Recently in San Antonio, I took part in hosting a film screening of Jose Jaramillo’s “Between 2 Worlds”, a documentary that takes a look at the Gregorian and Mayan calendars. This screening was part of a new project (Culture Consumers) that presents films as conversation starters to stimulate dialogue in the local community with some relevance to things happening in our homes, neighborhoods, city, country, planet, universe, and within our selves.

The screening itself took place on Monday, July 25, a day observed by some around the globe as the Day Out of Time, a notion proposed by the late Jose Arguelles. According to Arguelles, July 26 should be the beginning of the New Year (based on the rising of the star Sirius) and follow a 13 month/28 day lunar cycle, which equals 364 days. July 25 therefore is observed as a day without time to keep us on track with this natural cycle.

This concept should be utterly confusing since we have all been living by the Gregorian calendar since grade school. Also, the Day out of Time by most accounts has relatively nothing to do with the actual Mayan calendar as it is observed today.  In part, the reason we chose to screen the film on that day in particular was to provide the audience with references that challenged the general notion of time.

Between 2 Worlds explains how the Gregorian calendar spread as the standard of time and how it’s chaotic nature has affected our conscious evolution. Though some of the speakers show obvious bias, it still presses some interesting concepts. Stripped from the religious connotations, the film forces you to contemplate the direction we are headed in as a group when our lives are based around a rigid grid of hours and deadlines.

Whereas we have the opportunity to work on solving so many of the worlds problems based on the simple fact that we are now increasingly aware of them, it seems we are too locked into the “old world” ways of structured time tables to even try.

This is where new age Mayanism identifies our current plot on the course to conscious evolution. According to the speakers in the film, this is the truth behind the debated 2012 prophecy; not merely an end time event wiping the world clean, but a journey to an enlightened state where we shed our egotistical ways and reconnect with each other and the Earth. This idea permeates several contemporary philosophy circles and is spreading, even though arguments have been made reminding the “Marley-esque” that the Mayans were not peace-loving and were a particularly brutal tribe. At the screening itself, one professor noted the inaccuracies of the film’s “facts” and advised that anyone interested in learning the truth about the Mayans go directly to archaeological site reports and follow their own intuition from there.

Though I continue to find a personal comfort in the hopeful outlook of a conscious evolution, I am aware that it is a romantic vision, highly idealistic, and possibly not even remotely connected to the Mayans. Nonetheless, I can’t help but make a personal observation attesting to the escalating height of awareness in and around me.

Today, we are flooded with information at every turn, and if you tune into any frequency outside the commercial realm, you will begin to see unfiltered streams of reality. This expanded awareness of what is happening to real people all over the world plays into how we think and act, and therefore has real world implications. The concept I’m getting at is probably better explained in this clip from Richard Linklater’s “Waking Life”.

Then again, it may just suffice to say that we, as a species, have not reached the end of our collective journey. This means that we may be jumping the gun a bit, settling into a global routine of endless consumption, convinced that this is how life will play out from here on.

Despite the current “Business As Usual” context our economy is struggling with, there is a chance that we are on the brink of a major shift. The indicators are becoming more apparent and people are increasingly vocal about their dissatisfaction with injustice. These voices are echoing and it feels necessary to stimulate conversations that are alternative to the framed debates being regurgitated daily in our social environments and at home.

For me, it means that it’s important to keep putting in my two cents. For you, I hope it encourages the same.