Is the New Age Here?

By Both Sides Now
Published on August 8, 2013
article image

The universe isn’t a giant clock, and other notes on
transitioning to a new age.

This article originally appeared in issue 123-124 of Both Sides Now: A Journal of Lightworking, Peacemaking, and Consciousness.

Is the New Age here? Well, yes and no. Previously, we
discussed why
we didn’t see a dramatic change in the world
as of the end of a Mayan
calendar age–confusingly referred to as a “world.” Our basic premise was that
ages don’t end abruptly one day, with an apparent new reality starting on the
next one. When December 21, 2012 came and went with no “big event” taking
place, many or most people who were following the Mayan anticipations tended to
brush the whole thing off as just another failed prophecy–just as many had
expected some big event as of the year 2000.

As we indicated, there is a transitional period from one age
to another, whether one uses the Mayan system or the astrological one whereby
we are leaving Pisces and entering Aquarius. So when we say “yes and no” it is
because in some ways we are still in Pisces, while in others we see
manifestations of Aquarian consciousness. In fact, some of the Piscean actions
would appear to be desperate attempts to hold back the dawn of a new age. It is
a global problem, but we can see it most strongly in the U.S. This can
be seen in things like: stubbornly sticking to a dependence on fossil fuels
when they are becoming scarcer and contributing to global warming; refusal of
most super-rich to share any of their wealth with those whose work produced the
wealth; building an immense arsenal and maintaining global military bases at
enormous expense when we can see that military options have become great
failures as well as humanitarian abominations. Religion itself has become so regressive
and decadent that many are giving up on it–particularly the young. These are
but a few signs of the times.

In the past, full transitions have taken place over several
lifetimes or generations, but recently we have seen that affective time as
accelerated, and change has been taking place at a breathtaking rate. Several
writers have referred to what is going on as “collapse.” The book The Voice of Rolling Thunder has a good
paragraph by Stanley Krippner on the subject:

The physicist David Peat points out
that Western science has its own tricksters and clowns. The most prominent is
entropy or disorder. The overall entropy of a system needs to increase so that
order can emerge. This is sometimes called creating order out of chaos. If
science insists on generating order, this can only be done by creating disorder
somewhere else. Chaos theory explores the different consequences that chance,
randomness, and probability can play in the world. It negates the philosophy
that the universe is a giant clock, because chance plays an important part in
weather, floods, and even the growth of insect populations. The “butterfly
effect” demonstrates how a tiny shift in the initial conditions of a system,
such as the motion of a butterfly’s wing, can have major consequences if it
triggers the parts of a system that are most vulnerable to change. Medicine men
and women understood this principle; all that was needed to change some potions
into healing elixirs was a single drop from a freshly harvested stem of an herb.
[This is also true of conventional drugs: a proper dose can cure but an
overdose can be fatal.]

The best we can seem to do (speaking for ourselves and
anyone else) is to keep a finger on the pulse of the times and avoid future
tripping, because this appears to be a time for expecting the unexpected.
Still, we can heed the messages from visionaries like Diane Tessman, and face
the future with our eyes wide open.

Image: A logarithmic scale conception of the observable universe with the Solar System at the center, inner and outer planets, Kuiper belt, Oort cloud, Alpha Centauri, Perseus Arm, Milky Way galaxy, Andromeda galaxy, nearby galaxies, Cosmic Web, Cosmic microwave radiation and Big Bang’s invisible plasma on the edge. By Unmismoobjetivo, licensed under Creative Commons.

UTNE
UTNE
In-depth coverage of eye-opening issues that affect your life.