JOSE, THE MAYAN MOJO MAN

From the land that brought us fire ants, lawn maintenance companies and illegal drugs, now comes calendars. Is this really what free trade is all about? Currently, December 21, 2012 has supplanted January 1, 2000 as the most popular date associated with apocalypse. It's all based on the way ancient Mayans kept tabs of time. Most scholars call the current spat of doomsday predictions pure bunk. According to these folks, the Mayans saw no utility in chiseling out another "long count" calendar. There would be plenty of time for that in the future.

So, is this just another example of ivory tower thinking? Decide for yourself.

Everyone and his brother is currently pointing to 2012, but one of the original prophets predicting this date is a fellow named Jose Arguelles, in his book The Mayan Factor: Path Beyond Technology. Jose is quite different from your run-of-the-mill God-speaks-to-me doomsday prophet:

"Ever since he had a visionary experience at the age of fourteen atop the Pyramid of the Sun, Teotihuacan, Mexico in 1953, he has pursued a lifelong investigation of the mathematics and prophecies associated with the Mayan calendar."¹

Jose actually seems like a guy that I'd like to meet. He helped come up with the Earth Day concept, and has been called the Father of the Whole Earth Festival. He also spent some time studying Buddhism under Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, but has since moved on to what he calls the "Universal Religion."

On the other hand, I have to wonder if Jose didn't ingest a little too much peyote back on that Pyramid of his. if you visit the Galactic Research Institute home page, you might see what I mean. The Law of Time is defined as "...a comprehensive whole system discovery which demonstrates that time is the universal factor of synchronization."²

Well...duh. "Synchronization" means to occur at the same time. You can't really synchronize watches if time is making small talk at the water cooler.

There's a lot that flies over my head when I read about the Law of Time. (Maybe that's a good thing.) At first, I didn't quite grasp how time can be defined by the ratio 13:20. Then I think I figured it out on my own. It's really quite obvious:

13/20=6.5
Multiply the digits in 13 by the result: 6.5 * 1 * 3 = 19.5
Subtract the decimal from the integer in 6.5: 6 - 5 = 1
Add the decimal to the integer in 19.5: 19 + 5 = 24
Subtract the first result from the second result, and you get...The Number 23!

Or not.

At least the Galactic Research Institute has a novel way of avoiding doomsday. Go ahead and lust after your neighbor's wife. Go ahead and break every one of the Ten Commandments. Just be sure to throw away all of your calendars before 2012:

"By making the Thirteen Moon/28-day cycle the harmonic (13:20) standard of everyday time measurement, replacing the irregular twelve-month global standard, the Law of Time establishes a new foundation for the reformulation of the human mind and its systems of knowing."³

Without further adieu, here's how much time (12 month calendar) you have before noospheric consciousness leaves you behind: