Are The Hindus Right?
According to Dustin, occasional commenter here and ubermesiter over at Odd Things…yes.
Imagine where we are as a worldwide society and where we’ve come over the past 12,000 years. Early societies formed, everything continued to grow. Sometimes slow, sometimes fast, but always growing, moving forward. Technology grew, our ability to access it grew, but at the same time much was lost.Think about where you are today. Sitting in front of a computer, eating packaged food, never having to worry about finding, hunting and killing your next meal, or braving the wildlife to get your next drink of water. It’s certainly not equal around the world, but the world has completely and totally changed since nomadic peoples started villages, cities, etc. thousands of years ago.Now, imagine that suddenly everything changes. There’s a catastrophic, worldwide disaster. Struggling survivors remain in pockets. Knowledge of how the world worked just days ago is suddenly scarce. Do you know how to take raw materials and rebuild the world? As the years pass most of the knowledge is quickly forgotten as you and your tribe focus on basic survival.
Although he doesn’t refer to it, his ideas resonate reasonably well with the Hindu (and to some extent Buddhist) idea of world history measured in cycles of thousands of years. What with the eschaton upon us and all, perhaps the idea that our world goes through cyclical changes punctuated by violent upheavals is not so far fetched as the anti-velikovskians would have us believe.
While Catastrophism has not been supported by many scientific studies (and has in fact been disproven by some, such as ice-core drilling) it remains alive as a possible explanation of apparent vanished civilizations. A year after Velikovsky’s death, Walter and Luis Alvarez published a scientific paper outlining their theory that a 10-kilometer wide asteroid had struck the Earth 65 million years ago, leading to the extinction of the dinosaurs. It would be interesting to see if any new research supports this sort of “cosmic catastrophism” in regards to other question marks in the historical record.
Although there is argument amongst Hindu scholars about the lengths of certain eras and prophesized signs of the “end times,” the popular wave of sentiment in the last decade or so is that we are headed for the cosmic crapper by December of 2012. Does all this time-marking reflect actual cycles of human or natural events, or is it just an arbitrary matrix laid upon events to make sense of history?
According to some Mayan myth observers,
Earth and her inhabitants are currently travelling through the 13th baktun cycle - the final period of 1618-2012 AD. This cycle is known both as “the triumph of materialism” and “the transformation of matter.” The Maya predicted this final baktun would be a time of great forgetting in which we drift very far from our sense of Oneness with Nature and experience a kind of collective amnesia. Like a memory virus in which we begin to believe the limited reality of appearances and grow dense to the spiritual essence which fuels this world, so humanity’s sense of ego and domination has grown.
…which agrees favorably with some interpretations of Hindu predictions of our future. I begin to wonder if any remote viewers, such as Joe McMoneagle, have found any corroborating evidence in their ruminations on the subject. From the little I’ve read, there seems to be no defining moment coming soon. Of course, there are few if any singular events in history which radically changed the lives of everyone on the planet, and none in recorded history which are matched with undisputed archaeological evidence. Even if we find out that aliens have been visiting us for centuries, and providing us with evolutionary pushes along the way, this will not affect the vast majority of the population on a daily basis.
 What this rumination also brings up are questions about humans and their ability to see their own future. Based on past experience, no one has ever been popularly successful in predicting word-changing events, probably becuase anyone who does is not really taken seriously, and the “hit rate” for prediction is so horribly bad. Studies on the average person’s ability to predict what will happen in the next few seconds, especially if it is emotionally charged and has a direct effect on the individual concerned has a slightly better record.
Ultiimately, we believe what makes us feel best, even if that future spells doom for all.
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Dec 26 2007 
December 26th, 2007 at 1:03 pm
The next release of the motion picture 10 000 B.C. will surely spark a lot of questions regarding past civilizations and the current accepted timelines of mankind cultural evolution.
It’s no wonder they’re releasing this film BEFORE the year 2012
December 26th, 2007 at 3:37 pm
“While Catastrophism has not been supported by many scientific studies (and has in fact been disproven by some, such as ice-core drilling) it remains alive as a possible explanation of apparent vanished civilizations.”
The dinosaur-killing comet at the KT boundary seems like a genuine “catastrophe” that now has scientific support (and it was widely attacked when first proposed in the late 1970s).
And now the evidence for a series of much recent catastrophes is building up. Richard Firestone and colleagues have impressive evidence for a deadly supernova around 41,000 years ago and a more recent bombardment 13,000 years ago that wiped out the North American megafauna and the Clovis hunters:
http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1726.html
A “superflood” 8000 years ago caused by a massive glacial lake in Canada breaking its bounds was powerful enough to bring the Gulf Stream to a halt:
http://environment.newscientist.com/article/dn13013-ancient-flood-brought-gulf-stream-to-a-halt.html
And the proposed massive eruption of Toba in Indonesia around 75,000 years ago is beleived to have nearly wiped out our immediate ancestors, accounting for the “genetic bottleneck” in modern humans:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory
I’ve become a catastrophist myself because all these events seem to have left markers on our recent prehistory. I’m also reasonably convinced that collapses of several civilisations can be traced to dramatic events like supervolcanos or cometary impacts. The tree rings examined by Mike Baillie tell an interesting story of global climatic events and Oxford astronomers Clube and Napier describe the breakup of a large comet in our solar system over the past 20,000 years as the culprit.
