16May2005 - Email this article.
The Dutch in the original article has been translated into English by Marienella Meulensteen.
The predictions of the Mayas about our near future are confirmed and supplemented by all kinds of different disciplines. In this part of our series about the unique year 2012 we show the connections. Old civilizations, the bible, certain software and current affairs, all agree with the Mayas.

But let us first create some clarity about the pivotal point of the year 2012. A reader of DaanSpeak pointed out to us a sentence of the previous part of this series in which it says that in 2012 a cosmic cross is formed because ‘our solar system will be in one line with Hunab K'u, the center of the Milky Way, the place the Mayas call the cosmic womb’. The reader says to have recalculated this and his result is not 2012, but 1998.
Maya-expert John Major Jenkins researched this before for his classic Maya Cosmogenesis 2012 and writes DaanSpeak that the period in which the crossing occurs, starts in 1980 and ends in 2016. The year 1998 is therefore the center of that period; of 2012 can only be said that it falls within the period 1980-2016. So it all still lines up with the facts, but it is not so that 2012 is the sparkling center of the period. What was the reason to choose so specifically for December 2012? The answer is that the Mayas found something other than the middle of that period more important: 'The ancient Maya intended their 2012 end date to target the alignment of the solstice sun and the Milky Way galaxy', Jenkins writes to DaanSpeak. 'Ultimately, the Maya envisioned the alignment to occur in 2012 as a union of the Cosmic Mother (the Milky Way) with First Father (the December solstice sun)', Jenkins writes. He writes further: '[...] the rare alignment of the December solstice sun with the Galactic Center [is] the reason why the Mayas chose to end their 13-baktun calendar on December 21, 2012.' Read about this discovery of Jenkins in the intro of his book Maya Cosmogenesis 2012. (The English word solstice comes from solstitium. It describes the northernmost or southernmost point that the sun reaches every year).

The year 2012 connects a point of time to the concept 'end of time'
The alignment with the center of the Milky Way, or this 'galactic alignment [,] is a core idea in many of the world's spiritual traditions—especially Mithraism, the Vedic Yuga doctrine, and Neoplatonic philosophy, all the way up to William Blake', Jenkins writes in his books Galactic Alignment and Pyramid of Fire. In his book Galactic Alignment Jenkins researches 'the ideas of the Traditionalist school, in particular the writings of esteemed scholar Ananda Coomaraswamy and symbolist philosopher René Guénon. These writers pioneered the resurrection of the Primordial Tradition, or Perennial Philosophy, and a major idea in this school is that the current cycle of history is ending amid a proliferation of inverted spiritual values and rampant materialism we are approaching the end of Kali Yuga. In the Vedic doctrine of World Ages, Kali Yuga is the final age, the age of greatest spiritual darkness, and its end signals the shift to a new World Age. Clarifying some undeveloped areas within Traditionalist thought, and drawing from the insights of various Vedic commentators, I identify the galactic alignment of era 2012 as the key to the timing of this transition, anchoring the Vedic yuga doctrine to a real astronomical event.'
Many people -also think of the prophet John in the last book of the bible- have envisioned the end of time (and because of the cyclic character of the time, therefore the beginning of a new time), but before there was no date attached to it. The word date herein is a relative concept, as we stated in the previous part of this series. But somewhere a zero point can always be found, each adult for instance has been exactly one meter tall to the hundredth millimeter; in short, there's always a border, even as it concerns in this case periods of tens of thousands of years. For the transition of the old to the new time, the Mayas set the boundary which was later rediscovered by Jenkins: December 21, 2012.

Software comes to the same conclusion:
2012 is end/beginning of time
The famous psychonaut, the late Terence McKenna, used a specially developed software program [zip] named Timewave Zero. 'The software takes these theories and discoveries concerning the I Ching and creates time maps based upon them.' In the program, a line waves through the times (see left). The closer to the zero line, the greater is the chance for novelty. The spot of the highest measurement is indicated by the value zero: 'The end date is the point of maximized novelty in the system and is the only point in the entire wave that has a quantified value of zero', writes McKenna.

The zero moment that McKenna calculated is December 21, 2012. 'We arrived at this particular end date without knowledge of the Mayan Calendar [...]'. For some time the line lay against the zero line (for the period of the last 1500 years), but on that date it really touched the base line. 'We are on the brink of possibilities that will make us literally unrecognizable to ourselves and those possibilities will be realized, not in the next thousand years but in the next 20 years because the acceleration of invention and novelty and information transfer is at this point so rapid', he writes in an undated article, but in any case before April 3, 2000, when he died. The theory he developed behind this he called the Novelty Theory.

