It?s such an eerie time right now. The weather is changing radically before our eyes, with sixteen typhoons in the Pacific this year and powerful hurricanes still forming, with extraordinary environmental changes that suggest that the planet?s natural system is in the process of a profound breakdown, and far faster than anybody imagine. And now with SETI having discovered a repeating signal that may not be natural in origin, and the growing realization among astronomers that many stars have small, stony planets like earth orbiting them, and the detection of methane in the Martian atmosphere, meaning that life processes are going on there right now?it?s just a very eerie and wonderous?and dangerous?time.

I feel like we as a species have come to an edge, and we know it, each one of us, but we can?t quite speak aloud what we know, not just yet. We?re reacting in many different ways. Some of us have retreated into religions and beliefs that enable us to pretend that change isn?t happening. I see the two great fundamentalisms that are presently sweeping the world as being like cicadas screaming at the end of summer. Their strident voices tell us what they know to be true about themselves: their great gods are about to join the army of immortals that are lost in human memory. The mind of man is changing, becoming more focused, more in touch with what is true, and is, once again, at the point of leaving old gods behind.

Most of us simply try to ignore the changes, and continue go about our everyday lives as we always have, hoping that our chain of days will not be broken. Some few of us are ready to embrace change.

The crop circle researcher Lucy Pringle sent me an image of a crop circle that had been formed at Silbury Hill in August. This figure spoke to me as no other crop circle ever has. When I looked at the central symbol, based on an Egyptian image, I felt as if I was going to take flight myself. Then something inside me told me that the circle had to do with 2012, that it contains the essential message for us now. I realized that it is a kind of herald of change, if you will, that is intended to attract the attention of those want to look toward what is coming, a new world.

Then Anne found, on BBC news, a story about the circle saying that researchers were also relating it to 2012. I did not know the why of it, only that this message was contained in the image. (To read the story, click here.) Whether or not the circle was manmade doesn?t concern me, but the fact that it was created over two nights does suggest that. What concerns me is the effect it had on me. Understand, I?m not talking about an emotional effect such as one might experience before a piece of great art. What I am saying is that the image literally sent a packet of information about 2012 into me, information that I am trying to convey here. I am sorry that I cannot say that it?s about places to go to survive, etc., etc. I?m not even sure that 2012 will bring some dire physical upheaval. But I am sure that change is on the way. It may be that it only unfolds inside those ready for it, that they pass a silent test, and become the focus of mankind?s future, while those who could not go beyond the old model fade away.

What is happening now is not only that our physical environment is shaking apart?something is shaking apart inside us. It is deeply personal, it is profoundly important and it is going to change the world by changing the mind of man. This, in part, is the message of 2012. I?m not saying that it isn?t also a message of physical apocalypse. But don?t expect it in a day.

I don?t think that I have ever been so deeply moved by an image of anything as I was by that circle. It almost spoke aloud to me, of the profound divide we are crossing. Mankind has taken a step in a new direction. A die has been cast, and that brief image, already, as you read this, harvested into time and memory, is the seal of this age, stamped there by the mystery that surrounds us all.

Possibly, on the conscious level, it?s quite unintentional?simply an attempt by some people with various pieces of equipment and some considerable skill to make something that would ?fool? the gullible. If so, then what the shadows that walk within them are doing is very different from what they may think. They are responding to a vast message, ?an unknown name in the sky,? as Archibald MacLeish so eloquently put it in his ?Epistle to be Left in the Earth.? (?It is very cold, there are strange stars near Arcturus, Voices are crying an unknown name in the sky.?) This is a poem, incidentally, written in the same mind that created that crop circle, if it was made by the hand of man. A poem filled with prophecy, attached to the primary meaning of the human soul. (To read it all, click here.

