Last Week

Last week we introduced a new edition of the blog, “The Lens of Evolution of Teilhard de Chardin’.

This Week  

This week we will see how Teilhard understood that the most essential aspect of universal evolution can be found in the tendency of matter to become more complex over time.  Understanding how this tendency can be found in all aspects of the universe’s coming to be, including how it manifests itself in human is essential to the ‘sense making’ that Teilhard’s lens can provide.

Teilhard’s Unique Understanding of Evolution

Before we can begin to understand how his ‘lens’ can be used to make sense of everything we see and to address and heal the many ‘dualisms’ that have risen in humankind’s attempt to understand reality, we must first address his comprehensive understanding of ‘evolution’.  In his masterwork, “The Phenomenon of Man”, he emphasizes in very strong terms how he considered evolution as such to be an underlying context for understanding reality.

“Evolution: a theory, a system, a hypothesis? Not at all, but much more than that, a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems, must henceforth bow and satisfy if they are to be thinkable and true. A light illuminating all facts, a curve all lines must follow: such is evolution.”

   His repetition of the term ‘all’ indicates his belief that putting everything that can be seen into the context of evolution will result in a significant clarification of the reality which surrounds us.  Such a context, however, is not one that can be easily found in ‘conventional wisdom’.

To begin with, the term ‘evolution’ itself is not one which on which significant agreement exists.  The most common use seems to be that of biology’s theory of ‘Natural Selection’, first proposed by Charles Darwin and limited to a process of successive reproduction and differentiation on a small planet during the small universal time scale of a few billion years.  Teilhard, recognizing the incompleteness of such an approach, insists that any perspective which purports to address all of reality must address, as Julian Huxley says in his introduction to the “Phenomenon”

“…the material and physical world,… the world of mind and spirit.. the past with the future; and of variety with unity, the many and the one.”

      Thus, if Teilhard’s use of the term ‘evolution’ is to meet his lofty intent it must offer an approach to understanding all phenomena over all stretches of time and all expanses of space.

Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ embraces everything by placing it into a natural context which can be approached in empirical terms, from physical events in the past, to the oft confusing cacophony of current human affairs.  It goes forward to address the bridges to a future that will take us to the ‘fuller being’ that the fourteen billion years of uplift in the universe suggests is possible.

To identify evolution as the underlying principle which explains the appearance of things as quarks, atoms, molecules, cells, neutrons, humans, poems, songs and cultures, it is necessary to first identify a metric which is common to all, and therefore by which all things can be seen in a unified context.   Again, from Teilhard

“Fuller being is closer union: such is the kernel and conclusion of this book.  But let us emphasize the point: union increases only through an increase in consciousness.  And that doubtless is why the history of the living world can be summarized as the elaboration of every more perfect eyes within a cosmos in which there is always something more to be seen”.

   And in that ‘elaboration’, Teilhard suggests, can be found the missing metric.

“There is not one term in this long series (from quarks to persons) but must be regarded, from sound experimental proofs, as being composed of nuclei and electrons.  This fundamental discovery that all bodies owe their origin to arrangements of a single initial corpuscular type is the beacon that lights the history of the universe to our eyes.  In its own way, matter has obeyed from the beginning that great law of biology to which we shall have to recur time and time again, the law of ‘complexification”.

   Hence, recognizing that the universe unfolds in the direction of increased complexity is a necessary first step for understanding how everything fits together.  This “increase in complexity” is therefore one of the first things to be seen as we look through the ‘lens of evolution’.   Seen through his ‘lens’, the phenomenon of evolution is expanded from the narrower context of biological replication on a small planet over a relatively short period of time into a truly universal process by which everything that can be seen comes into being.

Science is in general agreement that biological evolution proceeds by way of ‘Natural Selection’, but Teilhard shows how not only is Natural Selection dependent on a ‘pre-biological’ stage of evolution (producing such things as atoms, molecules and DNA), but leads on to a ‘post biological’ stage in which things such as human relationships, conscious decisions and cultural norms are required for future development.
Such a triad of modes of evolution can also be seen, although rarely, by others.  The evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins addresses these three waves of evolution in his book. “The Selfish Gene”:

“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 the new replicator “conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission”.

   Dawkins acknowledges that genetic evolution is still active in the human, but, as he puts it, is “panting far behind” that of human cultural transmission as humans continue to evolve.  In Teilhard’s insight of ‘complexity’ as the essential ingredient of universal evolution, we can use his ‘lens’ to trace its rise through human history, how it manifests itself today, and to begin to see how it can continue its unfolding into the future.

More importantly, we can begin to trace the tracks of increasing cosmic complexity upon our individual lives if we know how to look.  He provides an example of the focusing of his lens when he says

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

Next Week

This week we took a first step into seeing Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ by understanding that the fundamental metric at work in the evolution of the universe is the ‘phenomenon of increased complexity’.

Next week we will look a little more closely at how this ‘phenomenon’ can be seen as the essential activity active in the universe as it unfolds into the state that can be seen today.

September 25, 2024 – Introduction to the ‘Lens of Evolution’ Of Teilhard de Chardin

   Developing a perspective in which everything can be seen to make sense

This Week

This weekly blog has been in process for several years now.  It has focused on the writings of the Jesuit priest and scientist, Pierre Teilhard De Chardin, and on how they offer a wonderful and highly integrated insight into the universe we inhabit, and more importantly, the part we play in it.  The blog continues to grow as my awareness of the world, as seen through his unique perspective, slowly begins to take shape.

Making Sense of Things

We live in a reality which often does not make sense.  While global human welfare in general can be seen to increase over time, and most of us obviously benefit from it, the future today seems ever more unreliable in comparison to a past which becomes more tolerable as we move further from it.  Today’s currents are felt to be carrying us into a fickle tomorrow in which the successes of yesterday are not guaranteed.

