Survival Guide - Jonathan Cainer`s Forecasts

Jonathan
CAINER
2012
Survival Guide
2012 Survival Guide
By Jonathan Cainer
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With thanks to…
MW
PR
VL
All inquirers & all inspirers
© Jonathan Cainer
Cover illustration by Nick Ellwood
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Contents
What is special and different about 2012?
07
What about Planet X?
15
Will we really align with the Galactic Centre?
17
What about the 'end of the Mayan calendar'?
29
Will the world economic system collapse?
42
Will we make contact with aliens?
45
Will there be earthquakes, tornadoes, tsunamis and droughts?
49
Will the Antichrist appear?
54
Will the Earth collide with a giant comet or meteor?
56
What and when is The Age of Aquarius?
67
What about the transit of Venus?
77
Will solar flares destroy our communications?
92
What if we survive 2012 unscathed but it all goes wrong in 2013? 94
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Jonathan Cainer
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Introduction
I've seen some pretty big ‘end of the world’ scare stories in my time. I
particularly recall being deluged with mail in the run-up to 1999.
This, many people insisted, was when Nostradamus had told us the
world was due to end. I gave out as much reassurance as I could, but I
felt like one man trying to run up a descending escalator. It was
almost as if somehow, people truly wanted the news to be bad. They
were half hoping the end really was nigh. They were buying right in
to the doom and the gloom and, when you told them that there really
wasn't any, their faces filled with a weird mixture of disappointment
and disbelief.
2012 has now become just as notorious in the minds of many
people and it is not just the usual suspects who have jumped aboard
the bad news bandwagon. The internet has made it much easier for
people to spread far-fetched theories and to terrify millions with welldescribed conspiracy theories. The people who post these scare stories
aren’t doing it because they’re on a mischievous mission. They are
very sincere. They truly believe in what they are saying. And nothing
in life is so convincing as a story told by someone who swears that
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what they’re saying is the truth. But that alone doesn’t make it the
truth. And in a world where the actual truth is hard to define – or hard
to explain, or both – the passionately pronounced belief can sound far
more persuasive than the tentative statement of probability.
Journalists, looking for a sexy headline, have picked up on these
stories and help draw them to the attention of an even wider audience.
And now we've got something else to muddy the water - for the threat
of economic disaster hangs over our heads and, according to the socalled experts, this is neither a fantasy nor even a false fear. Ah, the
experts. How we love them.
Somebody wise once said that an expert is simply someone who
knows two per cent more than the rest of us do. I do not mean to
undermine their authority but as you will see from the rest of this
book, I simply have to assert my own astrological judgement - which
is that 2012 is actually going to be a surprisingly good year.
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What is special and different about 2012?
2012 contains a most unusual transit of Venus and hardly ever in
history has there been a more auspicious alignment to bless all our
lives. We can argue that the doom and gloom surrounding this year is
an asset, not a drawback. As financial institutions teeter on the brink
of collapse, destabilising governments the world over in the process,
millions are getting a wake-up call. Do they want to be woken up? Of
course not. None of us ever wants to be woken up. All of us resent the
alarm clock when first we hear it. Nor, usually, do we want to be
sobered up. If we are tipsy, we far prefer to carry on rolling around in
our own little bubble of distraction and merriment. The fact remains
though, that for as long as we can all remember, most of the world has
been sleeping while a few have been getting wildly intoxicated. The
sleepers are those who just go along with whatever life seems to
expect of them. They accept the rules of engagement as they are
currently being followed in the great game of money. They pay their
rent or their mortgage, they use their credit cards, they earn their
crust. They worry about debt, they struggle to make their income
match their expenditure and they somehow feel so ashamed of their
own need to borrow that they will accept the most outrageous terms
when taking out a loan. They are more inclined to be grateful for
being taken on trust than to question the extent to which they are
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being taken for a ride. Meanwhile, in the halls of high finance,
amazing sums of money are being gambled on a series of ludicrous
propositions. The people at the ‘top of the pile’ are drunk with high
numbers. The people at the ‘bottom of the pile’ are all but sleepwalking. For years, a few voices have piped up with the words "This
is unfair and unsustainable". If those voices are heard at all, people
agree and then shrug their shoulders: "It may be unfair, it may be
unsustainable, but what can we do? It is the way of the world." For a
full explanation of what to expect during this year of great change, see
the section on global finance. For now, let me suggest one reassuring
thought. The fact that everything seems to be falling apart is not, in
itself, a bad thing. If some of it actually does collapse, that is not
necessarily so bad either. It may be the only way to bring about the
waking up and the sobering up which this world has needed for so
long. Obviously, if it brings us to the point where we are all starving
and suffering, that would be very bad indeed. But that is not going to
happen. It simply is not going to get so bad. Once we all realise this
and relax (as we will, slowly, during the course of the year) we will
find we are living in better times... times which are not only
prosperous but which are altogether more equable.
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Much the same can be said about another fear that has in recent
years been prominent in the minds of millions. What's going to
happen about climate change? Here too, there has long been a need
for a waking up and a sobering up. Here too, that's precisely what's
going to happen in 2012. We must all take care in the course of this
pivotal year to understand the difference between the moaning of a
person who is being roused from their slumbers and the complaint of
someone who is truly facing a dreadful threat. Despite all you may
have heard and all that you may continue to hear, it is my pleasure, as
your astrologer, to tell you it is all going to be okay.
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What about Planet X, planet Nibiru or the Brown
Dwarf Star with the 3,600-year orbit?
Ah yes, what about them? If you really want to give yourself an
uncomfortable afternoon, Google any or all of the above. There are
hundreds of internet pages dedicated to these topics. Well, I should
really say to this topic, for the Brown Dwarf, Nibiru and Planet X are
all pretty much one and the same idea. I am only going to give you a
very potted summary. If you want to know more about it, you will
have to take yourself a ride on the magical search engine of
cyberspace, through twisted tunnels that lead to the websites of
the weird.
If you take such a journey, you’ll soon discover the basic idea.
Supposedly, there's this enormous celestial object moving on a very
slow orbit around our sun. It takes 3,600 years for it to complete one
rotation. Even if this true, that’s mighty gradual. It makes slowmoving Neptune look like the champion athlete, Usain Bolt! The
mega-planet has been lost and forgotten for centuries but now, it is
back. Any moment now, we’re not only going to see it, we’re going to
feel it because it is so darned big, it will exert a humungous
gravitational pull on our own planet.
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Legend has it that this mysterious monster has cleverly managed
to hide itself from the eyes of conventional science by adopting a
cunning disguise. Our astronomers cannot see it because it is right in
front of their eyes. They are so busy looking for teeny little things on
the far side of the galaxy that they have completely ignored this
gigantic hunk. Last time it came near enough to us to affect our
gravity, a flood came rolling in and that nice Mr Noah had to build his
ark in a tearing rush.
Fortunately, the ancient Sumerians were fully aware of the backstory to this Biblical tale and left us warnings in a series of scrolls and
carvings which weren’t (but could have been) titled: Urgent Alert To
Folk Of The Future. These went on to say, in not quite so many
words, that if you ever happen to find yourself living in the early part
of the 21st century, you should be very, very worried because the
nasty flood-causing planet is coming back.
Sadly, nobody speaks ancient Sumerian any more. Even more
sadly, nobody knows where these ancient scrolls and stone-carvings
are or indeed, if they ever really existed. Thankfully this very nice
chap called Zecharia Sitchin published a book in 1976 in which he
found the scrolls (at least in his imagination) and in the same
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imagination, he translated them all for us. How he became an expert
in ancient Sumerian we don't quite know… I expect the explanation
would be in the same Sumerian text if only Zecharia were still around
to translate it for us. Anyway, he warned us about Nibiru's previous
visit – and now it is back again, woe betide us all.
Now I know what you're thinking. This makes no sense. Even if
such an object could really exist, by travelling on a trajectory that
takes 3,600 years to circle the Sun, it simply couldn't move fast
enough in a single year to get to a point where it could loom so large
in our sky. Given that nobody can see it now, it certainly couldn't get
close enough, quick enough to knock the Earth off its orbit, cause us
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to wobble on our axis or exert such a strong gravitational pull that we
start rotating in the other direction. We'd have to see it coming. And
so far, nobody has seen anything.
"Not so," say our lovely friends the conspiracy theorists. "You are
thinking like one of the millions who have had their brains washed in
the mainstream. Just look at all the earthquakes we've been having
lately. And consider all those other terrible disasters. Planet X has
caused all that. The scientists can see this perfectly well. They know
exactly where the mega-planet is. They know too that it is getting
closer and closer every day and it is only a matter of time until we are
all doomed. They even know what some of the internet sites claim to
know, that it’s not really a planet but a ‘brown dwarf star’. But they
are not telling anyone because they have been sworn to secrecy by the
Government. The authorities don't want us to panic, you see. Armed
guards have been placed on 24-hour watch outside the home of every
astronomer and sky-watcher on Earth. If they ever try to break ranks
and tell us the truth, they are going to be disconnected from the
internet and then locked in a room and forced to watch endless re-runs
of Family Guy until they lose their minds and come out screaming.
Through this method of control and suppression the CIA / KGB / MI6
/ ASIS have ensured a total media black-out. The only people clever
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enough to break-through are those wise souls behind the internet sites
that you found when you went Googling. Thank goodness they exist."
Or something like that. Yawn.
Is it all complete and utter nonsense? You’ll have to reach your
own conclusion. I hate to be judgemental. I believe that an open mind
is the key to an open heart. I really can’t bring myself to be dismissive
of such a story, especially given the fact that I am an astrologer and
many people can be equally dismissive of all that I do and all that I
believe in. I have no right to stand up and point the finger of ridicule.
I may be inclined to think that this story makes about as much sense
as someone standing up and saying: "If you want to lose weight, eat
nothing but pizzas and cream cakes and make sure that you never
exercise." But probably, someone, somewhere, reckons this is the
very regime we all need to follow. I bet someone, somewhere, is
willing to stand up and testify to the number of pounds that they shed
overnight when they took this advice. Probably somewhere too,
there’s a website that reckons the Earth is going to tilt on its orbit
once the population of pizza-eaters gets past a certain point. We can’t
rule this kind of thing out. But nor, really, do we need to plan our
lives around it.
