2012, the year of self-fulfilling prophecies

It’s December again and most people are as usual gearing up to welcome the new year in style, deciding about places to travel to and parties to attend and I have to admit that it is very hard to stay out of the festive spirit, but I decided to take some time out to see if we should be celebrating the arrival of the next year, or should we rather be busy preparing for some apocalyptic events that 2012 might hold for us?

2012 is supposed to be special isn’t it? At least if we are to believe a lot of theories out there it is and now that we are almost ready to enter into the new year, i think it would be a good time to gauge what we can expect from the year ahead.

I personally think that 2012 will be nothing more than a year of self-fulfilling prophecies. We will come back to what a self-fulfilling prophecy is, in a while.

First let us look at why the year 2012, specifically the date 21 December 2012 is upheld as the doomsday, end of the world day by different groups of people and theories.

Listed below are different sources of information that people interpret as being the sign of the end of world arriving in 2012.

1) Mayan calendar:

The Long Count calendar identifies a day by counting the number of days passed since a mythical creation date that corresponds to August 11, 3114 b.c.e. in the Gregorian calendar. According to the Popol Vuh, a book compiling details of creation accounts known to the K’iche’ Maya of the Colonial-era highlands, we are living in the fourth world. The Popol Vuh describes the first three creations that the gods failed in making and the creation of the successful fourth world where men were placed.

In the Maya Long Count, the previous creation ended at the start of a 14th b’ak’tun ad will end on December 20, 2012.

Which can simply mean that this calendar which was meant to depict a certain amount of time on a cyclic time frame ends on December 20, 2012. That is like saying that the last date on the 2011 calendar will be December 31st 2012. That doesn’t mean that the world or time will end on that particular day. It just means we need to print fresh calendars for the next year. Long count calendars last for thousands of years and I am sure if Maya were style around they would have been busy working on the next long count calendar.

To me a calendar containing dates for a limited amount of cyclic period is no shocker. We get a calendar for a year which contains dates for that year, once the year passes we get the calendar for the next year. Similarly it comes as no surprise to me that Mayans made a long count calendar for a fixed amount of cyclic period that lasted 5000 odd years. I guess they would have planned to make the long count calendar for the next cycle as well when the time came. But they didn’t even last through their first long count calendar and that ends on December 21 2012.

On a lighter note, this Mayan calendar theory seems to be nothing more than what the cartoon found here depicts below.

All said and done, that calendar is some marvelous piece of intricate stone work to say the least.

2) The I Ching:

The I Ching (Wade-Giles) or “Yì Jīng” (pinyin), also known as the Classic of Changes, Book of Changes and Zhouyi, is one of the oldest of the Chinese classic texts. It is an ancient Chinese system of fortune-telling. It does not predict anything by itself, but rather describes a system of making predictions by casting signs.

Although the I Ching makes no predictions itself, it was used by Terrence McKenna in his “Timewave Zero” theory. This is where the assertion that the I Ching predicts 2012 comes from, and not from anything in the I Ching itself.

3) Terrance Mckenna’s Time Wave Zero theory (based on I ching):

Terence Kemp McKenna was an Irish-American philosopher, psychonaut, researcher, teacher, lecturer and writer on many subjects, such as human consciousness, language, psychedelic drugs, the evolution of civilizations, the origin and end of the universe, alchemy, and extraterrestrial beings. He used the I Ching and plotted a graph of what he called ‘Novelty’ against time. Novelty at any given point in time is representative of the new change at that point in time.

This graph stops on December 21st 2012, which Terence Mckenna said means that “Linear time would cease to exist,” and they called it the zero state.

“Achievement of the zero state can be imagined to arrive in one of two forms. One is the dissolution of the cosmos in an actual cessation and unravelling of the natural laws, a literal apocalypse. The other possibility the culmination of a human process, a process of toolmaking, which comes to completion in the perfect artefact: the monadic self, exteriorised, condensed, and visible in three dimensions; in alchemical terms, the dream of a union of spirit and matter.”

In other words, with the speed of evolution accelerating, amount of change taking place in a given time is increasing drastically and maybe there will come a time when the rate of change will reach such a speed that change is all that will exist. Various fringe scientists have tried to calculate this point of infinity, giving us calculated dates ranging from 2010 to 2050. Dates that many of us will live to see. Perhaps the date is Dec 22, 2012. Ethnobotanists and fractal time experts Terrence and Dennis McKenna believe so, and they present their ideas in Invisible Landscape: Mind Hallucinogens and the I Ching (1993).

