Jonathan McGregor Bethel

by Jonathan McGregor Bethel

It must be stated at the outset of this article that the expectation in 2012 of any singular event could very well lead to complete disappointment. None of us know for certain what will happen in the years to come, especially the specific date of 12-21-2012, as the future is yet to occur. I try to approach this great mystery of 2012 with an open yet discriminating mind, open to possible scenarios yet discriminating and requiring evidence. That being said, it is obvious that right now is a time of radical transformation, and society is subconsciously gearing up for a “Shift of the Ages,” a moment when the Zeitgeist, the spirit of our time, shifts to a higher pattern. Many are coming forward to proclaim “The End of the World,” and they point to the Maya themselves as stating the end is coming. But the fact remains that the Maya encoded the ending of one 13baktun calendar cycle and a new beginning, what they called “Creation Day.” This is not the “End of the World” being solicited in the main stream media, a guarantee that doom, tumultuous changes, and a turmoil ridden future lies ahead; they are using the tried and true application of fear to make money, and it is very reasonable that this fear is in place, for events could be very dire, yet we have to approach this moment in history with the poise and watchfulness of the spiritual warrior.

Although mankind has traversed the evolutionary gap between the savage rain forest and the modern civilized city, it now sits in a very alarming situation; it now faces a bifurcation point in the evolutionary path it has trod thus far. This unavoidable fork in the road will lead us either down the path of destruction and decimation, or we will be impelled down the evolutionary channels toward enlightenment and liberation, freeing ourselves from the entropic grip of materiality and the thralldom of our everyday world. This is a very novel predicament for humanity, one it has never seen before, a moment a planet brings forth only once in its' lifetime. This razor's edge that we are teetering on is fast becoming a slippery slope, and the global operational systems are careening out of control. On the one hand, we have reached a monumental moment in which all indicators point to the fact that we are approaching a quantum leap in our evolutionary trek, a rapturous instant in which our species' evolution shifts to a higher, unimaginable level of functionality; however, on the other hand, the global situation looks very grim, and certain actualities could create a situation where our existential being is subjected to harsh realities, realities that are the consequence of what we started long ago in history. This situation is building up more and more pressure and is working its' way toward a breaking point. Because of humanity's selfish and disharmonious behavior, we have created a situation that looks fairly dire and dreadful for our species, yet the contradictory is also true; never before has the human race been so perfectly poised so as to initiate a whole series of evolutionary steps that could precede a Utopian civilization.

Mankind has never found himself at a crossroads of such magnitude, a bifurcation point that will change the course of history. Nevertheless, that is no excuse for a botched job in the grave matter at hand; it is crucial to our survival that we get it right! That sounds like a paramount amount of pressure and will require an impeccable discipline; indeed, this is intense pressure, and this rite of passage requires utilizing a higher more disciplined order for quelling the more primitive behaviors that will only guarantee our demise. An immense amount of cooperation and compassion is required to get us passed the inhospitable situation before us. It is vital that we quickly get a clue and start doing what we know we need to do, yesterday and not tomorrow, before our tenuous grip on reality quickly slips away, and we tumble erroneously down the path of failed attempts. No, this will not do! If we really want to make it through this perilous passageway in the hallway of history, then we need to quickly wake up, come to our senses, and merge our scientific world view and knowhow with a true ecumenical spiritual paradigm founded upon ethics, thereby placing well meaning attention and focus on the problems at hand. A merging of these two worlds could help create the impetus for us to form a true global community where the “Good of the All” is sought out for the “Good of the All” by all our individual talents.

