Anonymous

Chapter One

Chaos Point 2012: Science and Prophecy

Dr. Ervin Laszlo

There is a growing wave of thinking that associates the coming of a chaos point with the famous end of 2012 date. Some people contest this assumption and go as far as to claim that all talk of a chaos point is mistaken; the world as it is today will not change, at least not in our lifetime. Others take the contrary view; they claim that it’s already too late: the chaos point has already been passed. This is the view expressed by, among others, James Lovelock, the British scientist who, thirty years ago, worked out how the Earth possesses a planetary-scale control system that keeps it fit for life (the ‘Gaia hypothesis’).

Lovelock maintains that the ‘Gaia system’ is out of control. ‘I think we have little option,’ he wrote in The Revenge of Gaia (February, 2006), ‘but to prepare for the worst, and assume that we have passed the threshold. The Earth’s physical condition must be seen as seriously ill and soon to pass into a morbid fever that may last as long as 100,000 years.’ The principal reason for this pessimistic assessment is global warming. The heating up of the atmosphere will create ‘a hell of a climate.’ The average temperature will rise 8 degrees centigrade in temperate regions and 5 degrees in the tropics.

Is Lovelock right—have we reached a catastrophic chaos point already? When we take a closer look at his argument, we find room for a more positive assessment. Lovelock’s reasoning about the dynamics of the Earth’s physical-biological systems is sound, but he doesn’t recognize that not only nature, but also humanity, is a dynamic system on the threshold of a chaos point. Human societies, the same as the planetary ecologies, are not infinitely stressable. Sooner or later they reach the point where they tip one way or another. When that chaos point is reached, they become ultra-sensitive and capable of rapid transformation. The dangers, as well as the opportunities conveyed by chaos points, apply to natural as well as to human systems.

Will the coming of a chaos point in human societies coincide with the famous 2012 prophecies? Many people say so, but such claims need to be substantiated. For the most part, the claims refer to esoteric prophecies coming from traditional cultures. These may convey important information and merit being known. But is there scientific evidence to back them up?

The Prophecies

The most famous of the prophecies that speak of the end of 2012 as a critical point in human life and civilization is undoubtedly that of the Mayans. The Mayans viewed civilization as a cyclic process, where shifts from one phase of the cycle to the next occur at measurable intervals.

The cyclic concept of the world was not unique to the Mayans. Cycles exist everywhere in nature and have been recognized in almost all cultures. In the biosphere some cycles are daily, others seasonal or annual. Roughly twenty-four-hour circadian cycles govern many of our bodily functions in accordance with the alternation of day and night. Menstrual cycles average twenty-eight days, and the ebb and flow of tidal waters reflect the changing positions of the Moon and Sun relative to the Earth. Solar cycles displayed by the frequency of sunspots last about eleven years, with the solar maximum and solar minimum recurring in each cycle.

Cycles have been perceived in history as well. In traditional cultures, they were seen as the advent and passing of ‘Great Ages’. These include the astrological Great Year, which lasts just under twenty-six thousand years (based on the precession of the equinoxes), as well as the Yugas of Hindu philosophy, a cosmic epoch with a cycle of dark and golden ages: the Kaly yuga (Iron Age), the Dwapara yuga (Bronze Age), Treta yuga (Silver Age), and Satya yuga (Golden Age). Many myths speak of celestial cycles, and many civilizations have attempted to map their principal transitions. Celestial calendars were a major reference for life in many parts of the world. One of the most famous of these calendars is the Tzolk’in calendar, a 260-day Mesoamerican system that was known to the Mayans.

Modern historians, among them Arnold Toynbee and Pitirim Sorokin, had also advanced a cyclic interpretation of history. Toynbee viewed civilization as a movement rather than a condition, exhibiting a ‘life cycle’ where eight years is the period of gestation, eighty the period of physical self-expression, and 800 the total life-span.

The Mayan’s interpretation of history is embedded in their calendar, completed by priest-astronomers in the year 1479 and carved into the Aztec-Mayan sunstone. The Mayan calendar details long passages of time, including mathematical calculations so accurate that modern astronomers are at a loss to understand how a traditional people could arrive at them (for example, the calculation of the length of the Earth’s revolution within a thousandth of a decimal point).

The most famous calculation is encoded in the so-called long count. The ‘Age of Jaguar’, the thirteenth baktun of 144,000 days, will come to an end on the 21st of December 2012. That will mark the end of the Fourth Sun (also known as the Fourth World) and the end—and at the same time also the beginning— of the Mayan calendar. This transformative date is written as 13.0.0.0.0 in long count notation, which is the same as the notation for the first day in the calendar.

December 21, 2012 marks the end of the long count in the Mayan calendar (and thus also the end and rebirth of the calendar), but not the end of the world. Carlos Barrios, a Guatemalan historian and anthropologist who became a Mayan Ajq’ij ceremonial priest and spiritual guide, is currently the most authentic spokesperson for the Mayan elders. He is definite on the question regarding the end of the world.

Other people write about prophecy in the name of the Maya, They say that the world will end on December 2012. The Mayan elders are angry with this. The world will not end. It will be transformed.

