The 2012 Story

central to Islamic and Oriental meta physics. Indeed, teleology threatens causality, the cause-and-effect principle at the heart of Western science, which is why it is anathema.

In order to avoid irking the priests of scientism too much, both McKenna and Chardin attempted to discreetly incorporate into the deficient models of Western science certain ancient perennial insights regarding how time and consciousness really work. But importing Oriental insights into containers built by Occidental minds is like trying to squeeze the ocean into a bottle. The implications of the Omega Point, the Singularity, and 2012ology require a radical revisioning of Western philosophy’s approach to reality. In a nutshell, consciousness doesn’t evolve, it remembers, or awakens, to its full potential. From this top-down perspective, physical brains evolve in order to accommodate awakened minds.

My friend Curt Joy noted that Terence mentioned, at one point or another, virtually everything about 2012 so it is not really possible to nail him down to one official position, especially when he’s no longer around to engage in a dialogue. His theory, however, is most known for two things: Time speeds up and something definite is going to happen on December 21, 2012. We’ve already addressed the unacknowledged subjective source of the experience of time speeding up. On the other point, the future may be predetermined but our subjective experience of it is not. So the idea of a predictable definite “something” happening for all of us specifically on December 21, 2012, seems incredibly unrealistic.

It’s possible that, for Terence, the idea made sense as a projection of the sudden “rupture of plane” experienced in the psychedelic breakthrough. Projected onto historical process, a global rupture of plane should occur at the precise moment that the molecules of time-events avalanched en masse into the central pineal gland of our collective consciousness. In other words, the subjective visionary breakthrough experienced by the shaman perhaps became a model, for Terence, for a collective breakthrough of higher consciousness. There may be some truth to this, but the main issue with this scenario is, I think, the role of individual free will.

The warning to newcomers that I would offer here is that the idea of something suddenly occurring on December 21, 2012, is highly unlikely. I don’t personally believe that it is built into the architecture of external events in quite the way that Terence laid out in his Time Wave Zero theory. Similarly, the experience of time speeding up probably has more to do with the state of our consciousness than with the boiling over of external events in history.

Finally, I’d like to offer a topsy-turvy twist on Terence’s Time Wave Zero theory. To use one of Terence’s favorite terms, it’s quite the conundrum. His Time Wave Zero theory, or Novelty Theory, describes an intensification of novel or new events as we approach 2012. In his examination of historical events, Terence saw novelty increasing when unusual or unexpected events occurred. The Berlin Wall coming down, for example. So the ultimate novel event, the most bizarre and unexpected occurrence, should occur on December 21, 2012—and that would be for the theory itself to fail, with a grand business-as-usual occurring. But with the fateful day transpiring in this way, the theory then instantly vindicates itself. The grand Nothing-In-Particular at the end of time would be the most unexpected and novel thing that could possibly occur, according to the Novelty Theory itself. Its own failure would prove its efficacy. Now, that’s a conundrum. I hope that somewhere Terence is smiling at that one.

FRANK WATERS AND THE MEXICO MYSTIQUE

Frank Waters was a brilliant thinker and an engaging writer. His classic book on the Hopi was published in 1963 and opened the discerning reading public to the vast and mysterious psyche of a misunderstood Native American group. His novel The Man Who Killed the Deer was a compassionate and profound account of the inner world of the Pueblo Indians. Waters, himself part Cheyenne, was born outside of Colorado Springs in 1902. He lived among the Hopi in the Four Corners area for many years and retired to the mountains near Taos, New Mexico. His observations in his book Mexico Mystique are those of a mature, elder philosopher, presented in sure-handed tones. We see in his explanation of his book’s title the belief that ancient worldviews can have great meaning for modern people:

Since Jung’s discovery of the collective unconscious, we are no longer obliged to regard ancient Nahuatl and Mayan gods as idolatrous pagan images concocted by a primitive people merely to bring rain and ward off evil spirits. They are primordial images of soul significance rising from the unconscious into consciousness where they are given form and meaning. A universal meaning as pertinent now as it was two thousand years ago. So today, despite the flood of archaeological and anthropological reports, documented histories, and popular writings of all kinds, there is still a Mexican mystique.⁸

In writing his book on the Mexican calendar, Waters practiced something that has been, in recent years, winnowed out of books on 2012 as a kind of irrelevant annoyance. He actually researched and studied the Maya tradition. Based on his general knowledge of indigenous cultures, tempered with specific details on the Maya gathered from his studies, Waters drew some insightful conclusions about the Long Count and its cycle ending. For example, it was patently clear to him that the 13-Baktun cycle was part of a World Age doctrine. This is a clear conclusion to draw, and Maya scholars such as Gordon Brotherston and Eva Hunt supported and explored the idea, but in more reactive and defensive quarters my emphasis on the idea has drawn an incredible amount of scholarly backlash.

Waters also concluded that the importance of the 13-Baktun cycle must involve astronomy. He thus presents an astrological interpretation of the cycle-ending date, based on a planetary horoscope for the date and an astrologer’s assessment of it. Unfortunately, Waters’s academic source for the end date (Coe’s book The Maya) contained a flaw, resulting in a mistaken calculation for the end date that he used. Strangely, in Mexico Mystique Waters cited the book Hamlet’s Mill but didn’t seem to catch the oblique reference to a precessional alignment model. Waters’s book was the first one dedicated to the end-date question, and he can be considered the man who launched the 2012 phenomenon. It planted a seed but did not spawn a great legacy of followers, as Shearer’s book drew attention away from the Long Count to the 1987 date while the 2012 meme morphed in other directions in the hands of McKenna and Arguelles. A later edition of Coe’s book provided a corrected end date, which for all intents and purposes must have rendered Waters’s theory irrelevant, although as late as 1990 I attended a talk by an astrologer in Boulder, Colorado, who utilized Waters’s horoscope charts.

Efforts to track early references to 2012 reveal a lack of coherence and agreement. Peter Tompkins’s 1976 book Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids makes a wry reference to “2011” in the final pages, reporting that “sensitives say the Serpent People are due to return to earth in 2011 to help create a world government.”⁹ Peter Balin, an artist and traveler, published a book in 1978 called Flight of the Feathered Serpent and put another astronomical observation for 2012 on the table, setting the stage for seeing the Maya calendar as a teaching game and oracle. Balin’s book is a well-illustrated poetic treatise, somewhat after the fashion of Shearer’s books, that presents a tarot-like game/oracle that spiritual seekers could engage and learn from. The artistic presentation of the system anticipates and resembles the Dreamspell game created by Arguelles in the early 1990s.

Balin also mentioned, briefly, the Venus transits of the sun that were to occur in 2004 and 2012—an idea taken up later by Swedish author Carl Calleman. Good diagrams of the Venus transit are provided, along with a brief discussion of the facts that such a transit occurs roughly once every 130 years and one will happen in June of 2012. It’s interesting that Balin points out this fact, but the next step would be to demonstrate how the Maya were aware of Venus transits and how Venus transits evoke a known theme in Mexican cosmology. For example, the myth of Quetzalcoatl involves the morning star rebirth of Venus from the sun, which takes place after the inferior conjunction of the sun and Venus. This event occurs once every 584 days. The Venus transit is a much more precise, and therefore rare, version of inferior conjunction, such that the planet Venus actually transits across the disk of the sun. Balin listed Waters’s Mexico Mystique in his bibliography, and he states that the end date falls on December 21, 2011—a partial correction of Waters’s erroneous sourcing from Coe. With these examples, by 1980 there were clearly several books in print that mentioned or explored more fully the cycle ending.