How does Teilhard use his ‘lens’ to open the door to connecting to God?

Today’s Post

Last week we saw how the recognition of the ‘core of person’, and the realization that such a core is also a manifestation of Karen Armstrong’s ‘immortal spark’, is that which connects us to the universal agency which ‘sustains and gives life to the entire cosmos’.  While this recognition may well bring us closer to a clearer understanding of God, it still does not address how a relationship with such a God is possible.

This week we’ll apply Teilhard’s ‘lens’ to the opening of that door.

Teilhard’s Seven Steps of Meditation

All religions include rituals that are intended to put us in touch with the ultimate ground of being, be it the Eastern Brahman or the Western God.  One practice common to most of them is ‘meditation’, the goal of which is both increased awareness of ourselves and of this ultimate life force which lies at our core.

Of course, while each expression may have the same goal of finding both our ‘true’ selves and this ‘core’, each brings its unique presuppositions to the practice.  As a result, the word ‘meditation’ often brings with it a presumption of some religious dogma or hermeneutic, hence introducing this concept here might be seen as distinctively contrary to the ‘secular’ approach employed in Teilhard’s ‘lens’.  As we shall see, however, echoing Richard Dawkins, “the divesting of all the baggage that the word ‘God’ carries” works equally well as a method for experiencing God as it did for his definition.

We’ll start with an example of Teilhard’s use of his ‘lens of evolution’, which closely follows Maurice Blondel in understanding God as the ‘immanent ground of being’.  Teilhard described this experience of meditation in his book, “The Divine Milieu”. This description is independent (“divested of the baggage”) of most traditional religious assumptions and demonstrates a framework for a ‘personal contact’ with God as we are exploring.

Step 1: Recognizing the Facets of our Person

  “And so, for the first time in my life, perhaps, I took the lamp and, leaving the zones of everyday occupations and relationships, where my identity, my perception of myself is so dependent on my profession, my roles- where everything seems clear, I went down into my inmost self, to the deep abyss whence I feel dimly that my power of action emanates.”

   Here Teilhard begins with an exploration of the ‘scaffolding’ of his person: those influences which affect the development of personality: beliefs, faiths, and fears.  How much of who we are and what we believe have we consciously accepted, as opposed to those facades which we have erected as a protective skin to ward off the dangers of life?

Step 2: Moving past the Safety of the Scaffolding

   “But as I descended further and further from that level of conventional certainties by which social life is so superficially illuminated, I became aware that I was losing contact with myself.  At each step of the descent, with the removal of layers of my identity defined from without, a new person was disclosed within me of whose name I was no longer sure, and who no longer obeyed me. “

  How can we begin to objectively see ourselves, steeped in our facades and scaffolding as we are?  What happens when we begin to recognize these facades and scaffoldings, and try to imagine the consequence of divesting ourselves of them?  How can we ultimately trust that what lies beneath is indeed ‘trustworthy’?  Upon what can we place our faith in our capacity for the ‘dangerous actions’ that we must undertake each day?

Step 3: Encountering the Font of Our Consciousness

   “And when I had to stop my descent because the path faded from beneath my steps, I found a bottomless abyss at my feet, and from it flowed, arising I know not from where, the current which I dare to call my life.”

   Where does our life come from?  Every day we are barraged by stimuli from our instinctual brains, fears, elations, and ideas that arrive unbidden from what we refer to as our ‘unconscious’.   One philosopher refers to our life as “what happens while we were making other plans”.  How does that happen?

Step 4: Facing the Intangibility of the Font

   “What science will ever be able to reveal to man the origin, nature, and character of that conscious power to will and to love which constitutes his life?  It is certainly not our effort, nor the effort of anyone around us, which set that current in motion.  And it is certainly not our anxious care, nor that of any friend of ours, which prevents its ebb or controls its turbulence.    We can, of course, trace back through generations some of the antecedents of the torrent which bears us along; and we can, by means of certain moral and physical disciplines and stimulations, regularize or enlarge the aperture through which the torrent is released into us.”

   While we might well recognize that there is a font from which flows the stuff from which we are made, it cannot be empirically articulated.  Whatever the source, it is beyond our grasp.