Our ever-increasing technology, while it grants us certain respites from the labors of the past, seemingly undermines this ‘progress’ by exposing the possibility of a future of diminished energy, shortages of necessities and one rife with human conflict.  Even the unprecedented tightening of the web which connects us on so many levels is shot through with a dystopic framing of current events. News of conflicts, pandemics, and shortages all reflect a generally negative view of the human condition.

And, adding to this is the sense of the world closing in on us.  With the ever-increasing human population on a planet of restricted space and limited resources, one scarcely able to bear our weight upon it today, surely there will come a time that the human wave will crest and crash back into a dark void.

The Economist, a well-respected global magazine, reported on this pervasive sense of dread a few years back. They cited the many polls that identify generally comfortable people who nonetheless report that they are unhappy, a phenomenon which is relatively new in human history, breaking a long-sensed bond between ‘comfort’ and ‘happiness’.  This new ‘dualism’ can be seen in the newly emerging group of individuals who are relatively well-off and well-educated: the ‘middle class’.  Evidence of this ‘satisfaction paradox’ can be seen when seemingly comfortable people vote for political parties which would upend a status quo which had previously supported a high level of life satisfaction.

The statistics presented by Johan Norberg in his book, “Progress”, outline how the general improvement in global human welfare very clearly suggests an upward trend towards a positive future.  However, Steven Pinker in his book, “Enlightenment Now”, notes a rising sap of pessimism, particularly strong in the West, that either ignores such data or rejects it outright.

Obviously, such dystopia requires a view of reality that is antithetical to the data which it seems to reflect.  What is needed is a perspective grounded in an objective assessment of existence, in which such phenomena can be put in context.

A casual look at our two major systems of understanding reality, science and religion, quickly surfaces their limitations in such assessment.  Religion’s many tangled threads of supernaturalism, otherworldliness, dogmatism and antiscience compete with its positive insights into human nature for our attention.  Science, on the other hand, with its astounding success in articulating what we see in the universe around us, still fails to offer succor for the threads of fear that persist in our existence.

Both, however, carry threads of insight into both the human condition and the place of the human species in the cosmic scheme of things.  What is needed is an integrated context into which these threads can be knitted.

Such an integrated context can be found in the writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,    Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), a French Jesuit priest, scientist, paleontologist, theologian, and philosopher is most noted today for his insights into religion, spirituality and mysticism, but in this book we will widen the net to explore the application of his thinking to the wider scope of universal evolution and how it is playing out in human affairs today.   In seeking a more comprehensive grasp of reality, and our part in it, we will explore the phenomena of evolution, religion, science, and life in Teilhard’s integrated context.

The Evolutionary Perspective

Humanity’s earliest records address attempts to ‘make sense of things’.  Such ‘sense making’ seems to be required for humans to not only survive in a world rife with danger, but to arrange themselves in increasingly complex arrangements in doing so.  Evidently, belief in an underlying causality of events helps to add the confidence necessary to deal with them.  As the many early writings found in ‘sacred texts’ reveal, attributing both ‘natural’ and human-caused phenomena to supernatural beings was effective in developing the confidence to deal with them.
The sophistication of ‘sense making’ increased with the complexity of society.  The ‘Axial Age’ (some eight hundred years BCE), for example, ushered in a trend towards a ‘person-centered’ causality instead of one centered on the supernatural.  As Karen Armstrong puts it in her book, “The Great Transformation”, during this time civilizations across the globe were beginning to rethink “what it means to be human”.
One of the results of this ‘rethinking’, also charted by Jonathan Sacks in his book, “The Great Partnership” was the rise of ‘empirical’ (as opposed to ‘intuitional’) thinking in ‘making sense of things’.  This of course led to the emergence of science in the great human enterprise.

The resultant conflict between this new mode of thinking and the traditional, well-entrenched institution of religion is well documented, as is the popular belief that while they might co-exist, collaboration is unlikely.

By the late eighteenth century, Science’s increased technology had enabled its inquiry into reality to extend to the entire cosmos.  Not only was ‘reality’ now considered much bigger in size but seemed to have a history of immense time as well.  These two recently discovered aspects added a third observation, that of universal evolution.  The universe, considered static for generations, was now seen as dynamic.
In this same time frame, while most Western theologians were resisting such ‘modernism’, a few were beginning to recognize how such cosmic insights might not be antithetical to the tenets of religion, but actually inform religious beliefs in a way that might stem the tide of secularism that science seem to be fostering.
One of the first was Maurice Blondel (1861-1949) who believed that this new cosmic vision could lead to a reinterpretation of traditional Catholic concepts in a way in which their inherent message could be seen as more relevant to human life.  As an example of such ‘reinterpretation’, in his book, “Man Becoming”, Gregory Baum cites such Blondel insights as

”Every sentence about God can be translated into a declaration about human life”.

   As Baum saw it, Blondel’s recognition of a dynamic universe opened the door to recognizing how such traditional Christian concepts could be mined for their relevancy to human life.  He correctly identified one of the key contributors to the drift of contemporary religion towards increasing irrelevance.

“A message that comes to man wholly from the outside, without an inner relationship to his life, must appear to him as irrelevant, unworthy of attention and unassimilable by the mind.”

   Teilhard de Chardin was no less concerned about the irrelevancy that dogged the traditional ‘extrinsicism’ of Christianity.  Like Blondel, he also recognized the immense potential that the new insights of science could bring to ‘reinterpreting’ traditional Christian teachings into terms more relevant to human life.
Unlike Blondel, Teilhard studied science much more intensely.  While Blondel opened the door to the recognition of how scientific insights could better focus religious concepts, Teilhard took the bold steps of doing so.  He recognized that a common hermeneutic between science and religion was essential to increasing religion’s relevancy.   He also saw how religion’s emphasis on the human person and his relationships could widen the scope of science to include the phenomenon of the human person.

