Time may be defined as a series of sequential moments in linear order. Just as a child recites the alphabet by running through a linear series of unique letters, so time runs through a linear series of orderly, sequential and unique events, from the beginning of time to the end of time.
Presumably time is a straight line that begins at one point, Alpha, and ends at another, Omega.
Most clocks, however, represent time as a circle. The small hand (hours) and the big hand (minutes) run round and round, through the same sequence of 12 numbers, over and over and over again. There is no end to the number of times that the hour hand, the minute hand or the second hand on a clock may sweep through the same sequence.
Circular clocks imply that time is indeed a series of sequential moments that follow one another in an orderly and sequential manner, but the series is cyclical and recurrent -- at 12 midnight a clock magically resets itself, and starts all over again.
At midnight on December 31st, our calendars act like circular clocks and do the same thing: They magically reset themselves to zero and start the sequence of 12 months all over again. The 12 days of Christmas (December 25 to January 6) neatly bracket that magical zero-hour, and thus they represent in miniature the twelves months of the year and the twelve astrological signs of the celestial zodiac.
Like a snowglobe, Christmas represents the magical circle of time in one small and beautiful crystal ball. In the center of that crystal ball, one may see the image of a father, a mother and a baby held in the mother's arms (the past, the present and the future) joined together in a happy family group.
What is this picture trying to tell us?
Be joyful and glad! Life may sometimes seem to be linear, at the end of each year it may seem to end in gloom, doom, winter, death, despair and darkness, but in fact life is a great circle. At the end of each cycle of time, the clock does not stop. Sunset is followed by a new sunrise. Winter is followed by another Spring. Death is followed by birth, resurrection and a new generation of life.
Time does not stop. Life goes on. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.
Recently, a number of books on the year 2012 have made people begin to wonder if time and the world are about to end. As proof, they point to the Mayan calendar, which ends on the date 21 December 2012.
Obviously this is a very linear, straight-line way of looking at things. It's a philosophy of time that places little or no faith in the great circle of time or the power of life to regenerate. It believes in abrupt beginnings and dead ends.
This "End Time" view of 2012 is the natural opposite of the Big Bang Theory of creation, and it is the necessary corollary of such a linear hypothesis of time. If time and the universe began at point Alpha with a Big Bang, then surely there must be some final point in time, point Omega, where time and the world come to a screeching halt with a Big Crash or a Big Thud.
To straight-line thinkers, the Mayan calendar suggests we are going to reach point Omega in 2012 because 21 December 2012 marks the end of the Mayan calendar.
Should we all panic, then, and run around like Chicken Little shouting that the sky is about to fall on us? Of course! Start screaming right now. But only if you really believe that time is linear.
The Mayan calendar itself is a big circle, and one must emphasize that the Mayans believed that time was cyclical. December 21, 2012 may represent the end of a great cycle, but one must underscore the word cycle. The Mayans were not linear thinkers.
The Mayans thought of time and life as a great circle.
One might ask anyone who is worried about time ending, how did they know that it would not end at midnight on December 31st, 2011? After all, that was the last day on just about every 2011 calendar ever sold.
Why did all of the calendar makers make December 31 the very last day in 2011? Why didn't they keep the 2011 calendar going? Was it because they knew that the world was going to end on December 31 at midnight?
Or did they, like the Mayans, stop there because that was the end of a single cycle?
The Mayans assumed that people in the future would be bright enough to realize that calendars, like alphabets, are linear measurements of cyclical time. All calendars must come to an end. They end when they have finished summarizing a single cycle of the never-ending cycle of time. The fact that a single calendar has come to an end does not mean that time itself is going to dead end.
The Mayans assumed that the people of our generation (a generation that they imagined as the distant future) would be bright enough to understand the circular nature of time. They never imagined that millions of people would be running around in 2012, freaking out over the end of a calendar the Mayan priests had carved on a temple wall, thinking that time itself was going to stop.
Just in case future generations really were that stupid, the Mayans decided to portray time as a big circle or wheel. They trusted that we would understand what a circle means.
What were they thinking?
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