http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=comic&id=11740&page=1

apparently Obama gets very Dude when the infocalypse hits.

In anticipation of tomorrow's presidential inaugural, Dan Goldman extrapolates a psychedelic, science-fictional scenario from a catchy campaign slogan and the millenial apocalyptic notions of pre-columbian astronomers.

http://www.skepsis.no/articles_in_english/the_2012_phenomenon.html

the complete text of an M.A. thesis all about 2012. it traces the roots of the thing back from Teilhard's thinking and 20th century apocalypticism, through the first mention of the 2012 date in the McKenna's Invisible Landscape to José Argüelles' Mayanist perspective to the present. there's plenty of nuttiness on the way: cosmic alignment, calendar reform, conspiracy theory, neoshamanism, etc. one interesting point is that the whole 2012 mytheme complex seems to have been fueled largely by the ingestion of tryptamines...

Where has the notion of the year 2012 as holding a special apocalyptic or millennial significance originated? What are the most important historical sources for the 2012 phenomenon? Are there indeed several 'pure' (as in independent) sources of prophecy that separately mention the importance of the 2012 date as is often thought in New Age circles?

Furthermore, we will need to take a look at what might have been the most important ideological influences on the 'founders' of this modern mythological phenomenon.

These questions naturally lead to a wider concern with the 2012 phenomenon in general, in two ways. Firstly: is it possible to construct a typological approach to the variety of 2012 speculation? Are there clearly discernable types of theories that we can identify? Secondly: what are the most important shared characteristics of the various instances of 2012 speculation?

The questions formulated above are relatively straightforward and can be answered by taking a good look at the historical evidence. A more implicit question that runs throughout this thesis is connected to a preliminary hypothesis: that what appears to be a rapid popularization of apocalypticism in the form of the 2012 phenomenon can be interpreted as a paradigm of a wider tendency towards apocalypticism in contemporary esoteric milieux, and perhaps even in the wider culture as well.

There's nothing worse than business as usual when you're expecting the end of the world. Can you imagine the sinking feeling some people will experience on that morning when it slowly begins to dawn on them that rather than toppling headlong into a worldwide collective existential abyss, they instead have to show up for work? It will be reminiscent of those early childhood days of waking to a beautiful, silent, freshly fallen snow, the heart leaping in a Christmas-morning-like rush of freedom and possibility, only to learn that the three-inch sprinkling of powder was insufficient to shut down the local schools.

And just when you thought you'd be off the hook from all your financial obligations for the fourth fiscal quarter of 2012, instead you end up incurring a bunch of late fees because you had been hoping to slip into the End Times with a few unpaid bills. Rather than hearing the voices of angels guiding our souls to the next station on our way to oblivion, instead the phone is ringing off the hook with creditors who won't take no-or Armageddon-for an answer.

I have a friend who is stuck with about two-dozen 50-pound bags of rice in his basement from the Y2K scare, although when new visitors ask him about it, he has conveniently invoked the impending Avian Flu pandemic as the reason for his hoarding habit, and now as the global bird cataclysm fades from the headlines, 2012 is the logical next scapegoat. Fortunately, the average person doesn't quite grasp that a 50-pound bag of rice will be about as useful in December of 2012 as the rolls of quarters were in the pockets of the Heaven's Gate suicide people. About the only truly useful thing to take with you to the Great Transition might be about 600 mics of pure LSD, to help you leap out of the body just before the world leaps out of you.

Meanwhile, if nothing does happen, Christmas morning 2012 should be a barrel of laughs. "Merry Christmas sweetie! I was going to get you that new hydrogen-powered Barbie Transporter you've been bugging me about, but I was pretty certain we'd all be dead by now. Sorry, my bad. Here, have a spoonful of rice." Then finally, the ultimate insult, New Year's Day, 2013, we're all still here, and not only here, but as miserable and whiny as ever. Or even more so, considering that we had fully expected to be on a permanent vacation from existence by then. Instead, we're faced with Macbeth's tormenting reminder:

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time. [+]

For the Eschaton, positioned in eternity, all things are somehow coexistent in time or outside of time. All events have already happened. Shamanism is a formal technique for viewing this hyperdimensional object outside of time in a three-dimensional way, by transecting it many, many times until an entire picture of it emerges. The mushroom evokes a profound planetary consciousness that shows one that history is a froth of artifact production that has appeared in the last ten to fifteen thousand years and spread across the planet very quickly. But mind in human beings precedes the history of technology and goes back into the archaic darkness.

We have to understand. Whitehead said, "Understanding is the apperception of pattern as such;" to fear death is to misunderstand life. Cognitive activity is the defining act of humanness. Language, thought, analysis, art, dance, poetry, myth-making: these are the things that point the way toward the realm of the eschaton. We humans may be released into a realm of pure self-engineering. The imagination is everything. This was Blake's perception. This is where we came from. This is where we are going. And it is only to be approached through cognitive activity.

