The following comments are by cosmologist Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet, I have tried to put links to some of PNB's  references to make the comments easier to follow.

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Some thoughts on the 2024 ‘end time’ mania, its origins, its logic, inspired by the article in the New York Times 1 July 2024 edition ‘The Final Days’ by Benjamin Anastas

My attention has been drawn to a crescendo a certain section of our society is experiencing, primarily in the West, I might add, regarding the Maya calendar ‘end time’ configuration. A number of researchers have postulated when that might actually occur. John Major Jenkins and a few others have pinpointed the December Solstice of 2024.  Jenkins, for one, is of the opinion that this lesser cycle will coincide with a major galactic alignment on the same date – hence the extreme importance of this momentous happening.

Others question the purported accuracy of such projections, as I do as well. Be that as it may, excepting Hindus, human civilisations across the globe and throughout our historic cycle have been anticipating an End of some sort. Usually it is envisioned as the end of the world and by Rapture or other fantastic means the faithful will be lifted off this woeful planet and transported to another more benign planetary kingdom, if not the Kingdom of God the Father itself.

Would that it were such a simple matter. No, I believe that we must pay for our sins and play out the drama of cleansing the slate, as I have referred to the impending process. A humanity that can live with anything as atrocious as the Holocaust must realise that there is something in the human constitution that allowed for this madness. When it is a collective wave we know that it is a species deformity, something that lies beneath the surface of every human being; and that must indeed come to an end if time is to continue. If we do not discover what it is in the human structure that allows for these aberrations, periodically waves will rise to the surface and collective horrors will return to demonstrate its evil dimensions. Therefore, might it not be that what stands before us is not an end, as such, but a true coming to terms with the fact that a greater world is being born where these lower tendencies will no longer have a place, and the strength to overtake the higher?

The anticipated End is simply a play-out of the focus of the Age of Pisces which was on a Heaven beyond the planet we live on and, above all, free from the confinements of Time. This Earth is our hell, or at best a mere stepping-stone, as most Hindus now believe, to an extra-cosmic, liberated dimension beyond the entanglements life on planet Earth imposes. If we study every religion the Age of Pisces gave birth to, the pattern is the same: somehow we must end it all – be this even just through meditation practices which allow us to experience a state of Nirvana that does apparently obliterate our experience of life and the complex web it weaves forever.

It is logical to conclude that if our collective wish is to flee this Earth, we are going to project this desire into all such mysteries we seek to unravel. And this is what we are currently doing with 2024.

In the New Way cosmology, 2024 would fall at the 5 Point of a Gnostic Circle ennead. This year, 2024, set the ‘Maya end’ almost in the middle of that 9-year cycle. But as those who have studied the New Cosmology know, these cycles do not definitively shut down – however much our religious beliefs would ensure us that this will be the case, sooner or later, to prove an ultimate redemption of the Good and an eternal burning in hell for the Evil. Cyclic time is unending. We come into the wheel or we step out, but that wheel continues. It is simply that conscious awareness is put to sleep for a while.
    
This deep sleep is experienced at the eighth stage of the Vedic journey. It is known as the stage of Death, - Scorpio of the zodiac. But there are four more stages beyond this ‘death’. Scorpio thus presents us with an interlude, much like the Limbo Pope Benedict has recently dispensed with. Its importance is to dissolve all memory of the past and to present a cleansed slate. The great shift that awaits humanity is the beginning of a long period of human history where Scorpio itself will be transformed into what it was known to be in the Vedic Age – the realm of the soaring Eagle, Vishnu’s Garuda.

There is something revealing of certain human tendencies in these End World manias, but they would be apparent only to students of the New Way. It is the new cosmology that allows us to understand the strange propensity to disregard reality in favour of illusion, or at best speculation. There is ever present in the majority of the species and abhorrence of definitiveness and hence the wholesale rejection in our age of Absolutes – Time and Space for one. Relativity of Einstein did away with all such notions for good; but let us observe how this rejection manifests in manias such as 2024 has brought to the surface.

There are dozens of New Age researchers speculating over the true meaning of the Maya purported end-time calendar prophecy. We may fantasise that if a Maya priest were to manifest in our midst to explain exactly what this sacred calendar does predict and what its true function is, he would be ignored, and he might even be stoned! As proof we have the attitude the New Way cosmology provokes. Barring a minute percentage of the population, it is rejection either without seeking to make any effort to penetrate its mysteries, or else rejection based on the dismissal of its definitiveness.

Here is the curious part: the New Way cosmology describes in very great detail the actual, the real process New Age seekers are striving to find in their apparent desire to unravel the Maya mystery. We have that process presented in the complete body of Gnosis of the New Way, covering the evolution of the Earth and all its living creatures well beyond any fictitious end-time. It describes non-speculatively the mechanism for this process according to a new science that is based on Laws by which its premises can be accurately tested. The heart and soul of the mechanism is a string of births on Earth which serves to forge an axis composed of Time’s energy. They are not fictitious; they are real. And these real entities exist today, or have existed until just recently; in a word, there is nothing speculative about the Descent – and alas that is its undesirability.

This ‘science’ is founded on Time. It is a higher or wider understanding of its function in our world and the role its verticality plays. Science after Newton measures space only. It has wrapped Time into its horizontality, causing it to lose its vertical function and hence its own absoluteness.

How would that play itself out in society, for example in the current mania under discussion? The fact is that those who are interested in such issues would be the first to reject the absoluteness of the New Way. They do not want its axis of births in Earth time because that is too definite and leaves no room for speculation and illusory web-weaving. It is too confining. They would not want anything like what The Tenth Day of Victory presents as ‘proof’ because that too thrusts these speculators into a world they are not prepared to accommodate into their newly-acquired sense of freedom from laws and confinement. It is to be borne in mind that we are in the Sagittarian 9th Manifestation. One of the principle dilemmas of the sign is how to live in a world of confinement, impeding a romp through the vast and boundless expanses of the Infinite. This is what is presented to the Initiate who has passed through the portals of Scorpio and must confront the enticements of Sagittarius in his or her Journey. The temptation would be the choice that the aspirant must make to take the plunge inward, downward, into the heart and the core of the whirlpool of Time and reject the pull of otherworldliness. This is done by confinement to a Point, a Seed – in search of the Immanent One. If that is achieved, the 9 becomes the 10 – and only then. If that is achieved, the integration of the 9 and the 12 has taken place. This is the first step to Immortality.

In Auroville we faced the same rejection: the measurements of the Mother’s plan were too confining for the same reason, if at all we can attribute some amount of sincerity to the rejection. The Inner Chamber’s plan offered absolute truths if reproduced accurately. But the builders wanted to be ‘free’ and ‘unbound’, lest their creativity be hampered – equating, as the human creature does, creativity with this inferior brand of ‘freedom’.

Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet
Director, Aeon Centre of Cosmology
27 July 2024