Science completely marginalizes human experience. We are told that we live on a typical planet around a typical star at the edge of a typical galaxy, and that we are animals of a complex type, easily identified with other typical forms. My notion is to take seriously the apparent vectoring in of universal intent on the human world and at the same time try to keep away from the pitfalls of religion. The ride to the end of history is going to be a white-knuckled experience. I offer this metaphor in the hope that it may make the trip to the transcendental object, glittering at the end of time, an easier ride.
CHAPTER 3
TIME
Terence McKenna: The subject for this trialogue is near and dear to my heart, you might even say it has my initials on it. I’m very interested in time, the largest frames into which phenomena can be fitted, and the various ways in which we can view our humanness when we change the way we look at time. What orthodoxy teaches about time is that for reasons impossible to conceive, the universe sprang from utter nothingness in a single moment. Notice that this idea is the limit test for credulity. If you can believe this, then you can believe anything. It’s impossible to conceive of something more unlikely, yet this is where science begins its so-called rational tale of the unfolding of the phenomenal universe. It’s almost as if science said, “Give me one free miracle, and from there the entire thing will proceed with a seamless, causal explanation.”
There’s an aspect to the phenomenal universe that impinges on anyone who undertakes to examine it, one that isn’t given any weight whatsoever by science. When we look at the span of time that stretches from the big bang to the present moment, it’s very clear that complexity has aggregated toward the nearer end of this process, the dimension in which we find ourselves. For example, the early universe was very hot, and only a kind of electron plasma could exist. By cooling, complexity appears, and each successive advance into complexity occurs much faster than the stage that precedes it.
But what I want to concentrate on is what I call the “short epochs.” The first billion years of the life of the universe was an extraordinarily boring and empty period. Atomic systems were forming, and the simplest elements were aggregating into stars. This permitted fusion, the cooking out of heavier elements, and after a long period of time, the appearance of four-valent carbon, which permits a whole new set of properties to emerge, including ultimately, life. My terminology is largely drawn from Alfred North Whitehead, a great-unsung hero of British twentieth century philosophy. He had a notion of a progression of epochs leading toward what he called “concrescence.” I’ve taken his notion of concrescence and attempted to construct a terminal cosmology that literally stands on its head the scientific explanation of the origin of the universe. I don’t believe the universe is the push outward into substantial existence by primal explosion. I believe the universe is being pulled and shaped into an ever more complexified and concrescent entity that is in fact a transcendental attractor located in the future. It’s transcendental in the sense of residing in a higher dimension than ordinary space, and in the feeling/ tone sense in which we ordinarily use the term “transcendental.”
This idea is basically Catholicism with the chrome stripped off. It restates Teilhard de Chardin’s idea of the Omega Point, the telos attracting and drawing history into itself. What I’m interested to consider is that most delicate of all questions in prophetic systems of this sort: What is the role of humanity in all of this? Science evades this issue by setting us down somewhere between the big bang and the heat death of the universe, imagined millions of years in the future. Science completely marginalizes human experience. We are told that we live on a typical planet around a typical star at the edge of a typical galaxy, and that we are animals of a complex type, easily identified with other typical forms. My notion is to take seriously the apparent vectoring in of universal intent on the human world and at the same time try to keep away from the pitfalls of religion.
I think that history is the shockwave of eschatology. This is a concept we’ve not sufficiently entertained, but which we will be forced to entertain as the planetary crisis created by modernity builds toward some kind of climax. What I mean by saying history is the shockwave of eschatology is something like this: If this planet were a planet of hummingbirds, woodchucks, giraffes and grasslands, then Darwinian mechanics as modified by molecular biology would be sufficient to explain what’s going on. The fly in the ointment of that simple schema is us. We represent some other order of existence. My notion is that out of the broad moving stream of animal evolution, a species was selected, or fell victim to—the terminology can vary—the influence of an attractor pulling in the direction of symbolic activity. This is what we’ve been involved in through chant, magic, theater, dance, poetry, religion, science, politics, and the cognitive pursuit of all kinds, occupying, for all practical purposes, less than 25,000 years—a blink of an eye on the cosmic scale. This is the shockwave that precedes eschatology. An analogy can be seen in the undisturbed surface of a pond. If the pond begins to churn, it indicates some protean form moving beneath the surface, about to make its presence visible. This is the appearance of history on the surface of nature, a churning anticipation of the emergence of the concrescence, or the transcendental object at the end of time. It’s been anathema to discuss this in secular society, even as a part of “New Age” secularism, because it’s always been the province of beastly priests and their hideously hierarchical and constipated religions. Decent people have tended to turn away from it.