Teilhard recognized that the starting point for such an audacious enterprise was the concept of ‘evolution’.  He envisioned a twofold expansion of this concept:

• science would open its concept of evolution beyond the Darwinist biological limitations to that of a phenomenon underpinning the evolution of the cosmos
• religion would recognize that such an understanding of the evolutionary process by which reality comes to be what it is provides an essential basis for a reinterpretation of its concepts in terms of human existence

Johan Norberg, a contemporary historian, summarizes many statistics to substantiate Teilhard’s general sense of confidence in the future (‘Progress”).  He and Teilhard both recognize, however, a headwind of pessimism that inhibits a general positive view of the direction of evolution in the human species.  This ‘headwind’ is indeed real and impossible to ignore.  It did not appear recently but depends on the existence of a dystopia that has been prevalent in human society since its beginnings and will continue as long as a narrow perspective of human existence persists.

Teilhard proposes a widening of this perspective as an antidote to this headwind.  If, he suggests, we can see ourselves in a context of reality which is evolving in the direction of ‘fuller being’, we will be able to

“..spread our sails in the right way to the winds of the earth and always find ourselves borne by a current towards the open seas.”

   This “spreading of sails” involves the recognition of a reliable causality in each of us that is always at work in our lives to bring us to an ever-fuller degree of ‘being’.  He asserts that such recognition will awaken us to our potential as human persons and provide the stimulus for our personal and collective fullness.  As he put it:

“.. 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 he is not an isolated unit lost in the cosmic solitudes and realizes that a universal will to live converges and is hominized (made human) in him.”

   In saying this, he is stating a belief that when we, individually and collectively, see ourselves as the current manifestation of the same energy that has breathed the universe into existence over the past fourteen billion years, the emerging confidence in this energy within us will enable us to overcome all obstacles to becoming more what it is possible for us to be.  As he puts it in more poetic terms, Blondel’s insight that the universe is ‘on our side’ allows us to perceive ourselves as being held in God’s hands.

“..the one which holds us so firmly that it is merged, in us, with the sources of life, and the other whose embrace is so wide that, at its slightest pressure, all the spheres of the universe respond harmoniously together.”

   To experience oneself as being held in the hands of God can truly count as a significantly ‘decisive moment’.  A person who feels that, as Maurice Blondel put it,

“The ground of being is on our side”

    will experience life quite differently than one who feels adrift in an uncaring, or even hostile, universe.

But the act of experiencing is very dependent upon understanding.  Considering the way that understanding contributes to belief, and hence the importance of such understanding, Teilhard develops a way of seeing that can contribute to this skill of sailing.  This mode of seeing is based on his grasp of all reality as it exists in a flux of a universal ‘becoming’.  It is his ‘lens of evolution’.

Next Week

Having restarted this blog in a new edition, next week we will go on to look at how Teilhard’s unique insights into cosmic evolution can provide a ‘lens’ for seeing how the past leads to a present with such a powerful potential for a future.

 As seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, how can mysticism be seen as a key ingredient of human evolution?

Today’s Post

Last week we looked at mysticism as a skill required to move into the future.

This week we look at the part such a skill plays in human evolution.

The Mystical Role in Human Evolution

We have addressed mysticism as a skill which is required to move us into the future.  As such, it is a key evolutionary skill, without which human evolution would simply be replaced by an endless repetition of replication followed by decay.  (Indeed, as we have seen, many materialists consider this to be exactly what is happening.)

If we can agree that coming to recognize that whatever perception that we have of reality falls short of whatever is ‘real’, one of the challenges of life is pursuing a bridge to close this gap.  Human history is filled with examples of both failing to do so as well as those where success has led on to a clearer understanding of life and our part in it.   There have been many historical attempts to solve the enigma of the ‘one and the many’, manifested in the cacophony of social experiments which attempted to tame human self-centered tendencies while reaping the harvest of human capabilities.  They speak volumes of attempts to develop the skill of building this bridge.

Richard Rohr addresses the role of mysticism in developing this skill.

 “Charles Péguy (1873–1914), French poet and essayist, wrote with great insight that “everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.” 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. Spirituality’s goal is to get people to that deeper level, to the unified field of nondual thinking, where God alone can hold contradictions and paradox.”

   This journey from mysticism to politics frames the path of human evolution.

Teilhard offers another perspective on this path.

“Truth has only to appear once, in a single human being, for it to be impossible for anything ever to prevent it from spreading universally and setting the whole world ablaze”

   Teilhard’s understanding of the slippery term, ‘truth’ is very simple.  As he sees it, it is simply that articulation of reality which is most consistent with the reality that it is addressing.  The narrower the gap between our inner grasp of reality and the reality itself, the more confidence we can have in our understanding of it.

We have referred frequently to the statistics assembled by Johan Norberg in the quantification of our human evolution in terms of human welfare.  As he sees it in his book, “Progress”, this data was summarized in the nine categories of

Food                                                      Sanitation

Life Expectancy                                 Poverty

Violence                                              The Environment

Literacy                                                Freedom

Equality

In his identification of objective historical data which shows how human welfare has exponentially increased in each of these categories, we can see aspects of the mystical basis of our journey to the future in play.

In each of these nine cases, for the specific advances which he documents, an individual or group of individuals must first become aware of some specific phenomenon, wonder as to its causality, try to replicate it, and eventually be able to reliably cause it to happen.  The first two steps are intuitive in nature, then transferring to the empirical state in the last two.  The first two begin with a single person, or with a small ‘psychism’, and as the movement to the second two occurs the ‘reach’ of the idea extends.  As we saw from Péguy above, “everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.”  Paraphrasing this in our terms: “Every idea begins with an intuition about reality which becomes articulated into the standards by which we govern ourselves.”

