Paul Laffoley
(b. 1940, Cambridge, Massachusetts)

The Omega Point
1970
Oil, Acrylic, and Lettering on Canvas
68 1⁄2 x 68 1⁄2 in.

Subject: The process of evolution, which directs the force of consciousness to a state of super-maturity

Symbol Evocation: The Universal Center of Unification

Comments: Scientism means from our perspective at the beginning of the 21st century, an exaggerated trust in the efficacy of the methods of natural science, especially physics, and the willingness to apply these methods to the other areas of knowledge, like the humanities. Historicism is the doctrine that the passing of the facts of history is the sole standard by which human events are to be valued. To be part of history—not as an abstraction but as a concrete certainty—is superior to being considered either morally good or evil. By this doctrine the individual who lived only once enjoyed the glory of entering history or lived and died a failure. While scientism and historicism often worked hand in hand, they just as often blocked each other’s efforts producing a world population bent on becoming a totally objective and totally isolated set of individuals afraid of any kind of unification. As Teilhard de Chardin put it, the fatal mistake of egoism “… is to confuse individuality with personality.” But his description of true unity is of utopic space: “Whatever the domain—whether it be the cells of the body, the members of society, or the elements of a spiritual synthesis—‘union differentiates’.” In every organized whole the parts perfect and fulfill themselves. By failing to grasp this universal law of union, so many kinds of pantheism have led us astray in the worship of a great whole in which individuals were supposed to become lost like a drop of water, dissolved like a grain of salt in the sea. If we apply it to the sum total of consciousnesses, the law of union frees us from the dangerous and ever-recurring illusion. In confluence along the line of their centers, the grains of consciousness do not tend to lose their contours and blend together. On the contrary, they accentuate the depths and incommunicability of their ego. The more together, they become the other, the more they become “themselves.” How could it be otherwise, since they plunge into Omega? Can a center dissolve? Or rather is not its own way of dissolving precisely to supercenter itself?

In this way, under the combined influence of two factors, the fundamental immiscibility of consciousness and natural mechanism of every unification, the only form in which we are able to correctly express the final state of the world on the path of psychic concentration is in a system whose unity coincides with a paroxysm of harmonized complexity. Thus it would be false to represent Omega merely as a center born of the fusion of the elements it gathers together or nullifies in itself. By its structure, Omega in it ultimate principle can only be a distinct center radiating at a core of a system of centers.

Currently the theoretical physicist Frank J. Tipler (1947- ), who co-wrote The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (1986) with John D. Barrow—a book of physics theory based on the Omega Point, has now written his own book on the Omega Point called The Physics of Immortality (1994). Tipler starts by saying: “When I began my career as a cosmologist some twenty years ago, I was a convinced atheist. I never in my wildest dreams imagined that one day I would be writing a book purporting to show that the central claims of Judeo-Christian theology are in fact true, that these claims are straight forward deductions of the laws of physics as we now understand them. I have been forced into these conclusions by the inexorable logic of my own special branch of physics.” What Tipler goes to argue is that the transition from the noosphere to the Omega Point can be represented physically by our material universe inversing the “Big-Bang” (the first singularity) by contracting to the Big Crunch (the final singularity). As we approach Omega all intelligent life forms that ever existed will be recreated as virtual reality computer programs run faster than light speed. As a result we will have an effective eternity of existence (or aevum: the Latin for never ending time) in which all people will be resurrected before the universe ends in the Crunch-Omega.