Take It With A Pinch Of Salt

I was sat in an American diner, chomping down some French Fries that tasted somewhat tasteless, when I realised that you have to take everything with a pinch of salt.

The waitress was elegantly poised as she explained to me how the ‘moist’ and ‘unrefined’ qualities of the prestigious Grey Salt she was about to give to me would guarantee an enjoyable end to my stay at the B&B. I fingered the salt curiously, before clenching a small clump in my hand and spreading it over the plate of food.

When the waitress left, with a gleeful expression beaming from her high cheekbones, I began to think about the article that had kept me awake the previous night. It told me that I had just over a year left to live, that the world was coming to an abrupt ending on December 21st 2012. I spent the entire journey home researching the cosmic phenomenon on my iPhone.

I learnt that 21st December 2012 is the end date of a 5,125 year-long cycle in the Mesoamerican long count calendar, a dating system used by the ancient Mayans. This date is believed to mark a transition within humanity as a whole: a physical or spiritual transformation: a shift in global consciousness that could lead to a more enlightened presence on earth for the human population.

One new-age writer, Daniel Pinchbeck, claims in his book 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, that ‘materialism and the rational, empirical worldview that comes with it has reached its expiration date,’ he suggests that these pragmatic traits will be replaced by more ‘intuitive, mystical and shamanic,’ qualities. And to a certain extent, I’ve come to agree with him.

I spent a few weeks investigating the myriad of theories surrounding 2012, whilst munching away at bags and bags of salt’n’shake potato crisps. I found myself baffled by the complete lack of rationality, logic, and empiricism that dominated the discourse. I read a series of theories that, quite comprehensively, lined the spectrum of lunacy.

At first my exploration only led me to mild conjectures. Apparently a powerful ‘solar maximum’ would take place in 2012 and the excessive heat as our orbit brought us closer to the sun would cause the surface of the earth to melt, thus signalling the end of humanity.

This seemed viable to me, of course if we were closer to the sun the heat would be greater and if the change was drastic then the implications for us could be horrific. I phoned up my parents, my friends, and even my ex-girlfriends to tell them about my dangerous discovery. I was thoroughly distressed. Most of them seemed strangely apathetic to my warnings, with only my Uncle Gary even making the effort to ask me how I knew all of this. He told me to phone him back when I could verify the catastrophe with scientific knowledge.

However no such phone call was made. I learned from the U.S National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that the 2012 solar maximum is predicted to be ‘below-average’ in terms of irradiation, the weakest since 1928, and that it could even occur after December 21st and in fact take place in the spring of 2013.

After this scare I found myself craving cured meats and smoked cheeses as I carried on my study of the year 2012.
The next theory I looked into suggested that some kind of planetary alignment will create a combined gravitational effect between the Sun and a supermassive black hole in the middle of our galaxy, called Sagittarius A*. However I don’t think the author of this theory, Lauren Mora, will have gotten too many A* grades in Science at school seeing as the black hole she talks of is 30,000 light years away form earth and would have to be 6 million times closer to our solar system to have any gravitational effect, according to professors at the University of California.

I thought I was growing accustomed to the scaremongering and inaccuracies of the apocalyptic theories after systematically ruling out the chances of solar storms, magnetic pole reversals, earthquakes, supervolcanoes and photon belts by doing a bit of scientific reading behind the ideas. I felt like my capacity to be shocked had been saturated like salt in brine. That was until I discovered some of the more outlandish theories.

I was casually sipping on a glass of margarita when I came across a theory that shocked me into spitting out a mouthful all over the computer screen. As I wiped away the gritty green liquid I read about how a computer program called the Web Bot has predicted that a cataclysmic event will devastate the planet in 2012. The program, that is created by Clif High and George Ure, who call themselves ‘The Time Monks’, analyses ‘Internet chatter’ and shifts in ‘emotional tension’ to generate predictive reports of the future. It was not the idea of the end of the world that shocked me—I had just read a handful of apocalyptic predictions— but the ejection of my margarita was fuelled solely by my incredulity at the thought of such an idea receiving any kind of scientific credence.

I began to worry about the state of the world. A world where data on the Internet was being used to sell people bogus predictions of the future. It seemed like maybe Daniel Pinchbeck’s proposition was coming true, that rationality and empiricism were being replaced by mysticism and occultism. I relined my glass with an extra thick helping of crunchy sea salt as I contemplated a future where such absurdities were heralded as truth.

