Apocalypse 2012
Apocalypse 2012: an investigation into civilization’s end
by Lawrence E. Joseph
Broadway Books, 2008
272 pages
Only an idiot can deny the possibility of a conscious force larger than ourselves. The problem is not the force or forces, but how our historical tradition has treated the alleged direct interactions with this force and the implications we have drawn from such alleged interactions.
We, the medium, are the problem. And, only those disciplines, call them religions, if you wish, that require a re-experiencing of the light (a very common metaphor associated with the descriptions of such experiences) are even worth consideration.
The books whether Bible, Koran or Veda keep a possibility alive that most human action denies. But it is only the realization of that possibility, in the achieving states hinted at, that is worth the candle.
The silliness of atheism matches the silliness of those who clutch a book and pontificate whether priest, imam or rabbi.
Such people are usually part of an organized hierarchical structure that have brought about death untold and have maintained, for the most part, social structures that enslave the masses and support the elite control of such masses.
The succour they offer to the downtrodden hardly balances such historical crimes, but I don’t think myself wise enough to criticize except in particular instances that impinge upon me and maintain a distance from such organizations, though I have often maintained close personal relationships with those integral to the hierarchy.
Anyone who reads as widely as I do and mixed in the circles I did for almost two decades before going underground would know about both the Mayan’s uncanny cosmological accuracy and their obviously related calendar systems and predictions. It is one of the mysteries that is always on the back burner of those who actively pursue a deeper understanding of the world that Dawkins and his ilk are now trashing in an overt and sometimes offensive fashion.
I met Jose Argüelles a few times in my 60s-70s travels, so I read The Mayan Factor when I encountered it in the late 90s. It strongly reinforced a viewpoint that I was developing and had been developing form the late 60s due to more mundane factors: the creation, mainly in the West, of a way of life that was not sustainable and that would eventually lead to the kind of collapse that Jared Diamond’s book has made into a commonplace.
By Earth Day of 1970 (the first one), when I structured and organized and then emceed two massive ecological demonstrations in Philadelphia in conjunction with the Philadelphia Earth Week Committee of which I was not a member as I resolutely joined no organizations and rarely if ever attended meetings with more than two others, through almost two decades of activism, a few simple ideas were obvious. One of those ideas was: the technology that we were creating was on course to bewilder the mind and to destroy human coherence.
I formulated this idea in a simple apothegm: “nanoseconds now, can the emotions follow.” The answer in 2009 is obvious: no.
And the data overwhelms regarding the alphabet growing of perceptual disorders that are leading to an increasing inability of a larger and larger percentage of the population to understand the complexity that surrounds; a growing disappearance of real depth of analysis, seemingly aided by too much viewing of information on mediums that do not lend to it being comprehended and utilized; and perhaps worse a comic book view of history that this book illustrates. In his discussion of Soviet use of telepathy to garner atomic secrets (p. 144) – spies were quite sufficient and well documented; and his discussion concerning the punishment of the Germans for World War II (p. 184-7) wherein he seems totally unaware of the decisions to rebuild Germany as a bulwark against the red menace. (A reading of Kai Bird’s Chairman of the Board, his fascinating biography of America’s most well-connected and perhaps powerful post World War II individual is a good place to start one’s historical education about this complex and on-going matter.)
That said his middle eastern viewpoint is a necessary corrective to the American establishments’ view of Israel, that less and less people share, and Obama’s State Department will further if it does not break the mould and appoint an Arab-native speaker among our top diplomatic negotiators and I can’t totally disagree with the Vatican’s intemperate statement about the current crisis, as since Hamas took over, the Gaza strip feels and now looks increasing like the Warsaw Ghetto. (Disclaimer: I was born of a Jewish mother.)
Very soon after Earth Day, it became obvious to me that we were heading for ecological disaster on the basis of the future studies I had begun to do. These studies plunged me deep into energy use and the history of Capitalistic development. I applied my knowledge to China and India and soon realized that the developmental path being pushed by the economists and investors I was reading and eating with would require four to six earths to sustain. My long seminar on Roegen’s book on economics and entropy with a soon again to be top Wall Street player was just icing on the cake.
