What was unique about Teilhard’s mysticism?

Today’s Post

Last week we looked at a second example of ‘evolutionary mysticism’, seeing how Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ can lead to a deeper and wider grasp of both reality and our place in it as human persons.

This week we will look a little deeper into how Teilhard’s insights into such reality bring a new and powerful facet to the traditional practice of mysticism.

Empiricism and Intuition

As we have addressed many times in this series, humans are capable of grasping realities in two different but overlapping modes.  In the ‘intuitive’ mode, popularly thought as taking place in the right hemisphere of the brain, reality isn’t addressed as it is objectively ‘in itself’, but more as it appears subjectively as an object of our consciousness.  As we saw a few weeks ago, when we fill in what’s missing from our attempt to ‘objectively’ make sense of reality, we are using ‘intuition’.  Intuition is usually contrasted with ‘empiricism’, which attempts to make sense of this reality using as little imagination as possible.

When a physicist weighs a rock, he seeks information about the rock that anyone else that wants to know will measure in the same way and get the same information.  This is the empirical mode of consciousness and underpins the success of science in developing what sense it makes of reality.

Empiricism and intuition are commonly thought of as opposites, even though when put into a time continuum, are simply different stages in any thought process.  When it comes to a concept as slippery as ‘mysticism’, the size of the gap between them seemingly becomes bigger.  Even though such great scientists as Newton and Einstein had their ‘mystical’ sides, most materialists would see the two sides as solidly blocked by the wall of objective evidence of whatever phenomenon they were addressing.

Teilhard clearly did not erect such a ‘wall’.  Addressing existence from Teilhard’s perspective opens us to seeing facets of ever more deeply intertwined life in ever widening terms.  For eons, humans have understood this this, trying to fit their intuitions into the narrow scope of human language and empirical observation, but limited by their evolutionary incompleteness.

As Tennessee Williams observed of one of our intuitional practices:

“The object of art is to make eternal the desperately fleeting moment.”

    But the accumulation of empirical insight has increased over time.  As Norberg documents, as the empirical database has since mushroomed, the seeds of human maturity have begun to sprout more robustly over the past hundred fifty years.  This clearly demonstrates how a secular understanding of the ‘ground of being’ is emerging which offers not only increasing clarity and relevance to religious thought but an increasing focus on the human by science.  Secular mysticism occurs when the inclusion of both approaches merges into a single, harmonized enterprise.

Through Teilhard’s lens, science can be seen to dig deeper into an ever-expanding trove of objective observations towards the same deep core of existence that religion has intuited for generations.  By the same token, religion can be understood as refining its intuition of a ‘first cause’ which enriches all being by increased use of those insights provided by science.

Teilhard was one of the first to recognize that these two oft-orthogonal enterprises are on parallel but convergent paths to an understanding of reality which enriches both the spiritual and material aspects of human existence.  His recognition reflects a true ‘widening of vision’, now become capable of effectively grasping both past and future as well as both material and spiritual, in a way that recognizes the presence of God in the world which underpins not only the part we play, but more importantly, the fullness which is possible to us as we play in it.  Teilhard once again uses the metaphor of the sphere to illustrate the potential relation between Science and Religion:

“Religion and Science obviously represent two different meridians on the sphere of our minds, and it would be wrong not to keep them separate (which is the concordist error).  But these two meridians must necessarily meet somewhere at a pole of common vision (which is the meaning of coherence).  On a sphere it would be absurd (concordism) to confuse the meridians at the equator; but at the pole (coherence) they ought to rejoin each other by structural necessity.”

   Thus, Teilhard was unique in his insight that the intuition of religion requires a ‘grounding’ in empiricism for it to achieve its full potential as a tool for enrichment of human life.  Blondel recognized that the new view of reality provided by science in the late eighteenth century opened the door to re-emergence of the ancient intuition of the intimacy of the underlying cause of reality.  Teilhard went one step further in articulating this ancient intuition into empirical terms.  In the new and expanded approach to mysticism that Teilhard pioneers, the many metaphors proposed by mystics for millennia take their rightful place in the human passage from an imagined construction of reality to increased recognition of them as steps of progress toward an increasingly integrated grasp of reality.

In doing so, both Blondel and Teilhard showed how ‘grounding’ mysticism to a more complete and comprehensive empiricism can not only increase its relevancy to a society which is becoming more secular, but at the same time increase its potential to further the reach of science into the realm of human life.

The Next Post

This week we looked at how Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ expands the traditional religious concept of ‘mysticism’ by recognizing its need for ‘grounding’ it in the recognition of the value of empirical thought to intuitional imagination.  In doing so, he introduced yet another insight into the evolutionary value of ‘thinking with the whole brain’.

Next week we will see how such an integrated insight can lead to a ‘mysticism’ less typified by isolated ecstatic vision to one more germane to daily life.

How does Teilhard’s ‘lens help to bolster our mystical imagination with empirical findings?

Today’s Post

     Last week we suggested that mysticism is alive and well, not only in the religious sense, but in the secular sense as well.

This week, we will look into what it is that these modern mystics are seeing that adds a ‘liminal’ characteristic to our empirical findings as we begin to ‘make sense of things’.

‘Zero Sum’ vs ‘Win-Win’

We have previously seen how Johan Norberg identified nine facets of human evolution documented in examples of increases in human welfare that show them all to increase by an unprecedented explosion over just the most recent hundred fifty years.  In his book, “Open”, he goes on to address how such undeniable data contradicts the prevalent but dystopian concept of ‘zero sum’.

To many, the idea of ‘zero sum’ underlays the popular belief that any gain is necessarily countered by a comparable loss.  Norberg sees such a belief as essential to a prevalent current political belief that one side must necessarily triumph over the other side in any disagreement.  The viewpoint of ‘zero sum’ as opposed to ‘win-win’ can also be found in nearly all expressions of religion, alongside that which sees life as a ‘rise’ in some places countered by a ‘fall’ in others.

