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Tuesday, December 1, 2009

2012: Rebooting The Planet

As discussion of 2012 begins to enter the mainstream media, fact and fiction concerning ancient prophecies, astronomical alignments and doomsday scenarios can easily get confused. This can happen especially if you live in Western Europe or North America and are exposed to the shrink-wrapped, dumbed-down soundbite melodramas that masquerade as news. So let us begin to clarify matters with a bit of etymology.

The word "apocalypse" does not mean "the end of the world". Apocalypse means "revelation" (Greek: ποκάλυψις -translit. Apokalypsis), literally "the lifting of the veil" – a term applied to the disclosure to certain privileged persons of something hidden from the mass of humankind. The Greek root corresponds in the Septuagint (an early Jewish text) to the Hebrew galah (גלה), "to reveal".

Only through continued erroneous usage, has the term been degraded to refer instead to the end of the world. One possible source may be the phrase apokalupsis eschaton (from the Greek Eschatos meaning “last”) which literally means “revelation at the end of the world” or “the lifting of the veil at the time of the last thing”.

Gloomy interpretations of prophetic visions are prevalent in many early Christian Jewish writings. On closer examination, we find that even the term “end of the world”, as we encounter it in the King James Version of the Bible, is more properly interpreted as the “end of the age”. The word translated as “world” is actually the Greek word “eon” or “age”.

So we can now correctly regard apocalypse to mean “a vision of the end of the age”.

Ethnobotany Meets Eschatology

I was first introduced to apocalyptic philosophy by ethnobotanist and philosophical stuntman Terence McKenna. As I began to absorb his writings and later listen to his talks and trialogues (with Rupert Sheldrake and Ralph Abraham), I found his eschatological visions to be disquieting and inspirational in equal measure. As well as being known for his belief in the consciousness enhancing properties of hallucinogenic and entheogenic substances (sacred medicines used for at least 15,000 years), McKenna was also renowned for his formulation of Novelty Theory.

Novelty Theory essentially maps out the ebb and flow of “novelty” or dynamic creativity in the universe. Within this model, the universe may be considered as a sort of novelty engine. McKenna further demonstrated that when the emanation of novelty is graphed over a given period of time, a fractal waveform emerges which he termed “the timewave” or “timewave zero.” The resultant graph illustrates when (but not where) novelty increases and decreases. Crucially, a point of singularity is finally reached where there is a concrescence of infinite novelty when all conceivable things occur simultaneously. McKenna plotted this to occur at Winter Solstice 2012, on or around 21st December. He was later astonished and encouraged to discover that the Mayan calendar ends on the same day.

People are going to hear the words "Mayan calendar" referenced more and more frequently in various media streams over the coming years. It's already started to appear on mainstream TV and radio here in the UK. It's rather depressing to hear clueless newscasters treat the subject like a quirky ghost story. Like an X-files episode. I guess they're just reading the autoprompt.

For those new to the Mayan calendar, the crucial thing to note is that it's fundamentally different in primary function to our Gregorian calendar. The Gregorian calendar is a solar calendar for measuring time. It is based on the earth’s orbit around the Sun and appropriately focuses intent onto the physical movement of solar and planetary bodies. I believe that the Mayan calendar is not designed to measure time; its observance of galactic movement is epiphenomenal next to the core purpose.

Mapping The Evolution Of Consciousness

Researchers Ian Lungold and Carl Johan Calleman, amongst others, propose that the purpose of the Mayan calendar is to map the evolution of consciousness itself. The calendar has nine creation cycles, which represent nine stages of consciousness, or “underworlds,” as symbolized by the Mayan pyramids. Each underworld measures key aspects of consciousness development from primordial soup awareness and reactive responses, to cellular creation, stimulus-response, individual consciousness and cultural, planetary, galactic and universal consciousness. The length of each “underworld” grows progressively shorter, from billions of years, to millions, thousands, hundreds and then to the final 12 year period before galactic consciousness is upon us.

The pyramidal structure of the Underworlds, represented in numerous Mayan temples, is a good model for comprehending the acceleration of events. Time is speeding up as we phase shift from the current materialist Planetary frequency to the new, higher state of consciousness, the Galactic frequency. Finally, consciousness will then be ready to shift to a universal level of completeness.

So why should we use these ancient Mesoamerican ideas as a platform from which to consider the events leading up to Winter Solstice 2012? What does science have to say about the matter? Well aside from acknowledging that astronomically, the Earth is said to be aligned facing the centre of the Milky Way behind the Sun on this date, science has very little to say, at least publicly.

The Limitations Of Science

Far from being the cool, balanced surveyor of our shared physical reality, I have come to the conclusion that science has grown into rather an overblown and imperious autocrat. I’m constantly shocked at the arrogant headlines that pop up in Nature, National Geographic and New Scientist. “Scientists Discover Origin Of Cosmic Rays,” only to see a few days later the diluted “Scientists Cannot Agree On Origin Of Cosmic Rays.” This charade played out only this last month. It’s also appalling to see how quick they are to disregard pioneers who put forward theories that lie outside the established parameters of consensus science. People like Wilhelm Reich, Immanuel Velikovsky and even the veritable Bard himself, Terence McKenna.

