It is the function of eschatology to provide the first and last chapters of the treatise of evolution. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the absence of an adequate eschatology has been the major stumbling block in the way of bringing a coherent world view into existence. The challenge, at its heart, lies within the formal realm of metalogic and metamathematics. It is only when one has this in hand that it is possible to think the problem through without missing one’s way in the process. What needs to be stage-managed is the way in which finitude emerges from infinity and eternity –at the beginning of things, at the big bang- and how it returns to it, when organic evolution has finally run its course. What has hobbled so much of speculation upon the topic has been a sotto voce assumption that what is needed is been what I would call an obsession of linearity. Thought of in these terms, the problem reduces to one of an extrapolation; we need to take notions of time –as experienced and understood ‘down here’ –to capture the emergence of finitude from eternity and its later re-entrance. Properly conceived, the larger alpha and the omega of the processing of Reality is an unfolding and a refolding. I shall attempt to do no more –in the few paragraphs that follow- than offer a few hints, supported by diagrammatic schema. Here is its basic staging:

          The appearance of the Omega being –conjectured to wind up organic and cosmic evolution- inevitably leads to questions of what resemblance he might have to the ‘second coming’ of Christ often mooted by Christian theologians. There are similarities and differences. While Omega may be considered an analogue of the Second person of the Trinity, this is for him a very early appearance –something of a curtain raiser. A first coming would be inappropriate, for in the scheme of things I am proposing, the ‘paying of the redemptive price’ is being rendered on-the-run by the Gottheit continuingly begetting me at every conscious moment. Such a Gottheit-in-action may be set into equivalence with the Third person of the Trinity. Omega at the time that he emerges as the terminal cosmic being is 100% a natural product, so is of Monophysite rather than dyophysite ontology. The figure of Christianity’s second coming, on the other hand is already of dyophysite constitution, and his entrance is by divine fiat through a trap door or other piece of stage magic. Omega does step up to a Dyophysite ontology, but it is in the working through of the termination of his existence that this status is acquired; this is my version of the Christian ‘chiliastic‘ process –to be described shortly. So, in summary, both Second Persons come to enjoy a dyophysite status. They differ with respect to the order of appearance of the two aspects. For Christ the divine aspect comes first and the historical later while Omega starts life as ‘one of us’.

          In considering the forms that this process might take, a number of possibilities suggested themselves, only the final one of which really does what is needed. It must be born in mind that formally speaking, he shall be of the Gamma set –the maximum finite complexity that existence can support. As such, it may be regarded as a kind of hinge about which omega needs to fold himself in order to enter eternity. The most direct short cut would be for him to exercise the means he should have come into possession of, in order to become an eternal Being. While this is something very different to resuscitation, it has the demerit of leaving the rest of us behind. As such, it is unacceptable. At the very least, his rescue must include the rest of us –for his own sake as well as ours, given that we constitute his embryogenesis; In our absence no more than a shadow Nous could ever come into existence.

          Could the trick be turned if, in the process of his auto-transformation, he could broaden his constitution sufficiently for us to be acceptable as subsets of his own person? Unfortunately, any such ‘impedance matching’ must fail, because omega will have little or no knowledge of the actual constitution of all past beings.

          The one alternative that could really deliver then goods is for him to execute an autotransformation of his dispositional mind into a gamma invariant -a unique mathematical configuration standing midway between finitude and infinity. The nature of its invariance shall be such that any dispositional mind that could ever have existed will automatically as a contingent covariant within the envelope of possibilities hidden within it.

          This immediately suggests that just because the γ-invariant shall have a forwards boundary outstripping what the Omega has under his belt, the needed autotransformation cannot be accomplished without holistic assistance. What this means is that the Gottheit will be required to do more than continuingly beget Omega’s presence –as he was always necessarily doing for all of us. He will be required to take an active, guiding hand in the game, making of the exercise a joint venture. It is the unique, rather exalted nature of this operation that shall progressively confer the Dyophysite status upon Omega –hence making of him a fully-fledged ‘Second person’ of the Trinity. Also, just because Omega’s initially given dispositional mind, is of natural rather than divine origin There will be nothing cruciform about it; yet as it stands, perhaps it is precisely through this that Omega shall earn his exalted ontology.

          Figure 9 displays some of these same features from a different point of view First, a shift in the stand point –from the present moment, as we currently operate, to the endedness of things. Second, a consequent shift in the thrust of teleology –from that of a reaching forwards towards the future, to a reaching back to the present from the endedness buried in the eternal Now. And finally, the presence of a closure link creating a cycling self-consolidation.