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Will we really align with the centre of the galaxy
at the end of December 2012?
No. Not really. Well, kind of. The centre of the galaxy is a distant
point in the Milky Way that our solar system revolves around. Just as
we go round the Sun, the Sun goes round the Galactic Centre. It’s a
journey just as slow as the one being taken by Mr Zecharia Sitchin’s
monster planet but it is scientific fact, not pseudo-scientific fantasy.
Our Sun aligns with this centre of the galaxy every year around this
time and it has been doing so for the past 20 years at least. It will
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continue to do so for many years to come. Someone somewhere has
seized on this fact and then twisted it and made it sound special for
2012. But to say that there's anything important about the particular
alignment in 2012 is stretching the point way too far. It's just a regular
late-December thing. To make a big deal out of it is like saying the
world should prepare because in February there will be a great festival
when people all over the world declare their love for one another,
gifts are exchanged, cards are sent and many find themselves falling
into a deep embrace. Well, yes, that's true, but it happens every year;
it's called Valentine's Day.
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What is this ‘end of the Mayan calendar’
really all about?
The Mayans were a civilisation who lived in the northern part of
South America. In particular, they occupied the territory that we today
know as Mexico. They are not to be confused with the Aztecs or the
Incans although they have many traits and beliefs in common and
there are some indications to suggest that they measured time in
similar ways.
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The Mayans were a very clever bunch, responsible for some
impressive architecture - not least a series of enormous pyramids
some of which still stand. Pyramids, clearly, were once very popular
around the world. We know that they also existed in China because
they show up in aerial reconnaissance photographs of remote parts of
this region. Usually, though, when we think of pyramids we imagine
the kind we see in Egypt with smooth sides reaching all the way to the
top. The Mayan pyramids tend to be stepped. But it is easy to imagine
how those steps might once have been filled in to create a similarly
smooth surface. Perhaps they once were. Even so, we know that
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Mayan pyramids were constructed quite a long while later than their
Egyptian counterparts
Much research points to the idea that the Egyptians made
extensive use of astronomy (and thus astrology) in the design and
placement of their edifices. We also know that the Mayans looked to
the sky when they were building pyramids up from the Earth. The
most famous proof of this can be seen at Chichen Itza, a few hours
drive out of Cancun. There, a pyramid has been cleverly positioned to
catch the rays of the setting Sun, these cause a shadow to fall slowly
across the face of the building. At different times of the year, the
shadow takes up more or less of the pyramid’s face. On the day of the
equinox, the shadow is longest. Just a tiny sliver of a light is left
towards the very edge of a raised partition that stands proud of the
pyramid steps. As the Sun goes down the light begins to appear at the
top left and it slowly makes its way down to the very bottom - at
ground level. This gives rise to a wonderful optical illusion. It looks
for all the world, like a snake slowly appearing out of nowhere and
slithering down the side.
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To enhance the vision, the Mayans
created a sculpture of a snake's head at
the very foot of the pyramid so that, on
the day in question, when the line of
light reaches the ground it meets up
perfectly with this carving. The serpent or, in particular, the feathered
serpent was an important mythological creature to the people of this
area, who identified it as Quetzalcoatl, one of their most powerful sky
Gods. Quetzcoatl was also the name they gave to Venus – or, at least,
to Venus as it appeared in the morning sky. Venus, as I'm sure you
know, is sometimes an evening 'star' and sometimes a morning 'star'.
We only ever see it at dusk or dawn because Venus (when viewed
from Earth) is never far from the Sun. Generally, it is up when the
Sun is up and down when the Sun is down. When it follows the Sun
down, we get to glimpse it for an hour or three as darkness falls and
makes it visible. When it comes up just before the Sun, we only see it
until the Sun has risen. The Sun is so bright in the sky that it drowns
out the light of all other celestial bodies apart from the Moon (if the
moon happens to be up during the day.) We never see Venus during
the hours of daylight. Well, when I say never, I mean almost never. In
2012 we get to glimpse it in daylight... but for more on that, you need
to read another chapter of this very book.
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It has been suggested by some historians that the Mayans did
not understand that Venus, the evening star, and Venus, the morning
star, were one and the same. That's why they had two different names
for the one heavenly body. But then much has been suggested by
many historians and a great deal of it is deeply unreliable. This
indeed, poses one of the biggest problems for a researcher trying to
understand what the Mayans really knew and what they believed. The
world, it seems, is full of expert historians who have wildly differing
theories about this civilisation. They can get away with saying pretty
much what they like because they have hardly any written
information to draw on.
When the Spanish conquered this part of the world, back in the early
16th century, they systematically destroyed every text and written
record. They were, they believed, doing the world a great favour by
stamping out the heathen, pagan religion of the land and replacing it
with Christianity. There's nothing new about this kind of shockingly
arrogant behaviour. It is, sadly, what religions have done to other
religions right around the globe since time immemorial. But the
Mayans were treated to an extraordinarily nasty insult to go with their
injury. A Spanish Bishop called Diego de Landa Calderón took
personal responsibilty for eradicating most of the Mayan knowledge
and tradition. Not only did he destroy the ancient writings, he
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persecuted the priests and elders. Once he had rid the world of all
written information and murdered those who had learned the oral
tradition, he then set about writing his own History Of The Mayans. It
is hard to think of a more untrustworthy source of information. It
would be like a priest, deciding that Harry Potter was blasphemous,
gathering up every copy of every book and every movie, burning
them all, sentencing JK Rowling to solitary confinement in prison for
life... and then writing his own description of life at Hogwarts. But,
sadly, Diego’s dodgy description is about the only source left; The
History of the Mayan people, as told by the religious zealot who
persecuted them almost to extinction.
Historians ever since have had no option but to refer back to his
work since it’s pretty much all they’ve got. Some take it as the truth.
Others take it with a pinch of salt. The best and most hopeful
interpretation we can place on Diego’s behaviour involves him having
a sudden, late-life change of heart. Perhaps, with all that blood on his
hands, he suddenly felt truly dreadful and set about atoning for his
many sins by writing down the most accurate summary of Mayan
culture and belief. A less favourable image involves him burying this
noble ancient tradition and then defecating on the grave by listing a
whole bunch of accusations against the Mayans in order to justify his
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own unspeakable actions. Whichever view they care to take, no-one
can be sure of the real truth.
Thus, we have to be very careful when we hear the tourist
guides telling us that the Mayans were barbaric and inhumane.
They may have been - or they may not have been - but the Christians
most certainly were! We’ll never be really sure whether Mayan
children were actually brought up with flat-boards tied to their heads
in order to give them pointed skulls or how accurate are the similarly
arresting images of young Mayan males threading cord through their
foreskins and traveling in procession, one tied to the other. Some of
this may have been true, some of this may not have been. But we can
see one very good reason for questioning the perceived wisdom in the
way historians recount the relationship of this civilisation with the
planet Venus.
If, as we are authoritatively told in some books, the Mayans
could not tell Venus, the evening star, from Venus, the morning star,
how come they knew about the 242-year cycle of Venus transits - and
why did they base their famous 'long count' calendar on this
exceptional phenomenon, a good 500 years before any astronomer in
the West was even aware of it? And why too, if their understanding of
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the sky was so ‘primitive and silly’ did they go to all the trouble of
creating the pyramid at Chichen Itza, where the descending serpent of
light and shadow can still be seen, in perfect alignment on the
equinox, to this very day?
The Mayan calendar is about all that we have left, in written
form, of their wisdom and knowledge. Our understanding of it is not
complete. The only other points of reference we have access to are the
various totems carved with signs and symbols that can be found
around some ancient Mayan settlements. From these we can glean a
little something of what they knew and what they thought. But it is a
bit like trying to piece together the history of modern Western
civilisation from a few Keep Off The Grass and This Way To The
Exit signs.
The only other hope of attaining true insight into the Mayan
mentality must come from the Mayans themselves. The Christians
wiped out many of their priests, elders and teachers but they did not
quite manage to kill off the entire population - although they came
pretty close to it. When they weren't rounding them up and killing
them, they were giving them the flu, and various other illnesses to
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which these people had never been previously exposed and, thus, for
which they had no immunity.
Still, though, in modern Spanish-speaking Mexico there are
pockets of population where the ancient Mayan language continues to
be spoken - and where at least some of the old traditions are faithfully
upheld. One of these is the tradition of visiting the Pyramid of the
Serpent on the day of the equinox. If you ever go there you’ll find,
amongst the Western tourists, hippy travellers and rainbow people
(for all of whom this is a popular attraction) indigenous families who
have clearly walked to the site from their villages some great distance
away. The women carry their children on their backs along with
provisions for the journey and the families camp out overnight in
eager anticipation of the serpent’s appearance. There are also some
who proclaim themselves to be Mayan elders, teachers and holders of
wisdom. They have at least some of the oral tradition but it can be
difficult, in conversation with them, to know whether what they are
telling you is an accurate reflection of their ancestors’ view or a
carefully concocted pastiche that blends a little Mayan folklore with
some native North American imagery and a fairly large helping of
New Age philosophy.
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Fuelling this suspicion is the way that the story of the Mayan
calendar seems to have changed over time. Twenty years ago, most
sources seemed to be unanimous. The long-count calendar is a
prophecy. It speaks of a time when the world will end and gives a
very precise finishing point. A date that translates in our modern
calendar to December 21, 2012. It certainly seems as if the Mayans
had the end of the world on their mind. But there are some who feel
sure that the Mayans had the end of the world on their mind long
before that. They claim that they were expecting their own extinction.
There are many stories told of this civilisation ritually preparing for a
time when they would be wiped off the face of the Earth. Sometimes
this is put forward as an explanation of their fatalistic response to the
Spanish invasion.
The Mayans apparently believed that one day Quetzalcoatl
would return - and that he would come from the sea. Thus when the
Spanish invaders arrived, they put up no resistance. They welcomed
them with open arms expecting to greet their saviours - who promptly
massacred them. But this story raises as many questions as it answers.
If the Mayans were expecting their extinction, they got it 500 years
ago when the Spanish came. So how come they are still expecting it?
Even the end of the Earth itself could not have been as ghastly or as
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painful as the torture that the Spanish inflicted upon these people by
the thousand. And if the Mayans did think that the arrival of the
Spanish represented the dawning of a new era for them, they can't
have been using their long-count calendar properly because according
to that it wasn't supposed to happen till 2012!
