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Carnival 2012--A Psychological Study of the 2012 Phenomenon and the 22
Classic Pitfalls and Blind Spots of Esoteric Research

   Andrew4

   © 2010, Jonathan Zap edited by Austin Iredale

[first part dropped]


   The synchronistic way that I encountered the 2012 date during an
   eclipse outside of my chiropractor's office, is a natural segue into
   my analysis of the psychological forces that distort the 2012
   subculture, as well as many other esoteric subcultures.  I find these
   obscuring forces to be so classic and  ubiquitous that I'm going to
   define them as a numbered list, beginning with:

1. Esoteric researchers vastly underestimate the trickster aspect of the
unconscious and synchronicity.

   A long time ago I coined this same principle in a more
   Biblical-sounding way to be sure I remembered it (since I've fallen
   prey to it plenty of times myself):

2. Wherever you cast your obsessive attention, there shall you find weird
patterning.

   I wrote about these first two principles recently in a document very
   relevant to the present discussion:

   Reality Testing is Politically Incorrect

   Here is an excerpt:

   Wherever you cast your obsessive attention you are bound to find weird
   patterns that are hard to explain as coincidence and that will tempt
   you to explain them in ways that confirm your obsession.  For example,
   it's a bit of a weird pattern that the terrorist attack in Spain
   apparently occurred 911 days after 9/11.  Does that mean the choice of
   this date to come up with that number was intentional?  If you are a
   9/11 Truth Movement True Believer then the answer is a resounding Yes!
   because all weird patterning and synchronicity is interpreted in that
   direction. But I've got some politically incorrect news for true
   believers everywhere:  Weird patterning and synchronicities are to be
   found everywhere you cast your obsessive attention!

   Here's an example of weird, synchronistic patterning---I just saw a
   magazine ad put out by a tire company. The ad tells you how to know if
   you have enough tread left or need to replace your tires. The test is
   you take a penny, put it between the treads and see if Lincoln's head
   is covered. It turns out that Lincoln's head is exactly one sixteenth
   of an inch from the outer edge of the penny. OK, but here's the spooky
   part that probably proves that Illuminati operating through the
   Federal Reserve control every aspect of this country: Lincoln just so
   happens to have been our sixteenth president!  Does this means that
   Illumanati,  secretly controlling the tire industry and the U.S. Mint
   set up that parallelism for some nefarious purpose?  I think it means
   that weird coincidental or synchronistic patterning occurs everywhere,
   and will light up wherever you cast your obsessive attention.

   As great a visionary genius as Terence was, I think he was fooled by
   principles 1 & 2 on the 2012 topic. His fractal time wave descended
   into infinite novelty so close to December 21st, 2012 there had to be
   a connection.  Similarly, I was astounded by the multi-layered
   synchronicity that occurred during my first encounter with the 2012
   date outside of my chiropractor's office, but I also sensed the joke,
   sensed the trickster aspect toying with me. Just to underline this
   even more let's turn this into a third principle:

3. Synchronicities do not necessarily mean that you are on the right track
with esoteric research.

   Synchronicities are endlessly fascinating, but be careful how you
   interpret them.  It is easy too read too much into them.

   Somewhere, right now, there are a couple of high school students who
   have been reading Aleistier Crowley,  playing Led Zeppelin records
   backwards,  and doing bong hits with their fingers nervously touching
   the planchette of a Ouija Board. They are experiencing mind-blowing
   synchronicities and all sorts of uncanny occurrences, but this does
   not mean they are on the right track with their esoteric studies!

4. The unconscious includes active, sometimes sinister, intelligences that
are aware of your attention and have their own agenda.

   As Nietzsche put it: "If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will
   gaze back into you."

   Exploring the unconscious is a treacherous enterprise. Jung said the
   only way to do it was with a strong moral stance. You don't go
   deep-sea diving without the right equipment, and a moral compass is
   indispensable equipment for exploring the unconscious.

5. Esoteric studies are perilous without a strong moral compass.

   You need a strong ethical stance to explore the unconscious without
   being consumed by it! If you are exploring the unconscious because
   it's trippy, or because it inflates your sense of self-importance you
   are likely to remain lost in the unconscious. According to Terence,
   when shamans go into the realm of the ancestors to heal somebody they
   go in there, do what they have to do as quickly as possible, and get
   out as quickly as they can so as to minimize the danger.

6.  Work with trustworthy mentors/spiritual allies who will give you
rigorous reality-testing and Socratic dialogue. Avoid sycophants, disciples,
and true believers!

   If you're going to do deep-sea diving you want some highly
   experienced, reliable people in the boat on the surface who are
   watching your oxygen lines and who can help pull you out of the abyss.
   When I began writing on esoteric subjects as a nineteen-year-old
   undergraduate in the late Seventies, I had mentors and spiritual
   allies. After a couple of years, I realized that wasn't enough and
   also began a rigorous six-year Jungian analysis.  I have always worked
   with mentors and spiritual allies who have strong reality testing and
   no hesitation to tell me if they think I'm on the wrong track or
   getting too full of myself.  If you seduce people,  or have people
   attaching themselves to you, who give you  uncritical adulation for
   your discoveries, then it is like you have added heavy lead weights to
   your diving suit. Very likely you will never make it back to the
   surface and the clear daylight.  And this brings us to one of the most
   classic pitfalls of esoteric research:

7. Archetypes and other forces in the unconscious are powerful, high energy,
obsessively fascinating, and pose dangers of ego inflation, literalization
and possession.

   Many take what they experience literally, failing to recognize the
   trickster aspect and the need for interpretation. This can lead to
   becoming possessed by unconscious contents. It is very easy to
   identify with the forces, archetypes and entities you encounter during
   unconscious exploration and you may find your ego  becoming
   monstrously inflated. Key red flags include: you feel you have seen
   something no one else has ever seen; you feel filled with a sense of
   special destiny, perhaps messianic fervor; you feel an intense need to
   proselytize and convert others to your new vision.

   This gets a bit tricky because some of those red flags could be up and
   you could still be onto something valuable. To be honest I've been
   aware of some of those red flags in me since the Seventies. I am also
   well aware that I am a narcissistic personality type, the ruling
   personality type of this age (though I have never had narcissistic
   personality disorder, a much more serious condition). Very gradually
   I've made progress realizing how my narcissism and self-importance
   work, how they distort many things, and how to compensate for them so
   that I am not constantly acting them out in destructive ways. The
   self-monitoring and efforts at compensation for my narcissism are an
   imperfect, moment-by-moment struggle. Typically, I am self-monitoring
   the words I write and that come out of my mouth, scanning them for the
   thousand flavors and faces of my narcissism. When I sense my
   self-importance heating up, I try to reign myself in. Is what I am
   writing/saying of moral, informational and/or entertainment value to
   others or am I merely caught up in self-promotion? The price of
   freedom from unconscious possession is eternal vigilance. There is,
   however, one red flag that presents such a serious warning that you
   need to stop right in your tracks and confront the dark force before
   you take another action:

8. If your esoteric research, discoveries, etc. cause you to think that you
are entitled to certain sexual privileges, that you are imbued with some
special powers such that sex with you is an evolutionary catalyst or
spiritual initiation: STOP! GET HELP! YOU ARE BECOMING AN EVIL ASSHOLE!

9.  Sex, money and power tend to flow together. Many of the most revered,
exalted gurus, prophets, religious leaders and spiritual teachers have been
horrible sex, money and power abusers. Tolerating that in yourself or
someone else means you have crossed over to the dark side!

   Buddhist and Hindu gurus who came to the U.S. in the Sixties were
   particularly notorious for such abuses, though, of course Catholic
   priests are in a class by themselves, or should be. Chogyam Trungpa, a
   spiritual genius who founded Naropa here in Boulder, is a very notable
   example of this syndrome and his case ties in directly with  Argüelles
   as we will see later.  I discussed the problem with Trungpa and his
   "crazy wisdom" approach in my 2007 essay: Dynamic Paradoxicalism--the
   Anti-Ism Ism http://www.zaporacle.com/dynamic-paradoxicalism Here's an
   excerpt:

   In acknowledging a place for darkness and irrationality, the dynamic
   paradoxicalist must be very wary. This acknowledgment can all too
   easily slide into the indulgence of sophisticated rationalization,
   where one excuses foolishness by acknowledging that darkness has its
   place alongside light. This is no small pitfall. This type of
   rationalization excuses the sadistic and/or hedonistic antics of
   abusive gurus, for example, by claiming that they are "crazy wisdom
   teachers." Dynamic paradoxicalism is a philosophy best suited for
   those who are grounded in a strong, Warrior stance.

