The world has “ended” many times. Every few years, doomsayers predict that the world is going to end. It ended once in 2000, and now again in 2012. There are various predictions about how the world will end – flooding and fire for instance – that reveal our fascination with doom. Celestial entertainment is popular, especially if it portends doom and disaster.
At the turn of the millennium, in the year 2000, a lot of people came to me and asked, “Sadhguru, the world is going to end. What should we do?” I told them, “What you should do is, after you spend your money on whatever it is you wish to spend it on, bequeath the rest to Isha. I have work to do after the world ends!” Nobody did anything like that because doomsaying is just entertainment and most believe such predictions only as long as it is part of entertainment, and not seriously enough to the point of giving anything.
Where did this number ‘2012’ come from, anyway? What is time but a human idea?
Neither the planet, solar system, nor cosmos have counted 2012. Mother Earth does not know what 2012 is; this is all human nonsense. Somebody just said, “This is number one.” At least if you had started counting from the beginning of the planet, maybe, but you just started counting whenever you knew how to count. According to the Hindu calendar, there are many hundred thousand years still left for the planet.
In Indic culture, people have been counting for much longer. We have calendars running 60,000 years into the past and hundreds of thousands of years into the future. Maybe the Mayan calendar ends in 2012, but we have yugas and yugas coming.
However, if you insist that the world is going to end on a particular date, then let us end it the way we know it. What we have known in the world, what has marked the history of humanity most, are wars and battles, famines and misery. The ugliest incidents in history are what we remember most. Let’s end that world.
Let’s create a world where we can experience the most beautiful things, which will be remembered for posterity. If we are willing, we can create a new world – a world that is inclusive; a world where strife and suffering do not dominate; where there is greater understanding.
Today, technology has empowered us in a way that one individual is able to achieve what one thousand persons could not do earlier. Because we are so hugely empowered, our consciousness is far more important than it was ever before. If we do not invest sufficient time, energy, and resources to raising our consciousness, we might have to pay a steep price.
For a shift in consciousness, we don’t need galactic help. If you are willing, it will happen – with or without a fancy date. As a generation of people, whether we make this into a great time or we make this into a horrible time, everything is in our hands. Let us strive together to make a new world possible that is free of the negativities of the past.
Nature only creates a certain conducive atmosphere. It is individual human beings who have to decide how to live in this world. Whatever the times, people have acted in ways that are good, bad and ugly. So, let us end the ugliness in this world, and make a new world full of intelligence, integrity and inclusiveness. We can make it happen.
