2012 Galactic Alignment: Doomsday or the Dawn of a Golden Age?

“We shall not cease from exploring, and at the end of our exploration we will return to where we started and know the place for the first time."

T. S. Elliot, Little Gidding V

The spectrum of scenarios expressed about December 21, 2012 ranges from apocalyptic “end of the world” rhetoric to the promise of a golden age or a mass ascension of humanity to a higher state of consciousness. Famous prophets and prophecies such as Nostradamus, Edgar Cayce, the Hopi Blue Star, South African Zulu shaman Credo Mutwa, and certain interpretations of the Bible, to name a few, are often cited as evidence for major events in this timeframe.

The Prophecy of the Popes, attributed to Saint Malachy, is a list of 112 short phrases in Latin. Arnold de Wyon, a Benedictine historian, as part of his book, Lignum Vitæ, first published the prophecy in 1595. They describe each of the Roman Catholic popes, along with a few so called anti-popes, beginning with Pope Celestine II, elected in 1143, and concluding with the successor the current pope, Benedict XVI. The last pope is described as "Peter the Roman," whose pontificate will end in the destruction of Rome.

Misinterpretation of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar seems to be the basis for the belief that a catastrophe, or epic event, will occur on December 21, 2012. Sandra Noble, executive director of the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies states, "For the ancient Maya, it was a huge celebration to make it to the end of a whole cycle." She considers the portrayal of December 2012 as a doomsday or cosmic-shift event to be "a complete fabrication and a chance for a lot of people to cash in."

What does happen on 12/21/2012, according to most Mayan scholars, and based on a start date of August 11, 3114 BCE, is the close of one of the ancient Maya calendar cycles--the end of b’ak’tun 13. One b’ak’tun is a period of 144,000 days, equal to 394.26 tropical years. Thirteen b’ak’tuns is roughly 5,125 years. But just like our New Year, a new cycle begins and goes to the next b’ak’tun, at Long Count 13.0.0.0.0. The full long count has seven more b’ak’tuns, before the odometer turns over. The next big phase, a p’ik’tun, a complete series of twenty b’ak’tuns, will occur on October 13, 4772, which is 2,760 years from December 2012. In other words, the ancient Maya weren’t expecting the end of time but the continued turning of calendar wheels.

Other evidence of potentially big change comes from astrophysicist Dr. Paul LaViolette, author of Earth Under Fire, who first alerted the scientific community to the existence of what he calls superwaves, or cosmic pulses, in 1983. His principal area of research at the Starburst Foundation is the investigation of intense cosmic ray particle barrages that travel from the center of our galaxy and can last up to several thousand years. Astronomical and geological evidence indicates that the last major superwave impacted our Solar System around 12,000 to 16,000 years ago, producing abrupt changes in Earth’s climate. This is also the time that researchers say Atlantis was destroyed. It’s estimated that approximately one or two superwaves strong enough to trigger an ice age are presently on their way to us.

There is evidence that the Galactic Center has erupted as many as ten times in the past two millennia, the most recent event occurring about 700 years ago. According to LaViolette, the electromagnetic radiation pulse accompanying such a superwave would be far more intense than any gamma ray pulse we have experienced in modern times, knocking out electrical power grids and global communication networks.

Another theory that impacts the 2012 scenario is the possibility that our Sun is in a binary system with a brown or red dwarf star. Astronomers first postulated the hypothesis for this still-theoretical object in 1987 to account for cycles of mass extinctions that appear in the geological record. In 1984 paleontologists David Raup and Jack Sepkoski examined 250 million years of fossil records and observed that massive species extinction occurred at 65 million year intervals. Two independent teams of astronomers, Davis, Hut and Miller, and Whitmire and Jackson, examined the data and suggested that the Sun had an as yet undetected companion star in a highly elliptical orbit.

Additional support for a binary companion comes from the Hindu Vedas, the ancient wisdom of India. Walter Cruttenden, founder of the Binary Research Institute, popularized the idea in his award-winning documentary, The Great Year. Hindu cosmology includes an explanation of the phenomenon of Precession of the Equinoxes, through a cycle of ages called Yugas, which are mirrored in the description of the Greek ages. The mechanism for this is a binary companion of the Sun whose periodic appearance ushers in a golden age and whose disappearance plunges the world into unconsciousness. In this view, the closer our companion gets, the more light and wisdom increases. The Rishis, Hindu sages, taught that this cycle was about 24,000 years, close to a full cycle of the astrological ages. Discovery of our Sun’s companion would symbolically indicate an increase in light and the potential to reclaim ancient knowledge.

Ancient Indian astronomers also gave a physical reason for how the dual star, or binary motion, might facilitate the rise and fall of human consciousness. They said that as the Solar System traveled along its set orbital path with its companion star, it would cyclically move close to, then away from, a point in space referred to as Vishnunabhi, a supposed magnetic center or "grand center."

