More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Jamie Wheal
Read between
May 22 - June 12, 2021
Despite being shunned by the very gatekeepers of Faith and Reason that he was trying to unite, Teilhard captured the imagination of generations of writers and artists. Science fiction writer and accidental mystic Philip K. Dick references him, as do Annie Dillard, Arthur C. Clarke, Flannery O’Connor, and Don DeLillo. Surrealist painter Salvador Dalí created his giant masterpiece The Ecumenical Council inspired by Teilhard’s redemptive vision for the end of history.
“If the cooperation of some thousands of millions of cells in our brain can produce our capacity for consciousness,” he wrote, “the idea becomes vastly more plausible that some kind of cooperation of humanity as a whole or a fraction of it may determine what [philosopher Auguste] Comte called a Great Superhuman Being.”
“The concentration of a conscious universe would be unthinkable if it did not assemble in itself . . . every consciousness . . . remaining conscious of itself at the end of the operation . . .” Teilhard writes, “each one becoming more itself and therefore more distinct from the others the closer it comes to them in Omega.”
Vietnamese Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh echoed this idea when he wrote, “The next Buddha will be a Sangha,” meaning that the next Great Awakening would not be led by an individual avatar (a Buddha or a Jesus). Instead it would take the form of a dedicated community—the Sangha. This version of our salvation is collective and inclusive.
the split between those committed to the global-centric Infinite Game and the ethnocentric Finite Game. The Infinite Game—which recognizes everyone’s right to play and seeks to extend the Game to more and more players—is a practical expression of what Teilhard calls “Universal Love.” Those who refuse to take that step and remain separate will be advocates of the Finite Game, who seek to win while others lose, and keep the spoils of the game for themselves.
Erica Chenoweth at Harvard’s Kennedy School has famously posited that historic civil rights movements have required 3.5 percent of a population to reach a tipping point of transformation.
As we hurtle toward the final reckoning of the Omega Point, Teilhard envisioned exactly how it would all go down—a race of three intersecting curves: the viability of the planet, those drawn to inclusion, and those dedicated to separation. “In this hypothesis which conforms more closely to the apocalyptic traditions,” Teilhard suggested, “three curves would perhaps continue to arise around us simultaneously in the future: the inevitable reduction of the organic possibilities of earth, [and] the internal schism of consciousness as it becomes increasingly more divided over two opposing ideals of
...more
“The Earth would end at the triple point where . . . these three curves would meet and reach their maximum at exactly the same moment,” he proposes. “The death of the planet, materially exhausted; the tearing apart of the noosphere, divided over what form its unity should take, and simultaneously, giving the event its whole significance and value, the freeing of that percentage of the universe which has succeeded in laboriously synthesizing itself across time, space and evil to the very end.”
We’re not slouching toward Bethlehem anymore, we’re hurtling toward it.
Our GPS may not be able to help, but our CPS—our Cosmic Positioning System—might. And once we upgrade our navigational software, we find that the Omega Point has very specific coordinates. The corner of Everywhen and Neverwas. The intersection of Kairos and Chronos.
The ancient Greeks defined two very different types of time. Chronos is linear, discrete clock time. Marching inexorably from past to present to future. A horizontal move through space. We’re all overly acquainted with Chronos these days—never enough of it, life ripping by in the rearview mirror. Frantic and bored at the same time. And no matter how successful or regretful we feel, never able to get any of it back. The ancients also expressed the notion of Kairos, or sacred time, the Deep Now. It includes all instantiations, pastpresentfuture bundled into one seamless and sanctified moment.
...more
Rather than trying to escape this human condition, Omegans submit to it. But they do so not in grim resignation or in forgetting their true nature—they do it while holding both, willingly. And in completing that impossible task, they are transfigured into twice-born humans, or as Yale’s Harold Bloom calls them, anthropos.
That juxtaposition—of being in the world (Chronos) but not of it (Kairos), is both the best and worst thing about the human condition: the blinding light and joy of peak experience followed by the inevitable return to the constraints of our flawed existence.
But risking dying to finally feel alive is a fool’s errand. Not safe, repeatable, or scalable.
Cantankerous poet and farmer Wendell Berry has a different suggestion. Expect the end of the world . . . Be joyful though you have considered all the facts . . . Practice resurrection.
