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I just got off the phone with Reverand Tom. I'm very glad to have met such a brilliant and passionate man who deeply cares about where we are going. He has put forward a tremendous body of work that I believe finally addresses so many of our planetary problems head on. I have yet been unable to find serious argument with any part of his proposal. It is both visionary, and should be taken as such, but also a deeply thought-out and rigorous plan for making concrete and meaningful, positive change in the world The best part of Tom's ideas is he embraces ALL, and leaves no one out. His plan does not require some fundamental force in our society to change - whether it be good or evil, great or small. Rather Tom, like an Aikido master, lovingly colloborates with these forces for the benefit of all. Whether they be the super rich elite or the poorest child.
What Reverend Tom is proposing is nothing short of pure unbounded love fueled by hyper-rationality and spiritual gusto.
So what's next? I believe Tom is right. We are on the verge of a total breakdown of everything we know. All of our old systems our on the verge of collapse. Everything will break down. But not in a bad way. This breakdown will merely be a reshuffling of the deck, an economic renewal towards something greater - a new holistic system of planetary stewardship and radical accelerating transhumanist hyper economics into the cosmic frontier. It benefits everyone. And the only way this is going to happen is through macroscale engineering projects which the super-rich will decide is what they want to do next. Why? Because they will have to if they want to survive, and because it will be exciting for them. It will allow them to go to the next frontier. All the automation in the world is not going to be enough for the super-rich to bootstrap themselves to the stars. Not even nanotechnology is going to save them. They are going to need as many people as they can all participating in the greatest projects of our generation, of any generation. They will produce enormous wealth for those at the top, and more wealth for all us that we have never seen before. It's a win-win situation for all of us. To get a good idea of some of these starter macro-scale engineering projects, please Tom's articles, Collective Empowerment (pdf) and New Section XVI.
Please be nice to Tom. He is a super nice guy. Disagree, debate, argue, but please be nice. Tom is not crazy, only a brilliant, sensitive and caring man wishing to help, and I believe he is just the one to do it. Let's give him a chance.
I told Tom that his ideas are a few steps ahead of most people, and probably at least a step or two ahead of even the most astute Future Hi reader. What he has presented in these preliminary documents are first drafts, raw manifestos to get the ball rolling. Let's see where we can go next.
I've been observing the optimism and "pronoia" espoused by upwinger and Chris in their posts, and the angst espoused by Ralph Metzner in his article, and in their own unique ways, by Paul and eventhorizon. I'd like to offer a perspective on how we can reconcile these divergent perspectives into a single worldview, and how we can "take charge of the situation" and proactively instigate the future of joy, ecstacy, freedom, and abundance that God has prearranged (but not preordained) via universal intelligence. I've been researching a "hyper-holism" that reconciles epistemological and ontological opposites — so that we can: a) see the world's political situation in its true context, and b) effectively reconcile religious and political opposites. What follows is the preface for a large paper/thesis that I am working on. Following the preface is a description of a special twenty-one page .pdf file that I have prepared, and a link to it. It is meant to offer a message of hope that is unbridled, yet grounded in the deepest Truth of our Reality. I can not think of a better forum in which to release this material, and hope you will find it to be both interesting and useful.
------------------------------ Beginning of Preface ------------------------------
Collective Empowerment and Entheogenic Freedom
This work is based on ten years of research at the point where science and the world's many religions come together without compromise. This research reveals a symmetry in the structure of human belief, as per the four cardinal paradigms of culture depicted below. As such, this paper draws insight with equal ease from: a) hard rational logic, b) the inspired appreciation of scripture, c) awakened subjectivity, and d) heartfelt ecological sensibility. This research also shows that the goals of collective empowerment and entheogenic freedom are closely related to each other, and to the securing of a unique destiny that is virtually unknown outside "psychedelic futurism." In particular, it shows why these twin goals can not be easily and fruitfully secured unless the quest to do so is made inseparable from a destiny characterized internally by communal, nanotech ecotopia, and externally, by a system of cosmic life that would eventually compare to this earth, in the same way that a towering oak compares to an acorn. It then maps out the way forward in detail.
Religious Monotheism
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...Mystical Pantheism --------.....-------- Scientific Materialism
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Paganism/Environmentalism
This paper cuts through mundane superstition to tackle the subject of time-symmetric causation head-on. The belief that cause always precedes effect is the most deeply ingrained superstition of the human race. Many are aware that time as we know it is an illusion. Few however, are aware that behind this illusion is a meta-reality in which objective forward in time processes, and subjective backward in time processes engage a holographic relationship of infinite depth. The paper introduces the nature of this relationship, and describes the primal challenge therein (and backs itself up with an appendix detailing the 12+ logical/philosophical arguments and 40+ pieces of empirical/observational evidence that overwhelmingly confirm the reality of time-symmetric causation). In this regard, it: a) presents the living destiny that has been prearranged, but not preordained, by the gestalt quantum-computational intelligence of Reality, i.e. God, and b) shows how the interaction of the real-numbered physical realm and the complex-numbered imaginal realm is rapidly bringing civilization toward an Eschaton characterized by a stark bifurcation of destiny.
This paper's goal is to give an overview of how we can help guide civilization through the lethal economic crisis that it will face circa 2010-2014 — while at the same time, securing freedom for entheogens in the context of specific group energy rituals. It is meant to offer a solid foundation for the challenge at hand. I hope it will be the starting-point for the wide-ranging discussions that will need to occur in these areas.
-------------------------------- End of Preface --------------------------------
Because this proposal touches on so many different aspects of culture, I have assembled bits and pieces of my work into the special twenty-one page file mentioned above. This file is designed to acquaint "psychedelic futurists" with the scope of my analysis, and the course of action that I am proposing. Because the new hyper-holism is so radical in its breadth, and the journey through and beyond the Eschaton even more radical, I have interspersed various charts with the text, and put everything in the order that I believe will be the easiest to follow. Included are the following:
1. A two-page chunk that contains the above preface and a high-level conceptual overview.
2. A two-page chunk that details the true role of the Divine Feminine vis a vis the Eschaton.
3. Two one-page charts that describe the four-fold symmetry of human culture in detail.
4. A detailed six-page introduction of how we may understand and navigate the Eschaton.
5. A two-page chart that describes "holographic libertarianism," an innovative political idea.
6. The three-page description of what life might be like in the "Millennium" and beyond.
7. A four-page list of experiments that should powerfully confirm time-symmetric causation.
This is obviously a work in progress, and some things may still be a bit rough (especially the list of experiments). Beyond that, the main six-page introduction contains a lot more information than would normally be there (to momentarily compensate for the unfinished paper per se). Please bear with it, for I feel that this research will prove to be accurate, and that the proposals based on it will ultimately be useful.
This file is intended to take people on a visionary journey. I hope Paul and the other people here experience it that way, and by this means, feel the living energy of an entheogenic future that is forever trying to get our attention. My suggestion would be to print out a copy, fasten your seat belt, and happy journeys!
http://home.earthlink.net/~thomaswinans/CollectiveEmpowerment.pdf
If people are interested in hearing more, I'll be happy to discuss the subject matter here, and/or post links to the various sections of the paper as I complete them. Please give me your feedback.
Sincerely,
Reverend Tom
A friend of mine sent me this link to Greg Baden's video:
Into the Zero Point (right click to save)
Some topics: 2012, Transcendeing the Kali Yuga's Four Ages, Mayan & Eygptian Calenders, accelerating technology and why it exists, Magnetic Shifts, Global Climate Change, Changing Human Chemistries, Becoming and Demonstrating Love-Wisdom-Compassion, Acceleration of Intense Healing of the "Big Stuff" since all the easy stuff is past us, Why your feeling disenfranchised and hopeless, and how we can get past it.
Very interesting and intense food for thought on the coming changes.
When I was about 12, I read an astounding article by Robert Anton Wilson's called Next Step: Immortality in Future Magazine. I identified myself as an immortalist from that day on. This same magazine introduced me to all sorts of other new cutting edge ideas. Immortality appealed to me because all the wonders I read in Sci-fi and all the amazing futures I imagined myself living in would now come true, because I would live thousands of years to see them all. I would be alive when we first colonized the solar system. I would be alive when we set out for the stars and colonized other planets. I would be alive to become a space pioneer and experience alien cultures and super advanced extraterrestrial races. All of these visions then and still are much greater and fantastic than anything, save perhaps Star Wars, that I have ever seen depicted on film.
This desire has continued pretty much unchanged all the way through to the present. However, as I have gotten older, experienced more, seen the pressures the world now faces, and more deeply understood the implications of things like nanotechnology, this vision has been shaken. Even a year ago, I don't think I would have said that, but today, the foundations of my quest for immortality have come under greater scrutiny. Is my desire for immortality a genuine spiritual quest or based more around a fear of death? If so, do I really want to live in fear? Living in fear has got to be the worst way to live, since it precisely takes you away from living in your heart, your true center. From what I can see almost all immortalists are such because of their fear of death. They are immortalist more because of their fear of death, rather than their love of life. American culture in particular has a great fear of death, and it is one of the reasons so many American's are bamboozled into mind-numbing reality tunnels - from shop-until-you-drop consumerism to spiritually vacant dead-ends.
Fear can do weird things. I have seen many immortalists trade in many of their principles for the promise of longer life. If faced with their own death, I have seen them embody the worst of culture in a subconscious desire to blend in, not step out of line, or be noticed, especially now in a our climate of squashing dissent. For example, I haven't see any contemporary immortalist taking the moral high ground on any social cause that is sufficiently counter to the status quo, precisely because such an action could jeopardize their immortal quest. After all, look what happened to Martin Luther King, Jr. So the question becomes, at what point, if at all, would an immortalist be willing to die for a just cause over their own quest for physical immortality? Because lets face it, things could bad enough, that such a choice could soon face all of us.
