The Gardener’s Attempt to Point Out the Obvious
Yes this ship is moving
Fuller (odp/uoregon.edu)
Many people dream of traveling through space never ever knowing that they already are. Bucky Fuller, the scientist and inventor (Buckminster Fuller), saw it very clearly: we are hurtling through space on a giant spacecraft called Earth.
It is not easy to be aware of it because we are going at the incredible speed of 65,000 miles per hour! As if that were not enough, we are moving on whilst also spinning at more than 1,000 miles per hour.
What a traveler you are indeed! In an average life span, a human being would have finished a trip of more than 38 billion miles—the equivalent of traveling around the Sun some 76 times, or going to far away Pluto and back several times!
A camera of NASA’s robotic spacecraft that took a picture of us from that distance a few years ago only saw a pale blue dot, which you can see in your computer if you check out Carl Sagan. Yes, there we were in that pale blue dot: all humanity from the beginning to the present, all the evolutionary developments, the heroes and the villains, the different races, the agonies and the ecstasies, the wars and the peace treaties, all our smartness and stupidities, all of us across the little stretch of time in a few millennia contained in what looked like one pale blue dot from that distance – our Spaceship Earth.
The porthole of Spaceship Earth is a porous crystal 430 miles thick that allows everyone aboard to have a full view of everything outside our planet and yet still blocks out the airless outer space – unique, to say the least!
Blue Marble From NASA
And, needless to say, this craft is superbly designed to ensure the protection and sustainability of plant, animal and human life within, – life that Earth herself has spawned – unless we deliberately and foolishly do things to destroy it – which, fearfully, humans are capable of doing.
We are going on autopilot and the gravitational force of the Sun keeps us on orbit. Our atmosphere enables us to view and discover the universe around us, thus characterizing the craft as also an exploration vessel.
In our travel through space we are not moving alone but with the rest of our solar system. Some whom we call Astronauts are sometimes able to go “out” on an expensive excursion. Our moon is just 1.3 seconds away, for those who can travel at the speed of light, which is 300,000 kilometers per second, but our fastest space vehicles, Voyagers 1, and 2, could only go at 9,333 kilometers per second – so far.
EROS from solarviews.com
Continuing our voyage, what we see farther on, 7.5 light minutes away, is Eros – an asteroid about 33 kilometers long. The last time a much smaller one than that hit Earth, the sudden impact killed almost every living thing.
That huge meteor 65 million years ago, six miles wide, plunged toward Earth at 40,000 miles per hour… slamming like a cannonball into what is now Mexico, and punching a hole so deep in Earth’s crust that her molten insides erupted all over the planet, even hitting the other side in what is now India!
Jennifer Morgan – Photo by Lael Morgan
It was a super mega mega-nuclear bomb, in the staccato description by author Jennifer Morgan: huge rocks and dust exploded into the atmosphere. Tidal waves drowned all life near shores. Forest fires burnt across the globe. Rocks even vaporized in the searing heat. Sunlight couldn’t penetrate the sooty veil that blanketed the planet.
Without sunlight, plants began to die, and so plant-eaters fell, then flesh-eaters. Without animals to carry pollen and seeds, even more plants died. And every single dinosaur went into the dark night of extinction. But some mammals survived and this fortuitously led millions of years later to the emergence of our very own species – the human.
This time, though, that asteroid “out there” Eros is well behaved – posing very little danger. But one time it hit very close, – to within 75 light seconds from Earth – which inspired the production of a thriller movie (did you see Deep Impact – with Morgan Freeman?).
Traveling like this, can’t we at least ask where we are going? In space, despite those scary meteors, we are generally in what astronomers call “a safe zone,” in just the right distance from the sun to have a temperate climate, and with the whole solar system in an excellent neighborhood of stars. Our craft moves between two spiral arms of the Milky Way galaxy, far away from the dangerous galactic core, fortunately for us.
Andromeda Gallexy from solstation.com
A very remote danger lies much farther away – the Andromeda Galaxy, 2.5 million light years distant, twice as big as the Milky Way, heading towards us at 500,000 kph, and most likely to reach us in 3 billion years – to swallow or be swallowed by us. No gardener intends to be around by then.