In the case of a tenth category, that of ‘fuel’, this can be clearly seen.  The phenomenon of ‘fire’ was experienced long before it could be caused.  The ability to control heat, of course, had obvious value to human welfare, and as Teilhard notes, the ‘truth’ of this value spread inexorably among early humans.  The next steps continued the spiral of development between awareness and articulation, as the need for greater thermal efficiency grew along with the need for surviving the inevitable downsides of each new articulation.  The deforestation related to wood burning was replaced by the asphyxiation of coal burning, then by the atmospheric damages from gas:  all resulting in ever more efficient fuel which was offset by new ecological risks.  Each step requiring new insights into our reality followed by new articulations of these insights and new effects on human evolution requiring new insights.

Thus, the ‘mystical skill’ of humans can be seen as the essential aspect of our spiral path to the future as it is followed

–     from our intuitional peering into liminal space

• through our conscious articulation into ‘ideas’
• and finally emerging as the set of social norms encoded into our cultural practices.

This winding path is the social counterpoint to Teilhard’s understanding of cosmic evolution: “fuller being from closer union and closer union from fuller being”.

Next Week

This week we took yet another look at the role played in evolution by the human consciousness mode of ‘mysticism’.

A key theme in this blog has been the seeing of reality, both of ourselves and the environment we inhabit, through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’.  In doing so, we have seen how such a seemingly secular perspective can open traditional Western religious beliefs to a new and deeper bearing on human life, one which is not only more relevant to it but more intimate with the source of life which underlies our being insight.

Next week we will look at the play of mysticism in the weave of music in the fabric of human consciousness.

How does Teilhard’s ‘lens’ show mysticism to be a key to the continuation of human evolution?

Today’s Post

Last week we continued our look into Cynthia Bourgeault’s insights into ‘enstasy’ and saw examples of it in scripture and in the works of Elaine Pagels.  This week we will take a look at how mysticism can be seen in both our ‘personization’ and in the continued flow of human evolution.

The Mystical Role in Personization

We have seen how Teilhard understands the progress of universal evolution as captured in the process of ‘complexification’.  He further sees this process leading to the emergence of ‘personization’ as he sees the ‘reflexive consciousness’ of the human as the point of greatest complexity reached thus far on this planet.  To Teilhard, not only does ‘true union differentiate’, and ‘fuller being result from closer union while closer union results from fuller being’, but that in these recursive dances the continuous rise of complexity takes on the unique mantle of ‘personness’.  What role can mysticism be seen to play in this unfolding?

As we have come to see, Teilhard exemplified the enstatic mode, continuously weaving the profound insights of Christianity into a common cloth with the profound insights of science.  As we saw two weeks ago, Cynthia Bourgeault, who introduced the concept of enstacy to our conversation, showed how Teilhard’s insights into the evolutionary foundation of the human person led to his insights on the uniqueness of the person.  She also noted the potential danger of the other face of the ‘liminal space’.

“Teilhard’s evolutionary vision is profoundly enstatic.  He fought ecstasy all his life- the siren call, as he took it, of the Asian traditions to dissolve into the One, to fund union at the point of undifferentiated simplicity.”

   She notes elsewhere that ecstasy and enstacy are not necessarily opposites but work differently in the human person.  In the traditional treatment of ecstasy, the person is pulled away from Teilhard’s psychism in order to come into contact with what is most real within us.  In the great stories of Christian mysticism, the mystic’s first step is to pull away from the trappings of society.  Some see this happening in the early days of the church as the ‘Desert Mothers and Fathers’ sought to escape the hierarchical church’s need for orthodoxy.  But no matter what the cause, the mystical life was a clear ‘siren call’ from the depths of the soul.

Teilhard’s concept of the psychism, on the other hand, recognizes that we can be called into fuller being as we undergo closer union.  Teilhard, reflected in Bourgeault’s insight, notes that both enstasy and ecstasy require a ‘peering into liminal space’ for the vision that can move us to fuller being, but it is only the translation of the inner sight into fuller articulation that causes this to happen.

It should be noted that the great mystics often return from their ecstatic visions with such articulations.  For example, we saw above Hildegard’s understanding that her visions were instances of a natural human capability of ‘resonance’ with the divine.

When we explore this resonance, we are peering into the liminal space between what we know and what is real, by seeking what is still left to be understood.  To the extent that we understand, we activate our potential not only to understand more fully, but to become fuller ourselves.  Such mysticism is not only an aspect of the potential by which we become more fully what we can be, but by which the evolution of our species becomes more fully resonant with its environment.

Not only are the things we see in liminal space yet to be understood, but they also illuminate the potentiality yet to be actualized.  Thus, when we peer into liminal space, it can be said that we are looking into the future.

As we have explored it here, mysticism is simply a skill which is, as Audre Lorde put it in her poem “The Unsayable’

“…the way we give names to the nameless so it can be thought.”

   Giving the ‘nameless’ a name so that it can be thought is bringing an intuition into the empirical state in which it can be objectively considered.  An insight into the future thus becomes a tangible way of preparing for it.   Seen from the perspective that we have been developing, mysticism can be seen as the building of planks to be installed on the bridge that we are building to the future.

Next Week

This week we began to address mysticism as a skill which is required to move into the future.  It is a key evolutionary skill, without which human evolution would simply be replaced by an endless repetition of replication followed by decay.  (Indeed, as we have seen, many materialists consider this to be exactly what is happening.)

Next week we will take yet another look at human history to see how it shows the slow increase in the ‘skill of mysticism’ at work in the building of our bridge to the future.

