If we are to go by the various reported predictions from different cultures, made palpably real by the recent success of the Hollywood film 2012 in the popular imagination, it seems that end of the world is at hand. A great planetary alignment, a process that takes places once every 26,000 years, seems to be the main culprit for the disasters that will befall earth by 2012. As Doomsday 2012: The End of Days, a show in the History Channel, reveals: “Geophysicists have a theory…of a ‘pole shift’ in which the entire mantle of the earth will shift in a matter of days, perhaps hours, changing the position of the North and South Poles, causing worldwide disasters.”

It is the Mayan calendar from which this numerical figure is based, marking the 26,000-year earth cycle on the midnight of Dec. 21, 2012. “All moons, all years, all days, all winds, reach their completion,” the Mayan prophesied. “Measured is the time in which we can know the benevolence of the sun. Measured is the time in which the stars look down on us.”

For the New Age practitioners, they believe that the end of the world will not happen on the physical level but in the consciousness of man as humanity accepts a new world order that is governed by spiritual pursuits. In his book Secret Knowledge: The Keys of Enoch, Dr. James Hurtak writes: “Humanity must begin to understand that in a new era of true enlightenment, the exclusive material mind-set will have to pass away in order for human nature to implement new tools at quantum change.”

But what is special about 2012 is that various prophesies consider the year with particular importance: The Mayan Calendar, the “Bible Code,” the Chinese I Ching, and even artificial intelligence such as the “Web-Bot” project. The Lost Book of Nostradamus, an illustrated manuscript given to his son and later donated to Pope Urban VIII, is being interpreted to point to this year based on the seer’s constellation sketches.

The Mayan Calendar

The ancient Mayans, who were obsessed with time cycles, created the Mesoamerican Long Count Calendar, which can date solar and lunar eclipses and planetary conjunctions thousands of years into the future (with their suggested meanings). The Mayans were able to predict their own doom, the coming of “white-skinned bearded gods” across the sea on March 5, 1519, the precise date when Hernando Cortes and his conquistadors arrived in the New World.

Eerily, the Mayan calendar ends on the “13th baktun,” in the winter solstice of 2012: December 21. However, this is just the prevailing reading of the Mayan calculation. In fact, the Mayans made predictions for humanity well over the 13th baktun. The year 2012 is at once an end and a beginning of a new cycle.

The Bible Code

A computer program scans the Old Testament, in its original Hebrew writing without punctuation marks or spaces between letters, for cryptograms based on letter sequences and crisscrossing words. Prophetic words and letters form a cluster said to point to specific events. The “code” was discovered not by a fundamentalist but by a scientist—Dr. Eliyahu Rips of Columbia University, who is a leading expert in “group theory,” a field of mathematics used in quantum physics.

For example, the words “Hitler,” “Auschwitz,” and “Nazis” are said to be embedded in Dt 10:17-22, a passage reminding Israelites of their exodus from Egypt. In Genesis chapters 39 to 41, the following words are clustered together: Mapecha HaSarfatit (“French Revolution” in Hebrew), the French king “Louis,” the word “Beit”—the Bourbon royal dynasty, the French national anthem “Hamarseilles,” and the prison cell “Bastillia.” In Numbers 3:34 also, “Einstein,” “science,” “a new and excellent understanding,” “he overturned present reality,” and “theory of relativity” appear.

So what’s in 2012? In Dt 1:4 appears “comet,” “It will be crumbled, I will tear it to pieces.” And in Ex 34:10, “earth annihilated.” Nearer to count is 2010, thrice clustered: “L.A. Calif.,” “great earthquake,” (Ex 9:24, Nm 23:11), “fire, earthquake” (Gn 27:17).

Jewish rabbis, specially Kabbalists, say that according to the Jewish calendar, 2012 is the year we enter the Big Sabbath (Jewish year 6,000) when 1,000 years of sacred time and space begin after the 6000 years which is equated to the six days of a cosmic week. The Bible code says there will be a “spiritual redemption” by the coming of the Messiah, with the condition that “you will keep my Shabbat,” and “I will be a God to you and you will be my people.”

The I Ching

China’s oldest text, the I Ching or Book of Changes, is a fortune-telling code that works by tossing three coins, then drawing lines of heads and tails, repeated six times until a hexagram combination is made. A mathematical graphing of the I Ching into a map of time reveals a pattern. The 64 hexagrams repeat 64 times over history. Under its “Time-Wave Zero” calculation, the highs and lows of the pattern match significant periods of history such as the fall of Roman empire, the discovery of New World, and major world wars. The pattern comes to an end in one specific date—December 21, 2012.

The Web-Bot project

Web-Bot began in the late ‘90s as a program to predict possible stock outcomes for business consultants. The concept behind the Web Bot is to have a massive scanning of the World Wide Web, to comb into people’s “collective unconscious.” It works on a principle that messages transmitted from subconscious slips of Internet users come true as a kind of collective self-fulfillment.

So far, the web-bot’s track record is impressive. It predicted the 2001 anthrax attack in Washington, the December 2004 tsunami, the 9/11 terrorist attacks and Hurricane Katrina in 2005. A nuclear war and a series of catastrophes peak on 2012: solar event, plasma discharge, a burning of a big chunk of North America, and people in caves.

You can treat these prophecies as coincidence, accurate forecasts, or apocalyptic literature, but take them with a proverbial grain of salt. Since no one is really certain what will happen on 2012, it is up to you whether you will start living as if your timetable is already ticking. What’s certain is that something special is waiting for all of us in 2012.