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Twentytwelvology. You won’t find it in Webster’s dictionary. Not yet. But believe me, before this decade is out, we’ll have that as well as plenty of 2012 -isms and -ographies. The 2012 Phenomenon” was recently the subject of a paper written by anthropologist Robert K. Sitler.1 The sub-title of his paper brings focus to his approach: “New Age Appropriation of an Ancient Mayan Calendar.” In his assessment of the writings and statements of popular writers, New Age teachers, and independent researchers (including myself), he sorts the wheat from the chaff and exposes “merely tangential connections to the realities of the Mayan world.” To his credit, he distinguishes the serious work done by myself and Geoff Stray2 from the wild and unfounded speculations of other writers.Sitler’s area of focus is the Long Count calendar and its 2012 end-date, which is the subject of growing interest and controversy – not so much among academicians, who dismiss it as irrelevant, but among spiritual seekers and people interested in the wisdom attained by ancient civilisations. So, what’s all the clamour and confusion about? What is the Long Count calendar?

The Long Count Calendar: An archeological site that’s been known about for decades preserves an open secret about the culture that invented the Long Count calendar. Izapa, in southern Mexico a few miles from the Guatemala border, was the chief ceremonial observatory of “the Izapan civilisation.”3 It was the transitional culture between the older Olmec civilisation and the emerging Maya, and enjoyed its heyday between 400 BCE and 50 CE. My investigation of Izapa’s carved monuments and the site’s astronomical orientations have revealed a great deal about how they understood the Long Count calendar.4 The earliest monuments carved with Long Count dates were found in the region of Izapa and have been dated to the 1st century BCE. The Long Count notation uses bars to represent 5 and dots to represent 1. Five place values are almost always used, representing the following periods of days...

1. Humanity and Planet Earth are currently going through a huge change or shift in consciousness and reality perception.

2. The Mayan civilization of Central America was and is the most advanced in relation to time-science knowledge. Their main calendar is the most accurate on the planet. It has never erred. They actually have 22 calendars in total, covering the many timing cycles in the Universe and Solar System. Some of these calendars are yet to be revealed.

3. The Mayan fifth world finished in 1987. The sixth world starts in 2012. So we are currently "between worlds". This time is called the "Apocalypse" or revealing. This means the real truth will be revealed. It is also the time for us to work through "our stuff" individually and collectively.

4. The Mayan sixth world is actually blank. This means it is up to us, as co-creators, to start creating the new world and civilization we want now.

5. The Mayans also say that by 2012- we will have gone beyond technology as we know it.- we will have gone beyond time and money. - we will have entered the fifth dimension after passing through the fourth dimension - Planet Earth and the Solar System will come into galactic synchronization with the rest of the Universe. - Our DNA will be "upgraded" (or reprogrammed) from the centre of our galaxy. (Hunab Ku) "Everbody on this planet is mutating. Some are more conscious of it than others. But everyone is doing it" - Extraterrestrial Earth Mission.

6. In 2012 the plane of our Solar System will line up exactly with the plane of our Galaxy, the Milky Way. This cycle has taken 26,000 years to complete. Virgil Armstrong also says that two other galaxies will line up with ours at the same time. A cosmic event!

7. Time is actually speeding up (or collapsing). For thousands of years the Schumann Resonance or pulse (heartbeat) of Earth has been 7.83 cycles per second, The military have used this as a very reliable reference. However, since 1980 this resonance has been slowly rising. It is now over 12 cycles per second! This mean there is the equalivant of less than 16 hours per day instead of the old 24 hours. Another intrepetation is - we, or rather Consciousness have been down this same road seven times before over the last 16 billion years. Each of these cycles of Creation runs 20 times faster than the last one. The same amount of Creation is paced 20 times tighter. This is why time seems to be going so fast. It is not "time" but Creation itself that is accelerating.

Here is an idea worth considering: Thousands of years ago humankind had attained a high-level of technological achievement. They understood laws of nature that are unknown to us today. They explored Antarctica and mapped the entire globe. They made monuments that we would have difficulty recreating with our modern techniques and equipment.

Then tragedy struck in the form of a global cataclysm. They were not expecting it. The disaster was so terrible that most humans perished and many animal species became extinct. Those humans that did survive were forced to live like animals while the Earth recovered. Memories faded, and knowledge disappeared. Society began again from scratch, returning to pagan beliefs and simplistic lives. But there were some that survived who somehow managed to remember more, that retained some of the advanced techniques and ideas that others had forgotten – and had the foresight and dedication to warn future generations of the next cataclysm. Knowing that it would be more than 10,000 years before the cataclysm re-occurred, they had to allow for certain possibilities: that in the year 2012 we could be speaking a brand new language, following unpredictable religions and using any sort of numbering system. If they were to leave us clues to help us survive, those clues would need to be big and solid enough to last 10,000 years; and coded so as to be unambiguous - regardless of the culture that interpreted them. Some modern humans, of various backgrounds and disciplines, are working towards deciphering what they have left us.

We are on the verge of cloning humans, of aping God. Regardless of ethics and laws, it will happen – for whenever scientists have had the ability to do something, they haven’t been able to resist – it is in their nature. On the other side of the coin, when there are not enough clues to solve a puzzle, when none of their predecessors have made quality in-roads, they have rattled off stock answers and moved on to something easier. These unsolved mysteries are typically of a historical nature – our scientists have been unable to observe the processes in real-time, and have chosen not to make unscientific guesses. The tasks have by default been given to the independent researchers, the untrained pseudo-scientists, the men and women with imagination, verve and daring...

You can't tell by looking, but scientists say the Sun has just undergone an important change. Our star's magnetic field has flipped.The Sun's magnetic north pole, which was in the northern hemisphere just a few months ago, now points south. It's a topsy-turvy situation, but not an unexpected one.

"This always happens around the time of solar maximum," says David Hathaway, a solar physicist at the Marshall Space Flight Center. "The magnetic poles exchange places at the peak of the sunspot cycle. In fact, it's a good indication that Solar Max is really here."

Above Left: Sunspot counts, plotted here against an x-ray image of the Sun, are nearing their maximum for the current solar cycle.

The Sun's magnetic poles will remain as they are now, with the north magnetic pole pointing through the Sun's southern hemisphere, until the year 2012 when they will reverse again. This transition happens, as far as we know, at the peak of every 11-year sunspot cycle -- like clockwork.

Earth?s magnetic field also flips, but with less regularity. Consecutive reversals are spaced 5 thousand years to 50 million years apart. The last reversal happened 740,000 years ago. Some researchers think our planet is overdue for another one, but nobody knows exactly when the next reversal might occur.

Although solar and terrestrial magnetic fields behave differently, they do have something in common: their shape. During solar minimum the Sun's field, like Earth's, resembles that of an iron bar magnet, with great closed loops near the equator and open field lines near the poles. Scientists call such a field a "dipole." The Sun's dipolar field is about as strong as a refrigerator magnet, or 50 gauss (a unit of magnetic intensity). Earth's magnetic field is 100 times weaker.