   (See:  http://www.zaporacle.com/category/warrior-stance/)

   The dynamic paradoxicalist must take full responsibility for
   discerning where he needs to be in relationship to the paradox.  If
   you find yourself leaning toward the dark, lunar, irrational side of a
   paradox, be very wary about your motives, and see if this is what the
   totality of you really needs to do. There should be a heavy burden of
   proof on the decision to abdicate rationality and discipline.

   Spiritual genius and abusive guru Chogyam Trungpa is a classic example
   of sophisticated rationalization. He defined crazy wisdom in the
   following way:

   "But this craziness is not so neurotic; it's just basic craziness,
   which is fearlessness and not giving up anything. Not giving up
   anything is the basic point. At the same time, you are willing to work
   with what is there on the basis of its primordial wakeful quality. So
   that is the definition of crazy wisdom, which is sometimes known as
   wisdom gone wild."

   ( See: http://www.shambhala.org/teachings/view.php?id=131)

   Huh? Another explanation is that the Buddhist emphasis on vertical
   transcendence may often mean a neglect of the horizontal plane of
   development, such as integration of the shadow, which can then rule
   the personality as an unintegrated autonomous complex. Trungpa's crazy
   wisdom path involved sexual abuse of students and drinking himself to
   death at the age of 48. His chosen successor spread AIDS to some of
   his young disciples.

   Trungpa's most famous dysfunctional moment occurred when he drunkenly
   plowed a sports car into a joke shop in Dumfries, Scotland, an
   accident that left him partially paralyzed. Trungpa seemed almost
   proud of that occurrence, a great cosmic joke, but what he should have
   gotten from this episode is a respect for the trickster aspect of the
   unconscious. The trickster aspect of the unconscious is what so many
   mystics and metaphysical explorers always seem to miss!

   In The 2012 Story, John reminded me of something I had either never
   known or had completely forgotten--that there was a very strong link
   between Trungpa and Argüelles. Once I thought about it I remembered
   that shortly after I arrived in Boulder in 1995 I met a very
   charismatic man whose first name was Bill, and who was a close
   personal friend of Trungpa and Argüelles.  We mostly talked about
   Trungpa, whose warrior writings I had studied, and Bill told me some
   of the back story about what he was like up close. I often wondered
   whether Bill's alcoholism--he was quickly drinking himself to
   death--was encouraged by Trungpa's fatal alcoholism. Noting my
   connection to the I Ching, at one point Bill said I reminded him of
   his friend Argüelles,  a comparison I obviously don't relish.

   For all these reasons I was fascinated to read the following in The
   2012 Story:

   "In the 1970s Argüelles lived in Boulder, Colorado, and he was
   involved in the founding of Naropa College in 1974. He was a devoted
   student of Trungpa Rinpoche, who was known for a spiritual teaching
   style called Crazy Wisdom. This school of thought, and its leader,
   became famous for techniques that disrupted the rational mind. The
   methods were unorthodox and, in retrospect, highly questionable. Some
   of its `graduates' have claimed that it left them in states of severe
   confusion. Author Sam Keen had this to say about the proliferation of
   Wisdom teachers:

   "One of the things I frankly don't like about your magazine [What is
   Enlightenment] is the holding up of these people who are supposedly
   "in the absolute" and totally liberated.  I don't know whether you
   remember, but for many years I was the person at Psychology Today who
   interviewed all these gurus. And so I've had a good bit of experience
   with a fair number of them--Chögyam Trungpa, Oscar Ichazo, Muktananda
   and others. And if these are all examples of people who are totally
   liberated, I say give me slavery because they were people with
   enormous illusions and who were cultivating enormous illusions in
   their followers. By and large almost all of them were totally unclear
   about three important things: sex, money and power. And they could
   play like they were liberated as long as they had a whole cult of
   disciples who did everything for them except wipe their asses--and
   probably that, too. And most of them were on enormous power trips. So
   I think the idea of total liberation is an idea that is more crippling
   than helpful"  (112-3).

   John adds: "Argüelles, in his biography, discussed the extreme, yet
   often endearing nature of Trungpa's character, and remembers that he
   benefited from learning presence of mind by practicing dharma art
   projects, with Trungpa's guidance, in the late 1970s. In my opinion,
   a devaluing of facts and rational assessment might have been instilled
   in Argüelles at this time and Argüelles's own predilection for
   creative process and model-making took precedence. The irrational
   teachings of the Crazy Wisdom school may in some way underlie the
   unorthodox presentation of Dreamspell, which is, as I discussed,
   irrational and internally inconsistent." (113)

   One of the major fallacies Argüelles and many others like him fall
   prey to is the pre/trans fallacy I mentioned earlier. This fallacy was
   observed and incisively described by Ken Wilber. Essentially, the
   pre/trans fallacy notices a common tendency to confuse pre-rational
   states with trans-rational states, since both are non-rational. The
   "reductivist" version of this is the tendency of "scientism," which
   reduces all transrational mystical states to prerational infantilism,
   and dismisses authentic spiritual experience as "superstitious
   nonsense." Freud clearly fell for this half of the fallacy, especially
   in The Future of an Illusion. The "elevationist" version of the
   fallacy, ubiquitous in the New Age, is to elevate prerational states
   to the transcendent and to demonize rationality. From this side of the
   fallacy, babies are thought to be Buddhas, and anything tribal or
   aboriginal is romanticized and inflated as infinitely superior to
   anything modern or rational. Promiscuity is seen as a daring rebellion
   from antiquated taboos, even though it is usually in high conformity
   to what peers are doing. There will be a recognition of the
   conventionality of the older sexual morays of the past, but a failure
   to recognize that the rebellion into promiscuity is part of a vast
   conventionalism of the present, and that this new conventionalism is
   actually based on a still more primitive level of development than the
   old conventionalism. Regressing to pre-rational hedonism, indulging
   every impulse and irrational notion is seen as enlightened,
   post-conventional and transcendent. This is the state of the typically
   goofy New Age person who never heard an urban legend or bit of
   mystical-sounding nonsense without adopting it wholesale. This type of
   person is fiercely anti-intellectual and anti-rational, so it is
   impossible to talk them down from their absurdities. Even the attempt
   to do so casts you, in their minds, as this clueless rationalist stuck
   in his ego. They believe they have transcended rationality, while
   forgetting that to transcend something you first have to achieve it!

10. Beware, beware the pre/trans fallacy!

11. Once you abandon rigorous reality testing and rational discernment, you
end up deceiving yourself and others.

   Once you abdicate rationality and discernment  in favor of supposedly
   intuitive free-flowing imagination,  you have contracted a virulent
   and progressive disease. The person who has stepped into this lunar
   anything-goes mode has taken up permanent residence at the bottom of
   the ocean buffeted by this force and that, deceiving himself and
   manipulating and deceiving others.

   It seems  hard to believe now that Argüelles was once a Princeton art
   history professor.  If you listen to him now, for example his April 1
   (yes, some Gregorian calendar irony,  April Fools day) 2009 interview
   on Coast-to-Coast AM with George Noory, it's hard not to notice that
   he's just become a total buffoon.

   Upon hearing his interview, I wrote the following blog:

   I finally summoned my will to listen to George Noory's interview with
   Jóse Argüelles on April 1st and it was both torturous and
   unintentionally hilarious on Jose's part.  Jóse  mentioned the
   significance of all sorts of dates, including that one of his books
   was released on Good Friday, but didn't care to notice that his big
   interview was happening on April Fool's day.  Any grounded person
   listening to this interview would have to recognize the cosmic
   appropriateness of this date.

   Some of my quotes may be off by a word or two as a perfectly accurate
   transcription didn't seem warranted.

