“For millennia, mankind had wandered in the darkness…but now, as had been prophesied, there was a change coming...Mankind has reached a crossroads…predicted long ago, prophesied by the ancient texts, by the primeval calendars, and even by the stars themselves. The date was specific, its arrival imminent...”
—Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol

The Long Count calendar from the Central America Maya started on August 11, 3114 BC and will end in a couple of years., How did these ancient peoples have such a sophisticated sense of time far beyond anything known today and what do their prophecies predict?

Astonishingly, not only the Maya singled out this date, now looming so close. Similar Last Days prophecies are found from the Hopi, Navajo, Cherokee, Apache, ancient Egyptians, Kabbalists, Essenes, Qero elders of Peru, Subsaharan Dogon tribe and the Australian Aborigines.

Over the last 50 years, many scientists have presented cataclysmic theories of what is to come - magnetic pole shifts, galactic core explosion and earth crust displacement, as featured in the Movie, 2012.  For the first time in 26,000 years, our sun and Earth align with the galactic centre of our Milky Way galaxy.

The entire 5,125- year cycle - merely an instant of geological time – is just phase we’re going through. This phase complete, a new evolutionary stage will begin. This is known as the noosphere, the mind of Earth. If we choose to evolve, we can now think and act as a single planetary organism and co-create our future together. A planetary consciousness will emerge, bringing not destruction, but, at long last, universal peace.

THE RADICAL REVOLUTION OF MIND

“We were saying how very important it is to bring about in the human mind the radical revolution. The crisis is the crisis in consciousness, a crisis that cannot anymore accept the old norms, the old patterns, the ancient traditions, and continuing what the world is now, with all the misery, conflict, destructive brutality, aggression and so on. Man is still as he was, is still brutal, violent, aggressive, acquisitive, competitive, and he has built a society along these lines.

“What we’re trying to do in all these discussions and talks is to see if we cannot radically bring about the transformation of the mind, not accept things as they are but understand it, examine it, give your heart and your mind with a thinking out a way of living differently.

“But, it depends on you not somebody else, because in this there is no teacher, no pupil. There’s no leader. There’s no guru. There’s no master, no savior. You are the teacher the pupil, the leader, the guru of everything and to understand is to transform.”

—J. Krishnamurti, a quote from the powerful film Zeitgeist Addendum and free through Google at: click to watch

The Great Challenge Facing Humanity:
Collective Ego and Amnesia

It’s said that those who forget the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them.

Myths from all around the world speak of a golden age of humanity brought to an abrupt end by our own arrogance, greed and overweening lust for power. The Atlantis story is not alone in this respect but one of hundreds of similar “myths” that testify to a great forgotten episode in human prehistory – a civilization with advanced technological accomplishments that severed its connections to its own spiritual roots and thus “angered the gods”, “lost the mandate of heaven” and was destroyed.

Destroyed so completely, Plato says, that the survivors had to begin again like children with almost no memory of what went before.

Is ours the next lost civilization? Will what we have built and created with our global scientific culture be swept away, lost beneath the sea or ground to dust and scattered by the winds? Will we be remembered in some future age for our flying machines, our ability to travel thousands of miles in a single day, even to reach the moon and planets, our magical devices in which we were able to witness distant events, our almost unbelievable technology, our unimaginable wealth and abundance – as though from a time when the gods walked the earth? Will we be looked back on as a people who lived through a golden age and squandered it utterly?

In mythical terms, it has to be said, such an outcome looks chillingly likely. For it is hard to imagine a civilization that has more completely severed its connections to the spiritual roots of all being than our own – a society that fells the sacred rainforests and replaces them with soya bean farms, a society that preserves not only the wealth and privileges of the few but also the grinding poverty and suffering of the many, a society that makes war with terrible weapons and spreads hatred like a virus across the planet, a society that has forgotten how to love.

Perhaps this was why the ancient Maya, keepers of a calendar of unknown origin and surpassing technological complexity, chose to transmit a warning to us? Perhaps as their great visionaries journeyed through the dimension of time they saw this defining moment that we call 21 December 2012 and mapped it out for us in order to alert us to the doom that we alone – not the universe, not blessed mother earth – have the power to bring down on our own heads.

And perhaps it is not too late. For if the Maya were able to peer into the future then they will have also seen that nothing is inevitable, that the power of choice remains with us – each one of us as individuals, each society, each alliance of nations and ultimately the whole of mankind. So although it cannot be doubted that we do indeed stand at a crossroads today, the Maya also saw that we are not compelled to choose the road that leads to ruin and destruction.

But a new state of consciousness will have to be birthed amongst us if we are to avert disaster – if we are to take the right road, the good road, that leads to a brighter tomorrow. And this is entirely possible, not in the blink of an eye, not without hard work and dedication, but nonetheless possible.

It will be on these matters that I will speak at the 2012 Tipping Point Conference to be held in the Yucatan, Mexico, 22-24 January 2010. I am privileged to be part of a unique line-up of speakers including John Major Jenkins, perhaps the world’s leading expert on the science behind the Mayan calendar and its underlying spiritual roots, Daniel Pinchbeck and Jose Arguelles, visionaries of the new age, and Stanislav Grof whose lifetime of dedicated exploration of the mysteries of human consciousness has helped to chart a new way forward for mankind.

Conference details, schedule and speakers at:
www.greatmystery.org/events/cancun2012.html

Warm best wishes and seasons greetings to all,

Graham Hancock, the groundbreaking author of international bestsellers The Sign and The Seal, Fingerprints of the Gods and Heaven's Mirror, questioning humanity's history with an increasingly popular challenge to the entrenched views of orthodox scholars.