2012

Regarded by the Mayans as the end of time, but that may be seen to be time as we have known it since the invention of the Gregorian calendar and the clock. It has enabled us to write history books and plan future progress, sending our minds from the past to the future in a pendulum swing that drives the present world civilization towards . . . .

What if the end of time means we all return to the present: to that place called here and now when we live moment by moment like all the other creatures on the planet. What if we were forced to go back to the garden and live in a higher state of consciousness than we have been as working class citizens, dropping our highly advanced weapons and using technology for creative visual arts and music - then Wall Street might come down like the Berlin wall, and the trees could grow freely again.

In our obsession to progress towards an unknown goal, we have forgotten to express gratitude for the natural world from which we evolved. The forever growing jungles have been replaced by concrete jungles that are heavily weighing down the planet. Perhaps we should stop measuring time, worrying about it passing too fast and thinking that we don't have much; Perhaps we don't have as much choice as we like to think.

It happened back in the summer of 69 that I read about a geological study which had been done on layers of sedimentary rock deposits. The article appeared in the “Science Digest”, a small magazine to which I had a subscription since I was always scientifically curious. Geologists were saying in this report that they had observed the magnetic contents within the deposits and seen that there had been some very definite shifts in the earths magnetic axis over long periods of time. These “shifts” had resulted in rather dramatic reversals in the magnetic poles so that the North pole had ended up in the southern hemisphere and the South pole in the northern hemisphere. The scientists were quite conclusive after several months of observations and in their conclusions they specifically noted that these reversals occurred approximately every 25 to 26 thousand years. On this large time scale they estimated the last reversal to have been around twenty-five thousand years ago, and so were predicting the next one to be before the year 3000AD. The times quoted were not specific to the year but rather general in centuries, and if we were to add a mere 3% possible error then the year 2000 would fall within range, while the year 2012 would be just as likely as any other.

Three years later I was studying yoga in India and part of that study involved the science of Yantra Yoga and its time cycles, big and small. It is rooted in an understanding of energy movement and the various frequencies of that energy which are known to have specific effects or results in the molecular and material world. The Hindu and Buddhist calendars are both based on these time cycles. When I was presented with the idea of a grand cycle of 25,600 years in these calendars I was immediately struck by the coincidence. In Hindu mythology it is said that at the end of this cycle the world turns upside down – to me that sounds like one way to express a reversal of the poles, while implying the chaos that might result in any civilization. In the well re-written history books of the West we did not really exist that long ago but in other more legendary history, civilizations did exist then.

For Eastern cultures (both Hindu and Buddhist) this 25,600 year period has been divided into ten periods of 2,560. And, in their system of time measurement we are in the tenth era, while within that era, in their calendar system, we are entering the year 2553, which is our calendar year 2010.

Soon after my return to the West I headed south for Mexico again, after realizing the North American lifestyle no longer made any sense to me. This time I went a little further into Guatemala, and in fact all the way to Columbia. What I had learned of the inner world while in the East now gave me a very different perspective on the ancient ruins: pyramids and temples of the Aztecs and Mayan civilizations. I had developed a much better idea why these people had been building pyramids. Also, the Mayan calendar with its five ages, the fifth of which was coming to an end in the near future began to make some sense, considering what I had seen of the state of the modern world in my travels through over a dozen countries.