Time is a fractal
The structure McKenna saw appearing over thousands of years, he also encountered in a small form, through which he discovered that time has a fractal-like structure. In a fractal part of the whole is like the whole. (Look at these animations to better understand what fractals are). This discovered structure links up with the predictional talents of the Mayas. They were the ones who discovered that time repeats itself, is cyclical. They gave different values to different periods of time. E.g. some days were good days, and other days of e.g. periods of twenty years, were less favorable. 'Because Mayan time was cyclical, effects were thought to eventually, and potentially, repeat themselves. So you have all these various cycles that fit together. [...] By looking at the calendar, the Mayas could not only see what day it was, or year, but also what 20-year period it was in relation to. They could also see what was to come', writes B. J. Moyer of Mesa Community College. Therefore, the Mayas foresaw their own demise ahead of time. 'Knowledge of fractality in the past attests beyond speculation that this [our present-day] civilization is one out of many and it will expire, just as its predecessors did, on a due date', writes Daniel Srsa, author of the Prophet's Manual, a book full of complicated calculations which have to prove that time is a fractal and that 2012 is the year in which all predictions of all old cultures will reach their peak.
Srsa -a Croat who does not have perfect command of the English language - writes: '[The] Glue that knits all theories and all prophecies into one is [the] fractal interpretation of reality. Fractality incorporates relativity with quantum principles into one interpretation and more - [...] Fractal super symmetry of space/time is [the] double helix curvature - it is [the] theory of everything (physical and spiritual) that gives ONE meaning not only to partial physical theories but also reveals spiritual truth inherent to prophecies and ancient texts and monuments of Mayan, Biblical, Egyptian, Sumerian, Vedic, Chinese and other origins because they are only different derivates of ONE reality.'

Calleman:
Acceleration is part of creation/evolution
Maya-authors Dr. Calleman and Ian Xel Lungold write about their joint discovery of the 'Schedule of Creation' of which time as a fractal is a part: 'You have heard that history repeats itself. This is now proven fact. There is a repeating pattern to all of Creation. Quantum physics has proven this over and over in the organization of matter. There is a pattern of intentions and events as well. We, or rather Consciousness, have been down this same road 7 times before over the last 16 billion years.' Calleman and Lungold also observe an acceleration of time: 'Each of these cycles of Creation runs 20 times faster than the last one. The same amount of Creation is paced 20 times tighter. This is why time seems to be going so fast. It is not "time" but Creation itself that is accelerating. There are scheduled impulses on the part of Creation that are affecting global events today and during the next 9 [...] years until the Mayan calendar ends near 2012'. And in the meantime it is 2005 and it only takes 7 more years until 2012.

Calleman:
The same number of events in less and less time
Dr. Calleman: 'The actual pattern of Creation described by the Mayan calendar looks like a pyramid which consists of 9 levels or cycles', which each are subdivided in 13 cycles of the same length, writes Calleman. 'The Sumerian, and Mesopotamians wrote this same pattern in clay tablets as their understanding of Creation. The Ancient Vedic texts, that are the basis of Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism and Taoism have the same understanding of 9 levels with 13 sections each', writes Calleman elsewhere. According to him, each following level on the way to the top takes twenty times shorter. Even though the duration of each cycle becomes shorter, the number of important events stays the same, 'the same amount of change or evolution'. Developments on the lowest level take (20 x) billions of years and the cycles just before 2012 take only (20 x) twenty days. The numbers twenty and thirteen are prominent in the Maya-calculations.

