The Real Advent – December 21, 2012: The Gardeners’ Tale of the End and a New Beginning

Expect a hundred million gardeners to gather together today December 20 up to December 22nd, 2012.  How are they going to do this? Where? What for?

Through an unprecedented 33-hour global live webcast linking more than 40 major locations, many of today’s top cultural leaders will join together in a call for a collective shift to a new way of living.

Bestselling authors and thought leaders such as Deepak Chopra, Marianne Williamson, John Perkins, Wayne Dyer, Ram Dass, Jean Houston, Neale Donald Walsch, Don Miguel Ruiz, Jack Canfield. Michael Bernard Beckwith Shiva Rea, Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, Oscar Miro-Quesada and Mayan elders will lead this first-ever event, inspired by Mayan cosmology.

Livecast locations include dozens of locations around the globe. 

Millions will connect via 12 waves of unity that will be staged every two hours leading up to the “birth moment” at noon Pacific Time on December 22. These will include synchronized meditations, prayers, and songs worldwide, ranging from a Havdalah prayer from Jerusalem to One Billion Oms led from India and a world peace prayer ceremony from Mt. Fuji together with a global Yoga Wave at 2:00 pm Pacific on the 21st, with locations around the world singing one song. 

Many of those in the habit of celebrating Advent are joining in even more urgently. Where the word “future” can too readily suggest something growing out of the present, “Advent” points to the arrival or “coming to us” of “Something” or “Someone” bringing Source near to us, coming to enlighten and make us – giving us a free Choice: darkness or Light, fear or Love. 

The Mayan Calendar[1]

The ancient Mayan calendar is based on cycles within cycles within cycles. What happens tomorrow, December 21, 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?

Well, for starters, if one is wearing the 2012 lenses, one can’t help noticing with many of our best minds that we have been living in an unprecedented time where the greatest threats to our survival, the greatest crises and the greatest magnitude of those crises have all converged into this narrow window of time over a course of just a few years leading to tomorrow, 12.21.2012. As I write I just remembered not to exclude “Pablo,” this month’s super-typhoon that wrecked havoc in traditionally typhoon-free Mindanao, taking big numbers of lives and livelihoods in its trail – just when government seemed to have been sure about its disaster-preparedness levels.

The position of Earth within our galaxy creates powerful changes that signal the end of one world age and the beginning of the next. The knowledge of these cyclic changes is known as the doctrine of World Ages.

Does anyone know 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, they would look to us like they are moving slowly.

So what that means, scientist Braden emphasizes, is that 2012 may possibly not happen in a day, as perceived by us. The alignments that we’re talking about have been happening gradually over time rather than in a heartbeat, or a moment. So it’s not like we go to bed tonight 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 my 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.”

In fact, 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” that we were 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.

The Secret of 2012 and a New World Age

Modern science looks at the universe and sees great waves of energy pulsing across the Cosmos, making time merge with the space it travels through, moving scientists to use the term space-time. 

They also see these waves of time repeat as cycles within cycles, as already noted: “Every 5,125 years,” said Dr. Gregg Braden, summing up the views of indigenous peoples and modern science in his book Fractal Time, “the earth and our solar system reach a place in their journey through the heavens that marks the end of precisely such a cycle. With that end, a new world age begins. Apparently, it’s always been that way.”

Thus, “we’re living the end of time. Not the end of the world,” Dr. Braden emphasizes, “but the end of a world age – a 5,125 year cycle of time – and the way we’ve known the world throughout that time. The present world age began in 3114 BC and will end – in A.D. 2012,” tomorrow, December 21^st of this year to be exact.

And, “who said so?” Our ancestors — Indians writing the Mahabharata, indigenous American peoples like the Aztec and the Maya, and now modern cosmologists – scientists who study the origin and history of the universe. Of course, it’s only quite recently that modern scientists have made sense of the meaning of a world age, and they have done so only now because of technology, or the lack of it.

“More than 51 centuries ago,” going back to Dr. Braden, “our ancestors did their best to inform and warn us of what they knew would be an era of powerful transition in a future that they could only imagine in their dreams. That era is now.” In the past, world age endings have triggered cataclysmic shifts that changed the face of the earth and altered entire civilizations. Is tomorrow, 2012 –21-12 ushering in an era of chaos and destruction or a thousand years of peace and cooperation or both one after another – or something or Someone for us to freely choose?

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” of our planet 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.

If, like Astronauts, we continued such a voyage, what we’d 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, dinosaurs and all, leaving a few tiny mammals to survive and evolve us into being.

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!

Observing the heavens and their impact more closely

If we pay closer attention, as our ancestors 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 ancestors 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.

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 needed 2160 years to go to the next. Well, actually, we’re almost there in the next – the Age of Aquarius. Thus, humanity is experiencing a chance to heighten its consciousness. We should now be able 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.

One must wonder why the Maya suddenly left their temples, observatories and pyramids forever, and walked into the jungles of the Yucatan and returned to whatever it was that they had come from. What did they know in their time that we must begin to understand in ours?

Would gardeners be quite simplistic in suggesting that, for our part today the question is quite simple: how far away have we gone from an organic to a chiefly extractive way of doing and being?

The economic system is clearly one of the systems that are 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.”

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 – if we allow a global consciousness to shift to Light and Harmony and Beauty. Yes, if we embrace the technology advanced by St. Francis of Assisi who designed the first Christmas crib.

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 a new world, starting 12.22.2012 we would have signed at last a true planetary peace treaty to last us another world age. We would have made the oil wars passé, useless, funny.

It is not difficult, really. The global birthing movement is going on – adeste fideles! Let’s go, let’s join, let’s realize how one we are. Source has become flesh – a baby. The most wonderful song breaks the stillness of the night – Peace on Earth at last.

Otherwise, if we refuse to think these new thoughts that can create a new world, after all the oil wars have wrought unimaginable destruction in land and oceans, and when it would be 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 still possible, future generations, as the Maya did in their time, what the end of a world age, is all about.

But wait – it is December 21,2012. A new world is ours to choose; it is ours to share.