Observing the heavens and their impact more closely
If we pay closer attention, as our forebears did, in our journey through the heavens, we will notice familiar stars and constellations changing their position in space, from our vantage point; the scenery of the night changes as we journey on.
And we will notice a circular path carrying us through 12 familiar Zodiac signs. So, the 12 constellations that we pass through in this circular path can each be assigned, as our forebears did assign each one, a piece of the circle, a 30-degree piece such that 12 constellations x (times) 30 degrees each = 360 degrees of the orbit! Cool – is really what you can say to those wise folk of old who handed down so much information through the generations across the major cultures.
Braden
According to Dr. Gregg Braden, modern satellites confirm that it takes Earth 72 years to pass through one degree of the Zodiac. Therefore to pass completely through one Zodiac sign will take 72 years x 30 degrees for a total of 2,160 years (whoever still has such a time perspective today – but our forebears did). This means our journey through all 12 constellations takes 25,625 years. This divided into five world ages, each lasting 5,125 years, in the calculations of both the ancients and us moderns.
The name we give to our time in history – one Zodiac age – is determined by which constellation provides the backdrop for the rising sun or the day of the Spring (vernal) equinox each year. Thus, we are presently in the Age of Pisces. You only need 2160 years to go to the next. We’re almost there in the next – the Age of Aquarius.
The Mayan Calendar
The ancient Mayan calendar which, by the way doesn’t end in 2012, is based on cycles within cycles within cycles. What happens in 2012 is the ending of a major cycle. Says the scholar Jose Arguelles:
For the Maya, 2012 is the ending of what is usually referred to as the Great Cycle. The Great Cycle is a 5,125-year cycle that began at their date 13.0.0.0.0 on the Mayan calendar. On the Gregorian/Julian calendar that date is August 13 B.C. 3113. What happened at that point? If you go look back in your history books you can find most Western history books say the history of civilization began about 3100 B.C.; this is just 13 years off from the Mayan Long Count, which says, “No, to be precise, according to your calendar, that would be August 13, 3113 B.C.”
On December 21, 2012 a cycle will be complete – a cycle of what the Maya called 13 baktuns. There are 13 baktuns between 3113 B.C. and 2012. A baktun is a cycle of exactly 144,000 days. Thirteen cycles of 144,000 days and you come to the completion of a cycle. This cycle is what we call the cycle of history or the cycle of civilization. This cycle is a very interesting one in the history of Earth and the evolution of the solar system, and even the history of the galaxy.
Dec. 21, 2012 also marks the ending of a larger cycle, a cycle of 26,000 years [25,625 years, to be exact, as noted above]. This is a long cycle. There is also a larger cycle than this that closes on Dec. 21, 2012: a cycle of 104,000 years. All of these cycles are coming to a conclusion or a convergent point in 2012.The climax of this cycle will occur during the seven last moons of the thirteen baktuns (June through December 2012, or right now).
So, what is this date all about? Fighting one another to sustain unsustainable life ways.
Well, for starters, if one is wearing the 2012 lenses, one can’t help notice with many of our best minds that we are living in an unprecedented time where the greatest threats to our survival, the greatest crises and the greatest magnitude of those crises are all converged into this narrow window of time over a course of just a few years leading to 12.21.2012.
No one knows for certain what the end of our world age will bring. The beginning and the end of cycles of world ages are marked by astronomical phenomena. We’re talking about alignments between solar systems and planets and galaxies. And these are huge systems that move slowly over long periods of time or, more accurately, to us they look like they are moving slowly.
So what that means, scientist Braden emphasizes, is that 2012 may possibly not happen in a day. The alignments that we’re talking about happen gradually over time rather than in a heartbeat, or a moment. So it’s not like we go to bed December 20th in one world and we wake up after midnight on December 21st and we’re in another world. In those two days, I’ll bet the garden will most probably look the same.
Let’s have a longer take from Braden:
“We actually entered into the 2012 window of change right around the year 1980… And the zone closes right around the year 2016. So … we are over halfway through the window of time and well into the changes, whatever changes we’re going to see; we’re well into those changes. The very changes that so many people are anticipating and fearing and preparing and waiting for, they’re already happening.” So we’re already living the time of abrupt climate change, certainly, and extremes of heat and cold. We’re already seeing the rise of the sea level and super storms and mega earthquakes that are wiping entire communities off the face of the earth. And we’re already seeing multiple fires raging out of control on multiple continents and diseases killing millions of people that we have no medical cure for. Those are the worst-case scenarios in so many of the predictions and prophecies that we are anticipating. Well they’re already happening.
