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”.