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toward the concrescence of the Eschaton, and the shockwaves from the transcendental object at the end of time, would be rendered totally
insignificant. We'd simply encounter a car crash on the highway of the solar system, totally independent of the progress of biology on the
planet Earth.
Terence: It's entirely possible. I didn't want to bring it up because it's a little Halloweenish. The transcendental object at the end of time may
be nothing more than a five-kilometer-wide carbonaceous asteroid, that in a single moment will send us all up to the gates of paradise.
Ralph: You're trying to destroy my argument by appropriating it!
Terence: As I've said, the dissolving of boundaries eventually means the dissolving of the boundaries between life and death itself.
Ralph: If the Eschaton is a comet rapidly approaching New York City, why is it necessary to have this increase of complexity, the population
explosion, the destruction of the ozone layer?
Terence: In the million years preceding the impact that killed the dinosaurs, an enormous extinction was already underway, that we've not
been able to figure out. It's as if the Earth knew what was coming. What I'm suggesting is that biology knows, returning to our discussion
about homing pigeons. Biology has a complete four-dimensional, or five-dimensional map of the planet's history. The map says, "A comet's
on the way; let's get these monkeys moving," leading to the production of sufficient
complexity that when the impact event occurs, it will have a transcendental relevancy.
Ralph: An opportunity to proceed into another dimension.
Terence: All of history is a curious relationship with this intuition that nobody wants to face, but that nobody can quite get rid of. We're
sacrificing goats and we're doing this and we're doing that, because we have this very restless feeling that all is not well in three-dimensional
space and time. History keeps bearing this out. Now it's upon us.
Jorge Luis Borges,5 the Argentine surrealist, had the interesting idea that a species could not enter hyperspace, whatever that means, until the
last member of that species perished. What's happening is that vast numbers of souls are accumulating in another dimension, waiting for us to
decently depart this moral coil so that the human family in a body can find itself at play in the fields of the Lord.
Rupert: I want to think this through a bit further. We used to think that there might be this great transformation of humanity in a kind of
collective near-death experience, except it would be an actual death experience, brought about by a nuclear cataclysm. Although the bombs
are still there, that model's gone out of fashion for some reason. We're now more into ecological apocalypses. We've got all these models.
Let's assume there's a sudden transformation, where all of humanity is taken up into the transcendental attractor. Leaving aside the details on
the Earth, what effect does this have on the rest of the universe?
Terence: I think it's not an answerable question, but it is in fact what we will then set out to understand. We are literally packing up and
preparing to decamp from Newtonian space and time, for the high world of hyper-dimensional existence. We may find ourselves in the grand
councils of the who knows what, or we may find something entirely unsuspected.
I have talked before about shamanism anticipating the future. If you pursue these psychedelic shamanic plants, you inevitably arrive at an
apocalyptic intuition. I think shamans have always seen the end, and that the human enterprise in three-dimensional space has always been
finite. In the same way that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny as we look into the past, it seems reasonable to assume that death, which we
have spent a thousand years turning into a materialist vacuum, is in fact not what we think. There's an enormous mystery hovering over our
existence, that's only unraveled beyond the grave.
I would never in my life have thought that I would be pushed to this position. I spent the first half of my life getting away from this kind of
thing. However, the evidence of the shamanic hallucinogens is in fact that shamans have always done what they do via ancestor magic and
higher-dimensional perception, and that death is not what naive positivism in the last 300 years has attempted to say that it is. I realize it's
incredible to suppose that here at the apex of materialist, posi-tivist, scientific civilization, we're going to make an orthogonal turn into an
understanding of what lies beyond the grave, but in fact, this is probably the paradigm-shattering world-condensing event that is bearing
down on us.
Ralph: Conversion in progress.
Rupert: Given all that, I want to know whether this has happened somewhere else. If it can happen on our planet, perhaps it could change the
entire conditions of dimensionality throughout the galaxy, or better, perhaps, the cosmos. If it's happened on planets elsewhere in the galaxy,
what effect do you expect it to have had on us already?
Terence: When you explore the adumbrations of the transcendental object, you see all this transhuman, alien data, that is essentially what it
has been in its past history. You see the imprint of all life finding its way back to some kind of source that's in a higher plane. That's why it
has this alien presentation. It has
maybe a thousand civilizations poured into it, or ten thousand, or fifty million. Who can know? The universe is already old.
Rupert: I still can't work out whether we're talking about some planetary violence that gets hold of civilization after civilization, or planet
after planet, causing them to auto-destruct in a particular way, or whether we're talking about some cosmic process.
Terence: It seems to me just the continuation of life's program of conquering whatever dimension it hasn't yet conquered. Probably that
process is endless. Life is a chemical strategy for the conquest of dimensionality. It carries out its program, come hell or high water.
Ralph: Just like striking a match, biology comes to a planet, and the flame leaps up. Then pretty soon it burns out, due to exhaustion of
resources and the arrival of the shockwave of the Eschaton for that particular planet. Biology is extinguished once again. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]