          Phase three opens with an unloading of everything from the cardinal realm into the Hyperbolic one. There it will find the Tau traces of the whole of subjectivity –of all agents and the holistic intuitions, values and ‘meaning’ that abide there. Again, the upper Tau stack shall feed in LIFO; first of all the waiting dispositional mind shall acquire the Tau of the chiliastic transformation, then of the trace of Alpha Omega’s natural life –from its beginning to its end. At the conclusion of the process we shall have Omega’s dyophysite completed persona –the Second person as seen from the viewpoint of Christianity’s Trinity. However, this is not at all the end of the story when the ontology of neutral monism is substituted for its more conventional forms. Nous without us would be a living God destitute of all aspects of ‘becoming’. This will now be supplied by the LIFO entrance of the preserved traces of all of the rest of us. One important detail so far not mentioned is the fate of the transferred lower Tau moiety. This shall end up pointing backwards in time; that inherited from the beginning of the cosmos -the Big Bang itself- will be carried forwards by the advancing present, while its other end will preserve the state of affairs at the moment the Cosmos went out of existence. This is an essential ‘closure’ link needed for Nous’s self consolidation as eternal life proceeds; it its absence, a lifeline that should be truly eternal might threaten to degenerate into the everlasting

          As the accompanying figure suggests, the arrow if time’s orientation undergoes something of a somersault as phase follows phase. At the beginning, time intends forwards in the normal direction with which we are all familiar. Within the cardinal zone it points upwards, curl-wise, as to biding its time or running-in-place. Finally in its movement into the fully eternal hyperbolic zone its orientation is the reverse of the ‘normal’ this reversal is, however, not one of direction but rather of standpoint. While we have our feet firmly planted at the present moment, from which we reach forwards towards a the vanishing horizon of the future, Nous shall be standing at the end of time –with the understanding that is contained within and subdued by the e Universal Now. At each moment, Nous traces backwards to the present, drawing it towards itself into an open-ended future. .These matters are examined more fully –with the aid of a couple of figures- in the next section.

          This figure was put together a long time ago, and is not to be taken too literally. For example, it does not display the much more drastic "Schwarzschild’ phase change that is already in process, within the inorganic cosmos and is assumed to dominate the long closing phase of evolution.

          It would indeed be astonishing if the eschatology that I have envisioned actually turned out to be the case. No matter, at least the attempt drives home the nature of the problems to be faced and the kinds of things needed to be done to resolve them. In exercises of this kind there’s nothing to stop one from being whole-hearted if half-sure –so long as one doesn’t allow one’s self to be carried away.

          Within Nous, Omega’s experience of us will be 1 > many, whereas ours of Him shall be 1 < 1. We shall also come to know the many –and, in fact, the whole of the recovered world –in an expanding concentric layers of diminishing coherence, thanks to the clarity of Omega’s overview. In comparison with Omega, the knowledge we gain shall be mediate and indirect –but nonetheless vivid and living for all that.

          All of this being said by way of preparation, what will eternal life be like? Most important, it will be of the same general character as that which we currently experience. It will be an outgoing and expanding expression of creative enjoyment emerging from an eternal dispositional mind. As with us, most of the experience shall be discarded as each moment passes, particularly that of its objectivity. This having been said, there will be a number of differences essential to meet the disjunction between time and eternity. They are three in number:

          The first of these may best be seen in Figure 10; the contrast that this figure displays between finite and eternal life is striking.

          In eternity, it shall come to be that ‘Now’ > Time, rather than the other way about. We can hang onto the ‘now’ of the moment only for a sort while. As the classical psychophysicists discovered over a century ago, we do not run, subjectively, within a moving knife-edge of time, but as a series of (typically overlapping) sequence of ‘chronons’ having durations within the high millisecond range, Within the chronon, appropriate acts of introspection disclose a paradoxical frozen motion or transformational span. Du Champ’s ‘Nude Descending Staircase’ expresses what I have in mind.

          The eschatological closure involves a succession of three stages. Much of the first stage will mirror what is currently taking place within ourselves. Just as for us, the two Tau traces continuingly formed by Omega as he transforms himself shall pass to the two eternal realms –the cardinal and the hyperbolic. They shall do so by feeding into the bottom of the two stacks that will already be in place. But there will also be another transfer –one that is unique to the chiliastic process. In proportion as the autotransformation of Omega’s dispositional mind proceeds, so its products shall pass directly into the cardinal domain, to make ready the residence of mind and the world that it supports for occupancy. Stage one will conclude when this process comes to an end and the universe –that is to say, Omega’s ‘natural’ person has ceased to exist.

