Chapter 10

REACHING TOWARD OMEGA

As we spoke, and the circle widened, it seemed like one structure of relationship was giving way to another, and one could observe the shifting of boundaries from the old to the new. The fact that we were conscious of it, consciously groping our way into a new dimension, was perhaps the most extraordinary quality of what was occurring: imperfect beings, aware of our conditioning, consciously choosing to evolve. . . . Our attention expanded, and we could see the structure of universal spirit, incarnate as many, using us as its mouthpiece, revealing the perfection of Being—a vast impersonality that rendered our notions of personal significance completely obsolete. One knew that this bigness is our destiny.⁹

In the mid-twentieth century, French Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin put forth a radical new vision for our human future. “We are . . . moving forward towards some new critical point that lies ahead,” he wrote in The Human Phenomenon, “a harmonized collectivity of consciousnesses equivalent to a sort of super-consciousness. The idea is that of the Earth not only becoming covered by myriads of grains of thought, but becoming enclosed in a single thinking envelope so as to form, functionally, no more than a single vast grain of thought on the sidereal scale, the plurality of individual reflections grouping themselves together and reinforcing one another in the act of a single unanimous reflection. . . . Beyond all conflict of empires, peace in conquest and work in joy await us in an interior totalization of the world on itself—in the unanimous building up of a spirit of the Earth.” It was a vision with far-reaching collective implications, culminating in a final “unanimization” that he called the “Omega Point.”

And while Teilhard's vision would not come to be realized in his lifetime, nor has it as yet in ours, his words, written over a half-century ago, continue to shine as a beacon for anyone who has ever experienced collective wisdom and pondered its larger implications. For although our understanding of this mysterious collective consciousness is still only beginning to take shape, what is clear to most of those who discover it is that the experience itself seems to be pointing us somewhere. Carol Frenier, in synthesizing the personal accounts of over 150 individuals for the Collective Wisdom Initiative, found that the vast majority of those who have experienced the emergence of collective wisdom feel that the purpose of this wisdom is “to midwife a new social/spiritual order of an evolutionary magnitude . . . that is already emerging of its own power.” What exactly is the nature of this new order, this evolutionary leap? And what role might we play in “midwifing” it into existence?

The answer, it turns out, may lie in the very nature of collective experience itself. For if, as all the reports suggest, the collective mind really does think better, create better, and function better than any of our individual minds, and if our own individual capacities are actually enhanced by our conscious participation in this collective intelligence, then wouldn't the first evolutionary question be: What would it take for us to remove any barriers to the emergence of collective consciousness, not just as an occasional peak experience, but as a permanent ongoing capacity? What would become possible if even a small group were able to live and work together on an ongoing basis with unbroken access to this higher communal mind? And moreover, what if such a phenomenon were to begin to occur on a wide scale? If the growing body of evidence for Rupert Sheldrake's theory of morphic resonance is real, what could prevent such an occurrence from spreading through an ever-increasing number of groups throughout the globe?

In his landmark book Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, Robert Wright argues convincingly that the march of human history has not been random in direction but has in fact been progressing along a very specific trajectory—toward increasing cooperation and unity. As the parameters of our capacity to feel and express “brotherly love” have expanded from kin to tribe, from tribe to nation, and beyond, he writes, we have gradually “become embedded in larger and richer webs of interdependence”—on a course that leads, at least plausibly, toward the sort of ultimate Omega Teilhard envisioned. As Wright speculated in a recent interview, “Five hundred years from now, maybe the whole kind of techno-social organism on this planet will be sufficiently cohesive to have a unified field of subjective awareness. Maybe it will be like something to be planet Earth. If Teilhard is right that, more and more, there is such a thing as the collective mind of the planet, and that human beings are kind of neurons in some giant global brain, then maybe someday the planet will, in some sense, have a unified consciousness.” Could it be that we really are on a journey to Omega? Is it possible that the murmurings of shared wisdom arising in small groups throughout the world are but the initial stirrings of a much greater wave of collective consciousness trying to be born? Whatever the ultimate verity of Teilhard's vision, in our increasingly connected world, it is at the very least, to use Wright's lingo, a noncrazy idea.

However, if imagining a grand Omega centuries down the line feels a bit decadent given our current global predicament, at the heart of the experience of collective wisdom is another understanding—one with subtler and perhaps greater implications for the lives we're leading right now. What does it mean, after all, that we can come together in a collective higher mind? If the nature of our individual consciousness is such that it can merge with or be transcended by the collective, what does that say about the nature of who we are? As Chris Bache pointed out, “experiences like these teach us that whatever individuality is, we have to think of it in a way that is more like an open system than a closed system.” What if, in the face of this knowledge of our permeability and interdependence, the ground of our identity were to shift away from our cherished sense of separate individuality to the whole in which we are embedded? What if our overriding preoccupation with our personal welfare—the ego's endless chain of wants, desires, and fears—were to pale to insignificance in the face of a concern for our larger, collective identity and destiny? What kind of human world would come into existence then? Freed from the moorings of self-concern, what could our individuality express? And more importantly, where could we go collectively that we could never reach in our present, fragmented condition? Admittedly, given the current state of human affairs, this vision too seems a far cry from fruition. But in light of the remarkable potentialities emerging in our midst, it is hard to imagine a possibility more worthy of our collective aspiration.