RS: But the whole point about biology is that the earliest forms of life, mainly plants, were related to the light of the sun. All life on Earth is dependent not on merely terrestrial events, but on our relation to the sun and the wider cosmic environment. Even carbon and the other chemical elements on which biological life depends is fallout from exploding stars. Biology on Earth is rooted in a much larger ecology. I don’t think the evolution of life on Earth can be regarded as merely terrestrial, merely biological, in that sense. Every human culture has recognized the importance of celestial influences of one kind or another: the sun, the moon, the planets, the stars, the sky. Influences from outside the Earth are working on us all the time. The transcendental object may be located or channeled through the sun, other stars, planets, or constellations: something to do with the astronomical environment.
TM: If it’s truly a higher-dimensional object, then it’s in some sense everywhere in this universe, and all routes of evolutionary progress may lead into it, as a kind of universal hologram of time and space, a galactic community or intelligence perhaps. In other words, spores or viruses or bacterium probably percolate and permeate through the physical universe, and wherever they come upon a planetary environment in which they can work their magic, life takes hold. From then on it’s a battle in which life attempts to modify and control the abiotic environment, keeping it at equilibrium sufficiently for the program of bios to be put into place. That program is to grow from the initial seed and return to the higher, hidden source of all, outside the pleroma of three-dimensional space. It’s a Gnostic return, an idea of alchemical sublimation and rarefaction. I see the cosmos as a distillery for novelty and the transcendental object as the novelty of novelties. When we formally refine that, we discover something like a Liebnizian planet, a monad of some sort, a tiny thing that has everything enfolded within it. This takes us to another dimension, where all points in this universe have been collapsed and become cotangents. It’s an apotheosis. The Earth is giving birth to a hyperdimensional being.
RA: Just to shock you let me take a position much more pessimistic than yours. There have been several close calls lately, with comets. Some people, William Whiston for example, or Immanuel Velikovsky, felt that the beginning of our planet was a collision with a comet. It seems to me that it’s quite likely we will get hit by a comet—and even pretty soon. Suppose that this happened. We’d have an extinction such as there was 65 million years back, when Jurassic Park vanished into the ocean. Then, this entire biological miracle, accelerating to its own schedule, with exponential condensation toward the concrescence of the Eschaton, and the shockwaves from the transcendental object at the end of time, would be rendered totally insignificant. We’d simply encounter a car crash on the highway of the solar system, totally independent of the progress of biology on the planet Earth.
TM: It’s entirely possible. I didn’t want to bring it up because it’s so Halloween-like. The transcendental object at the end of time may be nothing more than a five-kilometer-wide carbonaceous asteroid, that in a single moment will send us all up to the gates of paradise.
RA: You’re trying to destroy my argument by appropriating it!
TM: As I’ve said, the dissolving of boundaries eventually means the dissolving of the boundaries between life and death itself.
RA: If the Eschaton is a comet rapidly approaching New York City, why is it necessary to have this increase of complexity, the population explosion, the destruction of the ozone layer?
TM: In the million years preceding the impact that killed the dinosaurs, an enormous extinction was already underway, that we’ve not been able to figure out. It’s as if the Earth knew what was coming. What I’m suggesting is that biology knows. Biology has a complete four-dimensional or five-dimensional map of the planet’s history. The map says: “A comet’s on the way; let’s get these monkeys moving,” leading to the production of sufficient complexity that when the event of impact occurs, it will be transcendent.
RA: An opportunity to proceed into another dimension.
TM: All of history is a curious relationship with this intuition that nobody wants to face, but that nobody can quite get rid of. We’re sacrificing goats and we’re doing this and we’re doing that, because we have this very restless feeling that all is not well in three-dimensional space and time. History keeps bearing this out. Now it’s upon us.
Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine surrealist poet, had the interesting idea that a species could not enter hyperspace, whatever that means, until the last member of that species perished. What’s happening is that vast numbers of souls are accumulating in another dimension, waiting for us to decently depart this moral coil so that the human family in a body can find itself at play in the fields of the lord.
RS: I want to think this through a bit further. We used to think that there might be this great transformation of humanity in a kind of collective near-death experience, except it would be an actual death experience, brought about by a nuclear cataclysm. Although the bombs are still there, that model’s gone out of fashion for some reason. We’re now more into ecological apocalypses. We’ve got all these models. Let’s assume there’s a sudden transformation, where all of humanity is taken up into the transcendental attractor. Leaving aside the details on the Earth, what effect does this have on the rest of the universe?
TM: I think it’s not an answerable question, but it is in fact what we will then set out to understand. We are literally packing up and preparing to decamp from Newtonian space and time, for the high world of hyper-dimensional existence. We may find ourselves in the grand councils of the-who-knows-what, or we may find something entirely unsuspected.
