This comprises what Carl Jung called a synchronicity.  A term that get bandied about too loosely sometimes, a synchronicity is not simply a coincidence–it is a meaningful coincidence.

Synchronicities are, by their very nature, impossible to ignore.  They are unexpected coincidences that seem to hint at the existence of some hidden order to the universe, an acausal orderedness, as Jung and his colleague Wolgang Pauli labeled it.  It orders the world but not in the cause-and-effect way we are used to thinking.  They are meaningful coincidences because they link inner psychological-spiritual states to external physical events in such a way that something new is created–a new relationship between inner and outer realities, a new range of possibilities, a new sense of the Whole and our place in it.

THE ANCIENT FUTURE

That the Mayan Calendar ends on the Winter Solstice of 2012 is not held as a fact by all, however most interpreters of the calendar agree it falls within a range of a couple years, and in most cases, a few days, of that date.  The December 21, 2012 date is based on the correlation constant well-attested from the earliest days of the Spanish military conquest of Mexico.  The issue that most commentators forget in their passion to fix the precise date of the calendar’s end, however, is that such Mayan dates are symbolic, not historical.

This is clearly understood by looking at the origin date of the Mayan Calendar itself, which is generally held to begin on August 11, 3114 B.C.E.  This is a Founding Date, marking when time began again–when one period of 13 baktuns ended and another began with the gods creating this world of human beings.  This is the symbolic date that the Long Count calendar begins, the traditional founding of the calendar which, 5,125 years later, ends on December 21, 2012.  That it is a symbolic date is clear from the fact that it pre-dates the actual invention of the calendar by at least two thousand years.

The essential point, however, is that because tradition dictates that another 5,125 year calendar follow the one that is ending, this Winter Solstice of 2012 marks the Founding Date of a new age of creation.

The only known Long Count date to specify the December 21, 2012 date occurs as an inscription in stone on Monument 6 at Tortugero, which seems to state that a deity associated with endings and beginnings will appear on that date.  Deeply embedded in ancient Mesoamerican cultures was the concept of sequential Suns, or Ages, when cyclic time began anew. Such is the subject of the famous Aztec Calendar Sun Stone, which shows the four previous Suns that have come and gone–and shows this, the current Fifth Sun, the Age of Movement, which is to come to an end on the day 4 Ollin.  Just as each of the preceding four Ages gave way to a new one, this Fifth Sun is to give way to a new Age, the Sixth Sun.

In other words, endings are established in order to initiate times of Starting Over.  This is an important psychological and cultural need, marking the mature ability to recognize when mistakes have led us in the wrong direction and decisions must be corrected by making a radical and positive departure from the past.  This is simply the modern practice of making New Year’s resolutions embodied in a deeper order of psychological-spiritual complexity:  recognizing a dead end when we come to it, we exercise the only real choice we have and reverse course to look for a living road.  We do not engage in lemming behavior, following the most paranoid and panicked among us over the precipice of destruction–nor do we engage in apocalyptic thinking, secretly wishing for the world to end rather than accept the fact that it will go on without us.

The ancients formalized endings so that symbolic beginnings could renew the human spirit and restore social cohesion.

THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE IS DEAD

Today, we are dying of history.  Our collective story is one of wrongs and revenge that cannot be forgotten or forgiven.  There is no going forward as a global civilization fully capable of creating a Golden Age for all humanity because we cannot stop going backward to justify our rage and violence and feuding.  We are imprisoned in a collective vision of pain and grieving for what we have lost when the prison cells have all been unlocked and the walls collapsed long ago:  the will to keep up the cycle of revenge and hatred is becoming more and more difficult to sustain when we see what we could be creating instead.

Whether the ancient Mayans intended it or not, the end of their calendar coincides with a profound turning point in human civilization.

