Why do we cling to MORE than life? Why do we press for Understanding and self-realization -- my gawd What is that? -- as well!
Yet every night, we surrender to LOSS of consciousness and Will. We fall asleep. We do not "change our mind" easily, and we almost never change our Personality. But gratefully we take to the pillow, and whatever we are, disappears.
OMEGA POINT. Paleontologist Jesuit philosospher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin described the Omega Point is the final stage in the evolution of consciousness. Chardin describes the vector of consciousness from planaria to lizard to dog to ape to human - as something going somewhere. He was unclear whether there was such a thing as actual "consciousness" -- whether the aware state had been reached or breached, or whether it was just the raw sprawl of speculation.
ReplyDeleteDon DeLillo's latest novel is titled "Point Omega". It is inspired by a film he saw. It opens with a man watching the film "Psycho" in slow motion (the eight-hour version). The narrative then jumps to a documentary film producer, Jim Finley, pitching his film to Richard Elster, a 73-year old scholar who served as an adviser to planning the Iraq War.
Chardin suggested that human development had reached a point of exhaustion, where the evolution of consciousness had breached a plateau or even come to a drop. What comes next? Could be a paroxysm or something sublime. Something is needed to lift the vector once again....just as perhaps the discovery of language began to bolt the mind out of its limbic repose.
Just as language has somehow escalated and aggravated consciousness, and in turn bootstrapped itself from the Howling Caw of a mere animal stimulation- response, perhaps a heightening of dreams...from the mere animal chase and jerk we find so amusing in our dogs and cats.
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