Another bizarre proposal that knocked me for six is Nancy Lieder’s story of how she was contacted by grey extraterrestrials called ‘Zetas’ in her childhood. She supposes that these alien beings implanted a communications device in her brain to contact her from the Zeta Reticuli star system, and that in 1995 they warned her of earth’s imminent collision with a large planetary object called ‘Nibriu’. The collision was originally pencilled in for May 2003 but Lieder has since aligned the apocalyptic clash with the 2012 phenomenon.

Scientists from NASA have repeatedly refuted the claim that a planet ‘four times the size of earth’ could exist within our solar system without, one: being seen, and two: effecting the orbits of the other planets. Astronomer Mike Brown notes that for ‘Nibriu’ to have no gravitational effect on the planets in the solar system it would have to be 1000 times further away than the distance between the earth and the sun (1000 Astronomical units) and that if ‘Nibriu’ were to travel that distance in less than two years, as Lieder purports, it would need to be moving at 2400 km/s which is faster than the galactic escape velocity. ‘At that speed, any object would be shot out of the solar system, and then out of the Milky Way galaxy into intergalactic space.’
Even though they are based on sound scientific knowledge, impossible assertions such as Brown’s that the planet ‘Nibriu’ would be expelled from our galaxy into intergalactic space, seem equally farcical to me as the bogus theories they are designed to debunk.

But little did I know there was still one more level of lunacy to go before the 2012 scale of insanity was to be completed.
Spiritual teacher and New Age author Terence McKenna proposes a theory so preposterous that I was moved to pinch myself with a pair of sharp pliers and fill up my bath tub with sea salt in an attempt to replicate The Dead Sea and cleanse my mind, body, and soul from the intellectually debasing content of his work.

McKenna’s 2012 theory is underscored by his love of psychedelic drugs, especially psilocybin-containing mushrooms and DMT. His ‘Stoned Ape’ hypothesis of human evolution suggests that as our primate ancestors moved from living in trees to open grasslands and savannas near the end of the most recent ice age they began to feast on psilocybin-containing mushrooms, and that this helped them acquire selective evolutionary advantages over other species that did not eat the mushrooms. He states that the effects of psilocybin, such as increased sexual arousal and ecstatic hallucinations were advantageous to the early humans as it encouraged the ‘development of spoken language in order to form pictures in another persons mind through the use of vocal sounds.’

In a similar vein of fashion McKenna attempted to use psychoactive drugs to better his understanding of humanity and the mysteries of the universe. He believed the drugs opened the mind up for ‘trans-dimensional travel’ and could enable him to communicate with spiritual ancestors and omniscient beings.

These drug induced unworldly affairs led him to discover how the story of the universe is simply the story of the ‘proton matter wave’s 13.7-billion-year-long fall into its own gravitational field.’ With some spurious references to Einstein and de Broglie he claims that on December 21st 2012 the wait will be over for the proton matter and the universe will be completed for eternity. He purports that we will enter into ‘Timewave Zero,’ a phenomenon that allows everybody to travel around the universe at the speed of light infinitely and timelessly, forever. The universe will reach ‘a singularity of infinite complexity, at which point anything and everything imaginable will occur simultaneously.’
The plot thickens…

This is all made possible by the tantric union of the world’s two most imaginative people with the hyperspace of the universe’s information, which he calls ‘The Superconducting Overmind.’ Humanity is condensed into one unitary being of interconnectedness, which leads to the human species taking complete psychokinetic control over the universe, ‘That is the ultimate goal of the universe’s existence.’

This was the point of no return for me. It sealed the deal. ‘Intuition, shamanism and a profound sensitivity towards the mystic’ has replaced ‘Empiricism, pragmatism, and rationality.’ But somehow, concurrent to Pinchbeck’s prediction, materialism still lives on.

Most of the writers I have mentioned are wealthy and successful in their own fields of study. It proves that there is a market for mysticism, and who knows, maybe the shift in consciousness has started a little earlier than expected. Maybe humanity is on the cusp of a spiritual evolution.

But of course, as I am telling you this, it is important for me to point out that I am spreading a small pinch of table salt all over my plate of mushroom risotto.