The Spirit of the Age has been Reason–which has come to mean The Age of Materialism– and it is Reason that appears to be the focus of our present turning point.  The logic of the intellect has given us a scientific materialism full of technological wonders capable of large-scale harm to the environment and society both:  not only are species and their habitats disappearing at an alarming rate but people are alienated from nature and one another in ways unimaginable just a few generations ago.  Governments declare wars that people do not want, armies stockpile nuclear and biological weapons too horrible to contemplate, speculators ruin economies and people’s well-being, people are starving world-wide and lack potable water when neither is necessary, and basic health care is withheld by modern practitioners who simultaneously do everything in their power to discredit traditional forms of medicine.  Politics and religion simply polarize people instead of bringing them together and personal liberty increasingly comes under pressure from the demands for security.  This is not, in a word, the world any of us want to live in.

The intellect can justify anything, can rationalize any type of behavior, can explain away anything we are doing.

But it cannot make us happy.

Because human happiness occurs despite reason, despite the intellect’s unending parade of excuses to accept dwelling in misery.

And human happiness is an ideal that more and more people across cultures are holding dear.

LONG LIVE THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE

The 2012 meme really came into being with Jose Argeulles and subsequently Terence McKenna, both of whom lent their considerable intellectual and creative capacities to the envisioning of a more positive and harmonious world.  Arguelles was also responsible for organizing the first Earth Day, for example, and McKenna, who calculated the King Wen sequence of the I Ching to culminate on the 2012 date, was once introduced by Timothy Leary as one of the five or six most important people on the planet.  Both men were instrumental in bringing the 2012 date to public awareness and tying it to their own efforts to transform human consciousness and, thereby, civilization in a positive way.  For this reason, the 2012 meme became early on associated with the the New Age movement.

These ideas surfaced as the works of Carlos Castaneda were really taking hold in popular awareness, his tales of the Yaqui shaman Don Juan introducing Western readers to the lifeway of Native American shamanism in present-day Mexico.  Interest overall, in the U.S. and Europe both, increased in regard to Native American beliefs, especially regarding shamanism, drumming, sweat lodges, journeying, and soul retrieval.  The underlying worldview of animism–that all matter is imbued with spirit–began pervading popular thought just as the environmentalist movement began to blossom:  people began feeling their kinship with nature instead of merely thinking about it.  This formed a perfect confluence of great rivers of thought as the nature mysticism of ancient Taoism and Zen also captured hearts and imaginations.

The monotheistic religions that had held sway for so long began to lose their appeal as people began turning to more traditional earth-centered belief systems.  Esoteric traditions from the Old World were finding their way into popular culture, reviving wide-spread interest in Astrology, Tarot, the Cabala, Magic, and Wicca.  All this arose as the feminist movement gained ground, spurring interest in cultivating personal power instead of expending external force.  Tibetan Buddhism entered our consciousness in a very real way as monks escaping the Chinese invasion began actively teaching in the West.  The Dalai Lama embodied a new model of how someone titled His Holiness ought to think, believe, and act.

The West was rediscovering the Heart.

And the internet became the new community plaza, the new city park:  people began meeting and exchanging ideas and, eventually, goods.  Its own innovation spurred further innovation and the capacity for free speech that could be heard world-wide drove the idea of democracy home in a new and startling real way.  The democratization of voices changed the way we perceived leadership and what actions we should accept from our government.  Our lives were being effected positively by people like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, not by the politicians who seemed only interested in getting elected.  And the betrayal by institutions people had trusted for their financial security drove the point home for folks who had never considered themselves outside the mainstream.

People across cultures began talking to one another via the immediacy of social networks.  Revolutions and demonstrations were coordinated using the new technology.  The idea of real democracy, not one nation’s copyrighted definition of democracy, has sunk in and is proving difficult to uproot:  in a world of peers, how can the disparity of wealth be justified?  when all cultures are created equal, can might really equal right?

