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Friday Woo Paranormal Pseudoscience Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Your Friday Dose of Woo: Five years

Time is important. Our life is measured in it, and there’s no way to reverse it. How we use our allotted time on this planet is, of course, the most important question that anyone ever faces. But how to measure time? It all seems so obvious, doesn’t it? You have years, which are divided into 365 days with a leap year every four years to make up for the fact that a year isn’t exactly 365 days. You’re good to go, at least for as long a period of time as anyone could expect. That’s all you could expect from any calendar, right?

Wrong.

If you’re a woo-meister, you know that a calendar could do so much more. In fact (well, not “in fact” so much as woo-meisters assert that) changing to a better calendar could save the world:

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Known as Time’s Special Witness, 7th century Mayan prophet Pacal Votan left a universal message for future generations of an evolving Earth.

Proclaiming,”If Humanity Wishes To Save Itself From Biospheric Destruction It Must Return To Living in Natural Time,” he foretold of our accelerated technological society, and the resulting damage of our collective divergence from Natural Law in exchange for materialist values.

Pacal Votan’s prophetic call is alerting present-day humanity that our biological process is transforming, approaching the culmination of a 26,000 year evolutionary program. Bringing the return of universal telepathy, heightened sense capacity, and self-reflective consciousness, this is a return to the sacred domain of our inner technology.

This grand cycle of evolution will culminate winter solstice, December 21, 2012 AD.

Yes! A prophecy from an ancient Mayan prophet, combined with a claim that we are approaching the culminatino of a “26,000 year evolutionary program”! Who could ask for more from their woo? Not me, that’s for sure, especially since I now know that the culmination of this evolutionary program will take place in just a little over five years. Bowie fan that I am, it’s all I can do to stop myself from belting out Five Years (which, of course, is the first song on one of the best albums ever produced any time anywhere, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars). It may be appropriate, given that the Bowie song is about what happens when the world learns that the end is coming in five years. On the other hand, like a lot of good woo, this Mayan prophecy promises great things at the Winter Solstice 2012:

As avid stargazers, the ancient Maya were keen to an astrological cycle we call the Precession of the Equinoxes. This is close to a 26,000 year cycle in which Earth transits through each of the 12 signs of the zodiac for about 2152 years each. Each of these astrological ages represents one month of the grand, Cosmic Year. Sumerians, Tibetans, Egyptians, Cherokees, Hopi, and Mayans refer to this same 26,000 year cycle in their mystical belief systems and each have developed calendars based on this great cycle.

The Maya messengers, reknowned for their architectural, artistic, mathematical and scientific achievements, left a calling card as a series of super-human sized stone monuments and pyramids with precise calendrical computations. Planted with great intention, these dates were left to ensure that future generations would be alerted to the coming end point of this great 26,000 year cycle. A cycle which corresponds also to a 26,000 year relationship of our Sun orbiting Alcyone, the central star of the 7 Sisters Pleiades constellation. According to the Maya, the “future” which lies beyond this end date is literally “a new world age” – “a new creation.”

The 26,000 year cycle of the Homo Sapien’s evolution and development is mirrored by the 260-day cycle of human gestation. Collective humanity is right now maturing into the being we have long been encoded to be. As with any labor, it is not the mother, or the baby, who is in charge – it is the primal process of Birth itself unfolding its own destiny.

Thus the December 21, 2012 AD is not the day where all of the sudden a light switch will flip on and everything will change, rather, we are NOW in the process of this transition from one World Age to the next. The changes are underway and will continue steadily accelerating as we head towards the culminating date!

Notice the exquisite woo-logic (or what passes for logic among woos). A prime example is the comparing of the 260 day cycle of human gestation with the 26,000 year cycle. Wow! It’s, like, so amazing, maaan! It’s, like, a number 100 times the number of days of human gestation. Never mind that the two have nothing to do with each other. After all, 260 days is really only 0.712 years, or 1/36,500 of the time of this “cycle” of 26,000. But, hey, days, years, months, what does it matter among friends, right?

