Apab’yan Tew, The Mayan Calendar and Everything has Life

Pushing Boundaries with Dr. Thomas R Verny

My guest today is Apab’yan Tew, speaker, herbalist doctor, bones therapist, auxiliary midwife, writer, researcher, musician and ceremonial dancer and singer currently practicing in the highlands of Central Mexico, Chiapas and Guatemala. He is the author of The Birth of a Universe: The Maya science of Pregnancy.
Apab’yan spent 19 years becoming a spiritual guide with one female and one male teacher learning his craft experientially. This education was exhaustive, arduous and offered only to certain individuals chosen from within an indigenous community. His two teachers were very different. About his woman teacher he says, “for her I was above all an assistant, for him his spiritual son.”
We discuss some of the foundational ideas of the Mayan way of seeing the world. Two of these, I find myself in total alignment with: Everything is connected and Everything belongs to a system. The third, Everything has life not only what we call human or biological but also what is not visible as well as the solids without apparent movement. Apab’yan
explains that everything also has a way of thinking and a form of communication or dialogue. If I understood him correctly, everything has consciousness.
The Maya actually have three calendars. The first is the sacred calendar, or Tzolk'in, which lasts 260 days and then starts over again, just as our 365-day calendar refreshes once it hits Dec. 31. This calendar is important for scheduling religious ceremonies and predicting the personality of a child.
The second calendar is the Haab', or secular calendar, which lasts 365 days but does not account for the extra quarter-day it takes the Earth to revolve around the sun.
The final calendar is the Long Count Calendar in which each b'ak'tun is 144,000 days long, or a little less than 400 years. To the ancient Maya, 13 b'ak'tuns represented a full cycle of creation. The Maya had several rarely used units that were even larger than b'ak'tuns, giving them the capacity to count millions of years into the future.
In the Maya highlands of Guatemala, parents come to visit a guide or shaman traditionally a few days after their baby was born. The guide would provide, a reading based on the sacred calendar.
What day was your child born? is the first question and from the answer the calculation is done. Of course there are many other questions about conception, pregnancy and birth quite similar to what a good obstetrician, midwife or doula would ask in the West.
I gave Apab’yan my birth date and in a few minutes he told me I was "8 Monkey" and then proceeded to explain what that implied in terms of my character and personality. Since it was all pretty positive, I would say he was right on.
My next guest will be Dr. Gordana Dodig, Professor of Computer Science and Professor of Interaction Design at Mälardalen University, Sweden, She will discuss with me cognition as a driver of evolution and evolution as a driver of cognition in living organisms, cells as information-processing agents and many other related subjects. I hope you will join me.
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