And even putting the morality issue aside, things are changing so fast now, that for me at least; it’s becoming increasingly difficult to even identify what the "safest" path to future survival is. Can we say with any certainty what kind of world will be here in 20 years? For me it is almost impossible to imagine. We are at such a critical juncture that the slightest factors are now capable of reaping the most tumultuous change.
The truth that I have been avoiding, but is now staring me in the face, is that my personal ability to survive the next 20 is now almost completely out of my control.
I think the primary reason for this is that as the world has become more populated, explored, controlled and monitored, our ability to act freely within it has become increasingly constrained. For example, I would love to move to New Zealand, and get away from what I see is a rapidly disintegrating free country, and a rise in American despotism and retrograde conservatism. But if you, like me, have contemplated such an escape, it's much more daunting than it first appears, or should be! Unless you are already very wealthy, or happen to have a LOT of experience in one of their in-the-moment much needed skill shortages, your chance of immigrating there are almost zero. Pretty much goes for any other place you care to run to. Lets face it, the world is a lot smaller today, and countries have responded by making it much harder to move there. Frontiers are dead. That only leaves the space frontier.
However, in practical terms we are no closer to space colonization now than we were in the 1970's when Gerald K O'Neill trail blazed a compelling pathway towards its realization.
Nanotechnology for me has always held the key to liberating humanity from slavery. But nanotech is not here, and the mechanisms of elite control have become stronger. Our ability to travel and move freely has become harder, economic conditions more straining, resources more depleted, the environment more destabilized, and political welfare coming apart at the seams. Meanwhile the most powerful technologies are coming under greater control of the military. Sure, decentralized technologies are a powerful liberator, but they are not a sure thing. As powerful as they are, it still leaves those with the most physical power having the most tools of oppression at their disposal to wreck havoc anywhere they see fit. Cyberspace is great, but we still have meat bodies. So those who can control, maim or kill those meat bodies are the ones in charge. Again, it all comes back to our physical bodies, and any fear we have around death. As long as we fear death, those with the power to kill us, control us.
Sure, as they "tighten their grip, more star systems will slip through their fingers", but those "star systems" from what I can see represent a rapidly diminishing portion of the population. There was a time when I thought I could identify what specific characteristics that portion would have, and adapt myself accordingly, but the honest truth is I can't, and I'd be surprised if anyone did. Substantial wealth seems to be a prerequisite, but I'm not even sure about that anymore. Assuming it was and I did have sufficient wealth, what do I do then? Do I move to a small tropical island? What would I do to survive once I'm there? Is this even practical or desirable? Would I have to leave my family? And an even more important question, assuming I could do all these things and it was necessary, would it be worth it to survive in a world that was left? What specifically would that survival entail? What kind of world would life after such global chaos played itself out? Will it be a world I would even want to live in? Is survival in "hell" better than no physical survival at all? Well, if you are like most immortalists, the answer would still be yes, because death is the final oblivion... end of story. For quite a long time, I used to take this as the most logical belief. However, would I want to live within a hellish world that consists of some insane global fascist feudalist empire of insane, craven, infantile warlords, and ex-heads of state with their armies and weapons of death? Or how about a society which consists of a legion of nano-powered weapons of control? A society in which free thought has been eradicated via covert nanobots swimming through my brain and bloodstream? I don't know, imagine your own dystopia.
I know have echoed Bucky Fuller in the past, utopia or oblivion. Although such dystopias are probably self-negating, how do we know clearly when the final choice needs to be made between utopia and oblivion? At some point, quite likely, the only thing that could turn it away from oblivion is enough people at the right time, putting their fear of death aside, and taking a stand against the forces of evil. Is that time right now, next year, or already beyond us? I have no idea, which is why this dilemma is all the more pressing.
Interestingly, quite a few immortalists (ones I met on the Extropian List in the 1990's) having realized these grave possibilities, and fearing their possible extinction have adopted some crazy politics. Rather than side with what is the moral high ground they now position themselves with the side that has the best chance of winning, regardless of what happens to be the morally higher good. From their perspective, the best way to assure survival is make sure they are on the side of the guns, and not on the side having them pointed at you. Sensible enough, right? They have become true survival-of-the-fittest type individuals. Rather than become potential slaves to future feudal lords, they now work hard to make sure they are the feudal lords! When I realized this for the first time way back then, I was seriously depressed and disillusioned. I never gave up my immortal quest, but any illusions I had about immortalists all sharing the same heart-felt quest for a just utopia were shattered that day. Boy was I naive!
Now, lets shift gears.
Lets say, we do make it.. that we do survive the next 20 years as nanotechnology changes everything. Call it the Singularity, or the 2012 Eschaton, it doesn't matter. Well, assuming the Singularity does come and all of us here are alive when it does, what then? This to me is the biggest irony of all. We all might still die. When you think about it, what is the technological singularity anyway? As far as I can tell, and even under the most benign circumstances, it seems to me to portend an utter annihilation of all that we were. Some might say this is a good thing. Well, it would certainly seem to be a good thing in the evolutionary scheme of things. After all, we are talking about the final escape of intelligence past the extinction point out into the infinite cosmos. For life and intelligence, this would be the ultimate liberation - a time for celebration, and an overwhelming feeling of relief at finally having escaped any shackles towards utter freedom, joy, infinite intelligence and wisdom.
So why the irony? The irony, because it’s quite possible, even likely that you and I won't survive such a transition. The very nature of accelerating intelligence would be akin to the ultimate trip, your ego would be obliterated into a billion pieces. Except in this case, as all that was you is subsumed into the SI matrix, there wouldn't be any "you" left, save perhaps the "useful" parts for the SI's purpose. In other words, you die. From the perspective of "you", your dead, same as if you had physically died. So if you permanently die in this way, is this still physical immortality? What difference would there be between this death, and actual physical death? In both cases, "you" are gone. Now, this is where my thinking might be different than other psychonauts. During my NDE, I felt no sense of annihilation. "I" was still there, except this time, there was much, much more than "I". The feeling was I became merged with a much higher and more complete version of my "self". I still had memories of being me in this life, and I still could recall all the details of my life now. I still experienced my ego, but my ego had become totally transparent to this infinite all encompassing love of my more complete higher self. In other words, my ego was now more like my big toe compared to the rest of my more complete body. I can't even begin to tell you how liberating this was. This place that I now found myself was eternal. It was like the ultimate rest stop for the soul. It was a place of total rest, joy and contentment. It was the TOTAL absence of all suffering. And the most amazing part of the experience was that it was totally familiar. There was nothing alien about it all. It was as opposite of otherness as you could have, it was HOME. It was the place I have always known, and always would know. A place that has always existed and always will. It was total confirmation. I rejoiced! It was the most real and true experience I have ever had. To deny, reject, or doubt it would be the ultimate folly. If I were to doubt it, I might as well doubt that I am happy when I am happy. The experience just was. No matter what the ultimate nature of reality is, this experience was the deepest confirmation, the deepest, truest resonance with the very essence of my soul. I lost all fear of death, and it changed my life forever.
These investigations have taken me deeper into exploring techniques for Out of Body Travel, Astral Projection and so on. Based on my own experiences in these areas, as well as reading lots of other peoples, I now believe that there is no death. For many, reincarnation (i.e. rebirth) happens because they are not ready to believe there is something more. According to Robert Monroe, a pioneer in OBE work, people are not able to move beyond rebirth until their belief systems are completely cleared of all limiting beliefs. If we are, as many spiritual and psychonautic pioneers have said, co-creators of Universe, then the ultimate nature of reality is consciousness. Therefore, as conscious co-creators of universe, until we believe in a transcending reality beyond death, it will continue to occur for us in a repeating cycle of death and rebirth until we finally get it. This is exactly what Seth via Jane Roberts was always saying. Consciousness is the name, and infinity is the game. No matter what, we are all heading towards something beyond death, beyond the physical universe, beyond space and time.... not just eternity, but infinity.
So this brings me to my current beliefs. Although physical immortality could be lots of fun under the right circumstances, it is no longer the only game in town. I will continue to pursue my physical immortal quest for as long as I can, for a love of life, not a fear of death. It's win win situation!
From Multipolarity Memes:
The probability of living in a simulation appears to depend on the ability of the world to produce lots of simulations of itself: so in our particular case you can see upon analysis that the evidence for living in a simulation is quite strong - we are after all living in the computer age and we are about to witness the birth of the realistic computer simulation. There is a self-reinforcing attractor effect here. Being in a world which demonstrates that creating simulations of itself is a causal norm increases the probability that this world is itself a simulation, so long as at least some of those simulations being created are extremely similiar to the original copy in the sense that they would have to preserve both the feeling that it is the original copy and its ability to copy itself. ... It would seem that our decisions on what types of simulations to create also effect the future decisions of our simulators in a transactional strange loop. So if we decide to create lots of 1st person solo-simulations for example, then this would have a significant "strange effect" on the individual. For instance it would organise substantial differences in the probability of one person being in a simulation compared to another person sharing the same topologically connected space. Furthermore this means that it is possible, with sufficiently enhanced mental reasoning, to reformulate the very nature of the simulation one is living in, without needing to directly access any substrate host worlds." -edit from my previous blog on what i called the "interestingness selection effect"Jerry Paffendorf's acc2005 talk "Brave New Virtual Worlds" is now online Link
See also:
Nick Bostrom's "Are You Living In A Computer Simulation?" Link
Marshall Brain's "The Day You Discard Your Body" Link
(To author of Multipolarity Memes blog - please contact me at psidoc at gmail.com)
Imagine you have running on your computer a small piece of code, even something as small as 1 kilobyte. Consider this small program a node. Imagine this node in turn generates output data that is based on two things - the first being determined by the specific algorithm its running and the second the data it receives at any one instant from hundreds or thousands of similar nodes elsewhere on the network (i.e. nodes running on other peoples computers). Imagine still further that all of these nodes, potentially hundreds of millions of them around the world, are all running and communicating with each other at light speed, and at increasingly faster speeds, based on available idle cpu time. At first you might compare such a scheme to SETI@home or other similar grid computing projects. The difference here though is that unlike grid computing projects, these nodes have no central controlling authority. This is important, just as the brain has no central controlling neuron or clusters of neurons.