Modern man throughout the twentieth century was coming to terms with his theological and scientific paradigms, and in the last decade of that century s/he saw an intensification of the integration of these two worlds; the true philosopher's stone, the stone of the wise, was condensing from the merging of these two paradigmatic systems. This new paradigm of thought was synthesized in a dialectical process where the thesis and antithesis were merged, the worlds of theology and science, and it is now informing the morphogenetic fields that rule social behavior all over our planet. These fields order our behavior through the process of morphic resonance, whereby our thoughts and emotions are in sync with the planetary mind, and our mind then follows suit. These global morphogenetic fields of humanity have been called many names: the collective unconscious, the genetic archives, the akashic records, and the phylogenetic unconscious. At any rate, this morphogenetic field that humanity resonates with is a sphere of thought surrounding the planet, and the synergistic tendencies of the information couplings within those fields are gearing up for and catalyzing a transformational shift to a whole new order of being. In the notions of the French priest and paleontologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the biosphere, nature, will give rise to and exude the noosphere, a global layer of thought, the informational synergy of which will actualize the Omega Point into being. This will usher in a new paradigm, a transcendence for all of humanity. It is interesting to note that Teilhard came to his realizations long before the global network of the Internet; therefore, many philosophers consider the internet to be the hardwiring of the noosphere.

The unrelenting questions of what will happen consistently assail the mind. Will we make it through the turmoil to see ourselves basking in the sunlight of enlightenment? Or will we destroy ourselves in some apparent need for defense or through retaliation? Will the Biosphere continue supporting our species when it is being decimated daily? Will we experience some major geological changes as a consequence of our relationship with the sun? Will our technology birth the next level of our evolution? Will the Gaian Mind, which appears to be the source of crop circles, bring us a further revelation of our place in the cosmos? Can a multitude of these events occur? This intense inquisitiveness will not be abated within me, and sadly, I'm afraid that the answers that have presented themselves are both appealing and disturbing, creating further vexing enigmas. So, what we are facing is manifold and many-sided; one singular event does not take the whole happening into consideration. Does this time of devastation and/or enlightenment have anything to do with 2012 as many have foretold?

What we are facing is both good and bad, in my opinion; one model of our future does not contain the entirety of that happenstance. It is multifaceted and diverse, but our mammalian brain seeks to create black and white scenarios out of the mysteries before us, seeking to simplify the unknown and fearful into nice little models of what we are moving into. But there is no way that what we are facing could be all black or all white; it is indeed both. The concrescence of novelty, the eschaton, will be an infinitely novel situation and contain both the good and the bad! As the universe becomes more complex and ramified, as more novelty accrues, then we can expect the intensity of those novel forms and events to increase; the novelty of both the black and the white will intensify in its' influence upon our lives. Therefore, it is understandable that the most horrid will occur alongside of the most divine in our shared, global future.

So, what kind of things could we be facing in 2012 or beyond? What are the tenable possibilities on our global horizon? Let's first look at the negative occurrences facing our global civilization, and then we will discuss the positive effects which also appear to be breaking through into our society. These doom ridden scenarios are things that, if they were to occur, would affect our global future and life as we know it in a radical way. These possibilities are things we definitely need to be considering as we move ahead.

Humanity is in a very precarious situation; never before have so many mounting crisis points been converging together. I'm no doomsayer, but if you remove yourself from the group mind with its aversion to the facts at hand, and you take a good look at what is about to transpire, then you can't help but be white-knuckled and fearful of the future.  But this fear is not at all what we need, if reality is truly affected by our minds as scientific studies are beginning to bear out. The following situations “Could” transpire in the years to decades ahead; they are not necessarily slated to occur in 2012!

The increased complexity and convoluted nature of our global civilization has made the threat of a pandemic a much more conceivable situation. A virus could be transferred to many areas of the world through our transportation grid in a very short period of time, and an all out pandemic could be actualized in a matter of weeks. When asked about a near future, foreseeable pandemic, doctors say it's a matter of “when” not “if” one breaks out. In the last 30 years we saw the introduction of many new biological threats: AIDS, SARS, West Nile, and now the Avian Flu, and these are threats that we must take seriously. When will this speculative disaster occur? It is uncertain, but scientists are very concerned about the possibility of a major unstoppable pandemic in the near future.