   George introduced the interview by quoting Daniel Pinchbeck:

   "I suspect that Jóse  Arguelles will come to be honored as one of the
   most important thinkers in human history."

   Jóse appeared with Stephanie South, an apparent groupie, who lives
   with him in Australia and who was introduced as his "biographer." She
   said she had met Jóse several times in her dreams before meeting him
   on the 3D plane. The "biography" is entitled 2012, Biography of a Time
   Traveler. Early on George asked, "Are you a time traveler or is that
   just a broad scope of what you do?" Jóse  responds, "I am a time
   traveler." Stephanie chimed in, "Jóse  is indeed a time traveler."
   Considering that Jóse believes himself the reincarnation of a Seventh
   Century Mayan King, a claim that Stephanie supports on the first page
   of her biography (you can read the first few pages on Amazon), perhaps
   this isn't a surprising claim.

   Jóse  talked about "the 90% of the brain we don't use." I've been
   debunking that since the early 80s but now it's been debunked
   everywhere as a medical urban legend--we use one hundred percent of
   our brains. See http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/tenper.html
   Perhaps Jóse was using the royal we?

   Jóse said he was deeply affected by Hoagland's face on Mars when he
   first saw it in 1983 and said that he immediately realized, "I know
   that, I remember that,  I was there, I know where that came from." He
   added that he was weeping with the power of this revelation and began
   "spiraling through time" and "unnecessary levels of knowledge began
   falling away."

   Jóse said the Harmonic Convergence of 1987 definitely worked, and the
   first evidence he offered was that just two months later the stock
   market had a big crash.

   To my amazement,  Jóse  went on at length about "the big 2007 N.Y.
   Times article" (apparently "Final Days," the 2007 article I referenced
   earlier that specifically credits John for debunking Jóse ) as though
   it was a huge vindication of his work.  He said the article
   represented a "big acknowlegement by the collective unconscious that
   2012 was on."

   Stephanie was asked what we should expect as we got close to 2012, and
   she replied that, "There will be a big transference of karma from Mars
   and Maladek." She added, "There will be a clearing of karma from all
   the world's systems, God willing."

   When asked what were the most important things we can do to prepare,
   the first thing she recommended was " a series of colonic
   irrigations." Jóse chimed in his support and pointed out that David
   Icke wrote about the cosmic insights he had after such a series.  I
   could imagine that colonic irrigations would be very powerful for
   either of these most important thinkers as they might cause the
   momentary release of their heads from colonic eclipse.

   In the last hour Jóse offered the intriguing theory that
   overpopulation was the result of technology speeding us up.  This
   might explain why the high-tech Third World produces so many babies,
   and the low-tech First World countries have zero or less than zero
   population growth.

   If a face on Mars' time-traveling spiral hasn't caused you to shed
   unnecessary levels of knowledge, you may find John's work on 2012 to
   be a bit more credible.... Of course some of you may be offended and
   will think I am being needlessly sarcastic and polarizing. I do not
   believe that reality testing and critical thinking are examples of
   unnecessary knowledge that we need to shed to make progress on the
   evolutionary spiral. Sometimes a fool really is fool and that needs to
   be pointed out.

   (End of blog from 2009.)

   Similarly, there are a number of high-profile esoteric researchers,
   some of whom I know personally, who once had incisive insights. But
   sometime in middle age their thinking shockingly deteriorated after
   spending too much time in an atmosphere of credulous anything-goes New
   Age fantasy projection. When I hear them speak now I cringe with
   embarrassment for them.

   This type of decline relates to how some once talented, sincere people
   gradually become full-blown charlatans:

12. Once you get addicted to the excitement, attention, adulation, and
income from esoteric work (and many other forms of work, sport and creative
activity) you are in danger of crossing every ethical line to keep the
goodies coming.

   I've written about this in my essay: "The Path of the Numinous--Living
   and Working with the Creative Muse"
   http://www.zaporacle.com/the-path-of-the-numinous-living-and-working-w
   ith-the-creative-muse/ Once an esoteric researcher, a writer, etc
   builds an ego identity, and possibly an income and social/sexual
   status from whatever they are doing, they feel entitled to play that
   role forever. Consider the case, for example, of a writer complaining
   of "writer's block." Is that an actual pathological condition?  Yes,
   but not in the way the writer thinks. It means his ego identity, and
   perhaps budget, has formed a dependence on the continuous flow of the
   creative muse and he feel wronged somehow when the creative flow turns
   off.  Was "writer" stamped on his birth certificate?  The creative
   muse is more likely to turn off if you presume upon it.

   If you've built up an identity, and an income, as a prophecy expert or
   New Age seer or whatever, then you want to keep that going.  So when
   the 2012 bandwagon rolls into town, and you can see that it's a really
   hot, sparkly bandwagon, suddenly all these people who know even less
   about Mesoamerican archaeology than I do, are suddenly on board as
   2012 experts, and are pumping out 2012 product and hyping it every
   chance they get.

   When people start going charlatan, they notice that they are in
   competition with other charlatans who might be making even more
   extraordinary claims. So if one guy says he has the inside scoop about
   all 64 types of extraterrestrial species visiting the earth,  then the
   next guy says of course he knows about the 64 types, everyone does,
   but he also  knows the names of every member of the Pleiadian High
   Council and can channel one of them on demand. The modality is
   copy-cat-plus-can-you-top-this embellishment until you get that giant
   disco ball effect. For example, for the last fifteen years I have
   watched while John's rigorous work on Mayan cosmology and galactic
   alignment has been co-opted and misappropriated by every snake oil
   salesman and his brother who stole it from some other charlatan who
   found it on some sketchy website somewhere and they are often
   genuinely ignorant that it originated with John.

   Some people and organizations putting out 2012 product never even had
   an original core of sincerity that got corrupted, but are just crass
   opportunists from the get-go. Sex, money, power and celebrity are
   highly attractive addictive substances that are often in short
   supply.  Some people, and some corporate entities will lie, steal,
   manipulate and even murder to get the goodies. Wherever there is a
   concentration of any of these goodies,  you will find that a
   disproportionate number of psychopaths, and what I call "situational
   psychopaths," will be attracted like moths to a flame.  I discuss this
   phenomenon extensively in my essay "Foxes and Reptiles--Psychopathy
   and the Great Financial Meltdown of 2008-9."

   http://www.zaporacle.com/foxes-and-reptiles-psychopathy-and-the-financ
   ial-meltdown-of-2008-9.

   An example of crass, opportunistic corporate exploitation of 2012 and
   what I would call apocalypse porn are some of the sensational,
   deceptive cable television "documentaries" on 2012, Nostradamus, etc.
   I recently tried to watch one of these on the History Channel and
   found them endlessly exploiting  the little trick of taking
   nonsensical assertions and posing them as provocative questions of
   the, "Could the Maya have been taught pyramid building by
   extraterrestrials?"  Within a ten minute period there were dozens of
   these Could? questions and an almost complete absence of declarative
   sentences.

13. Where opportunities for money, celebrity sex and power concentrate there
shall you find psychopaths and situational psychopaths.

   Wall Street and other centers of high finance, high-profile media
   venues, organized religions and cults are places of particular
   concentration. As L. Ron Hubbard is so often quoted: "If you want to
   make a little money, write a book. If you want to make a lot of money,
   create a religion." Making your own religion, however, is a lot of
   work, so many charlatans will settle for a book, board game,
   documentary or whatever.  A cult is just a recently minted religion
   with an income that is smaller  but concentrated into fewer hands.

14. A key warning sign that you or someone else is moving toward cultic
manipulation is the adoption of special names, titles and past-life
identities.

   We all know that one of the quickest ways to become a movie star is to
   be the son, daughter, brother or sister of a movie star. If you don't
   have such an opportunity, perhaps you can remember that you were once
   an occult star like Nostradamus, Edgar Cayce, a Mayan King, or
   whatever.

