John Jenkins - The 2012 Story

Scholars and New Agers should move their thoughts beyond the prerational and rational stages of psychological development. They have become locked in a staring contest, failing to see a higher level of consciousness where their dualistic standoff can be reconciled and a direct experience of transformation and renewal can occur. According to the perennial wisdom at the root of the recovered 2012 teachings, the key to facilitating that renewal is, as it is for any cycle ending, sacrifice. This isn’t rocket science, it just requires taking a step in the right direction and doing what needs to be done.

As for my own work to recover the lost cosmology connected with the origins of the 2012 calendar, there is more evidence for it now than there was fifteen years ago when I first put it on the table. Recent breakthroughs by scholars themselves are supporting a simple idea: The 13-Baktun cycle ending in 2012 was intended to target the rare precession-caused alignment of the solstice sun with the dark rift in the Milky Way. That’s the “end-date alignment theory” stripped down to its basics. I suspect that this work will continue to matter, and to be added to, long after 2012 has passed. I never intended or expected it to be conflated with misconceived apocalyptic madness, or enlisted into serving a dozen different doomsday devices. But I did suspect that it was generally on target and would one day be subsumed into Maya studies, with or without credit to its originator.

It’s likely that many of the curious people entering the 2012 topic are not going to care much for those details. They hear tell that 2012 is about transcendence, tripping, a new generation’s reimagining of Woodstock Meets Burning Man. If people are merely wanting to know where the party is going to be, they should think twice about the impact their celebration is going to have on the sacred sites they’d like to visit, and double-check if their intentions are congruent with what 2012 is really about—transformation and renewal. I don’t mean to rain on anyone’s parade, but if the end-of-time party planners invite Eternity (you’d think they would, right?), they better make sure there will be enough room in the parking lot. I hear Eternity will be bringing some friends.

This is one of the more hilarious and perplexing questions that I am supposed to respond to. I’ve given as many answers as times it’s been asked. What can you say? “I don’t know, I can’t predict the future.” “Right here.” “In the Now.” “Everywhere and nowhere.” How about this one: “I’ve already been there.” The reasons I’m not playing that game are many. First off, someone has to clean up after the party. That ensures that class divisions (worker bees serving party monsters) will survive the shift. Second, I’ve tried to envision what the ultimate cool “end of the world” partay would look like, and my mind meanders over various absurd scenarios. Let’s see… I could parachute into the Great Ballcourt at Chichén Itzá, ritually deflower a virgin, and throw her into the cenote while 100,000 people throng around the Pyramid of Kukulcan. I could wear a top hat and be the ringleader of the 2012 circus, a cosmogenesis carnival replete with requisite freaks and fantasias.

No one should be on center stage! Any expectation of me personally is antithetical to the ego-transcendence that I believe is a central idea in the 2012 spiritual teaching. I may be the ultimate party pooper when I explain that I’ve never seen the specific day as having any predetermined or inherent significance for those who are around to experience it, apart from its being an authentic calendrical artifact. And having to be somewhere at a specific time in order to experience eternity—I don’t know, it seems as counterproductive as consumerism has been to Christmas. The last thing I’d want to deal with is an event the Seven Macaws of mass media could have their way with.

Perhaps it is better to say where I don’t want to be. The scenario I’d like to avoid is thousands of seekers descending, Harmonic Convergence-style, on Maya sites that shall remain nameless. The postparty cleanup and repair that a tug-of-war between anarchist apocalyptarians and ascension acolytes would entail is too much to contemplate. The violations of local laws, confrontations with misunderstanding officials, and the bad mojo generated with local populations are not things that party planners are likely to anticipate or even care about. These are real concerns. It could be the biggest crazy party you ever wished that you never went to. Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll are probably not going to be applicable as a hoped-for salvation. If they are, then 2012 really will be a time-travel portal, as some have suggested. Many might be expecting to party like it’s 1967, even if they weren’t yet alive in that “summer of love.”

It should be clear by now that no one should be future projecting to December 21, 2012, waiting around for “the thing to happen.” To plan a gala affair on that date is the least productive behavior I could imagine, but it is bound to happen. So, what can we expect? Well, we can expect the typical media exposés, crass condemnation by clueless commentators, and throwing the entire 2012 baby out with the bathwater. The mere presence of the all-seeing eye of Big Brother would likely bring about a buzz-kill, and the Eschaton, the transcendental object at the end of time, could decide to remain in hiding. Even good intentions have a built-in catch-22. If we focus all our collective conscious energy on having an ego-transcending mind-orgy of blissed-out oneness on December 21, 2012, we are likely to catalyze the opposite collective shadow—a lunatic with a dirty bomb who will also be counting down the days, seeking to keep Seven Macaw in power.

Something new and surprising may nevertheless emerge. Let’s remember that emergence is attended by a sense of emergency, and this is a hallmark of spiritual awakening. We may even call it a crisis, a crossroads, a collective crucifixion as we ride the wave of earth’s apotheosis, awakening to the sacredness of the living sanctuary that our ancestors simply called “home.”

Whenever a profound experience of change is about to take place, its harbinger is the motif of death. This is not particularly mysterious, since it is the limited view and appraisal of oneself that must be outgrown or transformed, and to accomplish transformation the self-image must dissolve. 2

Clearly, the pathway through to the other side is to embrace death rather than fight it. This was the beautiful and profound message of Darren Aronofsky’s movie The Fountain , which deftly wove Maya themes together with this perennial teaching: Eternity cannot be found by living forever; it is found only when death is embraced . This is what was meant in the movie by Izzi Creo’s mysterious refrain: “Finish it.” The specter of death does not have to breed fear; it invites, rather, a meditation on mortality and a fuller appreciation for life. The paradox of this advice is well known to spiritual guides who facilitate the rebirth passage for people in crisis. The advice applies to 2012, which is the screen upon which the urgent fear of world cataclysm is being projected. The psychodrama of personal dissolution is a microcosm of larger portents.

Psychologist John Weir Perry observed the process: “In times of acute and rapid culture change, visionaries undergo the shattering experience of seeing the world dissolve into a chaos and time whirl back to its beginnings… dissolution of the world image is the harbinger of change. Expressions of cultural reform are explicit.” 3The crisis of change is throbbing with urgency; we feel the impending juncture of something awesome and profound on the horizon, but when, when, when? Death or birth? Both processes are utterly and completely interwoven, and if you embrace their hieros gamos , or sacred marriage, your passage to a new reality is ensured. Yes, an old world fades, but a new one appears. Here we see how the term “apocalypse” is best understood in its original etymological sense: it means “unveiling.” What is unveiled, or revealed? The dang an sich , the thing-in-itself, that which is, was, and will always be: Reality.