We were heading for a brick wall. In addition two other apothegms that I developed for my Earth Day statement about stress and pollution were also rapidly becoming reality.
After years of studying and lecturing about stress, it became obvious that stress was information the body could not handle in the timeframe allotted. The time deficit was expressed as a symptom (low blood sugar) or a full blown condition: hypoglycaemia. My bed was hosting many women with such conditions. My awareness came from much reading, intensive dialogue with Marc Lappé and others, plus a lot of women with identical symptoms. The conditions I first began to talk about in the mid 60s are now endemic and drugs as metabolic regulators (self medication) are now a plague.
I saw pollution in the same way as an outgrowth of a process – mainly industrial – that could not be reintegrated into the biosphere on a timescale conducive to human health and well-being.
The general awareness expressed in shorthand in these few pages made me fully aware that our present course at the time was leading to a destructive collapse and that the ecological work I was doing was a stop gap – it might buy time – but it would not solve our long range problems.
Then a combination of factors lead me in the direction of what one edge of physics is now attempting to actualize: a device that would provide energy without increasing the entropy (which we experience as pollution).
That involved forays into a realm of human endeavour that is littered with casualties. The pursuit is genuine as many are attempting to formulate a science that is not limited to our present framework: the Einstein four-dimensional space-time framework.
And that is how science works in both the formulations of Popper and Kuhn: it is tentative and provisional and can be changed by a new experiment of data sufficient to demonstrate that old formulations are inadequate. It is a method, but due to its reductive nature it tends to act as if this method – very limited – is a metaphysic, excluding – often from existence – what it can’t fit upon its procrustean bed. But… to be blessed for the agreement it has produced and the world-wide conversations, in certain areas of human endeavour, that is has created and continues to support.
I only that it survives the storm that is coming. When even the best of scientists are faced with phenomena that radically deny/defy their methods and their previous understanding, they act like frightened children, repress the experience and run for cover.
I watched this process first hand for most of the 70s and ran a free data distribution network for a select group less frightened by such anomalous events.
The confluence in my life of three close friends: Moses Hallett, an A. V-P at Bell of PA, Bill Whitehead, a New York editor of large intellect and courage and Andrija Puharich, an investigator extraordinary, lead to my helping to birth the study of Consciousness, before anyone was ready and my almost bringing the device mentioned previously in this article (a story I can’t tell yet) to public notice.
What I experienced in Arthur Young’s Philadelphia town house one day in the mid 70s – the disappearance and reappearance of a heavy solid object without an explosion – just confirmed, but strongly, what I already seemed to know through many unusual experiences and deep intuition and study. An entire series of events transpired that day in front of a number of people, all of whom testified to seeing the same thing.
I have written those events up in dramatic form. I will post that write up as soon as I can cut through the malice connected to my personal situation, for much of my writing is now being held maliciously or illegally. Further posting will clarify the above statements.
I have also written a series of novels that attempt to dramatize the energy that gathers around a device that is necessary, if we are going to survive what Mr. Joseph suggest is coming in 2012. They will slowly emerge if conditions feel right, as they cast some light on the difficulties we face as a species in attempting to transcend our present economic limitations, something that our green pundits have been slow to grasp, but the present public suicide of Capitalism should make easier.
While people have been arguing about global warming, the planetary eco-system has been moving into a period of abrupt climate change. After reading scores of books in the areas of scientific interest that Mr. Joseph focuses on, I came to the sad conclusion that we are at the edge of a period of planetary and climate change that will probably bring civilization as we know it to an end and result in a reduction of our numbers that few want to contemplate.
I have read everything by and about Kozyrev (p. 143-6) I could find since I first discussed him in 1973 at lunch with my Bell executive co-worker. His ideas about time streams and the energy associated with it should be investigated with great energy as my experience with physics of great accuracy and entities of great control over the physical world could be explained by what he suggests about time, our great unknown.
