Some thoughts on 2012

I have been reading a book …

The book

And we find that there is a very large coverage of this phenomenon on the internet. Many sorts of issues get caught up on this phenomenon, and I’d like to look at this from a spiritual point of view, and try if I can, to apply Swami’s dictum, first, common sense, then spiritual sense.

There are calendars, and then calendars. The Gregorian Calendar ( the one in common use by humanity) gets a good scrutiny, then the various Mayan Calendars are examined.  I must say, if you persevere with the Mayan stuff, after a few chapters, you begin to see just how much mathematical accuracy there is with the Mayan Calendars, even though they go back a long, long, way.

To understand that, you need to understand that the Mayan civilisation had their own way of saying “Everything is Brahman”.   They called it K’ul .

The calendars essentially had a spiritual function, as did the entire culture, which used astrology to determine times when grids of energy were full of K’ul, and the times were propitious for accessing K’ul and undertaking certain tasks. Does this sound familiar?

There  are some cogent claims for the year 2012 and the future of humanity undergoing change.  The exact form and nature of that change is of course, under furious debate, with many conflicting assertions which can be found all over the internet. This book does point to changes, and concludes that they might also be changes to consciousness, as well has changes to nature itself.

Therein is the key. Changes to consciousness.  Sathya Sai Baba has taken form for the people and undertaken a clearly avowed mission of restoring righteousness to the earth, restoring the Vedas, and the Vedic scholars. Vedas, of course, are not Hinduism, nor is the practice of chanting Veda a sort of Hindu practice of a particular kind. The Vedas are for all humanity, and contain the highest essences and guides for true humanness.

While all this 2012 material looks to the future of humanity, I find it curious that very little of the 2012 material looks to the past of humanity.  We have very little record of life on this planet,  more than 10,000 years ago. Yes, there is some archaeological material, but what of written records? I think there is only one continuous record, and that is the Ramayana. The Ramayana occurred over 20,000 years ago. Only one other religion goes back beyond the flood, Zoroastrianism (which Sathya Sai Baba has told is the oldest continuing religion outside of India) and their records were destroyed when Alexander the Great burned the Library of Alexandra. Many Gathas and Avestas were lost in that fire.

So what happened at the ‘flood’?  The planet nearly died, according to some sources.  Atlanta sank under the sea. Atlanta, Atlantis… Lanka, the home of Ravanna, the place of the war in the Ramayana.  Lanka was in the region of the Equator, as told by Sathya Sai Baba. It was not the Sri Lanka of this modern era.

I think, also, if we look to one festival in Hinduism, Diawali, Deepavali, there is another explanation given for the genesis of this festival; Lord Krishna raised his hand and stopped a heavenly body from colliding with the earth. The resultant explosion of light debris is celebrated to this day as Diwali.

So there is a tension between the future of humanity and the past of humanity. What is it we need to learn, what do we need to know and understand, how do we approach that which is coming? We’ll take a look at this in another post.