Conquering Dimensions

“One of the very large creodes that we can see at work in nature and society is what I call the conquest of dimensionality. Biology is a strategy for moving into and occupying evermore dimensions, and biology begins as a point-like chemical replicating system attached to a primordial clay in a proverbial warm pond somewhere at the dawn of time.”

The above quote, and those to be presented below, had been taken from a lecture given by Terence McKenna. It resonated with me, immediately, due to the fact that it proposes an inherent purpose lying behind everything in the universe — all life, all matter, all of our compounded understanding.

I had previously written about whether or not harmony can be seen as a purpose behind life — that everything seeks a state of equilibrium, of harmonic existence, using the concept to explain the practice of reproduction, evolution, natural progress, etc. However, this conquest of dimensionality referenced by McKenna seems to one-up my casual theory.

“As life develops, it folds itself, it becomes a three dimensional object, it replicates itself in time, by those means it claims the temporal dimension… after two or three billion years it has evolved itself to the point where, with strong muscles, it can move through space; with superb visual organs it can coordinate its exterior environment; and, finally, through the advent of language, it can tell its story, it can move information around.”

McKenna is expanding on the concept of evolution through a metaphysical lens. Organisms don’t just evolve to advance their own existence, they evolve to develop capabilities that allow them to move across space and time, transferring information through these mediums as well as their own existence.

Naturally, we must admit that it seems logical. It may be hard to wrap our minds around it but, if you look at Earth as an analogy: we have organisms of life that have expanded from water to occupy land and air, canopy and desert, mountain and valley. Why do we only consider this physical occupation and not also go further to consider time, and other forms of space — such as the internet? If human civilization advances to a point where we can transcend this reality and upload our consciousness onto a cybernetic cloud system, McKenna’s point becomes all the more exemplified.

“So when I talk about stuff like the evolution of photolithography and moving pictures out of photography and the evolution of surround sound and the global airline system and these kinds of things, these are dimension conquering phenomena, designed to shrink the earth down to a point.”

And so it seems that McKenna evidences a purpose — the purpose of shrinking earth down to a point. This takes some more metaphysical perspective but sense can be made of it: that the transfer of information, along with the transfer of ourselves, is becoming increasingly immediate — or at least, we’re determined to make it as immediate as possible. In the way that Elon Musk is working on connecting our brains to computers with Neuralink, in the way that computing is become increasingly sped up, cellular networks are currently converting to 5G, space travel is being vehemently pursued, communication barriers are being broken down by Google, everything is moving towards a direction of higher speeds and better efficiencies.

As I listened to McKenna, I could not shake the image of the universe expanding from my mind. As we currently theorize, the universe had long ago been a small point. As the Big Bang hurdled everything outward, and as all matter is understood to be in a state of constant expansion, it seems as though we are determined to bring everything back to that point — to slow the expansion, to bring closer the matter that has been spread apart, to unify, integrate, coalesce and consolidate.

One is prompted to wonder whether this is a universal — in the full sense of the term — cycle that repeats itself.

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