Soon 21 December 2012 will be upon us. Depending on your point of view, on this auspicious date you will either be preparing to adapt to your new light-body, or greeting the four horsemen of the apocalypse, or watching the heavens for signs of the rapture. Or, if like me, you see prophesies as mutable, reshaped by the choices made by that dysfunctional family called humanity, your experience of the probable end of the world will be sitting at a café, sipping a good latte with a fine woman, or man, and looking beyond 2012 and to new experiences and adventures.

Like many people, I used to believe that the final date of the Mayan calendar was best approached with the kind of glee one associates with root canal work. But over the years my point of view has been sculpted by better understanding the root of prophecy. Being an international lecturer offers me the luxury of coming into contact with different people of contrasting backgrounds and influences, and the more I experience and observe the more I have reached the satisfying conclusion that events in life are not so much predetermined but forever adapting to our choices which, paradoxically, re-shape our predictions of the future.

To predict is to be human. It is to provide a target whose aim is a seemingly absolute resolution. Prediction, together with its twin sister prophecy, gives life a reliable set of coordinates. We are scared of the unknown. And knowing the unknown, even if its outcome is undesirable, at least offers a degree of comfort to what many see as an unpredictable existence.

But what if prophecy is not the immovable object we are led to believe, but mercurial and mutable? After all, change is the only constant in the Universe. Everything is in flow. There is no living system that exists in stasis, unless you happen to be a rock. But even rocks eventually weather into sand by the ebb and flow of wind and rain and hikers. Even the Universe expands and contracts. Rather than being a static proclamation, prophecy ought to obey a similar law.

Prophecy is the probable future realization of consequences based on events and choices already in motion at the moment of its proclamation. The longer the timeline offered in a prophecy, the more likely its outcome will be influenced by humanity’s gift of free will, in which case any number of outcomes are possible over the its course of incubation. In other words, the fulfillment of prophecy becomes dependant on the choices made by the critical mass of collective human consciousness.

One of the earliest recorded uses of the term prophecy is in the Jewish Torah: ‘nevuah,’ whose root ‘Nuv’ means ‘to bear fruit’ or ‘to make flourish’. Early prophesies consisted of divine words from invisible forces, angels or God, in which humanity would be warned of the consequences of living against the laws of nature. Clearly, a lot of Godly advice has fallen on deaf ears during these past 3000 years.