Calleman is on the right track, but cannot calculate very well
The thirteen cycles per level are indicated with Days and Nights. The first cycle is the First Day, the second cycle is the First Night, the third cycle is the Second Day, and so on until thirteen. The time in which we live now has thirteen cycles of 360 days, which causes the year 2005 to be the Fourth Day. So it follows that 2011 is the end of the Seventh Day. And because time is fractal, you will find the global events of these periods again in previous levels. Therefore e.g., the Fifth Night of the eighth level (the level on which we are now, thus the level just before the last one) corresponds with the Fifth Night of the second level. By the way, Calleman is the odd man out with his opinion that the end-date is not 2012, but 2011. He is at odds about this with John Major Jenkins, but the discussion about that one year in a evolutional phase from 1980 to 2016 is of course not very interesting. 'I sincerely wish there was more attention being given to the primary sources on understanding 2012: the Maya Creation Myth, the monuments of Izapa, and the Mayan traditions which encode the end-date alignment (the sacred ballgame and king accessions, for example)', writes Jenkins to DaanSpeak about the difference of opinion with Calleman.
DaanSpeak itself did some calculations with Calleman’s numbers, and quickly came to the conclusion that they are not totally correct. We confronted him with this, but he said not to understand us and consequently he did not react to our emails any more; in a discussion with John Major Jenkins, Calleman also one-sidedly ended the correspondence. The Dutch Maya specialist Peter Toonen writes to DaanSpeak about Calleman: 'I find his hypothesis about acceleration fascinating. But I also have big question marks. Mistakes have been made, like the supposition that Homo sapiens is already two million years old (should be 200.000 years). But also the following: generally it has been accepted that the universe is 13.5 billion years old, and thus NOT 16 billion. But note this: our solar system is quite ‘young’, only 4 billion years old. And the unicellulars that he talks about only come to Earth about 600 million years later. And so on... So in the end, this particular idea is wonderful, but the theory is faulty.'

The speed of time increases
Miscalculations or not, it is noticeable for everyone that time goes faster all the time. Also science has studied this: 'Perceptions and experience of time-space compression and acceleration: the shaping of leaders' identities, is the title of an interesting document of Dr. Sharon Turnbull of the university of Lancaster, in which she goes over all sorts of scientific literature that deals with the phenomena of the acceleration of time. But you can also just look around you; there are more than enough examples of the fact that the speed of time increases. Think of the scene that really happened, about a 90 year old man who closes down his email after sending a home-made digital photograph, walks to the light switch and looks up to a photograph in which he stands as an eight year old next to the T-Ford of his father. What a distance this man has covered in his life: feeling the end of the First World War, experiencing WW II, the post-war reconstruction, the sixties up to his 3 gigabyte computer, which is related to Moore’s law, that says that computer power doubles every eighteen months, a law that has sustained for forty years. Or this citation from the Belgian magazine HUMO (#3344; 05oct04): 'Which nurse still has time for her patients? Or consider the recent discussion about postmen; these days all their steps are counted. And where do you still find a neighbourhood shop where the customers stick around to talk? Scientists compare that sort of gossip with the grooming of the monkeys: it is a way of keeping in touch, we need that. But it gets lost in the rat race 'that is forced upon us in school', thus Jef Vermassen interviewed in relation to his book Murderers and their motives.

Actuality shows acceleration of time and degradation of old period
Developments take place ever faster and extremes are on the increase. Old systems crumble fast and at the same time, by their urge to prevent this, their protagonists only seem to make it worse. The way in which the people’s representative Bush ruins the economy is totally opposite to his representation of corporate life. Whatever the case, the extremes will probably indeed increase; a sort of reversed emancipation wave. Now, not reconstruction is the object, but degradation. In the past, periods of emancipation were often ushered in by extremes; it could be that the system works the same way here, but in this case the extremist degrades his own ideal. Fundamentalists and extremists like Bush and 'the terrorists' nurture each other, feed off each other and perish by their own extremes.
The old system perishes irrevocably by its own extreme untenability. That is not bad, enough is enough, it has been carried on to the utmost and now it is time for something else. We have learned from our mistakes, it was educational, but now it is finished. Oil, the contaminating energy producer, the icon of the past, is courting disaster in the form of peak-oil, the Netherlands political system recognizes its bankruptcy in the scandals of the HSL and Betuwe line, the never used container terminal in Amsterdam and the ever more expensive metro line in Amsterdam, to name a few. The cabinet BushBlairBalkenende forces the attained civic freedoms further into the corner all the time in name of that same freedom. The American politics recognize their bankruptcy in corruption and the untrustworthy voting system. In the meantime, we trip over one scandal after another in corporate life: Enron, Shell, Andersen, Worldcom, the lies of the pharmaceutical industry, and finally the ever more devaluating dollar. Environmental problems are getting worse all then time, the overweight in the North is proportional to the underweight in the South, prosperity in the world is enormous, but is not divided honestly. This is just an arbitrary list of events, but it does make clear that the supporting pillars of old times seem to come down and the question is how wise it is to invest in things that are symbolic for them, like cars, pension funds, careers or stock exchanges. Maybe it is wiser to invest in the future and surviving the turbulent phase leading up to it as well as possible.

