2012: The beginning of a new era, Taíno spirituality and you

Apparently the world has not come to an end. But earthshaking changes are coming. We may not know what those changes are but we want to be ready. And this is one of the motivations for the event on Thursday, May 26: 2012: The beginning of a new era, Taíno spirituality and you. This is an event that's been in my mind since last year. That's when my friend José Muñoz and i started collaborating on several Taíno workshops that brought to the community some of the basic foundations of Taíno culture, the foundations that allow us to identify as Taíno and to actually go out and let the world know that the Taíno are still here.

The Taíno, as many Native people, have a special affinity with nature and things that are not of this world. The Native people of this hemisphere developed knowledge conocimiento that we can only imagine. The Maya for one developed a calendar that is very particular and takes into account certain events that only a very advanced civilization could know. Their calendar takes into account the movement and alignment of heavenly bodies that they knew and abserved hundreds and thousands of years ago but that we with our "superior" technology are only now "discovering".

The Taíno, being the Native people of the Caribbean, had contact with the Maya and the Aztecs and with other Native people of the continent. They were not an isolated civilization living in desolate islands. There was plenty of trade and contact going on between these civilizations. In fact this hemisphere had as many people if not more than the European continent. There were cities in the middle of Bolivia and in the jungles of what is now Guatemala that were bigger than any cities in Europe, bigger than Paris or London.

We are finding out that the Native peoples of this continent, even though they may have had differences in language, customs, religious beliefs, etc., were still very much in tune with nature. The workshops that José Muñoz gave actually opened up our eyes and minds to the fact that the Taíno had a certain knowledge of supernatural things that were also known by other people in the remotest parts of the world. That the same deities that were worshipped by the Taíno were also worshipped by the Aztecs and the Egyptians and the Greeks and the Chinese, etc....but they knew them by different names.

Among the knowledge that was shared was the Maya calendar. This is a calendar not of the end of the world in terms of disasters and fire and brimstone but in terms of the end of a spiritual age and the beginning of a new one. What will this new age mean to you is what 2012: The beginning of a new era, Taíno spirituality and you is about. It's not about telling you that a particular change will come but to prepare you to accept the changes and be ready for the new you...

Cemí Underground, Taller Boricua, Comité Noviembre and Taíno Gnostic Circle
Present
2012: The beginning of a new era, Taíno spirituality and you
A lecture presentation by Jose Bohiti Muñoz about the Maya Calendar predictions from a Native American Taíno perspective.
Thursday, May 26, 2011 at 7:00pm
$7.00 at the door

1680 Lexington Avenue at Taller Boricua’s Multi Arts Space at the
Julia de Burgos Cultural Center (Lexington Ave., 106th St., El Barrio, NYC)