Others believe we're five years from an unprecedented spiritual awakening. Whatever you believe, there's no denying that the 2012 movement has become a hot topic. Just take a walk through the non-fiction aisle of the nearest bookstore. Joseph Lawrence's "Apocalypse 2012: A Scientific Investigation into Civilization's End" and Daniel Pinchbeck's "2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl" are some of the more popular titles filling bookshelves these days.
Most recently, Louisville-based Sounds True, a publisher of spiritual books, audio programs and DVDs, published the book "The Mystery of 2012: Predictions, Prophesies and Possibilities," an anthology featuring many of the leading scholars on the topic, including Pinchbeck and John Major Jenkins, an independent researcher who has studied 2012 for more than 20 years and discussed the anthology at a Dec. 6 book signing at the Boulder Book Store.
The big question these books are trying to answer, of course, is what's going to happen in 2012 — in particular on the winter solstice, Dec. 21.
Here's what is known: The ancient Mayan long-count calendar — a calendar that spans more than 5,000 years — comes to an end on Dec. 21, 2012. This coincides with a galactic alignment in which the sun will align with the center of the Milky Way galaxy, an event that occurs once every 26,000 years, which could have potentially catastrophic consequences. The galactic alignment has the potential to create a shift in the Earth's poles, which would cause disastrous environmental events.
Many view this, in conjunction with the end of the Mayan calendar, as a sign of the end times. Viewers of the History Channel should be familiar with this theory, as the channel has featured the doomsday scenario in numerous programs.
But there is another theory, led by the likes of Jenkins, who makes his home in Windsor, and has spent much of the past two decades living and working with the traditional Maya in Guatemala. For him, 2012 is not the end. It's a chance for an unprecedented spiritual awakening.
"It's an opportunity for human life to understand our true natures," he says. "There will be a great awakening to the greater potential that human beings have."
The doomsday theories, though, have captured the public's imagination and have often overshadowed Jenkins' work.
"It's a little disappointing to see the carnival aspect of 2012 on the upswing," he says. "Because of the large interest that 2012 is generating ... a lot of people will be distracted by the carnival barkers selling snake oil."
There could be something positive in this, however, for at the very least the doomsayers have drawn attention to the topic, Jenkins says.
"That just means, relatively speaking, that more people will be able to navigate their way through the labyrinth to get into the heart of the information."
People are talking. A year ago, if you had asked someone their opinion about 2012, they likely would have responded that it was their favorite Rush album. Not anymore. In July, the New York Times Magazine ran a feature on 2012, and competing theories concerning the winter solstice of 2012 have gone from the fringe to the mainstream as the rival streams of perennial philosophy and apocalyptic prophecy have met at the confluence of popular culture.
"We're just seeing more titles. It seems there has constantly been one new 2012 book in circulation for the past year now," says Arsen Kashkashian, inventory manager at the Boulder Book Store, which has hosted 2012-themed readings by Pinchbeck and Jenkins in the past four months. "They used to be fringe things. They're being put out by the big publishers now."
As Dec. 21, 2007 draws near, it may be time to write up one final five-year plan. But should they be plans for the end of the world or just the end of the world as we know it? It depends on whose book you read.
Mutate or perish
It was 1986, and Tami Simon, the founder and publisher of Sounds True, which she started in 1985 with the vision to "disseminate spiritual wisdom," was volunteering at Boulder's KGNU radio station. She was working with new-age spiritual leader and author José Arguelles on a series of programs called "Earth Shift," leading up to the Arguelles-led Harmonic Convergence of 1987, a two-day gathering at various sacred sites around the world meant to usher in the final cycle of the Mayan calendar.
Arguelles gave Simon a T-shirt that read "Where Will You Be in 2012?"
"I remember, he said, 'Tami, we have 25 years. Mutate or perish,' which I thought was a very funny line," Simon says.
The 2012 issue percolated in the back of her mind for the next two decades. Twenty-one years later, she's still not entirely sure of her position on the 2012 movement.
"This is one of those topics that's very hard to pin down," Simon says. "It's like mercury under glass. It's hard to pin down exactly what I think about this."
While most people have just recently heard about the 2012 movement, Simon has had a two-decades head start. That hasn't helped.
"I was left with a lot more questions than any sense of clarity about my position on 2012," she says. "So we decided to put together an anthology ('The Mystery of 2012') about all the different viewpoints on the 2012 phenomenon."
That, she explains, is why she chose to put a large question mark on the cover of the book.
"The question mark says it all," she says. "We're not particularly taking a position, but collecting these essays that will allow the educated reader to get caught up on all the writings in this area and form their own opinion."
In addition to "The Mystery of 2012" anthology, Sounds True recently published a three-disc audio recording of John Major Jenkins called "Unlocking the Secrets of 2012: Galactic Wisdom from the Ancient Skywatchers."
Jenkins agrees with Simon that what will happen on Dec. 21, 2012 is not set in stone. The galactic alignment will occur, he says, and the Mayan calendar will reach its end, but beyond that, it's up to us.
"Ultimately, the outcome depends on free will," he says. "The Maya do not believe in predestination or predetermination."
"What we will experience on that day depends on what happens between now and then," says Arguelles, a former Boulder resident who now heads the Galactic Research Institute of the Foundation for the Law of Time in Ashland, Ore. "These five years are a spiritual test in preparation for our own conscious evolution."
