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INNER AWARENESS
Inner Awareness :
Will the world end in 2012?
By Jaime Licauco
Columnist
Inquirer
Posted date: September 03, 2007
MANILA, Philippines—The Mayan
calendar predicted the world would end Dec. 21, 2012. Is this true?
Yes, the world, as we know it,
will definitely end on that date, but it will not be the end of the
world.
I hesitated to write this
article because I did not want to scare people. But I was told by an
angelic being that I must.
This article began on my way
back to Manila from Poland. In a big book and electronics store at the
Amsterdam airport, two titles caught my attention: “The End of Time,
the Mayan Prophecies Revisited” by Adrian Gilbert and “Building Your
Mental Muscle.”
The mysterious Mayan
civilization flourished in meso America then disappeared without a
trace. It left fabulous temples, pyramids and other strange monuments
with stranger writings.
The Mayans always fascinated
me. The amazing calendar they left behind traced the precise movements
of the planets and the stars without using any instruments. It
described the present earth cycle from Aug. 11, 3114 BC, to Dec. 21,
2012.
Back in Manila, I got a copy
of an article by novelist Benjamin Anastas about the Mayan prophecies,
reprinted from the New York Times, from my neighbor Ricky Gonzales, a
management consultant. I was struck by the coincidence.
Escalating phenomenon
The article tells about the
growing interest in recent years about doomsday scenarios as predicted
by the Mayan calendar.
“The Mayan calendar,”
according to the article, “is at the center of an escalating cultural
phenomenon, with New Age roots, that unites numinous (spiritual)
dreams of societal transformation with the darker tropes of biblical
cataclysm. To some, 2012 will bring the end of time; to others, it
carries the promise of a new beginning; still to others, 2012 provides
an explanation for troubling new realities—environmental change, for
example, that seem beyond the control of technology and impervious to
reason.”
Predictions about the end of
the world is nothing new. Ancient Gnostics, for example, predicted the
arrival of God’s kingdom as early as the first century. Christians in
Europe attacked pagan territories in the north to prepare for the end
of the world in the first millennium.
The Shakers believed the world
would end in 1792. The Jehovah’s Witnesses have set the end dates from
1914-1994.
“Any religious movement with
an end-time prophecy is certain to attract followers,” says Anastas.
In the Philippines, a
religious cult believed the world would end Dec. 31, 1999. Its members
went inside a cave in Tagaytay wearing helmets and waited for the end
that never came.
A few years before that, a
retired military officer predicted the world would be destroyed and
two-thirds of the population would perish. The other one-third would
be taken by UFOs (unidentified flying objects) through a beam of
light.
Different
With all these failed
prophecies, why is the Mayan calendar prediction attracting a growing
following even in the scientific community? Is there something
different about it?
Yes, according to experts.
John Major Jenkins says the
Mayan lineage goes back to 2000 years. He argues that the ancient Maya
“calendar priests” charted a 26,000-year astronomical cycle, called
precession of the equinoxes, with the naked eye.
The 2012 end-date coincides
with the “galactic alignment” of the winter solstice sun and the axis
that modern astronomers draw to bisect the Milky Way, called the
galactic equator.
Adrian Gilbert, in his book
“The End of Time,” says, “Not only is the night of 21-22 December the
longest in the year, but because of the precession of the equinoxes it
corresponds with the day the sun stands exactly at one of the
star-gate crossing-points of the elliptic with the median plane of the
Milky Way.”
Gilbert names this position
the “southern star gate—its counterpart, the northern star gate being
placed exactly over the up stretched hand of Orion.”
Precession refers to the “slow
movement of the axis of a spinning object around another axis.”
Equinox is “the time the sun crosses the celestial equator, when day
and night are of equal length.”
Gilbert says this means on
Dec. 22, any person observing the sun will also be looking toward the
core of the Milky Way, the place astronomers say has a black hole with
a mass some three million times that of our sun.
Gilbert believes what was
prophesied in the Book of Revelations is already happening, coinciding
with the Mayan calendar. “This moment,” says Gilbert, “when the sun is
located at the southern star gate and Orion, with its northern star
gate, is dominant in the night sky, will signify the termination of
the tribulation prophesied in the Book of Revelation and the true
beginning of a new age.”
Note: For
inquiries on Inner Mind Development, ESP and Intuition Development,
and Soulmates, Karma & Reincarnation seminars by this writer, call
8107245, 8926806, fax 8159890, or e-mail innerawareness_2005@yahoo.com.ph.
For Davao seminar Sept. 29 and Oct. 1, call Jess Saplala at
0917-8313649.
