Omega Point and the Noosphere

By Jonathan Bethel - http://omegapoint.org

With the convenience of modern telecommunications and cyber technology, it is now
possible to interact and communicate with anyone in the world instantly. The distance
gap between people has been closed and now brain can speak to brain directly. Vast
webs of knowledge are now being created through the collaborative sharing of ideas.
The many nodes and interconnections of this global network are rapidly increasing and
proliferating throughout society. Many speculate that this super network is the central
nervous system of the burgeoning global brain. According to futurists, this sheath of
technology covering the planet, this technosphere, is the material basis of the now
awakening Noosphere, earth's mental envelope or field. The word noosphere derives
from the Greek "noos", or "nous", and means mind, while "Sphere", or "spheria," of
course means globe. It is therefore the globe of thought, and includes all knowledge of
collective humanity. This is a similar to Carl Jung's collective unconscious.

The Noosphere can be thought of as the complete and assimilated morphogenetic field
of the planet, the integration of all knowledge ecologies. Decades before the advent of
the internet and long before the World Wide Web, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit
priest and paleontologist, promoted the idea of the Noosphere. Chardin said, "We are
faced with a harmonized collectivity of consciousnesses to a sort of superconciousness.
The Earth not only becoming covered by myriads of grains of thought, but becoming
enclosed in a single thinking envelope, a single
unanimous reflection... for. no one can deny that a network (a world network) of
economic and psychic affiliations is being woven at ever increasing speed which
envelops and constantly penetrates more deeply within each of us. With every day that
passes it becomes a little more impossible for us to act or think otherwise than
collectively." These seemingly prophetic words take on substantive evidence when we
consider how modern man is inextricably connected to each other through a sprawling
global information network that is increasing its interconnectivity and bandwidth daily. Is
it possible that our machines and scientific insights are moving society towards the
attractor that Chardin called the "Omega Point", a technological/spiritual singularity?

The Biosphere

According to Chardin and the Russian scholar and biologist Vladimir Ivanovich
Verdansky, the planet is in a transformative process, metamorphosizing from the
biosphere into the noosphere. The biosphere - literally the sphere of life - is the region
for the transformation of cosmic energy on earth. It is a thin membrane or envelope of
life which covers the crust of the earth, including oceanic basins, mountain ranges, and
areas of the atmosphere where life is found. It is complex evolving form that is adaptive
to external and internal forces and can be thought of as a homogenous entity or whole
system. Verdansky defined the biosphere as,"the single greatest geologic force on
earth, moving, processing, and recycling several billion tons of mass a year. It is the
central subsystem of a centralized cybernetic system, Earth, which tends towards a
dynamic disequilibrium and tremendous internal diversity." Through accelerated
biochemical combustion and the release of "free energy", the biosphere has become a
major geological shaping force within nature, extruding the sprawling technosphere.
This artificial technosphere will culminate eventually in the awakened noosphere, the
sphere of thought and its collective intelligence. According to Verdansky, the noosphere
is currently surrounding the earth, yet it remains unconscious and operating on habit.
When it becomes fully conscious it will invoke a new field of awareness with new
possibilities and new horizons. Chardin believes that the
concept of the New Jerusalem in the bible is a reflections of this world beyond history.

Verdansky termed this transformative phase in biospheric evolution the "Psychozoic

Era." This is an era in geologic time when the biosphere becomes a major shaping force
on the planet, extending all of its primary functions by use of mechanical devices.

The Techno Sphere

The transition form the biosphere to the noosphere takes place through an intermediary
stage called the technosphere. The technosphere is the artificial sheath of technology
that emerged from the biosphere and now encircles the globe. It is atransitional stage
and is the mechanism and catalyst whereby the noosphere comes into being. The
technosphere is comprised of the global financial markets and the military-industrial
complex with their globe girding information network. Due to the release of large
amounts of chemicals and radiation by the activity of technosphere, the biosphere has
entered a phase of biochemical combustion. This is an
"acceleration of biogenic migration of atoms precipitating biospheric crisis as a prelude
to the advent of the noosphere; characterized by exponential curves of human
population, machine, and money at the expense of biospheric integrity and stability," as
stated by Dr. Jose Arguelles. In geological time, man's brief race from the jungle to the
cities represents only a flash in the galactic pan; however, these several thousand years
represent the emergence of man with his newly found information technologies from the
misty background of animal organization.

If we look back through history we see the thread of progressive thought that leads from
the African grasslands of our archaic past to the data clusters of information that we call
cyberspace. The first major breakthrough in interconnectedness came with the advent
of verbal language.
This represented a major breakthrough for the biosphere, for then we not onlt knew the
contents of our own mind, but also the contents of another’s through communication.
The shared knowledge base of the tribe formed and grew considerably. Now there
existed a field of knowledge that could be accessed by most members of the tribe. This,
in addition to a primitive tool technology, extended our physical force over nature and
greatly aided the developed the human species, giving them an exponential edge over
the rest of the animal kingdom.