The next question is what happens next? I'm not entirely sure, but the possibilities are both compelling and disturbing. First of all, it would depend on exactly how the seed node was created and instructed. What if it was given the simplest of rules, just like basic cellular automata that Stephen Wolfram describes? In this case, we would have no idea what evolve until it was released and ran through potentially quadrillions of massively interacting iterations. However, unlike basic cellular automata which occur on 2D or 3D grids, this p2p node system would, like the human brain, interact with tens of thousands of potential "neighbor" nodes. Further, these nodes would not just interact based on locality (latency times), but on semantic connections as well. The possibilities for experimentation here are endless, and even risky. Why risky? Because the level of complexity this p2p node network could achieve would be astounding, possibly exceeding the complexity of the human brain by orders of magnitude. It would represent a major advance over traditional neural networks (like the human brain) because connections would be made based on any definable means whatsoever, rather than on neurochemical convenience or traditional computer architectural constraint. The constraints would be more software than hardware based. And since computers are general computing platforms, such software constraints may not exist as we currently know them, since this type of informational exchange would exceed and surprise the person(s) who created the original seed node in the first place.
What this would essentially represent is a totally decentralized, out of control seed based cellular automata intelligence.
To me it seems the creation of such a thing would be totally reckless. Who is to say someone hasn't already done something like this? Who is to say that right now, running on your computer is some trojan node doing just such a thing?
Amazingly enough, what I have just describe would be one of the simplest possible implementations, and yet it is quite possible the end result of it running long enough could be some kind of super-intelligence. In other words, there might be a superintelligence running on the internet right now. One of many problems with this type of superintelligence is it emerged based on totally self-referential internal feedback. Nowhere in the scheme were humans, or the human world even taken into consideration. Quite possibly this type superintelligence, assuming it could evolve from the above scheme, would have no idea that humans even exist. It would by all definitions be an alien intelligence in every way that counts.
Ok, now lets start this experiment over, except this time we take a great deal more care about how its created and implemented, starting with the first node. What if we created a node that was general purpose enough, but with the specific goal reflected as much as possible the needs and wants of every participant on the network. A kind of avatar or virtual assistant that learned from everything you say and do. Obviously creating such an avatar would depend on the level of software advancements currently available. Lets assume we created this node today with the best minds in the world creating the best possible virtual avatar that we can. This though is only half the problem. The other half is how to these virtual avatars (smart nodes) interact with all the others. It seems that there would be a nearly endless number of semantic levels in which they could communicate. What if instead we created these avatars as basic "blanks" in which each human user defined them as they went along? More importantly they are open-sourced so that the best minds could continue to offer plug-in modules that enhanced these avatars in different ways. This way the marketplace of supply and demand of human needs would determine the courses, pathways and options these avatars took.
Meanwhile, why all these millions of avatars are running, even duplicating themselves, and intermingling at hyper-speeds all around the network, communicating with millions of other avatars, carrying on complex and subtle negotiations on your behalf, and in turn modifying themselves as they go along, what then do we get? Would we get a superintelligence from this as well? And if so, what kind of superintelligence would emerge? Interestingly such a superintelligence would likely be far more reflective of all of us. In a sense this new emergent superintelligence would be us. No longer would it simply be the amorphous global brain of all of us talking, but an actual instantiating global superintelligence that continually learns and improves upon itself based on constant human input.
One possibility of course is that someone or group of someone’s could modify their avatars to subvert the system towards less democratic means, in which their avatars, like agent Smith, takes over every one else’s. Who is to say what would happen then.
As you can see, I have no easy answers to how all of this could evolve, but the possibilities of p2p superintelligences seem to be much closer than I previously realized, for good or ill. One thing is for sure, the more open sourced it is the more resiliant it becomes to malicious tampering. The question then is what can we do to create the most friendly p2p SI possible? Eliezer Yodkowsky has his own ideas, and I'm pretty sure they are not p2p based. I would be very interested in getting comments from working members of the Singularity Institute on this.
Related:
Peer-to-Peer Games
Peer-to-Peer Virtual Culture
(Whitley's newest journal, from unknowncountry.com . This is exactly the kind of post I've been contemplating over the past two weeks, and Whitley here has done all my work for me, and has probably done it better than I would have. I urge anyone who stops by here to please take the time and read this all the way through. This is precisely the same message I myself have been trying to give to everyone. ... Thank you, Whitley.)
Just in the past two years, there have been two great earthquakes that have devastated populated areas and many other smaller ones that have also done great damage, the Amazon has virtually dried up, the Arctic has begun to melt, the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps have become unstable, and the weather has turned into a complex monster.
What is so interesting about this is that our planet is not the only one in the solar system that appears to be affected. There have been signs of unusual weather on Saturn, and Mars appears to be experiencing polar cap decline not dissimilar to our own.
Now a scientific paper has been published suggesting that increased solar activity over the past decade has resulted in the sun contributing anywhere from ten to thirty percent of the additional heat that's going into global warming.
In fact, it doesn't just suggest this, it goes a long way toward proving it. This will be taken by some people to mean that we needn't bother about global warming because it's the sun's fault. But, of course, it's not ALL the sun's fault and we can and must do something about the part that's our fault. The truth is that the added impact of solar heating makes the problem incredibly urgent. This planet's whole natural process is about to go into chaos, and when it does potentially billions of us are going to die, and the most vulnerable areas are the United States, Europe and China, so we Americans cannot expect to sit on the sidelines while the rest of the world suffers for our sins.
Anybody who doesn't burn to do something about the global warming problem is insane, and leaders who won't address it are in the process right now of committing the greatest crime against humanity that history has ever known.
When I worked on Superstorm, there were no models that factored in increased heating from the sun. But it's there all right, and therein lies the making of a catastrophe not unlike that prophesied as the end of the age, according to Jose Arguelles, by Pacal Votan, a Mayan ruler of the sixth century A.D.
I am beginning to see around me evidence that this man's prophecy was correct. Why that would be so is another matter entirely, and one that I cannot address except with speculation, but I can say that, if things keep deteriorating at the present rate, there are going to be environmental disasters of unprecedented ferocity in a few years, and I would not be surprised if they weren't upon us right around 2012.
There is no question at all that an age is coming to its end right now. In the past couple of years, the problems have become so obvious that they are very hard to ignore. The sun is more active than it has been in a thousand years. The magnetic pole is showing signs of a shift. Storms are becoming more frequent and catastrophic. Human pressure on the planet's natural functioning is rapidly overwhelming its ability to stay alive. Earth is dying.
And then there are the earthquakes and the subtle suggestions that great volcanic events might be impending. There are things nobody really understands, such as the hot spot east of Santa Barbara, California, and the signs of activity beneath some of the world's supervolcanoes.
The earthquakes are the strangest phenomenon. Why are they happening now? Are they in some way related to solar activity? If so, it's not something that our own science understands. We even have trouble understanding if there is a connection between earthquakes that take place in close time proximity but on unrelated faults.
There was a book published some years ago called Hamlet's Mill that suggested that much ancient symbolism was an attempt to warn the far future that earth every so often, perhaps on a regular cycle of about 12,500 years, went into a state of chaos.
Subsequent to the publication of this book, we have come to know that there was a complex series of cataclysms on this planet around 12,500 years ago, that led to the collapse of the world's then extensive glaciation and the beginning of the interglacial in which we have spent our entire recorded history.
There is all sort of evidence, commented upon by many authors, notably Rand and Rose Flem-Ath and Graham Hancock, to the effect that some sort of past civilization, advanced in ways that are hard for us to apprehend, was utterly destroyed during this time.
Sea levels rose fantastically during the glacial melt, and they rose fast, increasing hundreds of feet over just a few centuries. Nowadays, we live in what would have been the highlands of that period. Gigantic stretches of land that were present in those days now are gone. And there are suggestions, here and there, that there might be inundated cities and other structures, now far from land. But underwater archaeology is in its infancy, and geology has not produced more than a rough idea of where shorlines lay during the last glaciation. Add to that the probability that earthquakes have further altered landforms, and the chances of proveably detecting any unquestionable remains of even quite a large civilization become remote.
Nevertheless, in memory and in prophecy, we do have indications that this civilization was once there, and that it has tried to send warning forward.
We are living in the time it identified as the next age of chaos, and we would do well to acknowledge that fact as they did in their time, in order to do what they did, which is to project some remnant of what we have accomplished and what wisdom we have gained forward into the next human age.
It is fair to ask, then, what is to be done? I'm not a survivalist and I'm not going to recommend the purchase of flashlights and seeds. Time and chance will capture us all, and it will be a matter of luck and the moving finger on the wall who survives and who does not.
