It seems that there is no English version of this book yet. Peter Toonen is a Dutch writer/journalist, but also an aurareader. He appears to be an all-round seeker for knowledge/information and his book touches numerous different fields of it. Apparently the book seemed to me very new-age and in fact it is, but this is definately a different and better book than anything from the new-age corner that I ever laid my eyes on. Not too much of the ‘fluffy bunny talk’, but actually a pretty difficult book.
So, you may wonder, what is it about then? Well, the title means “the natural time” and the subtitle says “messages from the Mayas for the New Age”. I first thought that this was a book about the Maya-calenders, but this isn’t really true. As a matter of fact, the purpose of this book seems to be twofold. The writer would like to see our unnatural, artificial and actually useless Gregorian calender replaced by the much more natural “Synchrone Order”, the “Dreamspell calender” of José Argüelles (the famous Maya expert) based on the 13 Moons calender of the Mayas. The second idea behind the book is informing it’s readers about the end of many ancient calender that we have to face in our lifetimes. All of the many (post-)Mayan calenders, Egyptian, Chinese and other calenders all end on 21 december 2012. Toonen explains why, what may be the results of these ‘whys’ and has advices for what to do until that time. Many experts think the earth will be destroyed like at the demise of Atlantis and indeed there are several (cosmological) facts that make this theory frightingly credible. Toonen foresees big changes too, but he is more optimistic about the outcome for the human race. Anyway, I suggest you should read for yourself if you are interested.
A bit too much Toonen takes it for granted that you are familiar with the discussed material and his previous book “What Did The Mayas Know?” (1997). Especially in the beginning you get a lot of terms and sayings that you (or at least myself) are not familiar with. “Dreamspell”, “wavespell”, “bhaktum”, “kin”, etc., etc. During the book these things get clearer, but a short overview may have been handy.
Then there is the point that the book can get extremely technical in the fields of mathematics, science, pseudo- science, astronomy and astrology and the information comes in dizzying amounts. These subjects aren’t even the only ones dealt with, because there is also a lot of mythology, folklore, history, archealogy, zoology and quite a lot of new-age in the book. However sometimes Toonen gets pretty ‘fluffy’, his overall approach and writing is realistic enough for me.
Also his manner of writing is agreeable, but unfortunately he misses his goal to get ‘his’ Dreamspell calender to his readers! A lot of detailed information is scattered throughout the book and often I don’t even know what information goes with what calender or where it fits into the rest. I have read the whole book, but I wouldn’t be able to tell you how this Dreamspell calender works. There are wavespells, kins, sunseals, tones, colours, small and large cycles and even more. Nowhere all info is to be found in one place or explained as a whole so in the end I still don’t know who to tell what day it is…
Further in the book are personal parts in the font Times New Roman and informative parts in Arial. I don’t know the exact idea behind the personal parts and I quickly stopped reading them.
My conclusion about the book is that it is for people who seriously want to undertake the study and work to change their lives according to the “Synchrone Order”. This is no book to read, but to study and I am positive that if you feel upto that, it will be able to fill a lot of your time. I definately have to read it again (some time before 21/12/12) to hopefully have it make some sense to me. <25/7/02>