening to all the dialogues with your fantastic friends/guests. Your words, ideas, and wisdom are truly inspirational.  You have evoked a new appetite for knowledge in me that I hope to share with a starving younger generation. Thank you for doing what you do, and creating a unique space, void of boundaries and classification.  A breath of fresh air!  Much love and respect.” – Amit Kapadiya

In furtherance of creating and maintaining the planetary dialogues now required in the 21st century, we featured a special series of dialogues with myself and other elders in the weeks leading up to and including the 2008 Olympics hosted by China and the U.S. 2008 elections.  Those dialogues can be listened to separately on this site or as gathered as a series on my website www.livingdialogues.com under the collective title “Engaged Elder Wisdom Dialogues”.  They address various specific political aspects of our planetary crisis, with its dangers and opportunities for creating and sustaining a visionary and evolutionary shift. (We remember that the Chinese character for “crisis” is often described as meaning both “danger” when visioned from a fear perspective, and “opportunity” when visioned from a wisdom perspective.)

In all my Living Dialogues from their inception I talk in various ways about the call to generate dialogues across generational, ethnic, gender, religious, wealth, and national boundaries -- building bridges of understanding and wisdom in the cooperative spirit and reaching out -- required by our 21st century realities, and the essential roles that we all are called to play in our evolution for it to take place.

This is the time for renewed dialogue, for visionary and inspiring discourse producing practical and innovative ways of living and sharing together, to engage the deep spirit and spirituality of our own elder wisdom and youthful inspiration, and in so doing to experience and exemplify that “Dialogue is the Language of Evolutionary Transformation”™.

And that is what we all do, in our mutual roles as host, deep listeners, and guests, when we gather together here from all parts of the globe in Living Dialogues.

SUBSCRIBE HERE FOR FREE TO LIVING DIALOGUES AND IN THE COMING WEEKS HEAR DUNCAN CAMPELL’S DIALOGUES WITH OTHER GROUND-BREAKING TRANSFORMATIONAL THINKERS LISTED ON THE WEBSITE WWW.LIVINGDIALOGUES.COM.  TO LISTEN TO PREVIOUS RELATED DIALOGUES ON THIS SITE, SCROLL DOWN ON THE LIVING DIALOGUES SHOW PAGE HERE -- OR CLICK ON THE NAME OF A GUEST ON THE LIST AT THE RIGHT -- TO HEAR DUNCAN’S DIALOGUES WITH DR. ANDREW WEIL, BRIAN WEISS, COLEMAN BARKS, RUPERT SHELDRAKE, LARRY DOSSEY, JUDY COLLINS, MARIANNE WILLIAMSON, MATTHEW FOX, JOSEPH CHILTON PEARCE, DEEPAK CHOPRA, BYRON KATIE AND STEPHEN MITCHELL, CAROLINE MYSS, GANGAJI, VINE DELORIA, JR., MICHAEL DOWD (THE UNIVERSE STORY OF THOMAS BERRY AND BRIAN SWIMME), STEVE MCINTOSH, FRANCES MOORE LAPPE, STANISLAV GROF, RICHARD TARNAS, MARC BEKOFF AND JANE GOODALL, RICHARD MOSS, PAUL HAWKEN, PAUL RAY, JOSEPH ELLIS, DUANE ELGIN, LYNNE MCTAGGART, ECKHART TOLLE, MICHAEL MEADE, ANGELES ARRIEN, SOBONFU SOME. TED SORENSEN, ROBERT THURMAN, DAVID MARANISS, DAVID BOREN, GEORGE LAKOFF, TOM HAYDEN, JAY INSLEE, BRACKEN HENDRICKS, BOB GOUGH, VAN JONES, BARBARA MARX HUBBARD, LESTER BROWN, DAVID MENDELL, DEBORAH TANNEN, JOHN GRAY, ARI BERK, SUSAN JACOBY, JOSEPH M. MARSHALL III, JOHN O’DONOHUE, BRANT SECUNDA, MARK ALLEN, MICHAEL BECKWITH AND OTHER EVOLUTIONARY THINKERS FROM AROUND THE WORLD.

The best way to reach me is through my website: www.livingdialogues.com.  Many thanks again for your attentive deep listening in helping co-create this program.

All the best, Duncan.

P.S. As a way of further acknowledging and appreciating your part in these dialogues, and since I cannot personally answer all of them, I have begun to publish from time to time in these pages some of the appreciations received from you.

Roberts Sitler: I’m Roberts Sitler and in the conversations that I just shared with Duncan, I really sense the listeners who will be participating potentially in this conference and who will be listening to the theories and dialogues that you’d be hearing in the coming weeks and I feel that they have been charged through Duncan’s work with the potential to bring about inner transformation and I look forward to participating in the process with you.