Popular culture has changed.  What had seemed exotic had become natural, the new normal.  People form communities across vast distances, tied together by common ideals and purposes instead of physical proximity.  Invention, creativity, beauty, elegance, and spirituality have become ideals and purposes rather than self-interest, competition, nationalism, and religious zealotry.  People’s commonality has given rise to the Occupy Movement and the social networks have made it possible to coordinate those efforts across borders.

The momentum of change has intensified and its direction is away from empty promises and dead rituals and inhumane logic.

2012 AND THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE

Whether the ancient Mayans intended it or not, the end of their calendar coincides with a profound turning point in human civilization.

The issue at hand is not whether the Mayan Calendar predicts anything.  There is no way to be certain of that:  there is no evidence, no fact, to make such a claim with absolute certainty.  There is no reason to think that its end was calculated to coincide with the alignment of the sun with the galactic center–what is important is that it does coincide with just such an event.  In the realm of synchronicity, things coincide as manifestations of an acausal orderedness underlying the ongoing creation of the universe.  The issue is not whether the ancient Mayans set their calendar to end on a year of greater than normal solar activity or weakening geomagnetic field–the issue is that it does coincide with such concerns.  These events don’t stand in direct cause-and-effect relationships:  they are part of the underlying harmony of reality that spontaneously produces things like whole numbers and the discontinuities of modern physics.  Some things simply are and the more of them that overlap in the same time-frame, the more impossible they are to ignore.  This kind of simultaneity of meaningful coincidences and the implication of their momentum has likewise been brought to view by more recent social commentators and activists like Daniel Pinchbeck.

Civilization is changing.  Instead of engaging in a culture war with the antiquated worldview of religious extremism and national militarism and fetishized capitalism, people worldwide are simply moving on with life.  Letting go of the past, forgiving the wrongs done them, hoping for forgiveness for the wrongs they have done, envisioning a better world rising from the mistakes of the Age of Reason–the worldview of the global counterculture is constructive and filled with goodwill toward all.  It is a counterculture well on its way to becoming the global culture.

The whole “world ends in the year 2000″ was simply too full of fundamentalist trappings to capture this culture’s thinking.  But the Mayan Calendar, filled as it is with mystery and mathematics, steeped in the Pre-columbian civilization of the Native Americans of ancient Mexico, expressed with such magnificent artwork!  This is an ending that excites and inspires the Spiritual Left to compassionate action, one that infuses animists and nature mystics with the promise of restoring the natural balance between humankind, nature and spirit, an umbilical cord tying the lifeway of indigenous peoples to the lifeway of modern peoples.

We steer into the Winter Solstice of 2012 with full sails.  The wind of change is at our back, the momentum for a profound and lasting transformation of civilization has built to this cresting point.  We need do nothing different than what we have begun:  trusting in the World Soul to call us forward on its sacred path, we just have to keep listening to the Great Mystery and following its loving intent.

The Winter Solstice of 2012 will pass, a symbolic milestone that initiates another 5,125 year period of human civilization.  The world will be a completely transformed place when next the 13 baktuns of the Mayan Calendar come to an end.  Be assured, people will celebrate that milestone, for the Mayan Calendar is one of the great achievements of the human spirit–what, if anything, of these days, of our deeds, will those people 5,000 years from now remember?

If the years leading up to this turning point are any indication, they will remember us for founding an age of peace and prospering for all.

Those attuned to the coming Spirit of the Age are themselves synchronicities.  Each is a meaningful coincidence, alive at this time because an unaccountable and unfathomable acausal orderedness has placed them here.  They are meaningful coincidences because they link inner psychological-spiritual states to external physical events in such a way that something new is created–a new relationship between inner and outer realities, a new range of possibilities, a new sense of the Whole and our place in it.

 ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

 The Toltec I Ching,  by Martha Ramirez-Oropeza and William Douglas Horden, is published by Larson Publications. It recasts the I Ching in the symbology of the Native Americans of ancient Mexico and includes original illustrations interpreting each of the hexagrams. Its subtitle, “64 Keys to Inspired Action in the New World,” alludes to its focus on the ethics of the emerging world culture.

