More than 1,500 years ago, the Mayan people of Central America were in possession of a sacred calendar which completes a "great cycle" of 5,200 years on December 21, 2012, and they predicted that the times we are now in would be crucial for the human race and involve a global shift of some kind.

The year 2012 has rapidly become the focus of our fears about the way our world is heading. As David Douglas says in his The Mayan Prophecy 2012, the latest in a long line of 2012 books in recent years: "People all over the world are now talking about 2012, like a spectre coming out of the fog of the future."

It's said it will mark the end of one way of existence and the advent of another, the moment when the Mesoamerican god Quetzalcoatl, the "Feathered Serpent", returns, bringing with him an ancient, although to us wholly new, way of existence.

Incredibly, as shamans and astronomers, the Maya, whose civilisation peaked in about 500AD, were able to chart and log billions of years of evolution. They developed models of the universe and calculated the orbits of the Earth, sun and moon, with calendars for each.

Naturally, I don't like to think the Mayan end-date of 2012 is about the end of the world. The time is prophesied as one of renewal, and the estimated two million Maya indians living in Central America today don't seem to be preparing for doomsday.

I do believe, though, that there's a parallel between the Maya and the much earlier builders of Stonehenge and other ancient monuments, in terms of a vital message which has been left for us to decipher.

I think 2012 is best seen in the context of an accelerating consciousness – something reflected in the estimated annual £65 billion global personal and spiritual develop- ment industry and in other significant developments worldwide: environmental, political, technological, economic, social and religious.

This change has not been unheralded. Indigenous peoples all over the world, including the Aztecs, Incas, Maoris and Native North Americans, have spoken of this time, through their myths and histories, as one of great transformation. It's implicit in the Chinese I Ching and the Bible Code, too.

However, as if the 2012 end-date was not enough in itself, we will, in that year, witness the conjunction of the winter solstice sun with the equator of the Milky Way and the ecliptic, find out if today's scientific forecasts of potentially devastating solar flares are accurate, see the end of the 26,000-year Platonic Great Year, the end of the 225,000,000-year Galactic Year, and even the possible shifting of the Earth's magnetic poles.

On December 21, 2102, for the first time in 26,000 years, as the Mayan astronomers knew, the sun will eclipse the centre of our galaxy, disrupting cosmic energies that normally flow from that direction – and no one knows what the outcome of that will be.

Whether or not you believe in the implications of the Mayan calendar, it concentrates attention on the possibility of a seismic cultural shift of some kind.

Many people around the world are emerging from a materialistic paralysis and experiencing strange reorientations on mental, emotional, spiritual and physical levels.

To attain a sufficiently intensified state of consciousness that can address the environmental, military and demographic crises besetting us, I feel we need to integrate empirical and rational thought with the intuitive and shamanic modes of cognition known to ancient tribal cultures.

Certainly, we need a more spiritual response to the dangers inherent in the technological society if we are to pull back from the brink of an abyss into which we are staring.

Unconscious forces unleashed by millennial dread – including the whole of the "New Age" phenomenon and 2012 omens – must be shaped by, and applied with, a certain practicality if they are to be of any use to us in this period of psychic change.

David Douglas again: "Perhaps it is not events that we should fear, but fear itself."