   I get very wary when I hear someone has put "Master," "Grandfather" or
   "Elder" in front of his name. This has much bearing on the 2012 topic
   because we are hearing about "Mayan Elders" and their prophecies about
   2012.  When some New Age people hear "Hopi Elder" or "Mayan Elder,"
   they imagine some gnarled figure stepping out of the mists of time
   imbued with the wisdom of the eons. For someone like me, a
   middle-aged, secular Jewish white guy from the Bronx, to dare to hold
   an "Elder" to reasonable standards of evidence, etc. is presumptuous,
   offensive and sacrilegious.  If we look into it we might find that the
   "Hopi Elder" is a middle-aged guy about my age who is one 1/16th
   native American and thinks young New Age women are really hot. The
   Jews have been around for thousands of years, probably longer than
   even the ancient Maya, so doesn't that make me a Jewish Elder? But,
   wait, "Jew" has been an unpopular brand for several millennia, so
   maybe I'll  rebrand myself as "Cabalistic Elder Jonathan Zap." I once
   skimmed a trade paperback book on the Cabala, and if anyone challenges
   my cabalistic knowledge I can call him anti-Semitic and say he is
   disrespecting my ancestral lineage.  Anyway, this is how the game is
   often played.  It doesn't mean that there aren't  sincere, humble
   indigenous elders out there, but it often turns out that these
   personable folks are ignorant of their own heritage and have picked up
   most of their notions from recent New Age material.

   For many years I have heard New Age people talking in hushed tones
   about "Hopi Elder Prophecies." I need to do some research to confirm
   this, but I've heard that Hopi Elders asked (and were granted)
   permission to speak to the United Nations General Assembly in the
   Eighties to share their prophecy that a great cataclysm was coming
   later in the Eighties. I'll have to look into that, but something I
   witnessed myself is the huge build up to Hopi Elders speaking on
   Coast-to-Coast AM with Art Bell on June 16, 1998.  Someone has posted
   a transcript here:
   http://www.oneprayer.org/hopi_elders_art_bell_talk.html

   I'm going to include some excerpts because this interview has some
   close parallels to some of this elder fallacy going on with the Maya.

   (GF1=Grandfather 1, GF2=Grandfather 2 - younger, translated for GF1,
   GM =Grandmother, GW=Robert Ghost Wolf AB = Art Bell.)

   AB: We are being honored with the presence of two Hopi Elders,
   Grandfather 1 who is speaking Hopi and Grandfather 2 who is
   translating for us. They're in the Phoenix, Arizona area. In the Black
   Hills of South Dakota, we have Robert Ghost Wolf and we are discussing
   the details?..specific details?..of Hopi prophecy,

   With regard to what may be changing, Earth changes, is the time now
   very short?

   GF2: [Asks, then translates.] It is time for the end times here, that
   was prophesied and through the dreams that were given to us also.
   Through those dreams, we are learning that we are getting very close
   to the end times.

   AB: Might we ask how old Grandfather 1 is? His age?

   GF2: [Asks?] Seventy-five. 75 years old.

   AB: 75 years old. And, how old are the prophecies that we are talking
   about now?

   GF2: [Asks?] He doesn't know exactly what the age of these teachings
   are. He says they were given to them before Christ. It is mainly by
   word of mouth that it has been handed down.

   GF2: [Asks?] Through the Elder's teachings and wishes. The Elders
   wanted to let this become public at a time when we were close to the
   end times. So, he had decided to take this upon himself to let go of
   these things, in hopes that there would be a number of people that
   would understand and realize what is going on and start praying. We
   ARE very close to it and we are, right now, going through hard times.
   He wants to set some people aside?..their lives?..so that some lives
   may be spared.

   Actually, there are a few that he thinks are important things that
   will be coming up pretty shortly. There's one thing for sure that we
   are going to come upon is that World War III is....it will take
   place....and starvation is definitely a part of this thing, where we
   will hit starvation.

   AB: When does Grandfather think the very serious parts of the
   prophecies, another world war and mass starvation......when will these
   begin to manifest? How far away from these are we?

   [Grandfathers One and Two talk back and forth in the Hopi Tongue.]

   G2: Well, it's been said that there is no exact time and date for
   these things...events...to take place, but the year 2000 is a ...I
   would say...that is a close approximation of the time that all of this
   will start to take place.

   T: [Asks?] From these teachings that were given to him, he has
   understood that the solar axis itself, of the Sun, is going to change.
   The places that normally have cold weather will have hot weather. You
   know, the weather itself is going to get even worse. The temperatures
   are going to rise even higher, and that will burn up the crops and dry
   up the Earth, so nothing will be able to grow. It is true that the Sun
   itself is being affected by this also.

   AB: In farmer's fields around the world, in many, many places in the
   world...as a matter of fact even tonight, for the first time ever in
   the state of Virginia, there is a very complex crop circle. These are
   strange formations in farmer's crops. Does Grandfather know anything
   about what these may be, and why they happen?

   GF2: [Asks?] He has heard about these. He has seen pictures of the
   crop circles that have been out there. These are, in his own mind,
   teachings also, and they're telling us what is becoming of our time
   and where it is leading us. He has had a chance to look at a few of
   them, and he does understand what they're trying to put through?...the
   message in the circle itself. It is telling us that we are very close
   to it...

   AB: Do you also believe, as we have heard from Grandfather One, that
   Hopi Prophecy is now telling us that the end times are very, very
   near?

   GM: Yes, uh huh. Yes, that is true.

   AB: Alright. Would you ask Grandfather to give us some few things that
   we should all watch and look for to happen in the next say...18
   months...or year and a half.

   [Grandfathers One and Two confer.]

   G2: Okay, he says that these earthquakes are imminent but there is no
   real date as to when these will take place. That big earthquake that
   was supposed to hit California had been altered, in a way, by the
   Tibetans who had heard about that and they did a lot of prayers there
   and they helped in altering the intensity of the earthquake that took
   place in California. That is, you know, something that we should look
   for is a large earthquake that would take place. It's going to be real
   big. It's going to be devastating.

   Many New Age people I ran into during this period were just awed by
   these Hopi Elders. It never seemed to occur to them the Hopi Elder's
   brains were no bigger than their brains.  For them, indigenous=above
   reproach, voice of nature, channeler of the cosmos. The other thing to
   notice in the transcript is that alongside the claims of extreme
   antiquity ("before Chirst") for their prophecies, there are also
   sprinkled New Age memes--crop circles, Tibetans meditating away
   Californian earthquakes, and throughout it all, the extreme influence
   of Christian apocalypitcism.

   When some New Age people hear "indigenous Elder," they imagine someone
   who grinds maize with a stone and  steps out of a cave every few
   hundred years to announce prophecies. In reality, many of the
   indigenous people who step forth as spokespersons for their heritage
   are also steeped in Christianity.  For example, in 1996 I worked as a
   volunteer on a Navajo (Diné) reservation near Big Mountain, Arizona.
   The father of the family I stayed with, and helped with agricultural
   work, was a real, working Navajo medicine man. He and his family  told
   me many stories about Skinwalkers, rituals, healings  and so forth.  I
   witnessed Navajo arriving in battered pick-up trucks from long
   distances  to visit with him for his services.

   In addition to many Navajo artifacts, the medicine man's house was
   also filled with all sorts of American Christian kitsch of the sort
   you find lingering in  thrift stores--sun-faded bad color
   reproductions of a blue-eyed Nordic Jesus at the Last Supper laminated
   onto wood-grained particle board, etc.  Although many fundamentalists,
   particularly Christian and Islamic fundamentalists, have this extreme
   exclusionary religious identification, much of the world does not, and
   will gladly adopt elements from whatever sorts of religion they come
   in contact with. When  some New Age people encounter the words of an
   indigenous Elder, it may not occur to them that what  they are hearing
   is often a pastiche of New Age memes,  Western popularized notions of
   what their cultural heritage was supposed to be, and Christian
   undercurrents.

   In The 2012 Story, John describes some of his painful confrontations
   with the elder fallacy. John quotes an interview with a Maya teacher
   Carlos Barrios, who speaks scornfully of "...`anthropologists' and
   `other people' who write `about prophecy in the name of the Maya'"
   (180).  Here's an excerpt from the interview:

   "Anthropologists visit the temple sites," Mr. Barrios says, "and read
   the steles and inscriptions and make up stories about the Maya, but
   they do not read the signs correctly. It's just their imagination..."