But what does all this mean? Well, like lots of great New Age woo, it tells us that somehow we’re “out of touch” with nature, just not in the way you’re probably used to hearing. This particular woo tells us that it’s all our calendar that’s the problem:

What’s wrong with the calendar we have?

The 12-month calendar is arbitrary and irregular, lacking any correspondence to actual cycles of nature.

Put simply by physicist Mark Comings:”The 12 month calendar has a cycle that is contrary to and out of phase with the natural annual 13 fold gravitational wave created by the Moon’s orbit around the Earth.”

This lack of harmony, though generally un-examined, has a profound effect on the way we relate to the Universe we live within.

Wow, I never knew that the Gregorian calendar has such pernicious effects. But what’s the problem? Nasty skeptic that I am, I always thought that the rotation of the earth around the sun was a perfectly fine thing to base a calendar on, and plenty “natural,” too. For one thing, at least the seasons start and end on the same days every year. I’m happy to tell you more:

The system of 12 months and a corresponding 12 hour : 60-minute clock, is known as the 12:60 timing frequency, and has yet to be proven as a viable measure of time. This flat perception of time does not correlate to any actual cycles of time! It is an artificial model of reality. It is encoding humanity with a comprehension of the natural world as disharmonious and non-coherent!

For example, today on the Gregorian calendar is Tues, December 3rd. What day of the week will January 3rd be? What day of the week will February 3rd be?

The 13 moon calendar is an obvious and ancient way to structure the year. 13 cycles of 28 days describe the year perfectly, with one day of renewal before the new year.

Perfect Periodicity For every one time we go around the Sun,the Moon goes around Earth 13 times.

The year has already been divided by Nature-13 ‘moon’ths of perpetual harmony.

The 12-month calendar hides the 13th moon. The number 13 is now surrounded by superstition and is considered taboo; unlucky; evil. This fear is reinforced by cultural antiquities like “friday the thirteenth.” Often buildings have no 13th floor, or avoid constructing a # 13 apt unit.

Even if all this is true, what’s the problem? So what if we use the Gregorian calendar or some sort of lunar-based calendar. Given the tone of the rest of this woo, I think you know, dear readers. What is the very worst possible thing that can happen that New Age woo? That’s right, you can lose connection with nature, thanks to that evil scientific mindset:

Why has the 13th moon been hidden from us? What is to be gained by suppressing the creational principle of Mother Nature?

As prominent theoretical physicist Gerard J. Milburn reveals, “The aim of modern science is to reach an understanding of the world, not merely for purely aesthetic reasons, but that it may be ordered to our purpose.”

Living under the guise of the 12-month calendar, we have come to view nature as irrelevant – wilderness without intelligence, sentience, or order. It is from this fundamentally flawed perception that humanity attempts to progress ‘beyond the limitations of nature.’ In fact, it is our model of nature that is flawed, not nature itself.

As a comprehensive reflection of nature, the 13-Moon Calendar is an organization of creational elements that serves as a holistic tool for ongoing participation in life’s cyclic processes. If humanity wish to produce harmony, we must use harmonic tools!

And, of course, when when woo-meisteres think of great “harmonic tools,” nothing produced in the last several hundred years will do. It’s got to be ancient civilizations, preferably long dead ones like the Mayans. The nasty cynic in me is tempted to speculate that it’s because no one from these ancient civilizations can tell these woo-meisters that their interpretation of their society is a load of fetid dingo’s kidneys, but probably it’s just because invoking ancient Mayan mysteries just sounds really, really cool, particularly if you can start dabbling in numerology, astronomy woo, and invoking grand 26,000 year cycles of “evolution.” In fact, it sounds just that much more impressive if you can make it into a law, particularly if you call it the LAW OF TIME:

The basis of the knowledge of time is called the Law of Time.

The Law of Time is written: T(E) = ART
Energy (E) factored by Time (T) equals Art.

This means that (E) energy, any manifestation of the physical three-dimensional world, possesses order and is in harmony with its environment because it is factored by (T) time. In the conception of the Law of Time, however, capital T refers to time as the universal factor of synchronization. As such, time is defined by the self-existing and intrinsically perfect mathematical ratio 13:20. Derived from the mathematics of the ancient Maya, this ratio is a constant of time that organizes all of the universe as a radial sequence of synchronous moments reflecting different evolutionary phases simultaneously.