Go to the main site to see sample chapters, reviews and the link to Larson Publications for ordering the book.

Two companion volumes, The Five Emanations, and The Spiritual Basis of Good Fortune,  have recently been published that expand on carrying the practices forward in the modern world.

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Cyclical in the sense that history is divided into a series of Ages (sometimes called Suns), each of which led to a better, more humane, world.

Spiritually potent in the sense that the creative forces governing certain time periods (sometimes called gods in Western thinking) have sacrificed and invested themselves in the creation and sustaining of the world.

We moderns tend to view time as linear, forgetting that, as one Taoist sage put it, Everything we know about spirit we learn by analogy from nature.  The seasons of the year correspond to the times of day, both of which correlate to the four directions of the compass in what has been termed the Spatializaton Of Time—

The Map of Inner Change

By analogy, we know that Spring symbolizes the sowing of seeds, that Summer symbolizes the cultivation and care of what we are growing, that Autumn symbolizes the gathering in and harvesting of our efforts, that Winter symbolizes the resting and saving up of energy for the next creative effort.  This is the cyclical aspect of time:  starting something new, nurturing and developing it, sharing the benefit with others, and consolidating resources for the next endeavor.

But the spiritually potent aspect.  That is something else.  It requires that we sensitize ourselves to the Livingness of Space.  It means leaving behind the view of matter as dead and directly experiencing stone and tree and animal and weather and the sun and stars as Alive and Aware, with no less a spiritual half of their body than ours possesses.  It means standing in Spring and feeling the mood and intention of the creative force governing that season.  It requires, in a word, returning to the world view of indigenous people everywhere who hold every thing in creation as sacred persons, each with a lifetime and heart-mind of its own.  It is only our lack of sensitivity to the mood and intention of the creative forces invested in, and emanating out of, each thing that keeps us bound up in isolation and alienation from the loving embrace of Spirit-Nature.

It will seem strange to some to think of a stone as a sacred person.  But then again, have they ever thought of themselves as a sacred person?  They may know that indigenous people ask the plant for permission to take its leaves or ask the stone for permission to carve it but do they understand that the plant or stone are being treated as a sacred person?  One thing we can see as utter fact is the equality with which the universe treats all things:  the eagle may take the hare, but it dies touching the high-voltage wires around its nest, dooming the rabbits offspring as well as its own.  Any hierarchy we imagine to exist is leveled by death and accident.  The electrons making up my body come from stone and tree and sun and stars and, when this body disintegrates, its electrons will fly off into billions of directions to help constitute other persons, many of whom will not be human beings.  The webwork of subatomic particles forming the space-time continuum has no “holes”.  It is simply one unbroken interwoven Livingness of Space.

Every practical person in the world knows that things cannot go on like they have been any longer.  Only blindfolded ideologues and self-serving demagogues continue to push civilization closer and closer to self-destruction.  The rest of us know—or are rapidly coming to recognize—that we cannot simply go on propagating the same old dead worldview that allows the most brutish among us to continue desecrating Nature and Humanity.

The ancient Mayans and their counterparts throughout ancient Mesoamerica—as well as other indigenous peoples around the world, such as the visionaries who constructed the ancient Chinese oracle, the I Ching—were well aware of the patterns of human behavior, both individual and collective.  Intrinsic to such worldviews is the concept of a universal duality that makes up the universal unity of the world.  While this has many cosmological significances in term of the creation and sustaining of the world, it plays itself out in the patterning of human perception and behavior through the rule of action and backlash.

The future, in other words, becomes predictable simply by understanding that sooner or later, everything changes into its opposite.  The art of such predictions lies in being able to recognize when things are getting to be either “too much” or “too little”, states which call forth their opposites.  This requires a sensitivity to the underlying mood and intent of things, which manifests itself as a keen sense of timing.  The greater the historical shifts from one opposite to another, the longer the time frame.