   How is enstasy employed in the search for truth?

Today’s Post

Last week we intoduced the concept of ‘enstasy’ proposed by Cynthia Bourgeault to describe the articulate side of mysticism.

This week we will look at how the enstatic mode of human cognition can be seen in the stories of Jesus, the letters of Paul and the writings of Elaine Pagels.

Jesus, Paul, Pagels, and the Enstatic State

We can find examples of the enstatic mode in the gospels, the writings of Paul and in the insights of Elaine Pagels.

While the ‘stories of Jesus’ include many examples of the traditional ecstatic understanding of mysticism, as Jonathan Sacks puts it, Jesus followed the Jewish tradition of telling stories.

“When the Hebrew bible wants to explain something, it does not articulate a theory, it tells a story.”

   The stories that Jesus tells follow this tradition.  They don’t get right to ‘the point’, but rather ask the hearer to consider something that can’t be objectively and empirically addressed, such as love, relationship, and fullness.  The stories are a way of ushering the subject from the objective, or ‘left brain’ mode of thinking into the subjective, or ‘right brained’ mode of understanding.  Jesus’ ‘mode’ of communication was decidedly ‘enstatic’.

Paul goes a little further by introducing three new, enstatic, ways of addressing these subjects.

• First, he ‘taxonomizes’ the insights of Jesus, departing from Jesus’ ‘storytelling’ mode to one which organizes his insights into specific topics. In many cases, Paul’s letters can be seen as the ‘metadata’ of Jesus’s stories:  information that when structured into another format offer a deeper revelation of mystical truth.  Paul does this when he breaks down ‘virtues’ into the categories of faith, hope and love.  He organizes Jesus’ insights into those aspects of human behavior most relevant to personal growth into the eight aspects of the ‘Fruit of the Spirit’.  As we discussed earlier in addressing the lowly ‘spreadsheet’, such a reformatting of information allows it to be seen in a new way, one in which the ‘listing of the data’ can begin to become the basis for the ‘dawning of the insight’.
• Second, he reconciles the many seeming dualities of both Jewish traditions and Jesus’ stories. As Richard Rohr puts it

“Paul plays off seeming contradictions with ideas like flesh and spirit, law and freedom, male and female—holding them both and eliminating neither, until he gets to the reconciling third or the great spacious place called mercy or grace which then results in a “new creation” (Galatians 6:15). But most people try to understand Paul at the level of the initial binaries that he poses, interpreting one as totally good and the other as totally bad”.

• Third, he recognizes that there is more in this ‘liminal’ space than can be captured by our attempts to articulate it when he says

“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known, we see.” (2 Corinthians 3:18)

    It is in this third example that the idea of enstaty becomes most clear.

Elaine Pagels, in her book, “The Gnostic Paul”, finds the idea of ‘gnosticism’ to be one of the human modes of cognition that recognizes the insights to be found in liminal space.  As such, it peers around the wall of dogma that was erected by the early church to shore up its need for orthodoxy that was so valued by the Roman state.  As this mode of belief required no hierarchical structure, it was what provoked the institutional church to forbid its various manifestations of worship.

She sees this statement from Paul as one of many which recognized the importance of the enstatic state to both human growth and its consequences for a successful society.

She goes on to elaborate on ‘Gnosticism’ as she addresses the ‘Gospel of Truth’:

“The Gospel of Truth”, then, is all about relationships- how when we come to know ourselves, simultaneously we come to know God.  Implicit in this relationship is the paradox of gnosis– not intellectual knowledge, but knowledge of the heart.  What first we must come to know is that we cannot fully know God, since that Source far transcends our understanding.  But what we can know is that we’re intimately connected with that Divine Source, since “in him we live and move and have our being.”

      The term ‘gnostic’ was introduced as a pejorative by Irenaeus to warn Christians against heretical teachings, but as Pagels observes,

“The Greek term, often translated as ‘knowledge’, actually means ‘insight’, or understanding, since it refers to ‘knowledge of the heart’”.

Next Week

This week we carried Cynthia Bourgeault’s insights into enstasy to a look at how Jesus’ enstatic mode of expression is reinforced and deepened by Paul, and further refined by Elaine Pagels.   Next week we will see how Teilhard employs this mode of cognitive activity, and how it can be seen to play out in the events of today.

   How can mysticism move beyond the ecstatic experience?

Today’s Post

We have been exploring the traditional practice of mysticism from several different perspectives, seeing it from Teilhard’s perspective as a natural mode of human consciousness.  This week we will look at it as the empirical partner to the intuitional experience of ecstasy

Mysticism and The Duopoly of Things

Teilhard and Rohr continuously help us to better understand both reality and our place in it.  For example, we have seen many times how Teilhard addresses the recursive currents that can be seen to flow in evolution, in which we experience such things as

• Closer union from fuller being and fuller being from closer union.
• Increasing differentiation from closer union and the closer union that results from differentiation
• Becoming more centered as we seek to decenter ourselves
• How our personal growth is necessary to that of the noosphere, which in turn enriches our person
• How intuition leads to the empiricism which can reinforce and enhance the intuitional

All these insights demonstrate the integrated nature of human reality which reveals itself when seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’.  Such ‘dualities’ as those that flow from the traditional treatment of ‘the one and the many’ or ‘the spiritual and the material’ come into reconciliation when we understand them as collaborative energies that work together in human life to effect the ‘fuller being’ that Teilhard explores in them.

The example of understanding human consciousness as manifesting itself in the forms of intuition and empiricism, adds a duopoly of mysticism to these examples.

Cynthia Bourgeault, a modern-day mystic, Episcopal priest, and author, suggests this duopoly in an article in the ‘Teilhard Studies’ journal.  The article is entitled “God is a Person” and focusses on Teilhard’s rationale for understanding the ‘person-ness’ of God as opposed to the impersonal ‘cosmic whole’ suggested by many Eastern religions.

