Stargazing

I need to correct what I perceive as a factual error in my last post. It went like this:

"If the precession of the equinox is on a 26,000 year cycle, and the sun is as close to the line between the Earth and the center of the galaxy as it has been on that 26,000 year cycle, then I take the mid-point of that cycle, when the sun was furthest from that line, 13,000 years ago, as the time of the collapse of the last ice age."

I've been trying to work out in my head, how the sun could eclipse the center of the galaxy only once on a 26,000 year cycle. I haven't been able to do it; but still, I seem to fall back on that default idea about the winter solstice of 2012. Anyone commenting on what that date signifies is either condescendingly dismissive, or fatuously convinced, so it's hard to know what the truth is. Recently, I found a clip of Neil deGrasse Tyson mocking the idea, saying that the sun eclipses the center of the galaxy once every year, so how can that date be such a big deal? He would, I think, encapsulate the dominant scientific attitude about the myth of 2012, that it isn't even worth looking into, that anyone who does is clearly a crackpot.

It sometimes helps to look to the blind-spots of Science, when looking for the truth. What Tyson says is not really even true. According to Thomas Razzeto, the sun never in fact eclipses the center of the galaxy; but rather, once a year, you can draw a line from the Earth, through the sun, along the plane of the galaxy, within a few degrees of the center - the galactic alignment. This has been happening on the day of the winter solstice, the past hundred years or so, and will for another hundred or so more. The plane of the galaxy is marked by the great rift, what appears to be a dark line in the sky blocking light from the center of the galaxy - interstellar clouds, it turns out - which the Maya consider, or considered, the birth canal of the great womb of the cosmic Mother.

Razzeto simply asked, if there is anything at all to the date of Dec 21, 2012, what would you see, if you were looking from the place of the origin of the Long Count calendar? What he discovered, using a computer program called The Sky, looking from the village of Izlan, in southern Chiapas state, in Mexico, at high noon on 12/21/12, the sun can be found at the center of the great rift, at the same time that Mars and Venus are found balanced on either side.

Razzeto calls this the day of the triple rebirth of the sun, in the presence of the world tree. By triple rebirth, he means, the rebirth of the sun as it rises in the morning, the rebirth of the sun on the winter solstice, and the rebirth of the sun in the center of the great rift. The world tree, at least in my conception, something like the Earth, Venus and Mars, three very similar planets in many ways, triangulating, or at least appearing to frame the sun in a triangle. Razzeto believes the Maya chose this day to end their long count (which also implies an accuracy in calendar making that requires a computer these days.)

What will it mean, this arrangement in the sky above southern Mexico? Nothing, says Razzeto. It is only an arrangement that lends well to a metaphor, the triple rebirth, which we may choose to invest in, or not. It is a mythology that arose out of the Maya, or at least is arising now, in response to the striking talents of the ancient Maya. It certainly seems to me that if there has ever been a time to represent the death and rebirth of Ages, that time would be now. We can choose to see this time as a time of rebirth, or we can hold onto the ways that have brought us here, with so much seemingly on the brink of collapse. But then, a kind of death is necessary, to be reborn.

Razzeto is not going to be taken very seriously, by many. He's very earnest, with a very gentle voice. He's an independent thinker, unaffiliated with any school, simply a man who asked a question and went in search of an answer, and he doesn't refuse to look at any idea if it might inform his argument, some of which ideas are institutionally taboo. He is more of what we need, actually, earnest and awed people exploring ideas. Both genuine and authentic, he has come up with as credible a theory about what the hoopla around Dec 21, 2012 is really about, from the perspective of the skies, as anyone I've found.

As for the second half of that quote of mine, that the halfway point of this past cycle was the end of the last ice age, is unsupportable by any measure. It is true that back in 1998, the cycle of precession could be said to be complete, with the axis of the Earth as close to the angle of the plane of the galaxy, as it ever is on that 25,776 year cycle. The other side of that cycle would put us at about the year 10,876 BCE. That was a time around the end of the last ice age, but we can't really say. The closest I've come to anything corroborating that date, is the work of Robert Buval and Graham Hancock, pointing to the pyramids of Giza, and a layout that was reflected in the sky, in the year 10,450 BCE. As for positing too, that Neanderthal went extinct about 26,000 years ago, I've seen dates between 24,000-40,000 years ago. Science seems to have settled on the older number, this year.

So while I cast doubt on my assumptions about what happened 13,000 and 26,000 years ago, I don't doubt this will be the year that the bulk of humanity will have to face a future of decreasing energy supplies. And no, I don't think that is a result of precession, or an alignment in the solar system. It is simply a fact of geological limits, of supply and demand, which is understood by a small number of people, and thoroughly ignored by the vast majority, to all our peril.

Aristotle said that an educated mind should be able to consider any idea, without having to accept it. In America, we adhere mostly to ideologies or dogmas or institutional creeds, to the exclusion of all else. In other words, contrary to what we like to believe about ourselves, we let authorities do our thinking for us. Most of the ideas afloat in the world today are about social control. Which is why the decline of America is likely to be ugly, every ideology, dogma and creed fighting to dominate every other.

If there is anything we need right now, it is flexibility in thinking. Opening our minds to new ideas, unafraid. Because open-eyed and clear-headed folk have a much easier time in hard times, then do the ones who can not think clearly for themselves. And the fact is, most of the ideas that might lead to a kind of golden age for humanity, a healing time, are going to be hard to preserve the next 200 years, as the ideas of control will attempt to snuff out anything that might lead to such an age. My hope is, that the readers of this blog are some of those who will take it upon themselves to preserve what is best about this life, as long as they live, to pass on what they can. Such people may be the only thing standing in the way of another dark age.

Looking to the stars, to the spiral nature of this existence, what is my role, in maintaining the best of this human experience?