McKenna:
Accelerated time culminates in accelerated human development
Terence McKenna seems to concur with this idea when he writes: 'It seems more likely to me that all this complexity is better directed toward the end of the cycle when, after billions of years of evolution, everything finally comes together. Alfred North Whitehead proposed this same idea. He said that history grows toward what he called a "nexus of completion." And these nexuses of completion themselves grow together into what he called the "concrescence." A concrescence exerts a kind of attraction, which can be thought of as the temporal equivalent of gravity, except all objects in the universe are drawn toward it through time, not space.' McKenna envisions it in the metaphor of birth. The bible agrees with him when it names the last days of the end-time as the time of labor pains. Don’t forget that during child birth also an acceleration takes place at the end: a long beginning, a turbulent culmination, an acceleration, with as a result the beautiful new life...
At the last moment of the acceleration of our time, which reaches its peak on the point of time of '11:18 am, Greenwich Mean Time, December 21, 2012 AD' as calculated by McKenna, man will also experience an accelerated development according to him, a 'revelation of the interspecies' mind. In human beings, it is approached through the non-metabolizing neural DNA scattered through the body, and for humans it becomes apparent as a higher cortical phenomenon, as an experience, and as a confrontation with the Jungian "collective unconscious." This revelation and its integration into the field of shared experience is a process of transformation of the previously limited ego. The many magnitudes of duration in which the levels of the modular hierarchy of waves can be supposed to be operable, exceed at both ends of the scale, any physical processes known to occur.'

Russell:
Acceleration of time is part of creation/evolution
Someone else who sees an acceleration of time in which mankind can arrive at a higher plane during the last phase, is author Peter Russell. 'Russell studied with Stephen Hawking at Cambridge University, England, from where he has degrees in physics, psychology and computer science. In this highly-acclaimed work [published in 1998, see next paragraph], he offers a gripping account of the ever-increasing pace of change from the origins of life on this planet to the present day. He shows that this acceleration is not just a twentieth century phenomenon; it is a pattern intrinsic to evolution itself. He arrives at the startling conclusion that the pace of life is set to continue accelerating until ultimately it reaches a time of unimaginably rapid change. Mathematicians call this a “singularity”, a point where the growth curve becomes so steep it is effectively vertical. Moreover, this point is not set thousands of years ahead, but sometime early in the next century'.

Mankind at crucial moment in transformation process
What is interesting in the list of contents of Russell’s online book Waking Up in Time - Finding Inner Peace in Times of Accelerating Change, is that it shows familiar patterns: a situation that accelerates, a crisis, a transformation, leaving behind the old and waking up on a higher plane. This makes us think of the life story of Jesus Christ, a story that should be seen as a metaphor of how you can shape your own life (see this DaanSpeak). But maybe this story is also applicable in a larger perspective, namely that of the development of mankind on earth. Considering this, we now are clearly in the phase of the crisis; the more reason why we should be happy with the cabinet BushBlairBalkenende. Without them no crisis (in Jesus terms: no scene in the garden of Gethsemane in which Jesus asks God to let ‘this cup’ pass him by), without them no following phases like transformation, leaving behind the old and waking up on a higher plane.

Russell in the first chapter: 'Looking back at history it is clear that acceleration is not just a twentieth-century phenomenon. Change occurs much faster today than it did a thousand years ago - medieval architecture and agriculture, for instance, varied very little over the period of a century. But even then change occurred much faster than it did in prehistoric times - Stone Age tools remained unchanged for thousands of years. This gathering of pace is not confined to mankind; it is a pattern that stretches back through the history of life on Earth. [...] The timescales involved are getting shorter and shorter; from billions of years, to millions, to thousands, to centuries, and now to mere decades. Before very much longer it comes to an end. If you plot out the curve of this sort of acceleration you find that the curve soon approaches the vertical. In other words, the rate of change tends towards the infinitely rapid. Mathematicians call such a point a “singularity”; the equations break down and cease to have any useful meaning.' This is exactly what McKenna shows in his Novelty Theory in his graphic shown here above.
With singularity Russell means an accumulation of developments that progress so far that a high point is reached. He takes the computer as an example of these phenomena: computer power doubles every eighteen months, but if you extend that line, you will be, according to him, in 2030 at the level of a computer capacity comparable to a human brain and from then on you could better leave it to the computers to improve computers. As a consequence, the period of eighteen months will divide in halve continually, down to weeks, days, hours and minutes, after which singularity is reached. But: 'Once it takes hold inner development is likely to progress even more rapidly than technological development. We could arrive at a spiritual singularity -- a moment of unimaginably rapid inner awakening -- before we reached any technological singularity.'

