(The Associated Press runs an article on this event, annually—as they should. Click here for the 2013 story, as posted at Huffington Post, which features 24 pictures and a video called “Learn About Zoroastrianism.” Following is the AP story from 2010…)
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Iranians celebrate ancient Persian fire fest
By ALI AKBAR DAREINI
The Associated Press
Sunday, January 31, 2010; 12:17 PM
CHAM, Iran — Thousands of Iranians gathered at dusk against a snowy mountain backdrop to light giant bonfires in an ancient mid-winter festival dating back to Iran’s pre-Islamic past that is drawing new interest from Muslims.
Saturday’s celebration was the first in which the dwindling remnants of Iran’s once plentiful Zoroastrian religious minority were joined by thousands of Muslims, reflecting a growing interest in the strict Islamic society for the country’s ancient traditions.
The festival, known as Sadeh, celebrates the discovery of fire and its ability to banish the cold and dark, and it is held in the frigid depths of winter.
Sadeh was the national festival of ancient Persia when Zoroastrianism was the dominant religion, before the conquest of Islam in the 7th century. Now it is mostly celebrated just in the homes and temples of Iran’s 60,000 remaining Zoroastrians.
Recently, however, there has been an upsurge of interest among Iranian Muslims – more than 90 percent of the population – in their ancient heritage, when vast Persian empires held sway over much of central Asia and fought Greek warriors and Roman legions.
“I’m proud of Sadeh because it is part of Iran’s cultural heritage,” said Mohammed Saleh Khalili, a Muslim Iranian who traveled from Meibod, a town in central Iran, to join the celebrations. “Once it was a national festival and for centuries it has been restricted to Zoroastrians but there is no reason why Muslim Iranians shouldn’t celebrate the event.”
Zoroastrianism is a monotheistic religion predating Christianity and Islam and is believed to have influenced those faiths – and Judaism as well – being one of the first religions with a strong notion of good and evil. Continue reading →
A few weeks ago, I attended the annual Burning Man festival, in the Black Rock desert of Nevada, for the fifth year in a row. Burning Man has been called the world’s biggest party, but I don’t even know if I have “fun” at Burning Man in any ordinary sense—being there is incredibly intense, a kind of psychophysical endurance test. Despite the difficulties, I will continue to return as long as it is possible to do so. The gathering acts as an enormous shamanic transformer, constellating new insights and clearing away old junk.
I chose to go to Burning Man instead of staying in New York for the protests surrounding the Republican Convention. My increasing suspicion is that traditional forms of protest, at this point, are only playing into the hands of the security apparatus. The police and military get the opportunity to test out their latest tactics and shiniest gadgets, while the corporate media finds the most incendiary images to broadcast across the US, amping up the anxiety. The catharsis that protesters get from yelling slogans across barbed wire barriers and out of “free speech pens” might be energy that could be more creatively invested in other ways.
As the corporate and governmental superstructure continue a lockstep march towards their own self-destruction, their attempts to pulverize the collective psyche into submission becomes more transparent and overt. Electrical currents of spite and anxiety ripple across our public discourse and private lives. The individual’s refusal to fall into these traps or accept this negative conditioning can be a great liberation. At Burning Man, I kept thinking that the most meaningful political act, right now, is to continue cultivating fearlessness in pursuit of joy. To be fearless, calm, and joyful is to jam a wrench into the “Brave New 1984” technodystopic machinery that is seeking to impose itself on our world.
I consider the current sociopolitical abyss to be a kind of evolutionary tool. The control apparatus of modern society may be functioning as a training ground for a new level of consciousness. Many different thinkers of the 20th century, as well as the prophecies of archaic and indigenous spiritual traditions, have proposed that a major change in human consciousness is imminent. This has been articulated in various ways. Before his death in 1961, the psychoanalyst Carl Jung saw that the “reality of the psyche,” repressed by the modern mentality, would soon become unavoidable. Mankind was being forced to climb “to a higher moral level, to a higher plane of consciousness,” to handle “the superhuman powers which the fallen angels” had dropped into our hands.
The Austrian visionary Rudolf Steiner (founder of Anthroposophy and Waldorf education) claimed that the mission of his life on Earth was to return the knowledge of reincarnation to the West. According to Steiner, individual human beings reincarnate again and again, and the Earth itself passes through successive incarnations. He considered this phase to be the fourth incarnation of the Earth. Steiner thought we are approaching a fifth incarnation, the “Jupiter state,” where humanity would evolve new capacities and reach a new level of wisdom. Actually, it’s not just humanity: according to Steiner, the plant and mineral kingdom would reach a higher level of consciousness during this next incarnation, while humanity would split into several different “human kingdoms,” undergoing different forms of evolution.
The Indian philosopher Sri Auribindo also felt that we were moving towards a new level or intensity of consciousness. In one of his last essays, “The Mind of Light,” he defined this as the “supramental” state. Just as life had self-organized out of matter, and mind had self-organized out of life, consciousness would evolve beyond the obscurations and ignorance of our current condition to attain a level of truth-consciousness, and spiritual awareness, that could not be manipulated or fooled. Aurobindo speculated that our evolution would accelerate exponentially from that point. Once we had reached this supramental state, this truth-consciousness, we would be able to transform our physical reality and our bodies. “Man,” Aurobindo wrote, “is a transitional being.” The powers unleashed by technology might be reintegrated into the psyche, at a higher level of development.
As counterintuitive as it may seem at first, I propose that our current environment, saturated with noise and chaos and fear-mongering, is the necessary background for attaining this supramental condition, for accepting and mastering the reality of the psyche. The new mindset stems from a fearless curiosity and hunger for truth, and a rejection of the cynicism and negative programming foisted upon it by the corporate-controlled media and current power structure. The new intensity of consciousness accepts the reality of psychic and occult levels of reality, denied by modern materialism, but integrates this understanding with a scientific, pragmatic, and empirical approach to existence. As a speaker at Burning Man pointed out, it is not “New Age,” but “New Edge.”
My hypothesis is that at least a portion of humanity attains this level of “supramental” mind – including, as Aurobindo proposes, an accelerated evolution —as we approach the year 2012, prophesied by the Mayans as the end of the 5,125-year “Great Cycle” of human history. Despite current appearances, we are on the verge of a transition into a new intensity of human consciousness that will institute an harmonic and utopian situation on the Earth. This thesis is not mine alone—it is carefully elaborated by Carl Johann Calleman, among others, in his new book, The Mayan Calendar and the Transformation of Consciousness (Bear & Co.). This book supports the basic ideas of the writers Jose Arguelles and John Major Jenkins—a new outsider paradigm is crystallizing.
Arthur Magazine 