In short, I reckon that science is catching up catastrophism!
December 26th, 2007 at 3:43 pm
(Which?) othernick,
Should have checked with you before writing this! This is just the sort of info I was lookng for when I wrote the post.
It seems that when science takes the time to look into “outsider” theories, some of them are actually based (at least in part) in proveable fact. Fearless science–what a concept.
Thanks!
December 26th, 2007 at 5:36 pm
December 21, 2012 is the date Terence McKenna came up with while fooling around with the I Ching, a date he came up with before he knew anything about the Mayan calendar. I seem to recall a interview with Joe McMoneagle on Coast to Coast where he stated he didn’t see anything out of the ordinary when he remote viewed that date- maybe it will simply signify the beginnings of a shift in consciousness. Though perhaps it will be something much more dramatic and obvious.
McMoneagle’s remote viewing into the future has been pretty hit or miss- and McMoneagle is the best remote viewer I’m aware of so that’s not meant as a slam against him. He often has hits that are jaw droppingly accurate- but when it comes to his looking into the future, I’m not as impressed. During that same interview he said that if Ed Dames had been involved with the SRI program at the same time he was he would’ve dropped out. Now exactly what George Noory had hoped to hear- LOL!
Wow, I just looked at McMoneagle’s page on Wikipedia and it is nothing but a straight up hit piece done by a user named Kazuba who cites Martin Gardner and James Randi as influences and says on his own page, “How can I break it to you gently? The supernatural is an adjective, a very ancient and popular delusion.” Since November 1 this fanatic has made 44 edits to McMoneagle’s Wikipedia page. Apparently he’s on a crusade to give a Skeptical Inquirer slant to some of the articles dealing with the paranormal. These radical skeptics are every bit as annoying and close minded as fundamentalist religious fanatics. Their agenda has destroyed many a good Wikipedia article. As Spicoli said to Mr. Hand, “You dick.”
December 27th, 2007 at 7:03 pm
“collective amnesia”, I like that phrase.
Its also the subject of a chapter in a book that I’m reading right now. Shoot, I’d tell you the name but its at my house and I’m at my office right now.
Oh well. In any event, some interesting ideas and food for thought.
December 27th, 2007 at 10:31 pm
Ben,
It’s even more amazing that McMoneagle hasn’t responded. Actually, probably it isn’t, since the man has integrity and no time for fundamentalist idiots. I interviewed him in 1998, and he was cool about my “skeptical” questions, as was Lyn Buchanan.
December 28th, 2007 at 2:57 pm
Nice post Greg.
Thanks for the reference, too.
I think that not only were the Hindus right, but there’s practically no culture on Earth that doesn’t remember the last devastation in some fashion. Cyclical nature is, of course, big in Eastern philosophy, but it’s even more direct in other places around the world.
A few even do their best to “date” the regular occurrence and I think quite a few have done their best to pass the story and hints as to what caused it down over the past 12,000 years as well.
The next few chapters of my article are a little slow in coming, but they’re on the way shortly. I certainly hope that they shed a little light on what might have happened in the past, and what might happen again in the future. Of course, 2012 is a bit of a guess given the accuracy of our calendar over the past 12,000 years, but nonetheless, it’s a starting point that ends up being within a reasonable +/- error in some calculations.
December 30th, 2007 at 9:08 am
Greg: The issue is really about linear time and harmonics. For example Human Devolution, promoted by some Hindus, is based on the concept of an “immortal human” which goes against the older Vedic concept of Brahman as FORMLESS consciousness. This issue is really about patriarchy because “kala” means time whereas “kali” means time as female consciousness — beyond catastrophe. Brahman originally meant this, through the harmonics of “OHM” but the left-brain axiom “I Am that I Am” is based on a geometric-definition of time.
The same thing happened with the Mayans and people like Jose Arguelles project linear time back onto their culture — using scalars, for example. The best book on traditional Mayan culture is Martin Prechtel’s “Secret of the Talking Jaguar” which records Guatemalan shamanism right before the CIA catastrophe there in the 1980s — from a linear application of time as apocalypse.
The Mayans were traditionally scared of zero for a reason - it’s the symbol linking to female formless awareness. The secret of 2012 is found in complimentary opposite harmonics, not a western projection back onto nonwestern cultures. The same “Solar” geometric definition of time occurred with the Incas, against the earlier matrilineal culture based on the moon, as recorded in the academic book: “Sun, Moon, and Witches.”