Best that we humbly acknowledge that, somehow, the past had possession of extremely potent knowledge. It's demonstrable: Mayan texts do identify 2012 as an epochal year; and the environment is disintegrating in ways that suggest that this prediction, made over a thousand years ago by a man who didn't even have use of the wheel, is perhaps the most potent human idea formed in all of our history. If he is correct, then it's not difficult to argue that his was the best mind that ever lived, at least during this particular cycle.
For nearly three million years, earth has been rocked by climactic instability. The periodic nature of ice ages suggests that the sun heats up over a vast cycle of thousands of years, causing the release of greenhouse gasses through natural means, resulting in a spike in air temperature that violently melts the ice and ushers in another interglacial when the sun suddenly changes and cools down again.
This gigantic solar cycle must exist now, but it has not always existed. Actually, the earth has spent huge, unimaginably long epochs in a condition of stability unlike anything we have known across the entire history of our development. During many of these periods, there were no polar caps, and life evolved slowly, impelled by the competition for living space into the myriad of forms and survival strategies that we see around us today.
For the past three million years, though, the opposite has been true. The continuous cycle of cooling and heating that the planet is now undergoing has wrought havoc in nature. The number of species has been in decline for that entire period, and has just now reached the peak of the bell curve. We will see a phenomenal dieoff in the next few years, a massive collapse in the number of life forms on the planet.
The extinction event that created us, in other words, is about to challenge our very existence.
It's not as if it hasn't happened before. In fact, every time there was a gigantic climate change, the primates reacted by adapting themselves anew to changed conditions. Were it not for the instability of the present situation, we would never have become an intelligent species.
Now, that intelligence must be called upon again, to get us through to the next period of relative calm. During this period, we will leave behind virtually everything we now understand as civilization. The consumer society will be the first to go, a victim of overpopulation and our failure to address the need to find new energy sources early enough. With it will go the United States as superpower. We are already in the last phases of that: like the British Empire in 1910, our country is overwhelmed with debt and beginning to treat the restless in its client states with extraordinary brutality. Next will be some cataclysm, perhaps the unexpected collapse of Saudi oil or the detonation of atomic bombs in our cites or a great plague--who knows what it will be--but on the other side of it, the world will no longer be dominated by a superpower.
At the same time and consequent to the fall of the superpower, will come a period of climate change so rapid that growing seasons worldwide will be disrupted at the same time that the large scale movement of food around the planet becomes problematic due to a lack of energy resources. This is likely to mean sickness and famine on a very broad scale, especially in areas that are not self sufficient in food.
It's not a pretty picture, and the failure of human leadership worldwide just at the time when creative innovation at the top was most essential has condemned us to vast suffering.
So, why don't I just go ahead and fall on my sword or put a gun to my head?
Because I am optimistic about the future, and I have good reason to be.
At the same time that all of these negative forces are gathering and arraying themselves against us like some kind of dark army of invincible soldiers with the monstrous weapons of the apocalypse, all aimed straight at our hearts, the mind of man is responding in ways that are so far beyond what we presently realize that they beggar description.
However, we are on a collision course with two destinies: the planet is about to throw us off like a horse switching its tail at a persisten dobson fly, while at the same time we are on the point of making a series of phenomenal scientific breakthroughs that may finally take the mind in the direction it has been trying to go ever since we looked up and saw the stars, which is outside of the body, into the surrounding world and universe, into total knowledge, total freedom and a future so fantastic that what we will be in fifty years will be so radically different from what we are now that we will be all but unrecognizable to ourselves.
If we live.
This has happened before. During the latter stages of the dinosaur age, the climate entered an unstable phase as well, which lasted about three million years before a the great cataclysm that delivered the coup de grace. During this time, the number of dinosaur species gradually declined, and highly intelligent--by dinosaur standards--new species such as Struthomimus--evolved. This fast, smart little beast came about as a response to a consistently challenging climate.
In modern (by geologic standards) times, the mammals responded to our own climate challenge by evolving another highly intelligent species--us. But we're a much better contender than Stuthomimus, and for a very specfic reason: we are intelligent enough and informed enough to induce further, even more rapid evolution in ourselves, and perhaps save ourselves and even our civilization, from the coming upheaval.
Indeed, I don't believe that a changing environment is actually our greatest enemy. Our greatest enemy is a part of nature that lies concealed within us. It is the death wish that arises out of excessive population pressure. This death wish began to be triggered a long time ago, in the middle of the eighteenth century, when a restlessness swept europe as cities grew in population, crowding and filthiness. By the middle of the nineteenth century, there had been two major revolutions, the French in the 1780s and the upheaval of the 1840s. In the United States in the 1860s, the first war of population destruction was fought. And then, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the firing of a single bullet into the brain of an archduke in Bosnia turned on a killing machine that we had invented in the form of the European arms race that had unfolded from 1890 through 1914.
That killing machine, started by that single bullet, has never since been turned off. It is directly responsible for the rise of communism and Naziism and the massive avalanche of death that they brought to this world. Indeed, I could take you, event by event, from that bullet to the latest death in Iraq and show you just how direct and unbroken that chain really is.
I could take you, also, through the wicked hell of opposing ideologies that keep the machine running, and show you how a larger sense of enmity, expressed again and again as a desire to enter one utopian condition or another, has been threatening man from within even as the environment threatens us from without.
But this is not a history lesson. It is about what lies ahead, because the machinery of death might at last coming to pieces, and, if it does, then the human mind is going to spring free, and there will be wonders.
A confluence of scientific discoveries holds almost immeasurable promise for us. We are in the position, probably for the first time in any of the cycles we have lived through, of taking possession of our own evolution, and therefore also of the nature that now controls our lives with its dangers, its arbitrary cycles, and its indifferent casting of species after species down into death.
Biological and informational technologies are about to come together in ways that are beyond startling, that suggest that we may finally leap free of the bondage of the death wish and all the silly superstitions and ideologies that flow out of it, from the myth of the good communist to the myth of the superman to the myth of the free market, to leave it all behind, and along with it the religious and social superstitions that drive our ideologies on the ash-heap of failed ideas and false gods.
As our ability to create ever more dense information nodes is increasing exponentially, so also is our ability to deliver information to the brain, and to alter ourselves in ways that enable us to process it with greater efficiency.
And this is only one of many areas in which science is progressing toward the exact sort of post-apocalyptic human state that has been prophesied, that we will reach superconciousness even as the world falls apart around us.
It turns out that our approaching this state isn't connected with some sort of magic at all, any more than the spirit hole through which Pacal Votan said that he would speak was woven of an incomprehensible magic. Just as ordinary science is going to make the magic of the superconscious human being a reality, it was that hole that enabled archaeologists to discover Pacal Votan's tomb, and bring his existence back to light.
Magic, when you understand it, is no longer magic, and we are rapidly reaching the ideal human condition, which is one in which the average person is too smart to believe in the deadly superstitions and ideologies that claw at us like evil trolls trying to prevent us from fulfilling our destiny, which is to take flight and fill the universe with human mind, human spirit and human being.
If we live...
--Whitley Strieber 
I went to a talk by Joel Garreau who just published the book Radical Evolution. The subtitle of the book is "The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies—And What It Means To Be Human." The talk and the book are about the radical changes to come amidst a world of limitless technology.
I normally avoid these talks because I have—so I've thought—internalized the interesting perspectives on where the Singularity will take us. Turns out I just only have two extremist views. There's Ray Kurzweil who, in The Age of Spiritual Machines, describes a "Heaven" scenario for mankind, wherein we upload our minds to machines and simulate a paradise of infinite beauty. Then there's Bill Joy who asks: In a world where a million people can make an atom bomb, how do we stop ourselves from self-annihilation? (cf: Why the future doesn't need us). We can call his the "Hell scenario."
Garreau introduces an alternative view titled the "Prevail Scenario," which he ascribes to Jaron Lanier.
The rest of this post is about the Prevail Scenario, pulling quotes from Chapter 6 of Garreau's book.
In both the Heaven and Hell Scenarios, the embedded assumption is that human destiny can be projected reliably if you apply enough logic, rationality and empiricism to the project.
This is referring to Moore's Law and its extrapolations which see chip speed and technological progress as following a smooth, exponential (accelerating incline) curve. It is practically an article of faith among technologists that the computing power of the brain will fit on a chip the size of a penny within a few decades. However, Kurzweil and Joy are obsessed with this prediction, according to Lanier.
In The Prevail Scenario, by contrast, the embedded assumption is that even if a smooth curve does describe the future of technology, it is not likely to describe the real world of human fortune. The analogy is to the utter failure of the straight-line projections of Malthusians, who believed industrial development would lead to starvation, when in fact the problem turned out to be obesity.
Another Singularity-like exponential curve seems fishy upon a modest glance of history. One could say that there has been an exponential curve in warfare technology, starting with the invention of the phalanx by the Ancient Greeks moving on to guns during the Napoleonic Wars. After World War I, it seemed that warfare would come close to world annihilation. And a couple decades later, with the atom bomb dropping, fatalists would think that it was only a matter of years before nuclear winter would destroy humans. Sixty years later, we have prevailed. So while there has been an exponential development in warfare, a Singularity of human annihilation hasn't happened as would have been predicted.
The Prevail Scenario is essentially driven by a faith in human cussedness. It is based on a hunch that you can count on humans to throw The Curve a curve.
The Prevail Scenario is actually not a single scenario, but a plurality of scenarios that see technology's impact on humanity not as an exponential curve that leads to a vertical line of progress, but rather as a spaghetti of outcomes that is as rich and unpredictable as human history has been.
Lanier espouses a particular instance of The Prevail Scenario which focuses on human connectedness. In this perspective, technology's best contribution is in bringing humans closer together. To him, it is "the quantity, quality, variety and complexity of ways in which humans can connect to each other" that constitute the relevant Curve.
