So, the other day I started reading Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, the third in the Robert Langdon series (the previous entries being Angels And Demons and The Da Vinci Code, which maybe you’ve heard of?), and I’d like to tell you it’s a quick read, but I can’t. It’s pretty much a generic airport thriller drenched into esoteric research, some of it interesting, interesting enough to be worthy of a whole shelf of nonfiction books better than this, but hey, whatever. Airport thrillers have the opposite effect on me than other people, somehow. I tend to read them slowly, needing time to pause at each cloying and trite sentence.
That said, somewhere around page 70 it starts to pick up a little, when a severed hand turned into not into a hand of glory like I originally thought, but a hand of mysteries quite literally points the plot into a more speedy direction. Prior to that it seems like every other chapter is jacking off uber-mysterioso masonry and vague notions about research into the noosphere.
from here.
It’s actually the vague mentions of the noosphere that has me most interested, to be honest, just because the noosphere fascinates me. The stuff about the architecture of the nation’s capitol and it’s surrounding areas and the hidden meanings and symbols therein are interesting too, but having lived in DC, I’m familiar with most of it already.
from here.
Also coincidentally, a few days ago I finished The Fall Of Hyperion, the second in the fantastic Hyperion cantos, a crazy sci fi take on The Canterbury Tales that I would highly recommend for a variety of reasons, but interestingly, two of the characters that recur in the book are Jesuit priests, and one of them a follower of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French philosopher, geologist, paleontologist, and Jesuit priest himself who did a lot of work with examining the idea of the noosphere and developing the concept of the Omega Point.
Transformation in utopic space, from here.
The Omega Point is essentially the idea of the maximum level of intelligence and complexity and understanding, to which the universe seems to be driving towards. And humanity, one hopes, along with it. Though, realistically, probably not.
“We only have to look around us to see how complexity and psychic temperature are still rising: and rising no longer on the scale of the individual but now on that of the planet. This indication is so familiar to us that we cannot but recognize the objective, experiential, reality of a transformation of the planet as a whole.”
-Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
It’s a nice thought, that we could be heading somewhere better, almost despite ourselves, right? It’s nice to be optimistic about that kind of thing, probably. But the Omega Point, a kind of singularity, is something I think you’ll start hearing more about in the coming years as we slouch closer towards 2012, when the novelty wave winds down and the Mayan calendar runs out of time, and we’re either reborn, destroyed, or life as we know it continues on the same and everyone feels fine.
End of the world curiousity is natural, I think, especially more and more so in the past few years. Part of it being a response to cultural shifts and real world events that loom so large over our daily lives, but also there’s the curiousity/paranoia about “ancient forces” coming back to sweep us over. I think you’ll see more of a probing into some of these ideas, both the ridiculous and the stuff truly worth reexamining, possibly because of a tapping into the noosphere/collective unconciousness and shared interest, but also, and let’s be real here, just like Y2K, this kind of thing will prove to be highly marketable.