I have talked before about shamanism anticipating the future. If you pursue these psychedelic shamanic plants, you inevitably arrive at an apocalyptic intuition. I think shamans have always seen the end, and that the human enterprise in three-dimensional space has always been finite. In the same way that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny as we look into the past, it seems reasonable to assume that death, which we have spent a thousand years turning into a materialist vacuum, is in fact not what we think. There’s an enormous mystery hovering over our existence that’s only unraveled beyond the grave.
I would never in my life have thought that I would be pushed to this position. I spent the first half of my life getting away from this kind of thing. However, the evidence of the shamanic hallucinogens is in fact that shamans have always done what they do via ancestor magic and higher-dimensional perception, and that death is not what naive positivism in the last 300 years has attempted to say that it is. I realize it’s incredible to suppose that here at the apex of materialist, positivist, scientific civilization, we’re going to make an orthogonal turn into an understanding of what lies beyond the grave, but in fact, this is probably the paradigm-shattering world-condensing event that is bearing down on us.
RA: Conversion in progress.
RS: Given all that, I want to know whether this has happened anywhere else. If it can happen on our planet, perhaps it could change the entire conditions of dimensionality throughout the galaxy, or better, perhaps, the cosmos. If it’s happened on planets elsewhere in the galaxy, what effect do you expect it to have had on us already?
TM: When you explore the adumbrations of the transcendental object, you see all this transhuman, alien data that’s essentially what it has been in its past history. You see the imprint of all life finding its way back to some kind of source that’s in a higher plane. That’s why it has this alien presentation. It has maybe a thousand civilizations poured into it, or ten thousand, or fifty million. Who can know? The universe is already old.
RS: I still can’t work out whether we’re talking about some planetary violence that gets hold of civilization after civilization, or planet after planet, causing them to auto-destruct in a particular way, or whether we’re talking about some cosmic process.
TM: It seems to me just the continuation of life’s program of conquerin
g whatever dimensions it hasn’t yet conquered. Probably that process is endless. Life is a chemical strategy for the conquest of dimensionality. It carries out its program, come hell or high water.
RA: Just like striking a match: biology comes to a planet and the flame leaps up. Then pretty soon it burns out, due to exhaustion of resources and the arrival of the shockwave of the Eschaton for that particular planet. Biology is extinguished once again.
TM: This idea provides a way of imaging what’s happening without falling into the dualism’s that haunt either a reductionist view or an out-and-out, gung-ho, no questions asked, religious conversion. There are orthodox cosmologies that support my contention of the possibility of universal collapse. Hans Alfven, at the Swedish Academy of Sciences, who wrote Worlds-Antiworlds: Antimatter in Cosmology, has suggested that the universe is what’s called a vacuum fluctuation. This is a situation in quantum mechanics where a group of particles and antiparticles spring into existence and then annihilate each other. Because parity is conserved by quantum physics. An interesting aspect of these vacuum fluctuations is that quantum theory sets no upper limit on their theoretical size, merely saying that the larger they are the more improbable they are. The universe itself could be a vacuum fluctuation of some 1068 particles, springing into being, allowed by quantum physics. These have separated into a higher-dimensional space, and are in fact eventually at some point in the future going to reconnect to conserve parity. Alfven says that in this kind of a higher-dimensional collision, all points in both systems would appear to an observer to become cotangent instantly. What that would mean is the material universe potentially could disappear in a single moment. All that would be left is light, because light doesn’t have an antiparticle. No one knows what the physics of a universe made only of light would be like. I suggest to you that our many myths and intuitions that link light to the process of spiritual advancement, and talk about the generation of the light body and so forth, may anticipate something like this.
Even within the toolbox of ordinary quantum astrophysics, there are ways of putting together the syntactical bits together like tinkertoys to produce incredibly optimistic transcendental and psychedelic scenarios.
RA: There’s no way to personally leap into the dimensions of hyperspace in the birth event of the Eschaton. Not in quantum physics. I suppose we’re talking about a different kind of thing. What about the timetable, Terence? So far it seems like your idea is pretty similar to Teilhard de Chardin’s, except he didn’t give us a timetable.
TM: You mean when do I think it will occur?
RA: Yes.
TM: It’s weird to talk about this because it rests on a formal argument where you have to look at a lot of historical data. What I did was I produced curves that I felt were reflective of the ebb and flow of novelty in time. By fitting these curves to historical data, I slowly refined down a prediction based on spiral closure, which makes it happen much faster than you would expect. I predict concrescence at the winter solstice of 2012 AD. After I had made that calculation, I discovered to my amazement, that the Mayan civilization had a very complex cyclical and recursive calendar, and it also indicated that same date. I think if you take strict objective data curves and then put in the fudge factor of the unexpected, it seems pretty reasonable to suppose that at least there is a nexus of prophetic intensity of some sort, causing a number of traditions for some reason to focus on the late months of 2012 AD.
