If you haven’t heard that the world is due to end on December 21, 2012,  then you’ve either been sealed up in your 1950s bomb shelter or vacationing in Antarctica for the last year or so.

According the latest, hottest end-of the world prophecy, the Mayan calendar ends on 12/21/12. Coincidentally, (or not), a once-in-a-millenia astrological alignment is due to occur at precisely the same moment.

Terrance McKenna (the DMT expert who wrote prolifically on Amazonian hallucinogens, consciousness, and UFOs) further tied this Mayan prophecy to the the I Ching (an ancient Chinese divination system) by means of a complicated set of rather obscure personal calculations.

Scholars of Nostradamus, the 16th century European physician who wrote in vague predictive quatrains, also claim to see the end of the world on that specific date in those prophetic texts. They come to their confirming insight by means of some strange, alchemical reading not entirely clear to me at this precise moment in time (and possibly not all that clear to them either).

The wildly popular Left Behind series also continues to sell millions of books based on prophecies of imminent doom. These Christian-themed novels, all of which chronicle an ongoing evangelical fantasy about the End Times and the Rapture, are now a major publishing franchise based on a soon-to-happen apocalypse.

In many quarters, there seems to be something like consensus that the end is indeed near.

The movie “Knowing” takes all of these apocalyptic strains of prophecy and crafts a watchable film out of them. Because I love all things weird and paranormal, and because someone I respect and like was really moved by “Knowing,” I watched the movie to the end and it did hold my attention.

In the final scene, the world ends explosively as promised, but we are encouraged not to feel too bad about that for a variety of hastily cobbled-together reasons.

Seriously, at the end of the film, the sun melts the earth and everything on it, but it’s all good. Don’t worry about it. Quit acting like total annihilation of the human race and all earthly life is a bad thing.

We are made to understand it is all a sort of necessary cleansing.

After watching the movie “Knowing,” I got to wondering why is it that, out of all the various aspects of the paranormal and the occult, prophecy always tends to be so damned creepy? Sure, there are some ‘good’ prophecies, some happy predictions and positive New Age ideas, but the most popular prophecies tend to involve catastrophe or ultimate destruction.

Yet prophecy is wildly popular.

Why are some people are drawn to prophecy like moths to an imploding sun?

I had a husband like that once.

He hadn’t read one lick of the Gospels or any other religious text, but one day he ‘heard the call’ and read every last word of Revelations. After that, the guy saw demons in his sock drawer, and predictably (I won’t say it was prophesied, but it did come to pass) our marriage did not last.

He quickly found another woman who also sees the end of the world everywhere and in everything, and has stayed unhappily married to her for 20 odd years now. I guess that’s a good thing. I don’t know.

It’s a thing I’ve come to accept so I can move on with my life.

As a student of the paranormal, I am interested in prophecy though, in the sense that I find the idea of hidden information and interpretation of such secrets fascinating.

Nick Cage Faces Armageddon

In “Knowing,” a physics professor played by Nicolas Cage sees an apocalyptic pattern in a series of random numbers scrawled on a piece of manilla paper for a grade school time capsule that was buried in the 1950s.

Fast forward to today, when Professor Cage discovers that the numbers are actually dates of all the major disasters and all the people killed in them over the 50 years. Yikes.

Cage embarks on a quest to crack the prophetic code and to find out how a young schoolgirl could have written such a thing before the events even occurred. This fevered task forces him to face his inner demons and in so doing leads him back to God.

Then God, having welcomed the overeducated prodigal back into the fold,  celebrates by frying Cage and his parents and sister and the rest of the planet too, but not before sending his only child to another world with some really creepy angel/alien-type beings and a white rabbit.

I’m not kidding.

The moral of the story, I guess, is, “Come to God before He toasts your sorry intellectual butt,” but I don’t know, that message doesn’t seem like the best ad campaign God could have cobbled together, being as how he is All-Powerful and All-Knowing and so on and so forth.

What ever happened to giving away a free iPod with every purchase?

What’s Going On?

On a more serious note, I can’t help but think that prophecy zooms in on annihilation and apocalypse not so much because our world is about to end, (although it might well be about to end—I personally have no inside information on this), but because fear of apocalypse speaks to an interior landscape littered with signs and symbols of a terrorized personal refusal to let go and let God.

Faith and religion are not interchangeable—you can easily have one and not the other—a fact that is lost on many people today who pour over religious texts looking for some encoded reassurance in the form of detailed instructions and absolute facts.

Religion and prophecy both focus on the recitation of such precise geographic coordinates: the latitude and longitude of internal disaster and loss; the possibility of total interior meltdown at some looming future date.  Such moments truly are ‘the end of the world’ for the people experiencing them, and I would argue they are also profoundly spiritual moments.

As poet T.S. Eliot famously wrote, “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold.”

This troubles all of us on some level, some more so than others.

Moving through that confusion is part of the movement toward a different kind of “knowing”: one that is transpersonal and beyond the rational. Inside, we all know that our personal maps of reality are inadequate. When Descartes ushered in the Age of Reason, he did so in what he described as a ‘moment of radical doubt’.

Faith, unlike reason, is born in a moment of radical trust.

Faith is less about finding absolutes and more about developing a personal orientation toward mystery. In the movement toward faith, there is always loss, destruction, sorrow, and pain. The faithful always come to an ‘I don’t know’ moment and consent to open their hearts to it.

Faith, in other words, requires a surrender to mystery, but this surrender is a delicate thing. It is not an intellectual move. It runs much deeper and is in some sense beyond any individual decision. Faith is the antithesis of reason but is indeed a kind of knowing in itself: We begin to know what we cannot know. We let the darkness in and cease to fear it. We literally learn to see in the dark; to intuit, to sense and feel.

Faith is often born the way a baby is born: At the moment of greatest pain and hopelessness we can, through faith, find ourselves to be a conduit for new life.

In this sense all faith is at some point dependent on apocalypse, because without some collapse of the known, some crisis that loudly invites surrender, most of us will hang on to certainty for dear life, forever if need be.

We live in an age in which we know too much and care too little, when the harder we try to fix things the more we seem to screw them up. I think that apocalypse calls to us in this age because we know the old ways are not working. We all sense that something has got to ‘give’, and the feeling is not a comfortable one.

Although it’s popular these days to bash religion as irrational, it strikes me that at least in the West, religon and reason have much in common. Both religion and reason are driven by the engine of determinism: a belief in the process of cause and effect.

Set enough bad ideas in motion and before long, you get meltdown. Religion calls this domino cause and effect pattern sin or karma. Science calls it a lot of things, depending on which theory is in play. In either system, you can’t release a bad action into the material world and be confident your action will end there.

Today’s world seems to be infested with rapidly multiplying bad ideas and their consequences.

Will our world really end in 2012?

Honestly, I think it could. Not in fire or ice, not in some dramatic blaze heralded by creepy angel-aliens bearing white rabbits, but just in the sense that we could collectively realize that trying to control minds and matter is not the way to peace, that it’s time for a new age, a more intuitive, trusting one.

That, or we’ll totally fry ourselves.

I guess we’ll find out.