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 Years ago, maybe in some previous incarnation, I fell in love. I was attracted, entranced, by something I couldn’t quite grasp but had to pursue. Her name: Sophia. She has led me on many journeys into cosmological mysteries, inner reveries and revolutions, classrooms, courtrooms, jungles, jails, and the vaulted Hall of the Mountain King. Exchanging food for famine, money for metaphysics, and books for knowledge, I have pursued this love until I was shoeless in Gaza, shorn of my backpack in Brazil, and interviewed on the red carpet in Hollywood. It--she, that is (Sophia)--has sustained me through plagiarisms and poverty and guided me to beatitude and windfalls.
The 16th century Christian Hermetic mystic Jacob Boehme wrote: “I will set down here a short description how it is when the Bride thus embraces the Bridegroom … to enter into the inner choir, where the soul joins hands and dances with Sophia-the Divine Wisdom.” The Divine Wisdom, you say? Capital “D,” capital “W”? Why yes, I reply … the Divine Wisdom. You know, the transcendental Buddhi Mind, the Philosopher’s Stone, the eternal and infinite unmanifest Ground of all Being. The All Radiant Mother of All Buddhas. Sophia. She is the goal of the Philosopher, lovers of wisdom (philo-sophia) who seek to unite with Truth and Wisdom, to be swept up enraptured in the ultimate epiphany, to experience one’s soul stripped bare, down the eternal source, and imbibe for once and for all the profound Truth--that all true knowledge comes from an ecstatic immersion in the transcendent. And the world, ultimately, is embedded within the transcendent--to transcend the world is not to leave the world, but to enjoy and celebrate the world at its core.
Okay, enough of that. I grew up in the Chicago ‘burbs and by age ten was stapling cardboard boxes at my Dad’s factory. Then I graduated to operating the wood saws, the shrink-wrap machine, the pneumatic folders, and soon was fixing those beasts when they broke down. At sixteen I drove the cargo van around Chi-town delivering picture frames and doll house kits far and wide. And I was making some decent bucks too--$3.75 an hour! Yee-hah! But something was wrong in Paradise. At age seventeen I realized that capitalism wedded to materialism was a travesty, a trick that was leading the world to self-destruction. I promptly retired from wage-slave consumerism and remained stoned for two years.
That apostasy was triggered by a habit I had nurtured since I was a kid: used bookstores. One frosty December day I stumbled upon a little book by Alan Watts called The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. It literally leapt off the shelf of the used bookstore and into my hands, the blare of buzz saws still ringing in my ears from a marathon 15-hour stint at the factory. Flipping it open to a random page, I read: “Our society--that is, we ourselves, all of us--is defining the individual with a double bind, commanding him to be free and separate from the world, which he is not, for otherwise the command would not work. Under the circumstances, it works only in the sense of implanting an illusion of separateness. . . . Thus bamboozled, the individual--instead of fulfilling his unique function in the world--is exhausted and frustrated in efforts to accomplish self-contradictory goals. Caught up in a mindless and alien universe, his principle task is to get one-up on the universe and to conquer nature.”
Photo by John Major Jenkins
“Yes, exactly,” I thought to myself, and paid the buck-fifty. Sophia whispered in my ringing ears … “Say, big boy, why don’t you come up and see me sometime?” Like a quickly evolving addiction, I soon graduated from Watts to the hard core drug of Eastern Mysticism, sold to me by pushers such as Lama Anagarika Govinda, Yogananda, and Muktananda. Naturally I had to sustain my habit with long forays into the underworld of meditation, fasting, and yoga, with mixed results until I decided I needed to escape the city. I needed to experience the cool and fresh air of the countryside, of the woods and hills of some distant location, where I could commune with nature. I hit the local library, did some research, and by day’s end I had a plan: the Arkansas Ozarks. I hiked and camped for two solid weeks, wandering National Forest Service trails, getting lost and found, surviving a lightning storm that impaled my tent with huge tree branches, and emerged on the other side knowing that travel was now in my blood. On occasional adventures undertaken to slake my wanderlust, I jumped on freight trains, hitchhiked cross country, went overland to Honduras and back to Chicago in one month, lived in my 1969 Dodge Van while traveling all over the southern states, got thrown in jail in New Orleans, and relocated to Colorado in 1985.
