There is a rumor going around that at the end of the Mayan Calendar, the world will end. An alternative view is that the World Will Not End! [A third alternative is that time as we know it will end, but the world may continue merrily along -- in some fashion or another!]
Carlos Barrios [1], an historian and anthropologist, is reputed to have said that, “Other people write about prophecy in the name of the Maya. They say that the world will end in December 2012.” Barrios claims that the Mayan elders are angry about this. According to them, the world will not end. It will be transformed. There is, in fact, a difference.
The Mayan’s comprehension of time, seasons, and cycles has proven itself to be vast and sophisticated. The Maya developed 17 different calendars, some of them claiming to chart time accurately over a span of more than ten million years [But how would anyone know?]. The particular Mayan Calendar that has steadily drawn global attention since 1987 is called the Tzolk’in or Cholq’ij. This calendar was devised ages ago and is based on the cycle of the Pleiades. As such, it is held as sacred.
With indigenous calendars, native people have kept track of important turning points in history. For example, the daykeepers who studied the calendars identified an important day in the year One Reed, Ce Acatal, as it was called. That was the day when an important ancestor was prophesied to return, “coming like a butterfly.” In the western calendar, the One Reed date correlates to Easter Sunday, April 21, 1519 the day that Hernando Cortez and his fleet of 11 Spanish galleons arrived from the East at what is today called Vera Cruz, Mexico. When the Spanish ships came toward shore, native people were waiting and watching to see how it would go. The billowing sails of the ships did indeed remind the scouts of butterflies skimming the ocean surface.
This event initiated a new era, one that had been anticipated through the Mayan calendars. The Maya termed the new era: the Nine Bolomtikus, or nine Hells of 52 years each. As the nine cycles unfolded, the Mayan land and freedom were taken from the native people. Disease and disrespect dominated. What began with the arrival of Cortez, lasted until August 16, 1987 - a date many people refer to as the Harmonic Convergence. Millions of people took advantage of the latter date to share in ceremonies at sacred sites, praying for a smooth transition to a new era, the World of the Fifth Sun.
From that 1987 date until now, Mr. Barrios says, “We have been in a time when the right arm of the materialistic world is disappearing, slowly but inexorably. We are at the cusp of the era when peace begins, and people live in harmony with Mother Earth. We are no longer in the World of the Fourth Sun, but we are not yet in the World of the Fifth Sun. This is the time in-between, the time of transition. As we pass through transition there is a colossal, global convergence of environmental destruction, social chaos, war, and ongoing Earth changes.”
[All good calendar changes have transitions. They are really essential.]
All this, Mr. Barrios says, was foreseen via the simple, spiral mathematics of the Mayan calendars. “It will change,” Mr. Barrios observes. “Everything will change.” He said Mayan Daykeepers view the Dec. 21, 2012 date as a rebirth, the start of the World of the Fifth Sun. It will be the start of a new era resulting from and signified by the solar meridian crossing the galactic equator, and the earth aligning itself with the center of the galaxy. And while the so-called World of the Fourth Sun will indeed end, the result is true to the idea of Death and Rebirth. The key is not focusing on death, but on the rebirth!
At sunrise on December 21, 2012 for the first time in 26,000 years the Sun rises to conjunct the intersection of the Milky Way and the plane of the ecliptic. This cosmic cross is considered to be an embodiment of the Sacred Tree, the Tree of Life, a tree remembered in all the world’s spiritual traditions. Some observers say this alignment with the heart of the galaxy in 2012 will open a channel for cosmic energy to flow through the earth, cleansing it and all that dwells upon it, raising all to a higher level of vibration.
This process has already begun, Mr. Barrios suggested.
“Change is accelerating now, and it will continue to accelerate.” If the people of the earth can get to this 2012 date in good shape, without having destroyed too much of the Earth, Mr. Barrios said, we will rise to a new, higher level.