Data mining techniques would certainly enable the data generated by Dmitriev, Mukherjee and others mentioned in this book to be correlated in novel ways, so that we could perhaps see patterns that link sunspot activity, cosmic rays, meteor and comet activity, planetary relations and volcanic activity in new ways.
If FEMA could not handle Katrina, I do not, particularly in the midst of an economic planetary downturn that should spell depression in any language, see the United States gearing up as a nation to prepare for what is too often presented as a g Mayan prophecy. If it happens, city dwellers are doomed, but those who live in the country can prepare by storing long lasting food, candles, extra warm clothes and a stand alone energy source in addition to a wood stove.
Apocalypse 2012 is apt to confuse those who come to it without much preparation. That is partly due to the mode of presentation whose intention I would imagine is directed at a mass audience. Mr. Joseph at time indicates that he is not certain that he is doing the right thing by producing and correlating evidence that points to massive destruction in a few short years, yet he expresses impatience at scientists who refuse to comment on a series of events until the data is available, though that is how scientists are constrained, through training and peer pressure, to act.
We have seen the same general problem in action with the global financial crisis: those most qualified to know and to act, hesitating to do anything that would create panic and by hesitating producing the very mess that quick action might have avoided.
It is not a simple problem. It is faced by anyone in a decision making position involving uncertainty. Anyone who has ever read a classified intelligence report will know what I mean instantly. Donald Rumsfeld tried to spell out the complications – very real – but the insight has been lost in the lies he propagated. George Soros has written an entire book as it applies to the stock market and Joseph could have added greatly to the value of his book by reflecting at length on the process he went through. His failure to do so is our loss.
A lot of the scientific work mentioned in this book deserves extended consideration in a book directed at a more serious audience.
A few observations before I close this review: one of the houses I called “home” during the 70s had a Kozyrev mirror in its living room, but we called it a Faraday cage and produced the same results that are described in the book: increased telepathic and distance viewing results (they are probably related). I was adamantly against one of the uses to which we put such technology: monitoring both the White House and the Kremlin. After years of reflection, I now feel that the destruction of the group, a death and my specific problems are connected to this infringement. Alexey Dmitriev’s short statement adequately conveys the problem that such work educes in the minds of the thoughtful: “Physicists cannot solve the problem of why living organisms have pre-information about catastrophic events. This forces us to change our picture of the world. The world is not simply matter and energy, but also information.”
I have mused upon this problem since 1970. I have a shorthand for expressing it: the problem of relating E=MC2 to H= -S. Consciousness – whatever it may be – and time are part of the problem.
I have also come to the conclusion that a part of the answer may be buried in the Tibetan texts now being translated, but more of that anon.
I wince whenever Joseph or scores of other like him refer to divine intervention either directly or by implication. This is not due to atheism, but rather my desire to make distinctions. When the mind enters states that indicate a loosening of space-time constraints, the experiences that result are not necessarily “divine”. That label tends to cancel observation or an attempt at accurate description. That cancellation is a loss to us all as we need to chart that territory as best we can.
Mr. Joseph does this well when he talks about the ocean and the extra-planetary space around us wherein in the past the map said : “There be dragons.” The divine label often destroys that possibility.
The use of “apocalypse” in the title is also disturbing as an apocalypse refers to a cataclysm in which evil forces are destroyed. That is not what is going to happen if 2012 occurs in terms that the book discusses. Comets, volcanoes and the like kill indiscriminately.
I thank him for his reference to the Bible Code and Drosnin references which I scanned and quickly erased from consideration, probably due to spending years listening to a close brilliant friend who was a Baconian. But, no excuses, Joseph’s discussion indicates a need for closer consideration.
It is only fair to end this review with an observation of Alexey Dmitriev that I share with full consciousness: “We have reached the point of deadly synergy, at which climatic processes communicate with and amplify each other in severe and catastrophic ways…”