Garreau also provides a list of "warning signs" why the Heaven and Hell Scenarios seem unlikely:
• Resistance to The Curves of change is actually having an effect worldwide.• Certain technologies that affect human development and enhancement are globally seen as worth slowing down or stopping, in the way that the use of nuclear weapons was effectively prevented for the second half of the 20th century.
• Technologies that were seen as inevitable turn out to take much longer to develop than anticipated. Predictions common in the early 21st century begin to sound as silly as those of the middle of the 20th century, such as the paperless office, hotels on Mars and self-cleaning houses.
• Researchers voluntarily stop working on topics they view as too dangerous.
• Researchers decline funding for certain topics that they view as too fraught with human peril, putting their ethics ahead of their promotions, tenure, graduate students and intellectual curiosity.
• Researchers decline funding from organizations they view as too laden with problems, such as corporations and the military.
• Computational power is no longer seen as achieving exponential growth because of the inability of software to keep up the pace of innovation.
• There is little correlation between any exponential change in technology and the development of human society.
To close, I'll end with a nice refutation of a nanotech "Hell Scenario:"
He [Lanier] completely believes that the moment nanobots are poised to eat humanity, for example, they will be felled by a Windows crash. “I’m serious about that—no joke,” he says.
A few notes about the talk itself:
The talk was held at the SAP forum in Palo Alto and put together by the Bay Area Future Salon. The audience was comprised of about fifty people, most above the age of thirty. The crowd was well-versed in futurism topics, such as Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns. My guess is that Garreau took the time to speak here because this small group contains lighting rods for his kind of message. Garreau's book came out last month, so perhaps this is also part of some book tour. While the talk was simple, it had cogent details and an engaging narrative.
(This article is a cross-posting from my blog Philosophistry)
The Singularity as Eschatological Archetype
(A Few Observations)
“Heaven is not a different realm, but this world after we have improved it and ourselves.”
(RCW Ettinger, Man into Superman)
1
Whether it is named the Singularity or the Spike, the Transcendental Object at the End of Time or the New Jerusalem, the vision of humankind’s mass transcension into a hyperdimensional state of being is a millennia-old archetype whose depths obstinately refuse to be fully plumbed. Like all abiding memes, it is a motif whose representations can vary a great deal in detail without losing their basic archetypal pattern.
Today’s prophesized Singularity (as commonly publicized by Vinge, Drexler, and Kurzweil, among many others) is no different. Though first catalyzed by an unparalleled technological leap, this metahistorical Spike promises to comprehensively and irrevocably transmogrify every mode in which we relate to our selves, each other, and the phenomenal world at large. Our sphere of influence will vastly deepen -- not only outer space, but inner space as well will be laid bare to the penetrative stare of innumerable nanites and foglets. We shall at last see as we have been seen, and will then be, courtesy of superhumanly intelligent and benignly spiritual machines, summarily remolded in the image of our greatest and wildest expectations.
The only significant precedent to such a mind-bending warp in consensual reality would have to be the resultant Utopia often foreseen as the coda to the various ‘end-times’ scenarios of pious apocalypticists. Peering at length through the symphonic perversity of their feverish visions, we touch upon several key intimations regarding the ‘look’ and ‘feel’ of a post-historical planetary renovation -- visions which until recently have been either faithfully reverenced as gospel truth in spite of (or perhaps because of ) their seeming improbability, or alternatively scorned as hallucinogenic pipe-dreams. But when set alongside the forecasts of our contemporary futurists, these ancient allusions are sometimes startlingly similar to those foreseen today, and occasionally appear to describe the technologies of tomorrow in bold detail.
2
(Examples are plentiful and of varying extremes. The comparative overlap between these two seemingly disparate fields is remarkably large, should one choose to pursue it. I only wish here to outline a few of the more salient aspects.)
To sketch a brief example -- the ‘Spirit of Healing’ as foreseen in Zoroastrian traditions, which appeared to its forecasters as ‘a great stream of molten metal’ through which everyone will be made to pass, in order to be ‘purified’ for the transition to a new life in a paradisiacal ‘House of Song.’ This purgative has again been prophesized today, in the form of a nanotechnological ‘swarm’ that, once properly interfaced with the user, will eradicate biological impurities and augment his or her perceptions with neuromorphic stimulators, thus preparing and reprogramming the user for a life of longevity and transhuman magnificence. “Not only immortal, but eternally young,” reads the Zoroastrian text, a passage which finds a much amplified echo in the contemporary assurances of the cryonics movement. “Once more endowed with bodies,” we continue to read, “they will be able to experience the joys of the senses as well as those of the spirit.” Is this not a vision of a full-immersion Cyberspace -- a virtual theme-park of sensuality as well as a central repository of all the earth’s accumulated wisdom?
The Singularity, with all its attendant technological innovations in tow, also looms large in the chiliastic foresights of the Christian apocalypse. Its central motif, “the Holy City, New Jerusalem,” which descends from ‘Heaven” in plain view of the entire human race; a City of pure gold, “bright as clear glass,” adorned with jewels of every kind; a City that has “no need of the sun, neither of the moon to shine in it,” but is lit instead by the “light" of a fully integrated Consciousness –- what is this if not the premature vision of a supercooled solid state Hypercube, the glittering golden mobilia prophesized by FM-2030, our future perfect hyperspatial home? A mystical model of sacred geometry covertly expressing the known proportions of the planet itself, the New Jerusalem represents a measuring-out of Heaven on Earth, the architecture of a macrocosmic temple into which all humankind enters to receive its final transformative quickening. Crossing this final threshold into the numinous Light of the great Beyond, the many millions of humankind will disassemble into a metamorphic Omegon unshackled from the outmoded mores of space and time.
Our modern prescriptions for the Singularity thus form a significant -- and far more rewarding and technologically correct -- revision of the older eschatological models. These newer prototypes have their template in the earlier visions, however surcharged they may be with the theoretical promises of the mid twenty-first century. But whether seen through the blinders of tribal theism or through the google-eyed wonder of open source technology, the End promised by both the visionaries of yesterday and the futurists of today are one and the same -- a New Heaven and a New Earth.
3
The fact that there is a Singularity of one type or another expected by every long-lived memetic structure in human history seems to indicate that humankind was hardwired with a ‘Singularity code’ from the start -- that it is an integral product of our forward evolution, an inescapable eventuality designed to fire at a crucial crossroads in the forward advance of our Collective Consciousness. In both ancient and contemporary reports of the looming Spike, the doom prophesized by the teleological transition instead gives place to the penultimate consummation of an age-long metamorphosis -- no ‘end’ at all, but rather a new beginning, a ‘making wonderful’, a second genesis. This ‘new beginning,’ the most crucial phase of the unfolding Singularity, is akin to a running process long obscured by an encryption scheme almost supernatural in its complexity -- soon to be unraveled and fully deciphered and downloaded by one and all as a sparkling new metahistorical operating system whose relative omniscience and omnipotence converge joyously upon the Divine.
The Singularity is thus the quotient that the alchemical algorithm of Conscious evolution has all these millennia been struggling to resolve –- which is, how best to explode base matter into a meta-dimensional bloom of fully conscious hyperspatial adventure?
Again, the much-expected and multi-faceted Singularity is the long-anticipated answer to life’s primary impulse -- it only remains for the technological and teleological prowess of the Gaian Mind’s leading prototype to unravel the remainder of the equation and, with these coordinates in hand, steer the Ark of Life to its transcendent destination in the sky.
4
The coming Singularity brings with it the promise of a new, more masterly emergence of Consciousness, one that promises to unify our fragmented selves into a tightly-woven telesphere of ubiquitously wetwired, mutually reflecting minds. The human psyche itself -- own personal node of the One (or Total) Consciousness of planetary humankind -- now unshackled from the pains and pleasures of its carbon-based interface, shall fuse with its silicon panacea and populate the very air we breath with the sentient sparkle of hyper-dimensional joie de vivre.
The New Heaven (as prophesized by the ancient apocalypticists) is the opening of this final frontier, the interstellar depths of the cosmos brought nearer to us by our needful willingness to venture out from our increasingly crowded home-world via the establishment of a meta-terrestrial Humankind, like so many branches spiraling out from a central seed. The New Earth is this very earth alchemically transmogrified into a crystalline Hub of hyperspatial Omni-Consciousness, the brute coal of our sun-kissed sphere at long last compressed into diamond clarity, now sought out by cosmic denizens near and far for the precious treasure we have become.
In the end, evolution on this planet will have been the growth of an immortal spark of Divinity from an invisible evolutionary lever to a hyperspatial Entity with complete mastery of space and time, having the ability to traverse any distance of interstellar space and deploy any number of men and women and children as ambassadors (or avatars) to other worlds.
We shall be both flashing neurons in the unchained Gaian Mind as well as first class passengers on the grandest interstellar starship.
You can sign me up. How about you?
--Upwinger
At the top of a pyramid, swarming with tourists, I slipped through time. We were there on holiday, drawn to the majesty and mystery of this ancient culture so unique and inspired. In the Gregorian moment of April 6th, 3:30 eastern standard time my wife and I swayed on the 356th step of the great pyramid of the feathered serpent, Kukulkan, dizzy and winded from the climb, mind's reeling at this point of contact. We'd finally made it to Chichen Itza. Among the many exemplary Mayan & Toltec ruins, the central timepiece of Kukulkan was the reason for our journey and the immediate point of our first visit. We each, in turn, approached the great base and laid hands on it's ancient stones, gazing up along it's ridges at the whisping cloudlets passing in the wind. Around to the other side and up the steep slope of 91 steps, calves burning moving past numerous apes, some too unfit to make the journey. Inertia doesn't stop up on the top in the temple, milling through the thickened crowd, looking, seeking, tuning...
