Earth’s 26,000-year passage around the galaxy into alignment with the Milky Way’s galactic equator — a journey known as the precession of the equinoxes — is now just four years from completion. So says the legendary, galactic calendar of the ancient Maya. But many still wonder what 2012 really signifies.
Speculation includes opposing theories of global spiritual transformation and global apocalypse. Some — such as the Hopi Indians — believe the former is likely to be preceded by a little of the latter as a result of our environmental rape of the planet. Skeptics dismiss all of the above. So what’s the lowdown?
The first thing to know is that the Mayan calendar differs fundamentally from our Gregorian one. The Mayan calendar is based on the natural timing frequencies of the cosmos. This is why seven triangles of light form along the stairway on the Pyramid of Kukulcan at Chichen Itza on the spring equinox — the pyramid’s precise construction is a version of the calendar built in stone, displaying the Mayans’ mind-boggling grasp of archeoastronomy.
The Gregorian calendar is based on a solar year, but is otherwise divided into arbitrary weeks and months. This discrepancy led Maya scholar Jose Arguelles to dub the Gregorian an erroneous timing frequency.
“If you follow or are hooked via collective consciousness into a timing device that is irregular, inharmonic, connected with another device that is mechanical and sped up, then that’s what is going to happen to your mind, to your life and to your civilization. The end result will be a disaster for the planet,” wrote Arguelles of his revelation about the Law of Time (see lawoftime.org for more.)
The metaphysical community has been abuzz since Arguelles initiated the Harmonic Convergence in August 1987, when millions gathered at sacred sites around the world to honor a moment Arguelles identified as kicking off the home-stretch run to 2012’s transformation.
A key to the 2012 enigma, however, is that no one source has all the answers. Arguelles sounds like a brilliant prophet at times, and gets bogged down in mind-numbing esoterica at others. Yet a wider survey reveals numerous others thinking in similar ways, suggesting something transformative is indeed afoot.
“The ancient Maya understood something about the nature of the cosmos and the spiritual evolution of humanity that has gone unrecognized in our own worldview. This understanding involves our alignment with the center of our galaxy ... and identifies A.D. 2012 as a time of tremendous transformation and opportunity for spiritual growth, a transition from one World Age to another,” wrote researcher John Major Jenkins in his landmark 1998 book, Maya Cosmogenesis 2012.
“They believed that specific types of alignments in the cycle of precession stimulate evolution for life on Earth,” continued Jenkins. “When a given set of rules and assumptions has run its course, and has led civilization to the end of a particular road, the opposite orientation begins to appear ... and we can thus begin to understand the 2012 field-reversal as a moment in which the human spirit can emerge from unconscious patterns and blossom.”
This view, shared by many, is the fundamental underpinning of the great hope for 2012. Visionary ethnobotanist Terence McKenna devised a fractal equation charting humanity’s evolution that reaches a nexus point right around 12/21/2012, which he dubbed “Timewave Zero,” though he had no knowledge of the Mayan calendar when he formulated it. He theorized that the exponential technological advances of the past century “make no sense unless it culminates in the utter transformation of the species.” Does it not seem like we’re winding up toward something big here on the third stone from the sun?
Dr. Meg Blackburn Losey suggests a physical evolution, beyond using only 10 percent of our DNA. “The future, in fact, holds an unlimited array of new types of sensory perception. This is what I call our Seventh Sense, otherwise known as our multidimensional, universal sense. Our Seventh Sense will evolve more as we near 2012,” writes Losey in the Mystery of 2012, a comprehensive anthology published last year.
“What we are destined to experience in our lifetimes is not the end of the world, but the birth of humanity’s higher mind,” suggests journalist and neo-shamanist Daniel Pinchbeck in the same book. “We are not helpless spectators in this drama, but powerful actors, with an opportunity to directly influence the results.”
This last point is essential. The efforts of the powers that be — epitomized by the Bush Crime Family —suggest that the narrow-minded dinosaurs of the status quo seek to plunge the planet into as much chaos as possible to thwart humanity from coming together to transform society (can it be mere coincidence that modern Mayans, the Zapatistas, have been leading the revolution against corporate globalization since NAFTA’s implementation in 1994?) 2012 is a momentous opportunity that we dare not let slip through our collective fingers.
Inventor-philosopher Buckminster Fuller re-
peatedly indicated that we are facing our final evolutionary exam. Evidence suggests this exam is concluding over the next four years, that we have reached the galactic two-minute warning. Writer-philosopher Robert Anton Wilson framed this test of human evolution as a match between the Money people and the Idea people. Game on. •