Since we were first told that the Mayan calendar is due to ‘end’
in 2012, there has been a whole lot of back-tracking. We are now
informed that this date merely represents a moment when the Mayans
expected consciousness to change across the globe. It has now been
characterised as a time when we may come to see life on earth very
differently. One thing we can be sure of is that the Mayans thought in
terms of eras and epochs, just as conventional historians might
separate history into prehistoric, medieval and modern periods.
Western astrologers also have this concept. See our chapter on the
Age of Aquarius later in this book. The Mayans had a different way
of counting and a different definition of what constitutes an ‘era’, but
they were definitely aware that at different times, different values and
beliefs would prevail. It’s pretty clear that the date December 21,
2012 marks a point on the Mayan calendar when they expected one of
these rare ‘changeovers’.
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There is no evidence to suggest that they anticipated the date
itself to be important in anything other than symbolic terms. Had the
priests and leaders of this ancient culture still been in the business of
constructing totems, towers or pyramids, they might well have chosen
to begin work on one, on this auspicious occasion.
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Will the world economic system collapse in 2012?
No, but astrologers feel that Pluto's ongoing right-angle to Uranus
suggests it will soon adapt and evolve at a rate much faster than many
people feel comfortable with. A time of such change has long been
predicted and follows naturally from the upheavals that began in 2008
with the ‘credit crunch’. It was then that the banks and financiers
began to lose some of the air of unimpeachable authority that they had
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previously exuded. There are now fears that within 2012 we will see
the collapse of more banks, institutions, currencies and even nations.
Those fears are, of course, self-perpetuating. The more people who
expect things to go wrong, the greater the chance that they will.
Recession, in essence, is no more complicated than influenza. It
is just as contagious – and it might be best thought of as an illness that
gets into people. Once we start believing in it, we see the symptoms
everywhere and they simply serve to make us feel worse. Most people
get better from influenza. They get better from recession too but it can
take a lot longer and the strange thing is that they all seem to get
better at roughly the same time. Only on closer investigation do we
find that there are pockets of improvement, areas of business or even
just geographical areas where the problems don't hit as hard or last as
long, if they even take hold at all. In times gone by, people would
travel in search of work. For some, during a recession it may be an
option. But even if our geographical circumstances are too fixed to
change, we can all travel to a different place in our mind. Especially
now we are all so connected by way of websites and social networks,
we can pick and choose the company we keep and associate more
with those who take an optimistic view of the world's situation. The
odd truth is that simply by making this inner-journey, we can
immediately start to feel a bit more hopeful - and recession is all
about lack of hope.
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Recession may be best thought of as a psychological ailment
that affects millions of people at the same time. Because we are
surrounded by fellow ‘sufferers’, we tend to feel that it is not
something we can cure ourselves of. We talk dismally about the
‘current climate’ and we let this inform the decisions we make.
Thus we make pessimistic decisions and assume that we will have
no money to spend. In the very act of doing this, we take away even
more opportunities from the collective table. Naturally enough, for all
of us, this increases the expectation of bleak times ahead. Effectively,
rather like money itself, recession is a form of mass delusion. We
don't question this so much during the so-called good times. But we
are, perhaps, vaguely aware that money is silly. If you've got some
pieces of paper in your pocket, you can consider yourself well off. If
you haven't, you must be poor. Access to these precious pieces of
paper is highly restricted. There are only certain routes by which you
can get them. Why can't we all just have as many pieces of paper as
we need? "Oh goodness no..." we are told by those who claim to
know such things, "...the world just doesn't work like that!"
But during the so-called good times there are always at least
some optimists who insist that if you want to go out and earn an
endless amount of those pieces of paper, you can always find a way.
The people who preach and teach ‘abundance consciousness’ are very
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insistent about that. The whole notion becomes easier to envisage
when you stop thinking about pieces of paper and start thinking about
plastic. Where is most of your money? The likelihood is, you don't
keep it at home. There is none under your mattress. It is in a bank
account somewhere. What form does it take in that bank account? Is
there a little drawer somewhere in a central bank, surrounded by
guards and dogs, carefully labelled with your name and filled with all
the notes that belong to you? No! There are just some numbers on a
file, in a computer. You are paid in those numbers, you go shopping
with those numbers and you sit around worrying desperately when it
seems that those numbers just don't add up.
So why should those numbers mean anything at all? Why can't
we all just trade in some other numbers instead? Why can't you just
pick a number out of thin air and say: "This is my number"? Because
not enough of us are willing to believe that such a thing is possible.
We believe only in the numbers that the banks and credit card
companies keep track of. How real are they? Not very, in one way.
They are real simply because we all agree to believe that they are real.
What else is money then other than the ultimate manifestation of a
shared belief system? We may not all agree about our religion. We
may have different names for God or we may choose to declare that
we have no faith in the Creator whatsoever. Those beliefs represent
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our personal prerogatives. But financial beliefs are seemingly nonnegotiable. They are universal. They are far and away the beliefs that
are taken most seriously by the most people on this Earth.
You can say, "I no longer believe in this." And you can refuse,
to the best of your ability, to deal with money in your day-to-day life.
But the other believers won't let you get off that lightly. They will
evaluate you in terms of those numbers whether you want them to or
not. We might well ask, though, what would happen if one day
millions of people just woke up in the morning and said, "Why do we
believe in this? It is not like it does us any great favours." The answer
is, in theory, that if enough people stop believing in money, money
would no longer have such a powerful hold over the world. It is an
illusion, a belief, a thing with no true substance that exists only
because so many people choose to see it as real. What's interesting
about a recession is that it highlights that very truth in reverse.
Suddenly people stop believing quite so much. Sadly, they don't just
stop believing in money and start celebrating. They just come to
believe that there isn't very much money, that soon there may be even
less, and that life, therefore, is hardly worth living any more.
Ultimately it is an illusion within the illusion. But it doesn't seem that
way when you are trying to put food on your table.
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There are some who say that the whole illusion of money, both
good and bad, inflationary and recessionary, needs to be shattered.
They believe we would be better off without it. These people get very
excited during a recession. They anticipate a time of great change and
come-uppance. They think the rich will be made poor (and that will
serve them right) while the poor will be freed from lives of quasislavery, struggling and striving to earn their small share of an unfair
and artificial cake. A few people might lose their pensions, they
figure, and more might lose their jobs. But surely, that's a small price
to pay for changing the world into a fairer and better place.
There are others who are terrified of the damage that a recession
may do. If people stop spending, manufacturers will have to stop
manufacturing. Companies will have to stop trading. Governments
will have less profit to tax and thus less money to pay for the roads,
schools and hospitals on which we all rely. Worse still, they will have
less money with which to support the very poorest and most
disadvantaged in our communities. Thus the gap between rich and
poor will grow even wider, society will become even more unfair and
a growing number of disenfranchised individuals will become willing
to resort to desperate measures. And if the banks collapse, if the
governments cannot afford to pay their bills then the life-savings of
millions will also disappear, vastly increasing the number of people
35
who now need to rely on the state for support. That's the very state
which may no longer be in a position to help them. If this happens, so
the argument goes, before we know it, civilisation will collapse, we
will all have to go back to living in caves and hunting for dinosaurs.
This is likely to prove particular tricky because there aren't any
dinosaurs any more.
These observers may not want a recession to happen but their
fear of what could occur, should it take place, is a part of the reason
why every so often recessions do take place. Let us go back to the
point we have already made several times. Money is a fantasy that we
all subscribe to. Good times occur when we collectively imagine
ourselves to be prosperous. A time of wealth is still a dream but it is
the kind of dream that most people enjoy dreaming. Recession is
really also nothing other than a dream that we are much more inclined
to see as a nightmare.
So where is the cure for this collective malaise? It lies
somewhere within the possibility of an awakening. We have to stop
asking the question, "How do we get out of the bad dream and back
into the good dream?" Instead we have to ask, "Is there some way that
we could spend less of our time asleep?" That's one reason why
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previous economic downturns and slowdowns have been described as
a wake-up call. The question we began attempting to answer many
paragraphs ago was: will the world's economic system collapse in
2012? The answer is no, it won't. But it may come closer towards a
collapse than we have ever seen it come before. It may be that this
provides the wake-up call to end all wake-up calls. It may also be that
so many people decide they have had enough of the dream, that they
actually do, finally, wake up and start looking, seriously, at other
ways to reward merit and endeavour. Think, for example, how large
corporations supposedly exist to serve their shareholders. Everything
is fine as long as they make a profit. Everything is terrible if they
don't. Does it matter whether what they make is good for the world
and the people in it? Does it matter how green they are or how well
they pay their workers? Or how happy their employees are? Or what
difference they may make to their customers’ quality of life? Not so
much as you'd notice. Only one arbiter determines success or failure.
Isn't that woefully primitive? Isn't it a deeply divisive, desperately
unimaginative, outdated mechanism of measurement?
Might not the world, as it settles into the 21st Century, be ready
for a more sophisticated system of evaluation and exchange? Think,
for example of how, once, people were happy to divide the world into
37
‘good’ and ‘evil’. There were few grey areas. We had either heroes or
villains, angels or demons. Some people still like to think along these
lines. It comforts them and shelters them from the wind of confusion.
Yet most of us know now that any attempt to divide the world into
good and evil is, automatically, evil! Even if you have every reason to
count yourself amongst the good, the moment you start pointing at
someone else and declaring them to be ‘evil’, you are no longer being
quite so good. In fact, by making such a harsh judgement, you are
effectively aligning yourself with what can only be described as an
evil force! The concept of evil simply doesn't allow for nuance, or for
the influence of an exceptional circumstance, for mitigation,
explanation, understanding or forgiveness.
It is to be hoped that as we settle into the 21st century, we are all
growing out of that age-old paradigm: ‘our side good; your side bad’.
Ever so slowly, it is getting harder for us to wage wars with each
other on that basis. But the people with the most to lose from this
long-awaited evolution of consciousness are the arms manufacturers.
Have you any idea how much money is made through the sale of
weapons? There are influential people all over the world with a strong
vested interest in the continuation of conflict. Whenever nations
mistrust other nations, how they must rub their hands together with
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glee. People with these vested interests can't see past the need to make
and sell more guns, tanks and rockets. The more they sell, the more
money they make – and who in this world can argue with that?