Everything will change: December 21, 2012 will be a date of rebirth, the beginning of the World of the Fifth Sun. The nature of that world is not determined in advance, but the Mayan system suggests that it may be the beginning of a new cycle of Ages, starting with the Golden Age. It is likely to mark a fundamental shift in human culture and consciousness.

A world transformation at the end of 2012 is predicted by astrology as well. Astrologers have noted that at sunrise on December 21, 2012 the Sun will conjunct the intersection of the Milky Way and the plane of the ecliptic, creating a cosmic cross. The center of our galaxy will complete a ‘cosmic year’, a 25,920-year journey around the wheel of the zodiac. According to most systems of astrology, a new cosmic year will then begin, lasting for another 25,920 years. (The reality of this cycle—if not its astrological or Mayan interpretation—rests on independent scientific evidence: it concerns the rotation of the Earth on its axis. This rotation is about 23 degrees off vertical: our planet is like a spinning top that is slightly out of balance. In this condition it takes 25,800 years for the celestial pole to describe a full circle. The conjunction noted by Mayans and astrologers will occur in a 36-year window in time between 1980 and 2016. The Mayans have chosen the winter solstice 2012 as the decisive point, even though it’s not in the middle of this window, perhaps because at that point the Earth’s axis will point exactly toward the ‘galactic bulge’—the thick central part of the visual image of the Milky Way galaxy as seen from Earth.)

The cosmic conjunction noted by both astrologers and Mayans is seen as a fundamental realignment in a number of other spiritual traditions, including the Hopi time-keeping system, Vedic and Islamic astrology, Mithraism, the Jewish kabala, European sacred geography, medieval Christian architecture, and a variety of hermetic metaphysics.

Mystical philosopher Terence McKenna arrived at the 2012 date on the basis of mathematical calculations based on the I Ching. McKenna’s ‘timewave’ takes account of the ebb and flow of novelty in the universe. The great periods of novelty began about four billion years ago when the planet was formed, and continued sixty-five million years before our time, when the dinosaurs became extinct and mammals diffused over the continents. There was a surge of novelty between 15,000 and 8,000 B.C.E., the approximate period of the Neolithic Revolution and the birth of agriculture with settled communities. Another surge occurred around 500 B.C.E., when Lao-Tzu, Plato, Zoroaster, Buddha, and other seminal figures appeared on the stage of history. The calculation yields further novelty waves in the late eighteenth century, at the epoch of social and scientific revolutions, in the turbulent 1960s, and in the early twenty-first century, coinciding with the time of the 9/11 terrorist attack. The next peak of novelty fell on November of 2008, which was the date of the transformative U.S. elections, and another wave is to occur in October of 2010. The waves are to culminate on the 21st of December 2012. At that point, novelty is to reach infinity— anything and everything conceivable to the mind could then occur at the same time.

The Evidence

What independent evidence do we have that the 2012 prophecies harbor an element of truth? Are there scientifically established grounds to believe not only that an interesting conjunction will occur in the position of our planet at the end of 2012, but that this conjunction will signify a tipping point for all of humanity?

First of all, we should review what is meant by a tipping point, from the independent and impartial perspective of science. The disciplines known collectively as the systems sciences (general systems and general evolution theory, chaos theory, cybernetics, information and complexity theory, and non-equilibrium thermodynamics, among others) describe a tipping point as a state of chaos in a system. At that point, so-called ‘chaotic’ or ‘strange’ attractors replace more stable point or periodic attractors in the ‘phase portrait’ of the system, and the new attractors induce chaotic conditions in that system. This is not a purely random, aleatory condition, but a highly ordered one. It produces complex, finely tuned behavior that departs from the previously established behavior of the system. The system’s behavior becomes complex and highly sensitive to perturbation. In such a condition even small changes—whether they occur in the system’s environment, or within the system— produce major effects: the so-called ‘butterfly’ effects. In a condition of chaos the system is prone to sudden change and profound transformation.

There is evidence that the systems of life on this planet approach such a chaos-based tipping point. The evidence comes both from nature, and from our own human systems. Weather patterns turn extreme over the whole world; the changes range from droughts in China and Australia, floods in North America and increased cyclone activity, to devastating hurricanes that impact tropical coastlines and move inland. Threats to health surface on a scale never before experienced: avian flu and ‘novel swine flu’, malaria and other tropical diseases believed to have been vanquished. Global warming creates a widespread and frequent incidence of vector-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue fever, as well as of water-borne diseases such as cholera.

Climate change is a major factor of stress in the contemporary world, but not the only factor. The record shows global and local temperatures strongly fluctuating. The average is rising: in the summer of 2003 temperature fluctuations averaged 2.3 degrees higher than in previous years. Globally, temperatures have risen over the past century by at least 0.74˚C, and the principal causes are still debated. More than likely, both human and natural processes conspire to produce the warming. It is known that greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere trap the sun’s rays and heat up the atmosphere. This is bound to be a factor in global warming, whether or not changes in the physical processes of the Sun contribute to the