What if the mesoamerican calendar, as represented by the great Aztec stone disk in the Plaza de Mexico, were right about the end of human time? It need not be correct for mysterious, cosmic reasons. It may be right for a confluent combination of reasons perceived and understood by many individuals on this planet; reasons that were neither imagined nor foreseen by ancient peoples of Mexico and Central America. We call such a coincidence “serendipitous” when the coincidence is fortunate or beneficial. It might well be more serendipitous than calamitous for the rest of life on earth (the biosphere) if human power to affect it were to shrink and vanish.
If, as bible-believers think, the human race appeared on earth to govern it and every other living form, that race so far seems to have failed its mission. Firstly, it still fails to govern itself uniformly and in concert, either as individuals or as nations. If persons managed themselves well individually, then communication and cooperation among them would be smooth enough to require little government, but government’s task of management would be rather light and easy. Looking broadly at human populations and cultures as a single entity, it seems there is no way to cure its illness, the illness of division stemming from irreconcilable differences. In turn these stem from limits both of information and willingness to be further informed. Ego-awareness (and its potential for unaware ego) filters away as much perspective as (and more prospects than) it affords. Most artists, such as poets, eventually learn this even if they cannot well articulate it, for creativity is never the work of ego alone, but interaction between conscious and unconscious things or processes.
The world’s religions so far as they have appeared, then split, multiplied, mixed and transformed, clearly do not hold the cure. If any one of them were cogent and true enough, it would have succeeded, after 6000 or more years of something called “civilization,” to have convinced all humanity of its indispensible worth. It would have provided people with a shared, psychological and cultural frame bonding them all together, efficiently releasing so much energy formerly drained by repression, conflict and destruction that the biosphere would be healed and preserved, with humans no longer running wild on the face of the earth and misunderstanding each other and the necessary basis of their (hither-to unnecessary) existence.
It is all-too-human to magnify oneself as indispensible, to the point of becoming superfluous baggage on the back of humanity. If the Aztec calendar is essentially correct about the end of our time, we will see global warming has become irreversible, global warring ineradicable and global government impossible. Yet, how near to us are all the solutions to our problems! It is hard to see that we merely need to agree on what in important and open our eyes to the attitude and action it requires. Yet, how certain it is that we will not agree before an asteroid shower sets life back to the microbial level. Yet, would this not be a fitting climax to, and punishment for, human hubris, our seemingly inborn impulse toward self-separation and ego-inflation? Time is running out and like Nero, learning that Rome is burning, we sing before worshipful sycophants and strum our lying lyres.
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