In the most literal way, we have to learn to get over ourselves. “If we can forgive what’s been done to us,” Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk writes, “if we can forgive what we’ve done to others . . . if we can leave our stories behind. Our being victims and villains. Only then can we maybe rescue the world.”
Like the wife of Lot fleeing Sodom, turned to salt because she looked behind her. Like Orpheus unable to resist a backward glance into hell as he rescued his love, Eurydice—we can’t help but second-guess grace and fuck it up right on the brink of redemption.
When Saint Paul said, “Love keeps no record of wrong,” he wasn’t talking about maternal forgiveness or romantic second chances. He was talking about Kairos. He was pointing the way toward the Omega Point.
Like the old hymn goes, “Through all the tumult and the strife, I hear that music ringing. It sounds an echo through my life, how can I keep from singing?”
He who does not know the secret “die and become” will remain forever a stranger on this earth. —Goethe
If we’re sincere about trying to architect a flexible and inclusive replacement for doctrinal religion, this reversal is a key step. Rather than telling people what to believe, based on a distant and non-repeatable founder’s revelation, we can share the methods that prompt belief. And let everyone make up their own minds and hearts.
“How might we redesign Meaning 3.0 so it was open-source, experiential, and experimental?” then there’s a bold step we need to take for Omeganism to become a viable mythology.
“There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground,” Rūmī reminds us, “there are a thousand ways to go home again.” He’s right. But we’ve only got one nervous system. And that’s our royal road to redemption.
In our survey of the Big Five techniques—respiration, embodiment, sexuality, substances, and music—there’s a deceptively simple recipe that comes up time and again. Maximize endocannabinoids, endorphins, dopamine, nitric oxide, oxytocin, and serotonin. Increase vagal nerve tone and heart rate variability. Shift your brain into baseline alpha and theta activity, with dips into gamma or delta waves. Trigger a global reset of your brain stem with compounds such as nitrous oxide or ketamine or cranial-nerve stimulation (all these correlate with delta wave EEG induction). Load your nervous system
...more
Because here’s the thing about getting a glimpse of Kairos. Not only is it autotelic, it’s autodidactic. Autotelic just means it has its own reason or motivation for doing. Like dolphins surfing waves, or kids rolling down hills—we do it for the sheer love of it. But that autodidactic part? That means it’s self-teaching or self-disclosing.
We are a way for the universe to know itself. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. . . . We’re made of star stuff. —Carl Sagan
But it is to say that it’s high time we move from the reductionist materialism of the New Atheists and their blanket dismissal of truths that don’t submit to microscopes or telescopes. We’ll also need to steer clear of the other extreme. If we succumb to untethered magical thinking, we’ll only end up swapping out dusty old fundamentalism with newer, shinier versions of the same.
rational mysticism—call it the New Platonism. It still values reason, evidence, and logic but also leaves room for what lies beyond our ken. When navigating through terrain with no familiar landmarks, we need to be more precise with our compass bearings, not less.
what Henri Bergson and Aldous Huxley called the “reducing valve of consciousness.” Our conscious mind, for example, processes information at about 120 bits per second. Our retina processes up to 11 million bits. In a non-ordinary state, we expand that reducing valve and our umwelt—or the portion of reality that we can perceive expands with it.
“The universe is full of magic things,” Eden Phillpotts wrote, “patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper!” All peak states do, then, is sharpen our senses enough to perceive a little more of that magic.
we have suggestive evidence that there’s some form of legacy memory—both biological and psychological—that we inherit from our families.
That kind of ghostly intuition would seem magical and definitely beyond our own personal knowing—like using a Lifeline Call in the game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, but to our dearly departed instead of friends back home. As far out as that sounds, it’s very much in keeping with indigenous and traditional cultures, from Native Americans to the Greeks and the Japanese. They each have “ancestor cults” where they seek guidance from those who have come before.
In heightened states of consciousness, where our nervous systems are primed to perceive patterns and access information that isn’t normally accessible through waking awareness, is it possible that we can somehow “read” the information in our genetic DNA?
we’re not fixed at all. We’re more like a pattern or a process. . . . This transience of the body and the flow of energy and matter led us to explore our interconnectedness with the universe.”