All these images - the starship, the space colony, the lapis - are precursory images. They follow naturally from the idea that history is the shock wave of eschatology. As close distance with the eschatological object, the reflections it is throwing off resemble more and more the thing itself. In the final moment the Unspeakable stands revealed. There are no more reflections of the Mystery. The Mystery in all its nakedness is seen, and nothing else exists. But what it is, decency can safely scarcely hint; nevertheless, it is the crowning joy of futurism to seek anticipation of it.

The Greek word eschatos refers to the last things, the final things. The Eschaton is a neutral way of naming what some call the Buddha Matraiya, some people call it the UFO intervention at the end of history, and some call it the second coming. It's the last thing; the Eschaton. What I think is happening is that all boundaries are dissolving; between men and women, between society and nature, and ultimately the boundaries between life and death. We are going truly beyond ambiguity, beyond syntax, We've been trapped in a kind of demonic simulacrum for 25,000 years, created out of language. Now the accelerating process of involuted connectedness characterizing this Whiteheadian progression of epochs toward the concrescence, is in fact being fufilled.

Science looks down its nose at the apocalyptic fantasies of religion, thinking that the final time can only mean an entropic time of no change. The view of science is that all processes ultimately run down, but entropy is maximized only in some far, far away future. The idea of entropy makes an assumption that the laws of the space-time continuum are infinitely and linearly extendable into the future. In the spiral time scheme of the timewave this assumption is not made. Rather, final time means passing out of one set of laws that are conditioning existence and into another radically different set of laws. The universe is seen as a series of compartmentalized eras or epochs whose laws are quite different from one another, with transitions from one epoch to another occurring with unexpected suddenness. [+]

http://www.realitysandwich.com/old_struggles_new_earth

i'm kind of the same opinion as Danny here. which doesn't preclude me from aiming to plan something extremely ridiculous and awesome for the night of 12/21/12...

Although my book on prophecy and the Mayan Calendar is behind me, I am still approached all the time by people in search of the meaning of the encroaching end date of December 21, 2012. "Is it the end of the world?" reporters ask me on television. In emails, I am begged for advice on matters ranging from shamanic ritual to retirement funds, from dealing with extraterrestrials to seeking a safe place to hide out from polar shifts, earthquakes and super storms. Meanwhile, academics and self-taught experts send me their pet theories on tribal prophecies, astrological conjunctions, UFOs, Egyptian gods, quantum consciousness, Illuminati conspiracies, free energy technologies and much more.

My view is that "2012" is useful as a meme if it helps us to catalyze a shift in global culture and consciousness. Rather than fretting about what may or may not happen on that date, we should concentrate on the work that needs to be done now, on an inner as well as outer level. My recent focus has been the outer level, studying social theory and political philosophy. If we were to have an opportunity to transform society, what could that transformation look like in a practical sense? How could it be carried out? ( ... )

The shift of "2012" could mean that Eastern mysticism, the earth-based shamanism of tribal people and the West's pursuit of philosophical and scientific knowledge about the world come together to create a new form of consciousness. I suspect the West still has to realize its spiritual destiny – its dharma – in the transformation of matter and the creation of a truly equitable and sustainable world. As the design scientist Buckminster Fuller wrote, "No human chromosomes say make the world work for everybody – only mind can tell you that." We may not need "ideology" any more, as Tolle says, but we still need good ideas about how we reinvent our society and its institutions to become ethically transparent and sustainable. Rather than escaping from society's problems by embracing pure presence, we can use the awareness gained from spiritual practice to become more effective agents of social change.

The transcendent other casts an enormous shadow across the lower dimensional landscape of time. The stirring of the earliest life forms in the Devonian seas caught the call and every step that has been taken since then has been ever quicker, ever quicker toward the transcendental other, it beckons us and history is haunted by this thing. History is the shock wave of eschatology. History is a process that lasts, let's be generous, 25,000 years, the wink of an eye in geological time, and in that 25,000 years religions rise and fall, governmental systems, teachers come and go and there is a sense of being caught in a whirlpool that is spinning us toward fusion with the unimaginable. This is why the skies of Earth are haunted by flying saucers, they aren't coming from other solar systems, they are scintillas, remember this alchemical term - sparks - they are scintillas being thrown off the alchemical quintessence which lies like a great attractor at the end of time and the purpose of science and techne and electronic media and information transfer and all of this stuff is to knit us together, to dissolve our boundaries and to bring us to a point of singularity where language fails, where we lean over meanings' edge and feel the dizziness of things unsaid.