McKenna made his views clear in a 1994 talk: “Science has become a tyrant. It’s become the arbiter of all truth and that’s ridiculous. That’s absolutely ridiculous. Most of what’s interesting doesn’t fall under the purvey of science. Science has a Faustian dynamic, it dreams of a kind of ultimate resolution. Leibnitz said in the least of substances eyes as piercing as those of God could read the whole course of the universe. That’s what science wants: eyes as piercing as those of God. In the meantime, the Shaman acts to ameliorate our condition. I mean we are meat. We are suspended between vagina and grave. It’s all up for grabs. Humour is an admission of ignorance. Ignorance is the precondition for knowledge. In a sense, to take it to a deeper level, magic is a deeper perception than science. Science believes that the world is truly there. It is naïve in its empiricism. Magic knows that world is made of language, that the world is a construct of forceful imagination. The people who don’t know this are walking around inside the realities created by the people who do. Madison Avenue understands this. Government propaganda agencies fully understand this. And to the degree that you empower yourself, you will become more and more a dweller in linguistic constructs of your own making. This is what I meant by do not watch, do not consume. In other words, do not lease other peoples linguistic structures and live in them. Build your own virtual worlds. Build your own values and your own house of mirrors. Then you are on equal footing. But if you are consuming the manufactured linguistic structures; Marxism, Freudianism, Christianity, Keynesian economics, you name it… then you are to a degree giving up your humanness, your uniqueness.”

A good example of what McKenna is talking about is zoologist and ultra-atheist Richard Dawkins. The man with no soul. Pity him. Though be warned that your sympathy may turn to hostility when you realize how much airtime this man gets to peddle his bizarre technocratic fantasies. I like to think that he is actually a replicant, enraged at the discovery that he only has a limited life span and when that comes to an end, it’s all over. So to assuage his anxiety, he promulgates the idea that we’re all in the same boat. We are all just nuts and bolts like him. It will be interesting to see what Dawkins (and people like him) are saying and doing in the years and months leading up to December 2012.

Galactic Alignment & Unknown Energies

The Milky Way has a centre point which all the stars take millions of years to revolve around. It is located in the densest part of the galaxy, with the highest concentration of suns/stars, as seen from Earth. On four occasions within our 25,800 year orbital cycle, the galactic centre aligns with the sunrise of a solstice or equinox. The last time it occurred was on an Autumn equinox 6,450 years ago, perhaps parallel to the dawn of Old World civilisations. On 21st December 2012, which is a Winter Solstice (Northern Hemisphere) this centre will align with our sun once more. Mayan researcher John Major Jenkins (JMJ) presents a stack of scientific, historical and mythological data to show the significance of this event to the Mayan people. Their calendar ends on 21st December 2012 for a good reason. The exact nature of events is uncertain, though JMJ does state in his Maya Cosmogenesis 2012 book that (a) a door into the heart of space and time will open, (b) the cosmos will be reborn or recreated and (c) we will reach the Zero Point of the process - a moment of collective spiritual birth. He goes on to say that “on the level of human civilization, our basic assumptions and foundation values will be exposed, and we will have the opportunity to embrace values long since driven under the surface of our collective consciousness”. We should note the parallels here with McKenna’s Novelty theory.

There are strange things going on at the centre of the galaxy. Besides theorizing the probable presence of black holes and neutron stars, in 2005, a team of astronomers found a vast loop-like structure, 20 light years across, adjacent to the most massive star-forming region known in our galaxy. The loop, which was observed in X-ray wavelengths, is 15 times the size of the Arches Cluster, a star-forming region close to the centre of the Milky Way. This is the first time that such a distinctive and huge loop structure has been observed. The team of astronomers, which includes scientists from the University of Leicester, CEA Saclay and the Max Planke Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, observed the Arches Cluster using the European X-ray satellite, XMM-Newton, as a part of the XMM-Newton Galactic Centre Survey. The galactic centre can only be observed at certain wavelengths, such as X-rays, because large amounts of dust lie in our line of sight and this blocks out optical light. University Of Leicester's Dr Sakano says, “The X-ray spectrum of the loop is extraordinary. Most diffuse X-ray sources in the Universe have a characteristic temperature because they are the residual radiation from an event, such as a supernova explosion. However in this case the loop is non-thermal and this means that whatever the origin of the structure is, it is not stationary but rather the result of some ongoing process”.

Later on in 2005, it was reported that “eight new sources of very high-energy gamma rays have been spotted in the Milky Way - doubling the number of such sources known. The discovery may shed light on the origin of mysterious, energetic particles called cosmic rays but it also raises new questions, as two of the sources cannot be traced to any nearby objects”. Even in 2007, scientists cannot agree on the source of the highest-energy cosmic rays. Different teams with different ideas do demonstrate one thing however: they really don’t know.

Synchronicity As A Navigational Aid

If we study the parallels between the Mayan Calendar, Novelty Theory and Timewave Zero, it does seem that a key consciousness shift is likely to crescendo on 21st December 2012. So how do we protect ourselves, how do we survive, how do we pass through it to the other side in one piece? Relying on logic, science and the government is not going to be a successful strategy. I would recommend your best allies are intuition and integrity. Seek the timeless knowledge of your own personal destiny. The soul experiences itself from outside the 3D realm but we interface with the hologram on multiple levels; in dreams, in meditation, in feeling. The wise universe has a nurturing impulse to protect and guide its brightest students: it deploys synchronicity to the true path, to he who is doing the right thing. So we may experience synchronicity as a special encounter with someone, an ultra-relevant book, an unforeseen but profound journey, intense déjà-vu or a deep teaching unveiled personally for you. When such coincidences occur (there are no coincidences), you are walking your path. You are in your integrity. Balanced and truthful. From such a vantage point, the infinity of being will afford you the ability to stand back and bear witness to the approaching evolutionary jump in this divine creation.

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1 comment:

  1. Fine article, although I do not agree with your views on Richard Dawkins. I've read his book 'The God Delusion' and listened to most of his interviews. There is more to the man. I suggest you the link below. I sure miss Terence..

    http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/richard_dawkins_on_our_queer_universe.html

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