The Eschaton is conceived of as a boundaryless and causeless chaotic attractor that is drawing all space and time deeper into states of novel connection and complexity.[1]
The universe is made by mind, within and without organism and that mind is capable of boot-strap leaps in it's organisational self-expression, and we are priviledged to be the witnesses of the final act of life going through some kind of immense, transformative, unfolding from itself, in a kind of vortex which has been building on this planet for billions of years, but which has been accelerating to such excruciating intensities over the last 25,000 years that is has called forth self reflective intelligence from the monkeys and the invention of quantum physics and space flight and shamanism, and it is novelty upon novelty, novelty so intensified that the genetic machinery can no longer carry it, and it bubbles out in to the epigenetic, into art and language, poetry and religion and religious mania, and romantisism, and all of these things. It is a progressive knitting together, an expression of the universe's will to become, that causes me to think that we may be in the shorter gyres, the shortening spirals of this vortex of novelty and compression. Terence Mckenna. [2]
Omega point is a term invented by French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin to describe the ultimate maximum level of complexity-consciousness to which the universe seems to be heading. The universe evolves towards more complex states, while at the same time more conscious states. For Teilhard, this is the true theory of evolution, and he calls it the Law of Complexity/ Consciousness. Matter complexifies throughout time, whilst rising to more conscious states. For Teilhard, this is only possible if a higher form of consciousness is "drawing" the universe to itself. For it is impossible that lower conscious states can give rise to higher conscious states. Thus Teilhard postulates "Omega Point" as the critical point of consciousness which draws the universe towards higher states of consciousness, as observed in the Law of Complexity/ Consciousness.
As Teilhard envisaged it, the Law of Complexity/ Consciousness continues to rise through the socialization of mankind. Mankind is converging upon itself on the earth, creating more complex forms of communication and information exchange, all attributing to a rise in the collective consciousness of the human race. Teilhard envisages a critical point of 'reflection', in which the collective consciousness of mankind (like that of the individual human-being) will become conscious of itself, attaining its term at Omega Point, that divine center of consciousness which was always drawing the universe to itself.[3]
Five Attributes of the Omega Point -
In The Phenomenon of Man, Teilhard de Chardin describes the following five attributes of the Omega Point:
It must be already existing; This is the only way to explain the rise of the universe towards higher stages of consciousness.
It must be personal – an intellectual being and not an abstract idea; the complexification of matter has not only led to higher forms of consciousness, but accordingly to more individualized forms of personality, of which human-beings, who are "self-reflective", are the highest attained form of this personalization of the universe. They are completely individualized, free centers of operation. It is in this way that man is said to be made in the image of God, who is the highest form of personality. He expressly states that in the Omega Point, the human person and their freedom will not be suppressed, but super-personalized. Personality will be infinitely enriched. Omega Point, then, is a Person. And not a Person like you and I, but a higher form of Person. A Divine Person.
It must be transcendent; Omega Point can not be the result of the universe's final complexification of itself on consciousness. Omega Point, instead, is the prime mover, ahead, which draws the universe towards itself. Which essentially means, that Omega Point is outside the framework in which the universe rises. If it was found only in the framework of the universe it could not explain how the universe was able to rise to higher forms of consciousness.
