All the World's a Stage

New Year's Eve 2011 is but a day away.  There were a lot of political things that happened this year, things which set the drummer's drumming in their paper spinning rooms.  Inklings of tomorrow's work already staining their hands, and yet always new and different, even to them.  Industry, ho!!

I wanted to touch a little on a phenomenon which has been going on for a long while and will continue to happen in an unexpected way into the future.

Evolutionary stages.  Big, boggy words there.  Going back to the "Big Bang", forward through time towards us, there are a string of ever-shrinking evolutionary stages.  The first stage, way, way back, was several billion years long. The next, very long as well, but shorter.

Follow the stages along up to the appearance of earliest humans, 2 million years ago.  After this appeared the various stages of man.  Off this diagram, then, are the stages closer to our own time.  Anyone in anyway familiar with anthropology and human history will know modern, "civilized" humans have only been around for the last several thousand years.  There have been evolutionary stages as well since the beginning of civilization, not only at geological and biological levels, but also socially/culturally -- a clock melting and waning sweetly away.  In the last several hundred years have been increasingly smaller  and smaller evolutionary periods.  In the last half century evolutionary stages are short enough in duration to happen within an individual's lifetime.  These stages continue shrinking.  Where does this lead?

Mayan Cosmogenesis.  December, 2012.  The increasingly shrinking evolutionary periods will reach a point - a point at which shrinkage will no longer be possible, and then "flip".  Evolutionary periods will start to slowly - slowly, but Shirley - start growing in size.  It will be as if a higher being held a mirror to our history and reflected in that mirror our future. Slowly, our evolutionary stages will take longer and longer.  I imagine some of us who live long enough will eventually find evolutionary periods extending past a lifetime's length.

Most noticeably, this change will influence the speed of progress, the incessant hammering away of technology with its insistent, feverish pitch of capitalistic innovation. I think the harried pace of life in general will slow. We may look back on our lives of this past century, and wonder how we handled the frenzied buzz of everyday life.

No doubt, I could be wrong. I have nothing to prove anything I have to say.  It is just a hunch, a hunch which I am loathe to admit I have not entirely a total faith in.  So, it can come across as dinner table banter, or some such, and will have to go that way:

"Oh, look, we've said our part -- How time flies!"