The rare alignment marked by the winter solstice of December 2012 appears to be the cosmic marker that the ancient Maya and others identified as the time of such great and cyclic change on Earth. But in addition to the physical changes to the planet itself, they foretold of the emotional and spiritual transformations that the people of Earth would undergo to come to terms with the new weather, land, ocean, and climate conditions that the changes bring.

From this perspective, our 2012 end date truly is the end of one kind of balance that we have grown accustomed to and feel comfortable with and the beginning of something brand-new. In other words, when we hear ourselves saying that we want things to get “back to normal,” we may just discover that the world created by the changes has a new normal. The opportunity here is for us to benefit from our individual and collective experiences of the last *5,125 years and apply what we’ve learned as the foundation for the *sixth world age of humankind.

It may be no coincidence that it’s only now--in the last years of the darkest part of our cyclic journey through the heavens, just when we are faced with the greatest threats to our future and even our survival--that we have discovered we have the ability to cooperate with one another in a way that is unprecedented in the history of the world. It’s as if we’ve pushed ourselves to the very edge of our limits and our beliefs. Now we must apply what we’ve learned in order to survive what we have created.

We find ourselves living at this rare moment in time when the motion of the universe is converging in just the right way to give us just the right conditions that lead to a shift in the way we think of our world and ourselves. In the same way that we would check the road signs throughout a cross-country trip to make sure that we’re going in the right direction, 2012 is like and end-of-cycle reality check. It allows us to think about where we’ve been, evaluate the choices and direction of our past, and make any midcourse corrections necessary to complete our cosmic journey successfully. This possibility exists only when everything we need to make such a change appears in a single window of time. The 2010 “zone” of alignment appears to be just such a window.