When I attempted to understand objectively what could be going on, using computer simulations of the star fields, it turns out that the December 21, 2012 solstice occurs at a helical rising of the galaxy. Once every 26,000 years in the procession of the Great Year, there’s a winter solstice sunrise that catches 23 degrees Sagittarius on the plane of the galactic ecliptic. What does that mean? Who knows? Certainly not me. In Hamlet’s Mill, Giorgio de Santillana and Herthe von Dechend two very well-respected historians of science, suggest that for ancient peoples there were somehow galactic gates or way stations of some sort, through which souls had to transit to make their way back to their hidden home. I find this stuff a bit too mediumistic, but nevertheless, it is an objective fact that a rare solstitial conjunction that occurs once in 26,000 years will occur on the date I chose, and I did not know this at the time I chose it.
RA: Let’s look at this. We have here the coincidence of three different things. One we could fairly describe as a novel and very interesting kind of mathematical extrapolation of historical data that culminates in a point. The other two things, the Mayan calendar and the astronomical conjunction are both periodic phenomena. The Mayan calendar repeats the cycle of 26,000 years, and the great conjunction recurs every 26,000 years. They can be expected to recur at least once more before the sun gives its last gasp, and biology becomes extinct.
If we weigh these things equally, your mathematical extrapolation isn’t the same as the shamanic reportage of a hyperdimensional investigation. It’s more like academic scholarship, with a huge database of history and this imaginative curve used to extrapolate data. This suggests that your extrapolation curve could actually be reversed so that you have a completely different model. It’s not an ironclad extrapolation, and I think the case for this date actually being the Omega Point is weak. As far as the transition of all of us into the fifth dimension, I don’t see a necessary case for it.
TM: What it comes down to is a very fine-tuned argument looking at a particular historical curve that’s a damped oscillation. The curve of history actually does run down. It’s not elegant to try to make it one cycle within a larger or extrapolated set of larger cycles. The built-in damping factor makes it pretty clear that it’s a single cycle, with many cycles embedded within it, but on the highest level, actually having a beginning and an end.
RA: It seems to you radically implausible that there will be any future after this point.
TM: I’ve thought of many, many ways of expressing this that would make it less catastrophically radical. A very simple way that makes everybody feel a little better is to suppose that what happens on December 21, 2012, is that physicists who’ve been laboring for some time toward the technology of time travel, actually succeed. Suddenly the timewave is fulfilled, and yet the heavens do not fall, and angels don’t appear to lift us into paradise. The reason history ends at that date is because after the invention of time travel the notion of a serial of events ceases to have any meaning. Everybody agrees history ended yesterday. We then experience life in a post-historical a-temporal bubble where you not only tell where you live, but when you live.
There are other alternatives. How about this one: On December 21, 2012 AD, I drop dead. Everyone says,“Well, how peculiar, it was only about him. He insisted and we were all swept along for 25 years in some bizarre mathematical machination, and the irony is he was able to foist it off on us.”
It may not be planetesimal impact, or the oceans boiling, but I’m telling you, Ralph, there’s something out there. I’ll know it when I see it, and I’ll expect you at my elbow.
I’m an unfortunate bearer of this message, because if you knew me, you would know that I’m actually not a very pleasant or nice person. Believe it or not I hate unanchored speculation! Yet I find myself in the predicament of leading the charge into the greatest unanchored speculation in the history of crackpot thinking. My method is very formal. It’s very easy to predict the future, because who the hell can say you’re wrong? It’s a free-fire zone. Retrodiction, explaining or interpreting the past, on the other hand, is very difficult, because it’s already happened. If you’re wrong, everyone will know. What I’ve done is make a career of explaining the past with a wave that proceeds right past the present moment and into the future. My argument to the skeptics is that my wave has correctly interpreted any past moment that you can conceive of. Therefore, there’s a certain intellectual obligation to at least take seriously the contention that it predicts the part of history that has not yet undergone the formality of actually occurring, as Whiteh
ead might say.
RS: I’ve got one final question I want to ask you. Other people who tell us the end is at hand, as in placards reading “The End is at Hand, Prepare to Meet Thy Doom,” suggest that this requires some kind of moral preparation on our part. Does yours come willy-nilly, no need to get ready for it in any particular way, or does it require some special preparation?
TM: This is a very difficult question. Much of what I was involved in many years ago was political activism, political struggle. Yet, when I go to my sources on this matter, they assure me that it’s a done deal. Possibly one might spend one’s time reassuring other people, but only if you felt like it. The walls are now so high, the creode, or matrix, so deep, the momentum so tremendous, that I really don’t think anything could swerve or divert us from what we are being drawn into.
RS: I wasn’t thinking in terms of more recycling and so on. I was thinking in terms of conscious, moral preparation.
The Evolutionary Mind Page 6
