On January 26th 1974, I awoke in Fresno, California, alone. It was my twenty-fifth birthday, and I was living in a garage that I had remodeled into an apartment in exchange for rent.
I was the quintessential starving artist. Bread, peanut butter, wine and art were my diet. Cheap wine. Good art. No sales, and a few “broke” friends.
It was about an hour after rising that I started to cry, and I did so, off and on, for the whole day. It was an orgy of self-pity and a mental flogging that I was lucky to get through alive.
I had come face-to-face with the fact that, other than surviving my Southern Baptist rearing and a short stint in the Navy, I had not accomplished much in 25 years. I determined that I had been a coward-I had not put myself “on the line” in enough situations. I decided to change that right then and there. I would find ways to take some risks even if it meant actually risking the life I had been so protective of.
Within a month’s time, I was a member of a Hot Shot fire crew for the forestry service based in Fresno and I worked for the Chandell hang-gliding school (heavy lifting and ground school coach) in exchange for using their flying equipment. My last flight was off of Glacier Point in Yosemite. Oh Yeah! Twice in one morning!
Three steps and then the ground can be found, six thousand feet straight down. I saved my own life on that last flight, and it was a new beginning. It was The Beginning. Half way to the landing site I knew that I would not make it that far having lost too much altitude while “sight seeing” on the way down. There was no one there but myself to handle the situation. A distinct calm came over me as I climbed into the extreme left corner of the control bar to make a 180 degree left turn in the attempt to land in a meadow that I had already past. It was cramped and short with the main road of Yosemite running through it but it was the only spot without trees!
Between the meadow and myself, loomed a huge oak tree. Without a moment of thought I dove the kite straight at the tree to gain air speed and then “flared out” (raised the nose) just before hitting the tree. My bootlaces had leaves in them. Okay now I am past the tree but headed up instead of down into this short meadow. I levered my body through the control bar to slam the nose down and then immediately corrected so that I could flare out again before crashing into the ground. It was the hottest shortest landing I would ever want to make but I was standing in one piece and starting to shake all over, when I heard a roar. People who had seen the landing from campground 4 were running over to see what was up. I stood there watching them come faster and faster toward me and realized that my consciousness had speeded to were the whole event had happened in slow motion and now I was readjusting to the agreed upon rate of event. Now there, in that no time moment was the New Beginning.
By June of 1974, I had run across and read Dianetics: The Science of the Mind, by L. Ron Hubbard. I took communication classes and joined staff at the Scientology center in Fresno. I worked on staff to pay my way through training and the processing called “auditing.” I worked in the Publics Division of the center. That is, I introduced Scientology to people from off the street, taught communication classes and went door-to-door selling Dianetics books. I once sold 248 books in a week. I got an award. And I could eat. This is how I was making a living. I went “clear” in 1978.
Eventually, I ended up in Boise, Idaho, at a center that closed its doors in 1983. As the first corner hot dog vendor in Boise – and because of my habit of dancing on the corner to a boom box to stay warm – I attracted a little public notoriety. And then, I was hired by a group of silly drunk ladies to do a bachelorette party at their hotel suite. I guess you could say this was another beginning. I worked as an exotic dancer from thirty-four to forty-four. I should have quit by forty. It was done. But I was addicted to the attention and the quick cash.
It all went away so very quickly. I turned back to art.
In 1995, I was working at Park’s bronze foundry in Wallowa County, Oregon, the sacred homeland of the Nez Pierce Nation. While there, I wrote a poem about the Tinker and the Nymph. During the process of writing, I had another massive opening. Once again I was weeping but shortly followed by complete feelings of exhilaration. I slammed up and down for about a week on that one and ended up wrapping myself around a shaft of light that was angling through the universe and, coincidentally, through my bedroom.
I knew this to be the source of my creativity and I was now riding it. That realization blew my consciousness right out of that little mountain town.
I set off into the world and made it to Scottsdale, Arizona, where, in September 1996, I bought my first book on the Maya, Maya Cosmos by Linda Shiele and David Friedle, because of the illustrations.
I began carving the Mayan symbols as pieces of jewelry. The symbols, as I carved them with my own hands, communicated in the same frequencies as the beam I had joined earlier. This was something brand new, and yet it felt so familiar. I was enchanted. I started reading Shiele and Friedle’s book, and then Jose Arguelles’s Mayan Factor-with Maruice Cotterel’s Mayan Prophecies thrown in for good measure-and the DIE WAS CAST.
With a novice’s understanding of the Mayan calendar, I began carving all twenty Mayan sacred sun signs as astrological pendants. This took the lid off!
By the time I was finished, I had downloaded information of patterns and numbers, memories of being Mayan and of being sent from the past as a Mayan to this time, to pick up the skills needed to broadly educate mankind about the importance of the Mayan calendar-stuff like that.
It seemed that the information was an ocean around me, supportive but impossible to consume. I knew I was not going to have a normal life from then on. As I began to design the sales rack for the astrological jewelry, I discovered there was no easy, quick method to convert the Gregorian 365 ¼ day calendar to the 260-day Mayan calendar. Whoops! Dead jewelry line.