Certainly not the governments. They are funded in some large part by
the very firms who make the most money out of bloodshed.
So what might we, the human race as a whole, the collective
consciousness of the entire planet, be secretly wishing for? Might we
not all be inwardly yearning for a time when such groups lose their
iron grip on the people in power? How could this ever come about?
There are some who say that a recession could be the only force
39
significant enough to shift all of us, even such entrenched individuals.
But we must be careful with this line of thought. It is a sad but true
historical fact that when a nation is in a recession or a depression the
quickest and most effective way to get out of that trouble, is to go to
war. Suddenly all arguments against the spending of resources are
counteracted by the greater weight of the perceived need to put up a
spirited defence. Pension companies know this – as do the people who
work in the top corridors of all the great financial institutions. When
they take our pensions, our savings and the money that we have paid
into our various life-assurance schemes they put them into ‘safe
places’ where they can be sure of a return, even in troubled times.
And who are the corporations most likely to provide such a return?
Almost invariably they are the ones who deal in methods of death and
destruction. So the question is not, will the system collapse? We've
already been clear, but I'll say it again: No, it won't. A much more
interesting question though is: as it comes perilously close to collapse
and we all start getting frightened - what desire for change will this
awaken in the hearts and minds of millions?
Will we all just be desperate for a return to employment and
apparent prosperity, even if it comes at the expense of spiritual
progress? Or will people start to forge alternative ways of interacting
40
materially with one another? Will the masses rise up in protest against
the narrow-thinking politicians whose woeful lack of imagination has
led them into this trouble in the first place? Will things get so bad that
people start thinking of radical options and embracing progressive
ideas? Here again, the answer is probably not. The true driver of
positive change is, was and always will be inspiration not terror. The
progress that may yet come will be driven by a memory of how bad
things got, but they really don't need to get much worse than they
already are in order for that to start happening.
So here now is the most important question of all regarding
money and the world in 2012. If the whole thing is a collective
fantasy involving billions of people worldwide, what difference can
you as an individual make to any of it? The answer is as joyous as it is
surprising. If you are willing to overcome your own fear and to forget
about your own desire for supposed security and economic assurance,
you can start running in the opposite direction to all who are heading,
lemming-like, towards the cliff of despair. Simply by refusing to be
afraid you can challenge the expectation. The minute you start to do
this, you will notice you are not alone. How many people does it take
to run in the opposite direction before the whole crowd turn round and
start following the new leaders? Far fewer than you might imagine.
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You can, if you choose, play a very big part in helping the world
move away from the brink of economic collapse. But you have to
make that choice. You have to commit to it. You have to start actively
seeking out the company of others who are trying to make a similar
choice. You have to stop listening to fear, even when you are faced
with palpable, tangible examples of how much power fear seems to be
exerting over the world. Even when surrounded by people who are (or
seem to be in danger of) losing their jobs, their savings, even their
faith in life, you have to hang on to your own view of the bright side
and keep your own candle of hope burning brightly. That's actually all
it takes to beat a recession, but I'm not trying to kid you that it's easy!
It isn't easy. But it can be done. The clear astrological implication is
that such a turnaround is possible. You just need to choose to be a
part of it.
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Will we make contact with aliens?
Astrologically we are going through a phase during which almost
anything is possible. Towards the end of 2011, scientists nervously
declared that they had (they thought) discovered a sub-atomic particle
that could travel faster than light. According to all conventional
wisdom this is simply impossible. Some people are excitedly hoping
for the experiment to be repeated and ‘proven’. Others are keen for
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new evidence to emerge, confirming that some great mistake has been
made. I can confidently predict that no definitive answer, either way,
will be reached during 2012. I'm also prepared to prophesy that,
eventually, this record-breaking, mind-blowing, paradigm-shifting
neutrino will be found. And with that, the laws of physics as we know
them will all have to be rewritten. The very same cosmic climate that
now brings the world so much upheaval and uncertainty is causing
people in almost every walk of life to rethink their ideas. We now
know that there is water on the Moon and on Mars, while Venus has
an ozone layer. Twenty years ago all of these ideas would have been
considered unthinkable. Still, though, there is a great social stigma
attached to ‘belief in aliens’.
If you say you have seen a UFO, you are likely to be dismissed
as, at best, an eccentric with wild ideas or, at worst, a person in need
of psychiatric help. So I had best be careful what I say. There are,
though, some people who feel very strongly that aliens are already
walking amongst us. And, yes, they have taken on human form. The
way they see it, we all come into this world from another world, so far
away that we can hardly remember where it is or what it is like. We
do not belong here; we are only visitors and one day we will return
just as suddenly and mysteriously as we arrived. What are you and I
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but aliens? Yet we are so caught up in the idea that we ‘belong’ to this
world, that we find it hard to think in such terms. We don't just speak
about our ancestors as if they were extensions of ourselves, we speak
similarly about the people who used to live in the same land that we
do. We identify so strongly with the culture into which we were born
that we can hardly see where it ends and we begin. We identify with
the struggles and battles that were fought by previous generations. We
don't say, 'They used to think that' or 'They used to do that'. We say,
'We used think it - or do it'. But even if you belong to no other world
than this one, how could you be sure that your last visit to this Earth,
or your next one, will take place in the same land, the same culture,
the same family? The human race still has a long way to go before it
properly sees itself as one race. Once it has passed this first basic test
in intelligent understanding, it may yet get itself into a position where
sentient beings from elsewhere in the galaxy consider us worth
talking to!
45
Will there be earthquakes, tornadoes, tsunamis
and droughts?
Sadly, yes there will. There may even be more of these than usual. In
astrological terms, the ongoing right-angle between Pluto and Uranus
is a classic suggestion of increased seismic activity and it also heralds
sudden, dramatic weather changes. But we must see this in
perspective. There are natural disasters even when the cosmos is
comparatively quiet. We tend to see more under circumstances like
the current ones, but this does not mean that we should be expecting
problems at every turn. The vast majority of people will, in 2012 and
2013, go about their business, leading normal lives without once
46
encountering anything more radical than some slightly unusual or
unseasonal weather.
But our world is growing ever more connected. Where once, we
hardly knew about physical challenges faced by people in distant
lands, we now see their trials and tribulations reported in great detail
on the news and on the web. We don't just read about disasters, we
don't just see photos. We see live broadcasts. We feel far more
involved – and, at one level, that's a wonderful thing. It suggests that
we are becoming more sympathetic to one another. It also means that
we are more inclined to see other people’s problems as our own. We
may, for example think there is more war these days than there used
to be. There isn't. But we are more aware of what war there is. We
care more. We identify more. We are far less inclined to put up a
psychological barrier and say: "Oh, that's just something that's
happening to those strangers over in that distant place." Naturally
enough, this means that we can't help but think: "If it is happening
over there, perhaps it is going to happen over here too."
Another way to look at this is to think of what happens when
you are in a very dark room. It may be a terrible mess but you can't
see it so it doesn't bother you much. As the light begins to come
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through the curtains or even as the curtains are drawn back, the first
thing you notice is how much cleaning up needs to happen.
Ignorance represented a kind of bliss. Knowledge now
represents a duty to do something constructive. As we become more
aware of conflicts abroad, we suspect that the world must be getting
worse. But it is potentially getting a lot better. It is the same, to some
extent, with corruption, with suffering, with deprivation and with
disaster. Apart, that is, from one thing. Where we can now see manmade problems taking effect, we can choose to become part of the
solution. We can join campaigns and lend our energies to efforts to
‘clean up’ the world.
We don't feel quite so empowered when we become aware of
natural disasters taking place. We become more afraid. We recognise
that nature is a powerful and unpredictable force. None of this though
means that nature is any more powerful or unpredictable than it
ever was.
There probably are going to be more natural disasters around the
world over the next two years than there have been in the last few
48
years. But we will hopefully become more adept, if not at anticipating
and avoiding the impact of these, at least at organising ourselves into
task forces who can go out and help. All this is for the good. But it
does mean that more of us will be prone to worry and to care. It is
right that we should be more caring. It is not right that we should
therefore expect more trouble in our own backyard.
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Will the Antichrist appear?
People who do bad things practically never see themselves as bad
people. The more we judge them as ‘bad’, the more at risk we
ourselves become of displaying ‘bad qualities’.
That is the problem with overly simplistic notions like ‘good
and bad’. None of us are entirely good. None of us are entirely bad.
Some people though, might consider this a controversial statement.
What about Hitler? What about a mass murderer? What about
someone who gives way to some dreadful impulse and causes untold
harm? Perhaps I should revise this statement. Perhaps I should say,
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none of us are entirely bad but some of us do such bad things it then
becomes almost impossible to see the good that remains within them.
Then, though, we must explore the idea that none of us are entirely
good. Are some of us really so good that it becomes difficult to see
what could possibly be bad about us?
Here we have to be careful. Most, though not all, of the people
we might characterise as bad tend to see themselves as good. They
have reasons and justifications for their actions and they believe
wholeheartedly in these. We can even argue that what makes a person
‘bad’ is at least partially their own inability to see that they are doing
something bad. So what about somebody who sees themselves as
good? If they simply can't see what's bad about themselves, isn't that
bad too? Let's leave that question gloriously unanswered for the
moment and turn our attention to some of the people that we tend to
see as unequivocally, inarguably good. Say, for example, Mother
Teresa. Or perhaps, more to the point, Jesus.
Millions of people, all over the world, believe that Christ is the
ultimate manifestation of all that is good. They believe that nothing he
ever did or said was bad. They are entitled to that belief, of course.
They may well be right. But in refusing to accept that anyone could
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have no bad in them, they are taking a very big leap of faith. Implied
in this faith, amongst other things, is the idea that if someone else
doesn't believe in the same thing that they believe in, that person is
either bad or is subscribing to an idea that must be considered bad and therefore they must be well on the way to badness. The word
‘antichrist’ means precisely what it says. Someone who opposes the
teachings of Christ. Unless, that is, an antichrist is worse than that.
Someone who declares their own commitment to Christ but then uses
that faith to justify actions and attitudes that embody the very
opposite of whatever Jesus stood for.