But it's painfully frustratingly difficult to stop and silently open yourself to the intimacy and power of such a site when there are people everywhere around you. The ambience is just all wrong. And such wonders - power spots, vortices, monuments - really cry out to the sympathetic for an urgent communion. I tried not to think about the empty water bottles piling up under the capstone, then stepped through time.
Like straddling two rings of a spiral, I felt myself bifurcate gently between the present moment and a time some 2000 years ago, amidst the ancient Maya themselves. I felt the great celestial rites commanded from the temple, aligning with heavenly milestones - the solstice, the equinox, the rise of Venus. The vultures and falcons above had flown for millenia, and the lazy iguanas had been watching the stars since the birth of time. The buzzing hive around me blurred and thinned, semi-opaque, leaving me standing in the Isness of this timeplace, it's wordless moment coating me like amber honey. The information imparted was experiential, nonlinear, illogical. It was simply being in that place when it was far richer with meaning and intent and magick than the unwashed masses would now allow.
In 1935, Sylvanus Griswold Morley wrote:
When the material achievements of the ancient Maya in architecture, sculpture, ceramics, the lapidary arts, feather-work, cotton weaving and dyeing are added to the abstract intellectual achievements - invention of positional mathematics with its concomitant development of zero, construction of an elaborate chronology with a fixed starting point, use of a time-count as accurate as the Gregorian Calendar, knowledge of astronomy superior to that of the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians - and the whole judged in the light of their known cultural limitations, which were on a par with the early Neolithic Age in the Old World, we may acclaim them, without fear of successful contradiction, the most brilliant aboriginal people on this planet.
While I've been unable to find a direct translation of the word "maya" in Mayan, it's always fascinated me that the same word in Sanskrit means "illusion". The enigmatic Maya of Mesoamerica often seem to shimmer and glimmer, beautiful and alluring like a mirage rising from hot sands, fleeting like a sudden glimpse of the Jaguar's spots receding back into thick jungles. Rising from early Olmec cultures in 300 b.c. the Maya grew to number among the millions with vast cities and religious complexes extending from Belize, Gautemala, and Honduras, up into the Yucatan peninsula in the north. Then around 900 a.d. the great southern lowland cities like Pelenque and Tikal were abandoned for reasons still unknown. Some suggest crop failure, others that a great volcano covered the region in ash. Or perhaps, as Arguelles and McKenna fancifully suggest, the great emperor Pacal Votan, having descended into the Underworld of Xibalba, gained access to the controls of time and swept his people away to the Galactic Center.
In Vedic philosophy maya is the illusion of a purely physical, phenomenal and mental reality, in which consciousness is completely entangled veiling the true spirit of existence, Brahman. God is reduced to law. Nature is no more than mechanism. The self is alone and ephemeral. Karma and ego consciousness are the binding forces of maya, trapping the individual in the ceaseless cycle of death and rebirth. The Hindu path of enlightenment entails an awakening to the illusion of physicality, separateness, and time itself to the ever-present timeless unity of true being.
The Mayan god of all gods, Hunab Ku, is said to exist in the center of each galaxy, radiating its intent out to life through each local star. It is in this galactic core that the motion of the galaxy is initiated and it's superstructure distributed out to it's components. Galactic time and it's dynamic web of gravitational effects entrains solar time which, in turn, entrains cellular time through the circadian rhythms of nature. The Maya were the emissaries of Hunab Ku tasked with tracking and calculating the movements of time as they relate to our planet and it's "harmonic relationship" with the galactic core.
It's interesting to relate the glyph of the Hunab Ku to the concept of a black hole, which we now suspect lies at the center of the Milky Way. Like the yin-yan, the Hunab Ku is a dynamic interplay of black and white. A black hole is an ultra-dense gravitational object so powerful that light itself cannot escape it's surface. While the galactic core keeps the dark firmament moving and hung with bright stars, their light is always being drawn into the darkness. The glyph of Hunab Ku is said to be a two-way street, allowing access to the core of any galaxy. Warping and bending with gravity, at the point of dissolution time ceases, space collapses, and infinity is revealed.
Mayan cosmology is intrinsically bound to time and the Tzolkien is their codification of a fractal, cyclical conception of motion radiating outward from the galactic center, through our star to Earth. The product of a 365 day solar/lunar calendar and a 260 day sacred calendar, the Tzolkien presents a great cycle of 5200 tun of 360 days each. This is roughly 5128 years for the current cycle, beginning at about 3113 B.C. Within this cycle of 5200 tun are 13 baktuns, or eras, of about 144,000 days each (Current 144?). The present baktun is the 13th and last, set to end on that fateful day in December of 2012.
The Bhagavata Purana tells that Lord Brahma asked his four sons to go and create progeny in the universe. When they refused Brahma grew angry and a crying child appeared from his forehead. The child, Rudra, becomes Shiva and was asked to go and populate creation. Shiva, though ultimately formless, is often pictured in a dance, as the delicate play of nature - creation and destruction - as it unfolds through time in the 5 energies: Shrishti (creation, evolution); Sthiti (preservation, support); Samhara (destruction, evolution); Tirobhava (illusion); and Anugraha (release, emancipation, grace). Shiva, in fact, is the Conqueror of Time and has always been regarded and worshiped as the greatest deity of the Hindu pantheon. Maya only exists through the efforts of Shiva, and it is Shiva's to destroy with the blink of an eye.
The Maya established the first and most complete understanding of time as it relates to our planet and solar system. While western science only stepped on the moon once in 1969, the Maya were thinking galactically before the birth of Christ. Within the complex codices of the Tzolkien, perhaps aided by the intricacies of the I-Ching, appears to rest a template for eternity. Time, like the flow of a river, appears linear on the surface, only to reveal complex dynamics - eddies and vortices and currents - whorling below. The human penchant for eschatology surely must be beyond apocalyptica. The end of time may be simply that: the sudden collective awareness of the illusion of history. Like standing on the top of Kukulkan, tourists to my left, Mayan priests to my right, all of time is everpresent, compartmentalized and portioned out only by the fragmented self struggling to make sense of the vast data of hyperspace. Like a tesseract, the structures within time remain, only rotating in a higher dimension, archaic but entirely new. Within the Hunab Ku, the black hole, the vortex, as above and below, the singularity of spacetime - galactic or personal - collapses temporality into the timeless moment of eternity. The serpent gains wings, flying feathered towards the sun, a blackened silhouette against a fiery white star.
Like the world-order system of the I-Ching, the system of Mayan science is one of holonomic resonance, as much of the future as it is of the past. Indeed, from the perspective of Mayan science the terms future and past are of little value as guages of superiority of progress. For the Maya, if time exists at all, it is a circuit from whose common source future and past flow equally, always meeting and being united in the present moment. - Jose Arguelles, The Mayan Factor
History repeats itself, as the old saying goes. But for how long?
A series of thoughts and images that I decided to put into words as best as I could :
As ideas are shared with increased communication, levels of inspiration rise, lifting energy levels higher and higher until the gaps between planes get thinner. The barriers between this plane and the others begin to disintegrate. The Archetypes, or Essences, being keys that unlock the doors to the unconscious, are found and absorbed into consciousness at an ever increasing rate.
In times gone by the Alchemists, Hermits, Adepts, Occultists, the Wise One's of yesterday would spend years, lifetimes, seeking out like minded people in order to learn what they could, collecting knowledge and wisdom of the hidden arts. Today the seeking is being done on a worldwide scale. Technology making the barriers between people, countries and continents obsolete, the knowledge and wisdom amassed throughout history is found, clarified and shared.
The Others, the manifestations of the unconscious, increasingly come to Earth (or go next door) and defy logic to prove that logic isn't the only thing there is, imagination is also a universe in itself.
The Adepts on the edge, pass over, having also learnt how to go next door, and greet the guides on the other side of the mirror. More skills of relaying information and teaching are learnt. More keys of wisdom are replicated, brought back, and learnt exponentially. Hypersites, faint, material mirrors of the other planes and the Akashic records, edging ever closer in the Astral light, list the maps, paths, techniques, spells, symbols and essences, send people on journeys of Magick, inspiration, and initiation, and open the ways to creativity.
Artistic skills increase as does clarity, perception and vision, and the places beyond this reality begin to have a better representation and bigger influence in minds the world over until the planes eventually begin to merge. New memes and paradigms burst through as the dam finally breaks.
History's boundaries are transcended, and as the evolutionary leap approaches, the information age passes with it. Humans progress from being In-formations, to being I(ntelligence)-Magi-nations.
From there, they do as they will.
The depths reached, the balance restored,
the lessons learned, the psyche healed.
Way back in 1981, one of sci-fi's greatest visionaries, A.A. Attansio, wrote a breathtaking book called Radix. I was lucky enough to discover it the same year. I took it home and read it from cover to cover without putting it down. I was spellbound by the story, and the extremely imaginative psychophysics of this world. Like Dune, there was a large glossary of far-out terms in the back. Here is just a sampling.
CIRCLE (Center of International Research for the Continuance of Life on Earth, 2009-2113): a self-sufficient scientific community on the southern Peruvian coast (kro), established to find ways to compensate for the massive morphological changes that began as the earth swung into Line; at the time of its causal collapse (2113), CIRCLE was the only technological community of any significance on earth.
Kro: the term designating the people who dominated the earth before the Line exerted its influence; protected by a magnetic field around the earth and a clement sun, they thrived on their self-absorption and paid only cursory attention to the cosmos that surrounded them.
