It's now 8:45 pm, Friday the 21st here in Japan.
Only 3 hours left for something to happen. No zombies, fireballs of death in the sky or anything. Not even a little earthquake. This apocalypse is as boring as the others that came before it. Disappointed.
An interview with Graham Hancock. Forgive the length but imo it is well worth the read. Its an alternative view to the doomsday scenario and one I agree with...
Graham Hancock: Well, I’m definitely not going around the world wearing a sandwich board saying, “The end of the world is nigh,” because I don’t think it is. I think that there has been a lot of almost willful misreading of the Mayan calendar and of what the Mayan calendar suggests. It seems that there is a certain element of humanity that just loves the idea of doomsday, and actually, that idea keeps on resurfacing down the ages. There were elements of that around the time of the millennium—the year 2000. There were similar elements 1,000 years before, at the end of the first millennium—a sense that the world is going to end, and soon. I don’t share that view, and the ancient Maya in their extraordinary calendar system—which they themselves inherited from an earlier people called the Olmecs who we know very little about—didn’t share that view either.
What the Mayan calendar says is, however, extremely interesting. It envisages a cyclical view of history, and the Long Count calendar over a period of what are called 13 b’ak’tuns—just over 5,100 years—the latest cycle of the Long Count calendar does indeed end on the 21st of December, 2012, and it started around 3,100 BC. But when it started, it was following on seamlessly from the previous cycle. And when it ends on the 21st of December, 2012, it will roll on seamlessly into the next cycle, into the new cycle. So what actually the Mayan calendar is saying is not that we are coming to the end of the world on the 21st of December, 2012, but that we are coming to the end of a great cycle of the human story and that a new cycle is beginning.
And it’s really interesting; if you look at the period demarcated in the Long Count of just over 5,100 years, from 3,100 BC until 2012, that this is precisely the period of the evolution and manifestation of the city-state, of the state as an instrument in human affairs. There wasn’t much in the way of states—as far as we know—before 3,100 BC, about 5,100 years ago. But then you have ancient Egypt. You have Sumer. You have the beginning of centralised bureaucratic states with power elites who are imposing a particular vision of civilisation upon humanity. And the last 5,100 years has indeed been the period of preeminence of the state, and we see that most powerfully today with huge nation states, some of which are seeking to agglomerate into larger federal states, but all of which share this vision of a centrally controlled bureaucratic system of order in which the citizen ultimately is to be told what to do. The citizen may participate in the state through so-called democracy, electing representatives to parliament and so on and so forth, but once elected, they basically then run our lives for the next five or six years.
And this model of the world run by big states and by super-states and associated institutions, such as the large mainstream religions—whether Judaism, Christianity, Islam—and large corporations, again operating on the bureaucratic model with centralised control, in my opinion—I may be wrong—this system is now, today, in terminal decline. Just as it appears at its most powerful, the cracks are showing everywhere in the system, and you can trace almost all the problems in the modern world to these huge centralised bureaucracies—whether states, religions, or corporations. And all of this has evolved during the last 5,100 years that the Maya demarcated as this cycle of human civilisation.
So what I take from the Mayan calendar and from the Mayan tradition is that somehow— amazingly—they connected to a reality, to a real cycle in human behaviour, and we are indeed coming to the end of that cycle. Something new is going to emerge and it probably will take some time to happen. It’s not something that we should regard as happening overnight. It’s a process rather than a specific moment, but in this process, we are going to see the failure of the state model, the failure of the bureaucratic corporation, the failure of the mainstream religions— their inability any longer to fulfill the promises that they make—and an increasing disillusionment and a new mood and a new consciousness emerging in the world. I see signs everywhere around the world today of a new consciousness being born, which resists the control of the state and of large corporations, which emphasises the sovereignty of the individual, and which emphasises, indeed, individual sovereignty over consciousness as a key element. This is what’s new. This is the new birth that is coming about through difficulty and pain and problems.
But, ultimately, my view is hopeful, and a positive one. We are going to pass through a period of transition in the human story, and we are going to give birth to a new way of living in the world. A way which is more nurturing, more positive, more healing to the individual and to the planet and to the ecosystem that sustains us, more reverent of the meaning and purpose of life, and more spiritually oriented. I see all of this coming to birth now. Huge forces are resisting it, but it’s going to happen and somehow the Maya knew that.
Last edited by icecube; 12-21-2012 at 06:08 AM.
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Well that was fun. Does anyone know when the next end of the world date is?
Doesn't some guy in Ghostbusters 2 say February 14, 2016 the world is going to end? That's only a little over 3 years away! Something to look forward to!
So now that these Mayan apocalysts were completely wrong, and the thing their life revolved around, turned out to be a farce and never happened. Now what?
So now that these Mayan apocalysts were completely wrong, and the thing their life revolved around, turned out to be a farce and never happened. Now what?
So now that these Mayan apocalysts were completely wrong, and the thing their life revolved around, turned out to be a farce and never happened. Now what?
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