2012, Terence McKenna, The Huxleys, Darwinism, Drugs and Evolution

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.

Call Me Ishmael

Recently I've taken to using art as a tool for the manifestation of the collective unconscious in a Jungian sense, and so as Moby Dick has been prodding me for over a year now since Hong Kong, for reasons I couldn't quite fathom, I set up an RSS feed and curated a mood stream of every new piece of original art being shared with the world on the topic, and supplemented that with bits of data plumbing Jedi Knightery, to see if I can compile an emerging narrative. 

The learning so far is unsettling and an anomaly in expressionistic terms when looking back at history. It seems one of the key themes is not just the death of Captain Ahab and crew, but the death of Whales. Spooky whales levitating above the sea as if drawn in a state of mourning; lamenting the transit to a marine afterlife.

And then I awoke up from a nap just now, and for the umpteenth time was reminded of the book by The Guardian who week in and week out out are echoing the questionably tinnitus driven peals, ringing in my head and then out of nowhere, I realised the part of Moby Dick I had been so eager to share when reading this unusually off-topic novel for me that I find hard to follow. I overcame the age and relative formality of its language through the time tested clamour of Bangkok Go-Go bars. I find the neon, noise and nubility more soothing than when left a difficult text, alone in the distracting silence of home.

In any case, I meant to write how extraordinary it was learning of the whaling business in its heyday with respect to being the precursor for the entire edifice of imminent planetary industrialisation. That is to say, built upon the global scale of a wind powered floating business, in singular pursuit of yet another of natures exclusive and historically irreplaceable organic yields. If asked it is for this reason I argue leaving the oil in the ground instead of fuelling jet engines in the air for an economy levitating on the hologram of endless financial growth. What if say quantum entangled oil is the spice melange of a future interstellar life? To me, the what-ifs are a full nelson on the what-the-fucks line of reason.

I'll leave you with Melville's passage that left a slow burning mark upon me with a lesson on gateway drugs of the monkeys (homo consumericus) obsession with whale oil that was only displaced  when the black stuff leaking from the ground, looked like it had something going for it. 

Why did the Dutch in De Witt's time have admirals of their whaling fleets? Why did Louis XVI of France, at his own personal expense, fit out whaling ships from Dunkirk, and politely invite to that town some score or two of families from our own island of Nantucket? Why did Britain between the years 1750 and 1788 pay to her whalemen in bounties upwards of L1,000,000? And lastly, how comes it that we whalemen of America now outnumber all the rest of the banded whalemen in the world; sail a navy of upwards of seven hundred vessels; manned by eighteen thousand men; yearly consuming 4,000,000 of dollars; the ships worth, at the time of sailing, $20,000,000! and every year importing into our harbors a well reaped harvest of $7,000,000. How comes all this, if there be not something puissant in whaling?

Moby Dick - Chapter 24 -The Advocate

Moby Dick

Lurking around Youtube on the subject of Moby Dick last night/this morning I came across Cyrus Patel - Professor of English Literature at NYU. Each of these lectures on Moby Dick has around 5000 views (Jan 2011) which is rock star status for a lecturer on a subject that ostensibly doesn't pay immediate bills. 

He's amazing. 

I'm working my way through them but his lectures are a tour de force in video learning. Any more self-learning of this calibre and I'm flat out booked up on attention bandwidth for the rest of my life (or cloning is on the table). I've written a post about the process I'm going through with video learning that is still lurking in draft but this is brain crack stuff so I need to get it out there before I pop.