2012 and Beyond:

http://www.about2012andbeyond.com/2012/11/12/conversations-with-jim-selfand-gregg-braden-2012/

Gregg Braden has made it his mission to build a new wisdom bridging insights from science and spirituality. For over 22 years, Gregg Braden has searched high mountain villages, remote monasteries and forgotten texts to uncover their timeless secrets. Combining his discoveries with the best science of today, his original research crosses the traditional boundaries of science, history, and religion offering fresh insights into ancient mysteries. In doing so he has redefined our relationship to our inner and outer worlds, while sharing his life-affirming message of hope and possibility. Exclusive for OPEN EXCHANGE readers, Gregg shares a sample of his upcoming multimedia presentation. Here is our transcription: On Manifesting Peace In The World If you choose to participate in the healing of your body or in the cohesive nature of your family, if you want to bring peace and cooperation, communication in your family, in the boardroom, in an office, as an individual, or when many people get together and pool these experiences collectively, they have actually been documented to affect broad geographic areas. It's about the quality of feeling that we have in our hearts. In the early 1980s, before the science had fully documented the effects, a group of 200 people were trained to feel peace in their hearts. They weren't thinking it, they weren't praying for it, they weren't wishing for it. They were feeling as if the peace was already present, claiming it in the present, in their hearts. They were stationed throughout the war-torn areas of the Middle East, what at that time was the first Israeli/Lebanese war. And what the scientists found statistically, is that the terrorist activity stopped, altogether, during the window of time that these things were happening. Crimes against people declined. Emergency accidents in hospital rooms declined. Traffic accidents declined. And when they stopped [manifesting peace] all these things reversed. The results were published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution in 1988, and the bottom line is that human experience has a direct effect on the quality of life in a broad geographic area, during the period of time that the experience is present. This brings to light the core principle of the spiritual traditions, which says that this isn't something we're intended to do for a few moments and then stop. It's a way of being that never ends. It's a way of living

our lives, living a heart-based experience, to the best of our abilities living in care, in gratitude, in appreciation, in compassion throughout every moment of every day of our lives. On 2012 and World Age Cycles Almost universally, ancient texts and traditions tell us that we're living this pivotal moment in the history of our world, and in the history of our civilization. And as a scientist, when people ask me my take on this, and specifically around the year 2012, what I understood is that I had to understand the thinking of our ancestors. And that thinking led me into the leading-edge science of what we're discovering about our world. And it's all about cycles of time. So, a couple of facts: We, this generation is living the last years of a rare, mysterious cycle of time that began 5,125 years ago. It's called a Great World Age. The Present World Age began in the biblical area in 3114 B.C., and it ends in a rare astronomical event December 21, 2012. Those are facts. And it is a fact that there have been at least four world ages before this one. We're living the fifth and moving into the sixth. And it is a fact that at the end of each world age, the end of that cycle of time coincides with physical changes on Earth that are directly linked to cycles where Earth is located in space. So, the fact that the world is changing nowthere's the perception that Earth is broken and that we somehow have broken itand as a scientist what I know is that because we're living a cyclic experienceit's not the first and that if we know where and how to look into the past it will help us to understand how to prepare for what we can realistically expect, beyond all of the media hype and fear. And it's through places like the ice cores in Antarctica, where we can go back almost 500,000 years and look at every year of Earth's history and compare those years to now, that we arm ourselves with the facts of what we can realistically expect. And this is where it gets so fascinating, because the climate change that we're experiencing now has happened every 5,000 years for the last three World Age cycles. The tilt, the rotation, the angle of Earth in space is what triggers many of the physical changes that we're experiencing now. It changes the way we live our lives. Our systems are stressed, and in that stress we must make a choice of whether we work together to meet the changes, or whether we compete and fight against one another.

Ancient and Modern Wisdom The best minds of our time are telling us that we're living an unprecedented series of crises. Never have so many people been faced with so many crises, and each crisis of such magnitude, all of which are occurring in such a short window of time that must be solved so quickly, within the next five to ten years. The best minds are telling us that this has never happened before. Scientific American released a special edition in September of 2005 called "Crossroads for Planet Earth," and they identified the fact that we are at this unique juncture in civilization and in the

history of our planet. The purpose was to bring the general public up to speed on the fact that so many crises are converging in this window of time. Now, as a scientist when I see that my question is, "Why?" What we know is that the physical conditions here on Earth change on a rhythmic basis, on a cyclic basis. But there's so much time between one cycle and the next that we tend to forget what that means. So when the change does happen, we think that the Earth is broken. And the reality is that we're living a cyclic change now that our ancestors have been preparing us for 5,000 years, in the language of their time, since they lived through the last change. In their words, they attempted to tell us what we could expect and how to prepare. Our own science now is confirming that we're living through cyclic change. The very prestigious journal Nature published a series of articles showing, number one, that there is a very powerful source of energy, that there's a magnetic field in the center of our Milky Way galaxy that has profound influence upon life here on Earth. And that's news from the scientific community. Intuitively that makes sense. The second discovery is that Earth's location in space determines how we are influenced. Sometimes we're closer to that field and the influence is greater. Sometimes we're further away and the influence is less. And, our location changes on a cyclic basis. This is our own science telling us what our ancestors said through stories and analogy and, perhaps metaphor, for perhaps thousands of years. We just happen to be the generation living when we experience the end of one of these cycles and the beginning of the next. Even though we have technology that wasn't here 5,000 years ago, the stress is the same. And the bottom line for all of us is that the systems that are no longer sustainable under the stress of the change are the ones that break down pretty quickly. We're looking at economic systems breaking down, where one person benefits at someone else's expense, and we depend on ever expanding markets. At energy systems, fueling the planet with a finite source of fossil fuel that destroys the very planet that we love and cherish. These may work for a period of time but they're not sustainable in the long run. These are the kinds of things that are breaking down. So what people see is chaos. If we look closely, the only chaos is coming from the systems that are no longer sustainable. The ones that seem to work pretty well are continuing to work pretty well. And those are things like local communities growing their own food, for example. Local, organic community farms, sustaining food for their community. That seems to be working pretty well. And resorting to barter. A lot of barter systems are working really well, where the economic systems don't seem to be working so well. People relying on their own skills and living more sustainable kind of lifestyles, who are not so dependent on a large infrastructure are the things that are working pretty well right now. On Energy and Abundance Abundance is our natural state. It is a scientific fact, proven mathematically, that there is tremendous amounts of energy in what's called Zero Point Space. It's a

