Thursday, January 3, 2013

Where are the prophets of doom....now December has come and gone?

Yesterday, I found myself  thinking about this blog and noticed just how quiet certain Yogi Masters are now. To be totally honest, teaching Kundalini Yoga and being very familiar with the writings about the shift from Pisces to Aquarius, I also found myself uncharacteristically restless on two portentous dates in December, i.e. 12/12/2012 and 12/21/2012.

On the first of these dates, at 12 minutes past the hour I left my job and went into the ladies toilets where I meditated for 12 minutes. Even as I was doing this the more rational part of me was screaming 'what are you doing this for?' I ignored it and carried on meditating. I didn't notice anything different afterwards, but then again, I wasn't looking for anything. After all, the big one was 12/21/2012. What I was doing was only preparation.

The day of 12/21/2012 dawned and it struck me that there were other parts of the world where it was already 12/21/2012 and there was no reports of anything out of the ordinary. I was flying to my family that day for Christmas and so, counting flight time, I found myself being up all day and night of the 21st. If being mindful and aware were the criteria for being able to receive whatever shift was coming, no-one was more qualified! Again my journey home was completely
smooth and uneventful, no different than the everyday flow of life.

12/22/2012 dawned. When I woke up, I felt I had been well and truly fooled, taken in by prophets of doom, who had absolutely no proof, but had been so convincing that many people, including me, had listened. I could have pointed the finger at spiritual people, especially yogis, but to be fair, many people who don't see themselves as 'spiritual' were also anticipating 'something' would happen.

Having now had time to ponder the whole event, I think it shows how we as human beings are prone to fabricate meaning where there is none. All that happened, I assume, is that Mayans ran out of paper for the end of their calendar.

What some of us present day human beings did was to spin this into an end-of-the-world, doomsday scenario. We put meaning into totally meaningless events and then lived the month of December as if our interpretation really meant something. When you look at it like this, it is so ludicrous as to be funny.

There has been very little comment from those who were most vociferous, but I came across this post on Facebook which I am copying and acknowledging the writer for because he's had the courage to write what I was thinking and has phrased it better than I could.

"December 2012 has come and gone. No end of the world and no shift in  consciousness. No aliens arrived to ‘save the planet’ either. No  ‘rapture’ or anything of the sort. No three days of darkness. No planet Niburu.

"I hope this shows very clearly that all those who have been preaching these various events have been mistaken and that they would do well to examine and alter the processes by which they came to their completely incorrect conclusions and explain how they came to make such mistakes that have caused so many people so much distraction and caused many people to make decisions that have caused them serious setbacks if they wish to be taken seriously on any matter in the future. 

"Theirs is the  responsibility for having distracted the attention of the human species from the serious issues of Rapid Resource Depletion (RRD), Pollution and Global Climate Change (P&GCC), Global Monetary Collapse (GMC), and the increasing incredibility of the Growth Model of Development (GMD), which have to be responded to effectively and immediately."
~Nirmalan Dhas

2 comments:

  1. Skeptic that I am, I had two thoughts during this whole hubbub.

    1) What were the people promulgating this nonsense going to do the next morning (12.22.2012) when they woke up and nothing had changed?

    2) I already knew the answer: Start looking for the next conflagration to believe in, to misinterpret, and foist on a gullible population.

    These people are like politicians. As soon as the election is won or lost, what do they start doing? They start the process all over again: raising money, stirring up their supporters, predicting doom.

    The sad part is that so many people buy into it!

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  2. I believe such thinking arises in part from our tendency to project our own end, which is certain, on everything from our near community to the entire cosmos. And we have been doing it since we developed a strong sense of linear time which immediately raises the issue of endings. Once we get such an idea in our heads we start seeing signs everywhere like Pooh and Piglet seeing ever increasing numbers of 'Wozzle' tracks in the snow as they walk round and round a thicket. In India and many traditional societies time is viewed as cyclical - so things come back and repeat endlessly including, in their view, our own souls. In his book on millennialism, Heaven on Earth, Richard Landes humorously names the people who make dire predictions that fail to eventuate as Roosters, and the skeptics as Owls. In the end the Mayan calendar predictions were harmless. But sometimes millennial thinking can be very destructive. Landes chronicles many outbreaks of millennial thinking that killed millions. But some like the Mayan calendar or Y2k are quite harmless.

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