Once more, I am revisiting the Mayan heritage to understand the concept of end time and have a glimpse of what fractal time tells about the future.

Mayan Civilization
I was introduced to the Mayan culture by James Redfield whose book, The Celestine Prophecy, became a refreshing spiritual guide at the turn of the millennium.  For me, his mythical story was a ‘faction’, creatively using facts and fiction to bring out the truth.  In 1993, it demonstrated a new consciousness in a world that has gone scientifically physical and materially commercial.  While it was frowned upon by some mainstream religious thinkers, I endeavored to relate the Mayan ‘factional’ story to my Catholic faith.

The insights from the Celestine manuscript which dated back to the Mayan civilization in Peru were mirroring the spiritual [not the religious] dimension of inner life.  While the manuscript was silent on the role of Christ in history, it implicitly endorsed the redemptive act of Jesus who became a new creation. In 1995, Redfield’s idea of humanity’s peak spiritual performance reminded me of other evolutionary writings: The Origin of Species by biologist Charles Darwin, The Phenomenon of Man by anthropologist Teilhard de Chardin, Quantum Theology by religious metaphysician O’ Murchu, Chaos Point by futurist Erwin Laszlo, The Spiritual Alchemy by medical doctor and mystic Christine Page, and The God Code and The Divine Matrix by culture decoder Gregg Braden. Redfield, through a factional Aramaic manuscript discovered in Peru, heralded the fulfillment of the New Commandment and he ushered in the era of spiritual renaissance in the 21^st century.I consider The Celestine Prophesy as a forerunner of quantum energy, global harmony, and galactic consciousness. 

 This new consciousness was followed by the Law of Attraction in The Secret authored by Rhonda Byrne in 2006.  Today, Gregg Braden further explains in Fractal Time a heart-based consciousness in the New World Age by decoding ancient learnings based on the Mayan calendar cycle.

Fractal Time
My copy of Fractal Time was a gift from Giselle Valderrama, cousin of my spouse in 2009. I leisurely scanned through it with no sense of urgency.  As the date December 21, 2012 triggered a lot of visuals from Di Carpio’s Eleventh Hour and  Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth, I reread Fractal Time to find some answers. Surprisingly, the answer came from my visceral reaction that gave me a sense of hope for a new beginning at the end of 5,125 Mayan years, which is almost a year [exactly four days short of the birthday of Jesus] from today in our Roman calendar.

According to Braden, linear time repeats history in a fractal pattern.  Like many historians and scientists [physical and metaphysical] he believes that if we learn from the past we can secure and insure our future. We can learn from the fractal patterns that are found in nature and the pattern is expressed in phi formula. Leonardo Fibonacci  translated the golden mean of Aristotle as mathematical values in never ending proportions of Phi = 1.618 and phi = .618. Braden, using Fibonacci’s numbers, studied the fractal pattern of the Mayan calendar and formulated his findings into 22 Time Codes.

Time Codes
I selected some the following salient Time Codes of Braden: “1. Nature uses a few simple, self-similar, and repeating patterns – fractals – to build energy [quarks] and atoms into familiar forms of everything from roots, rivers and trees to rocks, mountains, and us. 2. The Time Code Calculator can pinpoint personal cycles of love and hurt, as well as global cycles of war and peace. 3. There is a consensus among the best minds of our time that the current depletion of our natural resources, exponentially growing population, global poverty, and competition for necessities of life are converging toward a ‘bottleneck’ in time. 4. The results are conclusive: Heart-based focus and heart-based living will have a direct effect upon the way we experience 2012 and our time of change. 5. Faced with the greatest number and magnitude of potentially world-ending challenges in 5,125 years of human history, we now discover that the key to our transition lies in our collective feelings about change. 6. December 21, 2012 is a rare and power window of opportunity for our collective emergence into our greatest potential.”

Heart-based Living
Last year, I talked about the end of “I think, therefore I am” paradigm of Cartesian era [Manila Standard Today Dec. 27, 2010].  Today, there are more metaphysical gurus who are advancing the notion that we live in a “feeling universe” and that our emotions are the stuff we constantly radiate to our family, community, country and the world.  Thus, 2012 is a window of opportunity to be reborn in the New Commandment of our faith.

Culled from 5,125 years of human experience, Braden asks, “Can we recognize that our greatest threats to our familiar way of life are really nature’s ‘nudge’ toward a new way of being?  As we witness the chaos that accompanies the perfect alignment with galaxy’s core, are we ready to receive the greatest gift of all: the inner change that comes from responding to life’s challenges with cooperation and nurturing of a heart-based way of living?  What instructions will we leave from our time to those who will go through the next world age and remember us as their ancestors?

As Lisa Nicole, co-author of Chicken Soup for the African American Soul, puts it, “The pen is in your hand.”  You alone will write the answers in your heart.  The universe is waiting.