Information on the 5th Night and Xibalba, the journey through the underworld that we have been traversing

From Alberto Villoldo

Xibalba, the 5th Night, houses of the Death Lords, and birthing pangs. Conference Call with Alberto Villoldo, March 2008.

Welcome everyone, to our evening conference call. Tonight we're going to be speaking about the Mayan underworld, and this critical time that we're going through that began in November of 2007 and goes until November of 2008, which the Mayan calendars refer to as the fifth night. It's a time of darkness, a time of going within, and it's a time of chaos.

The Mayans were obsessed with calendars, they were fascinated with time. They knew many different kinds of time, not just the linear time that we're familiar with that flies like an arrow. They knew circular time, cycles of time that go back to 16.4 billion years ago. They were able to predict planetary alignments like that which is going to occur December 21, 2012, which happens only once every 26,000 years. It's extraordinary how they were able to read the heavens and the stars.

Before we go into the topic of tonight's call, I'd like to go into the why of this call, which has to do with this very Mayan calendar that we're speaking about. As we get close to the end date, to the date of the new beginning of the Mayan Calendar, the resetting of time itself. We're coming into a period that all the prophecies of the Americas have described as a time of great upheaval, of tremendous upheaval, and of a need for agents of change, for agents of transformation, for men and women who are willing to step up and make a difference.

Our intention with these calls is to share with you the wisdom, the insight that the indigenous seers, that the wise men and women of the Americas have about the times that we're living in, so that we do not get mulched, so that we do not get caught in the storm, so that we can seize the opportunities that are presented to us and find refuge, safety, well being and tremendous possibilities for growth for ourselves and our families. My agenda with these calls is to share with you the most important information that I know about these epic times that we are living in.

But first, a note on the year 2012. The Mayan prophecies, the Hopi, the Apache, the Inca — I was recently with the Apache prophecy keeper, Maria Yraceburu, who's the Apache Elder who keeps the prophecy for her people. We were talking about how optimistic we were feeling during this tremendous time of gloom, and how all of the indigenous prophesies really speak about a time of opportunity, a time of quantum leaping. We were talking about how important it is to differentiate these from the Judeo- Christian doomsday prophecies that are so prevalent and have been so confused with the indigenous ones.

For those of you who are joining us just now, this is Alberto Villoldo and we are speaking about the end of time, the Mayan Calendar, and the Xibalba, the place of darkness, and the opportunities of renewal during this time of darkness.

So, as Maria and I were speaking, we were differentiating between the indigenous and the Western, technocratic, Judeo- Christian perspective of a judgement day, of a cataclysmic time which is compelling many people to say 'Hey, let's just bring it on. Let's cut the last tree down and let's bring on the Second Coming.' This is very, very different because the indigenous prophecies are optimistic. They are full of opportunity, they speak about a time of great choice, and about the people who do not make the right choice, about the people who refuse to choose as people who will go through tremendous suffering, people who will be caught and consumed in this place the Mayans spoke about as Xibalba.

Xibalba was in two locations according to the Mayans. Xibalba, which literally translated means the Place of Fear, the Place of Death, our equivalent of purgatory, if you like. They saw that this was a place located within the earth and they actually identified the entrances as some of them being near Coba, the Yucatan Peninsula, but they also saw it as the dark spot in the night sky, in the Milky Way. As you get close to the equator, and below the equator, when you look out into the Milky Way, you're actually looking into the dark spaces, the dark places in the vast cosmos that surrounds us, whereas into the Northern Hemisphere we're really looking more into the center of the galaxy.

So Xibalba was also associated with this dark place in the heavens, a place where there was no light. It was called the Place of Fear, the Place of Death, and it was ruled by twelve lords of death. It was an extraordinary city, an extraordinary place, there were gardens, there were temples, there were palaces. There were six temples, for example, that you had to pass through and where you were tested. There was the House of Darkness, the House of Cold, there was the House of Heat, there was the House of Hungry Jaguars, there was the House of Razors, and there was the House of Bats. Each of these houses had to be visited, you had to pass through and meet the challenges of each one of these houses successfully, not be seduced or consumed or destroyed by them.

So you had to go through the House of Bats, which is really referring to the plagues, tremendous plagues that have affected the planet. Through the House of Darkness, a time of darkness that we have lived in historically, that humanity spent hundreds of years in during the Dark Ages, and that we're living through at this time, as well. Now, remember that the Mayans understood that time was linear, but that there was another kind of time that looped back unto itself and did figure eights, and cartwheels, and where things occurred simultaneously and concurrently.