Russell:
Reaching the zero point happens before 2050
Russell is of the opinion that the last phase in the race to the zero point -the singularity- is the reaching by mankind of a spiritual development. He estimates together with other researchers that the zero point will be reached before the year 2050, 'assuming, that is, that we do not in the meantime turn the planet into a nuclear wasteland, accidentally create a plague that destroys us all, or decimate the ozone layer to such an extent that the land becomes uninhabitable.' 'If we do survive these challenging times and move on in our evolution, then it seems more than probable that the pace of change will continue to quicken, and any predictions we may make are likely to materialize far faster than we anticipate. The implications of such sustained acceleration are quite staggering', writes Russell in the chapter Compression - The Collapse of Time.

About the spiritual development of mankind in the last phase on the way to the zero point Russell writes: 'I believe the next major transition will be the transition to what we might call the Consciousness Age -- a period when the exploration and development of the human mind will become our major focus. There are two principal reasons for believing this. First, this is the direction in which our current crises are pushing us. As I have already discussed, if we are to survive the critical times we are now passing through, it is essential that we undergo a profound shift in values, and awaken to our inner truths and full spiritual potential. [...] Second, inner awakening offers us what we really want. Beneath all our searching, we are looking for an inner well-being -- peace of mind, joy, happiness, satisfaction, or however else you might identify it. All our material progress is, in one way or another, aimed at fulfilling that inner quest.'

Everyone who is alive now, finds himself in the last box of the last bar of the Maya calendar that shows the 'long count'. With that we are at the end of time, but also right at the beginning of another new era. We live in the most exciting period of mankind up to now.

Jenkins: On December 21, 2012 the soul of the Milky Way
is in one line with planet Earth
The calendar system of the Mayas can also be used for your own personal future, write Kees Visser and Barbara Roth in the Dutch magazine Bres. According to them you can discover your life purpose with it and realize where there still are blockages. 'You don’t have to feel at the mercy of that what happens to you any more, but you can design your own life with the help of energetic information that comes to you every 260 days in some shape or form.' Maya expert John Major Jenkins also sees this principle work the other way around. In a radio interview (RM) he says: 'The key principle with that is the 'As above, so below principle' or the 'microcosm reflects the microcosm'. Because when you can journey into your own deep self, the idea with the reflections between the microcosm en the macrocosm is that you can come to an understanding about the universe at large. [...] That deep self, the deepest part, the deepest nucleus of us, is also the deepest nucleus of the universe at large. [...] It's similar to the Hindu, Buddhist idea. In Hindu cosmology, the personal individual soul, the Atman, is equivalent to the soul of the universe, the Brahman.' Once every 26.000 years -this time in 2012- the soul of the universe, the core of the Milky Way, will be in one line with the sun, the center of our solar system, and with our planet Earth. So the center of our small part of the universe (microcosm) then is in direct connection with what the Mayas called the cosmic womb (macrocosm).

McKenna:
The Universe does not expand, but is pulled to the zero point
Talking about macrocosm, Terence McKenna, who was mentioned earlier, discovered during his research that the universe does not have an explosive character; no Big Bang that expands and expands. Instead of a pushing movement, McKenna sees a pulling movement. He writes: 'The universe is not being pushed from behind. The universe is being pulled from the future toward a goal that is as inevitable as a marble reaching the bottom of a bowl when you release it up near the rim. If you do that, you know the marble will roll down the side of the bowl; down, down, down; until eventually it comes to rest at the lowest energy state, which is the bottom of the bowl. That's precisely my model of human history. I'm suggesting that the universe is pulled toward a complex attractor that exists ahead of us in time, and that our ever-accelerating speed through the phenomenal world of connectivity and novelty is based on the fact that we are now very, very close to the attractor.'

DaanSpeak
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