Who was José Argüelles?

Jose was a man born in Minnesota in 1939. He died peacefully in New Zealand just after the tsunami ravaged Japan in 2011, when thousands of souls were rising from that part of our planet. His Mayan birthday names him Blue Spectral Monkey, the intersection of the eleventh tribe and the eleventh tone, a sweet 11:11 synchronicity.

There is a voluminous biography presented here on his legacy website, The Foundation of the Law of Time (FLT). Indeed, all the written offerings at the FLT are directly coordinate to Jose’s primary teaching and give a strong flavor of his style and impetus in bringing the Mayan code to our modern age.

The most important aspect of Jose to be addressed here is his birthright as Blue Spectral Monkey. He was a master magician, an incredible visionary who could contemplate the universe with an eye for the lost connections between spiritual traditions that have been buried due to divisive religious values. He could see numeric codes that interlaced the Mayan calendars with Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist and Christian teachings.

His Spectral quality dissolved the rigid demarcations that make spiritual traditions separate. He conjoined the Mayan code with the I’Ching and the Celtic runes, the Sanskrit chakras, and the Native American medicine wheel. He was childlike in his will to dig into layer upon layer of sacred teachings and add them to the mandala of inclusion it was his mission to offer the new world age. We are gifted this legacy of his boundless stirring of light into the shadows where the Mayan codes have been relegated since colonization came to the American continent.

And some factoids: he was Mexican American and has a twin, still living, named Ivan; he co-created the Whole Earth Expo in Northern California, and conceived the Harmonic Convergence that was celebrated in the summer of 1987 by people around the planet who for the most part did not attach it to anything Mayan; he lost his son in the same window of time, and wrote The Mayan Factor in a passage of grieving; he was a great visual artist and published a book of his works in various media called Mandala; he was a comparative literature professor who at different times taught at U.C. Davis, Evergreen State College and Princeton University.