For the past few weeks, I have observed a series of natural events that tell me that the leaves of our world are falling fast. While we concentrate on our wars and our elections and our various clever engines of denial, nature is adding up the account. Sure, politicians will try to tell us that two and two don?t equal four, and religious leaders will seduce us into believing that it?s all up to their false gods and we can?t do anything, but the truth howls at the human soul like a wild winter wind: the times are changing and it?s not good and it?s now. And there is another voice, as well: we CAN do something. We can do a lot. But it has nothing to do with ordinary leaders, ordinary actions and ordinary life. We, mankind, you, me and all of us, can become something new.

The ugly irony is that all the lies are uttered not because anybody really believes the hollow ideologies or twisted religions in whose names they are proclaimed, but on behalf of lunatic corporate masters who care only about how much they might manage to profit over the next few months, in a world in which money, ironically, will have little meaning.

I?ve had lines from another poem, this one by Louis MacNeice running through my head: ?The sky was good for flying, Defying the church bells, And every evil iron, Siren and what it tells: The earth compels, We are dying, Egypt, dying.?

The earth compels. Never forget it. It is the essential truth of ours and all eras, the denied truth that cannot be escaped. The masters of the death wish, our corporate masters, spend millions convincing billions that twice two are something other than four. But, in the end, nature is pure math. Nature does not lie. Nature is neither cruel nor loving, and it doesn?t respond to pleas or prayers. Nature is simply there, and in nature what we do is never noticed but always counts. Two and two are always four, everywhere and at all times, and no lie can ever change that, no matter how much we want to believe it. What is even more appalling though, is that the singers of the siren song are partly right: it is true that our actions are not entirely responsible for the changes that are taking place.

Just in these past few weeks, we have seen another unusual eruption of sunspots, for example. We?re well past the solar max, but still we have these distempers in our star. ?Our? star?it doesn?t belong to us, it doesn?t know we are here, it is simply out there sailing the vast sky, carrying us and our sparkling children, our hopes and dreams and all that we value, out of nowhere and into nowhere, for no particular reason. But for our reasons, of course. And we have many reasons.

We say that God is with us. We say that there is reason in the random pulsations of the world. But the truth is spoken most eloquently by the Preacher, the brilliant ancient voice raised in Ecclesiastes: ?I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.?

Time and chance are the true horsemen of the apocalypse. And the corporate masters and their religious and political flunkies therefore say: hands off, nothing you can do, just make another donation and buy another car. But it?s not true. What we can do is so far beyond their ken, so incredible, that they cannot even conceive it. Mankind is a mystical child, and eagle born of the wind and left upon the cliff?s edge, waiting here, deciding: will I fall or will I fly?

We can fly, and my message is this: that the future belongs not to the masters of this age, but to the meek, who are so light and fine, when the terrible time comes, they will be the ones who are light enough to fly.

As far as old Sol is concerned, the reason that he?s rumbling is perhaps that we?re traveling through an area in which there?s a slight increase of cosmic dust. There is a scientist, lonely voice raised, who knows all about this, called Paul la Violette who I?ve interviewed on Dreamland. But because he almost certainly has some real light to shed on things, he?s kept at arm?s length by his scientific colleagues and ignored in the media.

But you shouldn?t ignore him, you who can detect the scent of the truth.

If you look at the statistics, you?ll see that the number of sunspots at this time in the solar cycle are about average. But what you will NOT see is that we keep getting much larger ones that is normal at this time in a cycle, and that means something that we do not even begin to comprehend. It means change, though, certainly change. START

Here on earth, there is a complicated, subtle disaster taking place. Our world is breaking, and we don?t even realize it, not yet at least, because we have not yet begun to bow the heads that protect the magic of the human mind, not yet knelt in the terror that is to come. In part, it is caused by the fact that earth is burning. In part, it has other causes. We will talk about the human fire that is consuming our planet in a moment, but first let?s continue with our discussion of natural causes.

Recently, satellites in the southern hemisphere were damaged by solar radiation, because something is going wrong with our magnetic field, and it thinned as a solar storm that shouldn?t have been there passed by.

Homing pigeons in Sweden lost their way because of the field?s increasing derangement. And why is this happening? Not because of anything we?ve done. It?s happening because it?s time, because, by the laws of nature, it must.

