Will the world end on 12-21-2012?

It is said that the Mayan calendar will end on that day, but as usually happens with mystical events and mysteries, a synchronicity of prophecies from other, diverse civilizations seems to be telling us that there is more than meets the (third) eye.

A Mayan shaman who was interviewed recently for a news feature belittled the prophecy with a hearty chuckle. But the History channel broadcast a two-hour show last Monday to unravel the thesis that the Mayans do not have exclusive rights to the 2012 theory.

In his latest thriller, The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown also mentions 2012, part of a cocktail of so-called New Age beliefs that are not really new but actually spin-offs of ancient knowledge – from the Vedas and Scriptures, from unified consciousness – the unified field as TM practitioners know it –to the secrets kept in coded language, buried in architectural details, and hidden in the rites of Freemasonry. As for the art of numerology, is the reader not intrigued by the 1’s and 2’s in the date? Providing a springboard for the History channel’s highly informative and visually stimulating documentary is Nostradamus, a doctor, astronomer/astrologer and poet whose peerless forecasts in the 16th century are still studied today. His quatrains have been subjected to a hundred and one interpretations, all of them engagingly fascinating over time, but never more so than now.

And now, two years before 2012, we are learning that it was not only the Mayans, but also Nostradamus, the Hopi Indians and ancient Egyptians who held a similar world view, i.e., 2012 The End, according to planetary alignments and other celestial signs and readings. Whether it will come as a nuclear explosion, another world war, climate change or something so cataclysmic that even the four horsemen of the Apocalypse will not have a name for it, what can mankind do to prepare for it? Prepare? What for?