Norberg makes the case that if life were a ‘zero sum’ game, it would not progress.  Any increase in welfare encountered in human life would be paid for by degradation encountered elsewhere.  Nowhere is this perspective more prevalent than in the distribution of wealth.  In his book, “Progress”, he takes aim at the conventional wisdom that sees increases in wealth of the few as paid for by increases in poverty on the part of the many.  From such a dystopian perspective, “wealth is accumulated off the backs of the poor.”  The total wealth of the world, by this reckoning, is static, effectively ‘zero sum’.  In a Malthusian conclusion, human evolution eventually requires all the wealth to be owned by a few, collapsing society and leading to human extinction.

Norberg’s data, however, shows quite a different trend, and leads to a contrary conclusion.  The data not only shows world wealth increasing exponentially, but it also shows poverty to decrease at the same rate.  Effectively, by this reckoning, total global wealth is increasing.  ‘Win-win’ isn’t the exception: if you know where and how to look at history it’s the norm.

Norberg asks the question in his book, “Open”, where does this global trend come from?  In a mechanistic universe, in which energy is neither created nor destroyed, the rule of ‘zero sum’ would seem to dominate.  Teilhard poses an insight into the same phenomenon: in all relationships, not only does “true union differentiate”, it leads to increased fullness.  As in the case of Norberg’s nine metrics of human evolution, how does the increased ‘fullness’, now quantified in the increase in human welfare, occur?

The ‘cosmic spark’, postulated by the sages of the Axial Age, articulated so clearly by Teilhard, and addressed by the nascent science approach to ‘information’ is clearly at work in Norberg’s nine metrics.  Repeating John Haught’s insight:

“Running silently through the heart of matter, a series of events that would flower into ‘subjectivity’ has been part of the universe from the start.”

   This of course simply reflects Teilhard’s insight that the energy of evolution by which the universe rises to increased levels of complexity (and hence ‘consciousness’) necessarily continues in the human product.  Recognition of this ‘cosmic spark’ has been the goal of nearly all religious enterprises and is echoed in every mystic’s quest.  As Norberg’s insight shows, traces of it can be seen be seen in the most mundane facts if we but choose to cast our nets of understanding widely and deeply enough.

Evolutionary Mysticism

Insights such as this, a small example in a much larger group of perspectives of human existence, are illustrations of how a trained eye can be paired with a comprehensive set of facts to result in a much clearer perception not only of our environment, but much more importantly, the part we play in it.  This offers a ‘secular’ definition of mysticism.  When put into an evolutionary perspective, our understanding of ourselves and our milieu can come together into a comprehensive worldview that makes it possible for us to navigate our own personal evolution in a way that insures our collective survival.  The ‘evolutionary mystic’ is simply one who learns how use the insights of intuition to integrate the data available to us into a coherent context in which our own lives are resonant.  Teilhard employs his ‘lens of evolution’ when he says

“Evolution is the elaboration of ever more perfect eyes in a universe in which there is always more to see”

   While this perception of mysticism might be seen as distinctly contrary to the mystical experiences of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, with their emphasis on emotional ecstasy and separateness from society, the common ground is there: seeing.

One concept that Teilhard identifies as essential to human evolution is the ‘psychism’, by which humans pool their insights in such a way that a new insight is born, one which is deeper and more comprehensive than that of any individual.  In summary the psychism is simply a group of humans who collectively undertake a quest.  It can be a group of carpenters building a house, or a group of scientists discovering the treatment of a virus.  To varying degrees, such undertakings result in a satisfaction in what is accomplished, but whose progress is guided by a vision of the unfinished product and the need for depending on each other to achieve it.  The more difficult the job, the more necessary will be the triad of confidence, vision, and relationship (Paul’s faith, hope and love) that is active in the group’s work.

The holistic vision which sees the whole emerging from seemingly disjoint parts is just as alive in the psychism as it is in the desert mystic with her ecstatic emotions.  It is perhaps more profound in the psychism because it is a celebration of the fruit of human relations instead of requiring the recoil from them.

Put into the sweep of cosmic evolution, evolutionary mysticism can be seen in instances of ‘empirical mysticism’.  Teilhard’s “intuition bursting on a pile of facts” is described by secular thinkers such as Albert Einstein in terms of ‘joyful awakening’ to a clearer vision of universal cohesiveness.

The larger psychism, consisting in the groups of scientists which developed the molecular concept of genetic activity by which a treatment of the Covid-19 virus emerged, all report the same reaction to uncovering how the Covid virus attacked the human gene.

The Next Post

This week we explored the idea of increased ‘holism’ in the human attempt to more fully grasp and understand the objective reality that we reflect in our subjective minds.

Next week we will take a closer look at such a seemingly dualistic idea as ‘empirical mysticism’

   Secular mysticism today

Today’s Post

     Last week we continued our look at mysticism, this time looking at it from the role of ‘imagination’ in filling in the missing details that occur when we attempt to become ‘aware’ of the world outside the dark cave of our skulls.  This process can be seen as resonant with John Haught’s assertion that

“…every aspect of religion gains new meaning and importance once we link it to the new scientific story of an unfinished universe.”

This week we will focus Teilhard’s ‘lens’ on seeing how this plays out today

The Modern Mystic

Haught’s insight recognizes that religion and science need each other’s insights if they’re to help us make sense of things.  This simple realization is one of the pillars of modern mysticism: seeing things as a whole.

Humans have been learning to see things more holistic for centuries.  The simplest first step is to recognize that every action has a consequence.  A close second step is to recognize that all consequences cannot be foretold.  This of course is at the base of the record of human ‘trial and error’ that has taken us to where we are today.