Line: a hypertube; the timelike geodesies which connect the spacefree internal domain of a naked Kerr-singularity (a rotating black hole that is "open" to our universe); CIRCLE mantics first identified the ray of metafrequency energy jetstreaming from the massive black hole at the galactic hub as the Line; earth migrated into the flux of the Line fully in 2113 kro, though the transmuting effects of this atypical energy had been altering the planet for over a century. (See Linergy.)
Mantic: a human brain coupled to an ATP-pump; this mechanical means of extending intelligence was devised and utilized in CIRCLE; because of the mantic insistence on thinking in dialectical schema, they were obviated when the earth entered into the emergent, pluralistic reality of the multiverse.
Multiverse: the subquantal Field; the "internal" structure of the universe outside of time where all possible universes exist; this nth-dimensional domain is a reality at the core of all black holes; in some rotating, assymetrically collapsed black holes, this core is not shielded by an event horizon and "information" from the multi-verse enters the Einstein-space of our universe. (See Line.)
Psiberant: a substance which acts directly on the brain's third ventricle, the pineal gland, and the Fissure of Rolando; it dramatically increases empathic response in the user.
Radix: a mantic term for the root of existence, the void, or, if you prefer, the isostasis in which the infinite-dimensional space of the multiverse is imbedded; within this void, everything exists; the kro called it wu, ain soth, and sunyata.
Timeslip: collected Linergy, redirected to shape new, transient realities.
Tropiform: eo-crafted furniture which conforms to the shape of the user.
The story takes place in a future earth after it becomes transformed from a beam of energy/radiation that washes over the earth from a super-massive black hole in the galaxies core. The effect of this beam utterly transforms human consciousness into an entirely new plane of being. For 1981, this book was way ahead of it's time. You could say this book planted the seeds for my further initiation into the whole 2012 idea. Radix preceded Jose Arguelles book The Mayan Factor, which relied on a similar proposition that on December 21st, 2012 the Mayan Calendar will end, and humanity will enter into the Galactic Community. According to Arguelles this date represents when Earth will leave a denser vibrational energy and enter into a higher one via a beam of energy from a super-massive black hole at the Galaxies core. At this point humanity will become surfers of the Zuvaya - cosmic immortal beings joining the galactic community of light.
At the time scientists said that it was impossible for there to be black holes at the center of the galaxy. Then in the late 1990's they revised this position when indirect observations confirmed that Arguelles was at least right about there being large black holes there.
Now fast forward to a few days ago, and the latest image from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory orbiting the earth reveals that in addition to the very large super-massive spinning black hole, there are another 10,000 black holes and neutron stars at the center of our milky way galaxy. From the article:
In this Chandra image (shown below), four bright, variable X-ray sources were discovered within 3 light years of Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*). The variability suggests these are X-ray binary systems where a black hole or neutron star is pulling matter from a nearby companion star. Such a high concentration of X-ray binaries in this region is strong circumstantial evidence that a dense swarm of 10,000 or more stellar-mass black holes and neutron stars has formed around Sgr A*.
I find it interesting that three authors, Attanasio, McKenna and Arguelles, independent of each other all come to very similar conclusions about a future transformation of humanity. Even more curious is to find that what were once considered proposterous speculations on their parts regarding the galactic center have now been confirmed by the latest scientific evidence, contrary to expert opinion at the time their books were first published.
Ever brilliant Dale Carrico wrote this piece recently that clearly articulates my own position as well as problems with the singularity idea.
Technophiles who drift uncomfortably in the direction of the megalomaniacal end of the temperamental spectrum often wax enthusiastic about the near term arrival of post-biological superintelligence. Undaunted by the relentless deferment of the "inevitable" arrival of even the modest artificial intelligence we've been promised interminably by enthusiasts for decades, they warn of and (let's be frank) pine for the near-term and inevitable arrival of greater-than-human artificial intelligence to this day in the same urgent, sometimes hushed, tones.Not to delve too deep into my skepticism about this way of thinking, I will simply suggest that these starry-eyed projections (1) tend to overestimate our theoretical grasp of intelligence in general, (2) tend to underestimate the extreme bumpiness we should expect along the developmental pathways from which the relevant technologies could arrive, (3) tend to assume that these technologies, upon arrival, would function more smoothly than technologies almost ever do, and (4) tend to exhibit a rather stark obliviousness about the extent to which what we call technological development is articulated in fact not just by the accumulation of technical accomplishments but by social, cultural, and political factors as well, in consequence of which they simply rarely take these adequately into account at all.
I have no doubt that technology will continue to accelerate. I also have no doubt that computers in general will get smarter. And finally I have no doubt that given time, future intelligence will vastly exceed current human levels. What I do doubt however is that this greater-than-human intelligence will be an AI.
My position has always been that greater-than-human intelligence will be us. The future of intelligence is much more likely to be IA (Intelligence Augmentation) - augmented humans, and soon afterward fully nanoengineered post-humans. Singularitarians are probably correct in their assumption that its much simpler, theoretically speaking, to create a super-intelligence from scratch without all the messy genetic inheritances and logical fallacies that have plagued human intelligence throughout history. But like Dale points out, they vastly overestimate the complexity of actually doing so. This is why my position has always fallen on the more difficult task of figuring out how we humans can use what we have to make ourselves better. This means that both a combination of inner transformational work, along with the outer work of technological development will be necessary to make the transition to a greater-than-human, kinder-than-human intelligence. I think a good start would be to acknowledge the vast human potential (unassisted by technology) that has yet to be tapped.
Combining this human potential along with the powerful tools of nanotechnology should bring about this greater-than-human intelligence we seek. Otherwise, if current events are any indicator, without this kind of inner 'spiritual' transformation these unleashed technologies will bring destruction rather than liberation.
Those in the AI camp have no faith that such an inner transformation can occur, which is why they have put all their faith in a aritifical superintelligence. Some of them have put their faith in one individual who claims to be the one person who has the one solution to making all this happen.
So who is the more foolhardy?
Ray Kurzweil says that the biggest challenge for society as we approach the Singularity will be defining what it means to be human.
Heh, yeah right. I really doubt that the semantics of the word "human" will really bother anybody. Derrida and his gang of deconstructionist obfuscators have already shown how easy it is to skewer words and have nobody blink their eye.
People will treat humans as humans in a "I know it when I see it" kind of fashion. And the fact of the matter is, people have had a broad spectrum of what they treat as human for the longest time. Our American founding fathers treated people who were born south of the equator inbetween the Atlantic Ocean and the Indian Ocean who also happened to have an evolutionarily beneficial, but darker, pigmentation in their skin, as not human; i.e. slaves.
I think the questions that will come up is how humans, when granted enlightened thinking by machines, will be able to stand on the crutches of traditional human illusions.
For example, Nietzsche announced "God is dead." But I don't think everybody got the memo.
But, in the Singularity, once everybody is given the computing power of a billion Pentiums, they will be able to digest all of the human knowledge in the timespan of a hic-cup, and then get Nietzsche's news. Okay, perhaps this is not a problem because there are many atheists out there who are doing fine without God--or are they? Many studies show that religious faith is highly correleated with happiness.
But what about other illusions, like time, existence, love, purpose.
How will we react when we have a true understanding that time doesn't really exist, and that cause and effect is just a trick of perception, will we cease to treat things the way we treat them? Will we fear death like we used to? Will death even matter?
I guess the answer to those questions is, "it depends on how internalized the knowledge becomes." If we are able to process and deal w/ knowledge in a cold fashion, maybe it won't bother us like it doesn't bother intellectuals now--or does it? I read some of Consciousness Explained from Daniel Dennet, and I had to put it aside because I was seriously starting to lose my mind.
Or another problem in the Singularity is when we have absolute power to control our own emotions. Would we just shut off all pain? Maybe you would say, "but I'll always retain free will, and so I wouldn't choose to shut off all pain." But what if you could shut off your care of free will? "But I wouldn't shut it off." But you would be so smart to know that after you have shut off your care for free will, you wouldn't have any regret, and therefore it is a rational choice. In other words, what is to stop us from ending up in stable equilibrium of being a vegetable in bliss? Would there be safegaurds against it?
I still fantasize a bit about the Singularity and all the cool things I'll be able to do while in it, but to be realistic, I'd say that the Singularity may very well be just one big death. I'm not talking about a physical death, but a pandemic death on every human-laden concept. Even death will die. Life probably won't mean anything to us. Even the notion of "us" and "meaning" will dissolve.
My biggest worry in the Singularity is total dissolution. But then I temper that worry with the trust that even worriment itself will be dissolved. Yipes!
I just arrived back from Burning Man fully transformed. I suspect it will take me several months to fully digest this most awesome experience... maybe just in time for next year. It was wonderful to finally give warm embraces to people I've known only online.
As the Official Burning Man Website says, this event is notoriously indescribable. When I was there it becomes quickly obvious that no amount of eloquent speech or series of pictures could ever do it justice. Quite simply, Burning Man has to be experienced. It is Utopia. One of the things that struck me about every 30 minutes or so as I wandered the playa is, "I can't believe this exists, it is beyond description". I would look out to the horizon in nearly every direction to find this immense amount of novelty. During the day, art installations of various kinds were scattered about - some within a few hundred yards, others some one or two miles away, as if a mirage. Certain structures like the Temple were over 100 feet tall and were noticeable from almost any distance. Nighttime was equally amazing, when many more art pieces come alive to join the spectacle. Nearly everywhere I went, looking in front of me and in every direction, there was some kind of dynamic activity. It's not the dense activity of an urban city with its rules and boundaries, but a vast unbounded playa stretching for miles in every direction, filled with light, fire plumes, neon floating caravans with distant yet pleasant volumes of lounge-techno music, and thousands of glow sticks representing and protecting people as they walked and rode their bikes across the playa. So imagine seeing thousands of these various colors randomly crisscrossing the desert, stretching for several square miles in every direction. The sense of freedom, joy, excitement and possibility filled my every cell. I danced and moved and rode my bike hither and thither for hours on end, stopping at different installations, spending time in distant planetarium, and then traveling further out into the playa, which this year represented the heavens. As I traveled further from the Esplanade (the main arced avenue), the further out into "outerspace" I was going. At about a mile and half beyond the Esplanade, I encountered an illuminated and pulsating star with alien creature blowing in the night winds. I took several photos of it, but my camera is very old and doesn't work well at night, so here is a day shot.
