Mark Morford Explains It All For You

Mark Morford has been tweaking, tantalizing and teasing readers of the San Francisco Chronicle for long years now. Not as long as Herb Caen, to be sure, but still...

His columns were among the very few 'mainstream' media effusions that showed any real insight into what was really going on back in the early days of my involvement in the internet, despite the author's, shall we say, unique vision of Things As They Are.

Many of those who found him back in those days were delighted, and then they weren't so delighted any more because Morford does have a schtick, and unless you're up for it, it can be a bit much after a while, and then you crave it, can't get enough of it, and you want to go to San Francisco and take Yoga from him, and then you don't, and then you're all confused and you run around screaming while he twists himself into yet another impossible yoga position and laughs a celestial laugh that makes you stop and wonder... is this all really a joke?

All of it?

No!

So it goes on like that.

And then he comes up with something like "The Rapture Is For Cowards (or is it Ninnies?)" and you know he is dead on, spot on tuned into the Universe in ways you can only imagine being if you could ever get through your current karmic debt, which you won't, so just get used to it, ease up, and learn to laugh or cry or anything besides whatever it is you're doing now.

Verily, from the Mayans to the Greeks, the pagans to the nutball evangelicals, New Age hippies to the witches of Burning Man, every tribe has their ache for transformation, for a final, orgasmic release into the Great Void. Right now it's freshly coupled to a feeling that 2012 is particularly pregnant and tangy, more potentially explosive than any other year to date. Indeed, the 2012 cataclysm is an idea that's been hovering around the collective consciousness for so long, there just might be something to it. You think?

Do you want signs? There are signs. Global warming has accelerated, unprecedented methane plumes are blasting out of the Arctic seabed to scare the horses, nature is in increasingly furious uproar, we are running out of maple syrup, frankincense, whooping cranes, Adderall and those exquisite nautilus seashells, which is just all kinds of depressing. Extinctions are happening faster than we can count, and we can count pretty fast.

Yes, well. It couldn't be truer. But so what?

It gets worse. Or maybe better. Did you know every animal species on earth is (at least partially) gay? That nearly every species we know enjoys homosexual sex for all sorts of reasons, many of which we don't even understand and most of which would make any evangelical shake with muddled rage? True. Don't tell the Tea Party. Or rather, do, and watch their faces explode.

Then there's dark matter, the stuff that, along with dark energy, makes up 96 percent of the entire universe. It's completely unknown. Inexplicable. Baffling. For all we know it's made of chocolate lubricant, tequila blanco and invisible alien spermatozoa and it's pouring down right now to impregnate all girls named Tiffany and Dakota and Caitlin. Apocalypse!

Oh my God, India and China! They're running out of water, for one thing. And when both dry up completely they will hop in their strange little cars and drive toward each other at breakneck speed, daring the other other to chicken out first so the other can race in and steal all their incense and/or iPods and sell them for Evian. I read that somewhere.

And?

Here's the wonderful thing: Peel back the uppermost layer of any apocalypse fantasy, 2012 prophecy or doomsday scenario, remove the lunk-headed shards related to zombies, aliens, gold bars, Ebola outbreaks and locust invasions, strip away the tremulous Christian pathos and evangelical illiteracy, and you're left with one stunning, increasingly intense desire for ecstatic awakening, writ large.

Put it this way: The real reason 2012 is so frontloaded? Because we've loaded it. Because there really has been mind-boggling technological advancement, environmental breakdown, change in the karmic weather. The tang in the air is a real tang. We are not the same planet, the same species, the same spiritual lugs we once were. At least, not all of us.

It is very possible and very true that the window of opportunity for some sort of great spiritual leapfrog is finally opening wider than a tiny sliver of a crack. The real question is: What are you going to do about it? Or the bigger question still: Are you even ready?

See, this is this catch. This is the one thing all tribes agree on when it comes to rapturous spiritual transformations and awakenings, be it Jesus coming to hoover up your quivering soul or (more elegantly) a simple stepping into the sheer bliss of consciousness itself and swimming there for the rest of forever.

It's this: You gotta be ready. You gotta be aligned to it, attuned, have done a bit of the work. Simply put, you need to be awake.

And when Morford gets into a state like this, he might be on to something, for he is often content to spin yarn and smirk and leave it at that. Not this time.

2012 is here.

Now.

And:

it's all just seven billion angels dancing on the head of a pin of Shiva.

Well sure. But you knew that...

Read the whole thing. Ponder.