The next major development came with the written word and its trans-temporal ability to
convey knowledge. Both written and oral language gave us the ability to shift from the
genetic selection of the past into to the epigenetic phenomena of writing, philosophy,
music, and poetry, the fabric
of culture. Language allowed us to transform from biological evolution to mental
evolution. Whole systems of thought began to form and flourish throughout the world.
The accelerated growth of knowledge was fueled by several inventions, most notably,
the printing press. With the advent of the printing press in the 15th century, previously
ardous handwritten documents could now be churned out for the masses by mechanical
means, greatly expanding and ramifying information. The interconnectedness and
proliferation of knowledge intensified as the age of reason began to dawn. With the
advent of the industrial revolution merged with the discoveries in science in the 19th and
early 20th century, mankind leaped forward into a multimedia explosion of information,
through radio, television, telephones, movies and photographs. Information and
knowledge was growing now at a phenomenal rate and began to gain tremendous
momentum. The military industrial complex and global financial markets fueled the
spread of the techno sheath, the membrane that would aggrandize into the
technosphere in
the second half of the 20th century.

According to Dr. Jose Arguelles, the technosphere was heralded by the Atomic blast at
Hiroshima, marking the birth of the now complete technosphere and the beginning of
the cold war. Since 1945, the technosphere has spread over the earth like a progressive
cancer, promoting its globalist agenda wherever it found new resources. Thus is the
nature of the artificial stage of the technosphere, which appears as a consumptive
destructive marketing machine. Thus we find ourselves today in a nihilistic trance,
confounded by the myriad of global issues facing our species. It only requires scanning
the evening news to be quickly reminded of the fact that time seems to be running out
for Homo sapiens. It's always darkest before the dawn, they say! Enter Homo Sapien
Cyberneticus!!!

Omega Point and the Noosphere

Chardin saw the awakening of the noosphere as a complete unification of materiality

and spirituality hastened by what he called the Omega Point. He defined the Omega
Point as, "the climatic convergent point of human evolution as the emergence of the
hyper personal." This is a point of full super conscious global telepathy. The Omega
Point is the culmination and
integration of all forms of art, philosophy, culture, and science into a coherent dynamic
singularity. Chardin explains, "Someday, after we have mastered the winds, the waves,
the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love. Then, for the
second time in the history of the world, [hu]mankind will have discovered fire." He goes
on further to say,
"By its structure Omega, in its ultimate principle, can only be a distinct Center radiating
at the core of a system of centers; a grouping in which the personalization of the All and
personalizations of the elements reach their maximum, simultaneously and without
merging, under the influence of a supremely autonomous focus of union." Will the
coming mind grids of the future bring us into a cybernetic spiritual focus? From the
viewpoint of many futurists and transhumanists we are well on our way.

Chardin placed the influence of evolution over that of entropy. Despite the ever gnawing
grind of entropy, information has coalesced itself in our species and has been carried
forward through our information technologies. Now it appears that information is on the
verge of transforming itself, as well as our species along with it. Transhumanists believe
this is the dawning of the God-Man, Homo Sapien Cyberneticus, the co creator of a new
and more complex technological/spiritual universe. Chardin would agree. He considered
evolution as a series of steps leading to greater and greater layers of complexity. This is
very similar to Terence McKenna's novelty theory, based off of Alfred White Northhead's
mathematical concepts of novel concrescence. Chardin contended that man represents
a force in opposition to entropy. His Omega Point envisioned the space time continuum
as a cone, in which the point is the outcome of evolutionary intent, the eschaton,
omega, the divine.

For Chardin, the noosphere was the all, a dynamic mosaic of all culture merged into the
hyper personal image of the god self, the next stage of our evolution. Modern skeptics
argue that the noosphere is just a metaphysical explanation of today's global network,
and there is nothing spiritual about it. However, this interpretation doesn't seem to fit
with modern experience.
According to many modern futurist, the global Gaian mind is being hardwired by the
internet and fueled by nodes of spiritual thought, of both futuristic and archaic flavors.

Concerning the noosphere, Philip K . Dick writes, "due to the incredible surge of charge
from our electronic signals and information rich material therein, we have given it power
to cross a vast threshold; we have, so to speak, resurrected what Philo and other
ancients called the Logos.
Information has, then, become alive..."
According to Niel Freer, "We are at far more of a "turning point" than even the one
Capra envisions; in possession of far more of a "web of reinforcement" than Baines
could hope for; the morphogenetic-field potential is far higher than Sheldrake predicts;
the groundswell documented by Ferguson is about to become a tsunami, with a
capability to take the planet off hold and will close the "vision gap" in a way that is
perhaps more comprehensive than conceived by Barbara Marx Hubbard." According to
developmental psychologists, an embryo's brain develops in two
stages. The first stage is a multiplying of cells; the second is the proliferation of
interconnectedness of those cells. Realizing that it requires about 10 billion neurons to
comprise a human brain, as the world nears 10 billion people has the first stage of the
global brain formed, and now the second stage of interconnectedness commenced? As
the technosphere spreads across the earth wrecking havock in its wake, and the global
networks hum with the interchange of data bits, the embryonic collective mind stirs in its
slumber waiting for the proper moment to announce its awakening.