In fact, this is some kind of primary intuition about our actual circumstance. The reason it’s important is because we now are in a situation of planetary crisis, where you don’t have to be an enthusiast for Whiteheadian metaphysics or psilocybin, or the more arcane metaphors of Terence McKenna, to realize that we are approaching our limits. It’s inconceivable to speak of 500 years in the human future. History is a self-consuming process, and all we need do at this point is extrapolate any of a number of curves. Here are some of my favorites: The spread of epidemic, sexually transmitted diseases, the proliferation of thermonuclear weapons, the dissolution of atmospheric ozone, the rise in world population. When these curves are extrapolated, it’s very clear that we’ve taken business as usual off the menu.
Rather than seeing this as a situation driven by the momentum of bad historical decisions, I’d prefer to believe that what we’re witnessing is something like a birth; something that’s built into the laws of physics. We are literally on a collision course with an object that we cannot precisely discern, lying just below the event horizon of rational apprehension; nevertheless, our cultural east is streaked with the blush of rosy dawn. What it portends, I think, is an end to our fall, to our sojourn in matter, and to our separateness. It lies now so close to us in historical time, by virtue of our having collapsed our options in three-dimensional space, that you need only close your eyes, have a dream, take a shamanic hallucinogen, practice yoga, and there you will see it. It’s an attractor that’s been working on the species for at least a million years. I maintain that it is actually a universal attractor, and we represent a concrescence of complexity that is truly transcendental.
James Joyce wrote in Finnegan’s Wake, “If you want to be phoenix, come and be parked, up ne’ant prospector, you spout all your worth, and woof your wings, the end is nearer than you might wish to be congealed.” I’m carrying this same notion, because I think that otherwise we’re going to be victimized by an enormous pessimism arising out of the bankruptcy of science, positivism, and ordinary politics. The ride to the end of history is going to be a white-knuckled experience. I offer this metaphor in the hope that it may make the trip to the transcendental object, glittering at the end of time, an easier ride.
Rupert Sheldrake: Thank you!
Could you define Eschaton?
TM: Ah yes, let me fill in the footnotes. The Greek word es-chatos refers to the last things, the final things. The Eschaton is a neutral way of naming what some cal
l the Buddha Matraiya; some people call it the UFO intervention at the end of history, and some call it the Second Coming. It’s the last thing, the Eschaton. What I think is happening is that all boundaries are dissolving—between men and women, between society and nature, and ultimately the boundaries between life and death. We are going truly beyond ambiguity, beyond syntax. We’ve been trapped in a kind of demonic simulacrum for 25,000 years, created out of language. Now the accelerating process of involuted connectedness characterizing this Whiteheadian progression of epochs toward the concrescence is in fact being fulfilled.
Ralph Abraham: This sounds a little more optimistic than I’ve heard you before. You’ve accepted the Big Bang fantasy of science, and then reflected it into a similar event coming in the near future, about which you’re concerned with the “when.” You haven’t mentioned the date this time.
TM: I thought we could undertake a sort of generalized discussion of the assumptions that come out of this kind of thinking.
RA: For the first time I’ve heard you describe this forthcoming event as a birth. You interpret this optimistic event as an Eschaton. This is a myth made real, like the Christmas tree, where the events of history are kind of pasted on. As the tree shapes to a point at the top, you’ve drawn history around it, in an ascending spiral that ends at the point where they put the star. I think history can be wound on the form of this myth in a lot of different ways. You start with an assumption that’s very symmetric and identical to the scientific myth of the birth of the universe.
This puts me in mind of the history of history, where the concept of time in different cultures suits different models, of which there are only a few. There’s the bang to bang model, which you share with Teilhard de Chardin. There’s the infinite linear progress model, which is pretty much discredited now by everyone. There’s the reflection model, where a cycle is completed and then repeats from the beginning in a cycle of epochs that may be never ending. There’s the Kurt Gödel model, in which time goes forward and encloses on itself by going around a torus and coming back. Many ancient societies shared this model, where every action we are doing today will be repeated again another day. These different models for history are essentially mythical structures; that is, no scientific evidence can be given to distinguish one from other. They start on the basis of belief.
Now that we have archeology and cultural history, we know there are different models of time, historically, and that they fit into certain patterns. If it’s possible that what we do, think, or say affects the future, then it’s important which historical model we choose, because the myth itself guides action, determines evolution, and influences to a degree the outcome. I don’t see, though, even accepting the Christmas tree model, why the point with the star should be a birth or a death, or anything other than a simple cultural transformation, more or less presaged by a shockwave at the end of this epoch. Why couldn’t it be just a simple social transformation like the Renaissance?
TM: Because the planet can’t bring forth the birth of new societies. We’ve come to the end of our road in birthing new models of community. Wouldn’t you agree that when we look back over the whole history of life as known to us, it appears to be some kind of strategy for the conquest of dimensionality? The earliest forms of life were fixed slimes of some sort. Then you get very early motility, but no sense organs, where organisms literally feel their way from one point of perception to another. Then comes sequestering of light-sensitive pigment upon the outer membrane, and the notion of a gradient between here and there appears. Then for a long, long time there’s the coordination of backbones, skeletons, binocular vision and so forth. Then, with human beings some fundamental boundary is crossed, ending the conquest of terrestrial space, and beginning the conquest of time, first through memory and strategic triangulation of data out of memory, and then the invention of epigenetic coding, writing, and electronic databases. There’s an ever more deep and thorough spreading out into time. In this Eschatonic transition that I’m talking about, the deployed world of three-dimensional space shrinks to the point where all points are cotangent. We literally enter hyperspace, and it’s no longer a metaphorical hyperspace. What we’re saying is, this transition from one dimension of existence to another is the continuation of a universal program of self-extension and transcendence that can be traced back to the earliest and most primitive kind of protoplasm.