potential, and tapping into that potential is where I think our civilization ultimately will go. It's not going to happen overnight. Meanwhile, because nuclear energy technology has been proven to be safe when it is engineered well and all the protocols are followed, it may be a bridge technology to the future.... -------------------------------------------------------------------------------Fact: December 21st, 2012 signals the end of a Long and mysterious cycle of timea Great World Age that began 5,125 years ago! Fact: The end of such cycles in the past has triggered cataclysmic shifts that changed the face of the Earth and altered entire civilizations! Fact: The predictions for 2012, and what follows Range from an era of chaos and destruction to a Thousand years of peace and cooperation!

What does 2012 mean for us today?

The answer lives as the message coded into an ancient map of time! We're living the end of time. Not the end of the world, but the end of a world age-a 5,125-year cycle of time-and the way we've known the world throughout that time. The present world age began in 3,114 B.C. and will end in 2012 A.D. Because the end of anything also marks the beginning of what comes next, we're also living the start of what follows the end of time: the next world age, which ancient traditions called the great cycle. From the epic poems of India's Mahabharata to the oral traditions of indigenous Americans and the biblical story of Revelation, those who have come before us knew that the end of time was coming. They knew, because it always does. Every 5,125 years the Earth and our solar system reach a place in their journey through the heavens that marks the end of precisely such a cycle. With that end, a new world age begins. Apparently it's always been this way. For at least four such cycles (or five, according to the Mesoamerican traditions of the Aztec and the Mayan people) our ancestors endured the changes in global magnetic fields, climate, depleting resources, and rising sea levels that come with the end of time. The fact that they lived to tell the story stands as a powerful testament to an undeniable truth. It tells us beyond any reasonable doubt that the inhabitants of our world have survived the end of world ages in the past. Beyond simply surviving, our ancestors learned from the difficulties that can accompany the change. In the words of their day, they did their best to tell us what it means to live such a rare moment in history. It's a good thing that they did because such events are few and far between. Only five generations in the last 26,000 years have experienced the shift of world ages. We will be the sixth.

The present world ends at a specific time, with a specific event, on a day that was marked on a calendar over 2,000 years ago. There is no secret about that date. The Maya who calculated it also inscribed it as a permanent record for future generations. The date is etched into stone monuments that were built to last until the end of time. When the date is translated to our familiar system of time, the message becomes clear. It tells us that our present world age will end with the winter solstice that takes place on December 21 in the year 2012. It's on this date that the mysterious Maya identified the astonishing astronomical events that will mark the end of our age, and they did so over two millennia ago.

What Does It Mean? What does such a rare moment in astronomical history mean in our lives today?
The truth is that no one knows for sure. We can't, because no one living today has a direct experience of the last time something like this happened. What we do have, however, are good indicators of what we can expect. We have facts. When we marry the facts of today's science with the wisdom and the historic records of the past, we find a story that's almost beyond belief. It's the story of a journeyour journey-that began so long ago that it has taken over 256 generations and five millennia to reach the end. Now that we're doing so, we discover that the end is actually the start of a new journey. Perhaps poet and visionary T. S. Eliot best described the irony of an end being a beginning: "We shall not cease from exploration/and the end of all our exploring/will be to arrive where we started/and know the place for the very first time." While the story of a shifting world age based in our planet's orbit through the stars may sound like the plot of a Star Trek episode, the celestial calculations that our ancestors left to us are surprisingly consistent with the scientific findings of today. When we put it all together, they tell the same story. With that story, we suddenly have a new meaning for the greatest mysteries of our past, as well as the clues that tell us what to expect in our future. Fortunately, our ancestors left us everything we need to meet the challenges of a great world age. It's not only about cycles. It's about our ability to recognize patterns and where we are within the cycles. While quantum scientists tell us that we can never predict an exact future, what we can predict are cyclic probabilities for the future. This is precisely what the existence of repeating cycles of time demonstrates. Each time a cycle appears it repeats the general conditions that make something possible, rather than a precise outcome. Just as the conditions in Earth's atmosphere can create the perfect environment for a tornado without ever

actually forming one, time's cycles can bring together all of the circumstances that led to an event in history, without that event occurring again in the present. The key here is that the ingredients for a repetition are present and the situation is "primed." The way those conditions play out, however, is determined by the choices that we make in life. The beauty of such an understanding is that along with the moments in our time that are ripe for war, suffering, and chaos, we can also pinpoint the moments in our future that are ripe for peace, success and stability. Time Code 5: If we know where we are in a cycle, then we know what to expect when it repeats. To know in advance where our choices can have the greatest impact tips the scales in our favor as we complete the cycle that holds our well being and, ultimately our survival, in the balance. And that is the beauty of Fractal Time. Because the rhythms and patterns of nature tell us precisely when we can expect the repeating cycles of the past, they also tell us when we have the greatest opportunity to change the hurtful and destructive patterns of the past-the choice points-that create the new cycles of life!