As part of this examination, she references what she calls the ‘enstatic’ mode of consciousness as compared to the ‘ecstatic’ mode which is most commonly associated with the idea of mysticism.  She echoes Teilhard as she considers this mode to be

“.. a uniquely Western and Christian way of understanding what would nowadays be called the highest states of conscious realization”.

   In the ecstatic mode of mysticism, the mystic is said to be ‘carried away’ by the overwhelming sense of the divine in her life.  This intensifying and diaphanous experience is common to both Eastern and Western experiences.  However, Bourgeault sees a trend in contemporary Western thinking about mysticism that is ‘quasi-Buddhist’, and therefore reflects an understanding of the human person which is orthogonal to that of Teilhard.

In this Eastern-influenced trend, the concept of ‘person’ is, as Bourgeault puts it

“.. assigned to a more immature level of human development, definitely NOT carried forward into the higher evolutionary stages.”

    She sees this as part of an Eastern perspective of human evolution in which we are carried from a ‘more personal’ to ‘less personal ’state as we mature, and in which

“.. the personal drops out in favor of an impersonal or at best transpersonal universe.”

    This of course is quite orthogonal to Teilhard’s fundamental assumptions that

• the universe itself evolves to a higher degree of complexity over long periods of time
• this higher degree of complexity manifests itself in increased consciousness
• this increased consciousness evolves into a consciousness aware of itself
• and that this level of ‘reflexive consciousness’ is the basis of ‘the person’

From the ‘quasi-Buddhist’ perspective, all human problems can be traced to an overemphasis of the ‘person’, and therefore can be overcome by a ‘de-personalizing’ process.  From this perspective, the ‘person’ is less a natural product of universal evolution than it is a failure of it.

In our look at the Evolutionary Ground of Happiness, we saw how Harari Yuval agreed with this dystopian take on human evolution.  Certainly, there is a parallel dystopian stream of belief in Christianity that, as Luther put it, humans are

 “.. piles of manure covered by Christ”

   We saw how there is one as well in the evolution of psychology that considers whatever it is that is at the base of human consciousness, it is ‘dangerous’.

With all this, the trend towards the ‘solitude’ of traditional mystics seems justified.  Teilhard’s insight that the most valid venue of human personal development comes in the venue of ‘relationship’ initially seems contrary to such a perspective.

Thus, we can add Bourgeault’s insight of an ‘enstatic’ mode of mysticism to the mix.  Just as the ‘ecstatic’ mode can lead to a deeper experience of the ‘universal spark’ that exists in all of us, the ‘enstatic’ mode can lead to, as Teilhard put it, a “clearer understanding of God in the world”.  Not only is the ‘universal spark’ to be more deeply experienced, it is more completely understood as a principle at work in both our lives and in the intensification of complexity that we experience as a species.

Next Week

This week we expanded the recognition of mysticism from the traditional religious experience of ecstasy to that of the ‘whole brained’ experience of enstasy.

Next week we will explore how this more comprehensive mode of human experience is necessary to our growth toward ‘fuller being’ as person even as it contributes to the continued activation of our potential as a species.

   How does Teilhard’s ‘lens’ help to see the resonance between mysticism and reality?

Today’s Post

Last week we saw mysticism as a building of the bridge to the future while we are walking on it.

This week we will take a look at yet another aspect of mysticism, that of ‘resonance”.

Resonance and Mysticism

nother approach to recognizing the play of mysticism in life is to recognize that mysticism is a natural manifestation of it.  Richard Rohr looks to the ancient mystics for clues of how they understood the experience of mysticism.  In the cases of Theresa of Avila and Hildegard of Bingen, he saw them as recognizing that

“The human person is a microcosm with a natural affinity for or resonance with its macrocosm, which many call God. Our little world reflects the big world. The key word here is resonance.”

   Rohr sees such resonance as that state of consciousness which

 “…allows your mind to resonate with what is visible and right in front of you. … it erases the separateness between the seer and the seen.”

   As with most of the facets of human consciousness that we have addressed, while Hildegard and Theresa’s mystical experiences were highly formed by their religious beliefs, the underlying experience itself is seen here as a basic mode of human consciousness.  As we have explored it, it is simply a skill which is, as Audre Lorde put it in her poem “The Unsayable’

“…the way we give names to the nameless so it can be thought.”

   From her insight, it is the transferal from the ‘felt’ to the ‘thought of’, or from our subjective intuition to our objective articulation.

Seen thusly, it can be seen as the insight which underlays every religious attempt to ‘articulate the noosphere’ (as Teilhard puts it).  And as we have addressed it here, it is the peering into the ‘not-yet-understood’ facet of reality with which we must deal while we attempt to understand it.

However, just because we cannot nail it down, Teilhard and all the mystics treat the ‘unarticulated’ as worthy of being ‘trusted’.  In Teilhard’s rendition of his own ‘descent into himself’, his search for the source of his life that we saw in our look at Teilhard’s seven steps of meditation, he ends with the insight that at the bottom of everything lies a principle that can be ‘trusted’.

   “Our mind is disturbed when we try to plumb the depth of the world beneath us.  But it reels still more when we try to number the favorable chances which must coincide at every moment if the least of living things is to survive and succeed in its enterprises.

   After the consciousness of being something other and something greater than myself- a second thing made me dizzy: Namely the supreme improbability, the tremendous unlikely-hood of finding myself existing in the heart of a world that has survived and succeeded in being a world.

  At that moment, I felt the distress characteristic to a particle adrift in the universe, the distress which makes human wills founder daily under the crushing number of living things and of stars.  And if something saved me, it was hearing the voice of the Gospel, guaranteed by divine success, speaking to me from the depth of the night:

                         It is I, be not afraid.”

