It’s been 37 years ago from this August when our planet Earth was traveling through the exact same space as it is right now and a great celestial event took place that incited many thousands of people to gather at 200 pre-selected terrestrial “power centers” and conjointly meditate for peace and harmony.
This is not a myth. All the events we are about to report herein, really happened — both up in the stars and down here among us mortals.
Were you there? Do you even remember the great Harmonic Convergence of Aug. 16-17, 1987?
On those dates, Earth and five other planets, our Moon and the Sun fulfilled an ancient prediction and aligned across the heavens in a “grand trine” that brought all the points of the astrological chart into a convergence and a physical shift of planetary energies.
According to the ancient Aztec calendar, this Harmonic Convergence signaled the end to a 1,144-year cycle of warlike energy on our planet. The celestial shift was to signal a new age of peace and harmony, an Aztec interpretation of an Age of Aquarius, if you will.
But some of the contemporary astrologers, New Age thinkers and followers believed all this newly aligned planetary energy and celestial convergence required some extra help from humans. Led by José Argüelles, an artist, teacher and self-anointed spiritual leader, thousands of people gathered at places like The Great Pyramids, Stonehenge, northern California’s Mt. Shasta and elsewhere to meditate for peace and to synchronize their thoughts to help boost the planet’s newly aligned harmonic energies.
All this human mobilization was deemed urgent by Argüelles and others because there also was another prophecy from the ancient Mayan civilization that the 1987 Convergence was also the beginning of a final 25-year cycle that would begin the countdown to the end of all history.
Without a celestial course correction, the Mayans warned our planet would blow up or be overtaken by hostile aliens on the exact date of the Winter Solstice (Dec. 21) of 2012.
Mt. Shasta in 1987
A few thousand people ascended on and around Mt. Shasta in August 1987. They arrived in RVs, buses and caravans. National Park Rangers were put on extra alert for a predicted deluge of harmony seekers. But the crowd that materialized was well below earlier predictions. Estimates put the total between 2,000 and 5,000. Some had predicted a gathering of as many as 50,000 people.
Mt. Shasta harmonizers filled all the campsites and many motel rooms. Over the two days, they occupied their time with African drumming, Tarot Card readings and engraving runestones. They built temporary Buddhist shrines and a few parties erected Native American sweat lodges.
The owner of one of the town’s health food stores reported an uptick in business but complained that most of the extra food she had stocked for the Big Convergence was likely to spoil and go to waste.
“It’s like taking off a jar lid and opening the planet up,” one Harmonic camper said at the time. “The earth will be like wet clay upon which we’ll imprint our vision of a new world order. (Then) we’ll dance clockwise, symbolically putting the jar lid back on.”
Elsewhere, thousands of people gathered in New York City’s Central Park and at Mt. Fuji in Japan and Mt. Yamnuska in Alberta, Canada, among many other places. The New York Times reported a crowd size of 2,000 at Central Park under a headline, “Dancing at Dawn in Rite of Cosmic Harmony.”
Actress Shirley MacLaine, singer John Denver and Timothy Leary were among some of the celebrity meditators at the various power centers. On TV, night show host Johnny Carson had his audience do an “OM” chant, probably in jest. Gary Trudeau spoofed the gatherings in his Doonesbury comic strip.
“The vibratory infrastructure holding the Earth together is in a condition of intense fever called resonant dissonance,” Argüelles said on the eve of the Convergence gatherings. “This can be averted, by harmonic convergence achieved in a synchronized collective of human beings, through which the possibility of a New Heaven and a New Earth is fully present.”
Argüelles called for a total of 144,000 participants to attend organized gatherings at 200 locations around the world. His chosen number was not random. He was quoting from the Bible’s Book of Revelations: “Then I looked, and behold, on Mount Zion stood the Lamb, and with him 144,000 who had his name and his Father’s name written on their foreheads.”
The number 144,000 is also the total of Sahabas (companions) of Muhammad in Islam religion and 144,000 is also a significant number used in Jehovah’s Witness writings. (Sorry, is that too much information?)
Anyhow, no one apparently kept an accurate count in 1987 of how many people actually turned out for the Harmonic Convergence gatherings but a survey of old news articles suggests the total was well short of 144,000.
Apocalypse diverted?
It’s hard to say whether the gathered believers and peace harmonizers defeated the Mayans’ Apocalypse that was prophesized for Dec. 21, 2012. Sadly, Argüelles was not around long enough to see if his theories would come true. He died in 2011 at the age of 72.