An example of this process can be seen in the human approach to ‘fuel’, addressed in more detail in  February of 2020.  In this example, the earliest choice of fuel was wood, which quickly became a problem as society became more densely packed with the advent of cities.  Since it requires a lot of volume to produce heat, the logistics of chopping and shipping wood quickly overcame its caloric benefit.  Once it was realized that coal was much more efficient and required less logistics, it became the primary fuel but once again its ill effects on the increasing density of human population became a detriment.  This trial-and-error process has proceeded into development of many potential sources of fuel that are necessary for the continuation of human evolution, but which all bring a widening net of delivering technology as well as unwanted consequences which must be managed.

The size of the net, measured in such metrics as logistics, health hazards and cost, requires an ever-widening perspective.  Not only does the linear size of the net expand, but the necessity for understanding how consequences barely seen today can increase over time, such as the impact of lead paint on the development of cognition in children.  As the net of ills expands, it becomes necessary to widen the net of understanding the consequences.  Continual increases in the holism of the recognition of consequences are needed.
While seeing ‘mysticism’ in the pedestrian concept of learning to see things more holistically might not connote the rapt ecstasy depicted by Renaissance painters of St. Theresa of Avila, the effects are more profound.  Norberg’s nine facets of human evolution summarize the way human life can be improved and individual lives uplifted by such secular manifestations of Teilhard’s ‘psychisms’ in which human groups come to realize fundamental truths about both human needs and our capacity to meet them.

Teilhard, as a font of such an integrated view of reality, influencing Haught, Rohr and the many others we have met along the way, is an example of the ‘modern mystic’.  His highly integrated perception of the universe as a single thing in which traditional human concepts such as ‘one and many’, ‘natural and supernatural’, ‘sprit and matter’ are all knitted into a colorfully integrated fabric of reality in which the opposites addressed in each duality simply become single things with different ways to make sense of them.  It is not that the contrasts inherent in their traditional dualistic treatment disappear but are now recognized as points in a spectrum.  Blue is not the opposite of green, but simply another color that can be found in a single, integrated ray of sunlight once you employ a prism through which their particularities can be distinguished as different wavelengths of a single, multispectral beam of energy.  Using Teilhard’s ‘prism of evolution’, the long list of dualities which has mired religion in the mud of irrelevancy can be overcome, permitting it to regain its place in the human quest for the sense of things.

We have seen this insight from Teilhard before, but it becomes more relevant in the light of modern mysticism:

“I doubt that whether there is a more decisive moment for a thinking being than when the scales fall from his eyes and he discovers that the is not an isolated unit lost in the cosmic solitudes and realizes that a universal will to live converges and is hominized in him”

  To Teilhard, the ultimate mystical insight is the perspective that each of us participates in the universal upwelling of complexity that has infallibly risen over the span of fourteen billion years. While this might sound like a religious sentiment, Teilhard also recognizes the value of such a cosmically integrated perspective to secular science:

“To explain scientifically is to include the facts in a general coherent interpretation.”

   The degree of truth of a statement, he is saying, is directly proportional to the ‘general coherence’ which it reflects.  In such a way, the ‘evolution of truth’ can be seen as we use our mysticism to better understand what has been referred to as ‘the ineffable’.

The common ground between science and religion becomes more clearly delineated by such “secular mysticism”.  As science’s understanding of the universe unfolds, it uncovers the coherence of all things. As it does, this coherence can increase our own nondual recognition of not only our fit into the universe but the intimate relationship between the core of our being and the axis of evolution that nourishes it.

By focusing Teilhard’s lens, we have seen how the recognition of ourselves as ‘the fruit of the cosmic spark’ can result in a profound sense of our rootedness in the cosmic sweep of evolution.

Mysticism therefore isn’t a state only achieved by those who would withdraw from the teeming and throbbing mass of humans being painfully compressed as they advance across the globe.  The modern mystic, as modelled by Teilhard, is one who would recognize the single heart beating at the core of this phenomenon, the one to which we can hear our own heart resonate if we but learn to listen.  There is only one reality, and the authentic mystic seeks to discover how it manifests itself in the seeming contradictions in which it presents itself.

The Next Post

This week we have shifted our focus onto mysticism as it can be found in today’s secular world.

Next week we will address how evolution is proceeding in the human species today to identify what can be seen if we look at It through the eyes of a ‘modern mystic’.

   How can Teilhard’s ‘lens’ be focused on the Mystical Approach to Making Sense of Things?

Today’s Post

     Last week we took a final look at the many facets of orienting our lives towards in a way which makes us more open to Teilhard’s ‘winds of life’ so that we may be ‘carried by a current’ to the fuller being which is possible to us as products of a ‘complexifying evolution’.  Or, as Karen Armstrong sees it, we seek ways to experience the moments of ecstasy and rapture in which we inhabit our humanity more fully.
This week we will begin a look at yet another facet found in nearly every expression of religion, that of ‘mysticism’.

What is Mysticism?

Nearly every form of religion includes the highly subjective practice of ‘mysticism’. Traditionally, it is thought of as a communication between the natural and supernatural, often enhanced by prescribed rituals, and occasionally by psychedelic herbs.  Whatever underlies the experience, it is often profound, and felt by the mystic to open the door to a deeper, more inclusive insight into reality.  To many, it is less insight into reality and more a deeper experience of it

It is also deeply subjective.  What the mystic ‘sees’ is highly colored by personal biases and predispositions, all of which require interpretations to establish meanings.

The mystical experience has often been mistrusted by the established order of religious hierarchy, seen as potentially threatening to orthodoxy and hierarchy since most mystics saw their experience as a direct connection to the divine and therefore in no need for ecclesiastical mediation.  In the West, this dichotomy is evident in the distinction between monastic orders and diocesan priests.

In either case, the mystical experience itself is real, and evident in all forms of belief.  As in other concepts woven into religious belief, it can be viewed through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’.

If it indeed is a way to understand reality which is more complete, one which sees ‘the whole’ in place of ‘the components of the whole’, it is a valuable tactic for a clearer understanding of ourselves and our ‘fit’ into this reality.

