8) Transcendence: Is It Culturally Shaped or Is "Their Something" Universal?

Abstract" The Geometric Bridge across Global Consciousness: 2012, the Milky Way, and the Hyper Cube" Bethe Hagens, Ph.D. Goddard College, IBA Faculty Walden University, School of Public Policy and Administration. For more information on this symposium and the conference see http://www.sacaaa.org

In this presentation, I explore the consciousness phenomenon of 2012—“End of the Calendar/End of the World” thinking and emotion that is arising as sacred mythology in popular and empirical cultures across the globe. I propose geometric visualization as a largely unacknowledged psychic epistemology, drawing examples from Celtic and Etruscan archaeological sites; Plato’s Timaeus; graphic and mythological representations of the sky made by Greek, Egyptian, and pre-Columbian American cultures; the Book of Revelation; Lakota star knowledge; and contemporary scientific speculation on galactic cannibalism.

In all of these systems of imagery, two symbols serve as anchor points: the “bridge” of the Milky Way which divides the sphere of the night sky; and the so-called Hyper Cube, a classic representation of divine/astrophysical wisdom descending to Earth, “as above, so below.”

Earth’s axis of rotation has reached an extreme in its 26,000 year cycle of precession, which coincidentally can be observed with the naked eye as the winter and summer solstice sun appearing to rise and set “in” the Milky Way. Approximately 13,000 years ago, when this same unique dual solstice phenomenon could be observed, a disastrous cosmic event—a near-pass or collision of a comet or meteor with North America—drastically upset life across the planet.

I propose that geometric consciousness exploded across human cultures in attempts to explain and give meaning to this event in terms of the division of the sphere of the sky into quadrants, octagons, hoops, the upper and lower world, and a heavenly Cubic shape “holding” a future point in Time that would determine the fate of Earth.