But we?re here, each one of us, living and breathing and seeking meaning in our lives, each one of us as precious to herself or himself as you are to you. Of course, we?re also part of the weapon of time and chance raised against us. But it isn?t only because our corporate masters are greedy liars that we?ve come to this pass. It?s because of fundamental flaws in the very genius of our humanity.

Because we are brilliant and our memories are so excellent for what is exquisite in our lives, our species has concentrated on its sexuality to the point that we have lost sexual seasonality. The result of this is that our population has grown too great. Back in the eighteenth century, Thomas Malthus correctly predicted what is happening to us now: he predicted that there would be a bursting overgrowth of human population. It was inevitable. It was math. Two and two, as always, have turned out to be four.

So here we are, six billion of us on a planet groaning with our weight, each one a little spark in a vast fire. And the fire has reached its peak. We?re at the top of a very clear bell curve of growth. The next step is the same one that every other species takes when it grows too numerous for the planet to sustain it. The fire is about to burn itself out for lack of fuel: We are going to experience population decline.

We?ll know the details soon enough. Unless we can strike a spark of true genius, we are going to go down the path nature has carved for us. The masters of death, consciously interested in their profits for next three months, unconsciously serving the death wish that nature has built into the darkness between our genes, tell us that it probably won?t happen or, if it does, it?s God?s will and they and their hundred and forty four thousand closest friends are going to heaven anyway, so they don?t care. ?Blessed be the tie that binds our hearts in Christian love??

On one side, time, chance and the death wish that embraces them. On the other, a crop circle that is also a message from the soaring heights of mind.

Who?s mind? No matter if it was made by human hands or another mystery, I?ll wager that we know, and very well. I?ll wager that there is only one mind. I will tell you who stamped the meaning of this age on a field in England: you did, I did, that child laughing there beneath the tree, she did. But o, you say, it must have been aliens, it must have been angels. It could not have been us. And if it was us, then it isn?t important.

I beg to differ. If this one was made by human hands, it?s even more important, because it means that we?re beginning to embrace the one thing within us that calls out on behalf of a human future on this planet.

I see this as I do for a very odd sort of a reason. It has been the privilege and curse of my life to see behind the curtain that has been set (by aliens?by us?) around our little world. I have lain with the stage managers and kissed their secret parts, and in passion so strange that it passes the touch of my pen, I have tasted upon their worldless flesh, the delicious unmistakable sour of human skin.

I wish to bear testament that, even in the dying of our age and perhaps especially now, we are part of something very great. But we are also ignorant, and in a extremely crucial way: we do not know what part of it we are. I will say this, though, the universe is a vast and lonely place. It is not filled with millions of ?species.? There is no ?prime directive? benevolently preventing them from contacting us until we grow up. Indeed, I wouldn?t be in the least surprised to find that we are, effectively, alone.

That is not a simple thing though. What it means is that the miracle of our being is expanding in one way and not another, that?s all. I do know this: no matter what grand masters are about in this earth, aliens or whatever, the miracle here is you. You, now, behind your very eyes, drawing this incantation and the formulae hidden within it into the heart of the magical being that is you?alone.

What I actually mean when I use the word ?alone? cannot be stated directly because the meaning I am evoking is above words, because it is indeterminate. Not that it is without sensibility or logic. Far from it. But when mind looks at itself, it cannot see what is really there.

You will be asking at this point what I mean by ?the formulae hidden within.? Is there some secret about this particular construction of words? Well, yes, there is. In a sense, I have cracked a code, or rather, surrendered to it, and learned how to bring it into my words in the same way that the circle makers?all of them, human or not?bring it into the fields.

The crop circles look enigmatic and beautiful, but their meaning is clear to that which lives within us, the ancient, eternal part that does not speak. That?s the purpose of all incantation, to reach what is great within us.