Step 5: Accepting Our Powerlessness Over The Source of Our Life

   “But neither that geography nor those artifices help us in theory or in practice to harness the sources of life.  My self is given to me far more than it is formed by me.  Man, scripture says, cannot add a cubit to his nature.  Still less can he add a unit to the potential of his love, or accelerate by another unit the fundamental rhythm which regulates the ripening of his mind and heart.  In the last resort, the profound life, the fontal life, the new-born life, escapes our life entirely.”

   In addition to our inability to rationally and empirically articulate this flow of life into us, we are also unable to control it.  Our only choice is to accept it and come to enough appreciation of it that we are able to cooperate with it.

Step 6: Recognizing our Entwinement in the Fabric of Existence

  “Stirred by my discovery, I then wanted to return to the light of day and forget the disturbing enigma in the comfortable surroundings of familiar things, to begin living again at the surface without imprudently plumbing the depths of the abyss.  But then, beneath this very spectacle of the turmoil of life, there re-appeared before my newly-opened eyes, the unknown that I wanted to escape.  This time it was not hiding at the bottom of an abyss; it disguised itself, its presence, in the innumerable strands which form the web of chance, the very stuff of which the universe and my own small individuality are woven.  Yet it was the same mystery without a doubt: I recognized it.”

   Teilhard recognizes not only the source of life within us, but how this source is also interwoven into the ‘innumerable strands which form “…the very stuff of which the universe and my own small individuality are woven.”

Step 7: Recognizing the Face of the Ground of Being

   “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.”

How do I dare believe that whatever is at the source of my being, indeed of all being, it is nonetheless (As Blondel puts it) ‘on my side’?  How is it possible to see this ‘fontal’ life which pours into me at each moment as an individual instantiation of the general forces which have brought (and are still bringing) the universe into fuller being?  How do I dare trust that these forces, welling up over billions of years, will continue to well up in me.?   How can I begin to recognize, trust and more importantly cooperate with this inner source of energy so that I can be carried onto a more complete possession of myself?

In this short but very personal and straightforward description of the journey into himself, Teilhard offers an outline of meditation that is ‘secular’ but addresses the full gamut of a quest for the ‘ground of being’ that is within us that we call God.

Secular Meditation

There is nothing religious about these seven steps.  The assumptions about the nature of the universe that science and biology assert, once the phenomenon of increasing complexity is added, are all that is necessary to state them.  As Teilhard suggests, the addition of this phenomenon, while not yet a specific scientific theory, is not only necessary for inclusion of the human person into the scope of scientific enquiry, it is also necessary for the process of universal evolution itself.

A universe without increasing complexity would not evolve.

There is a similarity between these seven steps and the very successful “Ten Steps” of Alcoholics Anonymous.  The foundational step of exploring and learning to trust oneself is at the basis of much of Western thinking.  Psychology, as we will see in the next few weeks, can therefore be seen as ‘secular meditation’.

The Next Post

This week we explored Teilhard’s approach to meditation as a skill through which we can make contact with our ‘core of being’, and through this with God.  We saw his meditation exercise in the practical and secular seven steps he took in his search for the ‘cosmic spark’ which enlivens all things.

Next week we will move on to see how psychology can be seen as a form of “secular meditation”.

   How do we use Teilhard’s ‘lens’ to search for God in our lives?

 Today’s Post

Lst week we moved from a working definition of God to seeing how this God is manifest in the roots of our personal development, Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ shows clearly how these roots are extensions of the same upwelling of complexity that underpins cosmic evolution.  While awareness of this agency in our lives is a first step toward connecting to it, how is the second step, that of connecting to it, possible?

This week we will move on to explore how the concept of a ‘personal relationship with God’ emerges naturally from this use of Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’.

The History of ‘Looking For God’

Thus far, we have come to a ‘concept of God’ without recourse to scripture, dogma, or miracles.  While this may well be consistent with Professor Dawkins’ recognition that such a natural force is indeed at work in the ”raising of the world as we know it into its present complex existence”, it does not address what’s involved in a personal relationship with such a force.