The Sun is one of hundreds of billions of stars in our Milky Way galaxy, and a gargantuan Black Hole lives at the heart. All the matter in our galaxy -- gas, dust, and stars -- rotates around a central axis perpendicular to the galactic plane. The galactic plane is an imaginary horizontal line that bisects the Milky Way. The Milky Way is about 100,000 light years across, and the Sun is located in the outer part of the galaxy. Our Solar System is about 30,000 light years from the center, and is currently traveling within the inner rim of the Orion Arm. Our galaxy is one of fifty-four galaxies of various sizes that comprise our local group. Astrophysicists say that these galaxies are all moving toward something called the Great Attractor. A candidate for this role is a galactic conglomerate called the Shapely Supercluster, the largest concentration of galaxies in our nearby Universe, which is located in the constellation of Centaurus. Perhaps the Great Attractor is also the Grand Center the Vedas mention?

All the stars and stellar systems in the galaxy rotate around the galactic center but with different periods. Stars at the center have shorter periods than those farther out. Based on the distance from the center of 30,000 light years, and the estimated speed, the Sun completes one clockwise orbit, as viewed from the galactic North Pole, in about 225-240 million "terrestrial" years. One circuit of the Sun around the galactic center is called a Cosmic Year, or Galactic Year. Based on estimates of the Sun’s age our star has made that journey twenty times.

Closer to home, as Earth orbits the Sun, every year around December 21 the Sun rises against the backdrop of stars at the center of our galaxy. This creates a vertical alignment of the Sun with the Galactic Center. In addition, as the Sun slowly circles the Galactic Center, the whole Solar System oscillates above and below the galactic plane like a sine wave. What’s said to be significant now is a horizontal alignment with the galactic plane. When the Sun conjoins the galactic center at winter solstice there will be both a vertical and horizontal alignment. However, due to the slow movement of the solar system, this is not just a one-time occurrence, and we have already experienced this alignment for some time.

Using the wheel of the zodiac as a frame of reference, the Galactic Center is at 26 degrees 51 minutes of the sign of Sagittarius. Also in this same location of the sky, peering deep into the heart of the Milky Way, is the youngest Supernova Remnant in our galaxy. Supernova explosions are the death of massive stars and release tremendous energy. Jupiter, who was a god of light and wisdom, rules Sagittarius. This phase of astrological experience searches for wisdom through experiences of expanded vision and widened horizons. In the northern hemisphere this is the dark time of the year and has always been celebrated with festivals of light. At a minimum, the intensified energies of a galactic alignment can offer a wider lens into the Universe and a reminder of how big creation really is. If our minds are open they can be filled with light.

Whatever our opinions about 2012, we do seem to be riding the crest of exponential change, and those who study this subject see the acceleration as intrinsic to the nature of change itself. Futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil says, “The whole 20th century, because we’ve been speeding up, is equivalent to twenty years of progress at today’s rate of progress, and we’ll make another twenty years of progress at today’s rate of progress equal to the whole 20th century in the next fourteen years, and then we’ll do it again in seven years. And because of the explosive power of exponential growth, the 21st century will be equivalent to 20,000 years of progress at today’s rate of progress, which is a thousand times greater than the 20th century.”

Kurzweil also insists “The single most necessary component of any attempt to make predictions about the future is a deeply internalized understanding of the accelerating, exponential rate of change.” He popularized the idea of a critical mass of technological changes called a singularity. The specific term "singularity," as a description for a phenomenon of technological acceleration causing an eventual unpredictable outcome in society, was coined by mathematician and physicist Stanislaw Ulam as early as 1958. He wrote of a conversation with John von Neumann concerning the "ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue."

Proponents of the singularity typically state that an "intelligence explosion," where super-intelligences design successive generations of increasingly powerful computing minds, might occur very quickly and might not stop until the cognitive abilities greatly surpass that of any human. The technological singularity is the hypothetical future emergence of greater-than-human super-intelligence through technological means. Since the capabilities of such intelligence would be difficult for an unaided human mind to comprehend, the occurrence of a technological singularity is seen as an intellectual event horizon, beyond which events cannot be predicted or understood. Advocates of the theory expect the singularity to occur some time in the 21st century. It’s a very Aquarian Age idea.

Whatever happens on December 21, 2012 everything in the Universe is moving in vast orbs of time, and the wheels of astrology allow us to experience some of those nested cycles. If we are paying attention to the current acceleration of change, and the intensifying complexity of information, we’ll realize that we may indeed be approaching a point of no return, an event horizon, and that evolution takes leaps. Awake and aware, we can poise ourselves to catch the wave, or singularity, and make the quantum jump in consciousness. If something sudden and remarkable does happen on December 21, 2012, I choose to believe it will be cause for a grand celebration.