M.J. Rose

No society is worse at long term thinking than ours. Our technology is hardly purchased before it’s out of date, and we often become grumpy waiting in line for groceries when it wasn’t very long ago we humans would have had to wait for our baby greens to grow before harvesting them for a salad with feta cheese that we would have had to make ourselves from the milk of sheep we’ve raised for years! You see my point.

Long term thinking is something reincarnationists do all the time when we imagine who or what we may have been or lived in the past, and what will become of us in the future. But this perspective does not come naturally for many Westerners immersed in modern culture – the quick zap of the remote control, the ease of email, the near-instant gratification of high speed global travel – it’s all so quick and so easy and so very second nature.

Long term thinking was not always a rarity: Some believe that the Izapa civilization was the transitional culture between the older Olmec civilization and the emerging Maya, and it was these ancient Izapa who are thought to have created what we call the Long Count Calendar or the Mayan Calendar. For almost a thousand years the Long Count Calendar was recorded by the Izapa, marking the mudane goings-on of their society as well as mythological events that occurred at the very beginning of the current “World Age” that we are living in now and which, according to the calender, is soon coming to an end…

…and this is how the date December 21, 2012 comes into being. We’ve all heard that an ancient calendar has predicted that the world is going to end in 2012, and few of us are able to shrug it off as easily as we’d like, afterall, the ancients were mysteriously competent in many remarkable ways. However, it may be more “reincarnationist” of us to consider that perhaps the calendar marks less the End of the world, and instead marks an opening for a new Beginning?

Perhaps the world itself is due for a reincarnation?

According to an excellent article I found on edgarcayce.org “2012 was thought of by the Maya as a creation or recreation of the world, possibly during a time of war, conflict, and dominance of the Underworld and the Lords of the Underworld…the end of the Mayan Calendar is simply the end of the present World Age. And, important to us, it simply marks the beginning of the next cycle of rebirth, renewal.” Read the full article here.

For an example of modern long term thinking visit the Long Now Foundation and find out how great thinkers of our own time are considering the long view (and are building a clock that tells time for the next 10,000 years!)…

(This is a photograph of the first working prototype of the Orrery, or planetary display for the 10,000 Year Clock or, “The Clock of The Long Now“)