It must be autonomous – free from the limitations of space (nonlocality) and time (atemporality);
It must be irreversible, that is it must be attainable[4]
Teilhard imagines a critical threshold, Omega Point, in which mankind will have reached its highest point of complexification (socialization) and thus its highest point of consciousness. At this point consciousness will rupture through time and space and assert itself on a higher plane of existence from which it can not come back.[5]
If we are indeed passing through the archetypal matrix of the Apocalypse, a word which literally means “uncovering” or “revealing,” then the Jungian view tells us that this is essentially a psychic event, the “coming to self-realization of human consciousness,” or the “coming of the Self.” Daniel Pinchbeck
'Change more radical by magnitudes than anything that has gone before looms immediately ahead.'—Terence McKenna
2012 and the Nature of Time
...the condition of knowing a fading past and facing an unanticipatable future is not a ontological necessity of existence, it is possible to imagine an existence in which one saw into time, the way we as animals see into the space in front of us, so that we are able to run and leap and dance among the rocks, it's because we can see into space. A creature or a culture that could see into time could anticipate where the river of time would flow quickly, where it would broaden out and move slowly, with a rich sense of the conservation of accomplishments achieved, where it would cascade and break up it's previous patterns and produce great cataracts of novelty, a civilisation which knew these things, or a person which knew these things about their own life, would claim a new dimension of existential freedom for being. Terence Mckenna[6]
Novelty Theory suggests that on December 21 of 2012 AD, at the coincidence of the moment of the solstice and the heliacal rising of the galactic center, levels of planetary novelty will exponentially increase. [7]
'I come very close here to classical millenarian and apocalyptic thought in my view of the rate at which change is accelerating. From the way the gyre is tightening, I predict that concrescence will occur soon - around 2012 A.D. It will be the entry of our species into hyperspace, but it will appear to be the end of physical laws accompanied by the release of the mind into the imagination.' - Terence Mckenna[8]
'... we are living in a very unique moment, ten or twenty thousand years long, where an immense transition is happening. The object at the end of and beyond history is the human species fused into eternal tantric union with the superconducting Overmind/UFO. It is that mystery that casts its shadow back through time. All religion, all philosophy, all wars, pogroms, and persecutions happen because people do not get the message right. There is both the forward-flowing casuistry of being, causal determinism, and the interference pattern that is formed against that by the backward-flowing fact of this eschatological hyperobject throwing its shadow across the temporal landscape. We exist, yet there is a great deal of noise. This situation called history is totally unique; it will last only a moment, it began a moment ago. In that moment there is a tremendous burst of static as the monkey goes to godhood, as the final eschatological object mitigates and transforms the forward flow of entropic circumstance.' -Terence Mckenna [9]
The I Ching
... the I Ching... is a very ancient Chinese Oracle system that uses what are called hexagrams, which are six leveled ideograms of broken or un-broken lines and a possible subset of these is 64, which is an interesting number, because it's the number that DNA operates on, because it uses 64 codons, and in fact I came to see that as no coincidence, and actually life was organised around this number, and the I Ching as well, because both were subject to a set of rules which was surfacing in the phenomenon of biological organisation, and the organisation of the Chinese oracular theory for understanding past and future time. And I looked at what is called the sequence, which is the way in which you move from one hexagram to the next, and I sought order there, and found order that I think had been lost since pre ? time, and I came to see the I Ching as we posses it today as an archeological artifact, a piece of broken machinery....a taoist technology of understanding time.
...I was having this whispering entity, this daimon, this logos, show me these things, and it was expressed on a very, very practical level. I mapped what is called 'the first order of difference', in the sequence of the I Ching, that means how many lines change as you go from one hexagram to another, and I discovered that it looked like a random wave, it looked like a stochastic slice, except that at the beginning and the end, there were tongue and groove points of fit if you rotated the thing 180 degrees and brought it down against itself, so the thing achieved closure at the beginning and the end. This satisfied me that I was dealing with ... an organised structure, either of Nature, or created by intelligence, and then using the principle of hierarchical resonance and stacking of modules into hierachies which is really the principle by which all Chinese metaphysics has operated from the very beginning, I created a cosmic calendar, where each level was a resonance of the level below it, but either collapsed or multiplied by a factor of 64. -Terence Mckenna [6]
The Mayan Calendar
According to the latest and most amazingly sophisticated reading of the Mayan Calendar in Carl Johann Calleman’s The Mayan Calendar and the Transformation of Consciousness, the Mayan understanding saw time linked to the evolution of consciousness in a series of accelerating cycles or spirals, each one twenty times faster in linear time than the previous one. A nine stage process began 16 billion years ago with the Big Bang, and completes itself in the year 2011 – 2012 when we reach the phase of “conscious co-creation” of reality. Before we can possibly reach this stage, the shadow of the psyche is revealing itself in all of its many dimensions.
Looking at the energetic cycles that pulse within the larger structure of the Mayan Calendar, Calleman proposes that 2007, roughly, will be the year that the new level of consciousness is crystallized, while 2008, roughly, will see the collapse of the pre-existing form of consciousness, perhaps in a large-scale socio-economic meltdown. I don’t know if these dates are correct, but this seems to me to provide a possible model for what is taking place. Since the cyclical wave-form of history is accelerating, we are now in a period that bears resemblance to many past eras simultaneously – the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, the rise and fall of the Third Reich, the last days of the Ancien Regime before the French Revolution. I think that 2009 – 2010 we may see the drastic end of the current civilizational structure and the immediate movement into a harmonic planetary civilization with no nationstates, based on compassion, creativity, and generosity. If that doesn’t happen, instead of activating the noosphere – the thought-envelope around the Earth – we may end up in a necrosphere, a dead planet.
