I was turned onto a site by listmember Bill Casey. If you want to quit your day job and get lost in internet info, have a look at http://www.pagenews.info, the site is run by Peter A. Gersten Esq., former Director of Citizens Against UFO Secrecy (CAUS).
I particularly picked up on one piece about the sense of time speeding up. It always bothers me when people speak of that, since it defies the laws of physics. I am not married to lawfulness across the boards, but there are limits to how far my mind will stretch and that idea is challenging. But, when I read this, about the Mayan calendar, I got some sense of how to interpret that idea to fit into the reality I know.

2012 – Are We on a Schedule to Cosmic Consciousness?

Here’s an excerpt:

I sense an acceleration going on; that time itself seems to be going faster each year, and most people I talk to have the same view. But is it really time that is speeding up? Here’s an analogy that may explain the relationship:

Imagine a ball rolling across a level surface, the distance it travels each second would be constant, apart from the effect of friction

– this is a linear approach that is similar to how we perceive life. However, if the ball were dropped from the top of a tall building, in the first second it would travel thirty-two feet. But the time it would take to travel the next thirty-two feet would be less than half a second as its speed would increase exponentially because of the accelerating force of gravity.

If you were a microbe on this ball, you might therefore conclude that time is speeding up. In this case it is not time that is speeding up, it is the distance traveled that is increasing each second. In a similar way, evolution is also exponential and time is not speeding up, but the number of events occurring in each year is increasing: It took two billion years from the origin of life to the creation of cells and just fourteen years from the PC to the World Wide Web!

To demonstrate the exponential nature of evolution, astronomer Carl Sagan imagined a cosmic calendar (Video is above) in which one year represented the whole of history from the start of the universe (big bang) until today. His powerful conclusion was: “We humans appeared so recently that our recorded history occupied only the last few seconds of the last minute of December 31st.” When this type of acceleration is plotted on a logarithmic scale, as was done by futurist Ray Kurszweil, the pattern unfolds as a straight line with events increasingly faster and faster. Author, Ken Wilber suggests that this scientific view of history as mere evolution suffers one great defect: “It cannot explain or even suggest the meaning of this going somewhere. Why evolution – What is the purpose of history?”

However, an alternative with striking similarities to the scientific version of evolution is the Mayan Calendar which provides not only a context and a structure supported by history; it suggests a meaning of divine importance. The interpretations developed by Carl Johan Calleman, an internationally recognized authority in Mayan history, detail this inspiring viewpoint and provide credible evidence of its validity.

According to Calleman, the Mayan Long Count is not a calendar of time, but is believed to be a sacred schedule of energy for the evolution of consciousness through time. Its date of creation is unknown in the mists of centuries BC. It is a schedule of incredible mathematical precision in which time accelerates in each of nine overlapping epochs.

They cover from the ‘big bang’ billions of years ago until ending on the same date: 28 October 2011. Each new cycle commences with a distinct leap, a quantum jump, into an expanded form of consciousness which develops and matures toward the end of that cycle. The nine epoch with their significant starting events are shown in the diagram below.

The first cycle of the nine, labeled the CELLULAR CYCLE, puts the start of the universe – the big bang – at 16.4 Billion years BC. This is remarkably close to the current expert estimate of 15 Billion years. Over this vast period the galaxies and solar system were formed, eventually followed by the emergence of cellular life by 1.26 Billion years BC.

To give an idea of acceleration nested in these cycles, 95% of the time passes before the next cycle is initiated. Each successive cycle is exactly twenty times faster and twenty times shorter than the one below. (The mathematical duration of each one equals 13 X 20x years, where x reduces each cycle.)

Finally, the last cycle, optimistically named the COSMIC CYCLE, will start 10 February 2011 and last only 9 months.