December 21, 2012 marks the end of a 5,128-year cyle.  The Mayan Long Count calendar is established as beginning on a purely mythological date of August 11, 3114 BC in order that its end date would occur in our time.  The Mayan mathematicians went so far as to drop the date directly on a Winter Solstice, just to get our attention.  Aware of the patterns of human perception and behavior, the Mayan priest-scribes foresaw this time, our time, as the one in which the dead worldview would give way to the Living Worldview.

Let us honor their sensitivity to the changing Ages of human nature and their keen sense of timing.

Let us honor our own sacred nature by ending this Dark Age of inhumanity and joyfully advancing in the next, more humane, Golden Age of Humanity.

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The Toltec I Ching, by Martha Ramirez-Oropeza and William Douglas Horden has just been released by Larson Publications.  It recasts the I Ching in the symbology of the Native Americans of ancient Mexico and includes original illustrations interpreting each of the hexagrams.  Its subtitle, 64 Keys to Inspired Action in the New World hints at its focus on the ethics of the emerging world culture.

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By way of example, a Mayan tribal elder is quoted recently as saying that the idea of the calendar predicting a catastrophic doomsday springs from Western ideas and not Mayan.  This has been followed up even more recently by a Washington Post article approaching the matter from a scientific perspective, in which the astronomical basis of the movie 2012 is viewed as sensationalizing for profit.  That article does not take Sony Pictures to task strongly enough for its setting up a phony (and very hi-tech) website called Institute for Human Continuity, whose goal is Ensuring the end is just the beginning and where you can vote for who ought to lead humanity in the post-2012 era.  Sane and caring people everywhere ought to boycott this film just to protest this kind of commercial exploitation.

Think none of this matters?  Think everyone knows its entertainment?

According to the Post article, David Morrison, the author of an online feature called Ask an Astrobiologist, has “gotten nearly 1,000 e-mails from people who think something dire is about to befall the planet. One teenager wrote to Morrison that he’d rather commit suicide than see the world destroyed.”

An even more recent Los Angeles Times article entitled, Scientists try to calm ’2012′ hysteria, notes:

Morrison says it’s hard to know whether the people who have written to him with their fears represent a fringe or a larger cross-section of Americans who, distrustful of traditional sources of information and the authorities behind them, are falling victim to the Internet’s snake-oil salesmen.

In such an environment, the viral marketing campaign for the movie “2012,” which encourages people to “Vote for the Leader of the Post-2012 World,” can seem like confirmation of the apocalypse, rather than of an upcoming 90-minute entertainment vehicle.

A spokesman for Sony Pictures, Steve Elzer, said: “We believe consumers understand that the advertising is promoting a fictional film.”

Morrison said the movie’s distributors are feeding the “panic” by creating some of the fake science websites. Most of the sites, Morrison said, are full of misinformation and speculation, often by people who have written books they are trying to sell.

But scientific and ethical considerations aside for the moment, let’s return to the source of the 2012 phenomenon, the ending of a 5,128-year cycle of time as marked by the Mayan Calendar.

Drawn away from purely academic writings for the moment, David Stuart, arguably the foremost expert on Mayan glyphs in the world,  spoke his own words of reassurance for informed lay readers, in which he clarified his previous statements regarding the now-famous Monument Six of Tortugero, one of the few surviving Mayan texts that actually seem to predict events—and that specifically mentions the December 21, 2012 date.

Or does it?  Stuart references an article by his colleague Stephen Houston, who points out greater ambiguity in the reading of Monument Six than previously recognized.  The date may not reference any objective date but rather be ceremonial, having to do with the consecration of a particularly sacred building.

Great pains are being taken by such noted experts and the Mayans themselves to point out that the misconceptions about the world ending simply because the Mayan calendar turns over and begins another 5,128-year cycle are based on exaggerations and decidedly Western apocalyptic myth-making.  Why?  Well, obviously, the release of the special effects extravaganza 2012 may push already-anxious men, women and children into fear overdrive.

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