The Incarnational Nature of Liminal Space

Liminal space is the realm of the half-imagined margin between sleep and wake, in which our minds are unfettered, allowed to roam uncaged by the spreadsheet-like structures that we erect in our pursuit of a systematic grasp of reality as we seek to make sense of our lives.  This is the space prized by the historical mystics that have accompanied the structure-bound journey of orthodox religious thought in the quest for God.

In our own personal journeys, liminal space is that in which our insights can rise to light the darkness of unconsciousness, one in which the first stirrings of such recognitions as we have explored:

We are equal

Matter and spirit are bound by an implicit energy which grows over time

To become more I must love more

Fuller being always results from closer union which leads to fuller being

My failures do not define me

I can trust myself

Beneath and beyond what I see there is always more

The future can be better than the past

   And eventually the greatest insight

“It is I, be not afraid”

   The navigation of liminal space can be seen in the endless attempt by artists to solidify the flicker of insight seen in this milieu, to extend a line from the firm shore of the left brain to the translucent swirl of half-seen patterns of the right; from the elusive, transient ephemeral flash to the eternal solid written word or play of colors upon a canvas, from imagination to articulation.  As Tennessee Williams succinctly put it

“The object of art is to make eternal the desperately fleeting moment.”

   “The word was made flesh, and dwelt among us”.  This famous line from John could be rephrased as “the word becomes flesh and dwells within us”.  As we have seen, the term “word” is understood by Teilhard as the cosmic spark by which matter gathers ‘spirituality’ (as he defines the term) as it rises from the simplest of granules to the highly complex configuration found in the human brain.  Seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, his cosmic spark can be seen as active in our lives, that which lightens the cavernous pathways upon which we trod as we explore this liminal space within us.  Seen this way, it can give us confidence that what will be found is truly fuller being and can be trusted to lead us into greater, as Anderson puts it, “habitation of our humanity”.

This is ‘incarnational’ because the ‘word’ is indeed not only the blueprint for our being, but the light by which the search for what is ‘incarnate’ in us is directed.

As Jung sees it, the subconscious mind borders on the conscious mind in this liminal space.  It is Tennyson’s predawn lit by the ‘casement slowly growing a glimmering square’, filled with the ‘pipe of half awakened birds’, or the ‘teeming brain’ calling out for Keats to ‘glean’.

The Evolutionary Side of Mysticism

Christianity traditionally sees the roots of mysticism in the explosion of asceticism and monasticism that accompanied Christianity’s new legal status in the third century, one which led to the many “Desert Fathers and Mothers”.

Karen Armstrong, in her book, “The Great Transformation”, sees the roots of mysticism arising much earlier in the ‘Axial Age’ as the locus on God began to change from an exterior to an interior perspective.  During this critical period, thinkers across the globe were beginning to use their own lives and their own intuitions as reference points for their insights on human life.  As she saw it

“For the first time, human beings were systematically making themselves aware of the deeper layers of human consciousness.  By disciplined introspection, the sages of the Axial Age were awakening to the vast reaches of selfhood that lay beneath the surface of their minds.  They were becoming fully “self-conscious.”

 An intimate awareness of this ‘liminal space’ was beginning to be recognized as an authentic source of insight.

The Christian mystics tapped into the new hermeneutics introduced by Christianity to expand these insights.  As Richard Rohr puts it

“The 12th century Rhineland mystic Hildegard of Bingen, and later Francis of Assisi (1182-1226) and his early followers, brought back what I call “incarnational mysticism”—finding God through things instead of ideas, doctrines, and church services, which still persists as the mainline orthodoxy down to our time.”

  Rohr cites Charles Péguy (1873–1914), French poet and essayist, as he wrote with great insight that

 “…everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.”

   Rohr articulates this journey as he notes that

“Everything new and creative in this world puts together things that don’t look like they go together at all but always have been connected at a deeper level.”

   Thus, to him mysticism seeks that deeper level, to a unified mode of nondual thinking where contradiction and paradox can be held in tension by the right brain until the left brain can begin to see the connections between them.  In this event, as Teilhard puts it

“Intuition bursts on a pile of accumulated facts.”

   Rohr notes that such activity is pervasive in Christian history.

“Just as Augustine reinterpreted Christianity in light of Plato in the 4th century, and Aquinas integrated Aristotle in the 13th, today there are dozens of theologians across the spectrum re-envisioning the Christian faith. Whose ideas are they integrating now? Darwin, Einstein, Hubble, Wilson and all those who have corrected, and continually contribute to, an evidence-based understanding of biological, cosmic, and cultural evolution.”

   This ‘evidence-based understanding’ is the product of the left brain’s integration of the right-brain’s intuition.  It is another example of our ‘principles of reinterpretation’ that we saw earlier, and reflects the insight of John Haught that

“…every aspect of religion gains new meaning and importance once we link it to the new scientific story of an unfinished universe.”

The Next Post

This week we saw how mysticism, as a facet of religion, seeks a deeper view of reality in which our understanding of it is less important than our experiencing of it.

Next week we will continue this focus on mysticism, looking at how such an approach to understanding and participating in reality can be seen today.

  How can seeing life through Teilhard’s ‘lens’ help us to plot a course toward ‘fuller being’? 

Today’s Post

     Using Teilhard’s lens to understand how the ‘winds of life’ can carry us ‘to the open sea’, we have seen the ways that the thread of universal evolution rises in us both as a species and as individual human persons that together can move us forward in ways that we are led, as Karen Alexander puts it, “into a deeper possession of ourselves”.

This week we will look a little deeper into this dual aspect of human evolution as it moves us forward.

The Progression of Human Evolution

We have attached a great deal of significance to Johan Norberg’s documentation of the exponential rise in human welfare over the last 150 years.  As we pointed out, Norberg’s plethora of statistics clearly shows a global trend which documents a rise in the general state of human welfare.   This rise goes against the conventional wisdom which sees the state of humanity as ‘deteriorating’.  But even the atheistic scientist, Richard Dawkins, agrees that something is nonetheless stirring in human evolution in his book, “The Selfish Gene” when he contrasts this facet of human evolution to Darwinistic genetic change.