RA: Isn’t this a fancy way of saying we’re running out of time?
TM: Yes. Time is speeding up. There isn’t much left. Someone said time is God’s way of keeping everything from happening all at once. My notion is that we are caught—the transcendental attractor is a kind of black hole, and we’ve fallen into its basin of attraction. Now we’re circling ever faster, ever deeper, as we approach the singularity, called the Eschaton. All of this exceeds rational apprehension. It lies outside the framework of possible description. We’re on a collision course with the unspeakable. Contrasted with other animal life, we’ve been selected out for a very peculiar metamorphosis via information and the conquest of dimensions to become something completely other: a new ontological order of being.
RA: It’s too early to tell. Everything has accelerated. On the one hand, the population explosion, the destruction of the biosphere, the seriousness and irreversibility of all this is climaxing. Meanwhile, we have language, this 25,000, 60,000, or at most 100,000-year-old artifact. We’ve developed such things as agriculture and the urban revolution. We have automobiles and airplanes and computers hooking us up. We have all this increase in the complexity and fractal dimension of life, more or less to our benefit. We have, as it were, a race between two processes, both of which are growing faster exponentially. We don’t know for sure which one is growing more. Furthermore, the possibility of a miracle can’t be ruled out, due to the fact that we wouldn’t even have gotten this far without a whole series of them.
It’s a subtle matter, the way in which the myth of Eschaton can interweave in this race between the two accelerating processes. What do you think, Rupe?
RS: I agree with you, this is a cultural pattern. The Judeo-Christian tradition takes further tendencies already present in early civilizations. There’s movement towards some end time, envisioned in apocalyptic prophecy. The last book of the Bible, the Apocalypse of St. John the Divine, speaks of things not unlike those that Terence speaks of. As Terence is well aware, the apocalyptic nature of his thinking is a transformation of a vision that appears in Christianity and in Jewish, Messianic, and apocalyptic literature. The question is, to what extent is the pattern of acceleration you see in our culture a product of the fact that our culture is based on this particular myth of history? To what extent do these visions reflect some true perception of a cosmic process, something far beyond history? That’s not easy to decide, because there’s a self-fulfilling prophecy built into these cultural patterns. We’re now seeing these dreams coming true in many ways. They’ve led our culture to emphasize novelty, innovation, and change, always moving faster and faster. We’ve now spread this aspect of Judeo-Christian culture to the rest of the world, and the prophecy now seems pretty global.
For me, the big question regarding this prophetic vision is whether there’s a real influence of something beyond humanity, beyond history. Terence thinks there is, namely the transcendental object, the attractor; or as Teilhard de Chardin put it, the Omega Point. If this is the case, how limited is it in its range of application? Are we talking, as Terence sometimes seems to do, about something just happening on Earth, or as Teilhard de Chardin talks of the noosphere around the Earth, and the growing emergence of consciousness? Or are we talking about the transformation of the entire universe? There’s the same ambiguity in the New Testament, where St. Paul writes, “The whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain until now” (Rom 8:22).
If we’re just talking about this planet, these accelerating changes, graphs, and extrapolations look pretty plausible. If we’re talking about the solar system or the g
alaxy, however, I don’t think astronomers in the last few years or decades have suddenly noticed curves in their charts rushing off to some extreme point, where we can expect stars all over the galaxy to turn into supernovae. Nor can we expect planets all over the solar system to collapse, crumble, collide or otherwise undergo dramatic alteration. The history that we’re preoccupied with here and now, human history and the effects of human activities, doesn’t, as far as we know, seem to be mirrored in changes going on anywhere else in the solar system, the galaxy or the cosmos.
TM: It’s a difficult question. If we extend the search for a universal crisis beyond the Earth, the only evidence that has been offered by anybody is some kind of problem between nuclear theory, which has been very well established for 40 years, and the neutrino output of the sun. Searching for pathology beyond the solar system in the cosmic environment is, I think, outside the present reach of our technical ability. I tend to think, though the time wave that I’ve elaborated can be extended back into the pre-biological domain, that this is a phenomenon of biology I’m talking about. This is just one small planet, and biology is a process of conquering dimensions. Once it starts the process, as a primal slime, it accelerates and it bootstraps itself to higher and higher levels at tighter and tighter turns of the spiral, until it essentially exhausts and abandons the planet, carrying itself into another dimension.
The Evolutionary Mind Page 5