Teilhard addresses this idea of the human facility of resonance with reality when he sees the reasoning process as consisting of both intuition and empiricism

“Intuition bursting upon a pile of facts”

   He goes a little further when he suggests that there is something in human consciousness that provides a subjective reaction as we approach a more complete understanding of the real.  The ‘aha’ moment is always accompanied by an ‘aha’ feeling.  Such a nonconscious physiological reaction to reality is experienced by all of us every day.  We say that we are ‘moved’ by a melody or a work of art, but exactly what happens among the neurotransmitters that connect our sensory organs, brain, and body when this happens?  Such terms as ‘heartfelt’ are commonly used to address them, suggesting to some that the heart is, like the eyes and ears, a sensory organ itself. Do not we feel such physiological effects in our chest area?  Such physiological responses can be felt throughout our whole body as our hairs can ‘stand on end’, our ‘skin can crawl’, we can become lightheaded, we ‘tingle all over’.

Science can and does study such reactions, but a complete understanding of how such nonconscious physiological reactions result from a ‘mere’ conscious perception continues to elude us.

Such reactions are common, and they all suggest our capability to resonate with our macrocosm.

Thus, in its most basic form, mysticism is simply a name for this fundamental human capability.  How we make sense of these basic human reactions to external stimuli, however, is highly informed by what we believe about the stimuli itself.  Religious mystics will interpret these reactions in terms of what they believe to be true about reality, to the point where extreme physical reactions can occur, such as in the case of those with stigmata.

But, as Teilhard, Merton, Bourgeault and Rohr demonstrate, the thrill of the ‘aha’ sensation can also appear as a light for our exploration of reality in a way that clarifies our part in it.

Next Week

This week we addressed mysticism from the vantage point of ‘resonance’.

Next week we will move on to seeing it in the context of the many ‘duopolies’ which make up the multiple facets of human life.

   How can we become adept at seeing daily life through the ‘lens of mysticism’?

Today’s Post

Last week we looked at how the basic human exercises of ‘listening and seeing’ underlie seeing things mystically.  This week, we will carry this a little further, exploring how these basic skills can be better honed to allow us to become more deeply resonant to the insights that lie in the ‘liminal space’ of mysticism.

The ‘Interpretive Key’ to Secular Mysticism

Cynthia Bourgeault, in an article published in “Teilhard Studies”, uses the term ‘interpretive key’ to describe seeing reality through a mystical lens.  While her article focused on a much wider and deeper aspect of Teilhard’s vision (one which we will explore in a later post), it suggests that to a large degree, our reaction to reality is colored by how we interpret it.  As we have been discussing in this series, the true mysticism is that which leads us into an understanding of reality that is more resonant with it.  This suggests that such an improved understanding would benefit from a better lens of observing it.

As we undertake our daily life, we peer into an uncertain future, acting to effect outcomes which we hope will move us ahead, and all our actions depend on how well we understand the situations with which we grapple.  A significant and constant stimulus which we must process is the information in which we are inundated.  The multifaceted media which surrounds us requires a constant energy on our part to process and try to understand.

We spend a considerable part of our lives learning to do this, and to develop skills of doing so by which we can achieve some degree of becoming more whole.   As Teilhard suggests, we try to “trim our sails to the winds of life” so that we can be “borne by a current toward the open sea”.

A key skill that is necessary for ‘trimming our sails’ is finding a means of interpreting the flood of information that besets us every day.  Having a well-developed way of reading every news article, listening to every news broadcast, and sorting candidate political positions, is critical for putting such information into its proper context.  Not unlike the simple tool of arranging data into spreadsheets and plots, the right ‘interpretive key’ permits a more comprehensive picture of any subject to come into focus.

We have used the example of Johan Norberg’s insights into recent global history to illustrate how the immense data amassed over the previous hundred fifty years can lead to the startling insight that something is happening in the human phenomenon that lifts our species to a fuller quality of life.  As he points out, this trend in human history was neither planned, expected nor explicitly managed, but required the belief among many people that it could be done.
The ‘interpretive key’ that this suggests is simply reading each piece of news, each new opinion, each assertion, each political promise, for evidence of the ‘current’ that Teilhard suggests and that Norberg articulates as he plumbs the underlying current flowing beneath the turbulence of global data.

Teilhard, of course, goes much further.  He would doubtlessly agree with Norberg that the data shows the positive flow of human evolution, since he understands that such human data is to be expected in a universe in which “everything which rises will converge”, and “fuller being comes from closer union which comes from fuller being”.  The findings of Norberg are not exemptions to Teilhard’s forecast of continuing human complexification, they are examples of it.

The problem, of course, is that, immersed as we are in the turbulent waves of existence, the underlying currents elude us.

Richard Rohr reflects on the thoughts of Charles Péguy (1873–1914), French poet and essayist on this subject

“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.  Spirituality’s goal is to get people to that deeper level, to the unified field or nondual thinking, where God alone can hold contradictions and paradox.”

   Thus, a key skill in distinguishing the superficial waves from the essential current is ‘putting things together’ that are seen to be disjointed. Teilhard proposed a very straightforward ‘interpretive skill” to putting things into a such a perspective, in his example of the cell.

“…the cell, like everything else in the world, cannot be understood (ie incorporated in a coherent system of the universe) unless we situate it on an evolutionary line between a past and a future”

      One such ‘interpretive key’ which is emerging in our culture is ‘recognition of the footprint.”  To make sense of any concept, we must put it into its larger timeline.  The ‘footprint’ begins to emerge when the precedents and probable outcomes of a phenomena begin to be seen.