“I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet.  It is still in its infancy, drifting around in its primordial soup, but is already achieving evolutionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind.  The new soup is the soup of human culture”, and this new replicator “conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission”.

   Dawkins’ insight that human evolution continues faster by way of ‘memes’ (units of cultural replication) than in genes (units of biological replication) correlates well with both Teilhard and Norberg.  All three recognize the ‘something new’ that is happening with humans that suggests a ‘fundamental’ to the ‘harmonic’ of biological Natural Selection, which requires genetic changes to produce new species.

As we have seen many times, but particularly emphasized by Teilhard, this ‘fundamental’ isn’t something that waits to come into play in living things.  As John Haught succinctly puts it

“Running silently through the heart of matter, a series of events that would flower into ‘subjectivity’ (the ‘person’) has been part of the universe from the start. So hidden is this interior side of the cosmos from public examination that scientists and philosophers with materialist leanings usually claim it has no real existence.”

   And as we have seen, finding and cooperating with this undercurrent as it is active in individual human life is an essential step towards reaping the existential reward of ‘fuller being’ that is granted to us as a ‘fruit of evolution’.  But while it might be possible to take this step, in what form does it present itself?

Taking the Steps Toward Personal Evolution 

We have seen many examples of how both scientists and theologians, as well as atheists and theists can objectively recognize in nature today what was seen only a few hundred years ago as ‘supernatural’.  Understood in this way, a ‘reward’ was granted as an action of an extrinsic and supernatural god, prompted by piety, and only fully realized after death.  The dimensions of ‘correct’ piety were defined in the tenets of organized and dogmatic religion.

We have also seen how such a thread of belief was paralleled by the continuation of the more intrinsic concepts of God, such as found in Paul and John, and kept alive by the ‘Desert Fathers and Mothers’ of the early Church.

Elaine Pagels suggests a third strand, closely related to the second but decidedly seen by the hierarchical church as heretical, one which shows up in what are called the ‘Gnostic Gospels’.  In such writings as “The Gospel of Thomas”, she finds resonance with the concept of secular meditation that we addressed earlier.

“(The Kingdom of god) is a state of being that we may enter when we come to know who we are and come to know God as the source of our being.”

   This ‘state of being’ is the same ‘interior side’ as described by Haught above and seen as the object of discovery of the process of mediation.

Thus, the awareness of its existence, and the importance of coming to recognize its agency in each of us is a necessary prerequisite to our full immersion into the flow of life as it carries us to ‘fuller being’.

As we have seen, Teilhard addresses how the human species can continue its evolution by

“…continually find(ing) new ways of arranging (our) elements in the way that is most economical of energy and space” by “a rise in interiority and liberty within a whole made up of reflective particles that are now more harmoniously interrelated.”

   We also saw how Norberg showed concrete examples of how the three legs of the table of increased human welfare are related in this succinct statement:

• The rise of interiority reflected in the importance of the individual person in legal codes
• The rise in liberty reflected in assertions of equality and individual freedoms which enable innovation and invention
• The necessity of fruitful and productive human relationships which multiply the products of such innovation and invention

Teilhard’s succinct description of steps towards continuation of human evolution can be seen to be mirrored in individual life.

• ‘Finding new ways of arranging our lives’ requires a constant re-evaluation of our lives with a view to how we can reorient our perspectives, become less subjective, recognize, and overcome our biases and other of the many practices suggested by the vast body of spiritual thinkers.
• “Most economical energy and space” refers to the ‘spiritual energy’ that we expend. How much of our time is spent in concerns about things we cannot control instead of exploring ways that it can be focused on a ‘clearer disclosure of God in the world’?
• “Increasing our interiority and liberty” by searching into ourselves more deeply on the one hand, while expanding our ‘field of view’ of the world around us on the other. This is closely mirrored by Teilhard’s dyad of “centration and excentration” in which every increase in our grasp of reality contributes to a deepening of our fullness, which in turn enables us to see things more clearly.
• “More harmonious relationships” occur when we apply this dyad of ‘centration and excentration’ to our individual relationships. In Teilhard’s insight into our relationships, the energy of evolution that incessantly causes ‘the stuff of the universe’ to unite in such a way that precipitates more complex products is active in the human in the energy of ‘love’.  While this energy obviously powers the advance of the human species, its activity in the human person effects the personal ‘complexification’ required to move it forward.  In his succinct statement, he understands ‘fuller being’ to emerge from ‘closer union’, which itself is facilitated by ‘fuller being’.

The Next Post

This week we have addressed how our evolution as a species is dependent on our evolution as individual persons.  While Teilhard and others clarify steps toward the ‘fuller being’ that is possible to us, increasing our understanding of ourselves and the reality in which we are enmeshed can be difficult.  It calls for us to be able to see beyond the obvious, the everyday stuff of life, and our own limitations of habit, bias and often, fear.

Next week we will begin to focus Teilhard’s ‘lens’ on the “state of being that we may enter when we come to know who we are and come to know God as the source of our being” as suggested by “The Gospel of Thomas”.

How can seeing life through Teilhard’s ‘lens’ help to iive a life more open to the forces of evolution and bring us to ‘fuller being?

Today’s Post

     Last week we saw how we can train ourselves to be more open to the energy of evolution that Teilhard describes and which runs through our lives.

This week we take a closer look at some specifics.

The Aspects of ‘Fuller Being”

In addition to Paul’s list of the facets of ‘the Fruit of the Spirit’, he provides a longer list, this time of the manifestations of love in our lives (From 1 Corinthians 13:4-8)

Patience                               Calmness

Kindness                              Truthfulness

Self-confidence                 Trust

Humility                               Hope

Respect                                Non-egotistical

Perseverance

This list clearly parallels his list of the eight facets of ‘The Fruit of the Spirit’ that were addressed above but have the same reciprocal relation to our quest for ‘fuller’ life.  Both sets of characteristics identify what can be found in authentic human growth, but as commonly reflected in religious thinking, they are less ‘results’ than they are behaviors which must be practiced.

