About Year 2012

As I said in my "Message from the Author", since I was a young man I was fascinated by Oriental wisdom; more particularly, I was fond of anything that had to do with India. This fascination increased when I had the opportunity to study the doctrine of cosmic cycles (and later on to write about it) based on texts from Bhagavata Purana and other sources.

However, it was only after I made up my mind to translate my book "La rueda del tiempo" into English, and to start publishing fragments of this translation on Qassia and other channels, that I finally understood what probably was the real motivation behind my studies: I wanted to know WHEN the overall human cycle would end on this planet. And, would it be during my lifetime?

There was no morbid curiosity in it. Contrary to what many people may think, the doctrine of cosmic cycles is not at all pessimistic. If the stress is placed on the coming Golden Era rather than on the last stages of the present Age of Kali, it is, by far, optimistic. And we are talking about the end of our world, i.e. an order of things, and not about the end of the world. After the end of the current order of things, according to the doctrine, the Earth will know a new Golden Era in which everything will be again as it was at the start of the present great human cycle, when all beings lived in perfect and blissful harmony with the higher principles.

Be it as it may, thus far I have presented fragments of the book that cover half its chapters. Now I need to make a pause for a while in order to complete the whole translation before long. And although real hard work is awaiting me in the near future, in the meantime I will try to publish some more excerpts from it.

On the other hand, I must admit that I expect to make some money from the proceeds of the book, though this should come later. In the meantime, publishing fragments from it on other channels and formats, e.g. as Squidoo lenses, should yield as well some income. This, for me, is no trivial motivation either.

Back to “Year 2012”: those who have followed my blog series will probably know that the final date I have arrived at is any time now from 2010 to 2082, and that before the new millennium (or “New Age”, or “Golden Era”) arrives it is very likely that there is an early “beginning of end” on or about 2010-2012 plus a longer, last period of 72 years (the length of a degree of the cycle of precession of the equinoxes). By the way, this last period is referred to by the Tibetan Buddhists as “the time of no-time period”.

A friend of mine asked me once about when I was expecting the current age to end and the new one to arrive. Almost without thinking, I answered “By 2012 or so.” Maybe I was remembering reading something about 2012 on some book or article dealing with the Maya calendar, or maybe with the Persian or Judaic ones. At the time I did not suspect of the interest that this date would soon arouse.

Following are some interesting quotes about the year 2012 and the Maya Calendar from several sources (mainly Wikipedia).

http://www.armageddononline.org/Disaster-Prophecy/2012.html

December 21 — The Mesoamerican Long Count calendar, notably used by the Maya civilization among others of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, completes its thirteenth b'ak'tun cycle since the calendar's mythical starting point (equivalent to 3114 BC August 11 in the proleptic Gregorian calendar, according to the "GMT-correlation" JDN= 584283). The Long Count b'ak'tun date of this starting point (13.0.0.0.0) is repeated, for the first time in a span of approximately 5,125 solar years. The significance of this period-ending to the pre-Columbian Maya themselves is unclear, and there is an incomplete inscription (Tortuguero Stela 6) which records this date. It is also to be found carved on the walls of the Temple of Inscriptions in Palenque, where it functions as a base date from which other dates are computed.However, it is conjectured that this may represent in the Maya belief system a transition from the current Creation world into the next. The December solstice for 2012 also occurs on this day.

Also (Hindu Calendar):

http://2012wiki.com/index.php?title=Hindu_Calendar

In the “Brahma-Vaivarta Purana”, Lord Krishna tells Ganga Devi that a Golden Age will come in the Kali Yuga - one of the four stages of development that the world goes through as part of the cycle of eras, as described in Hindu scriptures. Lord Krishna predicted that this Golden Age will start 5,000 years after the beginning of the Kali Yuga, and will last for 10,000 years.

And: Mayan Calendar Matches Hindu Calendar

It is interesting that this prediction of the emergence of a new world is prophesied to appear about the same time that the Mayans predicted it to come! The Mayan calendar began with the Fifth Great Cycle in 3114 BC and will end on 21 December 2012 AD.

