Dear Pace,
The reason Hobie's article received so many hits was because it was put on the Front Page by Rayelan AND because it was picked up by Surfing the Apocalypse (And maybe many others, as well). This puts it in the face of a much larger audience.

As for prophecy...I bet you could predict that it was going to get dark this evening, eh? Based on your knowledge of the earth's 24 hour cycle, you could predict with some certainty that the sun will fall below the horizon and we will be bathed in darkness this very evening...and the next, and the next...

There are those, like the Mayans who understood much, much bigger cycles. They then are able to tell us when our particular Cycle in the great scheme of things would come to its end. The end of Time, as Mr. Arguelles so brilliantly shows us, is 2012. The End of Time...not the end of existence, however. Time will no longer be this 'manual' thing that we must laboriously deal with. It will merge into our automatic layer in the same way that height, width and depth already do. We will 'own/be' Time like we now own 'breathing'. And we will be off using our Consciousness to do more creative things than worry about the clock. Time brought with it technology. According to Mr. Arguelles, 2012 also begins 'The Path Beyond Technology'.

E.