By Ellen Debenport
Visionary author Gregg Braden tells us that we will enter a new world age in 2012. The transformation has already begun, but conditions are ripe for real changes this year. How our society collectively approaches the challenges in 2010 will make the critical difference for what transpires in 2012.
Forget all the scary predictions you might have heard about 2012, says author Gregg Braden. The real challenges are likely to be this year: 2010.
But as always, what actually comes to pass will depend on the collective consciousness we hold as human beings. We have choices.
Braden, whose books integrate science and spirituality, waded into the 2012 controversy last year with Fractal Time: The Secret of 2012 and a New World Age. He does not make predictions as much as lay out probabilities based on astronomy, ancient wisdom and myth, geologic records, and what little we know about the end of ages past. He also created his own mathematical system to forecast potential events, the Time Code Calculator.
“Are we headed into a time of catastrophe or 1,000 years of peace? Are we looking at Armageddon, Eden, or possibly both?
The truth is that no one knows for sure,” Braden writes.
In any discussion of what 2012 portends, Braden suggests keeping three things in mind:
• We know humanity will not be wiped out. Humans have weathered these passages before and lived to tell the story.
• We are already in the shift now. It actually began about 1980 and will continue until about 2016, Braden says. What we are living through is typical for the end of an age: global warming, melting polar ice caps, rising seas, exponential population growth, depletion of natural resources, and war, especially over natural resources. It is temporary.
• We know from spiritual law that we can choose how to move through change and choose what comes after it.
What Are the Predictions?
Ancient civilizations knew the earth passed through long cycles, and they told stories of cataclysmic changes that had occurred during shifts in the past. We have hints of lost civilizations and mass extinctions.
The Hindu Vedas, written about 1500 B.C. but passed down as oral history long before then, describe how the universe is created, destroyed, and reborn over vast periods of time called yugas.
We are believed to be in a Kali Yuga, also known as the Iron Age or Black Age, the period of greatest darkness for humankind. It is the shortest cycle and a necessary transition. People living through a Kali Yuga are believed to lose 75 percent of their self-awareness, Braden writes. This period is marked by:
• Unreasonable rulers.
• Addictions.
• Famine and death.
• Helpless targets preyed upon.
The Hopi tell stories about three worlds, vast lengths of time that ended:
• First, with fire.
• Second, with the planet freezing over and not spinning.
• Third, with a great flood.
Their prophecy says we are in a fourth world that will end in our lifetimes, and we will soon be living in the fifth. Hopi prophecy states, “When earthquakes, floods, hailstorms, droughts and famine will be the life of every day, the time will have then come for the return to the true path.”
Writes Braden: “The key here is that the Hopi knew of these cycles long before modern researchers could confirm them scientifically. If such indigenous knowledge of cycles is so accurate for the past, then what does that mean for their predictions of what's to come in the future?”
The Aztecs, like the Mayans, believed the universe is composed of great waves of energy that repeat as cycles over time. They call these cycles “suns” and say we are living at the end of the fifth sun. End-of-cycle changes are necessary for purification before we move on.
They believe the other “suns” ended:
• First, when the animal kingdom overcame the human kingdom.
• Second, with a great wind that swept the earth clean.
• Third, with a rain of fire from the sky (supported by geologic records of a time when portions of the earth were covered with fire, perhaps from a giant asteroid).
• Fourth, with global cooling, also confirmed in the geologic record.
Nostradamus, the 16th-century French seer, predicted that the time around the new millennium would bring great change. So did Edgar Cayce, the American psychic of the 20th century, but he added, “It may depend upon much that deals with [the] metaphysical ... There are those conditions that in the activity of individuals, in line of thought and endeavor, keep oft many a city and many land intact through their application of spiritual laws.”
In other words, we have choices. “With each new cycle, we have the opportunity to move beyond the thinking that has limited or destroyed us in the past,” Braden writes.
Heeding the Lessons of Fractal Time
Fractals are patterns that repeat themselves throughout nature in large and small ways. For instance, the neurons of the brain fire in the same pattern as lightning in the sky. The particles inside an atom replicate a solar system. The arms of the Milky Way look like the outer bands of a hurricane, and the same spiral pattern occurs in the way hair grows on a human head or seeds grow in the center of a sunflower.
