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Balancing Lines & Circles

October 3, 2008

It’s hard to imagine that a society like the Mayans could have been so wise and sahrp when it came to time, calendars and a cosmic ethos and yet apparently so little attuned to the realities on the ground. The Mayan culture would fit the phrase, you’re so heavenly bound that you’re no earthly good. At least history seems to be telling us that about their civilization.

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Societies and epochs have a tendency to follow the line or circle mentality (circly being circular or cyclical).

As we have moved away from an agrarian culture and into the industrial-digital-service world, we’ve left behind some things that are very important. We’re no longer aware of the seasons like we once were when we were a farming community. We no longer see the major cycles that the old Farmers Almanac would remind us. As a result we miss things like the Milankovitch cycles and opt instead for the Al Gore global warming paradigms.

Yet on the other hand, the Mayans were so caught up in cycles (of the heavens) that they lost sight of the straight line to destruction that they were following.

Jared Diamond reveals that the Mayan cutlrue which unexplicably disappeared in just a couple of decades, did so because of their obsession with cycles and their blindness to straight lines. He wries, “The Mayans overfarmed, deforested, and overpopulated their land” without noticing. A 2004 NASA study verified Diamond’s theory by revealing that trapped pollen in sediments taken from the Mayan geographical homeland, dating back to just before the Mayan collapse, indicates that trees had almost completely disappeared and had been repalced by weeds.

It’s also estimated that the Mayan civilization had 1,500 persons per sq. mile. Way too much for life to be sustained.

As a result of their blindness to the straight line of progress in many fields, their population abruptly declind by 90% in a few decades. The opposite lesson needs to be learned by the post-modern world. Cycles need to be planned for and understood because several of those BIG cycles are coming around not too many years down the road.

Can you say 2012? :-)

Written by Ernie · Filed Under 2012 

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