Now, if the co-operation of some thousands of millions
of cells in our brain can produce our consciousness, the idea
becomes vastly more plausible that the co-operation of
humanity, or some sections of it, may determine what Comte
calls a Great Being.
 
—J. B. S. Haldane (1932)

   Man, as science is able to reconstruct him today, is an animal like the others....  Yet, to judge by the biological results of his advent, is he not in reality something altogether different?

   ...to give man his natural position in the world of experience, it is necessary and sufficient to consider the within as well as the without of things.

   If we wish to settle this question of the "superiority" of man over animals...I can see only one way of doing so...—making straight for the central phenomenon, reflection.

   ...reflection is...the power acquired by a consciousness to turn in upon itself:...no longer merely to know, but to know oneself; no longer merely to know, but to know that one knows.

   Because we are reflective we are not only different but quite other.  It is not merely a matter of change of degree, but of change of nature, resulting from a change of state.

   From the moment we regard evolution as primarily psychical transformation, we see there is not one instinct in nature, but a multitude of forms of instincts....  The mind (or psyche) of a dog, despite what may be said to the contrary, is positively superior to that of a mole or fish.

   ...it could be said that every form of instinct tends in its own way to become "intelligence"; but it is only in the human line that the operation has been successful all the way.

   I referred to the unparalleled complexity of the human group....  Let us try to perceive what this multiplicity represents when viewed as a whole.  If we do this we will see that its disturbing aggregation is nothing but a multitude of sequins all sending back to each other by reflection the same light.

   How is it that we are not more sensitive to the presence of something  greater than ourselves moving forward within us and in our midst?

   ...consciousness...is nothing less than the substance and heart of life in process of evolution.

   ...man...flourishes on the leading shoot of zoological evolution.

   We saw geogenesis promoted to biogenesis, which turned out in the end to be nothing else than psychogenesis.  With and within the crisis of reflection, the next term in the series manifests itself....noogenesis.

   When for the first time in a living creature instinct perceived itself in its own mirror, the whole world took a pace forward.

   Geologists have for long agreed in admitting the zonal composition of our planet....the barysphere...surrounded by the... lithosphere that in turn is surrounded by...the hydrosphere and the atmosphere....science has rightly become accustomed to add another to these four concentric layers...the biosphere....outside and above the biosphere there is the noosphere.

   To give man his true place in nature it is not enough to find one more pidgion-hole in the edifice of our systematisation or even an additional order or branch....in spite of the insignificance of the anatomical leap, we have the beginning of a new age.  The earth...finds it soul.

   Among all the stages successively crossed by evolution, the birth of thought...is the only thing comparable in order of importance to...the advent of life itself.

   This sudden deluge of cerebralisation, this biological invasion of a new animal type which gradually eliminates or subjects all forms of life that are not human...this immense and growing edifice of matter and ideas— all these signs...proclaim that there has been a change on the earth and a change of planetary magnitude.

   "There is nothing new under the sun" say the despairing.  But what about you, O thinking man?  Unless you repudiate reflection, you must admit that you have climbed a step higher than the animals.

   ..."positive and critical" minds can go on saying as much as they like that the new generation, less ingenious than their elders, no longer believes in a future and in a perfecting of the world.  Has it even occurred to those who write and  repeat these things that, if they were right, all spiritual movement on earth would be virtually brought to stop.

   Either nature is closed to our demands for futurity, in which case thought, the fruit of millions of years of effort, is stifled, still-born in a self-abortive and absurd universe.  Or else an opening exists—that of the super-soul above our soles.

   ...life, by its very structure, having once been lifted to its stage of thought, cannot go on at all without requiring to ascend even higher.

   ...there is for us , in the future, under some form or another, at least collective, not only survival but also super life.

   The outcome of the world, the gates of the future, the entry into the super-human—these are not thrown open to a few of the privileged nor to one chosen people to the exclusion of all others.  They will be open only to an advance of all together....

   ...evolution is an ascent towards consciousness.. That is no longer contested even by the  most materialistic, or at all events by the most agnostic of humanitarians.  Therefore it should culminate forwards in some sort of supreme consciousness.

   ...we have not sufficiently meditated upon the three-fold property possessed by every consciousness: (i) of centring everything partially upon itself; (ii) of being able to centre itself upon itself constantly ; and (iii) of being brought more by this very super-centration into association with all the other centres surrounding it.

...in the establishment now proceeding through science and the philosophies of a collective human Weltanschauung in which every one of us co-operates and participates, are we not experiencing the first symptoms of...the birth of some single centre from the convergent beams of millions of elementary centres dispersed over the surface of the thinking earth?

   Far from being mutually exclusive, the Universal and the Personal...grow in the same direction and culminate simultaniously in each other....at the Omega Point.

   In every organized whole, the parts perfect themselves and fulfil themselves.  Through neglect of this universal rule many a system of pantheism has led us astray to the cult of a great All in which individuals were supposed to be merged like a drop in the ocean or like a dissolving grain of salt.

   ...Omega , in its ultimate principle, can only be...a grouping in which personalisation of the All and personalisations of the elements reach their maximum, simultaneously and without merging , under the influence of a supremely autonomous focus of union....It is for this central focus...that we shall henceforth reserve the expression "Omega Point".

   Beyond all nations and races, the inevitable taking-as-a-whole of mankind has already begun.