Marc Schultz

Ends of the earth

I work the web exclusive reviews, so more or less every nonfiction book that doesn't get reviewed in print (for any number of reasons, including but not limited to timing, content, and the relative merits of a ton of other books) comes to me. These include all kinds of books about 2012, which, not incidentally, is my new favorite thing to read about.

Quetzalcoatl crop circles, Wiltshire, UK, Aug. 2004

I've just finished two newish titles on the subject: Daniel Pinchbeck's personal odyssey 2012: The Return of Quetzlcoatl (out last spring from Tarcher/Penguin), which is good (Really good. But flawed); and Llewellyn's brand new The Gaia Project 2012: The Earth's Coming Great Changes by Hwee-Yong Jang, a charmingly inept translation -- from the Korean -- of a nuts-and-bolts primer on how the universe works (hint: not how you think).

They're entirely different kinds of books -- one's a (very) personal psycho-spiritual journey, the other's an efficient guide to the end of the world -- but Pinchbeck is the clear winner in terms of audience appeal. His is an epic tour, with a Fox Mulder- type mix of professional skepticism and "I want to believe" sincerity, through what mysteries remain in this Wikipedian world of universal knowledge: crop circles, alien abductions, fungal consciousness, hallucinogens, crummy marriages and ancient Mayan prophecy.

Jang, a business professor-turned-enlightened entity, doesn't have any of that. But he does have this:

"From the beginning of the year 2005, all of the beings experiencing physical deaths can no longer enter the spiritual world and instead have to go to one of large space ship and wait to leaving for new world in the outer space."

Yep, that quote is all [sic]. Jang outweirds even the Mayans. The way he sees it -- and, despite the corrupting influence of big New Age book money, I believe he's sincere -- 2012 happens to be the year that the purification of the earth's energy (by means of natural disasters, global warming and a major shift in the earth's axis) reaches completion, at which time the entire planet will ascend into the fifth dimension as a body of pure energy, which will ultimately raise the consciousness of every being in the universe (a plan devised, in a Douglas Adamsesque explanation, by hyperintelligent tenth-dimensional beings).

Yes, it's confusing (Jang's word, and he uses it a lot), but in no way a downer -- the calamities we've got coming to us in the last years of the material world are all for the good, as is our transition to the fifth dimension. Jang's advice is, comfortingly, also more or less straight Adams: don't panic. And visit my web site.

Posted by Marc Schultz on March 15, 2007 | Comments (1)