Alfred North Whitehead, of whom you often speak, Terence, was not only a great philosopher, but he also founded one of the most interesting schools of twentieth-century theology. His father was an Anglican vicar, and he himself was extremely preoccupied with questions of theology. His view of reality as process led him to a new interpretation of the divine process, and to the establishment of a school of evolutionary theology, called Process Theology. It leads to the idea of the evolutionary process as some kind of divine process, a manifestation of the divine process working itself out through creation. Therefore there is a sense in which God evolves. Process theologians talk of two poles of the divine: one an eternal pole, which is changeless; the other an evolutionary pole, always changing. Somehow these poles come together in a final culmination.
With this view we get a much greater sense of the evolutionary process on Earth and in the whole cosmos as part of the divine process, not somehow external to it. Actually, the speaking of the Word, the vibratory coming forth of things in time can be seen as the very essence of the divine nature. This is partly what Matthew Fox means by the Cosmic Christ. When St. John says at the beginning of his gospel, “In the beginning was the Word,” he doesn’t mean in the beginning was Jesus of Nazareth. He means that in the beginning was the cosmic creative process with consciousness, meaning, and a vibratory nature. “Word” implies a process in time, with a beginning, middle and end. The whole universe is, in a sense, the Cosmic Christ, a divine, creative cosmos.
RA: That’s what I meant by the space-time model of reality: the space-time continuum with all phenomena attached, including individual consciousness, the morphogenetic field, the wave functions of quantum mechanics, and the extra dimensions of the image, and so on. We could just call it the Logos and avoid the word “Word” because of its habitual association with sound and the lower-dimensional languages.
RS: I think it’s better to keep that association, because sound and “Word” have the same sense of beginning and end.
RA: As you like. This sensorium of God is very compatible with the view of general relativity and of quantum mechanics, where the functions describing ordinary reality and perceptions are distributed over the whole of space and time, and vibrations in the past are still ringing into the future and vice versa. From this perspective you have what can be viewed as an evolutionary equation in which not only the curvature of space, but also the very topology of space, including black holes, worm holes, and so on, is evolving in time. On the other hand, if you impress any kind of boundary condition, like a hypothesis of the future, or a hypothesis of the past, onto the picture, then the possible topology in this evolution is severely restricted.
What you’re suggesting is very consistent with the modern scientific view of the universe. This could be interpreted as an evolution of cosmology as well, but we have a different picture of the mystical unity now than we did previously. Still, there seems to me to remain a tension between the idea of linear progress and the asymmetry of time on the one hand and the mystical view of the union of things. Even the entry of God into the model, can be thought of as a zipper that’s unzipped and connected only at the ends. God intervenes here and there; meanwhile, humans and other creatures are free to screw up as much as they want.
On the other hand, the idea of the perpetual intervention of God suggests a knitting together of things in a more holistic way. The zipper is zipped, and consciousness is totally interconnected at all times. I think these are two entirely different views. The idea that you described under the name Process Theology seems particularly consistent with the modern view.
From the perspective of chaos theory, I think that the emergence of form from chaos in the morphogenetic process can be viewed either within the linear progression of time, or outside of it. I prefer to think of it as being connected throughout time, and that the linear progress of time is some kind of illusion that’s normal for biological life.
RS: It’s not exactly linear; it’s developmental. One way of representing this is through the idea of entelechy, which draws a living organism toward an end or goal. As Aristotle said, the entelechy of the oak tree draws the acorn toward the mature form of the oak. This process can be disturbed—insects eat the leaves, lightning strikes it, branches are blown off in a storm, there may be a long drought—all these accidents can happen. The exact course of its development is not exactly predictable, but the entelechy continues to draw it toward its mature form, enabling it to regenerate after damage. Unless it’s killed off, it inexorably continues its development.
Another way of representing the evolutionary process is through the idea of an attraction that lures creation toward some kind of completion or culmination, as some process theologians would express it. This cosmic end or goal is what Teilhard de Chardin called the Omega Point. Terence calls it the cosmic attractor. Freedom, diversions, digressions, and all sorts of things can happen on the way, but there’s some kind of attractor towards which it’s all being pulled. This seems to me entirely consistent with the traditional Christian view, although Terence puts it across more forcibly than most of the professional proponents of Christianity. And more persuasively.