When we addressed Norberg’s well-documented insights into global trends, we noted in the ‘history of fuel’, how the ‘footprint of fuel’ grew as the secondary costs of providing fuel began to be more completely understood even as the process of providing it became more complex.  As a result, it has become common today to question the real consequences of decisions about fuel.

For years, the recognition that fossil fuels were nonrenewable has precipitated the search for new sources.  Today, as concepts such as ‘electric-powered vehicles’ are seen as more sustainable, questions begin to surface about the ‘footprint’ of fabrication and storage of electric power.  While the impact of emissions from operation of battery-operated vehicles will be reduced, what is the environmental impact of the many steps of producing batteries?  What is the impact on the environment as batteries are depleted and must be disposed of?

Each round of innovation and invention that occurs as we continue to increase our need for energy incurs wider and wider ripples of impact on the already complex milieu in which we live.  An ever-widening net of insight is always needed to be able to keep up with this trend.

Next Week

This week we addressed how a truly integrated sense of mysticism is needed if we are going to continue to build our bridge to the future while we are walking on it.

Next week we will take a look at the different ways that such a mysticism can be seen as active in an integrated human life.

How can we learn to use Teilhard’s ‘lens’ to see mundane life ‘mystically’

Today’s Post

Last week we addressed looking at life through a ‘lens’ of secular mysticism.  This week we will move on to seeing how the skills of ‘listening’ and ‘seeing’ can play out in human life

The Skills of Listening and Seeing

Teilhard suggests a simple and secular approach to developing such a skill.   To him, understanding the resonance between what is there and what we understand about what is there requires such a skill.  His ‘lens’ of such understanding was simply the context of evolution.  He starts with the assertion than to understand anything begins with the insight into where it comes from.  As he puts it, addressing the phenomena of the ‘cell’

“…the cell, like everything else in the world, cannot be understood (ie incorporated in a coherent system of the universe) unless we situate it on an evolutionary line between a past and a future”

   Applying it to our exploration of ‘the footprint’, a good start to understanding something is to see it in the context of ‘past to future’.

Take the humble ‘spreadsheet’ for example.  A spreadsheet is nothing more than a two-dimensional list with one set of categories listed in ‘rows’ and another set listed in ‘columns’.  In a spreadsheet about ‘exercise’, for example, the rows could list ‘days of the week’, and the column ‘miles walked’.  The ‘metadata’ extracted from such a spreadsheet could include ‘trends’, and the trends would become more highly articulated as the spreadsheet grows over time.
More metadata would emerge if a new column, ‘weight’, was added, and a new insight into one’s health would slowly emerge.  As a result, any decisions about changes to the exercise plan would be better grounded.  This exercise of extraction of insight from observation is one small example of the ‘peering into the space between what is there from what we think is there’.

One of the more powerful tools that can be used to analyze ‘data’ to form ‘insights’, are plots.  Reformatting the rows and columns of spreadsheets into a graphic representation, with ‘rows’ on one axis and ‘columns’ on the other, offers a more comprehensive insight into the data, showing such things as peaks, valleys, frequencies, and trends in a more intuitive way.  It is not that the basic data is meaningless, but that the organization of the data, first into rows and columns, then into plots, allows us to grasp the underlying data more meaningfully.  With these two new modes of presentation, we engage the data at different levels, affording deeper insights.  With the plots, for example, we ‘see’ things like peaks and valleys as visual constructs, not just data to be integrated in our minds.  This approach becomes more powerful as the data becomes more complex.  In our example, correlations between weight and exercise durations can be more clearly seen, and optimum durations and frequencies can be explored.
But is this mysticism?  How can such activity possibly be in the same category as, say, that of St. Rosalie, engulfed in ecstatic swoon as depicted in Anthony van Dyck’s painting?  How can relatively mundane data analysis lead to the profound emotional experiences of a St. Rosalie or a St. Therese of Avila?

A partial answer lies in the combination of depth and width that we discussed last week.

We saw in our examples of evolution in human life how the use of such ‘mundane’ techniques can be employed in addressing one of the most significant phenomena of the human species: human evolution.  In this example, we saw how Johan Norberg amasses a stunning ‘pile of facts’ into a format that allows such a ‘burst of intuition’ which clearly shows not only that we are evolving but how it can be objectively seen that we are doing it.

As far as comparing what was seen by Norberg to the ecstatic visions of Rosalie and Therese, imagine their reaction had either been able to see a future in which the miseries of the poor everywhere would have been so significantly alleviated, or the pains of the hungry abated, or the risks of childbearing so wonderfully reduced.  If their souls could have been so ecstatically moved by experiences of the nearness of the divine, such tangible evidence of work of the divine in human life would have added an even deeper dimension.
And could not an argument be advanced that, even if Norberg’s insights were truly mystical, they did not reflect the intimacy with God that is common to all mystics.  If we look at Norberg’s phenomenal results in his light of human progress, how could it be denied that whether or not we are aware of it, we are, as Teilhard puts it, “carried by a current to the open sea”.   Teilhard takes this insight one step further when he asserts that this current can be seen as the two ‘hands of God’.

“- the one which holds us so firmly that it is merged, in us, with the sources of life, and the other whose embrace is so wide that, at its slightest pressure, all the spheres of the universe respond harmoniously together.”

   Thus, whether or not we recognize it as such, we are being made even as we make ourselves.  The true miracle is not that it is happening, but that we are so unready to acknowledge it.  Perhaps an ecstatic state of upturned eyes isn’t called for, but ‘eyes fully opened’ to the miracle that is gifted to us by the process of universal evolution certainly seems appropriate.

Next Week

This week we began to carry our look into mysticism into how it can be seen in the natural current of human life.

Next week we see how such natural manifestations of mysticism can be seen in the same context as that experienced by the great Western mystics in history.