So each one of these houses represents tests that humanity, and each one of us individually, had to overcome. The test of darkness, the test of illness, of disease, of bats, the House of Blades, of razors and blades and swords, which is the house of violence, of war we find ourselves and the planet in. The House of the Hungry Jaguars, the Hungry Jaguars represent greed, the seduction of greed, that maybe if only I can do the next deal or sell the next project, which is wonderful, terrific, but when we're caught in the grip of the greed that is so infectious in our time, we succumb to one of the lords of death. The House of Heat- the world is heating up, we're facing this globally- but personally the House of Heat had to do with purification. Could you stand the heat? Were you able to purify, detox, to eliminate the poisons that live within you.

The House of Cold was the house where communications broke down between people, where people spoke to each other and did not understand each other. This is the dilemma we face in the world today, and we see it sometimes with our own partners and children, like we are speaking different languages, and we become cold internally. We had to be victorious with each one of these challenges, we had to not lose sight of what we came to do, which was to survive all of these tests that were presented to us in Xibalba so that we might emerge victorious and in glory.

So Xibalba, in a sense, is a place of learning. Even though it was identified with the underworld, with what we in the West would call the collective unconscious, it was identified with the place, with the space that is the world we live in. Xibalba was the place of the great learning, of the great lessons. The lessons were unavoidable; everybody had to go through these tests. How you learned, though, was programmable. You could choose how you learned; that's where you had free will and choice. You could either learn through suffering, through battle and getting seduced in one of these houses of the lords of the underworld, or you could learn directly from knowledge. So Xibalba, which was the place that we would call purgatory, or the Bardos; the place of illusion, is happening now, is happening today, and those who choose to learn consciously can live in heavenly paradise within this realm of the great lessons, the great learning. Those who practice ignorance and get seduced by one of the houses of darkness or of blades or of violence get to learn through suffering.

The journey through Xibalba required that we cross several rivers, whether to get in our get out of this realm of death. This is the realm that we are living in today; we are living in a world of death and of suffering. The rivers that you had to cross, first was the river of scorpions. Then there was the river of blood, which represents all of the war, all of the violence that we're experiencing in the world. Then there was the third river of pus, which represents illness, disease, and plagues. And then, after you cross these rivers, and you pass your tests, because you were tested everywhere along the way, and if I look back on my own life I can see the many times that I had been tested and I have failed. I have been seduced by the test I have been presented with, the test that we're all facing; seduced by everything that stroked my ego, that I had to learn the most difficult way, through suffering, through divorce, through heartbreak; the loss of everything I loved, and then of course deciding never to learn that way again. Until it happened the next time.

We had to be successful in our journey through this dark period, and particularly now that the Mayan calendar signals that we are entering into the Fifth Night of the Galactic Cycle, that we will continue until November of this year when we enter, mid-November, the Sixth Day in the Galactic Cycle. So one of my favorite parts of the journey through Xibalba, and those who would like to read more about it; practically the only reference we have to it is in the Bible of the Mayans, called the Popul Vul, and I recommend Tedlock's translation, they speak about when we cross these rivers successfully we come to the House of the Lords of Xibalba, to a great hall, and we come to look at the Lords themselves, which were described as demons, but demons that existed only because fear lived within us. They presented themselves as our greatest and most terrible fear; whatever it is that you fear the most, that's how they would appear to us.

Surrounding them would be the other Lords, but some of them would be mannequins, dolls, human-like mannequins, and if you confuse one of those for the real Lords, then you had to pay, you were punished for being seduced, being confused. These Mannequins presented you with all of those seductions of your life, all of the things that we wanted to hear. It's extraordinary watching the candidates for the elections, for our presidential parties debating and seducing and engaging us, and how easily seduced we are by everything that comes out of Washington, how easily seduced we are by everything that comes out of Hollywood, and how easily seduced we are by everything that comes out of the economy. These are the mannequins that are challenging us to awaken, to recognize what is the truth and what is the lie, to recognize all the lies that we are living in; how we live in the time of the Great Lie, how medicine makes us ill, how economics make us poor, how companies make us slaves. We are what, in the Hindu traditions was referred to as the Kali Yuga, the time when Kali would come and devour. This is what is represented by that house of the hungry Jaguars, that they come to devour those that refuse to awaken to their spiritual nature, to their luminous nature, who want to postpone the seduction a little bit longer, who want to postpone responding to the call for a little bit longer — until our 401k plan is fully funded, until the kids are fully grown, and we live under the illusion that we have the rest of our lives to do that.