The Hindu Kali Yuga calendar began on 18 February 3102 B.C. There is only a difference of 12 years between the Hindu's beginning of the Kali Yuga and the Mayan's beginning of the Fifth Great Cycle.

It is amazing that both calendars began at about the same time over 5,000 years ago and both calendars predict a totally new world and/or golden age after about 5,000 years into their calendars! We are definitely on to something with these Mayan and Hindu 2012 predictions. Historically, this is an amazing fact since these two ancient cultures did not have any contact.

(First published on Qassia 26 May 2008)

More about “The Wheel of Time”

By the time I had retired the last Spanish version of my book La rueda del tiempo (in English, “The Wheel of Time”) from circulation, various articles by “disciples” of René Guénon, by far the most authoritative researcher in the doctrine of cosmic cycles, had started to appear, mainly on the Internet, in which they claimed the following:

(1) The length of the full human cycle is 64,840 years, equivalent to five half cycles of precession of equinoxes (5 x 12,960 years); a calculation suggested (but only suggested!) by Guénon in Some Remarks on the Doctrine of Cosmic Cycles, as well as the following point.

(2) The year 720 of the Kali-yuga (which would last 6,480 years, or a tenth of the above figure) would have coincided with that of the beginning of the Jewish Era, traditionally established as 3761 BC; therefore, also based on other tempting elaborations by Guénon in various articles, the Kali-yuga would have started in the year 4481 BC.

(3) Once the corresponding calculation was made (6480 – 4481), the end of the Kali-yuga (virtually equivalent to the end of our civilization) would be in 1999. Some even, resorting to decimal numbers, further elaborated: the catastrophe, whatever form it adopted, would visit us … on the 14 November 1999!

Well, concerning the doctrine of cosmic cycles, the first thing to understand is the word millennium is not equivalent, as might be thought, to a thousand common years, but to an indefinite length of time usually referred to any major cosmic cycle. This is a point that will never be stressed enough, and it surely is an elemental principle that the aforementioned authors seemed to have forgotten. Even worse, not only did they evidence their inability to let go of the literal sense of the term, but also a certain proclivity to the kind of hysteria that usually attacks the masses as the end of any major cycle draws near, not to mention such frightening cycle as the one that was about to visit us.

Under these terms, the fact that the year 2000 arrived painlessly – in other words, without any fatal outcome to regret – did, by far, not mean that the validity of the doctrine of cycles became dubious. On the contrary, it merely denoted that it was all misconceived. Looked at in retrospect, on the other hand, it did not mean either that our planet had got rid of the atrocious cataclysms that usually escort the end of all major cycles, as quite obviously such end, should the doctrine remain valid, would be yet to arrive.

Be it as it may, sure as I was that Guénon would have never approved of such excesses – though still doubting whether or not his “suggestions” had been made on purpose so that such calculations failed – I set myself to the task of publishing a third edition of La rueda del tiempo with a view to clarify this point as much as possible, at the same time that correct any omission, make some points more specific, and even improve the general appearance from the previous editions.

It has not been until now, however, that I have been able to finish this task. And curiously enough, the most remarkable fact about it is, I have not had to substantially modify the previous editions, apart from correcting one or two wrong references, adding some data and refining a bit writing and syntax. On the other hand, I have hesitated as to the convenience to keep some sections, such as, for instance, the description of the Egyptian “Divine Year”, which could deviate the attention from the main subject, and I even was tempted to completely suppress a certain chapter that could seem little convincing. But I was dissuaded by the fact that, while such sections are not essential to a better understanding of the matter, they can be profitably read, in particular the latter, which briefly depicts the Kali-yuga of the present cycle – virtually the history of our so-called civilization.

Now, it is understandable that this particular view of history will frontally crash with that of the majority of readers, who, save for one or two exceptions, know very little about oriental doctrines. In this sense, it is essential to understand the concept of maha-yuga, the Hindu cycle of four yugas or decreasing ages whose lengths are proportional to 4, 3, 2 and 1 and can, in fact, be assimilated to any temporal cycle, as another fundamental point of the doctrine is that there exists a total correlation among them all; and then stop at the concept of Manvantara, this one referred to the total human cycle and whose length must be calculated as two cycles of precession of equinoxes or a total 51,840 common years. One more step, and it must become clear that if the yugas sum up proportionally 10 (because 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 = 10), the length of the Kali-yuga will be one tenth of that total, i.e. 5,184 common years.