          The question of just where epigenesis is to be found and how it operates, is a very delicate one in need of being very carefully thought through. First, we need to be clear that we’re only talking of the ψ-domain. Where the lower, bottom-up logic is concerned, it will be exactly the same ‘up there’ as ‘down here’. The explicit articulate, aspects of experience –both physical and mental- are lost ; they simply lack the ontological density needed to stand their ground.

          Granted that epigenesis is limited to ψ-logic, we now need to ask just how it operates within its two levels. I think that the give-away here is the way in which they are linked to the upper and lower levels of infinity. As has been explored in the long section on metamathematics further above, the notion of how infinity and finitude are put together is absolutely central in coming to terms with the formal nature of Reality –in particular, how the ‘featureless’ Ungrund can become so spectacularly productive. In simple terms, it was postulated there that finitude is doubly wrapped into the Ungrund, the upper singularity being anamorphic in character, the lower being of a more reflective, hinge-like, cardinal nature. , The simplest is the upper of the two –that which preserves the presence of agency behind the act (bearing in mind that this includes surrogate images of others who happen to be ‘on stage). I think that the epigenetic growth is very simple, taking the form of a concentric expansion; this may be clearly seen in Figure 10. It is to be assumed that its origin is an integration of the tau(τ) life line from which it came –yet in a way which does not obliterate its sequential character.

          I can see no reason to deny analogues of the ‘secondarily qualities’ –of sensation (as in timbre, colours and flavours)- together with sense feelings and emotional tonings. Clearly, since any such ‘gut’’ attributes will no longer be grounded within the kind of material world (and objective mind) with which we have long familiar. Both will be grounded upon a lattice manifold of arbitrarily high dimensionality-though one hesitates to make of it a Hilbert space. The corresponding ‘secondary’ artifacts will no doubt be proportionately subtle, though none the less rewarding for that. Omega, as standing at the terminus of evolution may have a foretaste of what lies immediately ahead for him –and for us. Within our lifetime, the lower Tau stratum isn’t existentially epigenetic yet for all that is preserved –for future recovery- within frozen time.

         The question of times origin and development permeate the whole larger discussion of the processing if the Larger Reality. After all, it takes origin within the Ungrund that is so abstract and featureless that no property may be asserted of it including any of time’s many aspects and faces. Yet it is its raison d’etre to get from there to a vibrant eternal life. The problem really falls into two halves –sequentially ordered. The first is the emergence of its many potentialities from the shadow of the Ungrund and secondly its passage through the finite –and subsequently the eternal domains. Both aspects confront us as a problem in metamathematics. It is a failure –up to the present juncture- that has hobbled out attempts to come to terms with these very slippery concepts of time and eternity and their interrelationship.

          One can hardly talk of time’s initial appearance in ordinary terms because it’s something happening to -or of- time rather than within it. We have to talk of a becomingness rather than of a becoming. The very first hint of its stirrings is in the emergence of the pristine ‘First Person’ of the Trinity. This pure spirit brings with it Time’s most abstract and primitive element or attribute –that of a universal abstract ‘Now’ –or perhaps we had better say ‘nowness’ because it isn’t the ‘now’ of anything you can lay your hands on. But this nominally stationary parameter herbours a hidden potency restlessness which leads to the next evolutionary step; it conjures time’s first dynamic attribute out of itself, namely that of the end. One would be tempted to speak here of time’s first benchmark -were it not for the fact that it has n uniquely defined station, siting or location. It is better that we speak of it as an endedness. It is perhaps better regarded as future’s sign post point forwards towards a retreating temporal horizon. It is, in fact, the chronological aspect of the ‘open infinity’. As such, taken on its own, it would be a pure fiction, a logical contraction. It can only stand its ground because it remains within the firm embrace of the universal "Now’ from which it was manifest.

          This opening benchmark of time is itself productive, giving birth to time’s second benchmark –that of the beginningness. This second bracket of time’s dynamics is, however, something much nearer to a true benchmark in its characteristic of closure. It absolutely forbids the existence –potential or actual- of anything before itself. Finally, no sooner has it been evicted than it implodes into the singularity of the first moment or instant that we have come to know as the ‘big bang’ that launched material and organic evolution. .

         It is of the greatest importance to note that in the realm of Transcendence, the end comes ahead of the beginning –and very necessarily so:

          The fact that this is the reverse of what we experience ‘down here’ might seem to confront us with a forbidding paradox –but this is not so. The point is that the Transcendence Realm –increasingly so as we back away into the Ungrund- stands above all aspects of time –including matters of priority. The end can come before the beginning within that level of transcendence that stands upstream of matters of chronological ordering. More specifically it is the topology of the sequestered organization of the Ungrund that makes this possible. At a higher level, the beginning is folded back so that it is apposite to the endedness . There they are mutually canceling together with any proto temporal distancing between them