I was disappointed with this book to say the least. As anyone who reads the " 2012 books" knows, there are a lot of the New Age theories that go with the whole 2012 idea. I'm not a believer on any of those theories and think a lot of them are extremely far fetched. It seemed to me that the majority of this book and it's essays fell in line with the New Age possibilities. There were only a couple of essays that I thought had any substance and grounding which one was in part one and the other in part two. The other 24 essays were just a bunch of New Age mumbo jumbo (which is great if you like that kind of stuff)!

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2012 scares me and this book is a collaboration of people from all walks of life and their take on what is to/not to happen in 2012. So it's very interesting to see others veiwpoints.

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I was fairly convinced that there was something to all the 2012 rumors, up until the time I read this book. This is one of the most turned-to references on 2012, and if this book reflects the level of substance to the 2012 prophesies, then that means that there is nothing to the rumors at all.

While it is true, as the other reviewers point out, that this book contains a variety of differing opinions, those reviews do not indicate the extremely poor scholarship that those opinions represent. To be fair, I could only bring myself to get through 313 of the 398 pages in this book, but in those 313 pages, I was stunned at how badly written, researched, and thought-through almost all of the essays were. Many of them share the common theme of badly misunderstanding the cultures that they claim to be drawing from (Buddhism, in particular, is a favorite for authors in this book to misunderstand). Almost all of them share the common theme of having insurmountable source citation problems. For instance, among the few essays that even bother to cite sources for their ridiculously outlandish claims, many of them cite only other works by the same author. An article by Gill Edwards entitled "Wild Love Sets Us Free" is exemplary in this, making nonsensical claims that, among other things, "Trying to be good and virtuous leaves us feeling lonely and disempowered. Whenever we try to be good, we allow ourselves to be controlled by other people...we cut ourselves off from the our emotional/intuitive guidance--the God within us--which is constantly guiding us toward the fulfilment of our desires. Life becomes a joyless treadmill" (page 233). Of Edwards' four citations, one of them is of herself, and another reads, in its entirety, "Jung, Carl."

More common than insufficient citations is a failure to cite at all which, in a book as off-the-deep-end as this one, is unacceptable if the authors want to be taken seriously. Of the twenty-six essays in this book, only ten even bother to make an attempt at citation.

The only trend more common in this book than a failure to cite sources is a failure to write about anything pertaining at all to 2012, which I felt as an insult to the readers. For instance, it was painfully obvious in the essay "Socially Responsible Business and Nonadversarial Politics" by Corinne McLaughlin that McLaughlin had originally written the article for a purpose entirely unrelated to 2012, and had just inserted phrases like, 'This may happen by 2012' in a few places in order to mask the essay's irrelevance. Many of the authors love to use the words "inter-galactic" and "hyperdimensional," to a point that their writing almost becomes self-parody in how hollowly verbose it tries to be. Many of the essays, in particular one by an "artist" who calls himself only "Janosh," are shamelessly self-serving promotions of other products made by the author. If you are not inclined to discredit these based only on this, consider this quote from Janosh's essay: "Now, let me tell you how I came to know some beings from another dimension: the Arcturians" (page 267). Janosh goes on to explain that after a rare cosmic alignment, he "experienced a visit from the Arcturians" (page 267), in which he saw visions of colors and shapes which he then made into art that you can buy a collection of. The Arcturians, as he claims, communicate with humans using crop circles: "The purpose of the Arcturians' 'supernatural' communication through crop circles is to guide humankind in its evolution to a higher level of consciousness. By using the energy, ancient symbols, codes, and holographic blueprints apparent in the crop circles, the Arcturians help prepare us both consciously and subconsciously for new times ahead, and especially for 2012" (page 269).

I was particularly interested in the Mayan prophesies for 2012, which are at the root of almost all 2012 predictions. The Mayan end-date, however, is dealt with in only one of the four sections of this book, which includes an essay by Jose Arguelles, the man responsible for first bringing the Mayan end-date predictions to light in his 1987 book, "The Mayan Factor." If you want to get to the heart of the Mayan relevance to 2012, perhaps you should try that book (which I haven't read), but first, you may want to consider how seriously you want to take Arguelles. I will let his scholarship speak for itself: in his article, he writes, "The one juicy piece of information that Hunbatz Men left me with was that our star system represents the seventh such star system that the Maya have mapped, charted, and navigated. This led me to think, 'Well, if that's the case, let's assume that the Maya were not from this planet originally, at least the seed Maya.' From this position, I went back and reexamined the information and data I had. It all fell into place, and it all made sense. The Maya are what I refer to as 'galactic surfers.' Some of them were especially amazing, and I refer to them as 'galactic masters'" (page 64-65).

There were only two articles in this book that I read which seemed at all grounded in reason. They were "2012 and the Maya World," by Robert Sitler, and "Mayan Stelae and Standing Stones: 2012 in Old and New World Perspectives" by John Lash. It is notable that neither of these articles conclude that there is any credibility to the idea that there will be a major cataclysm of some kind in 2012. Sitler points out that although the last time the Mayans predicted a major catastrophe, it did come true, that this catastrophe was part of a much larger trend, and more importantly, that it was a catastrophe only for the Maya, whose culture was being destroyed by the Spaniards. He suggests that if anything, we can expect this for 2012 as well, rather than some pan-human end-time. Lash, for his part, disproves the idea that the Mayan end-time correlates with those of the Hindus and Egyptians (although they share close start-dates) (page 207-208), and discredits the idea that the earth will cross a "galactic equator" in 2012: "With 3 degrees of precession to go, we are about 210 years from the midnight hour" (page 205) (rather than five years at the publishing of this book).

In short, if you're thinking about getting this book to give you insights into 2012, it's not even close to being worth your time.

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It's nice having so many different perspectives in one book on something so controversial as what could happen to society at a future date in time. As someone who is fascinated with the 2012 date, this book was beneficial for allowing me to sample a variety of authors from whom I can further explore.

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