About The 2012 Film And The Danger Of Hyping The Doomsday Story

By Carl Johan Calleman

Last week I made a presentation at a conference on 2012 organized by the Foundation for the Study of Cycles in Albuquerque. Since this was held at the day of the release of Roland Emmerich’s movie 2012 (intentionally released at a Friday the thirteenth) most of the participants went to its first showing after midnight on the same date and so did I. At that time the movie theatre was full and the audience larger than at the 2012 conference we were in where people were discussing the real story of the Mayan calendar. As one might expect nothing was right in the movie 2012 and, what is also noteworthy, it seems that no effort whatever had been made to get it right either. To begin with it supports the urban legend that the Maya predicted that the world would come to an end. This of course is not true. The contemporary Maya do not say that and there is no ancient Mayan source that says this. Instead, what the only existing ancient Mayan inscription says is that when the calendar comes to an end then nine cosmic forces will descend and these nine forces is what serious students of the Mayan calendar are interested in. Hence, this is not a movie I would recommend to anyone, but since I am so involved with the topic I felt I had to see it. I should say however that the movie was not as scary as I had expected based for instance on having seen Independence Day that was made by the same director in the nineties. 2012 is simply a standard Hollywood product with the typical ingredients of presidential worship and sentimental family dramas, that does not give anyone a reason to think more deeply about the topic and maybe this is exactly its purpose. It does however present a few observations that seem relevant from a more serious perspective such as the precarious situation of the US dollar and possible demands for a cancellation of debts. Yet, these phenomena do not really seem connected to the Mayan calendar or results of the cosmic plan in this movie.

The Mayan calendar as a serious description of a cosmic plan is of course not even mentioned or that the real end date has to be something other than December 21, 2012. In fact, overall I cannot say that the movie 2012 is on a more silly level than most New Age ideas of an event happening on the particular date December 21, 2012 (pole shift, Nibiru, galactic alignment or solar flares). In reality no such event could ever have been predicted by the ancient Maya, but to many who do not want to think outside of their existing box these have become urban legends that Hollywood is tapping in to and reinforcing. What the ancient Maya would have been able to do however would have been to sense the shifting energies of time in the same way as thousands of people today are rediscovering the daily use of the Sacred calendar and that there is a reality to the shifting energies that it describes. But to highlight this is far from the purpose of the simplistic interpretations of this movie. The 2012 movie seems to primarily have the purpose of distracting people from the ongoing transformation of consciousness and the associated socio-economic transformation. The best way of doing this is to focus on so-called Earth changes that we really have no reason to believe will happen in the years ahead but yet seems to be the line of thinking to which many people have been wired.

A curious result of the movie, and the fact that at least in one form the Mayan calendar goes mainstream, is that academic scientists have become engaged in debunking its validity and so for instance NASA, and some Mayanists, have issued statements that the world will not come to an end in 2012. While I may agree with that conclusion it seems odd to me, to say the least, to think that astronomers or Mayanists, who have never studied the evolution of consciousness would have anything of relevance to say on the matter. To understand the nine levels of evolution described in the ancient description of the end date it is not sufficient to be an expert in any particular academic discipline such as Mayanism. What is required is that you take a holistic approach integrating knowledge from historical and biological evolution in all of its aspects. To understand the big picture of the Mayan calendar you have to be able to see the patterns of evolution of consciousness and there is no way you will do that by directing telescopes to the sun or the center of the galaxy. Hence, while these astronomers may be able to debunk, and rightly so, a galactic alignment (which happen every year and does not mean anything in particular in 2012), Nibiru or a pole shift, they are not even aware that these are misinterpretations of the Mayan calendar to begin with, which is really about the evolution of consciousness. This shadow boxing where astronomy experts are debunking what the Mayan calendar is not about shows what a strong grip materialism has on people at the current time. The mainstream scientists and the media are simply not letting in the serious research about the Mayan calendar as a consciousness phenomenon and keep emphasizing the date December 21, 2012 to distract people from co-creating a new world. It is so much easier to concoct some simple idea about what will happen in 2012 such as a giant solar flare, a galactic alignment or a magnetic pole shift than to communicate our higher purpose and the necessity for people to participate in the manifestation of the cosmic plan if this is to manifest. This also attests to the difficulty of conveying the existence of a divine plan that operates through quantum shifts in consciousness that are really not directly measurable, but clear from all the effects these have had over billions of years.

It is worrisome that plans are said to be underway by Emmerich to create some kind of a television series on the topic of 2012, since this surely would continue to keep people in the dark about the socioeconomic transformation that is meant to result from the transformation of consciousness. Nonetheless, the very fact that this film was made and some superficial knowledge about the Mayan calendar has reached the mainstream does reflect the fact that people, at least on some level, are becoming aware that this universe has a purpose. Hopefully many will go on to explore this in more serious ways and see that there is indeed hope for humanity if we are willing to co-create it.

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