RA: Naturally I like these dynamical metaphors referring to the lure of attractors and so on; but in the perspective of the developmental aspect of time, there are in the dynamics of process and history certain moments of bifurcation. In a dynamical metaphor, bifurcation can be the time when the lure of the entelechy passes a moment of indeterminacy. In such a moment the intervention of God may be most appropriately attached to these dynamical events. A bifurcation in history such as the Renaissance is a time when anything can happen, and we don’t know exactly what’s going to evolve.
In chaotic dynamical systems, bifurcations can come in fractal clusters, which are called fractal bifurcation events. That means that you have something like a Cantor set of bifurcation moments creating zones of indeterminacy that fill up a fairly large amount of time. In other words, the moments occur very frequently when the intervention of God or even of human will affect history—even during a single day.
TM: It sounds like the time wave.
RA: Exactly. This is a punctuation of the whole entelechy concept, where Aristotle fails and Plato succeeds. There’s so much flexibility in this process, as viewed in the content of the dynamical metaphor, that the acorn that Aristotle refers to, could become a tree with five limbs or a tree with three limbs. There are a lot of variations that occur even within the microstructure of time, as in the microsecond timing of cellular events and so on. This variability fractally permeates the entire structure of time and the divine regulation of events. It actually liberates us from the simple notion of entelechy, the lure of a final destiny of the process.
RS: There’s a great deal of freedom, within constraints. In the oak tree, the vein pattern in every leaf is different, and it’s different on the two sides of the same leaf.
RA: But it’s still an oak tree.
RS: And each leaf is still an oak leaf; but if you look at the pattern of veins in a leaf, this is literally a primordial image of bifurcation. In the branching of the veins you have a different pattern in every leaf, while the overall general structure is similar. You can tell it’s an oak tree and not a beech tree at a glance.
RA: If the morphogenetic field is thought of as stretched over the whole of time, with some special spotlight on the present movement, then the development of a mature oak tree with an indeterminate number of leaves is already projected onto the future in a probabilistic way. The oak tree forms the successive concretization of this probability wave, as the spotlight of time moves along. From the point of the view of the mystical unity, these fields do extend over the whole of time, even if it’s infinitely in the past and in the future.
TM: The important thing to keep in mind is that the whole of time is probably not the same thing as forever.
RS: That would follow from the idea of entelechy, a culmination towards which animate
beings move. The only way to get to forever is to link on a new cycle at the end.
RA: Right.
RS: Let’s say the oak tree has acorns and it starts all over again; the universe gives rise to baby universes, which begin again. This is not a question within our own universe, which by definition is a unity: a “uni-verse” rather than a “multiverse.” If our universe has an attractor, a universal process, then we can leave open the question as to whether there’s another one after it. There’s a culmination, the universe comes to flower, to maturity; but in the details of evolution, we get galaxies, stars, plants, molecules, crystals, fish, camels, and so on, a vast variety of forms. There’s a lot of freedom in the evolutionary process, including the human evolutionary process. Things could be otherwise.
Despite all Terence’s efforts, human beings may not make it. The year 2012 may be the human moment of truth; but it may not be the cosmic moment of truth, or even the moment of truth for life on this Earth. Terence’s map is based on human history, and it may be that if humans blow it, then 2012 will simply mark the collapse of civilization, mass catastrophes, famines, civil wars in epidemic proportions, human beings reduced to a few scattered bands of survivors . . .
RA: And microbes will begin again.
RS: Or herrings, squirrels, and many other kinds of animals and plants. They may have their own version of the time wave and of evolution. Terence’s evidence refers only to human history. Apart from a few asides about the sun and neutrinos, it leaves out most of the cosmos. It may be that the time wave leads to a culmination of our species, while another kind of time wave would apply to the evolution of other species. There may also be a time wave that applies to the entire cosmos. For this reason it’s worth looking at astronomical indicators like variations in sun spot cycles or the occurrence of supernovae, exploding stars, which are presumably intense vortices of novelty. We could look at the occurrence of supernovae through the universe and derive some index of the distribution of novelty in time and space on a cosmological scale.