This is all very tricky territory. I can feel myself getting bogged
down in it with each sentence that I write. I sincerely hope that I
haven't lost, upset or offended you so far. Stick with me, please.
Over the last 2,000 years, many terrible things have been done
in the name of Christ and Christianity. Dreadful wars have been
waged. Horrible punishments have been inflicted. From our more
enlightened perspective in this modern day and age, we can look back
on many historical figures and accuse them of having been anti
Christ. Yet some of these people saw themselves as being completely
and utterly pro-Christ.
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So, what is an antichrist? Whatever definition you choose to
settle on, it is certainly nothing new. The world has seen many
influential leaders on to whom it is perfectly possible to fix that label.
From an astrological point of view, there is absolutely no reason to
expect the imminent emergence of another such figure. Depending on
how you care to look at it, the world is already full of folk who fit that
bill or it is no more full of it than it ever has been. Or the whole idea
is just a nonsense. From a ‘consciousness’ point of view, we are
living in times of awakening awareness. More and more people are
beginning to suspect that if any idea or principle is ‘anti-Christ’ it is
the notion that ‘antichrist’ can exist.
This takes us right back to the whole debate about good versus
bad. If it cannot be good to refuse to see the good in anyone, no
matter how ‘bad’ they may be, then it must be bad to think that
anyone is completely and totally good in every possible respect. Too
often we look at the world as if we are looking at a movie. We
experience an almost primeval urge to identify heroes and villains.
We want the distinction between those characters to be black and
white, crystal clear, beyond all discussion and debate. Otherwise, how
do we know who to cheer for and who to hiss at? Each of us,
individually, must wrestle with our own conscience. We must ask
ourselves, ‘Is it ever really fair to be so dogmatic and judgmental?"
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Shades of grey are never as pleasing to look at, especially when
they are shades of grey within ourselves. But we can argue that we
show a much greater level of maturity when we are willing to
acknowledge their existence. More and more people are starting to see
those shades of grey and, as they do, the potential power of both a
Christ-like figure and a so-called ‘antichrist’ diminishes dramatically.
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Will the Earth collide with a giant comet or meteor?
No. Small meteors collide with us all the time. Planet Earth is, after
all, a spaceship. We are all passengers looking out through the
window that we call the sky. Our ship travels through parts of space
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that are heavily populated with celestial debris. At various points in
the year, particularly August and November, we make contact with
hundreds or thousands of those small chunks of rock. They burn up in
our atmosphere. We call them shooting stars. Every so often stray
celestial objects come relatively near to us. Some of them don't
completely disintegrate. Meteors land quite regularly. Very rarely do
they ever hit anyone or cause any substantial damage.
Such events will continue throughout 2012 and long beyond.
There remains a small chance that one of these days a much bigger
object may appear in our sky and that we may have reason to worry
about a possible collision. But if that were ever to be the case, we
would know about it. It would be detected in plenty of time and
governments would work together to deploy the very technology with
which they usually wage war to reduce the size of such an intruder.
Science and astrology don't always agree but on this subject there is
unanimity. Nothing like that is coming our way, now or in the
foreseeable future. Whatever else we may choose to lie awake at night
worrying about, we really don't need to let it be this thought.
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What and when is The Age of Aquarius?
The Age Of Aquarius is a song from the musical Hair. It was inspired
by a phenomenon well-known to astrologers and astronomers alike.
We call it the 'precession of the equinoxes'. I'm going to precis this
quickly and roughly or I will end up writing another entire book. One
good reason why I shouldn't do that is that my friend Terry
MacKinnell has just written one, The Dawning. It is published by
Xlibris, it is available on Amazon and it is 400 pages long. If you
want to know what I think about this subject, I think pretty much what
he thinks! And, as he explains himself very well, I can't see much
point in reinventing the wheel. The idea comes from the fact that the
stars in our sky move very slowly over a long period of time. They
also, of course, appear to move very quickly each and every night. As
dusk deepens we see one constellation on the horizon and during the
course of the evening we watch as it rises and then eventually sets
over in the west. But the reason for this is not the fact that the stars are
moving. It happens because we are moving. And what we see, when
we look at the sky reflects the spinning of the great, big round rock
below our feet.
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Other than the fact that they go up and come down every night,
those stars don't change their position. Or rather, they do, but they do
it so slowly that we can't see it happening. Happily, there have been
people on the Earth, watching the heavens for thousands of years.
Some of them have left notes and detailed measurements. Others have
been extremely clever and perceptive. They have worked out that the
Earth has a little wobble in the way that it spins. When I was a kid, I
used to have a spinning top. I don't know if they make such toys any
more. If they do I'm going to get some for my grandchildren to play
with. You pump the little handle at the top a few times and it starts
whizzing round wildly. Then gradually it runs out of energy. Just
before it comes to a halt, it slows down and begins to turn with a
distinct wobble. That's pretty much what the Earth is doing, although
it doesn't spin anywhere near so fast or we'd all be dreadfully dizzy.
This is not happening because we are slowing down (so there's no
need to worry). But our wobble, in principle, is a bit like that wobble.
As the top spins, the handle on the top stands still. As you watch it
during the phase when the top is slowing down and wobbling, you
can see the handle beginning to describe a kind of circle. If you stuck
a giant pencil on the top of the handle and fixed it so that the point on
the pencil touched the ceiling of your room, it would draw a little
series of circles that would all join together to make one big circle.
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If the Earth is a spinning-top, then the North Pole is like the handle. It
points up at the sky and lines up with a star that currently, we call the
North Star. As our North Pole describes that same sort of circle, over
thousands of years this causes our pole to align with a different star.
The pole star that we see today and that sailors navigate by is called
Polaris. It is not the same star as the one that they looked at a few
thousand years ago when they were trying to establish where North
might be. It isn't just the North Star that changes over time.
Approximately every 2,150 years the Sun's position, at the time of the
equinox, will have moved into a new zodiac constellation. Thus over
25,800 years (give or take) the equinox moves through each of the 12
constellations. The precession takes place in reverse order. It leads us
backwards through the zodiac. That's why astrologers now talk of us
leaving the age of Pisces and not, as you might expect, entering the
Age of Aries but instead, entering the Age of Aquarius. The Age of
Aries is believed to have happened between about 2,000BC and 0AD,
but these dates are very rough – and my friend Terry has his own take
on this topic.
By the way, this precession of the equinoxes is also the
technical reason why the zodiac constellations don't line up with the
zodiac signs that we use in modern astrology. It is this apparent
anomaly that causes astronomers to scoff at astrology. "What silly
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billies those astrologers are," say the astronomers smugly, "they say
the Moon is in Leo tonight, but if you look at the sky you can clearly
see that the Moon is showing up against the constellation of Cancer!
They must be as blind as bats as well as stupid and superstitious."
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Actually we know full well what constellation the Moon is in,
but we don't use constellations to measure the sky. We very
deliberately take 12 equal divisions of the 'ecliptic' (the sun's apparent
path around the Earth) and (even though we also know that the Sun
doesn't go round the Earth) we define our zodiac according to those
measurements. We do this because we know about the precession of
the equinoxes and we feel that it is more important to take these into
account than to stick with the strictly visual information in the night
sky. We astrologers have known about this for thousands of years.
The ancient Greeks (and, in particular, a rather clever fellow called
Hipparchus) studied precession, as did the Babylonians before them.
So the next time you hear somebody dissing astrology for this reason,
please feel free to show them what you have just read, or direct them
to Terry's book, or just do what I do... roll your eyes, draw a deep
breath and pray to the God of patience.
Anyway, where were we? Ah yes, the Age of Aquarius. You
really must want to know about this if you have managed to wade
through the last few paragraphs. I commend you on your curiosity and
commitment. The excitement, expressed in that musical, centres on
the idea that right now we are in a process of transition between one
age and another. It hangs on the belief that we are entering a new age
and that perhaps it will be a golden age. That's a very appealing
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proposition. It makes us feel special because it allows us to feel that
we have been born at an important time of great change. The new age
is dawning and we are here to greet it. Won't our grandchildren
admire us for that? And back in the Sixties, there were lots of other
reasons to believe that a new age might be dawning. All those hippies.
All those festivals. All those Beatles' albums. Even, indeed, all those
stage-plays where people got naked and sang joyfully.
So when precisely should we expect this new age to dawn?
Surely if it started 40 years ago, it must be well under way by now?
Well, here I must welcome you to the world of astrological debate and
discussion. It is simply not so clear-cut. First of all, we are talking
about a dawning. Think of what happens when you watch a sunrise.
That's a very slow process. It gets light before the Sun has risen in the
sky. It takes a fair while before you see the first golden rays come up
above the horizon. It takes even longer before the whole Sun is up in
the sky. And if you happen to be in a forest, it can take even longer.
You may not see the Sun until it has come up above the height of the
trees. That's just one morning. One sunrise. One dawning. Here we
are talking about a dawning that takes 2,150 years. Let's do a quick
calculation. Suppose a daily dawn covers a couple of hours. That's
one twelfth of a 24-hour cycle. One twelfth of a 2,150-year cycle is
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going to take more like 180 years – assuming you are not in a forest.
So with all that in mind, can we now return to the question: "How far
into the dawning of the Age of Aquarius are we now?"
Er… not quite.
Remember I told you that astrologers, in their daily work, don't
use constellations because we prefer to refer to equal divisions of the
ecliptic, measured from the equinox? Well, there's another jolly good
reason why we like to use those equal divisions. The constellations
are not equally spaced. Nor are they even of equal size. Those little
‘join the dots’ pictures in the sky are all well and good but you can
spend forever arguing about where they each begin and end and
precisely how many dots need to be joined into each of the symbols.
Even if you can reach agreement on this matter, you've still got the
problem of what to do with the gap between each constellation. If, for
example, there's a gap between the end of the Scales and the
beginning of the Scorpion, whose gap is it? Does it belong to Libra or
Scorpio? Or is it, as some people suggest (and others refute
insistently) a kind of grey area or no-man’s land? Remember, we're
not talking here about the zodiac signs that you and I look at each day
when we want to see our forecast. We are looking at the
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constellations, which have the same names as our zodiac signs but are
in different positions. Most modern astrologers only ever even think
about these when they are considering the question of the astrological
ages. As soon as they do, the same old debates begin.
