What Will Happen on December 21, 2012?

What Will Happen on December 21, 2012?

What we perceive from our vantage point of being in human form is only a teeny sliver of the infinite swirl of interpenetrating realities that make up the universe. To us, there is a past, present, and future. Time appears to move predictably from moment to moment forming the days and years of our lives. 2012 is a real date on our calendars and each of the possible scenarios can be seen to be advancing steadily toward it like racehorses to the finish line.

If you were to ask the "2012 End-of-the-World" question of a gifted psychic, she (or he) would gaze into several of the parallel universes making up our possible futures and report back on the one that seemed to be the most vivid. This is like a handicapper picking the favorite in a particular race. Just as in horse racing, the favorite often wins or comes close. But, not always. On any given day, one of the long shots might cross the line first while the favorite trails the field.

From a cosmic perspective, picking the winning scenario is easy. Understanding the nature of how this can be done is considerably more elusive. Infinity is impossible to grasp in finite terms. When we pose a finite question in an infinite realm, it's like trying to cram a herd of stampeding elephants into a matchbox. It won't be the lack of effort that defeats us, but the minuscule size of the container we are trying to use. Our minds are the matchbox. We are going to have to think way out of the box to begin to grasp the answer to how our world will fare on December 21, 2012.

Global Focus

The simple answer is that every one of the possible scenarios you can envisage will find expression in one or more of the myriad parallel universes that manifests in every instant. And that includes the date spoken about by so many as the moment our world will come to an end.

What adds weight to this date is the fact that with each passing hour more people are becoming aware of it, adding their energies to the consensus. We have already seen the power of agreement at work in events such as World Healing Day, The Harmonic Convergence and other similar moments of global focus. It was not the calendar date that created the power; it was the cohesive intent of those who took part.

Ancient Cultures Share 2012 Prophecy

Having said that, it is no mere coincidence that so many disparate cultures all around the world, that have had no known contact with one another, should focus on the same date.

There is increasing evidence that the time leading up to the final solstice of 2012 does mark the presence of an energy portal that has never before been accessible to the human race. Each of us is being offered an opportunity to shift that may not again arise in thousands of years to come.

Whether December 21, 2012 actually marks an immutable cosmological event or becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy is moot. There is no question that it looms as a very significant moment.

What concerns most people, is how they and their loved ones will be affected. At one end of the bell-curve of probabilities is total physical annihilation. At the opposite end is the arrival of the Golden Age we all dream about. Every other conceivable possibility lies between them. Somewhere near the center of the curve most people will find their most likely scenario in which the monumental moment will pass quietly like Y2K and their lives will appear to continue as if nothing happened at all.

December 22, 2012 will dawn as clocks continue to tick and the human race continues to move one day closer to whatever future harvest it has sown. That doesn't mean that many other people, who live their lives at the extremities of the curve, won't experience radically different events.

Deciding Your Fate in 2012

Imagine if you will, that you are in the center of a vast central train station.

The tracks are arranged like the spokes of a giant wheel, each moving away from the center in a different direction. The trains are all scheduled to depart at the same moment on December 21, 2012.

Every human being on Earth is at the station; free to board any of the trains he or she chooses. Each train is destined for a different parallel universe in which one of the innumerable possibilities is played out.

You (like everyone else) are at the station and must get on one of an almost infinite number of trains. But, like the psychic, you can only see one or two of them. Your choices appear meager — almost as if you had no choice at all and your future was determined totally by fate. Such is not the case at all — unless, of course, you allow it to be.

If you remember the station scene in the Harry Potter books (or movies) in which the wizard children were able to board the Hogwarts Express on platform 9 3/4 by walking straight through a concrete pillar, then you will begin to see how all this works. What is delightfully easy for wizards is equally impossible for muggles (non-wizards).

The Hogwarts Express is bound for the next dimension — the Golden Age of our dreams. The problem is that until you become a wizard, you have no way of finding the right platform. The world, as you know it, will definitely end on December 21, 2012, if that's what you choose. You will definitely be there when it happens, seated on one of the infinite number of trains leaving the station. Every one of us will be required to be on board.