   Carlos obviously has contempt for anthropologists and people like John
   who read the signs but are not indigenous Maya. After this description
   of how outsiders misread the signs Carlos pontificates on what real
   Mayan Day Keepers know about 2012 and proceeds to relate (without
   citing) John's theory of galactic alignment in terms that appeared to
   be directly paraphrased from his books and web pages!  Barrios,
   without crediting John, adopted his galactic alignment scenario in a
   book he published in 2004. Adding insult to injury, Barrios wrote,
   "Many outside people writing about the Mayan calendar sensationalize
   this date, but they do not know. The ones who know are the indigenous
   elders who are entrusted with keeping the tradition." (182-3)

   Scholar Robert Sitler who investigated the 2012 phenomenon also ran
   into the elder fallacy: "Upon interviewing modern Maya spokespeople,
   such as Don Alejandro, he found that whenever they said anything about
   2012, it could be traced to modern authors such as Jóse Argüelles."
   (214)

   Once again, it is not the indigenous that I am singling out for
   criticism, but the blind spot some people have for special titles.  I
   also don't like automatic reverence for Bishops, Imams, Ayatollahs,
   Rinpoches, etc. I'd throw in a Jewish term, but the Jewish religion
   doesn't have much of a hierarchy, if it did, I'd be annoyed with
   whatever terms it came up with. People should be evaluated, on their
   individual merits, and a few syllables in front of someone's name only
   says to me that person carries around a claim of special status which
   immediately makes me wary.

   While we're on the subject of blind spots, there is a whole list of
   those I'd like to run through that have particular relevance to
   esoteric research and 2012.  A year or so ago I read a few books on
   the subject of blind spots, which are the cause of many unfortunate
   and even tragic outcomes. One of the most classic is called "loss
   aversion" and may explain why Terence remained so committed to his
   Time Wave theory despite some disconfirmations and successful
   challenges to its mathematical integrity.  My general descriptions of
   blind spots are excerpted from a card I wrote for my online oracle
   (the "Zap Oracle") entitled "Blindspots."

   Here is the entry on loss aversion:

   Captain Jacob Van Zanten was one of the most accomplished and
   experienced pilots in the world with a spotless record. He was the
   head of KLM's safety program. Nevertheless, during a day of acute
   frustrations, he made the impulsive decision to take off in a foggy,
   unfamiliar airport without tower clearance and plowed into another jet
   resulting in the death of 584 people. Captain Van Zanten was motivated
   by one of the most classic blind spots known as "loss aversion." Many
   studies show that people are far more motivated by preventing losses
   than they are by achieving comparable gains. It is loss aversion that
   keeps someone at the casino table trying to recoup losses until his
   life savings is gone. Captain Van Zanten had an excellent on-time
   record that was being undermined by a series of mishaps that day, and
   he couldn't stand the thought of the loss of his good record. His
   co-pilot, who warned him that he did not have tower clearance to take
   off, went along with the impulsive decision because of another classic
   blind spot -- the tendency to override your own better judgment out of
   deference to a person of authority.    (end of card excerpt)

   Both John and I last saw Terence alive early in 1999 at the Whole Life
   Expo in Denver.  I remember Terence speaking with a somewhat weary
   Captain Ahab-like determination about his Time Wave theory.  One
   sentence stuck in my mind as haunting, and it still resonates as such
   today. Terence said (approximately), "I've spent thirty years working
   on this theory and if it turns out to be wrong I'll spend the next
   thirty years working on why I was so obsessed with it." Unfortunately,
   Terence did not have a next thirty years. In a few weeks he had his
   first seizure and a diagnosis of terminal brain cancer.

   Terence had staked so much of his time, reputation, sense of special
   destiny, etc. on his theory that he felt he couldn't walk away from it
   even when there were disconfirmations and people like me pointing out
   flaws in his thinking. Unlike many lesser minds, Terence did not spurn
   such challenges, he welcomed them. He would often tell people that
   they should be suspicious if a truth was so holy you were supposed to
   avert your eyes and accept it without question. Terence encouraged
   people to prod, probe and test every purported truth. "The truth can
   take it." he would add.

   Although Terence welcomed challenges to his theories, most are not so
   welcoming. Someone who has built a reputation and identity for himself
   as a Dreamspell astrologer, for example, cannot so easily admit he was
   deceived or  hoaxed and walk away. When someone is invested in a
   belief system that gets challenged, more likely than not they will
   hunker down, fight back, and even increase their investment of time,
   money, and vehement commitment.

15. To progress with esoteric research you must be willing to walk away from
pet theories and cherished assumptions.

   Your commitment needs to be the truth, not to any particular
   hypothesized version of it. I can never be sure of my willingness to
   give up favorite theories, and I question myself about it frequently.
   This brings us to our next blind spot:

   Need for Closure -- Studies show that creative people are better able
   to live with ambiguity, but many cannot bear it. To overcome
   ambiguity, doubt and uncertainty people reach premature closure on
   important decisions, convincing themselves they have reached the
   correct verdict. Time and/or social pressure increase this tendency.
   People who surrender to fundamentalisms and absolutisms are often
   trying to permanently immunize themselves from the threat of
   ambiguity.

   The need for closure is a deadly temptation in esoteric research.
   Esoteric research often involves the study of ambiguous phenomena that
   cannot be reproduced on demand. Out of the hundreds or thousands of
   books the ancient Maya wrote, only four remain and what's left related
   to the Long Count calendar is particularly fragmentary. (76, 81)  One
   has to look back through the mists of time at the fragmentary
   evidence  left by an exotically different culture. Some areas of
   irreducible ambiguity may never be closed.  Part of the temptation is
   that  closure often brings status. People are magnetically attracted
   to people who have definite conclusions and are completely sure of
   themselves.  As Bill Clinton pointed out, "Strong and wrong beats weak
   and right."

   In ufology, for example, I have found that the most intelligent and
   diligent researchers (such as Jacque Valle) are the ones least likely
   to give you fixed conclusions. It is the ignorant and the charlatans
   who rattle off the names of everyone on the Pleidian high council,
   and have ready answers for everything.

16.  Avoid closure until you really know. Your powers of observation and
thinking increase with your ability to tolerate ambiguity.

   Next blind spot:

   Wishful Thinking -- The formation of beliefs and the making of
   decisions according to what is pleasing to imagine rather than through
   evidence or reasoned consideration.

   The New Age is rife with this. 2012 is anything you want it to be--a
   sudden end to materialism plus infinite abundance, plus world peace,
   plus time travel, plus...

17.  Be aware and very wary about what you want to believe and hold such
beliefs to even higher standards of evidence and critical challenge.

   Halo Effect -- The first traits we recognize in others influence our
   interpretations and perceptions of later ones because of our
   expectations. For example, good-looking people are judged as having
   better personalities and skills than those of average appearance.
   Celebrity endorsements improve sales of products that the celebrity
   knows nothing about.

   2012 is a virtual festival of halo-effect abuse. People take their own
   quirky notions and rebrand them as Mayan, indigenous, ancient and so
   forth. If the spokesman of a 2012 theory is charismatic and/or is
   genuinely an expert in some area, this doesn't entitle him to a
   general authority that can be abused  to promote a notion about 2012
   on which he is not an expert, etc.

18. Know the halos you are influenced by and compensate for their influence.

   One of the best-looking groups of people in the world are
   pharmaceutical sales reps. Big Pharma has them in both genders to
   appeal to doctors of whatever gender preference. If someone is
   attractive, realize that the halo effect may give that person outsized
   influence. Evaluate people and ideas on a case-by-case basis and
   independent of attached halos (Elder, Rinpoche, etc.).  Be very wary
   of researchers who insist on attaching halos to their stuff: "My deep
   inside sources tell me..."  "Elder so-and-so initiated me in the
   following mystery teaching." Other classic esoteric halos include
   unsubstantiated claims of extreme antiquity and exotic cultural
   origins for their material,  etc.

   The above blind spots are classic ones recognized by mainstream
   psychology.  Here are a couple I've come up with that are relevant to
   2012:

   The Amazing Success Formula Fallacy -- The belief in hyped-up
   one-size-fits-all success formulas. Dieters, multi-level marketing
   folks, and power of positive thinking/ you-create-your-own-reality
   absolutists are especially prone to this delusion -- The Secret, many
   self-help books, surefire methods to get rich quick, etc. When asked
   the secret of his success as a composer, Philip Glass responded: "My
   secret -- I get up early in the morning and work all day long." Even
   that isn't a success formula, because Philip happens to be a genius
   who works all day long.