The lessons of Xibalba are extraordinary. One of the interesting ones that I read into the journey through Xibalba is how this is the time to really reclaim our soulfulness, our souls. If we don't succeed in passing and overcoming the test of Xibalba, we lose our souls for eternity. We lose that divine essence, that divine essence has failed to sprout, has remained as a seed form and is mulched back into the earth. That drop of divine consciousness returns back to that great pool of consciousness, undifferentiated, unable to individuate, to become the divine itself.

So the story of Xibalba is the story of the ancient rulers of humanity, the ancient rulers of the world. Not of the Earth, because it's important that we differentiate between the Earth and the world. The Earth is our planet, the world is a human construct that has streets and roads and internet and airmail and telephones and fast food and belief systems and commercials and advertising. That's the world, that's the distinctly human world, and these are the lords that have ruled the world for this extraordinarily long period of time, and that the shamans strove to break free of their dominion, to find their freedom and their independence. According to lore, the Mayan twins who were the hero twins of Mayan creation had to outwit the lords of Death, because all of the human priests offered human sacrifice. They offered the hearts of the living as food for these lords of Death. The heroes of the Mayan story of creation had to defeat these lords of Death and change the beliefs of their people that Spirit did not want to be fed human hearts, human flesh, or human blood, whether in the form of sacrificial tearing open of a person's chest and removing their hearts or sending our best and finest young men in ridiculous wars that cannot be won. The Lords of Death no longer required sacrifice; we could pay homage to the Lords of Life, that we could break free from the call to death itself.

To me, this is a metaphor for what I have had to go through in my own life, and what I believe all of us have to and are challenged to go through, to no longer pay homage to the cult of Death, to the Lords of Death, to that which we receive in canned form in television and infomercials that are disguised as news, to break free from the cultural trance that we have all been educated into. I turned off my TV set, I think it was in 1992, and have not watched television since, except for a glimmer here and there. What we are getting is the information that is designed to turn us into good consumers, good worshippers of the cult of death, because the more we consume, the more we extract, the more we exploit, the more that we take from our mother, from the earth.

Our task today is to break free of the grip of the Lords of Xibalba, to emerge victorious and renewed. Because the other side of Xibalba, was at the very heart of it lay all of the purest and most fertile and richest energy of creation, which was that life force that grew in the corn and the squash and in the pumpkins and in the vegetables. Once we are able to clean up our own unconscious, clean up the baggage of history that has infiltrated the subconscious mind of ours, then we conquer the lords of death. We do so, in effect, by dying and seeing that there is no such thing as death. Not dying the physical death, but by going through our own process of initiation, of initiation and of resurrection, because the breaking free from the realm of Xibalba requires that we be initiated into a new life, that we die to who we have been and resurrect as a new being. I believe that this is what's happening planetarily, and those of us who have said yes, who have made that choice, are going to be living in and held in that world which is filled with grace and glory. Those who have not made that choice and who have not lined their lives up behind those difficult choices that need to be made at a personal level today are going to continue to learn through the ancient way of suffering.

During these years, these months that we have between now and the great galactic alignment that will happen on December 21st of 2012, we have the opportunity to create a standing wave that will reinform the planet, that will allow humanity to continue on it's journey into the future, that will help us create a world that our children's children can live in and dwell in. So I think that at this time, more than any other time in history, each one of us can make an extraordinary difference, and every person that we touch we have to touch with that grace and that beauty that lies within each one of us. At the same time, we have to attend to our own process of initiation. We are all being initiated today, there is a part of all of is that is going through a death, of how we viewed the world, of how we viewed relationships, of how we viewed our children.

Now most of the time, we go through that process the hard way. My daughter is teaching me what it's like to relate to a teenager, and I am learning the hard way. What she is doing is she is inviting me to die to those notions that I inherited from my parents, about what growing up should be. So we are in the process of shedding belief structures, behaviors, attitudes, emotions, personal histories that no longer serve us, and this is a dying process. In order to step into that rebirth, into that resurrection, we have to go through that process completely. We have to defy all the lords of Xibalba, we cannot allow ourselves to be seduced for an instant. Fifty years ago, thirty years ago we could postpone these decisions, we could not take sides. Today it is really staring us in the face. The choice, to me, is evident. We have to remain steadfast, to not be seduced, because the opportunities that await us with the beginning of the Sixth Day, beginning next November, are extraordinary.

