What does 2012 mean for us now? (Gregg Braden)

Fact: December 21st, 2012 signals the end of a Long and mysterious cycle of time-a Great World Age that began 5,125 years ago!

Fact: The end of such cycles in the past has triggered cataclysmic shifts that changed the face of the Earth and altered entire civilizations!

Fact: The predictions for 2012, and what follows Range from an era of chaos and destruction to a Thousand years of peace and cooperation!

What does 2012 mean for us today?

The answer lives as the message coded into an ancient map of time!

We're living the end of time. Not the end of the world, but the end of a world age-a 5,125-year cycle of time-and the way we've known the world throughout that time. The present world age began in 3,114 B.C. and will end in 2012 A.D. Because the end of anything also marks the beginning of what comes next, we're also living the start of what follows the end of time: the next world age, which ancient traditions called the great cycle.

From the epic poems of India's Mahabharata to the oral traditions of indigenous Americans and the biblical story of Revelation, those who have come before us knew that the end of time was coming. They knew, because it always does. Every 5,125 years the Earth and our solar system reach a place in their journey through the heavens that marks the end of precisely such a cycle. With that end, a new world age begins. Apparently it's always been this way. For at least four such cycles (or five, according to the Mesoamerican traditions of the Aztec and the Mayan people) our ancestors endured the changes in global magnetic fields, climate, depleting resources, and rising sea levels that come with the end of time. The fact that they lived to tell the story stands as a powerful testament to an undeniable truth. It tells us beyond any reasonable doubt that the inhabitants of our world have survived the end of world ages in the past.

Beyond simply surviving, our ancestors learned from the difficulties that can accompany the change. In the words of their day, they did their best to tell us what it means to live such a rare moment in history. It's a good thing that they did because such events are few and far between. Only five generations in the last 26,000 years have experienced the shift of world ages. We will be the sixth.

The present world ends at a specific time, with a specific event, on a day that was marked on a calendar over 2,000 years ago. There is no secret about that date. The Maya who calculated it also inscribed it as a permanent record for future generations. The date is etched into stone monuments that were built to last until the end of time.

When the date is translated to our familiar system of time, the message becomes clear. It tells us that our present world age will end with the winter solstice that takes place on December 21 in the year 2012. It's on this date that the mysterious Maya identified the astonishing astronomical events that will mark the end of our age, and they did so over two millennia ago.

What Does It Mean? What does such a rare moment in astronomical history mean in our lives today?

The truth is that no one knows for sure. We can't, because no one living today has a direct experience of the last time something like this happened. What we do have, however, are good indicators of what we can expect. We have facts. When we marry the facts of today's science with the wisdom and the historic records of the past, we find a story that's almost beyond belief. It's the story of a journey-our journey-that began so long ago that it has taken over 256 generations and five millennia to reach the end.

Now that we're doing so, we discover that the end is actually the start of a new journey. Perhaps poet and visionary T. S. Eliot best described the irony of an end being a beginning: "We shall not cease from exploration/and the end of all our exploring/will be to arrive where we started/and know the place for the very first time."

While the story of a shifting world age based in our planet's orbit through the stars may sound like the plot of a Star Trek episode, the celestial calculations that our ancestors left to us are surprisingly consistent with the scientific findings of today. When we put it all together, they tell the same story. With that story, we suddenly have a new meaning for the greatest mysteries of our past, as well as the clues that tell us what to expect in our future.

Fortunately, our ancestors left us everything we need to meet the challenges of a great world age. It's not only about cycles. It's about our ability to recognize patterns and where we are within the cycles. While quantum scientists tell us that we can never predict an exact future, what we can predict are cyclic probabilities for the future. This is precisely what the existence of repeating cycles of time demonstrates. Each time a cycle appears it repeats the general conditions that make something possible, rather than a precise outcome. Just as the conditions in Earth's atmosphere can create the perfect environment for a tornado without ever actually forming one, time's cycles can bring together all of the circumstances that led to an event in history, without that event occurring again in the present.

The key here is that the ingredients for a repetition are present and the situation is "primed." The way those conditions play out, however, is determined by the choices that we make in life. The beauty of such an understanding is that along with the moments in our time that are ripe for war, suffering, and chaos, we can also pinpoint the moments in our future that are ripe for peace, success and stability.

Time Code 5: If we know where we are in a cycle, then we know what to expect when it repeats.

To know in advance where our choices can have the greatest impact tips the scales in our favor as we complete the cycle that holds our well being and, ultimately our survival, in the balance. And that is the beauty of Fractal Time. Because the rhythms and patterns of nature tell us precisely when we can expect the repeating cycles of the past, they also tell us when we have the greatest opportunity to change the hurtful and destructive patterns of the past-the choice points-that create the new cycles of life!