   There are many versions of 2012 as magical success formula: Just wait
   till 2012 and all injustices will be righted or you will be swept away
   in a New Age Rapture. Conversely, if you've got a pole-shift doomsday
   scenario, then worries about the mortgage, cleaning up your diet, etc.
   get brushed aside because by 2012 none of that will matter.

19. Be extremely wary of esoteric products and persons who have an answer
and success formula for everything. If it sounds too good to be true, it
probably is.

   The Real Life Up Ahead Fallacy -- This isn't your real life right now,
   you're working toward your real life up ahead when you find your soul
   mate, perfect weight, career, dream house, etc. If nothing else, aging
   painfully exposes this fallacy. The antidote:  "existential
   impeccability,"--focusing in on the nowever as the time that really
   matters.

   After 2012 the real life will start, right now I'm just in the lead up
   phase, this is all preparatory, 2012 is when things will really
   climax. We will discuss this blind spot in more depth later when we
   discuss how countdown dates bind you to linear time and suck vitality
   out of the present. Other esoteric researchers play similar games. For
   example, for decades certain ufologists have hyped that "disclosure is
   just around the corner," and their inside sources confirm that the
   "disclosure year" is constantly upon us. David Wilcox is notorious for
   this with adamant insistence that his inside sources in both the
   government and the "Iluminati" confirm that Obama will soon hold an
   news conference with extraterrestrials standing beside him.

20.  Avoid any esoteric product or person that depends on some big drama
event up ahead. Authentic esoteric material should deepen your awareness and
appreciation of the present.

   Global dismissal of out group member--This person doesn't have
   scholarly/scientific credentials, there's something New Agey about
   them, they're just a clueless rationalist stuck in the old ways so
   anything they say is invalid and can be dismissed in advance.

   There are reliable and unreliable types amongst credentialed scholars,
   skeptics, New Age types, independent researchers, indigenous folk and
   every other human group that has ever existed.

21. Evaluate people individually and be careful about dismissing entire
groups.  Do not put a halo around certain groups or globally dismiss others.

   I know I do a lot of negative stereotyping of New Agers, but on an
   individual basis I have found many who are sincere, open-minded and
   have valuable knowledge and insights.

   The last  blind spot will also be a segue into our next major section
   on the "gatekeepers of 2012."

   The Objectivity Bias and Skeptic Fallacy  --You or someone else
   appropriates the mantle of objectivity without any evidence that he is
   not prone to the subjective factors that influence all people. The
   self-proclaimed objectivist will then, from a position of assumed
   superiority,  critique the subjectivity of others. The most comically
   absurd personification of this type is

   Ayn Rand and some of her disciples. (See the superbly researched Rand
   biography: Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne C. Heller)

22.  Be wary of yourself or anyone who claims "objectivity."  Claims of
objectivity generally involve  enormous blind spots about irreducible areas
of subjectivity.

   Most of us do this to some extent, but some people are real abusers.
   Nobody owns objectivity, but many think they do.  There is an
   irreducible amount of subjectivity involved in almost everything
   esoteric, and psychological subjects usually involve multiple layers
   of subjectivity.  When someone makes claims of being "objective" or a
   "skeptic," it usually means they have put a halo around themselves as
   supremely rational observers immune to the subjectivities that riddle
   others. Some scientists and academics fall for this fallacy, and so
   far every spokesperson for the so-called skeptic community that I have
   encountered falls prey to this.

   This leads us to the skeptic fallacy. The skeptics were originally a
   school of Greek philosophers who believed in tolerating ambiguity
   without resorting to premature closure.  They felt that their
   observational powers were increased if they withheld from conclusions.
   Notice that the self-proclaimed professional skeptics are the exact
   opposite of that. They are debunkers--true believers in a negative.
   They are priests of scientism rather than science. They have a-priori
   assumptions that paraspsychological phenomena, UFOs, etc. do not
   exist, and without questioning their own motivations they set about to
   discredit any people or research that runs counter to their
   scientismic assumptions. Dr. Raymond Mood, who is an M.D. and has PhDs
   in both philosophy and psychology, has pointed out the ignorance and
   faulty logic of skeptics who say things like, "I'm a skeptic about
   NDEs, I think they're just the result of an oxygen-starved brain." In
   other words: "I'm a true believer in a reductive, easily disproven
   explanation of NDEs."

   I recently confronted professional skeptic Michael Shermer with this
   fallacy. He had just spoken about what motivates people to believe
   irrational things. I pointed out that he is certainly not a skeptic
   and that he never mentions or seems to examine his own subjective
   motivations--- that he has built a whole ego identity and substantial
   income around being a professional skeptic, and it would disrupt his
   whole life, identity and income if he were to admit that here is valid
   paranormal research, etc. His answer was a personable confection of
   glib evasions. Other people are subject to irrational beliefs, but as
   a professional skeptic he's immune to that sort of thing. His
   scientismic assumption of himself as objective observer is an
   old-fashioned attitude that has been an obscuring force in science,
   esoteric research and many other fields for some time:

   "The main concern is that the claims of a few scientists are fiercely
   disputed by most of their peers, not on the basis of research, but a
   priori not even with rational arguments, but with emotional motives.
   Emotional motives with their aftermath of ridicule, contempt, and
   insinuation, based solely on an unphilisophical attachment to a closed
   system.  It seems barely credible!" Dutch author and Psychiatrist
   Frederik van Eeden said that in 1894.

   The 2012 Story documents many cases of the above fallacies perpetrated
   by the "gatekeepers of 2012"--academics, archeologists, epigraphers,
   astronomers and skeptics who arrogate to themselves the role of final
   arbiter on what the Maya intended about 2012.  For example, although
   many academic gatekeepers adamantly insisted for years that there was
   not a single Mayan inscription about 2012, in April of 2006 a
   translation was released by the University of Texas of a Mayan
   inscription on Tortuguero Monument 6 about 2012. While it looked to
   many as if it were a new discovery, in actuality Mayan epigraphers had
   been keeping it to themselves because they feared "creating a
   monster."

   This is typical gatekeeper behavior. The public can't handle the
   truth, and if it is inconvenient to our stated positions we can just
   keep it under wraps. John points out that, "Another well-known scholar
   elsewhere likened the 2012 people who actively interject their
   observations and comments on the academic e-mail forums to `a pit of
   vipers.'" (218-9)

   Although there is plenty of poor quality doomsday 2012 product out
   there, not everything produced by independent researchers is
   apocalypse pornography.  Many of the 2012 gatekeepers do not take the
   trouble to make that distinction, and will globally ridicule all
   nonacademic 2012 material as doomsday pseudoscience. Ironically, the
   first published connection of 2012 with apocalypse came from an
   academic!  John quotes an excerpt  from Maya scholar Michael Coe's
   1966 book The Maya:

   "There is a suggestion that each of these [time periods] measured
   thirteen Baktuns, or something less than 5,200 years, and that
   Armageddon would overtake the degenerate peoples of the world and all
   creation on the final day of the thirteenth."

