The Most Important Year of Your Life

by Eric Francis Coppolino, December 29, 2011

It was someone named José Arguelles who first described 2012 as the time we would take what he called the leap beyond technology. In his 1987 book The Mayan Factor, he told us that the 13th baktun of the Mayan long-count calendar would be ending on the winter solstice of 2012, personally starting the whole obsession with that date. A baktun is 144,000 days; 13 baktuns add up to about 1.8 million days, or 5,125 years, which is one-fifth of a full precessional cycle (that is, the cycle of all 12 “ages” in Western astrology).

Over the past 25 years, predictions of both doomsday and spontaneous enlightenment have flooded New Age literature and bled into mainstream thought, though in all of that time, none of it has struck me as particularly meaningful. Said another way, I’ve hardly ever heard a 2012 narrative I could even vaguely relate to. Pretty much everyone knows that 2012 is an important date in the Mayan calendar, but hardly anyone can tell you what it “means” without drifting into speculation.

Our sin-obsessed Christian culture, clouded by truly horrid visions from The Book of Revelation (sometimes called The Apocalypse of John)—the last book of the New Testament—always seems to be waiting on doomsday. However, Judgment Day is our shit, not that of the ancient Mayans.

Arguelles got things going with the Harmonic Convergence of August 16-17, 1986, a global meditation for peace. I took part in a major event as part of a spiritual community, and it had nothing to do with the “end of the world” or doomsday. To the contrary, we had our minds on getting the world out of the mess that it was in, not into a bigger one. In recent years, Mayan scholars and Mayan leaders have objected to the obsession with gloom and cataclysm.

“For the ancient Maya, it was a huge celebration to make it to the end of a whole cycle,” says Sandra Noble, executive director of the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies in Crystal River, Florida. To render December 21, 2012, as a doomsday event or moment of cosmic shifting, she says, is “a complete fabrication and a chance for a lot of people to cash in.”