"Is that bit of sky up there a part of Pisces or a part of
Aquarius?" The moment you ask a question like that, you get all the
experts murmuring. They become like rabbis, earnestly discussing a
part of the Old Testament and trying to work out what God really
meant - or like philosophers, determined to establish how many
angels can dance on the head of a pin - or even like judges on the
X Factor, wondering who to put through to next week's competition.
Nobody can give you a definitive answer. They can just tell you their
opinion. So we might as well put it out to the public and invite them
to vote.
Many different dates have been suggested for the start of the
Age of Aquarius. Some say we should take the beginning of the
Industrial Revolution. Others think it more appropriate to start with
the moment when we first put a man on the Moon. Yet more people
feel that we won't be living in a new age until we start putting women
on the Moon, and stop leaving it all up to the men. There are those
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who believe that the new age only really began when Tim Berners
Lee invented the internet.
My own personal opinion (and I know I shouldn't really add to
the confusion by throwing it in here but, hey, this is my article and I
am writing it) is that we can marry it all up to the moment in 1781
when William Herschel discovered a new planet called Uranus and
just a few months later the very first hot air balloons were invented,
giving us all the potential power of flight.
Actually, when I say that this is my opinion, it is what my
opinion used to be until I read Terry MacKinell's book. Terry reckons
that if we are going to use any technological breakthrough as our
marker point, we have to take into account the invention of the
printing press. That takes us back to the middle of the 15th century.
When he first mentioned this to me, I felt a bit cross. I wanted to say,
"Don't be so silly." But I didn't. He's a big chap and he's an Australian
too. It is never a good idea to argue with an Aussie. Anyway, I'm glad
I didn't because the more I think about it, the more sense I see it in it.
From a practical point of view, it works. There's your first glimmer of
light. There's information finally able to make its way to the masses.
The people who got access to those very first books must have felt
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just as liberated and amazed in their time as we feel when we type a
question into Google and get back a half-decent answer. You can, if
you want to get poetic about it, see the whole of the internet as a kind
of echo of that printing press discovery. The same note on a musical
scale, now being played louder at a higher octave.
Or, if you really want to start wearing puffy sleeves and giving
your hair a poet's perm, you could see the printing press as the first
glimmer of light after a long spell of darkness and the internet as that
same light, now much intensified, rising high in the sky and touching
everyone with heat and radiance. And when you stop to think about
the symbolism of Aquarius, it all figures. What does the water-bearer
keep in his (or her) urn? It is not plain old H2O. It is liquid, drawn
from the fountain of knowledge. Is this what the prophets meant when
they told us to look forward to an age of enlightenment? Apparently
so. That's a little disappointing for those who were hoping to see a
time when swords turned into plough-shares and lions laid down with
lambs. We are still a long distance from world peace and nor have we
found a way to share universal love. But then, I don't suppose that the
reality would have made the old song so exciting, "When the moon is
in the seventh house and Jupiter aligns with Mars, then this will be an
email planet and we'll all have Facebook in our cars."
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It is beginning to look very much as if we are already in the Age
of Aquarius and it is way past the dawning now. We may not be any
smarter than our ancestors were but we are undoubtedly better
informed. We are also a lot better connected. The great hope for
humanity is, perhaps, that as we evolve further we will reach a point
where we are truly driven by reason and understanding and that this
becomes the force that helps us all to end war and suffering. As we
discover more about who we really are and how we are relating to
each other, we may recognise the need to treat our planet with more
respect and become more appreciative too of our fellow human
beings. Maybe what catapults the whole of the human race into an era
of higher consciousness will be increased intelligence rather than a
deeper sense of love.
Terry MacKinnell
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What about the transit of Venus?
The most exciting thing about 2012 is the rare transit of Venus that
will take place on June 6. This, to all intents and purposes, is a kind of
eclipse but normally, when we use the word eclipse we think of the
Sun, the Moon and perhaps the shadow of the Earth.
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The Moon has nothing to do with this big event. The stars of this
celestial show are due to be Venus and the Sun. Venus, of course, is
the planet of love. Venus is named after the Roman Goddess of
Love, the same Goddess of Love who was envisaged by the Greeks
as Aphrodite.
Venus wasn't just any old goddess, she was the ultimate. The
most beautiful, captivating, seductive manifestation of femininity; the
most wonderful female fantasy figure, all flowing locks and glorious
figure, shapely and comely, soft, sensuous and girly. One brief look
into her eyes could steal the heart of any man… or woman. Long
before the world had heard of Marilyn Monroe, she was the supreme
centrefold, the perfect pin-up, the dream woman. And she was, of
course, made entirely of dreams. These were the days before movies,
photographs, even oil paintings. Nobody could say exactly what she
looked like because everybody saw her differently. Artists and
sculptors spent centuries attempting to capture her essence and create
her image. But none would ever dare to claim that they had shown the
world her true form for she was (and is) a goddess. Deities may
briefly take the shape of a mortal but they live forever in our
imaginations. They do not age, they are not flawed and they
encapsulate our own deepest hopes and wishes.
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What does Venus look like? If you want to see her, you must
look into your soul. She is a part of you. She belongs to you. She is
your own idea of the ideal woman. Whenever men fall hopelessly in
love, it is at the moment they gaze upon their partner or potential
partner and find themselves no longer able to recognise her for who
she is. Somehow, she has transformed herself before their very eyes
into their own living, breathing version of that eternal legend.
Whenever relationships crumble it is at least partly because Venus is
no longer so easily visible within the beloved. Thus Venus is a spirit,
a whim, a fancy, a fantasy. No woman has ever managed to
completely embody this endless desirability. But all have secretly
aspired to do this; many have consciously tried and some have come
surprisingly close.
What else can Venus do other than captivate and mesmerise?
She can reward and inspire. This is why she has also become
associated with the gift of creativity. She is the artist's vision, the
writer's idea, the composer's melody, the poet's elusive muse. She
does not simply represent physical attraction and earthly love, she
symbolises the joy and magic of spontaneous invention. Whenever
you are making something, creating something, conjuring a notion
from the ether of the unknown and bringing it into physical
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being, you are effectively embracing (and being embraced by) Venus
herself.
All of us can say that at some magical moment of our lives, we
have known her. None of us can claim that we own her. Venus comes
and goes from our lives. She visits but she does not take up residence.
She takes us for a journey but we can never take her for granted. In
this respect, she is a little like luck. We all know what it is to be
lucky, but none of us know how to keep hold of fortune and make it
do our bidding.
There are though, some who say that Venus and the love she
awakens in our hearts, counts for far more than luck. Luck turns up in
our lives, works a little magic and leaves. Venus turns up in our lives,
inspires us to work a little magic of our own and then leaves us with a
tantalising memory. For the rest of our lives we can look at the picture
we have painted, hum the song that has come into our heart or pursue
the idea that she has blessed us with. We may wonder how we did it
and feel bemused by the depth of inner talent that we once tapped
into. We may then understand why it is said that Venus can gratify yet
she can never satisfy.
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But those legacies of a Venusian visit can still last a lifetime.
They may inspire a symphony that millions will willingly pay to hear
– or even a business plan that proves profitable year after year. The
world may contain starving artists but none of these can truly be
considered poor, for they are all aware of the incredible wealth that
Venus has blessed them with. All this goes some way to explain the
traditional connection between Venus, the planet of love, and
opulence, luxury, comfort and sensuality. Nothing is more Venusian
than an expensive, exquisite item. If it is the finest, if it is the best, if
it is priceless beyond measure and precious beyond belief it, whatever
it is, belongs to Venus.
It isn't hard to see why Venus the goddess has given her name to
Venus the planet. For much of the year you can see Venus in the sky,
shortly after the sun has gone down. This is the planet so bright that it
shines. When, in 1806, the sisters Ann and Jane Taylor published
their song Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, it was the planet Venus that
they were referring to. But Venus is not always an evening star,
sometimes she is visible early in the morning, just before the Sun
rises. It is very important to understand this if you want to know why
this rare transit of Venus is so meaningful. The orbit of this planet
keeps it, on average, 108 million kilometres away from the centre of
our solar system. But the Earth is at an average distance of 150
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million kilometres. So we are always further away from the Sun than
Venus. No matter where we are in our orbit or Venus is in her orbit, it
always looks to us as if Venus is near the Sun in the sky. What
happens to an object that is close to the Sun from our perspective? It
becomes invisible! When the Sun is up, it shines with a light so bright
that all else is obscured. The sky turns blue and, against the backdrop
of the blue sky, not a single planet or star can be seen. We see Venus
only if she happens to be up just a little bit before the Sun or if she
happens to stay up a little bit after it. She may still be up, long after
she has vanished from our view, but the daylight stops us from
seeing her.
During a transit of Venus, that changes. A transit, like an
eclipse, requires two celestial bodies to be not just near each other,
but slap bang on top of each other. (Well, I'm talking about how they
look when we see them from here, not actually how they are in the
sky, but you take my point.) Once a century or so, we can actually see
Venus travelling right across the face of the Sun. She looks no bigger
than a tiny black dot – a strange, sleepy spider or a bewildered beetle
crawling gradually along the face of the great fireball. She can only be
seen for a few short hours. You can't even look at this without
wearing special eclipse glasses or making one of those funny
cardboard cameras that they tell you how to make in activity books
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for boys. But it is an amazing thing to witness – and scientists get
terribly excited about it. It allows them to make all sorts of
measurements. And, because it happens less than once a century,
some never live to see it at all, while others consider themselves lucky
to be experiencing a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon.
Even when it happens, it cannot be seen from everywhere on
Earth. You may have to travel a long way to catch it. That's why, in
1769, Captain James Cook found himself visiting Tahiti and making a
series of careful observations as he watched the transit of Venus on
June 3. Later on that very same journey, he discovered Australia. The
textbooks don't make much of this. They just give you the information
in a very matter of fact way. They say, "First he watched the transit of
Venus, and then he discovered a brand new continent." We
astrologers are inclined to read a much deeper level of symbolic cause
and effect into the whole expedition.
To see a transit of Venus is to be deeply and powerfully blessed.