This final explanation goes beyond that and considers the notion of a non-local source of all that inspiration.
thinkers kept reaching for some metaphor to describe their glimpses of the Information Layer. Buckminster Fuller called it the Design Realm and credited his prodigious output in the fields of architecture, sustainability, and futurism to his access to that domain. He was merely transcribing what already was, he humbly maintained, not inventing new things from whole cloth.
In the twenty-first century, Hungarian physicist Ervin László called this hypothetical realm the A-field, or Akashic field, after the Sanskrit term for space. For him, the quantum vacuum stretches across time and space and carries information with it. If and when we access that field, we gain entry to a world of incredibly dense, non-local data. Think of accessing the A-field as closer to surfing the internet instead of picking the Encyclopaedia Britannica off the shelf.
While most scientists hold that the universe is made up of combinations of energy and matter, or even timespace, others hold that at its simplest expression, the universe is information.
In the spring of 1989, at the Santa Fe Institute, Wheeler presented a paper introducing his concept of “Its from Bits.” “It from Bit,” Wheeler wrote, “symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom—at a very deep bottom, in most instances—an immaterial source and explanation; that what we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions . . . ; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe.”
Oxford mathematician Roger Penrose has floated a theory that human brains, under certain specific conditions, are capable of quantum computing via microtubules in our neurons. This idea would provide a structural explanation for seemingly impossible acts of cognition or intuition. While Penrose earned universal admiration (a Nobel and a knighthood) for his work in mathematics, his theories of quantum consciousness have not been received as warmly.
Stanford neuroscientist David Eagleman has cautiously resurrected an alternate explanation—what is known as the dualist argument of consciousness. The materialist argument insists that “mind” is only the by-product of activity in the brain. The dualist argument suggests that there is the hardware—the brain, and then there’s signal that the hardware picks up—the universe of information that Wheeler was talking about. Eagleman writes in his book Incognito: “I’m not asserting that the brain is like a radio, but I am pointing out that it could be true. There is nothing in our current science that
...more
Jeffrey Kripal, professor of religion at Rice University and dedicated explorer of the weird and sublime, puts Eagleman’s theory in broader historical context. “William James, Henri Bergson, and Aldous Huxley all argued the same long before Eagleman. Bergson even used the same radio analogy. This is where the historian of religions—this one, anyway—steps in. There are, after all, countless other clues in the history of religions that rule in the radio theory and that suggest, though hardly prove, that the human brain may function as a super-evolved neurological radio or television and, in rare
...more
There’s another known issue navigating the path to HomeGrown Human that’s worth mentioning: muddling our tenses. While most of modern psychology assumes that I am “me” and you are “you” and when we sit down together our clocks are synchronized, that’s rarely the case. In fact, we’re almost never truly sharing the present together. Our meatsuits might be co-located in space but not in time. We are lost in a sea of stories—painful pasts and fearful futures we want to avoid at all costs, or perfect pasts and fantastic futures we’re desperately hoping to have more of.
When we have a breakthrough experience of our truest/highest/bestest self, we conveniently forget our bad debts. “Sure, that Saul guy was a tax collector and a real sonofabitch, I’ll admit, but hey baby, that’s not me, I’m Paul now, can’t you see?” Our leading edge in Kairos gets precisely matched up with their bleeding edge in Chronos. Those closest to us aren’t willing or able to trust the New Me, until we’ve acknowledged and atoned for the Old Me that might have hurt them in the past.
Our own “personal journey,” if unchecked, can lead to dangerous ego inflation and distortion.
If we fixate on one element at the expense of the others, we fall out of balance. If we deny the sacred, the mundane will crush us. If we deny the mundane, the sacred will burn us. But once we accept both, we die to our lives of separation.
“Ain’t no saint without a past,” Dolly Parton reminds us, “or no sinner without a future.”
“Always and already,” Indian philosopher Nisargadatta observes, “the Other World is this world, rightly seen.”
To make it to the Omega Point, we’ll need to hitch our wagon to four very different horses: Danger Mouse, Tank Man, Soul Force, and Radical Hope.
There are two crucial hubs it talks to—the xiphoid nucleus, which triggers “salience reducing” (don’t you look at me!) behaviors, and the nucleus reuniens, which prompts “salience enhancing” (you want a piece of me?) behaviors.
