White Worldbridger Wavespell
Death – Equalizes – Opportunity
White Worldbridger is one of the 20 aspects of our environment celebrated in the Tzolkin (soul count) 260-day calendar. The glyph image is of a ‘death skull,’ which was the original expression of this time for the Maya. We are entering the celebration of dying, of crossing from this planetary world to a heavenly one, of bridging worlds in that passage. One half of the glyph shows the physical body at rest, the relief of eternal sleep; on the other side is the great beyond, vast nothingness that only our imaginations can fill until we arrive there. This empty space could be the white light that people with near death experiences speak of, and is certainly opposite our material world filled with objects, obsessions. The key to the consideration of death in this wavespell is not to suffer crushing losses, killed or martyred by dark fate, but to feel deeply into the peace of eternity and let it wash into our still living, breathing body vessels.
We are all aware of suffering. The culture we occupy is facing certain deaths of its dominion and it’s our turn to account for poor choices we have made from ego and overblown willfulness. In each of our personal lives we can observe the assumptions of ease we’ve made for generations – that we would have a home, money for food, that there would be as much food as money could buy, that daydreams like being successful in our careers could actually become the American Dream of achievement, celebrity – are less and less reliable as certain outcomes. The death of Western Civilization is not exactly imminent – these next 13 days we will still have a banking system and groceries and the desire to make something of our lives beyond a backyard garden – but there are those small hints that it has been motivated by greed and self-centeredness that are spiritually and emotionally draining to us, and physically and ideologically enslaving of those who have served our embarrassment of riches.
This treatise on societal ills is mostly an illustration of how each of us in the U.S., Europe, is not exempt from an organic righting of the imbalance that has been in our favor, materially, and that we are being shown ways to let go of selfishness for the sake of karmic, human justice. And while we may not feel that as sudden poverty, homelessness, starvation as in so many other corners of the globe, we may learn humility, co-operation and grace through the loss of other comforts. We may be asked to give up excesses in order to streamline back to simplicity and awareness of what matter matters.
In the olden days there was one marriage each lifetime, one income per household, one day of rest. In modern days, we are fragmented by choices, independence, freedom. We have so much free will, we can, through the miracles of science, survive disease, disability and disaster. We can prolong this life span on earth in order to avoid the fear we have of dying, of its immaterial unknown entry into an afterlife of which we have no scientific description. The cosmic joke is only that the ability we now have to live through almost anything means that our planet is overpopulated, and the longer stay we have on it is not necessarily more enjoyable.
In the very olden days, as in ancient civilizations like the Mayan, death was understood and embraced as ascendance from the hard physical toil of earth life. They saw its release – no war, no constant crop maintenance, no erection of pyramids out of quarried stone – and prayed for it to take them. While we may not want to be lifted out of our daily lives with as much desperation – except for those occasional suicidal impulses we each harbor – we could build a remembrance and reverence for the world beyond this one in order to connect to its relief and release now, building a bridge between.
The White Worldbridger wavespell is an invitation to reacquaint ourselves with the inevitability of death, and the deepest freedom it offers. In order to overcome fear of our natural end, we are given little practice deaths – the loss of one of our several jobs, of our several dear relationships, several unfocused downtimes where we admittedly have been goofing off (the Internet? addictive romance? feeling self-pity?) – in order to feel the true liberation that comes from allowing necessary endings to create that vast empty space of spiritual expansion. The deaths we encounter in this time are rarely physical, although there are old folks and old souls who will naturally align with this invitation to worldbridge, and at a time when crossing over is encouraged we may even notice some ghosts coming back for a spell to assure us that the afterlife is real and at peace. The deaths of this wavespell are positive losses, gut-wrenching for a moment, but ultimately invigorating, making way for new life. Like the autumn season and its brilliant foliage, death is beautiful, transcendent, and the only way to prepare for spring seeding and renewal.
We know about death as the precursor to new life from our deep spiritual disciplines, from nature, and this time is only a reminder that allowing death to roll through us is as simple as menstrual flow, as enjoyable as the ‘little death’ of an orgasm. The divinity of the White Worldbridger time is not in surviving the pain of a horrible division between what we love and feel is being taken away from us prematurely. It’s the understanding that everything we lose is cast into a pool of eternity and is available to us in etheric form as an angel, a spiritual flow, that can inform us still from the heavens. This metaphor applies to relationship losses, job terminations, and the ending we may experience of some lifelong dreams. Whatever we are asked to give up, to let die, will re-emerge as an essence within what lives on. When we intended to be a ballerina as a child, we wanted mostly to feel pretty, to float and have grace; desiring to be firemen, we were drawn to fearlessness, strength and the hero’s impulse to protect. When we now hold other job titles, we haven’t lost the original essence, can be a dancing flame or its firekeeper in spirit, still play it out in our living rooms and backyards.
Jose Arguelles chose three words to describe the White Worldbridger. Its power is death, and in fact we probably have more consciousness of that than birth. As kids we lost pets, buried them, but rather than going to the cat farm to see a new litter delivered in similar blood flow, just got a new clean, fluffy kitten from the pound. Take some time to recognize what you already know about death. You have been divorced, perhaps, or were devastated by the losses of young love. Or your parents were divorced and traditional family structures fell around you, killing your trust and fragmenting you into parts. Where we have survived famine as a culture, we have had our losses in other ways, and to humble ourselves to the power of death we really just need to remember we know it well, how it hurts, but also makes us stronger, at least in our sympathy towards others experiencing the same losses.
Which is why the action of White Worldbridger is to equalize. The essential arrogance of the overblown ego is that it could outlive others, could destroy others, even, in order to secure itself. When we are forced to face death, we are humbled. Encountering a literal death, a same-aged peer’s funeral, we awake to the possibility of our own demise, and recalculate our goals and missions for this time we have here, earthlings. Someone else loses a job, their relationship ends; the humble response is deep empathy and the instant reminder that it could as easily, equally, be us, was us, will be again. The egoic response is to feel sorry for them or separate, to go into a spin working harder on preserving our own job or partnership as if we could better avoid such deaths ourselves. The beauty of a physical death is the real emotion that arises for the loss, the slowing of time and purpose into only what truly matters. We can expect an equal distillation in this wavespell, that as necessary losses occur we are left with the fullness of what remains, and shared appreciation for the life force surging in its wake.
The essence of White Worldbridger is opportunity. When one door closes, another opens. Be reminded that anything that is falling away is in spiritual truth making way for renewal, deeper awakening, a stronger connection to the eternal strand that holds the prayer beads of these many finite lifetimes. Death on earth does yield human grief, an opportunity to let out tension, fear, the admission that we can’t control it, and the realization soon after that we wouldn’t want to. If you are invited by loss to emote heavily, welcome it as a first autumn rain. However, as you bump into the contours of your face while wiping away tears, notice how alive you still are, and warm, and radiant. Even better, let someone else wipe them away and make the same discovery.
