Among the many predictions for 2012 are predictions for a kind of mass spiritual enlightenment, a sort of anti-end of the world, more like a new beginning of the world. That’s a certainly a cheerier way of looking at things, although less likely to result in a blockbuster movie.

Although you never know…some of the spiritual enlightenment proponents also talk about things like confirmation of extra-terrestrials (and they aren’t thinking of bacterial fragments on the moon), so maybe you could make a movie out of that. But most just believe there will be some sort of more intangible positive transformation that will either usher in a new era or improve humanity in some way.

They could be right. Shifts in consciousness are not only frequently predicted, they frequently occur. The world had a shift in consciousness in 2008 when Barack Obama was elected president of the United States. There was a shift in consciousness when the Internet became the World Wide Web. There was a shift in consciousness with the mass production of the automobile, during the Industrial Revolution, at the end of World War I, during the Enlightenment and the Renaissance, when the US successfully implemented a revolution against the a colonial power and the French Revolution brought down monarchical power.

There was a shift in consciousness when slavery became unacceptable to the Western world, when the age of European colonization began. There was a shift in consciousness when television spread to the average home and when AIDS burst onto the scene. There was a shift in consciousness when antibiotics and vaccines became common. The light bulb ushered in a shift in consciousness and so did democracy and Communism.The use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a shift in consciousness and so was 9/11. The adoption of Christianity by the Roman Emperor Constantine was the beginning of one of the largest shifts in consciousness ever.

Shifts in consciousness are a dime a dozen. We are constantly undergoing them. For example, we are currently undergoing a global shift in consciousness in relation to gay rights.

It may seem to idealists that here on the ground shifts in consciousness take place in far too spotty and slow a manner. Some people long for a REALLY BIG shift in consciousness that will affect everyone all at the same time in the same way toward something that the idealist imagines would be preferable to the current situation, such as a world without guilt, fear, war, hunger, etc. So far that’s never happened, but of course that doesn’t stop people from hoping.

Astrologically and even physically that isn’t the way things happen. Sometimes there are little jolts or even fairly large jolts (the global economic meltdown at the end of 2008 was a semi-large jolt), and then the real work of integrating the new reality begins. It takes time.

Astrologically, this is represented by the slow revolutions of the outer planets. The outer planets do not, as far as we know, cause events, but their orbits give us a relatively decent symbol of the time scales and timing of the inevitable changes and evolution that we undergo. It’s understandable to wish it would all go faster–but it doesn’t.

To put it another way–our evolution, and our shifts in consciousness go astonishingly fast if we look at things from the perspective of how long life on earth has existed. We just fail to be impressed with our own progress. Think of how little time it has taken us to establish the rule of law, women’s rights, democracy, a repudiation of slave labor, global communications, and so on. In terms of the history of the earth, or even our own history, it’s less than a blink of the eye. Our progress seems so slow perhaps because our own lifespans are so short, or because our natures are so impatient.

The flip side is that our progress is so fast it scares us. We worry, for example, that our technological achievements outstrip our ability to cope with them emotionally and spiritually. And perhaps they do. I see no reason to stop wishing that we were all a lot better than we usually seem to be.

But what strikes me is that regardless of the challenges of a given age, humans remain human. We give our own age too much credit for both violence and bad behavior as well as progress and enlightenment. The humans of yesteryear had their technological and emotional and spiritual challenges. They had their wars, their natural disasters, their loves and their hates. They were violent and mean; they were spiritual and kind. They fought for a better world and they fought against a better world.

There’s never been a Utopia, in spite of all our efforts, but there has been progress. And sometimes that progress has crept in through the cracks left by the very things that idealists understandably dislike–fear, chaos, hostility, and war. As the now dwarf planet Pluto often says: “In destruction, there is rebirth.”

2012 will undoubtedly see its share of destruction, rebirth, and even impressive spiritual enlightenment. It’s just that most of us will be too busy complaining and just living to notice.