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2012 As we get closer and interest increases, I get asked more and more frequently what I think of the 2012 thing. I have hesitated to comment on it as my view is somewhat contrary to what many are projecting onto it. During a brief conversation with Daniel Pinchbeck (author of 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl) at Burning Man last month, I told him how my views were heresy to the 2012 true believers and he laughed and said he enjoyed heresy, which raised him in my eyes and encouraged me to speak more publicly about it. I have been saying when asked that what will happen after 2012 will be 2013, and it will look an awful lot like 2012 and 2011 before it. This is not to say that 2012 is not significant. It is. But it is not the kind of world changing event that many seem to think. I have a lot of respect for the knowledge of the Maya and related civilizations. They clearly knew a great deal. Their knowledge of astronomy and mathematics was far beyond anything that would be expected or even possible in the context of mainstream archeology and anthropology. I’m convinced that they are probably right about the endings and beginnings of cycles and many other things as well, but how does that apply to us? The Maya and the Central and South American pyramid builders were the western survivors of whatever cataclysm ended the last wave of civilization. Egypt and Mesopotamia were the eastern survivors. We know that the earlier survivors were aware of each other and had some contact and trade, as traces of cocaine have been found in the earlier Egyptian mummies. But over time, contact was lost and the western survivors were forgotten, left to evolve along the peculiar lines that they did in isolation from the rest of rebuilding civilization. Except for what esoteric knowledge remains among the shamans and other indigenous medicine traditions that remain, the Maya, Aztec and others where not able to withstand the onslaught of the eastern cultural stream when contact was reestablished. We know now that it was more because they lacked the necessary immunity to diseases the Europeans brought west than the vaunted higher technology, but they were largely and relatively quickly vanquished nonetheless. The eastern cultural stream, what we think of as western civilization, came to dominate both the North and South American continents in just a few hundred years. The world that incarnate humans live in is a consensual reality. There are many of them, but some are very large and dominate large tracts of habited lands and their cultures. Most of North and South America, Europe, the Middle East and many areas is the rest of the world have long been dominated by the cultural stream of monotheism, going back in Biblical times to Abraham. Whatever one may think of religion, if you live in a culture with its roots in the Judeo/Christian/Islamic cultural stream, it has been informed by the narrative of those religions and it is deeply embedded in your consensual reality. Post-Christian Europe still has its roots in the Church. Wherever the children of Abraham, Jewish, Christian or Islamic, have been the dominant culture, there is a shared heritage that largely informs your society regardless of how religious it may or may not be. In the face of the overwhelming tide of the dominant cultural stream, memes from the others, especially those for the most part vanquished or very small others, have little chance of making a big impact. A meme coming from the Maya is a stream flowing into the ocean of our culture. It may well be that crossing the galactic plane, if indeed we really are, could have interesting effects. But I believe that the real effects will take place in the hearts and minds of those who buy into it, and that is no small matter. 2012 will come to be seen as this generation’s Harmonic Convergence. Many will become more spiritualized and active in the paradigm shift that is occurring in our cultural stream and that is a good thing. 2012 will be followed by a remarkably similar 2013. |
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