referenced, and I immediately recognized the web page. It was one that appeared around 1999, and its treatment of 2012 included diagrams and direct cut-and-paste sections from an article I had posted on my website in 1995, called “Mayan Cosmogenesis: Cosmic Mother Gives Birth.” This article summarized my work on the galactic alignment, showing how it was encoded into Maya traditions like the Creation Myth. I concluded the piece as follows:
Understanding this aspect of Mayan cosmogenesis may also help us understand our own impending millennial milestone. What is going on in the world today? Is this alignment having some kind of influence? The precession of the equinoxes is, after all, primarily an earth rhythm. Whether we call it Mayan or millennial, we are living today in the shadows of a rare celestial juncture which parallels the increasing interest in “New World Orders,” “post-historic” thinking, and a major shift in world economic structure and what it means to be human. The Mayan myth seems to remind us that all life springs from the Great Mother. The transformation of cosmic recreation is already occurring. Perhaps we should look closely at this celestial alignment, imagine its meanings, and determine what this transformational shift means for future humanity. For the ancient Maya, on the far-future Creation Day which for us arrives soon, First Mother and First Father join forces to engender a new World Age.8
The problem with the appearance of my work on the Great Dreams website is that there were no links to the original source (my website) and my name did not appear. At one point I tried to e-mail the webmaster to seek a clarification, but I never received a response after several attempts. It was only years later when I described the situation as plagiarism, on the 2012 Yahoo Group, that the designer of the Great Dreams website piped up and defended herself, saying that my name and website appeared elsewhere on the website and thus their free use of my work wasn’t really plagiarism. Today their 2012 web page has been corrected, but for many years the galactic alignment information on the Great Dreams website seemed to be a general Maya “prophecy” of unknown origin.
As a result, I suspect that either Carlos Barrios or his interviewer, Stephen McFadden, had lifted the idea without, perhaps, being aware of its true source. I confirmed this later on, and communicated with McFadden about the situation. He said he was aware of my work, apologized for the omission of correct citation, and graciously corrected the official version of the interview that is posted on his website.9 Nevertheless, uncorrected versions of the interview still occasionally sail around the Internet.
Barrios, like Erick Gonzalez, has perhaps inadvertently been accomplice to a way of framing my work in the marketplace that prefers to deliver it through the mouth of an elder. However, Barrios thereafter adopted the galactic alignment scenario as a true expression of one of the so-called Maya prophecies for 2012. He included it in his 2004 book10 and shared it with author Lawrence Joseph, whose book
Lawrence Joseph began writing a book about John Lennon within hours of his tragic murder. He boasts on his website that this book was “written, typeset, printed and distributed twelve days after John Lennon’s assassination.”12 To such an enterprising soul, 2012 must have been irresistible. How would one begin a book on 2012? Talk to Maya elders, of course. Joseph recounts in the early pages of his book how he flew to Guatemala to receive the Maya prophecy about 2012 directly from Maya teachers, the Barrios brothers, learning that “on 12/21/12 our Solar System, with the Sun at its center, will, as the Maya have for millennia maintained, eclipse the view from Earth of the center of the Milky Way. This happens only once every 26,000 years. Ancient Maya astronomers considered this spot to be the Milky Way’s womb.”13 Except for the fact that the Maya have not retained a continuity of this knowledge “for millennia,” this is a fairly accurate paraphrase of my theory, including my interpretation that the Galactic Center was mythologized by the ancient Maya as a cosmic womb, a creation place.
Armed with the Maya prophecy for 2012, handed to him by Real Maya Teachers, the author of
Lawrence Joseph subscribes to the old idea, put forward by Cotterell and Gilbert in
The next peak in the planetary tidal force, essentially the sum total of the planets’ gravitational pull on the Sun, will come late in 2012… The sunspot maximum, coincidentally also due in that year, will compound the situation, subjecting the Sun to maximum stress. The Sun’s magnetic poles … are also expected to switch in 2012, adding further volatility to the situation. The resulting synergy of gravitational and electromagnetic pressure on the Sun cannot help but distort and distend its surface, releasing megabursts of imprisoned radiation, quite possibly ones that are far deadlier than any the Earth has encountered since homo sapiens has been around.”18
Although he tries to conceal it when it is deemed inappropriate, his unequivocally nihilistic position is very common in the 2012 discussion, and shares company with Brent Miller’s Horizon ProjectTM, which I’ll assess in a moment.
This chapter could easily be expanded into a book-size treatment of these various manifestations, but space prohibits more than a mention of many of them. I can’t possibly treat them all in this book, and I’m not implying that all of these researchers play fast and loose with 2012 in the way that others have, nor am I endorsing them. The books of Sri Ram Kaa and Kira Ra, William Henry, Jay Weidner, and Vincent Bridges (
My book
Wilcock also developed a highly elaborated system of hyperdimensional physics, which he explained during the Global Shift conferences that I also spoke at. His system utilized many ideas, including the galactic alignment and material from the Ra channelings, to explain changes happening in our solar system and the consciousness of