We have seen how Carl Rogers lists the facets of a ‘fuller’ life.

–more integrated hence more effective

– more realistic view of self

– stronger valuation of self

– increasing self-confidence

–more openness to experience, less denial or repression

–more accepting of others, seeing others as more similar

-clearer in communication

-more responsible for actions

-less defensive and anxious

Like Paul’s lists, these characteristics identify a ‘fuller’ life, but like Paul’s characteristics they also reflect the ‘work in progress’ necessary to get there.  Paul’s recommendation to ‘Put on Christ’ by adopting the behavior suggested by these lists is simply a method of training our neocortex brains to become more adept at dealing with reality.  Like Sacks’ ‘rewiring the brain’ by ‘rerouting the writing’, our success in dealing with life increases when we practice such behavior.

One distinct example can be found in one of the most fundamental human activities: relationships.  As we have seen many times, looking through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’, relationships (connections) are essential to the universe’s emergence in the form of increased complexity.  Connectivity between granules of ‘the stuff of the universe’ recurs endlessly in evolution to effect the increase in complexity which eventually manifests itself in the human person’s ‘awareness of consciousness’.

The ‘fly in the ointment’ suggested by almost every religion and reflected in Yuval Harari’s ‘Sapiens”, is that, with the human person, the previously infallible force of ‘instinct’, so successful in our pre-human ancestors, is potentially undermined by our two-edged ‘gift’ of ‘choice’.  While ‘choice’ might well continue our personal and cultural evolution, the making of it is frequently problematic.  Because of this, as we have seen, there is no guarantee that evolution will continue its fourteen billion year rise in the continuation of the human species.

Love and Fuller Being

Teilhard shows how the energy which has so faithfully raised the complexity of the universe thus far can be seen in that which energizes our human relationships: ‘love’.   We have explored the many aspects of this energy by which we are woven into the relationships necessary to our collective states.  In keeping with Teilhard’s convergent spiral of ‘being’ and ‘becoming’, ‘love’ can be seen as not only as a state of relationship but as the agency by which this state emerges.  As Confucius suggests, to get love we must give love, and that’s where ‘choice’ comes in.

Seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, love is quite distinct from the emotional or procreational impetus to unity, it is the ontological basis of the continuation of human evolution.  To love we must decide. Harari is correct when he intuits that with the human mode of consciousness in which we become aware of our awareness, choice is now necessary for its evolutionary continuation.  He is also correct that a dystopian facet of ‘belief’ has wound its way through our history, one which threatens a mode of belief which is more confident, more optimistic, and more conducive to our future.  ‘Belief’ and hence ‘love’ must therefore be consciously ‘chosen’.  Love is, in the human, ultimately a ‘decision’.

Thus, the ability to make decisions in favor of our continued evolution, both as persons continuing our quest for ‘fullness’ and societies continuing their fabrication of the noosphere, we must become more skillful in using our neocortex brains in modulating the instincts of our lower brains.  One way to hone this skill is to adapt the behavior which reflects the presence of the positive manifestations that we have explored thus far.  The lists that Paul and Rogers provide consist of basic practices which can move us in this direction.

An example of such practice can be found in nearly every human relationship.  In our most intimate relationships, found in the lives of committed partners, we profess to ‘love’ each other.   But there are clearly times when the ‘feeling’ of love is absent.  The increasing divorce rate in the West is evidence that this state frequently leads to dissolution of the union.  The recognition that it is possible to continue the relationship is a ‘choice’, one not easy to make but frequently resulting in a deeper relationship.

It is obvious that conflicts are inevitable as two persons pursue their own growth as they are fashioning their relationship.  Faith in one’s unearned capacity to grow and in the ‘grace’ (The flow of energy in human evolution) that comes with this capacity is necessary to cross this bridge while we are building it.  The ‘putting on’ of Jesus that Paul recommends is a straightforward step towards the other side.

In a society which values such appearances of maturity as Paul and Rogers list, their translation into the aspects of human welfare documented by Johan Norval is clear.   If the trends he identified continue, the emergence of a welcoming future becomes certain.  The skills required to continue them, to build a bridge over which we are crossing, are ones in which we must also become proficient.

As we have seen, a welcoming future is not guaranteed.  There are tendrils woven into the complex fabric of the human species that are very capable of resulting in , as Harari predicts, an early demise of Homo Sapiens.  But as Teilhard sees it, while we might be early in the game of making sense of things, the tools for doing so are nonetheless taking shape.  Norberg’s articulation of the shape that they are taking might be an early one, but his articulations are nonetheless examples of what can be seen as we learn to open our eyes to the true immensity of the universe and its path to a future into which we are constantly being welcomed.

The Next Post

This week we took a closer look at how we can posture ourselves to become more open to the energy of evolution as it manifests itself in human life.  While such a practice might saturate most religious teachings, Teilhard shows how they also are intuitive attempts to align life with the flow of evolution that rises through it.  Once again, we are reminded of his poetic observation that

“Those who spread their sails to the winds of life will always be borne on a current towards the open sea.”

   Next week we will take yet another look at this activity to see how Teilhard’s insight can be reflected in individual human life.

   How can seeing life through Teilhard’s ‘lens’ help us to be more open to the forces of evolution which can bring us to ‘fuller being?’

Today’s Post

     Last week we saw how Teilhard’s ‘spiral of evolution’ depicts the process by which the rudimentary elements described by physics reciprocally unite, complexify and re-unite as evolution rises in the universe.

This week we continue our focus on universal evolution to address how it continues in human life.

