While I do not really know the answers to these questions, I was intrigued to note a possible answer. In his latest book, The Intelligent Universe, James Gardner makes the case that our universe is designed to facilitate the emergence of intelligence. This intelligence in turn is needed to ensure the existence of the universe. How to reconcile the chicken and egg dilemma posed by this scenario? Gardner posits that the universe is an example of what physicists and mathematicians call a “Closed Timelike Curve”.
Gardner states:
In 1997 Princeton astrophysicists J. Richard Gott III and Li-Xin Li posed this intriguing question: Could our universe conceivably have spawned itself? Beginning with the recognition that ‘a remarkable property of [Einstein’s theory of] general relativity is that it allows solutions that have closed timelike curves (CTC’s)—hypothetical configurations of space and time where gravity is sufficiently strong to bend the space-time continuum into a looping configuration that allows events to influence the past—Gott and Li pointed out that, absent some rule like the chronology protection conjecture proposed by Stephen Hawking (which states that the rules of physics conspire to forbid the actual manifestation of CTC’s, at least at the macroscopic scale) the ‘Universe can be its own mother.’ Under the CTC cosmological scenario ‘the Universe neither tunneled from nothing, nor arose from a singularity; it created itself.’[i]
This is pretty deep stuff! However, if we recall that our minds evolved to allow for us to survive and function in a world in which contemplation of the distant future and of the ultimate topology of the cosmos had little survival value, we should not be too surprised if the ultimate nature and configuration of our universe seems strange to us!
If we live in a universe which comprises a Closed Timelike Curve, the cosmological geometry would allow for information to move from past to future, and also, under some circumstances, from future to past. Time is not linear stretching from Big Bang, onwards, but is rather circular, stretching perhaps from Big Bang to Big Bang.
So one possibility is that the Universe is configured as a Closed Timelike Curve; and the Mayan prophecies of Cortés’s and/ or Quetzalcoatl’s arrival/return, and their prophesy of the world shaking events of 2012 are indeed valid.
Another possibility is as I’ve explained above: astronomically significant events (the Quetzalcoatl prophecy is apparently related to a transit of the planet Venus) such as Earth’s passing through the plane of the galactic equator are simply inferred to represent the occurrence of terrestrially significant events: “As above, so below,” in other words.In both cases, we are given a warning concerning future events which threaten to seriously affect our existence.
In both cases we are offered an opportunity to take action to prepare ourselves for the coming changes as well as to shape those changes in a beneficial manner.
It should be clear to anyone who has bothered to pay the slightest attention to contemporary events that the Earth’s nations, our global economy, our civilization, and our planetary biosphere are accelerating towards catastrophe. It should be equally obvious that we are the cause of these impending catastrophes. Ultimately our deepest beliefs and wants are proving to be maladaptive. We must change or face catastrophic consequences.
Perhaps the Mayan prophecy of 2012 represents a final warning from this onrushing future. Or maybe its seemingly prescient timing is a coincidence.
Either way, it serves as a compelling warning to change our world’s fate by changing ourselves, or face the consequences of our failure to change. Certainly we have no one other than ourselves to blame for what may happen in the near future.
That said, I hope that we actually have a future that extends until 2012. Events currently seem to be moving faster than that. So we’ll see.
(Michael Byron is author of The Path Through Infinity’s Rainbow: Your Guide to Personal Survival and Spiritual Transformation in a World Gone Mad, and Infinity’s Rainbow: The Politics of Energy, Climate and Globalization)
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