I see the cosmos, if you will, as a kind of novelty-producing engine; a kind of machine which produces complexity in all realms—physical, chemical, social, whatever—and then uses that achieved level of complexity as the platform for further complexity.
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand that if the universe is complexifying faster and faster, an epoch—a time—will come when this rate of complexification is occurring so rapidly that it will become itself the overwhelming phenomena in the world of three-dimensional space and time. And I call this the Omega Point, or the transcendental object at the end of history.
We are all gathered here at the endgame of developmental processes on this planet. We are about to become unrecognizable to ourselves as a species. Our technologies, our religions, our science has pushed us toward this for thousands of years without us awakening to what the denouement would be. Now we stand close enough to it, and I think all but the most lumpen among us must feel the tug of the transcendental and the transformative.
The early universe was a pure plasma, a pure swarm of unassociated electrons. You didn’t even have atomic systems—let alone chemistry, molecular chemistry, life, complex speciated life, and dynamically balanced planetary ecosystems. Each one of those more complex phenomena crystallized out (or emerged, if you will) from the previous systems that had come into existence. So when I say time is speeding up, what I mean really is that more and more is happening. More and more is happening. And if you ask the question: well, what would be the ultimate state of connectivity or of happening? It’s when all points are connected to all other points. Somehow this concept of connectivity is intimately linked to the concept of complexity.
What I’m saying is that the universe is getting its act together. It’s connecting the dots. It’s bringing everything into co-relationship with everything else. And somehow it does this through the production of consciousness. Consciousness is this integrative function in biology which takes data which may appear profoundly unrelated and, in fact, brings it into some kind of a congruent relationship. We say an organism coordinates a point of view. Well, in a way, what’s happening over time is that the universe is coordinating a point of view. And as it does this, it becomes somehow more aware, more self-conscious, more being-like and less thing-like.
All nature aspires for this state of perfect novelty.
There really is a purpose to the universe. Its purpose is this state of hyper-complexification in which all of its points become related to each other.
We are the most novel thing on this planet. We are everything biology is—plus technology, language, politics, philosophy, art, so forth and so on. So suddenly, human beings become important. Not mere cosmic witnesses to a meaningless cosmos, but the cutting edge of a cosmos that glories in order and is moving toward higher states of order. And at the present moment we are the carriers. Once it was the volcanic processes that shaped this planet. Once it was the life of the early oceans. Once it was the great dinosaurs. But today, humanity represents the cutting edge of complexity and this process of moving toward complexification.
What is man’s purpose? To advance and preserve novelty. This is an ethical position. It means you don’t replace rainforests with pastures. You don’t censor books. You don’t lean on people who make gender choices different from yours. No, the purpose of being a human is to complexify reality even more: to hand on a more diverse, more complicated, more multiphasic universe to our children.
We’ve been involved in building complex prostheses which we call machines and computers. They are part of us. We don’t perceive them as part of us, because we identify with the flesh and exteriorize the fabricated metal. But, in fact, they are a part of us as much as our political systems, our agriculture production systems, so forth and so on. So the animal body has reached the limits of its evolutionary abilities.
We are finding ways out of the three-dimensional Newtonian prison, which says life is narrow and confined and ends at the grave. We’re doing it by becoming information that is freed from material.
We see: aha, we stand like children at the edge of the ocean of information. And we’re putting our feet in and wondering: could we swim in that? What would it be like to be wet in that? What would it be like to go into that new medium?
The degrees of freedom accessible to us are so multifarious that we can actually appreciate for the first time our circumstance, and our circumstance is awe-inspiring. I mean, we are about to take the step out of matter. The planet is on a collision course with the most profound event it’s possible to imagine: the freeing of organic life from the chrysalis of matter. For a billion years there’s been life on this planet, but never life that could step outside of matter. But this is obviously what’s in the cards, and we are privileged to be central to that event.
The presence of human civilization on this planet is the strongest evidence we have that matter and organizational processes are about to make some kind of a leap to a new order of being.
Can you imagine this planet in five hundred years, given the propagation of ordinary historical and scientific rates of unfoldment and discovery? Can you imagine this planet in a thousand years? No! No one can imagine that. Because processes are now in play which so totally rewrite the script that no one can imagine a hundred years or two hundred years in the future. Because the discoveries which will be made in that span of time will so totally rewrite the human experience of itself and the environment that we cannot see deep into the future. And this indicates to me that the future is exploding in an asymptotic unfoldment into a kind of cultural superspace.
When I talk about the transcendental object at the end of time, or the coming of the eschaton, or hyper-novelty, I mean that the process of the human and biological concrescence of intent reaches some kind of maximum.
When psychedelics were first being discussed, it was thought that they would prepare people for death. In a sense they probably do. But in the same way that they prepare people for death, they prepare people for transformation. It gets you used to the idea that the world is not what it appears to be. And it gets you used to the idea that the world is somehow animate, intelligent, and proceeding along its own agenda.
It’s just going to get weirder and weirder and weirder. And finally, it’s going to be so weird that people are going to have to talk about how weird it is.
The mushroom said to me once, it said, “This is what it’s like when a species prepares to depart for the stars.” You don’t depart for the stars under calm and orderly conditions. It’s a fire in a madhouse. And that’s what we have: the fire in the madhouse at the end of time. This is what it’s like when a species prepares to move on to the next dimension. The entire destiny of all life on the planet is tied up in this.
Nature is conscious. Nature is alive. Nature is an organism full of intent.
Our own decision to view the universe as dead, as inanimate, as unintelligent, allowed us, permitted us, to dissect it, to use it, and deny its validity outside of human purpose. Now the consequences of living like that is coming back to haunt us. You know, we have almost destroyed our home. We have almost cut the earth from beneath our own feet.
We must give reverence and credence to nature and nature’s methods, because no other methods will allow us to work our way out of the present mess we’re in.
The archaic holds answers. But it only holds answers if we are willing to think of the universe as a living, intelligent entity with which we are in partnership—not set against, but that in fact we are a part of a morphogenetic intent, and an unfolding reality that is larger than human understanding. Imagine: larger than human understanding!
