Some might think that a discussion about this topic is much overdue, since most people associated a possible end of the world with the date December 21, 2012 and would think there would be no reason for us to revisit this discussion today. It turns out however that this association of the Mayan calendar with an end-of-the-world scenario has stayed with people and blocks their access to true knowledge about the calendar that may support their processes towards higher states of consciousness. I feel I have also gained some new important insights regarding this phenomenon that are worth sharing and I am as convinced as ever that if we want to go with the world where it is meant to go, we need to know and understand the Mayan calendar.

I want to start by providing some history around this topic. Where did the prediction that the Mayan calendar would lead to an end of the world come from? The contemporary Mayan elders did not claim such an end and there is nothing in the sources from the ancient Maya that indicates that they expected there to be an end to the world. In fact, there is an inscription from Palenque that point to an event in the deep future, 4100 years from its date of writing (van Stone, 2012, Science and prophecy of the ancient Maya) meaning that the scribe did not beleive the world would have come to an end by then. There are also inscriptions from Tikal with a similar message. If anything then, the ancient Maya predicted the continuation of the world. So where did the idea of an end to the world come from? Was it from some crazy Newager that let his or her fantasies flow freely or wanted to stand out as a great prophet. No, it was not. In fact, it came from a person on the very opposite scale of how we are supposed to gain knowledge. It came from the late Mayanist scholar Michael Coe, the curator of the Yale Peabody Museum, who in his influential book The Maya claimed that the calendar would come to an end “perhaps with a bang” in 2011. In a revised edition, he claimed that it would happen in 2012. Possibly, he just meant this as a joke, but what is important to know is that there was nothing indicating this to be true or what the ancient Maya believed. Still the idea caught on and much later Roland Emmerich, would produce the catastrophe movie 2012, which shaped the view of the matter for most people. The established media on its part hardly ever discussed the Mayan calendar seriously and would only refer to it as an end-of-the-world scenario.

Granted, added to this were some independent researchers with basically false presumptions about the calendar such as John Major Jenkins’ idea that there was a specific date, December 21, 2012 when the calendar (but not the world) would come to an end. To many, the only thing that came to mind when you heard a singular date was that this would mean the end of the world. Yet, the Mayan calendar does not specify on what singular dates world events would happen, but describe shifting energies over longer periods of time. Patrick Geryl, in his book World Cataclysm in 2012 actually predicted the end of the world at the same date through some poorly constructed arguments. These examples of poor scholarship were however enough for the media to associate the Mayan calendar with the end of the world and refer to this as a New Age -phenomenon even if it truly had originated from Michael Coe.

Regardless, since nothing significant happened on December 21, 2012, or in the year 2012 as a whole, many people, including those that had believed that this would be the beginning of a heavenly existence, came to dismiss the Mayan calendar and lost interest in it. And yet, it was a scholarly misperception that the Mayan calendar would come to an end at this or any other date. In fact, as the research of Mark van Stone has shown, there was nothing to indicate that the famous Long Count (which the whole idea of an end to the world had been based on), would end after thirteen baktuns (time periods of 144,000 days). The Long Count was more likely to continue to twenty or maybe even more baktuns without an end. This is not to say that the shift in 2012 (or most exactly October 28, 2011) would not be meaningful, but there was no reason to associate it with the end of the calendar or of the world. This shift was instead one that marked that after all the nine cyclical waves of creation had been activated and synchronized, they would go downwards. Waves move up and down and so the pendulum swings in history. The ancient Maya had indeed written an inscription about this significant shift to come, the Tortuguero monument nr 6 which said that at this date (some 1500 years into the future for them), Bolon Yookte Kuh, the nine-level deity, “would appear in his full regalia.” This may of course be interpreted in different ways, but to me it has come to mean that all the nine waves had been activated. In a sense it meant a completion of a climb to the top of a nine-storied pyramid, or that as we after some reflection may understand, all possibilities of the nine waves of creation were now at hand (but we had not necessarily manifested them). The cyclical Waves of creation would still continue to shape the world of humanity, based on a quite complex interaction between these waves.

The damage made by the presentation of misinterpreted or false ideas about the Mayan calendar had however already been done. The official media and science had been able to imprint the idea that the Mayan calendar was about the end of the world to people in general. Most would not have had the time or interest to go deeply into what might have seemed like an esoteric discussion about an ancient calendar.  People at large might never have come to know that there existed a time-plan for the evolution of consciousness and that this had as a goal the state associated with the Ninth Wave. It is easy to see that the misinterpretations or outright lies would serve the status quo and take away hope for the future from people. As is so often the case, the truth comes limping behind after the interest in something sensational is gone and it becomes very difficult to correct an erroneous perception.This meant that what stayed with people in general was the perception that the Mayan calendar was about the end of the world and it still does. Yet, of course, this idea had been much fueled by the ideas from the Abrahamic religions, and notably Christianity that there would be an Apocalypse that would destroy the world as presented in the Book of Revelation. Billions of people have believed in this and it has been ingrained in them actually without any rational explanation. Notably in the United States there is even a large group of people identifying as Christian, who are welcoming such an apocalyptic scenario as they believe that this would herald the second coming of Jesus. These beliefs have been intensified in recent years as many political followers around Donald Trump share these beliefs even to the point of believing that the presidential candidate himself might be Jesus. Needless to say, unless people themselves undergo some change as a result of a shift in consciousness and live and act in accordance with this, no individual could be able to bring about a new and better world. Regardless, the long-time belief in an apocalyptic scenario among Christians has spilled over into the belief that the Mayan calendar would imply a similar scenario, an idea which as we have seen lacks any foundation.