Braden uses fractals, a form of geometry first put forth by math professor Benoit Mandelbrot at Yale in the 1970s, to describe the repeating cycles of time. Events occur in patterns, he says, and if we know where we are in a cycle, then we can calculate when events might repeat themselves.
For example, using his Time Code Calculator (available at www.greggbraden.com), he can take the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor as a seed event and predict future times when conditions are ripe for an attack on the United States. One such date was Sept. 11, 2001, the day the Twin Towers came down, he says. Another was in 1984, when the United States came perilously close to a missile strike from the Soviet Union, although few knew at the time.
This is an important point: The calculator shows when conditions are right but cannot predict what will actually happen. It's like a tornado watch—conditions are right for a tornado to develop, but that doesn't mean one will.
By Braden's calculations, this is the year—2010—when conditions will be right for a surprise attack on the United States, the use of nuclear weapons, and an economic crash. Conditions that could produce a global war show up in 2011.
That doesn't mean it will happen, and the consciousness we hold is crucial.
“When we understand what the darkness of our cycle means and why it's necessary, we begin to see the great challenges of our time in a new light,” Braden writes. “With that light, our moment in history and our response to the changes that come with it take on new meaning. With these ideas in mind, it becomes even clearer that now is the best time for us to go through such a cycle.
“The reason is that now is the first time we have the understanding, the need, and the technology to reach into the realm of all possibilities and choose the kind of future that will arise from the chaos of the present.”
Keep in mind that even if our current times seem bleak, he said, “the polarities of peace, healing, love and compassion are alive, well and abundant.” As always, whatever we choose to focus on will expand.
“All the big stuff will happen before 2012, just as it has been in these last few years,” Braden said in a teleclass.
Braden writes that heart-based living will directly affect the way we experience this historic shift.
“We're creating the new normal,” he said. “We're choosing right now what it is that comes from the dust of unsustainable ways of living that are collapsing. Rarely do we have the opportunity to literally reformat an entire civilization the way we do right now.”
Spiritually, heart-based living comprises the compassion, love, wisdom and understanding that Unity calls living from the Christ within. But heart energy can also be measured by science.
Satellite recordings have shown that the earth's magnetic field spikes whenever human beings are joined in focus. It happened on Sept. 11, 2001, when the Twin Towers came down, and in 1997 when Princess Diana died. Incredibly, this means that the heart-based emotion of the world's population can actually change the magnetic fields of the earth. And scientists have learned that magnetic fields influence everything from climate to war and peace between nations.
”When we create certain feelings in our heart—about our lives, relationships, people around us—we set up, literally, a pattern of energy that influences the very field that is changing the things in this world. We literally set up in our hearts a magnetic field in our bodies that speaks to the same magnetic field that influences all life on Earth,” Braden said in a teleclass.
Experiments are under way to do just that. The Institute of HeartMath® is developing the Global Coherence Initiative to find out how the earth's magnetic fields affect human heart rhythms, brain activity, stress levels and emotions. Then HeartMath, which has been researching the power of heart energy since 1991, will continue its efforts to teach individuals how to achieve the coherence that enhances our daily lives. The mission of the initiative is no less than “to shift global consciousness from instability and discord to balance, cooperation and enduring peace” (www.glcoherence.org).
So even as we face the challenges of moving from one world age to the next, “we are discovering that we are born with the power to harmonize our bodies with the life-sustaining fields of the earth in such a way that we can alleviate the potential suffering of those challenges. The way to do so is through the silent language of the heart,” Braden writes.
“What a powerful, beautiful and awesome convergence of circumstances. The way to ease the 2012 world-age transition is to change the way we feel about the world and to do so together. Could we ask for a more perfect scenario?”
We are already experiencing the birth of a beautiful new world and at the same time witnessing the death of everything that does not support that new world, he wrote. What will we choose? Will we cling to the old ways and fight for what remains or recognize that we are stronger together? Will we continue to compete for oil, water and fertile land or recognize that Earth is a home to be shared by us all?
“While anytime is a good one to make positive and life-affirming choices in our lives,” Braden wrote, “it seems as if nature is conspiring to create the perfect conditions that make choice and change easier: the 2012 choice point of opportunity.”
