by Carl Johan Calleman
About eight years ago John Major Jenkins and I had a debate about the meaning of the Mayan calendar end date focusing especially on whether the energies of the Long Count ends on October 28, 2011 or December 21, 2012. This still remains the most important question anybody interested in the “2012 phenomenon” is faced with, but while at the time the debate might have seemed theoretical, or even hairsplitting, it is now a question that has very significant and practical consequences as to how we relate to the future. While many would like to sweep the end date question under the rug or sit on the fence, no one can do so with their intellectual integrity intact. Since that debate Jenkins has appeared on a History Channel documentary where December 21 2012 is presented as a predetermined “doomsday” when the world is going to come to an end. I get quite a few letters, sometimes from young people that worry that the world will come to an end at this date since they have seen this documentary posted on YouTube. While most knowledgeable people would probably reject this way of presenting the Mayan calendar it is still important to ask the question who benefits from it. I feel there are indeed many people, also apart from the participants in such documentaries that benefit from the claim that the Mayan calendar ends December 21, 2012. Thus, I do not think that it is an accident that we do not hear of the October 28, 2011 date in public media. To begin with, as far as I know no one who adheres to the end date of October 28, 2011 has ever presented this as a predetermined doomsday and thus unduly associated the Mayan calendar with fear.
Since the abovementioned debate two different intellectual cultures have emerged around the two possible end dates, one based on belief (December 21, 2012) and one based on evidence (October 28, 2011). These two cultures are about as different from one another as any one of them is from that using the Gregorian calendar. The proposal of the December 21, 2012 date is based on the unproven belief that the precessional cycle actually means something for human evolution, and, amazingly, as far as I know no one advocating this end date seems to have even bothered to try to prove this basic assumption. In contrast, the October 28, 2011 date is based on massive scientific evidence that the Nine Underworlds and Thirteen Heavens known from ancient Mayan sources indeed describe cosmic evolution in all of its aspects. Moreover, while there is extensive evidence that the Maya based prophecy and prediction on shifts between baktuns, katuns, tuns etc, not a single ancient Mayan text mentions the 26,000 year precessional cycle. Since those advocating the December 21, 2012 end date do not identify shift points in the Mayan calendar leading up to their end date their hypothesis is however not testable from the predictions made, which is the hallmark of any serious scientific theory. Hence, it must be qualified as belief rather than
science. Based on nothing more than belief a culture has subsequently emerged around the December 21, 2012 date, since it serves as an ideal projection screen for fantasies, fears and hopes rather than something that can be proven and understood scientifically based on the patterns of the Mayan calendar.
The October 28, 2011 end date can however be rationally understood. It has also been verified by several predictions, most recently my own that an economic collapse would set in and when it would do so: Regardless of what forms such a [financial] collapse may take it seems that the best bet is for it to occur close to the time that the Fifth NIGHT begins, in November 2007 [strictly speaking the 19th] (The Mayan Calendar and the Transformation of Consciousness, page 233). In accordance with this prediction economists now agree that it began in December of 2007, see Figure 1). This prediction was actually formulated already in my first book in English, Solving the Greatest Mystery of Our Time: The Mayan Calendar written in 1999 and published in 2001 (page 187). This is really a direct parallel to Edgar Cayce’s famous prediction of the time for the New York stock exchange crash, in this case however made about ten years in advance, and so was made much earlier than any professional economist even considered such an economic meltdown. I however do not claim to have some unusual psychic abilities, and instead this prediction attests to the fact that with the right end date, October 28, 2011 the mystery of the Mayan calendar has been exactly solved. That these predictions were accurate can be verified by anyone, who cares to examine the relevant pages in my books. In contrast no one who claimed that the end date of the Mayan calendar is December 21, 2012 made any similar prediction and can mostly not credit themselves with having made one single accurate prediction based on the Mayan calendar. Already this should be a red flag for anyone looking for a way to understand the evolution of civilization based on the Mayan calendar.
Before going into the more practical consequences of adhering to the evidence-based or a belief-based interpretation of the Mayan calendar I however think that it is necessary to discuss the nature of time and what it is that makes the Mayan calendar special. It is in other words important to know whether we have any reason to concern ourselves with the Mayan calendar in the first place. Why is it that unlike all other calendars the Mayan calendar has an end date? The answer to this is that the Mayan calendar expresses an entirely different kind of time than other calendars. Most calendars, such as the Gregorian, Muslim, Buddhist or Jewish calendars, are based on astronomical cycles and reflect continuous time. They describe measurable mechanic time, the aspect of time that the Greek would call Chronos, which is also the only one that is recognized in the modern world. Since astronomical cycles, whether they are cycles of the moon, the earth or the precessional cycle, will continue over the next billions of years or so there is however no reason that calendars
continue...
Thanks Lynne