The irony is that, not only does the Mayan calendar not predict the end of the world, it is also by its very nature a calendar system that explains why the world has not yet come to an end and may never do so. In this sense it is opposite to the Gregorian or other calendars. Why would this be so? First of all, we may take note of the fact that the apocalyptic scenario of Christianity has no time plan attached to it. While people may want to believe in a time-plan in this religion, its adherents are not supposed to know about it and partly it is because the Mayan calendar provides such a time-plan that it has been dismissed. As a result, people have for soon to be two thousand years come to believe that the apocalyptic end-of-the-world-scenario could come at any time. This has over the centuries kept people in a more or less constant fear for a “time of judgement” that was the most obvious in medieval times, but is now resurfacing. The Gregorian and most other calendars based on astronomy are unable to predict or help people follow the rise of fall of civilizations that are integral parts of all evolutionary processes. Any shift in the wave movements of creation including the one we are in now may thus trigger apocalyptic beliefs. 

 This is in contrast to in the Mayan calendar (Long Count), which describes the rise and fall of the major civilizations in Fig 1. True, civilizations may fall in accordance with the rhythm of a wave in order to allow for something new to be created. Such a Wave, which by the ancient Maya was revered as the Plumed Serpent, then however also brings an underlying continuity to the evolution of life and consciousness that would not exist without it. Already from this, we can say that the Mayan calendar is life-affirming and provides what is the opposite to an end-of the-world scenario (which may also be why it have helped the Mayan people to survive much hardships and persecutions). But there is more to this as we can see when we go to Fig 2, which shows how two different waves with different frequencies are interacting (The 6^th and the 7^th Wave) and I will take these as an example of the effects that the higher waves have on each other.

Fig 2. The seventh peak of the 6^th Wave and the 7^th Wave shown in the same scale.

The example in Fig 2 shows how the peak of the 6^th wave beginning in 1617 CE interacted with the seventh wave beginning in 1755 CE. The beginning of this peak in the 6^th Wave was what brought the radically new way of thinking that we refer to as the scientific revolution. This was when for the first time people started to approach physics by mathematical models (Galilei and Kepler etc). This shift by itself however did not generate any industrial applications, which came only after the mind of the seventh wave had been activated in 1755 CE (generating the steam engine and all that would follow up until our present time). What is important to see is that the two waves interact in creating this industrial reality and especially that a lower wave (in this case the 6^th) serves to nurture and stabilize what was created by a higher (7^th Wave). In other words, unless the 6th Wave would have interacted with the 7th wave, the industrial revolution would not have been based on science and its many inventions and other novelties (also of a social nature) would almost certainly have failed to materialize.

Similar situations can be highlighted for all the nine different waves also when it comes to the origin and evolution of life where these through their interactions have stabilized each other and so guaranteed its continuation. What this in other words means is that if there were not nine different waves that through their interactions stabilized evolution and allowed for the support of higher states of consciousness, life would have been very precarious indeed and so the world could at any point have come to an end. In contrast, the Gregorian calendar is based on a singular time-line and would thus not describe the world as stably evolving to higher states of consciousness. Only a calendar system like the Mayan, which are based on several different waves that interact with each other, can guarantee the continuation of the evolution of life. Again, and in a somewhat deeper sense than previously, we thus find that the Mayan calendar system is more life-affirming than other calendars and especially then the Gregorian calendar. Needless to say, if someone wants to maintain an idea of an end to the world, it becomes necessary to follow the Gregorian calendar, which thus influences people on a subconscious level to believe in this.

That the Mayan calendar does not have any built-in idea of the end-of-the world may be an important thing to know at the current time, when humanity may very well be facing challenging times such as through economic recessions or otherwise, at least until the year 2031. It should then be recognized that the Mayan calendar does not by itself cause any changes in human life. It describes different possible states of consciousness and the human beings must decide themselves how to respond to these. Partly because of the vast suppression and misrepresentations that the Mayan calendar has been subjected to (including what we have seen more recently) people have not known how to relate to it. To this should be added that the fear of an apocalyptic scenario prophesied by the Abrahamic religions may have contributed to make a such scenario even more likely as a self-fulfilling prophecy. People want their predictions to be manifested even if these are destructive as this would tend to verify their religious or other world views, especially in chaotic times. But then, it is certainly not the Mayan calendar that is predicting or bringing such a scenario upon us, which with the risk of being repetitive is a message that is opposite of this. But in these chaotic times with an overload of ideas how do you know if you are on the right track? Nobody else, or no ancient scripture for that matter, will know exactly how you are to act or navigate this world. What I believe however is that a critical indicator is to what extent you are in resonance with the 9^th Wave or not (https://www.xzone.com.au/9thwave.php) is important. If you find that your life goes up and down with this Wave you very likely in tune with the evolutionary purpose of the universe. This of course will only be based on your own assessment, but if you are not, you may consider that something is missing or that you are not following your higher purpose (which is not necessarily what you may like in the moment).