It’s not often that I use words like pinhead, bonehead, moron or idiot… in public.

But today I’m inspired.

My local newspaper, the Boulder, Colorado Daily Camera, published an article called Five years and counting: Will the world end in 2012? about the phenomenon that the Mayan calendar ends on December 12, 2012 (12/12/12).

Now, if you’ve been wearing a patchouli scented tin foil hat that protects you from New Age thinking you won’t know that many think this day will be:

a) The end of the world
b) The beginning of the end of the world
c) The beginning of a utopian new world for those who have evolved enough

In other words, 2012 is a New Age rapture.

Now, I’m not saying that people who believe in any of these ideas are pinheads, etc. Quite the opposite.

The people who are talking about 2012 and, not surprisingly PROFITING handsomely by promoting the books, tapes, workshops, etc. about 2012 , demonstrate how smart they’ve become by learning from previous fizzled apocalypses/transitions like Firing the Grid, Y2K, the Harmonic Convergence, the Hale-Bopp comet, Nostradamus, as well as from every tele-psychic and every economic prognosticator (copies of 1999’s best-seller “Dow 40,000″ can be found for $0.01).

Rather than making an actual predictions, the smart pinheads are already hedging their bets so that no matter what happens, they’ll be able to say, “See, I was right!”

From the paper:

(John Major) Jenkins (says) that what will happen on Dec. 21, 2012 is not set in stone. The galactic alignment will occur, he says, and the Mayan calendar will reach its end, but beyond that, it’s up to us.

“Ultimately, the outcome depends on free will,” he says. “The Maya do not believe in predestination or predetermination.”

(Jose Arguelles adds,) “The resonance between the focused attention of human consciousness in alignment with the galactic center will bring about a radical change of consciousness, the evolutionary shift point,” he says. “It will be palpable. As our self-perceptions alter in a collective telepathic field, so will our perception of the universe. It will be the dawn of a new heaven and new earth. Expect a miracle.”

“What we will experience on that day depends on what happens between now and then,” says Arguelles, a former Boulder resident who now heads the Galactic Research Institute of the Foundation for the Law of Time in Ashland, Ore. “These five years are a spiritual test in preparation for our own conscious evolution.”

Can you hear the circular reasoning? If something happens, it was because of the “galactic alignment.” If nothing happens, it was because we evolved and circumvented the disaster.

There’s nothing to measure BEFORE the event, that can actually predict the event. But AFTER the event, or non-event, each of these “experts” and “scholars” will, no doubt look back and make up some other unprovable story to justify whatever they claim happened.

Hell, I’ll make 3 predictions now, that will last forever on the Internet:

First, a prediction in keeping with the brilliant pinheads: On 12/12/12, either something will happen, or nothing will happen. Guaranteed.

Second, for the majority of humanity, that is, for people who don’t know anything about this silliness, NOTHING will happen.

Third, on 12/13/12 we will hear that, in fact, we DID make a dramatic spiritual advance as a species, that while 99.99% of humanity was unaware of this, certain “sensitives” were able to perceive it! AND, you’ll be able to attend a workshop to maximize the “new energies” in order to help you manifest your destiny, live your birthright, discover your purpose, bend spoons, levitate, lose weight, get whatever you want (car, house, job, relationship), and, then, finally, be happy.

Oh, wait, that makes it sound like TODAY is 12/13/12… so I guess another effect will be the ability to go back in time and bring this enlightened wisdom with us!

I loved bowling when I was a kid. If I couldn’t get a ride to the lanes from my parents, or the mom of a sometimes-friend (the time being “when I wanted to go bowling”), I would walk the 5 miles to the alley.

And if I didn’t have any money, I’d pick up trash around the parking lot in exchange for a couple of games.

And I’d watch bowling on TV whenever it was on — this was when bowling got prime time coverage.

Earl Anthony was one of the greats playing then. Earl was the first bowler to earn $1,000,000. He won 41 Professional Bowlers Association titles. I watched a lot of interviews with Earl… and not once did anyone ask him “How do you get bowling to carry over into your daily life?”

Bowling was something Earl did during the day, like eating, washing, driving, talking, and many other verbs. But I never heard Earl say anything like:

“Well, I was having a fight with my wife, but thanks to the replacement of the thumb-hole in my ball, and some added swing strength, I was able to resolve the tension faster than one of my perfect 300 point games!”

The idea that bowling would actually carry over into the other area of his life seems silly.

So, why do we think that it makes sense when people ask meditation teachers, “How do I integrate meditation into my daily life?”

The technical answer to the question is simple: Just meditate every day.

But that answer won’t suffice because it’s not addressing the real question, the question under the question, which is:

“Will meditating fix the parts of my life I don’t like?”

I want to have more money, have fewer fights with my family, and have a better job.

I want to get stuck in the grocery store line behind a guy trying to pay for each of his 25 items with a different credit card, and feel nothing but boundless love and compassion, rather than imagining how far up his colon those cards could go with the right broomstick to push them.

And I want to make these changes in my real life by using a technique developed by celibate monks who left the real world because it was an obstacle to their practice.

There was a period in Western meditation history, about 20 years ago, when many of the articles in magazines were from the teachers who were asking, “How is it that I’ve been meditating for decades, and had all these incredible experiences, and I still can’t hold a job, have a happy relationship, or enjoy good health?” I know more than a handful of meditation teachers who spent as much time in therapy as they did on their cushions.

I have a friend who is a big-deal Tibetan monk (btw, everyone should have a friend who’s a big deal in some religion — you get to hear first-hand about how the religion biz is not what most people think). He recently said to a group, “If you take almost all meditators out of their cave or monastery and put them in a shopping mall, they can’t calm their minds either.”

This notion that meditation is a cure for what (you think) ails you, rather than simply a skill, like bowling, seems to create a rash of unrealistic expectations… which will have to lead to disappointment when you’ve spent an hour in the Bliss of Emptiness, and then blow up at “Robert,” the Dell Tech Support guy who takes another hour asking you to repeat your service code before he can incorrectly diagnose your hard drive problem.

And, frankly, after talking to Robert, rather than meditating more with the hopes that you’ll handle it better next time, you might want to go hurl some bowling balls down the alley as hard as you can! There’s nothing like the sound of a strike.