But this time, we are in the Fifth Night of the Galactic Cycle, we have to attend to our inner journey, and to not try to find our own healing through outside engagements, through new projects, through new ventures, through new relationships. When those come your way, of course engage them fully, but to attend to that housekeeping, to that deep scouring, to that purification process that the Mayan cycles speak of as happening during this time.

The lords of Xibalba, the most well known, there were two of them. One was called One Death, and the other Seven Deaths. They were the most powerful of the lords of Xibalba, and metaphorically they are talking about the seven rights of initiation that we go through in the course of our lives. From birth, to puberty, to first love, to marriage, to parenting, to menopause, to death. The first one is birth, the seventh is death, and these were ruled by these two powerful lords of Xibalba, who ruled over birth and over death. When we understand the relationship between birth and death, after we break free of the grip of unconsciousness we discover that there is life in death and there is death in life, that these are part of the renewing cycles of nature. Then we can call forth on those forces that will renew us personally, we can immerse ourselves in the depths of our own trials, of our own tests and emerge victorious, remain steadfast.

So particularly in these few months between now and November, it is a time to be vigilant, it is a time to be attentive, to not engage the world with too much drama, it's a time to really dedicate to ourselves, to our healing, to our growth, to give priority to those aspects, to those ventures and projects and experiences that are going to help you heal. This is the time of the deep healing. Then, come November, it's going to come the time of the great emergence, into the sixth day, which will be a very, very fruitful time. If we do not complete that process of purification, of healing, that alchemical process that requires breaking down, because the alchemists knew that the first step to make that philosopher's gold was the breaking down of everything that was old. They called it the negrido, they call it the breaking down of all of the structures that were useless and the deep re-examination of everything that we took for granted, of all of our presuppositions, of all of our beliefs.

This is the process that is occurring now. If we do not attend to this process now, what the seers and wisdom keepers that I am in touch with say to me, is that then it is going to be happening at the literal level, at the physical level. Come November/December and 2009, if you have not attended to your housecleaning, then the storms will come, the windows will be blown open, and your house will be cleansed. Better to do it beforehand, to attend to that inner journey, to those inner processes so that we can be in a position to germinate, to seed, to come forth with the dawning of the sixth day, in preparation for the great galactic alignment that will happen in the year 2012.

So Xibalba is a place, it is a place in the Milky Way, the dark spots in the Milky Way, the Mayans believe that it was a place within the earth, but Xibalba is a state of consciousness, the state that the world is in today. It's a state that the world is in, and the winds of change of Xibalba is so strong that they are unavoidable, they touch all of us, and they are an invitation to that alchemical transformation, to that deep inner transformation. Not to reinvent ourselves, not to trim sails, not to change the diet a little bit, not to attend to the little details; to take all of it on, to put every belief, every assumption that we have on the table and question it's legitimacy and it's relevance and it's truth. Because Xibalba is about telling the truth from the lies, it's about waking up from the age of lies and the land of lies that we have been living in and convinced ourselves of and begun to believe in, and to waking up into that clarity of vision that allows us to see truth even in the midst of chaos and confusion. Not only to see truth but to become truth, to practice truth so that everything we speak is truthful, everything we are is truth, and when you do that then you discover the power of emerging in glory from Xibalba is that everything you say then becomes true, because you have become truth. You have broken out of the hall of mirrors, out of the great illusion.

When I spoke with one of the Inka elders recently, we were talking about this dark time, and he said 'Alberto, we love the dark time. That's where all of our seeds begin to germinate. They cannot germinate in the light, they need darkness and moistness to germinate, and we look forward to our harvest, which comes in the spring. But you have to work the ground' he said 'you have to till the earth' and that tilling of the earth, that working of the ground is what we're called to do at this time, that the Mayans announced to us as being a time of inner journey, of inner renewal.

