Jan Irving has written an excellent conspiracy theory piece on the connection between Terence McKenna and a trumped up eschatology 2012, Esalen-proselytized, new age spiritualism. I say theory because he pulls back at the last moment and suggests Terence may have just been a useful idiot. My own view is he took a few Esalen cheques to put food on the table as the man lived frugally and was too broke to pay for the laser knife surgery he needed to remove the brain tumour at the end of his life. God knows we've all worked a few agendas to pay the bills haven't we? I have. Read this example.
However Jan's piece is well researched, makes strong and repeated connections and raises important issues that I had never come across before including the influence on Terence of Jesuit priest and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin who was also responsible for the Piltdown man hoax to sell Darwin's theory of evolution. The similarities between McKenna's Novelty and Complexity theory which links directly into his 2012 timewave zero work is too close to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's Omega Point Theory. See for yourself.
Omega Point is a term coined by the French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) to describe a maximum level ofcomplexity and consciousness towards which he believed the universe was evolving.
In this theory, developed by Teilhard in The Future of Man (1950), the universe is constantly developing towards higher levels of material complexity and consciousness, a theory of evolution that Teilhard called the Law of Complexity/Consciousness. For Teilhard, the universe can only move in the direction of more complexity and consciousness if it is being drawn by a supreme point of complexity and consciousness.
Thus Teilhard postulates the Omega Point as this supreme point of complexity and consciousness, which in his view is the actual cause for the universe to grow in complexity and consciousness. In other words, the Omega Point exists as supremely complex and conscious, transcendent and independent of the evolving universe.
Teilhard argued that the Omega Point resembles the Christian Logos, namely Christ, who draws all things into himself, who in the words of the Nicene Creed, is "God from God", "Light from Light", "True God from true God," and "through him all things were made."
Teilhard's term recurs in later writings, such as those of John Godolphin Bennett (1965), John David Garcia (1971), Paolo Soleri(1981), Frank Tipler (1994), and Ray Kurzweil, as well as in science fiction literature.
