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 didn’t mean to watch Oprah, honestly.

But I fell asleep on the couch with the TV on and when I woke up, there she was, in the middle of a makeover show. This show was the 2nd part of a series about hairstyles. On the first show, Oprah took 100 audience members and matched them up with hair stylists to the stars. So, on this show, we’re seeing the results.

“Our next audience member,” Oprah announced, “hadn’t cut her hair in TWENTY NINE years! Let’s see how she looked.”

And then we see a middle-aged woman with long, kinda frazzled red hair.

“And LET’S SEE HER NOW!”

Cut to:

This woman and her daughter, each with beautiful, stylish new coifs.

(If you’ve been wondering what this has to do with the Freudian Trance, here it comes…)

“So, why hadn’t you cut your hair for TWENTY NINE years?”

“Well, Oprah, after I had kids I just didn’t think about it and I guess I was kinda stuck with that haircut.”

(okay, get ready for it…)

“Right,” Oprah says. And with a knowing look in her eye, asks the probing question, “And were you stuck in other parts of your life, too?”

You could practically feel the audience stop breathing, waiting for the woman to reveal (with gobs of tears) that, yes, in fact, her life had been just one giant tar pit and, thanks to the freedom she felt with her new, un-stuck haircut, she had gotten a new job, replaced her entire wardrobe, mastered Mandarin, gotten a PhD in particle physics, solved world hunger, and become the U.N. envoy to Bulgaria.

Instead, the woman thought for a second. And just as her daughter started to shake her head, No, the woman says to Oprah, “No, not really.”

Her stunning psychological insight thwarted, Oprah just changed the topic and moved on.

“The way you do ANYthing is the way you do EVERYthing…”  This is the popular self-help line (made particularly popular by T. Harv Ecker… BTW, the “T.” stands for “The,” a name change Harv made in order to “affirm his uniqueness”) that Oprah was echoing. And the Freudian connection is simply that something always is a metaphor for something else.

While “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” other times it’s proof that when you were an infant you saw your parents copulating and, overcome with infantile jealousy and rage, suppressed your overwhelming feelings, which now reveal themselves every time you go to a baseball game and order a hot dog.

(Many of Freud’s interpretations of metaphors and dreams are no less ridiculous sounding.)

It’s easy to find seeming relationships between unrelated events… it’s what we do best. It wasn’t that long ago that we sacrificed one of our people each night to make sure the sun came back the next morning.

And now we love the Freudian notion that one aspect of our life is a metaphor for some other, hidden, aspect of our life.

Here’s the home version of the game: If your garage is full of stuff, can you see how your life is “over-full” as well and needs a clean up? Of course you can.  And if you believe in this relationship, you’ll pay money for the book/tape set/workshop that says you need to clean out your garage before you can have room for what you want in the rest of your life.

Now try this: If your garage is full of stuff (the same stuff), can you see how your life is “abundant” and how you’re blessed with more than you ever imagined having? Of course you can. And if you believe this, you may, instead, want to cram even more stuff into where your car used to be, so you have constant reminders of the bounty of the universe.

Finally, try this: Can you see how your garage has stuff in it… and there could be more, or could be less, and all it means is, well, there’s exactly as much stuff in your garage as there is, no more, no less? That “full” or “empty” is an arbitrary judgment and the amount of stuff has no relation to other parts of your life?  Of course you can.

Same stuff, different story.

The way you do ONE thing, is the way you do THAT thing (and maybe a few others), but not EVERY thing.

I recently began training to be a Masters sprinter (”Masters” is the euphemism for “old”). I assure you that the way I treat my running training is NOT the way I treat everything in my life. On the track, I’m competitive in ways that I’ve never been in relationships, or business or, well, even team sports (when the results are not entirely dependent on my efforts, I really don’t care about them).

Sometimes, Oprah, a haircut is just a haircut.