Midlife Transits

I went to the Jay Leno taping on October 30 and saw John Cusack. He’ s the star of a movie coming out in November about 2012 being the end of the world. There are lots of predictions floating around the Internet about that year these days. Here is part 1 of my own expert predictions. Enjoy!

THE MOVIE: I predict the movie will be a big hit, with lots of neato special effects, a so-so story line, and, with all due respect to Mr. Cusack, generally mediocre acting overwhelmed by the visuals. Basis for prediction: the buzz is strong and the advertising extensive; the special effects really do look cool; these kinds of movies tend to do big box office; knowledge of the generally weak storylines of these kinds of movies and the difficulty of making lines like “whatever happens, we’re still a family” Oscar-worthy.

THE END OF THE WORLD: will NOT occur in 2012. Basis for prediction: The historical record for predicting the end of the world is quite poor. As of this writing, every single individual or organization who has ever predicted the end of the world has been wrong. This is the safest prediction I could make because, if by some chance, the world did come to an unlikely end in 2012, there would be nobody left to care about my prediction.

All right, I’m being glib. Let’s look at a couple of the reasons why a movie about the world ending in 2012 would even be made. Reason #1: is the Mayan Long Count calendar. The Mayan Long Count calendar begins in August of 3114 B.C. and, according to the latest interpretations, ends on December 21, 2012.

However, as you may notice, the world itself did not begin in August of 3114 B.C. and the end of the calendar does not indicate that the even the Mayans thought the world would end in 2012. The Mayans had an ingenious and complex system of counting time periods, one that gave them the ability to create numerical symbols for a series of days lasting over 5,000 years. That’s impressive.

At the end of the cycle, the digits in the Mayan calendar can roll over, sort of like a car’s odometer, so that you get the equivalent of a bunch of zeros. Our own system does something similar when the digits roll over at the end of a millennium. We get excited when digits roll over, and the Mayans that came up with the calendar may well have gotten excited when the digits on the Long Count Calendar rolled over, but that is different from the world ending.

The Mayan world ended (to the extent that the civilization that achieved so much essentially collapsed) in the same way that most things in this world end, rather slowly. It did not take place in accordance with the end of any calendar. If history is any guide (sometimes it is), our own civilization will eventually collapse, rather slowly. But not by 2012. Ecological degradation poses a far greater threat to our civilization than the Mayan calendar does.

Even if 2012 sees a gigantic volcanic eruption (could happen at any time) that causes massive problems, or an asteroid strike (could happen, although we would probably be able to see it coming if it was large enough to cause major damage), or an extremely large earthquake, the world would not end. Human civilization has seen a number of really huge volcanic eruptions (e.g., Krakatoa), massive earthquakes, and even the occasional asteroid strike. Human civilization has seen a whole bunch of really major disasters, but thus far, not only does the world refuse to end, but human beings refuse to die out. Things can get bad, and sometimes they do, but human beings take a licking and keep on ticking. For some, this is undoubtedly disappointing, but it’s true.

Take, for example, the Black Plague in the mid-1300s. That was big. It killed close to a hundred million people, and cut the population of Europe about in half over the course of a couple of years. That’s huge. Think of a hundred million people dying in the US now; that would be a big deal. Yet, the world did not end. Europe didn’t even end. And the Mayans, for all their skills, apparently didn’t have a lot to say about it.

The bottom line is that we humans tend overestimate dangers and underestimate our own resiliency to deal with things, both large and small.Whatever happens in 2012, we will deal with it.

Reason #2 for predictions of the end of the world can be found in religious and spiritual sentiment. Most cultures and religions have some way of accounting for the beginning of the world and the end of the world. Maybe not all, but most. One of the things that sometimes goes along with strong spiritual or religious feeling is a longing to escape the boring realities and struggles of life here on earth to more quickly join God or experience the afterlife. A desire for justice against all the bad people in the world (and there are always plenty of those) plays into this as well.

That doesn’t mean that everyone who is religious or spiritual is worried about the end of the world in 2012. Most aren’t. In fact, some devout Christians emphatically speak against such talk on the basis that we humans are not given to know when the end of days will occur. But….among those who do worry about the end of the world, the reasoning often has a distinctly religious, spiritual, or ‘prophetic’ cast. There is the belief that something otherworldly, mysterious, and uncannily accurate is at work, and that we have only to look for the coded signs to see unprecedented disaster ahead.

Astrologically, you could call this too much Neptune or drinking the Neptune kool-aid. Neptune is notorious for misleading people. Whatever validity such feelings may have on an emotional, symbolic, or even spiritual level, they do not translate into literal physical events. Again, the record on these predictions is incredibly poor. Disasters happen that aren’t predicted, and those that are predicted don’t. No matter how strongly we may feel about things, we haven’t exactly unlocked the code yet.

Finally, there is the hodgepodge factor. Lots of people who are worried about 2012 aren’t especially spiritual or even prophetic. But they hear about all kinds of theories, including Planet Nibiru or other things, and it just increases their already present sense of worry.When people are exposed to a hodgepodge of evidence that seems to trend in the same direction, people have a tendency to place a lot of weight on that evidence and to believe that the evidence must be true. In other words, the fact that there are supposedly lots of different, unrelated reasons to think about 2012 makes it seem to people more likely that something really huge will happen then.

Since there is legitimately plenty to worry about in the world today, some people just take the hodgepodge all the way over into imagining a doomsday scenario. Give people like this a firm date, and they’ll latch onto it.

Then people get locked into a kind of reasoning in which they say to themselves “why would I be thinking or feeling such things if they weren’t true?” As one person quoted in an ABC News article said: “[My predictions] are so spectacular, they can’t possibly be wrong.” Most of our worries and fears, however, are wrong. And thank goodness for that!

BUT WHAT ABOUT PREDICTIONS FOR SPIRITUAL ENLIGHTENMENT?

My predictions for that are in the next post.