   John adds,

   "The use of Christian terminology to describe Maya eschatology is
   quite surprising. `Our present universe' he continues, is `to be
   annihilated...when the great Cycle of the Long Count reaches
   completion.' This is the kind of language that Maya scholars today
   find so offensive, and rightly so.  As I've been saying for two
   decades, the Maya Creation Myth itself does not espouse an idea of a
   final cataclysmic end to the universe. In a cyclic time philosophy,
   it's all about transformations and renewal." (229-30)

   In May of 2004, John posted to his site an acrimonious exchange he had
   with an astronomer:

   http://alignment2012.com/tonkins-error.html

   John asked if I would read it and give some feedback on what was going
   on. I responded by email and John included a large excerpt from one of
   my two emails in The 2012 Story (232-3).  The full exchange is linked
   above so you can judge for yourself whether my comments are warranted.
   Here is the complete text of the relevant part of the emails:

   That was a classic (if emotionally toxic to engage in) dialogue with a
   debunker priest of the scientism religion. You'll find the identical
   attitude at Psycop and the Skeptical Inquirer.  As I'm sure you
   realize, a debunker is not a skeptic, but a true believer in a
   negative. Scientism is their religion, and they have a brittle,
   neurotic power complex that feeds off of this identification. They are
   the aristocrats of truth wearing a purple mantle and carry the
   imprimatur of science (in their neurotic imagination). Those who are
   representatives of the vast truths and areas of perception that their
   brittle and hollow neurotic persona cannot bear to engage are the
   subject of such comic shadow projection that, like a Medieval Monarch
   who cannot bear even the thought that a commoner should gaze at them
   or directly address them, the very thought of an actual dialogue with
   a member of this group makes them squirm with nauseated distaste. You
   have violated this man's core psychic intentionality by daring to
   engage in a rational discourse with him (as they see rationality as
   their sovereign territory that those not part of their priesthood
   can't dare to trespass on). You have forgotten what your role is
   supposed to be in their mind: Passive Straw Man. The esoteric person
   is supposed to make a series of absurd points, be a cliché or
   stereotype with no rational ability to engage challenges, and they are
   supposed to be the monarchs of objectivity, authoritatively casting
   down idols and buffoons for the general public. With the comical and
   unwarranted disdain with which he addresses you as "a" John Major
   Jenkins and "your kind"--a phrase so often applied by racists to
   blacks and Jews--this guy completely reveals the intense irrationalism
   and psychological projection that are at the core of his point of
   view. This type of debunker is more brittle and irritable than even
   many fundamentalist religionists because even their worldview has more
   depth than that of debunking scientism. Psychologically, someone of
   this type is a humpty-dumpty teetering on top of a slippery wall above
   an abyss. Their own unconscious is so aware of the vast hollowness of
   their affectation of objectivity that they live in a toxic world of
   irritated disdain of most of reality, projecting their own intense
   irrationalism on most everyone else, and even their power complex
   takes on a nerdy, introverted and impotent form--instead of being real
   scientists, actually taking bold strides into the unknown, all they
   can do is take pot shots at the straw men of their own imagination.

   Another aspect of your exchange with the debunker is its obvious
   connection to the documentary and to the 2012 phenomenon in general.
   The 2012 field, in the collective psyche, is heating up and attracting
   irrationalisms. A classic aspect of this debunker is that he wants to
   be a bottom feeder. He wants to find the most inferior version of
   esoteric material to suit his purpose of having a straw man to knock
   down and thereby inflate his shaky ego identity. This is a parallel
   theme related to the TechTV interview you wisely backed away from.
   Lots of people want to either deify the esoteric person into a cult
   figure (as in some of José's disciples) or conversely put clown
   make-up on them as they lead them to the gallows. This is true of
   celebrity in general--kick em' while they're up, kick em' while
   they're down. We love to deify celebrities and we also love to see
   them deflated and shamed by scandals or other crashes.

   A giant deception is being set up (in unconscious cooperation) by two
   groups: The unground cheerleaders of 2012 and the debunkers. There is
   the potential to create a Y2K fiasco for esoteric research by setting
   up 2012 for inflated expectations which (because inflated expectations
   are almost impossible to realize) can be a great triumph for the
   debunkers. Your position on the subject is, therefore, anathema to
   both camps, which despite their differences of style are two sides of
   the same coin, two versions of the ego playing a masturbatory game
   with itself.     (End of email)

   Although,  I've focused here on gatekeeper abuse, I am not at all
   trying to dismiss the crucial, invaluable contributions to the 2012
   topic made by scholars and astronomers. John makes his appreciation of
   their work very clear throughout his books and websites.  For example,
   he writes:

   "I realize that I can be critical of scholars and New Agers in equal
   measure, but in this section I want to make it clear that I have been
   inspired and informed  by Maya scholars past and present...

   "Scholars whose perspectives I disagree with and critique are also the
   same scholars who have provided insights and breakthroughs" (240).

   Finally, I realize I have spent a large part of this essay angrily
   casting down idols and haven't said quite enough about what the whole
   phenomenon means for the collective psyche besides all the individual
   blind spots and fallacies that go into lighting up the glittering
   disco ball. Momentarily I will discuss the psychology of apocalyptic
   prophecy, but the largest perspective I have on the meaning of the
   2012 phenomenon relates to my work on the Singularity Archetype and I
   will save a quick introduction to that for last.

   The following brief passage from an introductory work on the
   Singularity Archetype entitled White Crows Rising will explore one of
   the major reasons why prophecy is so unreliable and why apocalyptic
   doomsday material is perennially popular:

   One of the reasons that prophecy has been so unreliable relates to the
   perpetual confusion in the human psyche between the inner world and
   the outer world. The confusion is only to be expected given that there
   is often a blurred boundary between inner and outer. Inner and outer
   converge through synchronicity and through many causative mechanisms
   such as self-fulfilling prophecies. The most classic confusion of
   inner and outer is interpersonal projection. We project some disowned
   part of ourselves on to another or others. For example, a man may
   project the disowned feminine aspect of his soul onto a beautiful
   woman he sees walking down the street.  He looks at her and feels this
   sense of eternal recurrence--she was meant for me, I've known her from
   other lifetimes. In a sense, the perception is correct, this aspect of
   his soul is meant for him, and it has been with him from time
   immemorial.  The incorrect part, and it can be disastrously incorrect,
   is the confusion of the inner and outer, the acting out
   interpersonally of what is intrapsychic. Most interpersonal violence,
   as well as genocide and other forms of collective violence, occur in a
   state of shadow projection, where disowned and dreaded parts of
   oneself, or of the collective, are projected onto a despised other or
   another race, etc.

   Anything with a strong emotional charge in the psyche, and especially
   if the charge is strong and uncomfortable, will be projected outside.
   One of the strongest charges in most psyches is anxiety about death. A
   classic projection is for a person to feel their own mortal
   vulnerability, the imminence of their own death that may come at any
   time, and to attribute that feeling to the world. I can feel it, this
   is all temporary, this world is going to end; I am living in the end
   times! Again, the perception is correct except for the confusion of
   inner and outer. Every mortal is always living in end times, death is
   always imminent and even if any of the many possible causes of
   premature death are avoided, the years left are still only a one or
   two digit figure. The uncomfortable feeling of perilous temporal
   fragility must go somewhere and an end of world prophecy is like a
   lightning rod for this intensely uncomfortable inner charge.

   Like a fractal or a hologram, the life cycle of the individual to some
   extent recapitulates the life cycle of the species. An individual has
   a certain limited life span before they cross the event horizon of
   death, and a species also has a limited life span before it becomes
   extinct. I've heard that the average life span of a species is a
   100,000 years. Because of the parallelism, it is easy for someone to
   confuse the imminence of personal death with collective eschaton. This
   confusion is also well motivated as it seems to displace much of the
   individual anxiety about death, which is usually faced alone, onto a
   "we're all in it together" general event that has strong elements of
   high drama and excitement associated with it. Instead of a feeling of
   powerlessness about the inevitability of one's own death, the prophet
   feels empowered by his sense that he has been privileged with secret
   knowledge withheld from the common person. Also, the ego is very
   concerned about its place in the social hierarchy and is appalled by
   the idea that it could cease to exist while others continue to live.
   If everyone checks out at once, however, then death involves no such
   social humiliation. Even better, if there is some sort of Rapture,
   where the ego is part of an elect that becomes immortal while others
   of the sort the ego doesn't like are annihilated or left behind to
   deal with the Antichrist and Armageddon, then personal anxiety about
   death gets channeled into an all-satisfying scenario. For these
   powerful psychological reasons, prophecies of the end of the world
   usually seem to be conveniently scheduled to occur before the end of
   the prophet's expected lifespan, allowing the eschaton to upstage
   anxiety about personal death.

   2012's popularity as projection screen for apocalyptic expectations is
   enabled by the convenience of its chronological nearness. Few people
   have heard that Sir Isaac Newton spent the last few decades of his
   life trying to decode Revelations and finally came up with an end-date
   of 2060.  Why don't we hear more about this?  It's not a sexy date yet
   because it's too far away.  Nobody wants to wait half a century.  I'll
   offer a prophecy of  my own:  Some time around 2050 we'll start seeing
   books and movies coming up with titles like "The Newton Code."