Recently I attended a gathering of medicine women, and I was honored to be invited, and they were debating the ways of the feminine during this time of great change. I was fascinated by the metaphors they were using, because they were not talking about Galactic Alignment, even though they knew about it, they were not talking about changes in the geomagnetic fields of the earth, they were talking about the last hours before birth, when the uterus begins to dilate, when you feel the pulses and the contractions becoming more and more intense. They were pointing out that those contractions are what's going to deliver a new time and a new human, that those contractions are good even if they seem to be on the outside painful and devastating, that we are going through a period of great contractions but that we can see that which is being born, we can see that which is about to be born. I was very inspired by their comments.

So the journey through Xibalba is the journey that we're in, and it comes to an end in 2012. And at that point, according to my understanding of the prophetic cycle, at that point is when those of us who have emerged victorious from, who have attended to our healing, who have met our personal growth, who've chosen to live in integrity, that these are going to be the individuals who will enter into the millennium of peace that the Inkas speak about, a millennium of gold, and we're not going to be airlifted by UFOs coming in from space, we're not going to be delivered unto another place, we will be in the same earth that we're in right now but inhabiting a different world, a world where we live in islands of peace in the middle of chaos and storm. Because remember that the world is what we create, what we dream into being, and this journey through Xibalba is a journey that, from a planetary standpoint, is coming to an end but a continuation for those who wish to continue learning through suffering.

So the option is a very tough decision; do I learn through bliss or learn through suffering. Now most of my life I've said, well I think I'm going to learn through suffering, I'll try that one more time and see if I can work on it a little bit harder next time. What presented itself to me is that as I purify, as I heal, as I shed the stories of my past the way the serpent sheds her skin, that it's so much more pleasurable to learn through joy, to learn through grace and to learn through beauty than to learn through all the other ways that I've been learning in the past, which included just about every conceivable way of suffering that I could imagine.

It's an exciting, it's a challenging time, it's a time of tremendous opportunity, it's a time when the medicine men of the Andes, of the Americas are bringing down, are channeling, are bringing through them vast new bodies of information, they are becoming vessels for a divine force that flows into the earth, and we're all becoming vessels for that divine force that is washing onto the planet, but it's coming to those pure places first, those pure places in nature that are becoming the receptacles for those codes for a new human, for the matrix of a new world, one that is not ruled by the six houses of the lords of Xibalba, by war, by plague, by famine, by violence, by coldness, one that is in grace.

Thank you so much for attending our talk this evening. My main interest in inviting you to this program is to really keep you abreast of the informal network of medicine men and women that I am in constant contact with where we update each other and they update me on their reading on how they feel the pulse of the planet and how close the contractions are to each other, what danger and what opportunity. They are the ones, we are the ones who can read and feel the pulse of the mother, and I invite you to come and join us next month for our conference gathering, but most important take this information with you into the world, don't just let it be another little bit of data: make it practical, make it useful. Remember that shamans have always differentiated between information and knowledge. Information is knowing that water is H20, knowledge is being able to make it rain. Information is knowing that we are living in the fifth night, a time of renewal, a time to heal, a time to attend to the cleansing of our luminous energy field, the erasing of ancient imprints, it's a perfect time for that, but it's important that we do, that we follow understanding with doing, with action. Bring it to action, share it with others, and particularly in this state that we're in the galactic cycle of the Mayan calendar, everyone we touch has a ripple effect, everything you do to heal yourself is amplified by a factor of ten; seize the opportunity and bring this light. Know that the entire world is going through a cycle of transformation, the schools that your children go to, the places where you work, your relationships; embrace them, call them on, call them on to their fullness, knowing that as you attend to this alchemical process, what will emerge, what will be born is that world you will inhabit, and your loved ones will inhabit, today.

Thank you, I look forward to speaking to you again next month, and many, many blessings, and a wonderful spring to those of you who are in the Northern Hemisphere, and a wonderful beginning of the fall to those of you who are calling from Australia and South America, and blessed journeys.

2012 — pdf document

About Alberto Villoldo

Medical anthropologist, Alberto Villoldo, left the world of academia for the South American rainforest 25 years ago. Apprenticed to Incan and Mayan Shamen from that day on, at the time of his initiation Alberto was instructed to bring their wisdom and their prophesies out into the world.

The Munay-Ki are the codes for the new human. Until recently they have only been available to the high wisdom keepers of the Americas. Delivered in the form of energetic transmissions, these rites form a body of information that could make a difference as we find our way to 2012. To see and hear what Alberto Villoldo's teachings are all about, click on the link. The Munay-Ki Rites