I arrived in Boulder with a sleeping bag and a few hundred dollars. It was a cold late September and snowing, but I was lucky because within four days I landed a basement hovel on the hill for $110 a month. At this point I began my career of making slingshots at a factory. It lasted three months. I then worked the night shift in a factory until I saved enough money for a lengthy trip to Central America. I was drawn to the Maya culture, and was reading about and studying their traditions. I wanted to cut loose (again) from the American nightmare of industrial materialism (being a mechanical robot operating machines to make quota five nights a week gives you a direct experience of the “nightmare” part of that statement). So, I squirreled away $1000 and went south of the border. Four months later I arrived back in Chicago in tatters, backpack lost, with twelve cents in my pocket. That first trip to Mayaland, visiting ancient jungle temples and Maya villages in Highland Guatemala, changed my life. I’ve since returned many times and have made my life’s work about working with the modern Maya, investigating Maya cosmology and calendars, and reconstructing lost wisdom. There’s Sophia again.
But why? Why respond to such an odd calling? In retrospect, I only knew what I didn’t want to do. I’ve never felt compelled to go down the path of official academia. I took a few steps in that direction but found, as Mark Twain said, that I didn’t want college “to interfere with my education.” And so I studied and explored what I wanted to, guided by a deepening immersion in what I loved. If that seems odd to a world steeped in values you could care less about, so be it. In 1996 a little free paper was produced in Fort Collins, called Zeitgeist, and I wrote an article for it called “Love Something? Look Into It.” That pretty much says it all. What is life if you aren’t living it--and loving it? As mythologist Joseph Campbell once advised, you have to “follow your bliss” if you want to find soul satisfaction. The alternative is to miss your bliss.
 I studied and I wrote and I traveled. I lived in a renovated garage in Louisville, Colorado for four years while I dove into my itinerant cosmologizing and hieroglyphic decipherments of the Maya inscriptions. In 1994 I hit upon a breakthrough and figured out something that no one else--even the professional scholars--had realized about the ancient Maya. They were advanced astronomers who anchored their now infamous 2012 date to a rare astronomical alignment. They didn’t think about it as doomsday, either. No, for them it involved profound spiritual teachings about transformation and renewal that could only come by reestablishing a connection with the Big Picture, the higher wisdom. The Maya laid it all out in their Creation Myth. All the evidence was there to see, and was documented in my 1998 book Maya Cosmogenesis 2012.
The result of being persistent and never giving up is now coming to fruition. I have four books in print and several other projects pending. I can’t say that I’m now able to purchase castles in France or islands in the South Pacific (or that I would if I could), but I am paying my modest bills. And the pioneering work that I presented fifteen years ago is now receiving vindication within academia, the very edifice that once rejected it without a second glance. Most importantly, I am now able to help set up a non-profit called The Maya Conservancy, to educate people about the ancient Maya as well as channel funds to projects in the Guatemalan highlands, where millions of Maya people are struggling to preserve their traditions in an increasingly hostile world.
To make a living in modern America as an independent intellectual, an author and researcher of arcane but nevertheless fascinating topics, is not an easy thing--especially without a string of letters after your name. In my experience, it could only be done by blazing a new trail, rejecting the path to oblivion laid out by kindly institutions and well meaning advisors. It is the path, as psychologist Carl Jung said, to your own individuation. And no one else can do it for you. Only you can navigate the pitfalls, distractions, and illusions that try to make you forget following your bliss. But there is one thing that can guide you as you do it. Her name is Sophia.
John Major Jenkins is an independent researcher and scholar of ancient Mesoamerican cultures. He is the author of ten books on the subject since 1989, travels the world giving presentations and has appeared in numerous documentaries. He writes, plays the bouzouki, prints on an old letterpress machine, and lives near Fort Collins. He can be reached at http://Alignment2012.com.
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