The Noosphere as the Catalyst to Human Evolution

Teilhard offers a second venue for such reciprocation with his concept of the ‘noosphere’ (July 14, 2022).  In its more common understanding, the noosphere is simply the aggregation of human lore, innovations built up over centuries of human cultural evolution.

But to Teilhard (and to some extent, Richard Dawkins in his concept of accumulated ‘memes’) the noosphere not only exists as a passive ‘bank of ideas’ but as an active agent in human evolution.  Along with the treasure trove of technology that it provides as it increases the individual and collective welfare of our societies, it is the underlying and ever clarifying quantum of guideposts to our behavior.  As Johan Norberg notes, while the innovations and inventions we have seen clearly contribute to our increasing welfare, they are not possible without the cultural insistence on the importance of the human person and the betterment of human relationships.

Thus, the noosphere, as Teilhard sees it, is a key reciprocal agent to our evolution.  As we better understand ourselves and enhance our relationships, we contribute these insights into a collective wisdom that increases our capacity for a clearer understanding that will continue to further our personal as well as our cultural evolution.

Thus, we are back to the ‘chicken-egg’ conundrum proposed by Sacks last week.  Do we act because we evolve, or do we evolve because we act?  Considering the universal convergence that Teilhard sees in the noosphere, the answer is ‘yes’.  The actions of generations of Westerners, demanding more freedom by way of many cycles of ‘charters’ and ‘constitutions’ has contributed cultural ‘DNA’ to an evolutionary process resulting in a society in which increased freedom leads to increased welfare.  While Sacks’ connection between action and neurology might not be strongly suggested here, there seems to be little doubt that the world today (as Norberg documents in posts from Feb 20, 2020 ) is strikingly different from that experienced only a few generations ago.  Actions can lead to consequences which enable further actions.

But the question still remains: how do we keep this recursive cycle going?  How do we assure a future in which the unprecedented progress documented by Norberg will continue?  Put another way, what is required at the unique granularity of the human person to foster the increasing convergence of the aggregate species in such a way that our personal and collective growth to ‘fuller being’ is ensured?

Values and Virtues as ‘Training for the Future’

We saw in the posts beginning April 8, 2021, how Paul masterfully summarizes what Jefferson refers to as “The Morals of Jesus”.  To some extent, Paul addresses Richard Dawkins’ ‘de-baggaging’ of the gospels in his summaries of Jesus’ precepts.  Focusing less on the ‘Stories of Jesus’ found in the gospels, Paul extracts and summarizes the teachings themselves into such lists as the three ‘Theological Virtues’ and the eight examples of the ‘Fruit of the Spirit”.

One of his metaphors is the admonition to “Put on Christ”.  A traditional interpretation is to understand such an action as ‘armoring’ one’s self against unbelievers, but a more direct interpretation is simply to see Jesus as a model for correct behavior.  Of course, the rationale for ‘correct behavior’ as evolved in Western Christianity has traditionally been satisfying God’s criteria for ‘salvation’ as promotion into the next life.  From Teilhard’s insight, however, ‘correct behavior’ involves that which positions us for ‘closer union through fuller being, and fuller being through closer union’, the two essential steps of both human evolution and personal growth.

We saw in the above reference how Paul’s concepts of the ‘Theological Virtues’ and the ‘Fruit of the Spirit’ translate easily into the insights of Teilhard as aspects of human evolution.  We can do likewise as we explore situating ourselves more securely into the ‘tree of evolution’.

We have suggested frequently that a necessary aspect of human evolution is developing the skill of using the neocortex brain to modulate the instinctual stimuli of the ‘lower’ reptilian and limbic brains, and further learning to use the two (left and right) thinking modes of the neocortex harmoniously in dealing with reality.  As we saw last week, Sacks observes how the performance of skills such as writing sharpens our mental ability to think more clearly.  This reflects one of the most common adages in history, ‘Practice makes Perfect”.  Athletes train, scholars and linguists memorize, children are taught to read, pilots train in simulators.  All anticipate an increase in the skills to which they train.
We have seen how Paul’s eight facets of the ‘Fruit of the Spirit’ can be understood as facets of the ‘happiness’ that is possible as we move toward Jesus’ ‘fuller being’.  They can also be seen as both aspects of behavior which reflect an inner maturity and acts of ‘training’ which can lead to the ‘fuller being’ that Jesus suggests is possible for us.  As in all ‘training’, repetition of an action enhances our ability to act.  Thus, when Paul tells us to “Put on Christ”, he suggests that acting out the behavior that he identifies as resulting from ‘an indwelling of the spirit’ will lead to the ‘fullness of being’ in which these facets can be found.

The Next Post

This week we moved from an approach to understanding evolution as it proceeds in the universe to looking at its traces on human existence.  As Teilhard suggests (and echoed by Haught and others) a rising awareness of this phenomenon in our personal lives is not only critical to the quality of life, but also to the continuation of our species.

Next week we will continue this approach to see how Paul’s insights into such aspects of human life are echoed in today’s psychology.

   How does seeing evolution through Teilhard’s ‘lens’ help us to participate in it?

Today’s Post

For the past several weeks we have been exploring the slippery phenomena of human happiness, concluding that a clearer understanding of our fit into our evolutionary process can bring us into ‘fuller being’ and hence greater satisfaction.

This week we will begin a closer look at how such a clearer understanding of this process can help us to do this.

How Did We Get Here?

We have seen how Teilhard and other contemporary thinkers offer insight into the critical process of ‘making sense of things.’  Very few thinkers from the full spectrum of these insights believe that humans are near the end of their process of becoming what it is possible for them to become.  The materialists at one end of the spectrum cite the ongoing mutations of the genomes that are the machinery for our future morphological manifestations.  Those at the other end take note of the incompleteness of our understanding of the universe and our role in it.

At the same time, there seems little agreement between these two poles of thought on what is essential to the continuation of the evolution of our species.  We can paraphrase Carl Rogers’ insight on personal maturity into recognition of the potential of our species to

“… reorganize itself at both the personal and cultural levels in such a manner as to cope with life more constructively, more intelligently, and in a more socialized as well as a more satisfying way”.