We can start with Teilhard’s assertion from last week that

  “It is through that which is most incommunicably personal in us that we make contact with the universal. “

   If Teilhard’s assertion is correct, it seems clear that the very act of being a person is the starting point for experiencing such a God.  If the God that we have defined is indeed the essential center of our existence, and this essential center lies along the axis of the unfolding of the universe, it would seem that finding such a transcendent source of ourselves would be very straightforward.  The myriad, oft- confusing and frequently contradictory methods offered by the many world religions are evidence that this isn’t necessarily the case.

A case in point can be seen in the many instances of ‘dualism’ which can be found in our own Western expressions of Christianity.  As Jonathan Sacks sees it:

“Much more so than Judaism, Christianity divides: body/soul, physical/spiritual, heaven/earth, this life/next life, evil/good, with the emphasis on the second of each.”

   He sees the entire set of contrasts as massively Greek, with much debt to Plato.  Further, these ‘either/or’ dichotomies can be seen as a departure from the typically Jewish perspective of “both/and.”

As Sacks points out, this duality tends to move God from the intimacy found in Judaism (and in the teachings of Jesus) to a distance that can only be overcome through the bewildering matrix of rituals of atonement, forgiveness and salvation which have come to characterize expressions of Christianity.  This point of view, captured in Blondel’s fear that as we regard our relationship with God from the standpoint of ‘we are here and God is there’, our search for God is sabotaged at the very outset.

Not that Christianity only expresses such distance.  If one takes John at his word,

 “God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him”

   Then Blondel’s statement that

 “It is impossible to say, “I am here, and God is there”

   makes much more sense.  It acknowledges that the act of God’s creative energy in me is necessary for me to make such a statement.

Blondel, Teilhard, Sacks and the contemporary theologian Richard Rohr all decry how this message of John, a logical conclusion from the teachings of Jesus and the theology of Paul, is frequently lost in the subsequent evolution of the Greek-influenced Church.  Thomas Jefferson, an early practitioner of Dawkins’ goal of “stripping the baggage” from traditional Christianity, sought to extract the essential morality of Jesus from the webs of duality which grew as Christianity was increasingly influenced by Greek philosophy.

This duality undermines the search for God within.  If we start with the assumption that “We are here and God is there”, the search is, as Blondel asserts, hobbled at the start.

All such searches begin with the facades and scaffolding that we inherit from our beginnings, which become frameworks which make it safe for us to act in a world saturated with unknown and potentially dangerous consequences of those actions.  They may keep us safe in such a world, but like all walls, they can keep us enclosed at the same time.   To discover our inner reality requires awareness of, negotiation with, and selective filtering of these artifacts.

This requires an open mind, and as universally acknowledged, a mind is a difficult thing to open.

This is not a new problem.  The subject of searching for our inner core has been the subject of religious thought for many centuries.  While the approaches found in the many religious expressions might be bewildering and often contradictory, there are nonetheless many common aspects.

The Next Post

This week we focused Teilhard’s ‘lens’ on the history of ‘looking for God’, and how the focus of the Christian church slowly shifted from the intimacy expressed in Jewish tradition to the Greek-influenced ‘over against’ decried by Blondel.

But this does not answer the second part of our question: what’s involved in a ‘relationship’ with such a God?   Having seen how we are connected to God by participating in this cosmic upwelling of complexity, next week we will continue to address how such a relationship can be achieved.

   How is it possible to relate to a ‘ground of personness’?

Today’s Post

Last week we addressed the phenomenon of ‘personization’ in evolution, recognizing Teilhard’s insight that evolution of the person is a natural manifestation of the increase in complexity that can be seen in, and indeed is necessary to, the evolutionary unfolding of the universe.

In doing so, we extended our working definition of God

“God is the sum total of all the forces by which the universe unfolds in such a way that all the entities that emerge in its evolution (from quarks to the human person) each have the potential to become more complex when unified with other entities.”

   with the missing piece by which the personal nature of these forces become clear:

“In the recognition of the comprehensive forces by which the universe unfolds, the one which causes evolutionary products to unite in such a way that they become more complex, conscious and eventually conscious of their consciousness (eg, the person) can only be understood as personal.”