Yet another step, consistent with the previous one, will make us understand that the characteristics of the present Kali-yuga, by virtue of the correlations to which I have referred, reflect accurately – yet in a more incisive way – those of the full cycle of 51,840 years; this, in practice, will give us a small-scale image of this cycle, including, also in a small scale but with lengths always proportional to the scale 4, 3, 2 and 1, those of the four descending yugas. The last step will be to specially focus on the last of these yugas, which we may call the kali-yuga of the present Kali-yuga – a period of time of little more than five hundred years, extremely rich in historical events and great material achievements but which unfortunately, precisely by reason of their being merely material, would appear to be leading us towards disaster at an ever increasing speed…

Thinking therefore about the Western readers, who in their great majority tend to believe in a brilliant future for mankind, I saw it convenient to commence this study by reviewing certain passages from the Bible that they may be me more familiar with; and starting from this point and from the unbelievable coincidences between those and other sacred texts from all over the World – coincidences that strangely prefigure the most recent discoveries of modern Astrophysics – to usher them through ancient universal myths such as the "Four Ages of Mankind" and the "Seven Eras of the World", to finally arrive at disquieting conclusions about the present moment and the near future of our planet – a turning point in time towards which there appear to be converging, in a most threatening fashion, cosmic cycles of various orders and magnitudes.

About “The Wheel of Time”

When I started my first version of La rueda del tiempo (in English, "The Wheel of Time") I was motivated by very special circumstances. A most precious, monumental Hindu holy scripture, the Third Canto of Bhagavata Purana, had come to my hands as if by accident, and I was marveled to learn that in such remote times the Hindus were already familiar with such advanced concepts as the expansion of the universe and the space and time relativity, both of them notions that the modern scientists would only become acquainted with from the Twentieth Century onwards. But what really amazed me were the huge lengths of time mentioned in relation to cosmic cycles. For instance, the Kali-yuga o "Dark Era", a cycle which clearly corresponds to the Age of Iron of the Greek and Roman traditions, would actually extend over 432,000 terrestrial years, a tenth of a human cycle of 4'320,000 years; and if its start was in 3102 BC, as recorded by Hindu astronomical texts, its end would arrive as late as 429,000 AD, without doubt a reassuring date in times of enormous global crisis as we are living now, but which does not absolutely correlate with data from other traditions announcing an imminent end for our troubled civilization.

The answer to my deep uneasiness would come a bit later, mainly in the form of an extraordinary article by René Guénon: Some Remarks on the Doctrine de Cosmic Cycles, originally published in French in 1937. Thanks to it, I was finally satisfied that such figures were essentially symbolic, as suggested by the fact that they are all multiple of nine – which precisely makes them "circular" o cyclic – and that they must be basically assimilated to the great cycle of precession of equinoxes, a key period of time in the development of mankind whose traditional length, 25,920 common years, also is a multiple of nine. True, at the same time I concluded that in the light of the most recent scientific discoveries, such lengths could also be taken in an approximately literal manner, something that Guénon could not be acquainted with in his time; but for the moment, it was fairly enough.

Then, as if by magic, came to my hands other articles, some of them very important and others that were not quite so, which helped me do a preliminary study and publish a first edition in 1998. This first literary endeavor contained some elements that have remained till now, the main one being my own calculation of the final date of the Kali-yuga and, therefore, that of the current human cycle. An additional element was a footnote, according to which such final date would appear to have been drawn nearer by a degree of such cycle, or 72 years - a phenomenon referred to in the texts as an overlapping of yugas.

Soon thereafter, however, I realized that this first version in Spanish not only contained some historical errors but also wrong quotes, so I tried to upgrade it by means of a second edition which was published and circulated for some years until – its cycle concluded – I opted for retiring it from circulation.

It is this version that I am now translating into English, which will be hopefully finished by the end of August of the present year, and trying to upgrade. But this story does not end here and, even at the risk of boring my blog readers, I will be back with more – lots more – very soon.