A pandemic is just one possibility on the shelf of global, future threats. In addition, we have the Geo-Political environment, a motley crew of a makeup with each component striving for dominance on the world stage.  It is one thing to agree to disagree with the other parties in the global arena; however, we now have radical terrorists, self proclaimed servants of God, who believe it is their God given duty to kill all those that will not convert to their way of thinking.  It is hard to deal with these people in a rational manner, as their behavior elicits the very primitive instinct of seeking their utter destruction. In addition, we now have the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and they are now in the hands of some very fanatical and tyrannical leaders. It is easy to foresee and imagine that if the terrorists ignited a nuclear bomb in one of our cities due to their ideological insanity, then the civilized world could very easily retaliate, thereby sparking a nuclear tit-for-tat of all the countries involved. This is a very real possibility and something that MUST be avoided at all costs.  Does that mean we should not retaliate if we were ever to be attacked with a nuclear bomb?  Well, I am a warrior, and anyone trying to kill me, my family, my friends, or any of the citizens of my country should be very aware that there are many of us who will stand up and seek to destroy them utterly. But that being said, we need to be exceedingly careful not to spark a nuclear catastrophe, if that were to ever happen. Therefore, our retaliatory nature could pose a big problem as we move ahead, as we now live in a world where radical mentalities and terrorism exist. 

Our global society is also facing major economic collapse as we move forward into subsequent periods of time.  Our economic markets are so reliant on what occurs globally now, and the countries of the world have created such a deficit that some financial specialists say what we are facing is insurmountable; we are operating on borrowed time, and a huge spiral into economic collapse looks like an extremely conceivable scenario.

If those realistic threats weren't bad enough, the biosphere is being destroyed in so many aspects that it is barely possible to imagine. Researchers believe that the biosphere may become completely uninhabitable in just a couple centuries. The facts of man's destruction of the habitat that brought him forth are truly appalling and ghastly. We are decimating the rain forest by miles daily, the main source of the oxygen we breathe. Climate is changing as both the jet stream in the atmosphere and the gulf stream in the Atlantic are shifting. Our oceans are dying from pollution and over fishing, and many species are being wiped into extinction.  Is this insanity? What are we doing to ourselves? The planet was never intended to support life for 6.5 billion people, and that population is only increasing daily. The facts of the matter make one wince when looking at all the details, creating a nauseating feeling in the pit of the stomach. The melting of the ice caps is occurring from a multitude of sources that are causing Global Warming. It is not just our fuel use causing global warming; it also has to do with natural cycles that revolve around the earth-sun connection.  The melted ice will cause the sea levels to rise, obliterating the coastline and inundating us with water.  This biosphere issue is definitely not something that will cause a global catastrophe in 2012, but it is an indication of where we find ourselves and the nature of our shared predicament.  The operative word is “Shared,” and we need to realize that all of us on the planet are in this boat together, and it has now begun to traverse the rapids and dangerous currents ahead. 

Additionally, we have the sun-earth connection to be concerned about.  The Sun's Coronal magnetic flux has increased 100% in the last century.  Global Warming is partly caused by man and is also caused by the earth's relationship with the sun, and scientists say the sun has steadily become more active in the past several hundred years.  It must be understood that when a Solar Flare or Coronal Mass Ejection occurs a wave of energy moves out in all directions, and when it impinges with a planet's magnetic field, the field contorts in reaction.  This contortion shifts the Jet Stream creating climate change, and it also puts stress on the system of plate tectonics, causing an increased number of earthquakes and volcanoes.  The last sunspot cycle ended with the two largest flares on record and the next major cycle is scheduled for 2012. 

Now that we have discussed some of the sobering bad news about our future, and because I like to be the optimist even in the most drastic and horrid of situations, I think it is essential to relay the whole picture. Yes, things look very dire, but they also look most promising.  Strides in science, medicine, government and technology are making major advances in ridding our species of the undesired effects of bad health, famine, poverty, or lack of any name.  So, like I said, what we are moving into is both wonderful and horrid.  It is a double-edged sword!

