2012 is Now on Everybody's Mind

The release of Roland Emmerich's film, 2012, has popularized this date on a planetary scale. What does it mean? Where did it come from? As awareness of 2012 becomes an event of mass consciousness, we begin to sense something of the greatest magnitude, a veritable world shift. The ripples from this shift are already creating waves washing up on the shores of the old consciousness. What is behind December 21, 2012, and what does it really augur?

It is generally known that this date is related to the Mayan calendar and the Mayan prophecies. How did the Maya come to this date, and what do their prophecies say about it? The Maya, whose civilization reached its heights in Central America and Mexico between AD 435 and 830, were expert mathematicians with a unique calendar system. How did they come to be operating with a sophisticated sense of time far beyond anything known even today?

In The Mayan Factor, Path beyond Technology (1987), I concluded that the primary intention of the Mayan calendar system was not to measure time but to record the harmonic calibrations of a galactic synchronization beam, 5,125 years or 5200 tun (360-day cycles) in duration. According to the time science of the ancient Maya, a great moment of transformation awaits us at 2012, when we pass out of that beam. For humanity this beam constitutes the wave harmonic of history. 5,125 years in diameter, this beam commenced 13 August B.C. 3113, a date marked by the Mayan calendar long count as 13.0.0.0.0, 4 Ahau. This precise date 13.0.0.0.0, 4 Ahau will occur again on December 21, 2012. Exactly 1,872,000 days will have passed, a cycle of 13 baktuns of 144,000 days each.

This interval, B.C. 3113 - A.D. 2012, comprises the totality of history as we know it -- from the First Dynasty of Egypt to the Twin Towers, hence wave harmonic of history. During this cycle, humanity has gone from a tribal creature just learning how to live in cities, to being a full-blown planetary organism.  In this process, humanity learned how to mechanize time. The mechanization of time created an unconscious mental field in which the human systematically separated itself from nature for the purpose of creating a vast industrialized order, the technosphere -- a sphere of artificial time cast over the biosphere. Since 1618, the human species has been living in its own artificial time, apart from the rest of the biosphere that continues to operate in the natural cycles. The dissonance between artificial and natural time has brought about the present crisis -- and pushed mankind toward a new condition of being.

The conclusion of the cycle in A.D. 2012 bodes a return to natural time and an evolutionary upgrading of planetary life. A resonant frequency phase shift will usher us into the brilliance of galactic-solar-planetary evolution. We shall pass not only into a post-historic, but a post-human, or super human phase of our evolution.  In fact, the entire 5,125-year cycle -- hardly an instant of geological time -- is but a mutative phase. With this phase complete, a new evolutionary stage begins. This is known as the noosphere, literally, the mental sheathe of the planet, the mind of the Earth, where we think and act as a single planetary organism -- a new race of bio-solar telepaths. With the advent of planetary consciousness will come not destruction, but at long last, universal peace.

Jose Arguelles, planetary whole systems anthropologist, received his Ph.D. in Art History and Aesthetics from the University of Chicago in 1969. He has taught at Princeton University, University of California, Evergreen State College, San Francisco State University, San Francisco Institute of Art, the Naropa Institute, the University of Colorado, and The Union Graduate School. Jose first introduced the date December 21, 2012 into mass consciousness with The Mayan Factor [1]. The initiator of the Harmonic Convergence global peace meditation of 1987, Arguelles is also the founder of the annual Whole Earth Festival (1970) in California, and one of the originators of the Earth Day concept. More information on Jose and his work is available here. [2]

Image by theilr [3], courtesy of Creative Commons license.