Apr 1st, 2009
Apr 8th, 2009
Apr 15th, 2009
Apr 22nd, 2009
Apr 29th, 2009
May 6th, 2009
May 13th, 2009
May 20th, 2009
May 27th, 2009
Jun 3rd, 2009
Jun 9th, 2009
The end in 2012
A background to cosmic theory
By Jake Gilliland
Environmentalists are familiar with doomsday predictions - from the ozone being destroyed by unrelenting greenhouse gasses, to human population increasing faster than natural resources. But some believe in a different type of end - one that will come despite our recycling efforts.
This week's unofficial featured specialist, Jake Gilliland, explains the apocalyptic insinuations beyond the Mayan calendar system, which ends in the year 2012.
The Mayans were like a blazing comet in history: fiery and bright, lighting up their particular piece of the sky and vanishing, leaving only a long tail. In the thousands of years since they disappeared-for reasons still not entirely known-their knowledge of mathematics, astrophysics, and weird architecture has continued to confuse and astound even the greatest minds.
One aspect of Mayan culture that has received particular attention is their conception of cyclical time. In their day, thousands of years ago, the Mayans mapped thousands, if not millions, of stars and their courses upon clearly understood celestial charts in ways that are poorly understood in modernity, coordinating life rituals and plantings with particularly significant days of the year. This knowledge was recorded on these charts as symbols of life and death and similar eternal ideas, abstractions that were then correlated with the rotations of time and revealed much deeper workings. The recognition of these workings led the Mayans to believe that the evolution of man itself is cyclical and that they themselves, at the height of their power, were only middling through the current era.
And they believed that on a certain day in the future, this running epoch would come to a discernible end. As the ancient Mayans mapped the stars they became aware of an astrological cycle we now call the Precession of the Equinoxes. This is close to a 26,000-year cycle in which Earth transits through each of the 12 signs of the zodiac.
At the end of this 26,000-year cycle, the Mayans calculated that the Sun would travel into a position between the constellations Scorpio and Sagittarius and would align itself with the center of the Galaxy, Hunab Ku. And indeed modern astronomers find that at the Winter Soltice, December 21st, 2012 the Sun will not only travel into this exact position but, additionally, the plane of our solar system will align precisely with the plane of the entire Milky Way Galaxy. Modern astronomers also have found that on this day, two neighboring galaxies will also have their galactic planes in alignment with ours, creating a truly cosmic event.
But the Mayans did not necessarily believe that this was the end, at least not of everything. Instead, this could mark the end of man's current cycle of struggles and mark the beginning of a New coming Age, where the mind itself would develop hitherto unknown powers and people would finally see the light, either as a higher vision or a blazing inferno, of their ways and would be forced to pick a path and to get serious about changing.
Will we watch the sun dip into the center of the galaxy's dark plane and come through this eclipse unscathed?
The deeper meaning of this coming End of an Age is open for discussion to us, but for the Mayans the stars would never lie, and the movement of the heavens meant something reciprocal to Man. The monuments and observatories they built have more than withstood the test of time and their astronomical knowledge, even in savage times, has seldom been matched in precision, let alone grandeur. But it is easy to dismiss, easy to be skeptical about something that has so come and gone, but if we do; if we simply ignore it, can we so easily escape the triumph, or catastrophe, that we can still sense coming even if we don't believe in it?
Many in the world feel it very strongly and have started whole grass-roots movements around solidifying human thinking on a global scale (check out GlobalOneness.com) around it so that we might focus this energy-if it comes-in the most holistic and altruistic of ways. But no one really knows if such a thing is even capable of being controlled. No one except for maybe the Mayans.
Originally Published: April 22, 2009
