Understanding Rainbow Bridge (And Getting Ready for 2012)

Earlier this week, we posted a gorgeous new video for a song called "Big Wave Rider" and we speculated about the origin of the name of the new psychedelic rock duo Rainbow Bridge. I guessed that they'd taken it from the famous Jimi Hendrix concert movie. As is often the case, I was wrong. The group's drummer/keyboardist, Bridget Smith, has now explained all to us.

In an email, she wrote this:

Well, the name Rainbow Bridge kind of came to us serendipitously. We ([bandmember] Adam and I) remember it hazily something like this: We had been thinking about what and how to name the band, and I suggested Rainbow Bridge to him and he then showed me a list of potential band names he had previously written, which Rainbow Bridge was on. (Or vice versa.) So we knew that was the one. As for why we were both thinking of that name, or what it is a reference to, I think the main reference for us was the work of José Argüelles (new age artist/thinker and advocate of the lunar/Mayan calendar, also organizer of the 1987 harmonic convergence). He references the idea of rainbow bridge, a connection to other dimensions, and a rainbow bridge meditation to bring peace and harmony. We also liked all the other references it includes, i.e., the pet-mourning poem and architectural and natural phenomena since we are avid cat lovers and design/nature enthusiasts. And the Jimi Hendrix movie/Hawaiian happenings is cool too!

I looked up Jose Argüelles on the internet. I'd say that he is pretty out there. Except he is not pretty out there. He is very out there. He is a big deal in New Age circles. Besides organizing the harmonic convergence-a two week span in August, 1987, when more than 144,000 people gathered in groups at designated sites around the world to meditate in celebration of a certain astrological alignment-and looking like a cross between the actors Nicholas Cage and David Straithairn, he was one of the founders of Earth Day, and his teachings are often credited with bringing the date December 21, 2012 into the public consciousness. Rather than believe the Mayan calendar's "end of history" will be the destruction of the earth, though, as the recent Roland Emmerich movie would have it, Argüelles says it will be a good thing.

He believes humans come from outer space, the descendants of "intergalactic star travelers," and that our extra-terrestrial ancestors will return in 2012 and make the world a wonderful place. "With the advent of planetary consciousness will come not destruction," he says, "but at long last, universal peace."

Humans, Argüelles believes, will play an important role in bringing our ancestors back. That's where the The Rainbow Bridge comes in. The Rainbow Bridge is an electromagnetic field that goes around earth, connecting at the poles. It also has something to do with radiation belts, rotating geometric shapes and the crystals at the earth's core. Humans will help build the Rainbow Bridge through meditation, through visualizing it. "Technically, you are directing the plasmic energy to come out of both poles and to come into a stream that creates a rainbow bridge around the earth," he says. And that, "When the rainbow bridge appears, the star people and the ancestors will be able to come across on that." Arguelles teaches the method, and says he has been practicing with people in Chile, and that they have had success at making rainbows appear in the sky. "We have been developing increasingly large groups of human beings who are willing to be telepathic biopsychic electromagnetic batteries."

I can't say that any of this makes a lot of sense to me. But sure, come December 2012, if I remember, I'll close my eyes and think of the Rainbow Bridge. Why not? Couldn't hurt. And that last sentence has already made my world a slightly more wonderful place.