Could this book turn into a series, updated every year, following up on the fall-out from the symbolic tipping point of 2012? Could the 13 individual takes featured here be followed annually by new commentaries, for as long as the project retained validity, on how our world copes with the times beyond the end of the Mayan calendar?
I think that would be a very good idea, if it hasn't already been thought of by the American editor, Jim Young, and his publishers. For the moment, though, this absorbing and inspiriting collection of opinion about the symbolic tipping point of 2012 offers much energising sustenance for consciousness-raising thought.
Outraged by the doomsday scenario of the Roland Emmerich movie, 2012, and how he felt it distorted the Mayan prophecies, Young, already the author of twelve books on spiritual subjects, was ready to produce another - as if by confirmatory magic, the title suddenly came to him the next morning in the shower.
Wide Spectrum of Ideas on 2012
He knew this was the first step - next was to find the contributors. And this he has done with aplomb. For these writers represent a wide spectrum of ideas that will appeal to an equally wide constituency - whether the interests are scientific, spiritual, psychological, anthropological or mystical, or all of these things. Generally, the tone is sanguine, the message, inaugural. Importantly, most will find a standpoint with which they can identify.
Among those who have made these diverse contributions to this international compendium are Ervin Laszlo, the Hungarian philosopher of science and systems theorist, Jose Arguelles, the Mexican author and artist, Geoff Stray, author and leading 2012 expert, Nicolya Christi, life coach, psychic and author, Dr Llewellyn Vaughn-Lee, Sufi teacher and author, the Swedish biologist Dr Carl Johan Calleman, Miguel Angel Vergana, a Mayan priest, and from the USA, Martien and Teressena Bakens, a healer and an artist.
Mystical and Esoteric Prophecies
The prolific Laszlo, who understandably gets pride of place at the front of the book to set the scene on 2012, says that quite apart from the mystical and esoteric prophecies, there is solid evidence that the year will be a 'turbulent period'.
For one thing, the solar maximum forecast for 2012 (or possibly 2013) would do more harm than any before, so dependent has human society become on the global energy grid: a major solar storm would cause the failure of electric power in most parts of the world. And for another, scientists predict breaches in the Earth's magnetic field, which hitherto has protected us from the effects of solar storms and coronal mass ejections.
Eden Sky, a student of Arguelles', echoes the essential theme which I have always pursued: that 2012 has become the 'inkblot' on to which people have projected their hopes and fears for the future. No one can say what will happen, but we must understand that all of us are caught in a time of shifting awareness as the solar system moves into new regions of galactic radiation.
Energy Inseparable from Consciousness
This shift is 'mind-blowing' and changes everything, says Gill Edwards, a psychologist involved in mind-body medicine, who reminds us that everything is energy and that energy is inseparable from consciousness, emphasising the all-inclusive nature of experience.
The Bakens pick up on the significance of the symbolism of the serpent, and how its coiled spiral shape is widespread in the art of the ancient world. The relationship between the serpent and the cosmos, which was understood by the ancients, signifies the spiral energy fields through which the universe is growing and developing towards a unity of consciousness, or oneness, ' the divine principle the masters have spoken about'.
And I agree wholeheartedly with Nicolya Christi when she says that for too long we have been disconnected from the soul, and living our lives from a personality level. Now, the profound changes afoot, heightening towards 2012, contribute to 'a higher vibration quantum field (divine matrix) ... We are shifting from duality to unity consciousness'.
Great Period of Psychic Change
Essentially, I feel that what this book is dealing with is the 'one life within us and abroad' which the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge so earnestly recognised 200 years ago at the very start of the great period of psychic change which, as it has gathered momentum, has brought more and more people to this universalist understanding.
The other contributors in the volume are Dr Mark Van Stone, art historian, Aluna Joy Yaxk'in, mystic and life coach, and Jim Young himself who rightly asserts that we have never needed to wait for 2012 to start living it. Some of us haven't.
2013! The Beginning is Here, edited by Jim Young. O Books UK £10.99 / US $19.95 ISBN 978-1-84694-565-6
Geoff Ward - Geoff Ward, MA Lit., is a British journalist, media consultant, author and lecturer/tutor in literature and creative writing