Now that you know where you will be on the day the world ends, you get to decide which train you'd like to ride. There is still time (according to the calendars of this illusion) before the trains must leave the station. Plenty of time for you to leave your muggle world behind and become the wizard you already are. The choice, as always, is yours.

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Jean-Claude Koven is a Rancho Mirage, CA based writer and speaker. He is the author of Going Deeper: How to Make Sense of Your Life When Your Life Makes No Sense, the Allbooks Reviews editor's choice for the best metaphysical book

Breakaway Continents Will Destroy Civilization

Breakaway Continents Will Destroy Civilization

In some 2012 doomsday prophecies, the Earth becomes a deathtrap as it undergoes a "pole shift."

The planet's crust and mantle will suddenly shift, spinning around Earth's liquid-iron outer core like an orange's peel spinning around its fleshy fruit.

2012, the movie, envisions a Maya-predicted pole shift, triggered by an extreme gravitational pull on the planet—courtesy of a rare "galactic alignment"—and by massive solar radiation destabilizing the inner Earth by heating it.

Breakaway oceans and continents dump cities into the sea, thrust palm trees to the poles, and spawn earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, and other disasters. (Interactive: )

Scientists dismiss such drastic scenarios, but some researchers have speculated that a subtler shift could occur—for example, if the distribution of mass on or inside the planet changed radically, due to, say, the melting of ice caps.

Princeton University geologist Adam Maloof has extensively studied pole shifts, and tackles this 2012 myth in a National Geographic Channel documentary airing Sunday, November 8. (The National Geographic Society owns National Geographic News and part-owns the National Geographic Channel.)

Maloof says magnetic evidence in rocks confirm that continents have undergone such drastic rearrangement, but the process took millions of years—slow enough that humanity wouldn't have felt the motion .

2012 MYTH 3
Galactic Alignment Spells Doom

Some sky-watchers believe 2012 will close with a "galactic alignment," which will occur for the first time in 26,000 years (for example, see the Web site .

In this scenario, the path of the sun in the sky would appear to cross through what, from Earth, looks to be the midpoint of our galaxy, the Milky Way, which in good viewing conditions appears as a cloudy stripe across the night sky.

Some fear that the lineup will somehow expose Earth to powerful unknown galactic forces that will hasten its doom—perhaps through a "pole shift" (see above) or the stirring of the supermassive black hole at our galaxy's heart.

Others see the purported event in a positive light, as heralding the dawn of a new era in human consciousness.

NASA's Morrison has a different view.

"There is no 'galactic alignment' in 2012," he said, "or at least nothing out of the ordinary."

He explained that a type of "alignment" occurs during every winter solstice, when the sun, as seen from Earth, appears in the sky near what looks to be the midpoint of the Milky Way.

Horoscope writers may be excited by alignments, Morrison said. But "the reality is that alignments are of no interest to science. They mean nothing," he said. They create no changes in gravitational pull, solar radiation, planetary orbits, or anything else that would impact life on Earth.

The speculation over alignments isn't surprising, though, he said.

"Ordinary astronomical phenomena are imbued with a sense of threat by people who already think the world is going to end."

Regarding galactic alignments, that "no ancient Maya text or artwork makes reference to anything of the kind."

Even so, the end date of the current Long Count cycle—winter solstice 2012—may be evidence of Maya astronomical skill, said Aveni, the archaeoastronomer.

"I don't rule out the likelihood that astronomy played a role" in the selection of 2012 as the cycle's terminus, he said.

Maya astronomers built observatories and, by observing the night skies and using mathematics, learned to accurately predict eclipses and other celestial phenomena. Aveni notes that the start date of the current cycle was likely tied to a solar zenith passage, when the sun crosses directly overhead, and its terminal date will fall on a December solstice, perhaps by design.

These choices, he said, may indicate that the Maya calendar is tied to seasonal agricultural cycles central to ancient survival.