Jenkins believes our culture has reached "galactic midnight," what he describes as "the point of greatest spiritual darkness."
He likens this to the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year.
"It's the nadir, which is good news," Jenkins says. "We're turning the corner."
All of the recent press surrounding 2012 could have a negative and unexpected consequence, though, Simon warns, if people simply accept that what will happen — be it doomsday or a spiritual awakening — is inevitable.
"The future is in our hands," Simon says. "We can't sit and wait for a dawning of a great spiritual age in 2012 or doomsday. We need to work right now with open hearts and intelligent activism."
And while she's not entirely sure of her beliefs surrounding 2012, she's certain of her approach.
"I think my own view is to put my attention into this moment and the next moment, not on what's going to happen five years from now," she says. "What's going to happen five years from now is going to be a product of this moment and the next moment and how we act."
Apocalypse 2012
Lawrence Joseph, author of "Apocalypse 2012," released in hardcover earlier this year and slated for paperback release in January, has a different take on 2012 — and it doesn't necessarily involve attending a killer New Year's Eve party to ring in 2013.
"This is a real physical possibility that we have to deal with of 2012 being a catastrophic year," Joseph says. "If 2012 proves to be just another year, good. But we need to begin preparing."
Joseph, though, doesn't believe that the world is going to end in 2012. He believes that it is going to be a period of great change, and not necessarily for the better. He points to global warming and increased solar activity as two sources of strife.
"We cannot understand what happens on Earth without understanding what happens on the sun," Joseph says.
He says he first became aware of increased solar activity, which he has correlated with catastrophic events such as an earthquake in Ethiopia and Hurricane Katrina, while serving as the chairman of a plasma physics company in Albuquerque, N.M. His research led him, in 2005, to a solar physics conference sponsored by the University of Colorado.
It also took him to the source: Joseph went to Guatemala and spent two weeks with Mayan shamans.
"It was their work that really opened my eyes," he says, indicating that 2012 would be "a pivotal, quite possibly catastrophic, perhaps revelatory time in history."
His research among shamans and scientists resulted in "Apocalypse 2012," which is contracted for translation into 12 languages. Joseph says that unlike other doomsday books, "Apocalypse 2012" is not designed to be scary, but to serve as a warning.
"I'm emotionally incapable of believing that it's going to end on Dec. 21, 2012," he says, but adds, "We really have to take it seriously."
Arguelles agrees.
"There are a number of predictions that focus on a pole shift, a tectonic plate shift or some major perturbation to the electromagnetic field due to solar flares, or even a solar pole shift," he says. "Something like this — along with a collapse of the electronic communications grid — seems probable, and likely to peak by the time you get to the target date."
Rather than apocalypse, though, Arguelles, who along with Stephanie South is currently working on a seven-volume book series titled "Cosmic History Chronicles," sees this as the opportunity to reach a higher consciousness.
"The resonance between the focused attention of human consciousness in alignment with the galactic center will bring about a radical change of consciousness, the evolutionary shift point," he says. "It will be palpable. As our self-perceptions alter in a collective telepathic field, so will our perception of the universe. It will be the dawn of a new heaven and new earth. Expect a miracle."
The final countdown
So nobody totally agrees on what, if anything, will happen on Dec. 21, 2012. For some, it's the dawning of a golden age of spirituality. For others, it's the much-ballyhooed end of the world — though proponents of this theory seemed to be in short supply among the roughly 120 people in attendance at Jenkins' Dec. 6 reading.
Among them was Jake Wagner, 28, of Boulder, who first heard of the 2012 movement five years ago.
"It just seems like some sort of crescendo is going on," he says of the way 2012 has spread into popular culture.
Prior to the Internet, he says, a lot of this information was handed down from person to person. "Now it's to the point where it's reached the mainstream," Wagner says. "It's YouTube. You can now get easy access to these (2012) videos."
Ryan Cohen, 26, of Boulder, also believes that the zeitgeist is in effect. Information about 2012 was available a decade ago, but the public wasn't necessarily receptive to the message.
"The paradigm didn't exist for people to get it," Cohen says.
"I suppose up until then 2012 was beneath the horizon line of mainstream popular consciousness, though it was spreading massively in the alternative culture," Arguelles says. "There always comes a moment when the energy of an 'idea' pushes up through the mass mind and becomes so overwhelmingly evident in the popular culture that it can no longer be ignored. It then becomes part of the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times."
Kashkashian, of the Boulder Book Store, has another explanation for why the 2012 movement is beginning to garner so much attention in popular culture.
"People love the end of the world," he says.
He likens the proliferation of 2012 doomsday books to those preceding Y2K — and he sees their number rising in the coming five years.
"I think we'll see a whole lot more," he says, "but I don't think they'll be worth a whole lot in 2013."
The 2012 movement certainly contains the perfect storm of ingredients for a doomsday theory: the mystical (the end of the Mayan calendar), the scientific (the galactic alignment) and the ever-present societal unrest that every generation points to for proclaiming their generation as the last.
"There are many aspects of trends in current events to support this kind of thinking — everything from dire prognostications regarding climate change to the war on terror and increasing incidents of random acts of mass violence," Arguelles says. "The emphasis on violence in video games and much of mass culture creates the climate for a self-fulfilling prophecy."
For Joseph, it's also human nature.
"There's this sense of an ending that people periodically need to confront," he says. "Every culture has its own sense of how it began. ... Maybe every society needs a destruction myth, to see how it's going to end."
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