I am theorizing about the ongoing transformation of human consciousness, leading not to the end of the world but a birth – the birth of humanity’s higher mind' - Daniel Pinchbeck [10]
See also - An imploding cycle of energy increase culminating 2012-13 'Dr. Smelyakov et al.’s study shows that the Mayan Calendar, once properly understood, is not seen as simply a linear cycle of time but also as a focal point for an exponential "imploding" cycle of time based on phi. Based on our upcoming published research, we feel that this cycle delineates our movement through areas of progressively higher aetheric vibration in the Galaxy. Each time we move into a new layer where the vibration of the "zero-point energy" medium of space increases, there are direct, dramatic physical effects'
Metaphysical predictions
2012 is sometimes claimed to be a great year of spiritual transformation (or apocalypse). Many esoteric sources interpret the completion of the thirteenth B'ak'tun cycle in the Long Count of the Maya calendar (which occurs on December 21 by the most widely held correlation) to mean there will be a major change in world order.
Accordingly, several eclectic authors claim that a major, world-changing event will take place in 2012:
The 1995 book The Mayan Prophecies linked the Maya calendar with long-period sunspot cycles.
The book 2012: Mayan Year of Destiny claims the Maya may have been instructed in their wisdom by discarnate entities from Orion and the Pleiades. Contact was maintained through shamanic rituals conducted in accordance with the movements of planets and stars.
The 1997 book The Bible Code claims that, according to certain algorithms of the Bible code, a meteor, asteroid or comet will collide with the Earth.
The book The Orion Prophecy claims that the Earth's magnetic field will reverse.
The 2006 book 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl by Daniel Pinchbeck discusses theories of a possible global awakening to psychic connection by the year 2012, creating a noosphere.
The 2007 book Apocalypse 2012: A Scientific Investigation into Civilization's End by Lawrence Joseph does not make any specific new predictions, but it reviews a number of 2012 predictions made by various sources, and presents arguments for the possible existence of dangerous positive feedback loops involving solar storms, Earth's magnetic field, cosmic rays, hurricanes, global warming, earthquakes, and supervolcanoes that may be on the verge of erupting.
Terence McKenna's mathematical novelty theory suggests a point of singularity in which humankind will go through a great shift in consciousness. [11]
Technology Singularity
The acceleration of technological progress has been the central feature of this century. I argue that we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence.There are several means by which science may achieve this breakthrough;
-There may be developed computers that are "awake" and superhumanly intelligent. (To date, there has been much controversy as to whether we can create human equivalence in a machine. But if the answer is "yes, we can", then there is little doubt that beings more intelligent can be constructed shortly thereafter.)
-Large computer networks (and their associated users) may "wake up" as a superhumanly intelligent entity.
-Computer/human interfaces may become so intimate that users may reasonably be considered superhumanly intelligent.
-Biological science may provide means to improve natural human intellect.
From the human point of view this change will be a throwing away of all the previous rules, perhaps in the blink of an eye, an exponential runaway beyond any hope of control. Developments that before were thought might only happen in "a million years" (if ever) will likely happen in the next century.
I think it's fair to call this event a singularity. It is a point where our old models must be discarded and a new reality rules.[12]
In the book Biocosm, James Gardner presented his "Selfish Biocosm Hypothesis". The hypothesis is that there is a cycle of cosmic creation, in which highly evolved intelligences with a superior command of physics spawn one or more "baby universes," designed to be able to give birth to new, intelligent life. Thus, the ability of the present universe to support intelligent life as well as it does is not an accident, but the result of evolution in a long chain of the creation of more and more "bio-friendly" universes.[13]
He argues that the destiny of highly evolved intelligence (perhaps our distant progeny) is to infuse the entire universe with life.[14]
The End of Time
'The "end of time"depends on just how much mass there is in the Universe. We talk about this in terms of the density of the Universe, and compare densities to the critical density. If the density is greater than the critical density, then eventually gravity will overtake the expansion. The expansion will slow down and eventually reverse, so that the Universe will be contracting. Eventually it will end in a collapse (or a bounce) called the Big Crunch. If the density is less than the critical density then the Universe will continue to expand forever, with the gravitational force never overtaking the expansion. An ongoing area of research is to measure the density of the Universe. Currently, some observations (and some theories) indicate that the density of the Universe is very close to the critical density. In this case the expansion will slow down so that it is approaching zero expansion as time approaches infinity.' [15]
Why our time dimension is about to become space-like [16]
The fractal image at the top is "23. Eschaton" in the Chaos Tarot by J.M. Berger