   But we recognized that this definition does not answer the question, “how can we relate to this additional facet of the forces of evolution?”  This week we will take a first step in answering this question.

Personization and God

Although we began our inquiry on God with a statement from Richard Dawkins several weeks ago, he doesn’t go too much further before he states the basis of his belief that while such a god as he proposes might be reconcilable to the unfolding insights of science, the God that we posit here cannot possibly be reconciled with traditional religion.  He quotes Carl Sagan:

 “If by God one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God.  This God is emotionally unsatisfying…it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.”

   Of course, Sagan is right.  Once we limit the laws governing evolution to those found in the Standard Model of Physics and Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection, both Sagan and Dawkins are spot on.

However, neither of them acknowledges that limiting evolution to those influences found in Physics and Biology prohibits the very phenomenon of evolution itself.  It is only through inclusion of the agent of increasing complexity that the forces identified by Physics and Biology begin to account for the observed phenomenon of increasing complexity in evolution.  As we have pointed out previously, a universe without complexification would not evolve, it would remain static and featureless forever.

However, Dawkins is correct in one respect: the definition we are considering, and the six characteristics of God that his definition suggests, do not yet point to a God suitable for our personal relationship.  It is indeed ‘emotionally unsatisfying’.  To find this missing piece we must return to the characteristic of ‘personness’.

From the point of view that we have presented thus far, God is not understood as ‘a person’, but as the ‘ground of person-ness’.  Just as the forces of gravity and biology in the theories of Physics and Biology address the principles of matter, energy and life, the additional force of ‘increasing complexity’ is required to address the essential energy which powers evolution to higher levels of complexity and thus leads to the appearance of the person.

Teilhard offers an insight on this issue

“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 (becomes human) in him.”

   So, from Teilhard’s vantage point, the starting place for a personal approach to God, a ‘relationship’, is the recognition that this ‘axis of evolution’ which has contained the agent of ‘complexification’ for some 14 billion years is not only still active in the human but is the same axis that accounts for our individual ‘personization’.  Humans are not only products of evolution who have become ‘aware of their consciousness’, but specific products, persons, who are capable of not only recognizing but more importantly cooperating with this inner font of energy that can carry them into a more complete possession of themselves.

This unique human capability of being aware of the energy of the unfolding of the cosmos as it flows through our person, empowering our growth and assuring our potential for completeness, is neither earned nor deserved.  It has the same ‘gratuitous’ nature as gravity and electromagnetism: it is woven into the fabric of our being.  We can neither summon nor deny it.  Our only appropriate response to it is to recognize it and explore the appropriate response to it.

Teilhard commented on both our cosmic connection and our cooperation with it:

  “It is through that which is most incommunicably personal in us that we make contact with the universal. “

“Those who spread their sails in the right way to the winds of the earth will always find themselves borne by a current towards the open seas.”

So, For All This Is God A Person?

We have seen how Teilhard understands the concept of ‘person’ from both the concept of God as evident in the agency of complexity and the concept of the human person as an evolutionary product.

But to answer the question, “Is God a person?”, we return to Maurice Blondel.   As part of his objective to reinterpret Western theology, he posits that:

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

   Resonating with Teilhard, Gregory Baum paraphrases Blondel:

“The statement that “God Exists” can therefore be reinterpreted to say that “Man is alive by a principle that transcends him, over which he has no power, which summons him to surpass himself and frees him to be creative.  That God is person means that man’s relationship to the deepest dimension of his life is personal”.

   So, in answer to the question, Baum goes on to state Blondel’s assertion that

“God is not a super-person, not even three super-persons; he is in no way a being, however supreme, of which man can aspire to have a spectator knowledge.  That God is person reveals that man is related to the deepest dimension of his life in a personal and never-to-be reified way.”

   That said, if we are to undertake a relationship with this dimension of life, how can we go about discovering this universal presence in our finite and individual lives?