This when seen quite simply makes sense on the technological front. The evolution of technology is rapidly accelerating, today new technologies replace the old ones every month, so it is not so crazy to think that there would come a point where new technologies will replace old technologies everyday and a constant change is all that will exist.

In a nutshell their graph only suggests that 2012 will be a very eventful year with a lot of changes which looking at the current global scenario is not surprising at all.

The three Abrahamic religions Islam, Christianity, and Judaism seem to have very similar apocalyptic prophecies associated with the second coming of the Christ figure and the rise of the Antichrist leading to invasion of the holy land of Jerusalem, Israel. But none of these prophecies have any time line that says this would happen in 2012. They are the prophecies about the end times, and since the surfacing of the Mayan calendar end of time in 2012 theories, people have been combining the two in their heads to mean the same thing.

Hindus don’t seem to have any particular prophecies about the year 2012, even though some people claim that certain parts of the Hindu literature point to the ending of ‘Kalyuga’ that we are in now and the beginning of a golden age called ‘Satyuga’ in or around 2012. But I will not be too surprised if all radical Hindutva groups go around torturing and killing minorities trying to “make a pure way for the golden age.”

I tried to look for a Buddhist point of view on 2012, but they don’t seem to have any prophecies either. Except on someone’s website I read that Buddhists see intervention by UFOs in 2012 but I couldn’t help myself from not taking that too seriously.

4) Galactic alignment, Pole Reversal, Weakening Earth’s magnetic field and Planet X/Nibiru:

Ancient civilizations seem to have referred to the cyclic motion of the heavenly bodies as a method of time keeping, and different positions, and orientations of planets and stars were used as reference points for this time keeping just like the numbers on the face of watch mark different points in a 24 hour day. Galactic alignment seems to have been referred to by the ancient civilizations for the very same reason. Occurring of this alignment would just mark a point on the cyclic long count time keeping and there is very little chance that anything cataclysmic would take place due to this alignment.

Pole reversal is a scientifically proven phenomenon, due to which earth’s north pole and south pole switch their positions periodically. Even though a pole reversal might occur in the future, there is no hard evidence to suggest that it would occur any time soon, leave alone on a specific day in 2012.

A lot of scientists and theorists believe that earth’s magnetic field is weakening, which might be scientifically proven. But again, there is no evidence that it would reach a point that would lead to something cataclysmic in 2012.

As far as Planet X/Nibiru is concerned according to some it is supposed to be the 10th planet in our solar system that will return around this time. But scientists find no evidence of existence of any such planet in our solar system and as logical beings let us refrain from believing in something that has no proof of its existence.

5) Nostradmus’s apocalyptic quatrains:

Nostradamus has attracted a following that, along with the popular press, credits him with predicting many major world events.

Most academic sources maintain that the associations made between world events and Nostradamus’s quatrains are largely the result of misinterpretations or mistranslations (sometimes deliberate) or else are so tenuous as to render them useless as evidence of any genuine predictive power. Moreover, none of the sources listed offers any evidence that anyone has ever interpreted any of Nostradamus’s quatrains specifically enough to allow a clear identification of any event in advance. It is only after a major event taking place that someone interprets one of Nostradamus’s works to have predicted that event.

I am sure I have not covered all the possible 2012 theories that are out there, but the ones listed above are the main prophecies and theories that suggest that 2012 will be a year of dimensional change, apocalypse, end of time and the list goes on.

Anyway now let us get back to the question of what a self-fulfilling prophecy is.

According to wikipedia:

“A self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to become true, by the very terms of the prophecy itself, due to positive feedback between belief and behavior.

“The self-fulfilling prophecy is, in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evoking a new behaviour which makes the original false conception come ‘true.’ This specious validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuates a reign of error. For the prophet will cite the actual course of events as proof that he was right from the very beginning.

“In other words, a prophecy declared as truth when it is actually false may sufficiently influence people, either through fear or logical confusion, so that their reactions ultimately fulfill the once-false prophecy.”

In layman’s terms a self-fulfilling prophecy is one where an individual or a group of people uphold or propagate something someone said in the past and make sure that they do whatever it takes to make that prophecy come true.

There has been a lot of propaganda on the news, information channels and other media in general about 2012 and we have to understand that establishment, and most of the mass media network, never air anything that they don’t want the public to know about. But 2012 has not been ignored at all, if anything it has only been blown out of proportion to serve a hidden agenda.

