The 2012 Story

civilization result; if misunderstood and inverted, the crisis of the modern world results. You can’t have time without the timeless within which time happens. The two are indeed intimately related—one is the projected externalization of the other. As Plato said, time is the moving image of eternity. According to an old idea, time is the fourth dimension. That might have sounded compelling in the 1880s when Edwin Abbott was writing about the fourth dimension in his classic book Flatland, but it’s the third dimension that is time-bound. One dimension up is the fourth dimension, which is beyond time—the timeless. Eternity is not a long period of time; it is the cessation of time. Or, we might say, time is a small subset of the fourth dimension, which underlies time in potentia.

Here’s a good one: If everything is relative, then nothing is relative. Neither of these concepts has anything to do with quantity, though we tend to think of “everything” as “a lot of things.” I can remember laughing at the logo used by a local building supply company, emblazoned in big letters, announcing that they stocked “More of Everything!” More of everything? How can you have more of everything? That’s like having less than nothing. Similarly, one wonders why we even have words like “fuller” and “emptier.” If a glass of water is full, it cannot be made fuller. Likewise, when my bank account is empty, which it usually is, it cannot be made emptier, unless you call it going into debt. These conceptual mind-benders are as absurd as expecting something that’s dead to get deader. It leads to amusing assertions such as “all people are equal but some people are more equal than others.” If life lives, does death die?

I’m belaboring these conceptual paradoxes because they are a good way to prime the rational mind for a higher perspective that is there, but it denies. It reveals a nondual state of consciousness that more accurately reflects the true nature of reality—a paradoxical integration of opposites. And the big linkup is between the Absolute and the Relative. These terms easily transpose into “timeless and time” (or “eternity and time”). The phenomenal world is constantly moving in time; eternity is the unmoving center of time. Traditional cultures live at the center; Western desacralized civilization has colonized the periphery. When you deny the transcendent center, you evict yourself from it. The eye of a hurricane is unmoving while the motion happens around it. But neither would exist without the other.

Philosophically speaking, or perhaps we should say metaphysically speaking, the appearance that all the phenomenal world is endlessly changing, its individual elements constantly coming into being and falling back into nonexistence, suggests an unchanging ground. The poets and mystics of the world have seen through the illusion of impermanence, the maya of the phenomenal world, to the underlying ground state. In accepting and embracing death, they touch immortality. This nondual perspective is the essence of the Perennial Philosophy. Revived by Rene Guenon and Ananda Coomaraswamy in the 1920s and ’30s, it was identified with Vedanta and Oriental dzog-chen teachings. Its ultimate goal is the direct experience of the nondual state. As such, it is initiatory but demands allegiance to no creed, for its only purpose is the awakening of the true nature, the divine eternal consciousness within souls that are overly attached to egoism, the mind being clouded, as it says in The Popol Vuh, like breath on a mirror. This primordial tradition can never become obsolete. Perennial wisdom can be forgotten but will eventually spring forth again. Universal truth can be ignored, but it cannot be thrown out for long.

These ideas are surprising and unpopular to modern science. We will see in the next chapter how intimately Maya teachings and Maya prophecy are connected with these ideas. The Maya worldview is much more akin to these perennial ideas than to those of modern science. Modern science and the entire modern mind-set, which the average person has been deeply indoctrinated into, has a hard time enunciating, let alone appreciating, the true depth of Maya thought. As if that wasn’t problematic enough, the debunking style of scientism that attacks the 2012 topic merely results in travesties of misinterpretation and misconception. There’s just no way, according to this prejudice, that the ancient Maya can have anything important to tell us.

The assumptions and orientation of the modern world are diametrically opposed to the values of traditional cultures and a traditional spirituality that is rooted in the perennial wisdom. The transcendent location where the perennial wisdom resides has been denied by modern science and the modern secular culture of consumerism. The ego has arisen to run indispensable cultural institutions that were once, or ideally can be, informed and run by selfless principles in which the good of the whole is the primary objective.

If this sounds far-fetched and impractical, these values were in fact outlined and made law some 230 years ago, the authors being the founding fathers of the United States of America. Even before Thomas Jefferson died he lamented the rising power of aggregate capital (what we today call “big business”). He believed that the principles and ideals of a free democracy had already met their match and begun to erode. By the early twentieth century, John Dewey observed that “politics is the shadow cast on society by big business.”²⁴ And by the early twenty-first century AIG would receive billions in taxpayer bailout money while still giving its executives million-dollar bonuses. We are definitely not in Kansas anymore, folks.

What happens to a culture that forgets the center, denies the transcendent perennial wisdom, and becomes married to an antitraditional philosophy in which ego, consumer materialism, and self-interest run the show? What happens is the fulfillment of the Maya prophecy for 2012.

CHAPTER NINE The Fulfillment of the Maya Prophecy

I am great. My place is now higher than that of the human work, the human design. I am their sun and I am their light, and I am also their months…

my light is great. I am the walkway and I am the foothold of the people, because my eyes are of metal. My teeth just glitter with jewels, and turquoise as well; they stand out blue with stones like the face of the sky.¹

—SEVEN MACAW, The Popol Vuh

We’ve already looked at the Maya Creation Mythology, known as the Hero Twin Myth or The Popol Vuh, and discovered that it expresses the Maya’s World Age doctrine. There are many Ages or cycles, and therefore many cycle endings, but the dynamics of each cycle ending are essentially the same. In the four previous eras alluded to in The Popol Vuh, the cycle ending always exposes an error in the activities, thinking, or understanding of humanity, leading to a corrective sacrifice followed by transformation and renewal as the next cycle begins. That is the fundamental structure of cyclic time, especially in relation to how human beings experience it.

The central story line of The Popol Vuh involves the exploits of the Hero Twins, and this narrative provides more intimate details of what happens as a cycle ending nears. Although not explicitly stated, the narrative applies to 2012, because mythic narratives are not historical accounts; they occur in the numinous space-time that was, is, and will be. The teachings are relevant “during cycle endings” and therefore apply to any cycle ending, including 2012. We can suspect that the Hero Twin story might speak to us, since we are living during the 2012 cycle ending. In other words, the Hero Twin story is a perennially recurring mythic drama, populated by archetypal characters, and we should be able to relate to its contents. This will be especially true if we can pierce the veil of the surface detail in the myth and get to the symbolic core of the story.

Getting to the heart of the message is important. Similarly, the “prophecy” in the story is a predictable general state of the world at the end of any World Age. It doesn’t concern itself with specific details on when and where earthquakes or asteroids are going to hit. Its symbolic or archetypal content may or may not reflect what is happening in our world. This is a test we can put to the Creation Myth. What is the Maya prophecy for 2012? Does the scenario for the cycle ending recorded in The Popol Vuh, that primary document of Maya prophetic philosophy, find confirmation in the events of the modern world? Is the ancient Maya prophecy for 2012 coming true? Let’s find out.