Even to live in the world while a transit of Venus is taking place is to
be touched by the hand of the divine. Here, albeit briefly, is an object
of the night, revealing itself during the day. Here is the hidden,
suddenly becoming visible. Here is the stuff of our dreams presenting
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itself to us in our waking world. Transits of Venus take place in pairs,
eight years apart. You get a gap of 121.5 years between one pair of
transits, then another gap of 105.5 years before you see the next pair
of transits. The world saw a pair of transits in December 1874 and
December 1882. The next transit took place on June 8th 2004. I
remember it well. It was a gloriously sunny morning and I watched it
through a special piece of welder's glass in central London, by the
side of the River Thames. There was hardly a cloud in the sky and I
felt truly privileged to be witnessing this rare spectacle. In the time
that it took for Venus to slowly crawl across the face of the Sun, I
walked over the Millennium Bridge from St Paul's to the Tate Modern
and then made my way along the riverside to the London Eye,
walking backwards for much of the journey because the Sun was
behind me! I can't claim that the transit itself was so powerful that it
protected me from falling into the river. I had a friend with me who
was watching my step! Venus was still visible as I rode around the
big wheel, hardly able to take my eye off it for a moment. I felt as if I
was being blessed, as if I was gaining access to the deepest part of my
own inspiration and vision. I began to see new possibilities for myself
- and for the world. I guess you could say I was seeing new horizons
hoving into view.
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My own life changed significantly in the days that followed. I
reached the end of my contract to write forecasts for the UK Daily
Mirror and returned to the Daily Mail where my predictions, in
Britain, have been appearing ever since. I also found that my own
powers of prophecy were enhanced and increased. At the time there
was much competition between London and Paris. The two cities
were vying to be the hosts of the 2012 Olympics. Bookmakers
considered Paris to be the favourite. Half-way round my journey on
the London Eye I looked over towards the docklands and felt
suddenly totally sure that those 2012 Olympics would be happening
there. I said as much in public despite raised eyebrows from several
so-called experts who told me I was going to make myself look
foolish. I foresaw several other national and international events at
roughly the same time. None of these had quite such historic
significance but all of them were right. I remember thinking, "Next
time this happens, I'm going to take a notebook and pencil and a much
longer list of questions to answer." I've got my notebook and pencil
ready now. I may well travel to see this next transit of Venus. It will
be happening on June 6 and will be visible from Sydney, Melbourne,
all of New Zealand and many places across the Pacific Ocean. From
North America it can be seen only partially, at sunset. From Britain
and Europe, the Sun will rise while the transit is taking place. It won't
be visible at all from most of South America or Western Africa. The
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next transit of Venus won't happen until December 11, 2117 and –
even allowing for advances in modern medical science – I don't
expect to be around by then.
Now, in telling you how it influenced me, I am not trying to
give you the idea that the event is only any good for prophets, seers
and stargazers. It is a highly auspicious occasion for every single
person on the face of Planet Earth. It is a time when ventures can be
undertaken and new plans can be made, a time when we can all setoff to explore new horizons within ourselves. Most of the
conventional astrology textbooks make little mention of the transit of
Venus. But from the research that I have done, it would appear that
the second of the transits in each pair is the more powerful by far.
Even if you hardly noticed the first transit, even if little in your life
changed on or around June 8, 2004, you can expect a moment of real
revelation on or around June 6, 2012.
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Will solar flares destroy our communications
systems and shut off all the Earth's electricity?
Have you heard of sunspots?
These are little dark markings on the face of the Sun that come
and go every so often.
You can't see them with the naked eye because, of course, you
can't look straight at the Sun. Indeed, you can’t do that, even if you’re
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wearing incredibly expensive sunglasses that have been desgigned by
for you personally by Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana.
To study sunspots, you need to have special equipment; infra-red
cameras, satellite telescopes and sensitive monitoring devices. Or at
least, that's what you need these days. In times gone by, sunspots
were measured by little wooden boxes with mirrors or pinholes in
them. You'd point them at the Sun, then project an image on to a piece
of paper or a white wall. Over the centuries, various students of the
cosmos have built and used such devices. They traced the sunspots in
pencil and watched how they changed over time. Gradually they
detected a distinct 11-year cycle in sunspot activity. The numbers of
spots rise and fall rather like a slow tide. Once every eleven years
they give us a ‘solar minimum’. Five and a half years later, (more or
less, give or take, it's not exact), we get a maximum. The last solar
minimum was in 2006. The last maximum was in 1999.
Somewhat to their shame, most conventional astrologers have
been slow to make use of this 11-year cycle in their predictive work.
Traditional fortune tellers tend to be more interested in the cycles of
the traditional planets. Only a few, at the cutting edge of horoscopy,
seem to recognise the potential benefits of getting more 'sunspot
savvy'. These are our academic comrades: writers and researchers
who rarely see clients and never turn out zodiac forecasts for
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magazines. Every so often, they turn up at astrology conventions and
present clever lectures, accompanied by slides full of numbers, graphs
and diagrams. They are forever telling us that if only we all studied
the sun more carefully, we might find many useful correlations. They
insist that if we paid more attention to those appearing and
disappearing sunspots, we’d have a much better understanding of
the great cyclic rhythms on Earth, such as the stock markets, the
weather patterns and the rate at which pandemics come and go. The
rest of us attend their lectures, nod attentively... and then decide to
carry on as normal.
Thus, these poor old pioneers are almost universally ignored.
Their fellow astrologers glaze over when they talk and the grown-up
world of science won’t listen to them because what they’re talking
about is a link between what’s going on in the sky and what’s
happening here on Earth. That’s astrology, not astronomy. And as any
astronomer will tell you, with a strange mixture of glee and venom on
their face, astrology is not a fit and proper subject for any intelligent
person to study. It doesn’t matter how many graphs they’ve got on
their PowerPoint presentation or how many numbers they have been
quietly crunching... they are pursuing a ‘silly idea’. They are
effectively suggesting that you can ‘read meaning’ into the mind of
the universe. They might as well be waving a crystal ball for all the
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chance they’ve got of being taken seriously by a scientist.
Astrologers, therefore, tend to leave the sunspots to the
astronomers who completely reject the notion that anything in the sky
might ever be ‘trying to tell us something.’ It’s a good job they don’t
know my friend, Greg Sams, who recently wrote a book called Sun
Of God. In this book, he makes an impressive case for thinking of the
Sun as a living being. Indeed, not just any old living being like a
plant, a tree or a goldfish... but an intelligent, sensitive conscious
being, like a human. Well, not perhaps exactly like a human, because
humans aren’t always very intelligent or sensitive and nor do they live
very long... but more like the traditional idea of a deity with special
powers and a distinct tendency to live for millions of years.
Greg reckons that the ancient civilisations, who worshipped the
Sun as a god, might have had it just about right. I like Greg and I like
his thinking, too. Why can’t the Sun have thoughts and feelings? Why
can’t it make deliberate choices and take active responsibility for all
the planets that revolve around it? Why can’t it be clever enough to
know what it is doing and why it is doing it? But then, I’m an
astrologer. I believe in a universe where nothing happens by accident.
I live and breathe the idea that the cosmos is kind and caring enough
to help us all by using the planets to write messages in the sky. I know
that makes me seem extra silly in the eyes of most scientists. But I’d
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like you, please, to hang on to that thought for a while. It could come
in useful.
Anyway, that’s enough philosophy for now. I’m trying to tell
you about what scientists currently do think, not what they don’t
think. So I’m going to have to adopt a tone of voice that shows them a
little more respect. Scientists, even the ones who believe in God,
really don’t think that the Sun is a god. Nor do they think that it
knows (or cares) about human life. They think it is simply a ‘thing’. A
kind of big fiery machine. A system. A process A giant nuclear
reactor that just so happens to be sitting in the sky, emanating
warmth, light and enough gravitational pull to keep the planets
moving. They are only interested in solar physics and solar chemistry.
If you asked them whether, one day, we might be able to predict the
price of gold by studying sunspots, they’d raise their eyebrows in
despair. But if you asked them whether there’s a connection between
sunspots at their maximum and solar flares, they’d smile and agree.
They may also add that those flares are linked to a phenomenon they
call Coronal Mass Ejection.
A Coronal Mass Ejection is called a CME for short. It is not
quite the same thing as a solar flare but there’s nothing very elegant
about the letters CME. If I use them, I am going to have to pepper the
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rest of this piece with awkward initials and some of my readers are
going to notice how warm the room is, remember how little sleep they
got last night and how good it feels to have breakfast digesting in
their tummies. Next thing you know, I’ll be talking to myself... and
the people who are helping me market this book will be trying to sell
it as the perfect cure for insomnia. But I need your attention because
we’re talking here about what could be a very big issue. So I am
tempted to take a cheeky liberty and fudge right over the delicate
difference between a solar Flare and a CME. If that worries you, look
it up on Wikipedia. But if that kind of thing really does worry you,
you may find the next few paragraphs even more worrying.
Solar flares (oh, go on then, CMEs) are gigantic blasts of light,
gas and radiation that leap out all the time from the surface of the Sun.
Sometimes, they happen once a day. Sometimes, they happen five or
six times a day. Maybe more. We can’t see them all because even
with our super satellite telescopes, we can only see one side of the
Sun at a time. The flares that shoot out from round the back need not
bother us much. The only ones that really matter are the ones that are
seemingly aimed in the general direction of the Earth. These have an
impact on the Aurora Borealis or the Northern Lights. The Northern
Lights can usually be seen from lands that lie towards the tip of the
Northern hemisphere. They are common in places like Norway,
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Sweden, Lapland and Alaska. Sometimes they come a little further
south and provide a glorious display above Scotland, Northern
England and parts of the North American continent. Similar
phenomena occur in the Southern hemisphere. Those lights are called
the Aurora Australis. You get them in Antartica, South America, New
Zealand and, of course, South Australia. The lights are very pretty.
They are also, probably, a danger signal. When they are at their most
spectacular, the flares (whoops, sorry, CMEs) are at their most
intense. That’s when they are most likely to have an impact on radio
transmissions and may also wreak havoc with electrical devices.
Some pilots have reported bad radio interference when flying at times
of intense solar activity. Apparently when those CMEs are really
strong, they can mess with radio signals closer to the ground. They
can also mess with electrical cables, knocking out power lines and
depriving entire cities of their energy supply.
