LOST Season 5 tidbit (mostly for Vice and me)

I got this from Jeff 'Doc' Jensen's LOST recap. It's about the book Jacob was reading, Everything That Rises Must Converge, right when Locke fell out of the window. By the by, I believe Locke was dead until Jacob resurrected him for his greater purpose. Which explains how he survived such a plummet. Anyway, this is pretty cool.

"As it happens, Flannery O’Connor’s aforementioned book takes its title — Everything That Rises Must Converge — from a phrase coined by an egghead and fellow Catholic provocateur named Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who concocted a theory of evolution called “Omega Point.” Basically, it’s the idea that there is some kind of transcendent entity or consciousness that is guiding everyone and everything toward greater complexity and enlightenment, until everyone and everything becomes transcendent, too. I think. More simply, it’s Jacob’s view: There is a single end; everything before then is progress. Chardin (not O'Connor) believed his Omega entity was basically Jesus Christ himself. His phrase, “everything that rises must converge,” is a poetical expression of a key Christian idea known in the Greek apokatastasis. It’s like the opposite of apocalypse, or rather, what comes after apocalypse. I’m not trying to get all religious on you, but it is what it is: apokatastasis is the idea that in the end, Satan will be defeated and that all of creation will be redeemed and unified under Christ. “Now is the judgment of the world: now shall the prince of this world be cast out. And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all things to myself.” (John 12:31-32) Or, again, to use a line from the show: “He who will save us all.” That, my friends, is the answer, translated from Richard Alpert’s Latin, to Ilana’s riddle: “What lies in the shadow of the statue?"

I don't think the hard Christian science element applies to the show, but I certainly believe that the overall philosophical view of 'Omega Point evolution' could certainly apply to the circumstances of the LOSTaways.

Fascinating, heady stuff.