   Many years after I formed this hypothesis I heard of an episode that
   gave it anecdotal support. In the 1960s there was a well-known woman
   psychic (but not Jean Dixon) who had a nationally syndicated newspaper
   column. She had a vision that a gigantic earthquake would destroy most
   of California on a particular date and reported this in her column. In
   copycat fashion, other psychics began to predict a quake on the same
   day. This woman was sincere in her prediction, and at great expense
   she relocated her family from the Bay Area to Nevada. On the predicted
   date there was no earthquake, but the woman died of some rare disease.
   (I have one published reference to this story, but have not been able
   to establish the psychic's name or many other details, if anyone has
   any leads please send to jonathanzap@hotmail.com)  (end of White Crow
   excerpt)

   If I have been pretty tough on false prophets and those who are always
   trying to get us to countdown to some exciting or terrifying date, one
   of the reasons is that the countdown lifestyle causes tremendous
   psychological and spiritual damage to people.  A few years ago I wrote
   a page and a half article on this entitled "Clocktime Metastasizes
   Toward 2012" :

   "Time is what keeps the light from reaching us. There is no greater
   obstacle to God than time. And not only time but temporalities, not
   only temporal things but temporal affections; not only temporal
   affections but the very taint and smell of  time".  --Meister Eckart .
   (c. 1260-c. 1328)

   Eagerly awaiting 2012 feels like hurrying toward tranquility. We are
   beset with time sickness, and the reset of that orientation is not to
   be found in time, but beyond time.

   In his book, The Perennial Philosophy, Aldous Huxley points out that
   the religions and political philosophies that are framed in linear
   time are the ones that cause violence and generate suffering. The
   progressive may seek radical means to create a future world where
   conditions are more ideal. The reactionary may take repressive
   measures to turn the clock back to some imaginary earlier time, when
   "traditional" values reigned. Both seek to find their salvation in
   time, in the temporal world, and both will employ temporal means to
   get there, usually claiming that the ends justify their dubious means.

   The more we identify with our mortal, aging bodies, the more we
   descend into clock-time, as our bodies are bound to clock-time in so
   many obvious ways. Conversely, our spirits are timeless, and therefore
   our psyches, which might be said to occupy a middle plane, have an
   inherently amphibious nature. Huxley describes the duality of our
   psyches as being able to live in both clock-time and eternity.

   I'm trying to ground this distinction, and find a way to integrate it
   into my awareness while living in this clock-time driven realm. I'm
   not much of a meditator, and can't recall any definitive experience of
   release from the temporal into the eternal. If I were to adopt an
   ambitious program of meditation to achieve that goal, I would, of
   course, be binding myself once more to a linear time track. I can't
   travel toward eternity; as John Major Jenkins suggests,  attuning to
   eternity is more comparable to breathing in or out than traveling
   toward a destination.

   The method I've found to be the grounding, integrating conduit for
   withdrawing from clock-time can be expressed in a two word phrase I
   coined some years ago: existential impeccability.  Existential
   impeccability means being impeccable right now, not striving to
   achieve some distant aim or goal. but simply to be impeccable for its
   own sake. When I seek to transform myself using the temporal, it
   always seems to back fire, just as when intelligence agencies seek to
   control the temporal they encounter blowback.

   From the stance of existential impeccability, we are path-oriented,
   not goal-oriented. We stay centered in an axis mundi of empowerment
   and actualization by focusing on impeccability in our relationship
   with ourselves in the now. With this focus, we are always at the
   center of our circle of influence and inner independence. With our
   focus on existential impeccability, we are also as effective and
   harmonious as possible with all outer relationships.

   The forms of violence done by temporally bound imperialist governments
   and evangelical religions each have their analog in our personalities.
   If I focus on capturing the Hottie, I descend into the nightmare of
   history, in this case the personal history nightmare of the adolescent
   soap opera. I live out of the moment in anticipation of the phone
   ringing, etc. This is the insight shared by an 80-year-old woman who
   said that she had now learned that striving to be loved was less
   fulfilling than to be love. When I get ambitious about anything:
   capturing the Hottie, becoming a celebrity, or writing a book, I step
   out into the flatland clock-time world; I find myself rushing toward a
   Precious in search of a wholeness that, had I but slowed down and
   turned inward, I would have found within.

   I trick myself with clock-time when I accept galling privations now to
   achieve a goal, or when I indulge now and imagine that tomorrow I will
   turn over a new leaf. Reaching for a stimulant like coffee can be a
   way of binding metabolically to clock-time--I sacrifice existential
   impeccability to get something that speeds me up now and slows me down
   later. This is the classic pattern of temporal means. There is always
   the archetype of the Devil's bargain: buy now, pay later; and you
   always pay more later than what you got now. But really you don't just
   pay later, you pay the instant you make the decision, even before you
   act on it, because you have damaged your inner relationship to
   yourself and tied another binding knot to Maya or the linear time
   bound matrix. Tie enough of those knots and, as Jung put it, "the life
   giving rhythm of the aeons becomes the dread ticking of the clock".

   Finally, the Singularity Archetype, the largest perspective I can
   offer for the 2012 phenomenon. My upcoming book will be the most
   thorough treatment of the subject, and will also include a study of
   some of the 2012 material in a section on what happens when the
   Singularity Archetype pathologizes. I will conclude with some links to
   writings on the Singularity Archetype for any readers who want to
   investigate it before the book comes out. Here is my attempt at a
   one-page summary of a vast subject:

What is the Singularity Archetype?

   The Singularity Archetype is a primordial image of human evolutionary
   metamorphosis that emerges from the collective unconscious. The
   Singularity Archetype builds on archetypes of death and rebirth and
   adds information about the evolutionary potential of both species and
   individual.

A Composite Picture of how the Archetype Presents

   A rupture of plane event occurs, usually threatening the survival of
   the individual and/or species. The event is a shock that disrupts the
   equilibrium of body/physical world and also individual/collective
   psyche.  It is an ontological shock that will be viewed as the worst
   thing possible by individual/ collective ego.

   There is another rupture of plane, which may actually be the same
   rupture as above, but seen from a cosmic rather than a personal view.
   The shock is revealed to be a transcendent evolutionary event. The
   revelation of the transcendent aspect will often involve spiral motifs
   and unusual lights. Consciousness and communication metamorphose and
   with them core aspects--ego, individuality, connection to linear time,
   corporeality, gender identification, social order, etc.---
   fundamentally transform.  There is a vision or actualization of
   release from some or all limits of corporeal incarnation and the
   emergence of "glorified bodies" that have enhanced powers and various
   degrees of etherialization. More visual and telepathic modes of
   consciousness and communication emerge and this is part of a
   transformation of individuality into "Homo gestalt"--a new species
   where individual psyches are networked telepathically.

   The SA may occur as a dream, vision or fantasy about eschaton--an end
   point of the species. The SA may also be experienced and even
   actualized to various degrees by an individual through transcendent
   and/or anomalous experiences such as NDEs, UFO/abduction/close
   encounter experiences, kundalini and psychotropic episodes.

   As with encounters with all archetypes, individuals and groups will
   attach idiosyncratic material to it such as particular end dates and
   scenarios.  But the SA cannot be located in linear time and is not
   reducible to a premonition of particular outcomes or predetermined
   futures.  It could, however, be viewed as a "strange attractor," a not
   fully formed pattern associated with the future that is affecting
   individual and species in past and present. Another way of defining
   the  SA (in its collective form) is as a resonance, flowing backward
   through time, of an approaching Singularity at the end of human
   history.

   Here are three links to documents (in ascending order of length) on
   the Singularity Archetype:

   Looking Toward the Event Horizon--The Singularity Archetype and the
   Metamorphosis of the Species

   (This article was published in Australian Magazine New Dawn on
   December 1st, 2008, and is reproduced with their permission.)

   Avatar and the Singularity Archetype

   White Crows Rising--the Singluarity Archetype and the Event Horizon of
   Human Evolution

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