I was a little curious as to the difference between a lunar calendar and whatever the dominant western/Christian/Gregorian calendar is (named after Pope Gregory XIII who instituted it), but a quick search for information led first to the fact that the Chinese new year is actually based on a lunisolar calendar, and then the explanation of that started to get more technical than I was interested in, so I can't share any insights about what that implies. But I did read an interesting article a few weeks ago about people advocating a return to a lunar calendar that would be based on thirteen 28-day months, with an extra day each year -- the last day on the calendar -- designated and celebrated as a "day out of time." I thought that was a very cool idea! More importantly, though, their claim was that the Gregorian calendar, with its uneven number of days and its disconnect from any natural cycles of time, serves also to disconnect humans from the natural rhythms of life, with deleterious consequences for us physically, psycho-emotionally, and/or spiritually. They proposed that adoption of a lunar calendar that reintegrated human activities with natural cycles could play a role in helping to reduce the "chaos" of modern society. Made sense to me, and seems worth a shot, but I suppose it would take a lot of work to get global society to change over to a new time-measuring system.
One of the differences between western and eastern thinking is how the two cultures conceptualize time, with westerners tending to think of time as linear, starting at the beginning and proceeding towards the end, while easterners tend to think of it as cyclical, repeating itself, inevitably returning to the beginning for another iteration. The ancient Mayans also apparently believed in a cyclical version of time, as all the 2012 prophecies associated with their calendar are based on the premise that a number of small and large cycles of time are coming to completion on the winter solstice of that year, thus the "end of time" myth that has diffused throughout popular culture. The truth about time, of course -- whether from an Einsteinian perspective or for those more in touch with 5-D consciousness -- may well be that it is an illusion, a product of our perceptual mechanisms, a characteristic of our experience under the constraints of 3/4-D consciousness that is recognized as an illusion in the higher dimensions. And really, if you stop to think about it, the only thing we can say for sure is "real" is the present moment, the sacred NOW. The past is gone, never to be retrieved, limited to memory traces, open to interpretation and subsequent revision. And the future is just an imagination, it has no true existence yet, in fact it never arrives but remains a vague vision of possibility while we are confronted instead with a steady stream of new now moments. I truly believe that if one could live entirely in the now, with no thought of the past or future, guided by the two principles of "love always" and "no judgment," one would be a spiritual master. My sense is that this was the core teaching of both Gautama the Buddha and Jesus the Christ (note that both of their titles refer to a higher or enlightened state of consciousness, and both of them were trying to instruct the rest of us on how to achieve that state).
Anyway, for us normal earth-based humans for whom time still seems a pertinent issue, maybe the primary value of marking and celebrating the beginning of a new year is the moment of pause it sometimes generates for reflecting on what kinds of changes to make in the future to improve upon the way things have been in the past. What greatly excites me about what is happening in Egypt etc. is that we have, in this very auspicious now moment, the opportunity as a planet, as a global society, as a human race, to reflect on what kind of changes we need to make to create a better future. The forces at work in Egypt are myriad and mysterious, and my guess is that all sorts of "bad guys" are trying to stir up trouble there, but one unavoidable conclusion is that the masses have experienced a shift in consciousness, and it is that shift which is fueling their uprising, as they can no longer tolerate the constraints and illusions that have kept them bound until now.
I have, for many years, been trying through my teaching and research to make the argument that global society is in the midst of a shift in collective consciousness, that the old paradigm is falling away and a new paradigm is emerging. It has seemed fairly obvious to me for awhile now that the collapse of the old system has been speeding up and grows more imminent each day. Most of the dominant institutions of the modern era are under attack for their inherent dysfunctionality, with their legitimacy now severely questioned. The Catholic church has been exposed for its rampant pedophilia, institutionally-condoned or at least protected, and investigations into the activities of the Vatican bank are exposing all sorts of nefarious connections (including recent revelations of very large "slush funds" for all sorts of high-ranking US officials). The whole finance/banking system, despite the fact that they are still operating and extracting as much wealth as they can while they can, has been exposed for its systemic fraud and corruption, and the push-back from the people is taking different forms, ranging from Iceland's refusal to pay back the bankers/creditors who put their country into financial turmoil, to the class action lawsuits springing up in the US against the large financial institutions that rigged the game and screwed the people. Political systems around the world, especially those explicitly identified as "non-democratic," are increasingly seen as illegitimate, and their citizens are clamoring for change as exemplified by the various "color" revolutions of recent years (claims of CIA instigation of these notwithstanding) and now the north African unrest. Even in the so-called democracies, more and more people are getting agitated by governmental ineffectiveness and/or apparent bias towards unpopular policies. Prognosticators are already predicting that this could explode into a global revolution, with even the UK and US not clearly immune from some kind of angry popular uprising.
With the primary political, economic, and religious institutions of our time all facing serious challenges, all demonstrating patterns of behavior that run counter to the interests of the people, the notion that the old paradigm is on its way out should not seem so far-fetched. And the continued collapse may not be pretty -- it is easy enough to assume that some sort of economic chaos will unfold as the systemic bankruptcy continues to play itself out. But the good news is that it is out of any such chaos that the new systems will emerge, like the proverbial phoenix rising from the ashes (maybe as good a metaphor for the cyclical nature of time as we've got). And this transition, from the old ways to the new ways, goes hand in hand with the shift in consciousness that is happening on the planet now. The shift has been happening for awhile, slowly but surely, with plenty of signs along the way for those who have known what to look for. I've suggested to numerous classrooms full of students that someday we may reach the tipping point, or what chaos theorists call a bifurcation point, where a system reaches a point of sufficient "chaos" that it induces a spontaneous shift into a new configuration. My premise has been that, once enough people shift to the new consciousness, we will finally reach a tipping point where the whole system undergoes a rather sudden transformation.
So here we sit, at the beginning of this new year, with the prospect that humanity has reached critical mass in terms of the unwillingness to tolerate the old system any longer, and the desire to establish something new and different. This is being expressed as a demand for freedom, from those who would control them -- the same basic instinct that has fueled other revolutions in other times. The difference now, in this dramatic moment in the evolution of civilization, is that we have the opportunity to consider carefully, collectively, what we need to do differently to improve upon the past. For me, the most exciting part of the pending global revolution is the attention I expect it will ultimately put on the questions of who are the controllers and what is their agenda. To undo the old paradigm means to release the system from the grip of those who have been controlling it, which requires knowing who they are and how they exert control. In other words, I'm quite sure that the emergence of the new paradigm will go hand in hand with considerable disclosure of what's been going on "behind the scenes" to maintain the old paradigm. My prediction is that those disclosures will prove to be very surprising to most!
With a better understanding of how, why, and by whom our dominant institutions have been manipulated to serve the interests of a few at the expense of the many, it will be more clear what kind of changes we can and should make to enable humanity to re-create society in ways that are more compatible with a new paradigm grounded in a higher level of consciousness. I am confident that we will make much progress on this front this year, as we get ready for whatever 2012 is going to bring!
(Cool picture of the storm over the US!)
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