I crashed for a month or four, and then, on a flight over Houston, Texas, I got a flash, an inspiration-within fifteen seconds, I had a full formula with which to convert the calendars. It was so simple, but everyone had somehow missed it. “I fell in the hole and look what I found” was what it felt like. I created a chart system based on the formulas and sold those charts at the Jose Arguelles Dreamspell booth at the Prophets Conference in Phoenix in 1997.
It was in Sedona, Arizona, at the Crystal Healings on the Rocks in 1998 that I proudly showed my work to an actual Mayan shaman who was there to speak and do ceremony. He asked me, “That is the Dreamspell, isn’t it?” I said, “Yes.”
He said, “That is not the Mayan calendar.” Oh Boy! End of Future.
A few months later, I was being prepared for a mission by this Mayan shaman to the Mayan lands. This included an ayahuasca journey and a traditional healing ceremony done by Amazon priests with the shaman and many Native Americans. I went straight to the Womb of Creation and had a visit with the Mother. No words.
The mission was to “follow” a group that Aluna Joy Yaxkin was leading. (I couldn’t afford the group fee anyway.)
This trip began with a spring equinox fire ceremony by the Barrios brothers at Tikal in Guatemala, who had been hired to do it. This hiring of Maya by Anglo tourists to do sacred ceremony in Tikal was not approved of by the Maya Council of Priests and Elders. And since I was on a secret personal mission to confirm the actual accurate day on the Mayan calendar, I decided not to attend the fire ceremony, and went off into the Tikal Ruins by myself.
I was lying on a thick rock slab that would have been a bed for ancient nobility or priests when a shaft of light struck my forehead. The download in those moments is still not describable in words. (By the way, it was a totally cloudy day-the sun had broken through a very small opening in the cloud cover.) At the same time this was happening to me, 30 people in the Ceremonial Plaza saw the ritual fire produce two twining serpents, who gazed intently at the crowd before the sun burst through and the snakes changed back to flames.
After visiting Palenque with the group, I split off and ended up in Copan Honduras, selling Mayan jewelry I had made to tourists along the way to pay for my journey. During those three weeks, I talked to two actual Mayan shamans through translators, and had them point to their current day on the Mayan calendar. Now I knew. Jose A. was in error and so were Aluna Joy and everybody else they had taught about the Mayan calendar.
On my return to the States, a good friend Beth Rahe and I got the charts to work with the actual Mayan calendar. I then went to study with the Mayan shaman back in California for a few months. After that, I moved on to become more active in promoting the new Mayan calendar charts as astrological placemats in Mexican restaurants.
I went back to the Mayan lands to meet with Mayan shaman, Hunbatz Men to get his endorsement of the calendars and placemats. He refused when he found that 10% of profits would be paid directly to the Mayan people in their villages and there was no money in it for him. While I was there, I went to Izamal and met the god Itzamna at the top of his temple.
Itzamna, is known as “The First Teacher” to the Maya, he is the one according to legend who brought the knowledge of writing, mathematics and the calendar. I went up and placed four codices at the four directions, put my arms up to a brilliant Yucatan sky and found myself shouting at the top of my voice, “Itzamna! You get your ass down here right now!”
He showed up, with two other curious beings who split as soon as they knew this was serious business. I said, “Itzamna, I am your man down here! This is your information that I am toting, and either you help me or you get down here and get your robes dirty!” I really had no idea that I was going to say that, and neither did Itzamna. Itzamna and I have a deal.
I went back to Cave Creek AZ, and right away the codex got published in Magical Blend magazine. And then a backer showed up with some money, so I moved to Cancun to market the calendars and the placemats to the hotel owners-who would sell them to tourists from all over the world. From one place, I would cover the globe. Well, ya gotta be a Mexican citizen to sell anything to anyone in Cancun. After nine months of trying, another great plan bites the big one.
Meanwhile, Dr. Carl J. Calleman, a micro-biologist from Sweden, had been advised of my new tool to convert the actual Mayan calendar, and sent me his unpublished book, “The Theory of Everything.” I read it. My life path changed dramatically some more.
Dr. Calleman came to Cancun, and we spent two months living together in a one-bedroom apartment while we tried to get his book published. No dice.
Dr. Calleman returned to Sweden, and I moved to Sedona to ground this information there – to start telling the metaphysical community about what had been discovered. Since June 2001, my partner, Madaline Weber, and I have traveled tens of thousands of miles talking to whoever would listen about this discovery. I am willing to talk to everyone.
This is everyone’s information.
In service,
Ian Xel Lungold
P. S. My great-, great-, great-grandfather was Johnnie Appleseed (John Chapman). He traveled the frontier planting seeds and distributing tracts of Swedenborg’s writings, door to cabin door. Emanuel Swedenborg, a scientific philosopher who broke massive ground in spiritual researches, lived and wrote in Stockholm.