Oh dear. I just said CME again, didn’t I? Okay, let’s deal with
that difference. It’s probably worth the effort. A flare is made of heat
and light. A Coronal Mass Ejection is a massive burst of ‘solar wind,
other light isotope plasma, and electromagnetic radiation.’ That
means a CME doesn’t have to be visible. If it happens around the
same time as a flare, as it often does, you can see it coming. If not,
you’ve got to use lots of clever, expensive equipment to work out
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whether it has happened or not. Until, that is, it hits the Earth’s
atmosphere and causes those skies to start twinkling like Christmas
trees. And a CME can carry terrawatts of electrical energy with it. If it
could only be harnessed, you could use it to boil enough water to
make a nice pot of green tea for everyone in China. No wonder things
get tricky when a CME makes contact with a power grid.
Are you worried yet? I don’t see why you should be. I haven’t
told you anything that’s new. Probably, you’re just thinking, “Well
they come our way all the time and they’re full of electricity, just like
lightning. We know how to protect our power grids and
communication systems from that. I bet that some boffins,
somewhere, know exactly how to protect us from CMEs too.”
Right. Now you can start to worry. It turns out they don’t! They
don’t usually need to because of something called the Magnetosphere.
This is a kind of invisible force field, way out in the Earth’s
atmosphere. It does all the protection for us by deflecting the worst
damage that a CME could do. Or at least, it is supposed to. But the
Magnetosphere is a bit of a new discovery. The more we find out
about it, the less we understand it. And the latest news from the world
of science is that the Magnetosphere is holey. Not 'holy', like my mate
Greg thinks the Sun might be... but holey, as in full of gaping great
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holes. Think of it as a torn safety net or a pierced suit of armour. It is
vulnerable. And so are we.
You’re still not worrying, are you? You are thinking, “Well,
okay then. So that Magneto-thingummy has a few little problems. But
if they were really that bad, we’d all be goners by now.” I like your
thinking. That’s what I was thinking too, when I first began to read
those internet scare stories. But now, I’ve got to tell you why those
scare stories might actually be just a little bit, er... scary.
You’ve been reading for quite a while now. Feel free to stop for
a while and make yourself a nice hot drink. You can check your email
too if you like. I’ll still be here when you get back.
There. See. I told you I’d wait!
Right.
Let’s begin with a recap.
The Sun is lively and the Sun is moody. For years at a time, it
just sits around quietly at the centre of the solar system, twiddling its
thumbs and doing very little. Then, once every eleven years or so,
goodness gracious! It starts spitting out great balls of fire.
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So what kind of mood is the Sun in right now? It turns out that
we’re due, even overdue, for a solar maximum. It could come today.
Or tomorrow. Or some time in 2013. And it may just be that we’re
about to be treated to an extra special, super ferocious set of ejections.
Not all maximums, you see, are the same. Every so often, you
get a kind of maximum 'maximum'. We had one of those back in
1859. It really made the Northern lights look lovely but it caused a lot
of trouble to telegraph operators.
In 1859 we didn't have national power grids or radios but we did
have instant messaging... of a kind. Messages were sent manually and
slowly, from one part of the world to another, by a smart little system
called Morse Code. Telegraph operators would tap out at set of long
or short ‘beeps’, each of which translated into a single letter of the
alphabet. The person at the receiving end would listen out carefully,
clutching a pencil. They’d count the beeps, work out what letters they
were all supposed to be and then pass the message on.
Or at least, that’s what they’d do when the system was working.
Every so often, it would play up. And often, the problem would turn
out to be a Coronal Mass Ejection.
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In 1859, the problem was particularly noticeable because the
CMEs were particularly strong. So, what would happen if we were to
ever get another of those ‘maximum maximums?‘ You might think
‘Hey, no problem. We don’t even use telegrams any more,’
But now, we use systems that are a lot more sophisticated – yet
a lot more vulnerable. Our phones, our websites, our TV broadcasters
and our SatNavs all depend, to some extent, on satellites. They all
need signals that are likely to get bounced right up into space and then
bounced right back down again.
Remember those pilots and the problems they had with their
radios? Well, they were a lot nearer to earth than those satellites are.
The satellites are up in space. So is the Sun!
A 'maximum maximum' with a particularly angry Sun might not
just take out the electricity in a few cities for a few hours or a few
days. It could rip apart the global communication network.
Not worried? You think you’d be fine for a while without texts,
phone calls, Google maps and all your favourite satellite TV shows?
Well, maybe you would be. You might even find life more enjoyable.
But that’s not really the issue.
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You’d come across that, the moment you tried to use your
credit card. How is the store going to take your payment if the card
reader can’t contact the central computer to authorise the transaction?
Or if there’s no electricity to power the little screen and run the
machine that counts the notes? If you’re only trying to buy a pair of
shoes, it’s not such a big deal. But suppose you’re trying to pay for
your groceries?
Even if you’ve got a stash of cash under your mattress, the
shopkeeper isn’t going to want to keep it under his (or her) bed. He’s
going to need it to pay the wholesaler to buy more deliveries.
Assuming that is, the wholesaler isn’t suffering from a power outage
and a communication blackout too.
As an expert in electronic transactions recently observed: “The
modern world relies heavily on the technical systems that enable
commerce. Electronic banking, ATMs, debit and credit cards are all
interwoven into electronic networks that link you and your
money with the seller. These systems are fairly well secured.
However, there is one single point of failure for all of these systems,
and that is the power. The electric transmission system.”
The ‘big fear’ is that if we hit a ‘maximum maximum’ and those
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CMEs turn especially vicious, the world may have to try to remember
how it managed in the old days. But it may not be so easy to turn back
the clock. The previous systems were built up slowly, over time. Not
everyone is going to be patient. Some may get angry. And hungry.
They may even go crazy and start to loot, pillage and steal. The forces
of law and order might not be able to contain them because the police
would not be able to use their radios or take phone calls. The
authorities may even run out of money to pay for the fuel that the
police need to keep their cars on the road.
Those who seriously expect all this to happen argue that the
only way to survive would be to build a bunker, deep underground
and fill it with enough supplies to last a year or two, because this is
how long the crisis could drag on for. You'd have to live in the
bunker, eat out of cans and then take it in turns to man a machine-gun
post so that you could mow down all the thousands of desperate
people who were trying to get their hands on some of your precious
reserves.
They are thinking about bunkers because they fear that the
banks and the governments aren’t making any plans to minimise the
problem. And if you tell them not to worry because the solar flares
won’t be so bad, they will point to various leaked documents and
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surpressed studies that they have found, all of which suggest that it’s
not just potentially ‘that bad’... it’s worse! But then, people who think
seriously about bunkers tend, generally, to be pessimists. And
pessimists often secretly yearn for the day when their most negative
expectations are proved true so that they can tell the world ‘I told
you so.’
OK. That’s enough, ‘What if it all goes wrong?’.
It is time for some, ‘What if it all goes OK?’
Nobody knows for sure what the solar cycle is about to do next.
We could indeed be about to experience a maximum maximum. But
we could also be about to enjoy a ‘minimum maximum’ – a
prolonged quiet period in the rhythm of the sunspots. There’s
historical evidence to suggest that this has happened before. The
sunspots don’t peak every 11 years or so without fail. Sometimes,
they skip a peak. That might buy us another eleven years to identify
the weakness and guard against it.
And even if they do peak, we’re not automatically doomed. To
do damage, those CMEs have to be pointing right at the Earth and
they’ve got to line right up with the gap in the Magnetoshpere at
exactly the right (sorry, I mean wrong) moment.
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The best way to think about this is to imagine that you live by the
side of a very busy motorway. Cars and trucks hurtle past your home
day and night. You often think, ‘What would happen if one of those
drivers fell asleep at the wheel and went out of control? They could
easily crash right into your building.’ Then you reassure yourself that
there are crash barriers all along the side of the road. If a car went wild,
it would only hit it and then be deflected. Just as you’re about to breathe
easy, you notice that one of the crash barriers is faulty. If they were to
hit it from a particular angle, it would give way.
It’s fairly likely that there will be an accident. There's a very
remote possibility that this accident could happen just where you least
want it to. But there’s a much stronger possibility that it won't.
In my view, as a professional prophet, the luck of the human race
is going to hold. We may get a wake up call. We certainly deserve one.
But if it comes, it will take the form of a near miss. We may have some
power outages and some surprising communication problems. But these
will only serve to ensure that someone starts making some contingency
plans so that if or when it really, actually, happens we’re not so
dependent on surprisingly fragile technologies.
Either you have to trust that, or you need to start digging a bunker.
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What if we survive 2012 unscathed but find out that
it’s 2013 we really have to worry about?
2013 is going to be a fine year.
Nor need we live in dread of 2014, 2015 or indeed any other
year in the 21st century. There will, of course, be those who want to
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tell us that 2012 has been only the beginning. They may well propose
the suggestion that things can only get worse. But look around you;
what state is the world in? Things can and will only get better! What's
fascinating to me, as someone who has watched so many dates for the
‘end of the world’ come and go, is that I know of no other such date
on the horizon. I'm willing to bet that it won’t be long before
somebody picks another point in the future and tells us that this is the
real time that we all need to be looking out for and getting worried
about. I rather suspect that the doom-mongers will next set their sights
on 2020 – or perhaps, 2036. But I'm also happy to promise that the
world will survive these and all other such dates with destiny.
Our children, our grand-children and even our grand-children's
grand-children, have a fine future ahead of them.
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Afterword
In writing this book, I have expressed various opinions; some of
which are based on my experience of 30 years as an astrologer and
some of which are based only on my 54 years of being alive on Planet
Earth.
The trouble with having opinions is that they tend to put the
opinion-holder at loggerheads with other people who have other
opinions. Astrologers, generally, do better when they keep their
opinions to themselves or better still, strive not to have any at all.
If you really dig deep on the internet, you can also find people
who say that in 2012, we will be visited by ascended beings from the
Fifth Dimension who will help us all rise to an elevated level of
consciousness from which the whole world will appear
very differently.
Let’s hope they are right. It would be very nice to think that
such revelations lie in store for us all. If we do all enter such an
inspired and enlightened state, no doubt we will all see our opinions
in a new light and we’ll start leading far wiser lives.
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In anticipation of just such a shift, I apologise for the number of
opinions I have subjected you to.
But I don’t apologise for saying that the world will not end.
It really and truly won’t.
If it does... you can have your money back!
Jonathan Cainer