People could argue that Argüelles was right, although more than a few critics in 1987 called him a “crackpot.” All the same, our planet did not blow up in 2012 and no aliens have stepped forward to claim Earth as their own.
At the same time, the 37 years since the Harmonic Convergence have not been exactly a time of “peace and harmony.” We continue to suffer through unending regional wars, a global pandemic, a man-made climate crisis and a dearth of international brotherhood.
Curiously, what did happen on Dec. 21, 2012 appears to have been a usual mix of news and events. On that day Disney announced it had bought the Star Wars enterprise and studios; a riot in Kenya killed 39 people; the National Hockey League strike continued; and, rapper Flavor Flav opened his first Chicken & Ribs franchise in Michigan. Not exactly Armageddon.
What was happening down on Earth during the 1987 Harmonic Convergence was subject to criticisms, jokes and confusion. But what was happening up among the stars and planets was astronomic fact. The Sun, Moon, Mars, and Venus were in exact alignment, astrologically called a conjunction. Various other planets also were aligned within what astrologers called the same “orb of influence.” These included Jupiter (in Aires), Neptune (in Capricorn), Saturn and Uranus (in Sagittarius) and Mercury, Venus and Earth (in Virgo).
This alignment formed what astrologers call a “great trine.” According to cosmologist Christine Page and others this presented “a 36-year window of opportunity for humanity to participate in the creation of a new era of consciousness.” Most regrettably, this time period expired in 2023.
What now?
Leading up the 1987 Harmonic Convergence, Dr. Argüelles in 1983 founded his Planet Art Network (PAN) in Boulder, Colorado while he was doing advanced Buddhist training at Naropa University. Argüelles envisioned the entire planet Earth as a singular piece of art where all human inhabitants were its artists. He was devoted to the belief of “galactic consciousness” where individual people’s thoughts and meditations could be joined to form a higher power. Hence the call for 144,000 people on August 16-17, 1987 to unite at the “power centers.”
The Planet Art Network organization still exists today and has been joined by other like-minded organizations such as the Global Consciousness Project (global-mind.org) at Princeton University and the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) (
https://noetic.org
.) IONS is located in Novato, California.
These organizations are devoted to the original beliefs behind the 1987 Harmonic Convergence gatherings that the power of “group thought” and collective higher consciousness are real things. They combine studies of ancient wisdoms like the Aztecs and Mayans with some more contemporary thinkers, most notably the Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
De Chardin, along with biogeochemist Vladimir Vernadsky conceived and defined a new realm of human existence on the planet that they called the Noosphere. (The name follows along with atmosphere, geosphere and biosphere as another of Earth’s whole systems.)
Basically, the Noosphere is a network of human thought and shared consciousness. The two men’s work preceded the development of the Internet by more than 50 years, but their descriptions of the Noosphere sound very much like today’s World Wide Web.
At the Institute of Noetic Sciences the leading hypothesis is “that consciousness is regarded as the most basic component of reality, more basic than physical concepts like matter, energy, space, and time. We investigate this hypothesis to better understand noetic experiences, like intuitive, psychic, and mystical states.
“Everything is interconnected. By embodying an awareness of this interconnection, we can tap into information and energy not limited by space and time, and profoundly amplify transformation, innovation, and well-being.”
In other words, these academicians and scientists are working to make every day a day of harmonic convergence, only without the Tarot Cards, removing Earth’s imaginary jar lid or waiting for the next astrological conjunction of planets which won’t be taking place again for another 5,125 years, according to the Aztec calendar.
Can we all say “Om,” or do I hear a chorus of “Ums?”
— Rollie Atkinson
8-17-2024
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Our solar system is moving with an average velocity of 450,000 miles per hour (720,000 kilometers per hour). But even at this speed, it takes about 230 million years for the Sun to make one complete trip around the Milky Way.
The Milky Way galaxy is moving at a speed of 1.3 million miles per hour (2.1 million km/hr) through the universe.
Our little alignment of a few local clusters of star dust we know as planets, observed by animated clusters of organized star dust we call people, seems rather cosmically of little but still significant importance. Everything matters at some point. But I personally believe we have hardly a clue of why and how this great vast work works
That was a very interesting article, I can remember myself and a couple of friends went up to the
mountains away from the lights of the city (Gravity Hill in Rohnert Pk.) we tried to see if the planets in line would show them self's to us, but after consuming some beers we had lost the point of the whole trip but we did go up hill on a downgrade..... bA