--McKenna

http://hyperreal.org/~mpesce/lectures/Technopagans%20at%20the%20End%20of%20History/

an audio transcription of an entire weekend workshop at Esalen lead by Terrence McKenna and VR pioneer Mark Pesce. these two really smart guys tackle a wide range of material related to the arcane aspects of technology in our post-modern era. some choice exerpts transcribed:

In ages where the imagination is empowered, magic rules the world. In ages where the imagination has somehow given way to positivism, empiricism, reductionism or some other form of so-called realism, magic withers on the vine. The realization that code is magical invocation is really a powerful one. Language in the hands of science becomes descriptive and discursive. Language in the hands of a magician creates...and we haven't seen languages like that for several centuries in the west. But when you write code and implement it, this is magical language. When your utterance is iterated in the machine, something happens. Once it is debugged, it is a magical invocation that works. And the world is becoming progressively more and more ruled by invocation.
~Language has some kind of symbiotic relationship to meat and silicon.
~Where the anxiety arises is in people trying to explain to themselves what is happening. The world is now so complex very few people "understand" it. But in whatever area you don’t understand it you generate mythology which explains it to you. So most of us, as the culture becomes more complex, our participation in it becomes more magical, more animistic, more provisional, more mythic. This is both a good and a bad thing. It leads to cults...which I think is a bad thing; in other words, people accept explanations for reality, the only argument for which, is that they are explanations for reality. Their persuasive force otherwise is zilch.
~Modernity was thoroughly existential. In other words, reductionist science tells you you’re the product of a cosmic accident; meaning is conferred; you’re lucky to be here; nature has no interest in your fate; nature indeed has no purpose at all. My own intellectual journey both experientially with psychedelics and through mathematical analysis of history, etc. leads to the conclusion that this existential point of view is able to maintain itself only by ignoring the evolutionary thrust toward complexity and novelty that occurs on every level of being.

And that in fact, if you begin to value novelty, you suddenly have a basis for a new human ethic, because human beings with their languages and their technologies represent a level of novelty never before achieved on this planet, something that builds on animal nature as a platform but goes well beyond it. So suddenly, from being a random accident, a chance-created witness to a meaningless cosmos, we become the cutting edge of the very process that the cosmos itself seems to value or seek to magnify and preserve. So what has crept back into being, for me and anybody else who accepts these overarching metaphors, is value. It’s a different kind of value than we’ve ever seen before. The last time we knew values, they were handed down from a religious hierarchy which talked directly to God and got strange messages. The new values are self-evident from an examination of nature. Anyone can inform themselves about the facts of biology and large scale complex systems, etc.

The new story is a story of recognizing our placement at this breaking wave of novel advance. Suddenly technology becomes a religious enterprise, good for something other than building consumer electronics and small appliances, and actually seen as the path toward some kind of transcendent possibility. The goal is well-formulated in spiritual ontology but the methods are a mess. They either don’t work or require lifetimes or make demands on people’s behavior that are practically inhuman. I think the new story is based on the recognition of our own centrality. We haven’t stood at the center of the cosmic stage for 700 years in our official myth. And now suddenly we’re returned there. Returned not merely as witnesses in a central position, but suddenly as actors. Because these technologies that are coming into our hands are truly promethian. Truly faustian. Truly capable of making us like unto a god. But not in the service of market capitalism and consumer fetishism; more in the service of the emotion of awe.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/01/magazine/01world-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

i, for one, welcome the transcendental object at the end of time.

Far from its origins, divorced from its context and enlisted in a prophetic project that it may never have been designed to fulfill, the Mayan calendar is at the center of an escalating cultural phenomenon — with New Age roots — that unites numinous dreams of societal transformation with the darker tropes of biblical cataclysm. To some, 2012 will bring the end of time; to others, it carries the promise of a new beginning; to still others, 2012 provides an explanation for troubling new realities — environmental change, for example — that seem beyond the control of our technology and impervious to reason. Just in time for the final five-year countdown, the Mayan apocalypse has come of age.

“The Utopian dream is a big part of the Western tradition,” Boyer told me, “both the religious and secular forms. But the wicked have to be destroyed and evil has to be overcome for the era of righteousness to dawn.” This is as true in the New Age as much as in any other one. Rumors of global crisis, the distrust of institutional authority, the ready availability of esoteric lore, the existence of individuals drawn to abstruse numerical schemes, the urge to assuage anxieties with dreams of social transformation — wherever these elements exist, apocalyptic thinking is likely to flourish.

When I asked Snow why he thought people were turning to alternative ideas and explanations like the ones espoused at his conferences, he told me the answer was a simple one. “The pillars of our expectations about the future in the West have started to crumble,” he said. “Religion, politics and economics — none of it is working any more. So when you hear about the ancient Maya and this changeover in 2012 involving solar cycles and astronomical events, you say, ‘Huh, maybe I need to connect with that.’ ”

Writing in the forward to Jenkins’s “Maya Cosmogenesis 2012,” Terrence McKenna proffers that “we, by choice or design, actually live in the end time anticipated by the ancient Maya shaman-prophets. Their bones and their civilization have long since gone into the Gaian womb that claims all the children of time. Indeed, their cities were ghostly necropoleis by the time the Spanish conquerors first gazed upon them, 500 years ago. Yet it was our time that fascinated the Maya, and it was toward our time that they cast their ecstatic gaze, though it lay more than two millennia in the future at the time the first long-count dates were recorded.”