Duncan Campbell: Welcome to Living Dialogues.  I’m your host, Duncan Campbell, and with me for this particular dialogue I’m truly delighted to have as my guest, Robert Sitler.  Robert Sitler  is an Associate Professor of Modern Languages and Director of the Latin American Studies Program at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida.  He received his doctoral degree from the University of Texas at Austin after completing a dissertation on Maya-related literature under the guidance of the late Dr. Linda Shelly.  His travels include over 30 years of regular visits to the Maya world, among a wide variety of Maya ethnic groups.  He has a particularly close relationship with the Mam-Maya community of Todos Santos Cuchumatan in Guatemala.  He has published a number of articles on Maya and Maya-related literature, his current research focuses on the cultural phenomenon surrounding the 2012 date on the long count Mayan calendar.  He is also featured in the Mystery of 2012: Predictions Prophecies and Possibilities published by Sounds True and you can reach him at www.stetson.edu/rsitler.  So Robert, what a great pleasure to have you here on Living Dialogues.

Roberts Sitler: It’s a pleasure to be with you.

Duncan Campbell: And we have really an auspicious moment here because you and I are inaugurating in this dialogue, the first of the series of seven dialogues that will be consciously leading up to an event on May 29 and 30 in Fort Collins, Colorado, a gathering entitled “2012 Now, Empowering the Transformation.”  And so as we go forward, we have really consciously understood that these series of seven dialogues between myself, who will also be serving as the Opening Presenter and Master of Ceremonies and yourself is the inauguration in a sense of a kind of pilgrimage that these seven dialogues are in a way a milestone as we are preparing ourselves and our consciousness to gradually focus in on this event which will be not just simply at the end of May, a transmission of information from various sources but an integral initiation and experiential transformation very much in the Initiatic Tradition of the Mayan people themselves and from that perspective, you’ve told me prior to this that this particular day on which we’re recording this dialogue has its own auspicious moment within the Mayan calendar.  Perhaps let us start there.

Roberts Sitler: Well, that’s very true.  This -- we’re talking about the 260-day ritual calendar known by the K'iche' as the Cholq'ij, the counted days.  And this is the day for [xx] is often part of it is referenced to a corn, but it’s very strongly connected with abundance and the number four actually has a very strong connotations of stability, it’s a very auspicious day especially for the beginnings, it’s associated with corn and the entire process of cultivating corn, which of course in the Maya world view is the same thing as cultivating a human being because corn and human beings are of the same substance.

Duncan Campbell: And that’s most interesting because again what it does is underscore the indigenous view and experience of our entire species from its beginning where even anthropologist talk about the indigenous world and the experience of humans in our indigenous stage of development as experiencing what they called Mystical Participation, meaning that we experienced ourselves, we humans, homo sapiens in our earliest beginnings as embedded in a fully alive conscious universe so that there was no radical distinction between the human, the animal, the plant or the landscape.  So for us to be talking about humans and corn made of the same substance is very interesting because it really reconfirms and reawakens that sense that we all are completely permeated with the divine consciousness, whether we call it creator or spirit or just simply the warm embrace of a conscious intelligence, we’re talking about our being situated in the cosmos and it’s an alive cosmos full of awe and wonder.  Sometimes really pushed to the side and forgotten or we might say we’ve become estranged from that in our modern consciousness.

Roberts Sitler: I think that’s very true.  I love your introduction.  It feels like we could stop right there, it was so articulate and possible.  I am most drawn to your desire to make this an experiential event rather than a conceptual one because honestly a lot of the conceptual sort of belief systems around 2012, I don’t think our essential to our experience of our connection with the divine as you described it and so that you’re starting out in such a rewarding direction and I just think that this particular way of shaping the conference is going to be very, very beneficial for your listeners and for the participants in the conference.  I know, I’m really looking forward to meeting the presenters myself and experiencing therewith them.

Duncan Campbell: And I think that’s really part of the key is that not only are the presenters going to be getting together in nature the day before and the day of our coming together as a greater gathering but all of us together, every participant in this gathering will be interacting in dialogue in the course of the day and a half that we’re going to spend together and it’s very much framed within the understand you’ve just also confirmed, which is actually the Mayan understanding as well as our indigenous understanding that when we come together in a gathering, we come together with the inherent knowledge that our gathering together is a way of amplifying our own individual access to, we might call it the logos or the wisdom of the universe that we are together, not to just simply share as in a scientific paper conference fragments of mental research and strictly information but we’re together in a real kind of celebration and initiation where together we understand that our energies if focused in a good hearted generous abundant way, on the possibility of transformation can evoke together a revelation and unveiling of a deeper heart reality than any of us can experience alone.

Roberts Sitler: That is so true.  I think, you know, honestly in my early experiences in the Maya world that you just described in terms of a conscious sense of shared experience, so it was one of the most striking features that I first became aware of among the Chol Maya that I was -- my wife and I were visiting right at the time, I became clearly aware that there was -- I’m reluctant to use the word communication because we imply words with that but there is a sense of living together in actually sharing the same consciousness between people and the Chol communities that I had never experienced prior to that and was quite a revelation to a young man at the time.

For full transcript, please contact Duncan Campbell