Science is making great progress, and a G.U.T., A Grand Unified Theory or a T.O.E., a Theory Of Everything, is within the grasp of humanity, giving us a true understanding of Space-Time and harnessing that understanding for benevolent and beneficial technologies, which we will use to find solutions to our present predicaments. A quantum leap in our evolution is apparently directly in front of us, if you consider the exponential explosion of technology.  A technological singularity is going to occur; it cannot be avoided.  Only one of the previously mentioned catastrophes could remove us from the course with the Technological Singularity. This Singularity will bring us technologies that will give us immense longevity and possible immortality!  That was a fairly welcome surprise as we entered a new millennium, discovering we were facing this event. The exponential explosion of technology will remove many of the problems we have dealt with for thousands of years. For instance, nanotechnology will be used to control cholesterol and plaque within our arteries, thereby alleviating one of the major causes of death.  The A.I. mind will know all our problems, and it will use intelligence a million times greater than man to find solutions and implement them in the moment.

Researchers are learning how much our mind is inextricably linked to the physical reality surrounding us, and with the advent of nanotechnology we will be able to create materially whatever we are visualizing mentally. Our science and spirituality are also no longer exclusive to each other, and the age old conflicts between the facts of science and our theological perspectives are dissolving and fading away.    Our scientific investigations are showing us that the quantum vacuum, the zero-point-field, contains the informational blueprint for the way our reality forms itself.  It is the reservoir for every occurrence that has ever happened in previous universes, universes that are iterations of the one multiverse; The zero-point-field is a non-local vacuum containing zero matter or energy but immense information that our universe uses as a guide to shape itself. This zero-point-field can be considered the mind of God, and now even most atheistic scientists realize that there is a higher dimensional information template from which our universe is formed.  Also, our world's religions are beginning to loosen the constricting belt of literalism, and they are seeing the truths of both science and other faiths; a convergence between disparities is taking place, and integration is occurring on many levels.

So, we live in a time full of radical changes of both a qualitatively good and bad nature.  The ancient seers knew that this exact period in time represented a period of catastrophic changes preceding a golden age.  Most cultural traditions have some intimation of the times we are living in, whether it is Hindu, Hopi, Mayan, or many, many others, and they are all in basic agreement that a great purging, a cataclysmic time of change, will precede a golden age of enlightenment.  The Mayans encoded 12-21-2012 into their calendrical system, and they pointed to that day for some reason.  Hundreds of years later in the 1970s a hippie botanist, Terence McKenna, had a vision under the influence of Shamanic Power Plants, and he saw how to distill a timewave from the Ken Wa sequence of the I-Ching.  This Timewave mapped the ingression of novelty into the universe, an organizing principle of ever increasing complexity upon which all of our reality is ordered. At any rate, he saw on the timewave that this nature of novelty hits a moment of infinite novelty, what is called the concrescence of novelty, at the same exact time that the Mayan Calendar cycle ends, December 21, 2012!  So, this date has given itself over to the minds of a culture of people over a thousand years ago and then to a hippie botanist in the 1970s, a very strange synchronicity indeed!  Then along comes Ervin Laszlo in 2006 stipulating that Chaos and Complexity Theory has shown how a huge bifurcation point in humanity's evolutionary trek occurs in late 2012.  At the fork in the road, we either go the route of self destruction or the high road of enlightenment and liberation.  Noting that Terence derived his timewave from the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching, and also noting the congruency of those 64 Hexagrams with the 64 codons of DNA, the 64 bit structure of computer code, and the central 64 squares of  a Tzolkin grid of the Mayan Calendar, then it can be surmised that a universal organizing principle is being perceived.

No one knows what will happen on December 21, 2012.  Will it be Doomsday or the Omega Point, or both, or neither?  One thing is for certain; now is a time of radical change, and both problems and innovations are creating a novel situation for a planet of 6.5 billion people.  The biosphere is more decimated than it ever has been. The Sun more is active than in recent time and may cause some major geological changes.  Our Technology has moved deep into exponential growth and is about to birth a singularity.  Whatever happens, I am sure it will be a ride we will never forget!

Jonathan McGregor Bethel

http://www.jonathanbethel.com/

email:

Jonathan.McGregor.Bethel@gmail.com 

Omega Point Institute

http://www.omegapoint.org/

http://www.sacredwisdom.net/

http://www.2012Eschaton.com/