Gregg Braden &
Prophesy 2012

In the early 1980s, before the science had fully documented the effects, a group of 200 people were trained to feel peace in their hearts. They weren't thinking it, they weren't praying for it, they weren't wishing for it. They were feeling as if the peace was already present, claiming it in the present, in their hearts. They were stationed throughout the war-torn areas of the Middle East, what at that time was the first Israeli/Lebanese war. And what the scientists found statistically, is that the terrorist activity stopped, altogether, during the window of time that these things were happening. Crimes against people declined. Emergency accidents in hospital rooms declined. Traffic accidents declined. And when they stopped [manifesting peace] all these things reversed. The results were published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution in 1988, and the bottom line is that human experience has a direct effect on the quality of life. This brings to light the core principle of the spiritual traditions, which says that this isn't something we're intended to do for a few moments and then stop. It's a way of being that never ends. It's a way of living our lives, living a heart-based experience, to the best of our abilities living in care, in gratitude, in appreciation, in compassion throughout every moment of every day of our lives.

Almost universally, ancient texts and traditions tell us that we're living this pivotal moment in the history of our world, and in the history of our civilization. And as a scientist, when people ask me my take on this, and specifically around the year 2012, what I understood is that I had to understand the thinking of our ancestors. And that thinking led me into the leading-edge science of what we're discovering about our world. And it's all about cycles of time. So, a couple of facts: This generation is living the last years of a rare, mysterious cycle of time that began 5,125 years ago. It's called a Great World Age. The Present World Age began in the biblical area in 3114 B.C., and it ends in a rare astronomical event December 21, 2012. Those are facts. And it is a fact that there have been at least four world ages before this one. We're living the fifth and moving into the sixth. And it is a fact that at the end of each world age, the end of that cycle of time coincides with physical changes on Earth that are directly linked to cycles where Earth is located in space. So, the fact that the world is changing now... and if we know where and how to look into the past it will help us to understand how to prepare for what we can realistically expect, beyond all of the media hype and fear. And it's through places like the ice cores in Antarctica, where we can go back almost 500,000 years and look at every year of Earth's history and compare those years to now, that we arm ourselves with the facts of what we can realistically expect. And this is where it gets so fascinating, because the climate change that we're experiencing now has happened every 5,000 years for the last three World Age cycles. The tilt, the rotation, the angle of Earth in space is what triggers many of the physical changes that we're experiencing now. Our systems are stressed, and in that stress we must make a choice of whether we work together to meet the changes, or whether we compete and fight against one another.

The best minds of our time are telling us that we're living an unprecedented series of crises. Never have so many people been faced with so many crises, and each crisis of such magnitude, all of which are occurring in such a short window of time that must be solved so quickly, within the next five to ten years. Scientific American released a special edition in September of 2005 called "Crossroads for Planet Earth," and they identified the fact that we are at this unique juncture in civilization and in the history of our planet. The purpose was to bring the general public up to speed on the fact that so many crises are converging in this window of time. Now, as a scientist when I see that my question is, "Why?" What we know is that the physical conditions here on Earth change on a rhythmic basis, on a cyclic basis. But there's so much time between one cycle and the next that we tend to forget what that means. So when the change does happen, we think that the Earth is broken. And the reality is that we're living a cyclic change now that our ancestors have been preparing us for 5,000 years, in the language of their time, since they lived through the last change. In their words, they attempted to tell us what we could expect and how to prepare. Our own science now is confirming that we're living through cyclic change. The very prestigious journal Nature published a series of articles showing, number one, that there is a very powerful source of energy, that there's a magnetic field in the center of our Milky Way galaxy that has profound influence upon life here on Earth. And that's news from the scientific community. Intuitively that makes sense. The second discovery is that Earth's location in space determines how we are influenced. Sometimes we're closer to that field and the influence is greater. Sometimes we're further away and the influence is less. And, our location changes on a cyclic basis. This is our own science telling us what our ancestors said through stories and analogy and, perhaps metaphor, for perhaps thousands of years.... And the bottom line for all of us is that the systems that are no longer sustainable under the stress of the change are the ones that break down pretty quickly. We're looking at economic systems breaking down, where one person benefits at someone else's expense, and we depend on ever expanding markets. At energy systems, fueling the planet with a finite source of fossil fuel that destroys the very planet that we love and cherish. These may work for a period of time but they're not sustainable in the long run. So what people see is chaos. If we look closely, the only chaos is coming from the systems that are no longer sustainable. The ones that seem to work pretty well are continuing to work pretty well. And those are things like local communities growing their own food, for example. Local, organic community farms, sustaining food for their community. That seems to be working pretty well. And resorting to barter. People relying on their own skills and living more sustainable kind of lifestyles, who are not so dependent on a large infrastructure are the things that are working pretty well right now....

FEEDBACK: CLICK HERE to email comments and feedback. Please note the title of the article or the author's name. Include your own name or type "name withheld" by request. Thoughtful responses will be published in our next edition.