The History Channel has aired a handful of special series on doomsday that include analysis of 2012 theories, such as Decoding the Past (2005–2007), 2012, End of Days (2006), Last Days on Earth (2006), Seven Signs of the Apocalypse (2007), and Nostradamus 2012 (2008)

The Discovery Channel also aired 2012 Apocalypse in 2009, suggesting that massive solar storms, magnetic pole reversal, earthquakes, super volcanoes, and other drastic natural events may occur in 2012.

There was also a Hollywood blockbuster titled ’2012,’ which showed how 2012 will be a year of utter destruction where mother nature will destroy the very life it sustained.

And if you know your history, you will know that governments have used mass media, cinema industry to further their propaganda for a very long time. From trying to make marijuana illegal to driving away illegal immigrants was all done by persuading the common public of their dangers through propaganda movies.

One thing is for sure, even if the governments or establishment is not directly behind all the talk about 2012 in the media, they at least have no problem with the hype that is being created about it or they would have kept this knowledge away from the common man and the only reason so as to why the governments promoted and allowed theories about 2012 on mass media seems to be- “because it helps their cause.”

With the help of the media there is already a lot of anticipation, doubt and fear that has been created in people’s minds.

While a small portion of people who do their own research might not give into these scare tactics, the common man has successfully been utterly confused.

I personally think that nothing extra terrestrial or unearthly will happen in 2012, rather everything that will go down in the coming year will be completely man made and it will be to serve a very selfish human purpose.

People from different faiths and religions will make sure that their prophecies come true. Christians will uphold their leader as the Christ figure, and the opposing Islamic or Jewish leader as the Antichrist and Muslims will hold the Christian leader as the Antichrist and they will fight over their holy land and rights and make sure that things are played out exactly how their respective holy books prophesied.

And systematic collapse of world economies, combined with wars, climate control using Haarp and shortage of living resources will sufficiently convince the gullible public that it is the end of the world as their respective religions had predicted.

In fact most of the stage for events that will unfold next year is already being set. The global economy, it seems, has once again been systematically and deliberately pushed to a point of no return, just like it was during the Great Depression in 1930s which inevitably lead to WWII.

Some of the similarities between the 1930s and now are uncanny. This is exactly how the economies were systematically collapsed during the Great Depression and countries were led to war and innocent young people were forcefully drafted into armies to fight and die.

Countries are collapsing one by one, tension between countries is rising, talks about the first great war of the 21st century have become a common place affair.

And as the next step in the fulfilment of these self-pushed prophecies- the war between the Israel and Iran seems to be drawing closer everyday, and once that happens it will become a religious affair and people will be convinced that it is the end of the world indeed.

It will be the next step in what Hunter S. Thompson very aptly termed “A Christian Jihad” when he saw the twin towers go down on September the 11th.

It will be nothing but furthering of a political and religious agenda that is very systematically being put in place and will most probably be executed without much hassle as most people won’t be able to wrap their heads around all the chaos that will follow.

Population reduction and a paradigm shift from a world run by sovereign countries to a world run by a single one world government in order centralize the world power, seem to be the primary reason for the stage that is being set as I write this.

2012 will be an year when the global bankers and leaders will set the stage where they can easily push forth the idea of a New World Order and a One World Government. Tattered and destroyed by wars, diseases, killings, and social collapse, people will settle for anything that promises peace and order.

If some of the independent researchers and journalists are to be believed, the leaders plan to reduce the population of the world to a mere 500,000,000 from the current 7 billion.

By the time our leaders get done with their evil plans, the human spirit would have been raped, tattered and destroyed and people who live through this hell will, at the end of it, beg for peace and mercy at any cost, and will settle for anything the establishment forces on them in exchange for a chance to live. All human freedoms will be taken away by the establishment, allowing just enough to turn people into mechanical work machines.

The new leaders will be hailed as the Christ figures, and the ones that lose will be marked in history books as the evil ones and a new global empire will be installed and pushed forward as the beginning of a more peaceful time for humanity, united under one government where divisions like country and religion will cease to exist.

They will sell war as peace, and slavery as freedom and people will buy it because they will be too weak to fight back. They will sell the One World Government idea as a chance for humanity to grow beyond manmade boundaries and unite, and people will buy that.

But when the day comes, don’t be fooled by their lies. The leaders only care about controlling every goddamn thing in the world, and they will stop only when they do. They will make it look like they are doing all this for you, the common man, but when they do remember that they will be the furthest from the truth.

2012 will not be the end of the world, it will be the beginning of a systematic collapse of the society that will eventually lead to further centralization of the world power into the hands of fewer men, and these men will decide how we will live and die.

Piyush Goswami of Bangalore, India, publishes the blog, I have to say.