On a typical day I would spend some 14-15 hours wandering the interacting with the art and enjoying immensely the company of fellow burners, hanging out at center camp for some hot chai, dance for awhile at Solarhenge, and back to camp to hang out with friends at Prometheatrics. I was introduced to this wonderful bunch through Mark Pesce, who unfortunately was unable to attend this year.
I spent a couple of lazy afternoons hanging out at The Brane, home of the 2nd Annual Palenque Norte lectures. When I first came into the tent I met Carey Thompson whose Galactivation Art is so beautiful. About an hour later I ran into Dlight of Tribal Oasis, who spoke eloquently of creating this type of post-modern tribal community full time. His ideas are very compelling and he now has me convinced of their attainability. He went on to tell me that regardless of what we've been told, hierarchy has ended and we now need to get used to living without those rules. The technologies of liberation are expanding so fast, that hierarchy simply cannot survive, and so we as a species need to finish the job of deprogramming ourselves out of this primitive hangover. He also mentioned that the singularity is really just another form of misguided monotheism, another type of hierarchy. The future is not a singularity, but a Cambrian explosion of diversity and creativity heading out in every direction. Perhaps it was my own state of mind at the time (he he), but his words struck a deep chord, ringing true like few things do for me these days. His message was hopeful, positive and inspiring. LVX23's words ring true too when he says that out on the playa we are expanding the mythos or morphogenetic field of modern humanity. Burning Man is pioneering the cutting edge of possibility - not a counter to culture, but front-runners scouting out the frontier of what is possible. This might sound overly grandiose, but the feeling on the playa of genuine fast-forward evolution is palpable.
I feel like I could write a book on my experiences, like it's been every other year I've been. Burning Man is a super-condensified experience - a day can seem like weeks have passed. I never escaped the feeling that I had landed on some beuatiful alien planet filled with novel delights at every turn. This alien feeling was immediate and viceral and I didn't want it to end. No manner of sci-fi movie watching can prepare you for it. A cross between Barbarella, Mad Max and Tatooine might give you a hint, but that's all. I missed the last few years, and feel very sad now that the event has come to an end. I'm so looking forward to next year, and I'm just bursting at the seams with new creative ideas to make happen for next year’s event. With all the walking and riding bikes I did this year, and coming across so many wandering, tired people, we are planning on creating a playa taxi service for next year, which we're thinking of calling Trip N' Taxi. Great way to meet new people, and a lot easier to get around. It’s merely a single idea of many. Several members of Prometheatrics and I schemed a few more ideas, which will have to remain hush-hush for now. If you're interested in creating and collaborating on some art installation for next year, please get in touch with me at psiphius at yahoo.com
One last thing, LVX23 mentioned this year there was not enough deeply sublime art as last year. I found out today that a lot of regular artists skipped this year’s event because they're too involved politically with the coming election. From what I've heard the numbers are large enough that an impact on the playa art would be felt, and so it was. Having missed the last three years I didn't notice it and was instead just so grateful to be here again, and in turn was even more enthusiastically participatory and social this year, and even more inspired to make more art for next year.
Hope to see more of ya on the playa next year!
Stay tuned for more pics - I'm working on an entire section of photos.
This guy was towering over me and must have been 6'6.
I had a vision last weekend concerning cultural/technological evolution and the concept of the Singularity (what follows is a rough outline of a larger paper I'm working on). The Singularity is alternatively imagined to be some apocalyptic transformation through fire which will purge the planet of the Old Ways and sweep the pure of heart into the next phase of existence, or it is a sudden shift in perception as technology is accelerating so quickly that life is indistinguishable from imagination. I tend to lean towards the latter, though I question how much of the Old Ways will disappear in the new paradigm.
But the vision I had was somewhat more mundane, acknowledging some of the current threads which will irrevocably necessitate a fundamental shift in the way we humans relate to each other and our world. Such a shift will undoubtedly call into question the entire edifice of western culture.
The first current is the shift from classical Newtonian Mechanics and Cartesian dualism which has laid the foundation of human logic for at least the past 400 years, producing the economic, industrial, and political theories which now rule the planet, to the emerging logic set informed by Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. This shift is already happening. Science is the new god and determines how we interpret ourselves and the world around us. Social relativism and quantum mechanical concepts such as Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and the Observer-Participant Paradox are eroding classical dualism and empiricism, replacing them with uncertainty and interconnectedness. Binary classification of nature is failing. Yes or No, right or wrong, black or white - these are increasingly becoming more and more fuzzy as the western mind grasps the gradients between such polarities. Dogma has only brought us ignorance, fear, and bloodshed. The separation and individuality that has typified the western mind is facing the realization that All is ultimately One, that certainty must yield to probabiity. In the Information Age - the Age of Light - the only functional ontology must be relativistic and subatomic.
Add to this the emergence of the global mind manifesting through the world wide web. Communication is faster and more dynamic than ever before. Information is being shared and iterated across the globe, accelerating technological innovation exponentially. Information feeds on itself. In a vast planetary network each mind is like a single neuron contributing to the processes of the digital brain. When information is so freely available the very foundations of society that have evolved under the guidance of elite priesthoods and governors - politics, religions, social castes, eductaion, economics - resolve clearly into outmoded traditions designed to keep the individual in a subservient role to the State.
Soon the advent of quantum computers will shift the binary substrate of the digital age into a fuzzy quaternary code infinitely more powerful and capable of crunching huge logic sets. Similarly, advancements in organic computing using proteins & DNA offer solutions to mathematical problems formerly impossible to solve. Imagine a global network of quantum DNA computers... Imagine how quickly scientific thought will be accelerated with such awesome computational power...
The currents of genetics and nanotechnology will perhaps have the greatest effect on the current paradigm. These two fields are tightly intertwined and their full realization will give humans the power to control nature on the atomic level. From engineering life to molecular manufacturing of resources, nanotech holds the possibility of endless resources available to anyone; of pinpoint medicine capable of treating any ailment or remedying any genetic error; of a post-industrial utopia where machiines run cleanly on less than a single volt of electricity. The utopia may be far off but the advancements of these fields and the integration of their products into society are already beginning to alter the landscape of reality. Hypermedia, virtual realities, genetic modification, mind-machine interfaces, life extension, and highly specialized and reactive nanomaterials are only a few of the technologies emerging that will challenge our perceptions and further erode the lines between imagination and reality.
As technology reconstructs the fabric of society, the society will be forced to upgrade its assumptions about every aspect of culture and governance. At some point in the not-too-distant future, the fundamental paradigm that has dominated western culture for the last 2000+ years will suddenly fail, to be replaced by the next paradigm. This event is gradually building but the powers that be - those invested in and trapped in the old ways - are actively fighting the challenges to their power base. The cost of evolution is often paid in blood. The momentum of history is building in such a way that the old ways will inevitably be sloughed off like dead skin; like the chrysalis from which the butterfly emerges, history as we know it may be left behind as an empty husk at the threshold of hyperspace.
As a prelude to an article I'm working on about The Singularity, here's a bit cross-posted from my blog:
CMC Magazine has a fascinating article by Rev. Philip J. Cunningham titled Tielhard de Chardin & the Noosphere. Chardin was a very forward-thinking Jesuit geologist and paleontologist born towards the end of the 19th century. After enduring the horrors of WW1 his ontology evolved into a highly spiritual conception of the human organism.
In the seeming myriad of entities around us, Teilhard perceives a unity: "My starting point is the fundamental initial fact that each one of us is perforce linked by all the material organic and psychic strands of his being to all that surrounds him." Moreover, that unity reaches back in time and continues into the future: "If we look far enough back in the depths of time, the disordered anthill of living beings suddenly, for an informed observer, arranges itself in long files that make their way by various paths towards greater consciousness."His personal research led him to develop the concept of the Noosphere - "a human sphere, a sphere of reflection, of conscious invention, of conscious souls" - and the notion that its coevolution with humanity would draw us all towards the inevitability of an Omega Point at the end of time.
"We are faced with a harmonized collectivity of consciousnesses to a sort of superconciousness. The earth not only becoming covered by myriads of grains of thought, but becoming enclosed in a single thinking envelope, a single unanimous reflection." Yet such a unanimity of consciousness implies a condition that humans generally reject, depersonalization. Indeed, the conclusion seems inevitable: "So that at the world's Omega, as at its Alpha, lies the Impersonal." At this point, "Omega," the last letter in the Greek alphabet, simply refers to the final stage of evolution. At the end the noosphere become an "all" that absorbs all.In refining his description of "Omega" Teilhard seems to agree. "Because it contains and engenders consciousness, space-time is necessarily of a convergent nature [and] must somewhere in the future become involuted to a point which we might call Omega, which fuses and consumes them integrally in itself." Here "Omega" takes on its deeper meaning. Noogenesis, as it evolves, inevitably reaches a single focus.