The flying I have done has been to escape, just a little bit, from the firmament of being, to square the circle and say back to nature, two and two is indeed four?but to add to my message of surrender, as it were, the hidden meaning of that angled circled: the greatness inside us is also part of nature. ?Through him, with him, in him in the unity of the universe??

Not the sunspots or the collapsing magnetic field or the melting ice caps or the coming storms or starvation or war or greed or ignorance, in then end, are the final definition of time and chance. We, and the choices we make, and the degree to which we are willing to surrender to our own power, are the real wizard in the castle of nature. This is why the aliens who have embraced me and raped and loved me, have, in the end, bowed to me even as, in what they imagined was secrecy, they continued their ugly cutting at the edges of our lives.

As we can control them, we can also control ourselves. We can find, in the new spirit that is awakening within us, the truth that we are so profoundly enmeshed in nature that we are nature, all of nature, not a vast collection of individuals, but the very mind of earth itself, the thinking mechanism of a conscious planet.

If we stay still, however, nothing happens. Game over. Two and two remain four. I am not talking about holding signs or making politics, not at all. I am talking about a new kind of becoming, a fantastic surrender of what we believe that we are. We do this by making our silent truth the active element of being.

But what does that mean? We will surrender our conscious mind to that which is great within us. Some of us are doing it now, have been doing it for years. The more we feel the stresses of nature, the more of us do it. This is the hidden meaning of Aquarius, the pouring out of the water of life. The little fish, Pisces, who lived so comfortably in the enclosed world of the water jar, now finds himself thrown out on the ground.

Suffocate or evolve.

A very long time ago, before we were yet truly human, this world was a sweet Eden. Gentle summers were followed by slow autumns, and the breath of winter was brief. With the rains of March came the spring, and we clambered in the trees?but then, one sudden season, the wind blew too hard, and the bough broke, and down came baby, cradle and all.

What actually happened was the earth burped a little and stretched a little, and three million years ago, Central America rose like a dark Venus from the sea. The vast equatorial current that had moderated the seasons for ten million years was disrupted, and the planet?s climate was thrown into chaos.

At that time, there were vast hordes of animals on this earth, their variety and their numbers completely beyond imagination now. But the ice rose north and south, and took earth in the grip of the void, cold, cold, and the creatures of summer were laid low.

As for us, our forests dried and fell, and suddenly the happy tree dweller was cast out of Eden, into the rocks and the storms of a new world, with only his little naked self to protect those he loved, and the astonishing sense that rippled in his head.

In that first touch of the selfsame chaos that challenges us now, eleven ice ages and three million years ago, we said no to time and chance, we counted twice two and cut something furry and made a robe, and we swallowed our terror and conquered the demon fire. (Recent fossil discoveries in the Middle East confirm that we?ve had had fire in our pocket a very long time, since even those times, when you would have said, on looking at us, ?what happened to that little naked monkey?s hair?and who in the world made that campfire??)

The rising of Central America destabilized earth?s climate and began an extinction event. The human species has never known a time in which extinction was not under way. In fact, our mind is a response to the pressure that this extinction event, with its chaotic climate, has put us under.

There have been eleven ice ages in the past three million years, and each one has brought with it the same sort of changes that we are seeing now. Each one has also brought to harvest another crop of species.

Will this one harvest us. Yes, say the corporate masters, yes say the death-wish preachers. But the crop circles say no and the aliens with their probes say no, and the heavy-bellied women and their children, and the believers in dreams and those who are willing to inherit the earth, they say no. I say no.

Nature has laid down the deck. Somehow, the little man, the guy in the back of the plane, the poor jerk making tennis shoes for a dime a day in Guatemala or working in a Wal-Mart for wages far beneath his dignity at a job far beneath his ability, him, the guy who is never counted and his wife who does not matter to the powers except insofar as she will buy their damned soap, and his kids who always end up in the band that doesn?t get any instruments, he suspects that, somehow, he might just square the circle.

And when this world falls down, as it now certainly will, he and his wife and at least some of his kids, are going to be there with the rats and the roaches, to look up and the vast and dangerous sky, and become wise?at last!

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