2012 MYTH 4
Planet X Is on a Collision Course With Earth

Some say it's out there: a mysterious Planet X, aka Nibiru, on a collision course with Earth—or at least a disruptive flyby.

A direct hit would obliterate Earth, it's said. Even a near miss, some fear, could shower Earth with deadly asteroid impacts hurled our way by the planet's gravitational wake.

Could such an unknown planet really be headed our way in 2012, even just a little bit?

Well, no.

"There is no object out there," NASA astrobiologist Morrison said. "That's probably the most straightforward thing to say."

The origins of this theory actually predate widespread interest in , the Nibiru doomsday was originally predicted for 2003.

"If there were a planet or a brown dwarf or whatever that was going to be in the inner solar system three years from now, astronomers would have been studying it for the past decade and it would be visible to the naked eye by now," Morrison said.

"It's not there."

2012 MYTH 5
Solar Storms to Savage Earth

In some 2012 disaster scenarios, our own sun is the enemy.

Our friendly neighborhood star, it's rumored, will produce lethal eruptions of solar flares, turning up the heat on Earthlings.

Solar activity waxes and wanes according to approximately 11-year cycles. Big flares can indeed damage communications and other Earthly systems, but scientists have no indications the sun, at least in the short term, will unleash storms strong enough to fry the planet.

"As it turns out the sun isn't on schedule anyway," NASA astronomer Morrison said. "We expect that this cycle probably won't peak in 2012 but a year or two later."

2012 MYTH 6
Maya Had Clear Predictions for 2012

If the Maya didn't expect the end of time in 2012, what exactly did they predict for that year?

Many scholars who've pored over the scattered evidence on Maya monuments say the empire didn't leave a clear record predicting that anything specific would happen in 2012.

The Maya did pass down a graphic—though undated—end-of-the-world scenario, described on the final page of a circa-1100 text known as the Dresden Codex. The document describes a world destroyed by flood, a scenario imagined in many cultures and probably experienced, on a less apocalyptic scale, by ancient peoples .

Aveni, the archaeoastronomer, said the scenario is not meant to be read literally—but as a lesson about human behavior.

He likens the cycles to our own New Year period, when the closing of an era is accompanied by frenetic activities and stress, followed by a rebirth period, when many people take stock and resolve to begin living better.

In fact, Aveni says, the Maya weren't much for predictions.

"The whole timekeeping scale is very past directed, not future directed," he said. "What you read on these monuments of the Long Count are events that connected Maya rulers with ancestors and the divine.

"The farther back you can plant your roots in deep time the better argument you can make that you're legit," Aveni said. "And I think that's why these Maya rulers were using Long Count time.

"It's not about a fixed prediction about what's going to happen."

End of the World

maya calender

Maya Predicted End of the World in 2012

The Maya calendar doesn't end in 2012, as some have said, and the ancients never viewed that year as the time of the end of the world, archaeologists say.

But December 21, 2012, (give or take a day) was nonetheless momentous to the Maya.

"It's the time when the largest grand cycle in the Mayan calendar—1,872,000 days or 5,125.37 years—overturns and a new cycle begins," said Anthony Aveni, a Maya expert and archaeoastronomer at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York.

The Maya kept time on a scale few other cultures have considered.

During the empire's heyday, the Maya invented the Long Count—a lengthy circular calendar that "transplanted the roots of Maya culture all the way back to creation itself," Aveni said.

During the 2012 winter solstice, time runs out on the current era of the Long Count calendar, which began at what the Maya saw as the dawn of the last creation period: August 11, 3114 B.C. The Maya wrote that date, which preceded their civilization by thousands of years, as Day Zero, or 13.0.0.0.0.

In December 2012 the lengthy era ends and the complicated, cyclical calendar will roll over again to Day Zero, beginning another enormous cycle.

"The idea is that time gets renewed, that the world gets renewed all over again—often after a period of stress—the same way we renew time on New Year's Day or even on Monday morning," said Aveni,