2012 Revisited - Lucidity in the Midst of Apocalyptic Hysteria

I hadn't realised before I started this blog - a big reason for which was to manage my own raw fear ignited by talk of cataclysms, pole shifts and the prophecies marking December 21, 2012 as doomsday - the sheer number of sites dedicated to the end of the Mayan Long Count - over 3,000,000 according to one account.

When the site author isn't adding his or her two cents about the apocalyptic origin of the date, its range of possibly interpretations, the likelihood of the actual end of the world occuring on December 21, 2012, the pedigree of the sources that would have us believe or disbelieve such information, and whether or not to head for higher ground, s/he is speculating if any of us will survive whatever is to come, cataclysm or ascension or both.

Since many of you seem to have stumbled on my own humble post on this subject, I thought it might be a good idea to share a more heartening and down-to-earth discussion of the Winter Solstice of 2012 that I found at the amazing web magazine Reality Sandwich - whose content runs "the gamut from sustainability to shamanism, alternate realities to alternative energy, remixing media to re-imagining community, holistic healing techniques to the promise and perils of new technologies"

In the post in question entitled: "2012 and the Annoying Persistence of Time", Richard Smoley offers a great background to the emergence of 2012 as the apocalyptic date du jour, pointing out that:

"Presently the date of choice is 2012. The concept of 2012 as a crux in human history owes its popularity to José Argüelles. He is best-known as the chief herald of the Harmonic Convergence of 1987, an event in which millions of people received or attempted to receive galactic energies that, Argüelles contended, were streaming to the earth and awakening a higher consciousness. But 1987 was only a prelude, said Arguëlles. The key date is 2012 – specifically December 21, 2012, the end of the Mayan Long Count. According to John Major Jenkins, author of Mayan Cosmogenesis 2012, the Mayan calendar, with its numerous and almost incomprehensible reckonings of cycles within cycles (including a "Long Count" spanning 1,872,000 days or some 5,129 years), points to a key juncture: the time when the point of the December solstice aligns precisely with the center of the galaxy. Another figure who pointed to 2012 (for quite different reasons) was the late psychedelic guru Terence McKenna. (For more details on these predictions, keep an eye out for my article on 2012, to appear in the March-April issue of New Dawn magazine.)

"What is going to happen in 2012? Since these prophecies are not Christian, there is no talk of the Lord's return. One view is that there will be a mass awakening of consciousness that will take humanity to a new level. One researcher into things Mayan, Carl Johann Calleman, author of The Mayan Calendar and the Transformation of Consciousness (who, for various reasons, puts the date a year earlier, in 2011), contends, "It will simply not be possible not to be enlightened after October 28, 2011, or at least from a certain time afterward when the new reality has definitely manifested." Others hint that the actual fabric of time will mutate into a newer, higher, 2.0 version of itself.

"What is one to say to this? As we've seen, predictions of the end of time are practically as consistent and reliable as the calendar. And yet if science is any remotely plausible guide to the truth, the universe has been chugging along for some 13 billion years and does not show any immediate indication of changing its tune. It's true that philosophers sometimes point out the problems of reasoning about the future on the basis of the past. As Bertrand Russell wrote, "the man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken." Even so, philosophers, like the rest of us, usually seem to act on the premise that tomorrow will come just as today has.

"The usual riposte to these objections is that we are living in unique times, that the pressures and challenges that humanity faces are unlike those human beings have ever had to face. So they are. But so they are for every generation. Every generation faces new challenges and pressures. Every age believes it is a new age, and every age is right."

But what I found even more interesting was Smoley's later comment to some of the reader responses his piece elicted that:

"I don't think that you can argue BOTH that the times require urgent and immediate practical solutions AND that we will be saved from ourselves by a mass awakening of consciousness that will happen in 2012. If the latter is true, why bother to do anything now? After all, if we all become enlightened in 2012, everything will become much clearer and the solutions can all be worked out in a jiffy. My own perspective is that the issues of the current moment--violence, discord, environmental stress--are serious and deserve serious, practical solutions. I don't think we can afford to wait or hope for a mass shift in consciousness that may or may not come. Nor, for that matter, may a mass shift of consciousness be necessary."

You can read the original post in full, here.

In the meantime, the best advice most of those writing about 2012 seem to offer is to "be the change".

In other words: to open our hearts, practise generosity, lovingkindness and gratitude. And to turn away from our hitherto rebellious state of individualism and embrace a global maturity, developing the ability to think beyond our immediate self-interest.