TM: The clustering of galaxies themselves in deep wells of space represents aggregations of novelty that are orders of magnitude more complex than the empty space between them. Since the discovery of the great attractor, it can be reasonably said that every phenomenon observable in the universe is furiously moving toward something, under the attraction of some larger system. There are whole groups of galaxies bound together by attractive forces, and planetary systems, human social systems, atomic subsystems, all bound to their local attractor and being pumped through the whole, as a subset of these larger attractive processes.
RA: This means that rather than thinking of the Eschaton as a big bang, or the culmination of all of the consciousness of the universe, we can see the entelechy as distributed in time. The human species can have its Omega Point at a particular moment in the time scale of the universe, while the nuclear process of the sun has its Omega Point and the solar system has its Omega Point. Considering all the different scales of the perceived universe, these could be distributed in time and space, so we can say that there’s entelechy everywhere, each comprising its own space-time continuum of extraordinary reality. This distributed model of entelechy itself would be a kind of a wave function, with its own time and novelty waves and its own probability functions and morphogenetic fields and so on. In this way we can get away from the particle view of entelechy and into the wave spectrum, a new kind of model of the universe.
Freud describes this strange fascination with entelechy and the Eschaton as a manifestation of Thanatos. We are fascinated by our own death, although we deny it and transfer it onto larger spheres. Now that we’ve achieved more or less the largest sphere in our search for the eventual death of the all and everything, perhaps we could extend the same consideration to creativity and birth and see the acorn, growing into the mature tree, as the ultimate principle of life. In these seeds, birth moments are distributed everywhere in space and time and throughout the reality of the universe.
SELECTED READINGS
The authors have referred to these readings in their conversations in the designated chapters.
CHAPTER ONE
Barbara Erhrenreich, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War (New York: Henry Holt and Company LLC, 1997)
Stephen Mithen, The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science (London: Thames and Hudson Ltd., 1996)
Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).
Rupert Sheldrake, The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance & the Habits of Nature (New York: Times Books, 1988).
CHAPTER TWO
Hans Jenny, Kymatik Cymatics (Basel: Basileus Press, 1974)
Terence McKenna, The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992)
Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge, A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution (New York: Bantam, 1992)
Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962)
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press; Reprint edition (October 20, 1994)
Rupert Sheldrake, The Rebirth of Nature (New York: Bantam, Reprint edition (April 1, 1992)
CHAPTER THREE
Hans Alfven, Worlds-Antiworlds: Antimatter in Cosmology (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1966).
Kurt Gödel, The Consistency of the Axiom of Choice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940)
Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha Von Dechend, Hamlet’s Mill: An Essay on Myth and the Frame of Time (David R. Godine Publisher; Reissue edition, 1992)
Immanuel Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision (New York: Amereon Limited, 1999)
C.H. Waddington, The Nature of Life (London: Allen and Unwin, 1961)
CHAPTER FOUR
Rupert Sheldrake, Seven Experiments that Could Change the World (London: Fourth Estate, 1994).
CHAPTER FIVE
Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (New York: Oxford University Press, Revised and expanded edition, 1990)
Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1988)
Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie Prigohzy Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982)
Paul Tillich, Political Expectation (New York: Harper & Row, 1971)
Delno C. West and Sandra Zimdars-Swartz, Joachim of Fiore: A Study in Spiritual Perception and History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983).
CHAPTER SEVEN
Rupert Sheldrake, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, And Other Unexplained Powers of Animals (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2000)
CHAPTER EIGHT
Terence Kealey, The Economic Laws of Scientific Research (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996)
CHAPTER NINE
Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. by Stephen MacKenna (Burdett, N.Y: Larson Publications, 1992)
CHAPTER TEN
Terence McKenna, The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992)
Rupert Sheldrake, The Rebirth of Nature (New York: Bantam, Reprint edition, 1992)
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Ralph Abraham, Terence McKenna and Rupert Sheldrake, Chaos, Creativity and Cosmic Consciousness (Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 2001).
Aurobindo (Sri), The Life Divine (Twin Lakes, WI: Lotus Press, 1985)
David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980)
Pier Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (New York: Perennial Classics, 1
976)
Matthew Fox, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1988)
Rupert Sheldrake, A New Science of Life (Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, Reprint edition, 1995)
Alfred North Whitehead, Process And Reality (Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh During the Session 1927-28) (New York: Free Press, Corrected edition, 1979)
The Evolutionary Mind Page 20