About 2012

 What the Mayan Elders are Saying About 2012

by Carlos Barrios

    

 Carlos Barrios is a Mayan priest, historian, anthropologist, researcher, and an expert in the Sacred Maya Calendar. Carlos was born in Guatemala.  After studying with traditional elders for 25 years he became a Mayan Ajq’ij, a ceremonial priest, shaman, and spiritual guide and member of the ‘World Council of Mayan Elders.

    Carlos initiated an investigation into the different Mayan calendars circulating. Carlos along with his brother Gerardo studied with many teachers and interviewed nearly 600 traditional Mayan elders to widen their scope of knowledge.  Carlos found out quickly there were several conflicting interpretations of Mayan hieroglyphs, petroglyphs, Sacred Books of ‘Chilam Balam’ and various ancient text. Carlos found some strong words for those who may have contributed to the confusion:

    Carlos Barrios: “Anthropologists visit the temple sites and read the inscriptions and make up stories about the Maya, but they do not read the signs correctly. It’s just their imagination. Other people write about prophecy in the name of the Maya. They say that the world will end in December 2012. The Mayan elders are angry with this. The world will not end. It will be transformed.”

The hope is that the meme of transformation spreads to as many people as possible. The world will only be transformed if enough people lend themselves to this task. Mr. Barrios seems to imply that the transformation will occur on December 21st, 2012.  The transformation has been afoot for some time already, but the process of transforming imperial civilization into a sane planetary culture is a work of indeterminate length.  December 21st, 2012 marks only the formal end of the Maya Long Count Cycle and it has the potential to be a mega-historic event in terms of a ritualized mass social observance with planetary scaled sociocultural implications.

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What is time?
Wikipedia defines Time as….
    Time is a part of the measuring system used to sequence events, to compare the durations of events and the intervals between them, and to quantify rates of change such as the motions of objects. The temporal position of events with respect to the transitory present is continually changing; future events become present, then pass further and further into the past.
    Time has been a major subject of religion, philosophy, and science, but defining it in a non-controversial manner applicable to all fields of study has consistently eluded the greatest scholars.
    Time is used to define other quantities — such as velocity — so defining time in terms of such quantities would result in circularity of definition. An operational definition of time, wherein one says that observing a certain number of repetitions of one or another standard cyclical event (such as the passage of a free-swinging pendulum) constitutes one standard unit such as the second, is highly useful in the conduct of both advanced experiments and everyday affairs of life.
    The operational definition leaves aside the question whether there is something called time, apart from the counting activity just mentioned, that flows and that can be measured. Investigations of a single continuum called spacetime bring questions about space into questions about time, questions that have their roots in the works of early students of natural philosophy.
    Two contrasting viewpoints on time divide many prominent philosophers. One view is that time is part of the fundamental structure of the universe, a dimension in which events occur in sequence. 

Sir Isaac Newton subscribed to this realist view, and hence it is sometimes referred to as Newtonian time. Time travel, in this view, becomes a possibility as other “times” persist like frames of a film strip, spread out across the time line.
    The opposing view is that time does not refer to any kind of “container” that events and objects “move through”, nor to any entity that “flows”, but that it is instead part of a fundamental intellectual structure (together with space and number) within which humans sequence and compare events. This second view, in the tradition of Gottfried Leibniz and Immanuel Kant, holds that time is neither an event nor a thing, and thus is not itself measurable nor can it be traveled.
No wonder time is confusing. The above definitions while useful don’t actually define time as a thing as the philosophers Gottfried Leibniz and Immanuel Kant concur. Time it seems is more of an intellectual construct. A construct we use to measure aspects of our world and not a thing in and of itself.
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