[…]

This is why you have never seen an ugly sunset. This is why the birds fly in patterns, even scorpions do a beautiful dance. All of the universe is actually a work of art… And in the days before the triumph of materialistic science it was common to say that God is the supreme architect. After the rise of materialistic science they said God was a clock maker. Big difference.

We say, what is time that it makes this order so harmonious and beautiful? What we say is that time is a form of information biology. We can see this in every living form; it has its stages of growth, it has its particular form of embodiment. Even its communities and social structures all have an aesthetic or artistic quality. This is because time is information biology and with the information biology of time, we say that Time in-forms life. This is a very profound point that we must understand very deeply. When we understand that it is time that informs life, then we see that time is the universal information and the universal in-forming principle…

Yes! They’ve hit the woo trifecta: information, mathematics, and astronomy woo, all rolled up into one. Actually, it’s even more than that, given the references to nature and earlier references to biologic evolution.

Of course, there are many, many other fantastic woo-filled passages on this website, far too many to be encompassed in this post. It’s truly astonishing in its combination of New Age mysticism, load of B.S. about prophecies from a long dead powerful civilization that, of course, possessed ancient knowledge that we have lost, complete with the obligatory references to “sacred geometry.” Of course, one of the oddest things about all this woo is that it’s the only woo that I’ve ever seen that quotes Dennis Kucinich in support. Of course, this Mayan woo has the obligatory reference to Deepak Chopra, perhaps the most reliable indication of only the highest level of woo. Even better, it cites him as having done actual “studies” allegedly showing how “the stress of linear time contributes directly to an acceleration of the physical aging process, inclusive of deterioration and disease.” Actually, I thought it was just time itself. Unless Chopra can tell us how to “unlinearize” time in a scientifically demonstrable way, linear time is what we’re stuck with.

Unfortunately, as we get closer to 2012, we can only expect to see more and more of this apocalyptic New Age silliness. I think I’m with P.Z. in this one. I postulate that the end of the 26,000 year cycle is not 2012, but rather 2112. I think Rush probably has a better handle on when this great event is supposed to happen.

On the other hand, if we’re to believe this particular site, then I have a reasonable expectation of being alive in 2012 to witness this great transformation of humanity. Maybe telepathy will break out, and we’ll see the dawning of the Age of Aquarius or something. Of course, as is the case with most religious, pseudo-religious, or spiritual woo, you probably have to believe to reap the benefits, which means that, given my attitude that virtually all New Age stuff is nothing but the finest (or worst) B.S., I’d probably be left out.

Maybe I’ll stick with the Rush prediction. It has the benefit that I’ll be long dead by the time 2112 rolls around; so no one will be able to tell me I was full of it.

By Orac

Orac is the nom de blog of a humble surgeon/scientist who has an ego just big enough to delude himself that someone, somewhere might actually give a rodent's posterior about his copious verbal meanderings, but just barely small enough to admit to himself that few probably will. That surgeon is otherwise known as David Gorski.

That this particular surgeon has chosen his nom de blog based on a rather cranky and arrogant computer shaped like a clear box of blinking lights that he originally encountered when he became a fan of a 35 year old British SF television show whose special effects were renowned for their BBC/Doctor Who-style low budget look, but whose stories nonetheless resulted in some of the best, most innovative science fiction ever televised, should tell you nearly all that you need to know about Orac. (That, and the length of the preceding sentence.)

DISCLAIMER:: The various written meanderings here are the opinions of Orac and Orac alone, written on his own time. They should never be construed as representing the opinions of any other person or entity, especially Orac's cancer center, department of surgery, medical school, or university. Also note that Orac is nonpartisan; he is more than willing to criticize the statements of anyone, regardless of of political leanings, if that anyone advocates pseudoscience or quackery. Finally, medical commentary is not to be construed in any way as medical advice.

To contact Orac: [email protected]

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