The Next Post

This week we have seen how our working definition of God, while totally consistent with that of Dawkins, is still open to the concept of God found in traditional Western theology once it has been (as Dawkins suggests) “stripped of its baggage”.  We have also seen how the element of ‘person’ is not compromised by our working definition once the potential for increasing complexity is understood as the process of personness.

But this does not answer the second part of our question: what’s involved in a ‘relationship’ with such a God?   Having seen how we are connected to God by participating in this cosmic upwelling of complexity, next week we will address how such a relationship can be achieved.

    How Can God Be Considered as ‘Personal’?

 Today’s Post

Last week we saw how Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ captures the human as

“.. the flame of a general fermentation of the universe which breaks out suddenly on the earth.”

This week we will refocus his ‘lens’ on how the result of this ‘outbreak’ can help to recognize the ‘personness’ of God.

 ‘Personization’ In The Human

Looking through Teilhard’s lens, we can see that the human person emerges from evolution not in a single discontinuous step, but instead from a slow accretion of characteristics layered one upon another over a long period of time.  Cells evolve from single-cell to multiple-cell entities, adding sensory and mobility characteristics and uniting through increasingly complex centers of activity via increasingly complex neural circuits.  There is not a single entity in this long line of development that does not proceed from a less-complex precursor.

There are two seeming discontinuities in this process.  The first is seen in the appearance of the cell itself.  At one instance in the evolution of our world, it is swimming in a primordial soup of very complex molecules.  At the next, many of these molecules are functional parts of an enclosed and centered entity, the cell.  As Teilhard notes:

“For the world to advance in duration is to progress in psychical concentration.  The continuity of evolution is expressed in a movement of this kind.  But in the course of this same continuity, discontinuities can and indeed must occur.  For no psychical entity can, to our knowledge, grow indefinitely; always at a given moment it meets one of those critical points at which it changes state.”

The advent of the cell is such a ‘change of state’ in which increasing complexity results in something totally different from its predecessor, but still composed of the same basic elements.

The ‘person’ is the second example of such ‘change of state’.  Materialists argue that the differences between humans and their non-human ancestors are too small to be of significance, denying any uniqueness to the human person.  This is true at the levels of morphology and supported by the evidence of DNA. It is just as true that human persons, through their unique ‘awareness of their consciousness’, are clearly separate from the higher mammals.  They represent the outcome from the same significant type of ‘change of state’ as seen in the advent of the cell.

Therefore, while human persons are clearly a ‘product of evolution’, their level of complexity has increased from ‘consciousness’ to ‘awareness of consciousness’.  It is in this new level of being that we find ‘the person’.  And in finding it, we can now expand our definition of God:

“God is the sum total of all the forces by which the universe unfolds in such a way that all the entities that emerge in its evolution (from quarks to the human person) each have the potential to become more complex when unified with other entities.”

   To which we add:

“In the recognition of the comprehensive forces by which the universe unfolds, the one which causes things to unite in such a way that they become more complex, conscious and eventually conscious of their consciousness (eg, the person) can only be understood as personal.”

   As Teilhard sees it, the person is

“.. nothing but the point of emergence in nature, at which this deep cosmic evolution culminates and declares itself”.

   In such declaration, evolution itself can be seen as ‘ultimately personal’.  From this refocusing of Teilhard’s lens, the human person is

 “…the flame of a general fermentation of the universe which breaks out suddenly on the earth.”

   Thus, God is not ‘a person’ (by Teilhard’s definition, a product of evolution) but the ultimate principle of ‘personness’.  In the human, evolution shows the universal process of evolution ‘declaring itself’, at least on this planet’ in the form of ‘person’.

The Next Post

Seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, this understanding of the evolution of ‘personness’, while locating the personal agency of evolution in the sum total of evolutionary forces, answers the question “Is God a person?”  It does however lead to the question of a human-God ‘relationship’. Humans are learning how to align themselves with many of the other aspects of ‘the ground of being’, which accounts for human evolutionary success thus far. How can such awareness of the personal aspect of these forces be seen to provide a basis of similar alignment?

Next week we will address this side of the question of personness and explore how the concept of God as an agent of ‘personization’ can be extended to that of understanding ‘him’ as an agency of evolution with which we can have a relationship.