Breaking News, World News and Taiwan News.

Updated Sunday, November 15, 2009 12:10 am TWN, By Mary Jo McConahay, Special to The Los Angeles Times

Sponsors
▪	Save 75% for all hotels in Shanghai, Beijing and whole China. Lowest rates for Flights in China.
▪	Get the best deals for Guangzhou Hotels or choose from more than 10,000 hotels in 499 Chinese cities.
▪	Find great real time deals on China Flights. Book flights to China or China domestic flights 24/7.
▪	Buy china wholesale products from reliable chinese wholesalers on DHgate.com!

The truth of 2012: There's no 'doomsday' on Mayan calendar

Some Maya spiritual guides say they have been consulting among themselves on the significance of 2012, traveling informally by foot and bus, including to Mexico (there is no pope or central doctrinal authority to whom ajq'ijab look for counsel, although some elders command particular respect).

Some experts on the Maya believe Dec. 21, 2012, merits no great attention, pointing out that only one inconclusive mention of the date appears among thousands of deciphered Maya texts. It's simply the end of an era — of about 5,000 years — with another one beginning the next day.

“The scale of Maya time-reckoning dwarfs anything in our own cosmology by many orders of magnitude,” wrote epigrapher David Stuart on his blog devoted to ancient Maya script.

Gabriel said she was cautious about magnifying the 2012 date's significance in a way that may be misunderstood.

“We do not want to commit the error that some Christians made at the turn of the millennium,” she said, referencing much-hyped doomsday predictions about the year 2000, which passed quietly. Nevertheless, she said, we live in “a time of transition” between epochs, when men and women will realize — or not — how to pull back from “destroying” the Earth with pollution and by cutting down forests.

“Conditions could be severe,” she said. “It depends on our answer. The universe responds according to the treatment it is given.”

Another ajq'ij, Gregorio Chayax, 70, wears a baseball cap, T-shirt and pants rolled above rubber sandals. He serves as a spiritual guide among the towering temples of Tikal, the most visited Maya site in the Guatemalan Peten rainforest (Tikal has a cameo in “2012”).

Chayax has already seen his familiar world disappear, well before 2012. He is one of only eight remaining speakers of Peten's once predominant Itza Maya tongue, according to the Guatemalan Academy of Maya Languages.

From 1991 to 2001, about 815,000 acres of protected Peten rainforest were lost to unlawful settlers, drug traffickers and cattle ranchers. Since then, the rate of loss has accelerated, according to Edin Lopez, technical director of the government's National Council of Protected Areas in Peten.

“We are not going to speak badly of cows,” Chayax said. “But the ranchers have no heart.”

Chayax suggested that a transition between eras, signaled by the end of the Long Count calendar, started more than 20 years ago and would continue for at least another 20.

“We are going to suffer more heat than now,” he said. “We are out of balance. We have become excessive in what we demand.”

Yet he said the actions of men and women might head off deterioration of life on Earth.

“Roots are still there, if we know how to find them, and make them live again,” he said.

1|2