   This is deeply resonant with Teilhard’s assertion that we must

“…continually find new ways of arranging (our) elements in the way that is most economical of energy and space” by “a rise in interiority and liberty within a whole made up of reflective particles that are now more harmoniously interrelated.”

   While surely a daunting task, we saw back in August how Johan Norberg, in one of the first attempts to gather data on such a process as these two thinkers propose, offers a relatively unambiguous picture of our potential for evolutionary advancement.  Building the bridge upon which we are travelling is surely risky, but if we understand how to put our history into an objective perspective (as Norberg suggests above), we can’t help but be encouraged in its construction.

Therefore, a recalibrated look at the past helps to see how far we’ve come and to extrapolate to a future which we can see as ‘welcoming’.  We have seen John Haught’s’ insight that such a recalibration helps us to read

“… nature, life, mind and religion as ways in which a whole universe is awakening to the coming of more-being on the horizon.  It accepts both the new scientific narrative of gradual emergence and the sense that something ontologically richer and fuller is coming into the universe in the process.”

   For all that, then, how are we to go about Roger’s ‘reorganization’ and Teilhard’s ‘rearrangements’ to ensure Haught’s realization of a ‘richer and fuller’ future?

Thinking With The Whole Brain

We saw in our look at human history how it can be seen to unfold as humans began to supplement the long legacy of reasoning through ‘right brain intuition’ by introducing the skill of ‘left brain empiricism’.  Jonathan Sacks traces this ‘neurological’ path through the slow reversal from ‘right to left’ writing (primarily written by the left hand) to that of writing in a ‘left to right’ direction (primarily written by the right hand).  He tracks this transformation as seen in the evolution of writing from the Phoenicians in the tenth century BCE to that of the Greeks by the sixth century BCE.   While this might initially be seen as simply a change in custom, Sacks goes further as he correlates this ‘custom’ with the unprecedented rise of empiricism seen in the explosion of Greek thinking with the appearance of Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, and many others whose empirical thoughts laid the ground for the later emergence of science.  He cites the neurological aspect of this evolution by noting that not only did the ‘handedness direction’ change, so did the hand commonly used to do the writing.  Right-to-left writing is done by the left hand, but left-to-right writing is done by the right hand.  Since such ‘handedness’ is controlled by brain hemispheres the shift that Sacks notes indicates a shift in the brain activity which controls the writing.

The period from the emergence of Greek empiricism to the first stirrings of Western Science, (approximately two thousand years, a blink of the evolutionary eye) is evidence of the slowly emerging skill of ‘thinking with both sides of the brain’.  The practice of using of the neocortex brain to modulate the stimuli of the ‘lower’ reptilian and limbic brains predates this relatively new skill, as can be seen in nearly every ‘pre-empirical’ society in their growing awareness that a conscious relationship to both the environment and to our fellow humans is necessary for social stability.  The many expressions of ‘correct’ human relationships can be seen as evolving from the basic axiom of Confucius,

“Do not do to others what you would not like done to yourself”.

   However, the many historic examples of human activity which are orthogonal to this axiom offer evidence of how difficult it is to practice.

The Reciprocal Nature of Evolution

Such difficulty is much in evidence as the ability to address ‘self’ emerges in human culture.  In our rapidly increasing access to ‘news’, afforded by the exponential growth in communication technologies, we are constantly inundated with evidence of the ills of our times.  As we saw in April 2020, there is a tendency towards a ‘moral lassitude’ which presents itself as a diminishing confidence in the future.  To many (as can be seen frequently in history), belief in an ‘end times’ offers the ‘promise’ of a supernatural intervention in which God will finally repair the mistakes of his creation.

Such dystopia is clear evidence of the difficulty of practicing Confucius’ axiom.  What’s the alternative?

We can start by recognizing the reciprocal nature of the evolutionary process in which we are enmeshed.  An example of such a phenomenon can be found in Sacks’ example of the relation of thinking to writing.  In his example above, a ‘chicken-egg’ question arises.  Did the practice of writing change from left-to-right because the skill of using the left brain emerged, or did the left- brain practice emerge because the ‘handedness’ of writing changed?  Either way, we can see a cultural norm and a neurological capability change in concert with each other.  This suggests that the use of a skill supplements its facility, which in turn enhances the use of it.

We can see another example in the common cycle of intuition-to-empiricism activity found in the human pursuit of the concept of ‘energy’.  Newton began this cycle with the intuition of the existence of an agency of motion.  He goes on to articulate this agency as ‘force’, framing it in an equation which equates the mass of an object to its rate change of velocity to determine the force.  This in turn leads to other intuitions of how this force can be ‘employed’, which leads to further application of Newton’s articulation into designs of machinery which supplement human work.  This blossoms into standards of conduct for the human activity which employs these machines.

Each of these steps involves a collaboration between states of ‘imagining’ (right-brained intuition) and processes of ‘implementing’ (left-brained empiricism) in a spiral which leads from less complex results to ones that are more complex.

We can see this reciprocal nature of evolution at work in the very essence of universal evolution.  In the post of June 2, 2022 we outlined Teilhard’s ‘convergent spiral’ in which the union of grains of matter can result in new grains whose enhanced complexity further enhance their capacity for future union.  This reciprocity recurs in the convergent spiral of history, with the ‘coefficient of complexity’ increasing in each cycle and thus increasing the potential for union all the way up to the evolutionary phenomena of the human person.

The Next Post

Putting our evolution into the context offered by Teilhard, Jonathan Sacks, Richard Rohr and John Haught is essential for ‘making sense’ of things in such a way that we can begin to ‘pay attention’ to how evolution emerges in our lives.  This week we took a first look at how evolution can be seen on a ‘macro’ level.  Next week we will narrow the focus to how these forces play out in human life, and, more importantly, how we can posture ourselves to better cooperate with them.