The systems of energy that allow Earth to be Earth include not only Social, Political, and Economic Systems, but, also significantly, Geological, Meteorological, and Agricultural Systems – greatly affected by its journeys across and around the space-time cycles closely observed by our forebears in the past and increasingly confirmed by the science of today. These are all common energy systems, or patterns of energy held together by common threads of vibratory experience and these threads are shifting, Braden observed.
But then Braden also says that, as we all know, there’s more than that that’s happening:
Braden
“There are a lot of really good things happening in the world at the same time. And I think what our ancestors said to us and what we’re discovering is, a lot of how we experience this change is determined by us and where we place our focus and how we deal with the change.”
His all-important observation is, however, not in the physical phenomena:
“The great danger is in our response to the changes of the world. How do we treat one another as individuals and as a society, as a community, as nations? Those great civilizations that collapsed had been around thousands of years. They buckled and collapsed and disappeared under the stress of the change in their time that we’re seeing in ours. And what the studies are showing is that the reason they disappeared is because when they didn’t understand the change, they began to fight one another, and fight to sustain unsustainable ways of life. And that’s what led to their collapse. Whereas other civilizations that cooperated and worked together seem to fare much better as they went through their world age changes.”
The data from one United Nations’ conference after another, and daily from all the front pages of all the journals in the planet, and hourly from all the broadcast and video channels world-wide show very clearly that the changes are intense. We are definitely living a very intense time in the history of our planet.
It is a good time surely to do a cosmic reality check. Let’s look at 5,000 years of history since the last world age; find out what works and what doesn’t. The systems that begin to buckle and collapse under the stress of a changing world are the systems that are not sustainable in the long term. Without being simplistic, gardeners suggest that the whole thing is quite simple: how far away have we gone from an organic to a chiefly extractive economy?
The economic system is clearly one of the systems that is buckling under the pressure of a changing world. Dr. Braden says:
Providing electricity and power to a planet by burning a finite source of energy that actually destroys the very planet that we cherish – that may have worked for a hundred years or so, but it’s not sustainable in the long run. And that’s a system that’s being stressed and taxed right now. So we’re in a place, a very rare moment in time where a single generation is being asked to choose what kinds of technologies and what kind of a world we want to surround ourselves with as we lay the foundation for the next 5,000 years of a world age.
War and Peace
Today there’s no doubting the fact that all the major wars on the planet are oil wars – all about fighting one another to sustain unsustainable life ways.
Scientists who have studied the cycles tell us clearly that the civilizations in the past that collapsed also collapsed because of war. They fought one another at the end of the cycles and their battles are “documented” in texts and myths and stories regarding what they were all about.
Braden points not only to the Indian traditions of the Americas but also to the 100,000 line epic of the Hindu bible, the Mahabharata, which was believed to be a fairy tale until the archeological sites started revealing that a great battle did happen in the place and is now being dated at a time when we thought no history existed. The historians and scientists have found this in other places as well. They found it in South America. They find it in the deserts of Egypt and Turkey. They see great wars in the past that have ended these civilizations. Ancient Rome may not be faulted for saying, “There is nothing new under the Sun.”
make me a channel of your peace…
St. Francis of Assisi
But don’t we have control over whether or not we have that final battle or not? Yes, if we choose Life consistently, and Peace, and the beauty of the garden. Yes, if we embrace the technology advanced by St. Francis of Assisi. Science after all is about understanding and harnessing the forces of nature. So maybe it’s less about harnessing and controlling and more about working with it in a sustainable way. The natural world must be held up as the real charter of science. When this happens soon with the advent of 12.21.2012 we would have signed at last a true planetary peace treaty to last us another world age.
Otherwise, after all the oil wars have wrought unimaginable destruction in land and oceans, and when it was too late to have embraced a world-wide organic economy characterized by energy renewables, fresh agriculture and beauty, let us pray a few of us will survive to warn, if it is still possible, future generations, as the Maya did in their time, what the end of a world age, is all about. FINIS
Charles Avila
The Gardener