How can the insights from seeing through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ point the way toward the future?

Today’s Post

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

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

Mysticism and the Future

We saw last week how the ‘mystical’ mode of thinking has always been a tool for setting our gaze on what John Haught refers to as the ‘not yet’. He suggests that one of the many stances required for our continued evolution, both as individual persons and collectively as a species, is a mode of ‘anticipation’.  In comparison with the conventional perspective of science which searches for meaning in the past and that of religion which sees it as ‘above’, Haught makes the case for recognizing that

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

   If Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ is correctly calibrated, any vision of the future would certainly contain such expectation of the coming of ‘something ontologically fuller and richer.”  Given Teilhard’s comprehensive ‘articulation of the noosphere’ that we have explored in our application of his ‘lens of evolution’ to the history of the universe, what kind of future can be expected?  What could Haught’s ‘ontologically richer and fuller’ future consist of?

As we have done in our many such ‘applications’ of Teilhard’s lens, we can base such speculation on anticipating how the many trends we have explored might be expected to extend themselves into the future.

For many, the future can be a fearful place.  Does the tide of evolution, having flowed to the neap of human consciousness, now stand poised to ebb, stranding us on a dry beach of soulless technology?  Are we nearing the satisfaction of our material needs only to find ourselves adrift in a vast expanse of spiritual emptiness?

As a starting place in our exploration of the future, we can simply extrapolate those trends that we have explored which substantiate Teilhard’s optimistic understanding of where evolution is taking us.  We saw once again last week how aspects of human evolution can be classified into the nine categories of global human welfare documented by Johan Norberg in his book, “Progress”.  Extrapolating these trends from the hundred-fifty year cycle that he addresses would offer a good starting point for imagining a future for the human species.

In a very real and tangible way, the future is constantly being infused into our present.  As we have explored in our series on mysticism,, via the ‘intuitional’ mode of the brain ‘the new’ is constantly arriving.  If, as Richard Dawkins claims, human evolution advances via ‘cultural memes’, the question must be asked, where do new such ‘memes’ come from?  If they are simply ‘replications’ of existing memes, no real evolution would result, just as the lack of new ‘organizational principles’ would have stalled cosmic evolution fourteen billion years ago.  If they are simply the stirring of organic functions, how can they be related to the brain’s physiology?

As Teilhard notes

“”To think, we must eat.”  Yes, but what diverse thoughts may spring from the same crust of bread!  Just as the same letters of an alphabet can be turned either into nonsense or into the most beautiful of poems, so the same calories seem as indifferent as they are necessary to the spiritual values they nourish.”

   The arrival of ‘the new’ is therefore essential to the evolution of the ‘more complex’, and this universal principle is just as active in the human species as it has been in all combinations of matter and energy since the beginning of time.
As we have seen in this series, the phenomenon of ‘mysticism’ involves the skill of listening to this constant infusion of the future as it flows into the present.  No scientist labors towards a new level of empirical understanding of a natural phenomenon without first being struck by new insights into its manifestation.

The intuitional mode of the brain offers a very real portal to the future.  It provides new insights for the empirical mode to articulate, and the ‘new’ becomes the essence of the ‘future’.

Keats notes the fecundity of this intuitive mode when he writes

“When I have fears that I may cease to be

   Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,

Before high-pilèd books, in charactery,

   Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain;

When I behold, upon the night’s starred face,

   Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,

And think that I may never live to trace

   Their shadows”

The Continuation of the Increase in Human Welfare

We have seen how Teilhard saw the increase in humanity across the globe changing from ‘expansion’ to ‘compression’ as population density inevitably increased in a world of finite space.  While recognizing the risk to human evolution that this phenomenon imposes, he identified two facets of humanity that would reduce the risk.  First, he insisted that the external push of compression would require an inner pull of convergence.

“To adapt themselves to, and in some sort to escape from, the planetary grip which forces them ever closer together, individuals find themselves compelled (eventually they acquire a taste for it) to arrange their communal lives more adroitly; first in order to preserve, and later to increase their freedom of action.”

   Next, he believed that ‘taste would be acquired’ for arranging life more adroitly in this process.  This is the opposite of the ever-present fear of compression: that we would lose ourselves and become assimilated into a faceless mass of compressed humanity.  He sees a different outcome to the inevitable forces of compression which

“…simultaneously and inevitably increases each human element’s radius of action and power in penetration in relation to all the others; and in proportion as it does so, it has as its direct effect a super-compression itself of the noosphere.”

   We also saw how a more adroit “arrangement of communal lives” is playing out in today’s world in the nine categories of human welfare documented by Johan Norberg.  Extrapolating his extensive data, we could reasonably expect such trends to continue.  Take as an example the data on Poverty.  Norberg’s data, ending in 2018, documents the reduction in global severe poverty from 85% to 12% in the last 150 years.  World Bank data since the continues this trend, although with a small uptick in the previous eighteen months due the global Covid pandemic.  As with all measures he documents, there is no reason not to expect this trend to continue until poverty is nearly eliminated across the globe.

The data he so thoroughly documents on the other eight examples of increasing global welfare also shows that trends are not expected to peter out at some future date.  However, neither he nor Teilhard ignore the fact that such future evolution is dependent on the ability of humans to act collaboratively to insure their future.  The atheistic historian, Yuval Harari, in his book “Sapiens” touches on this subject as he recognizes the necessity of ‘faith’ and ‘trust’ to human evolution.  Just as humans are building their bridge to the future upon the belief that there is another side to be gained, the bridge will not hold if this belief is undermined.  Teilhard’s need for us to “acquire a taste” for “arrang((ing our) communal lives more adroitly” will require such a faith in the future to continue.  Without it, Harari’s forecast that evolution’s gift of awareness of our consciousness will ultimately lead to our premature extinction will ultimately be confirmed.
Humans can listen to the echoes of creation through our intuitional sense.  While science does not have a clear explanation of this ‘unconscious’ activity of the brain, nearly everyone can point to its resonance with both our conscious thoughts and the actions we take as we parse these echoes.  Keats’ “gleaning of the teeming brain” resonates with Haught’s assertion that such activity is a heralding of “something ontologically richer and fuller.. coming into the universe.”
Teilhard suggests a key ‘parsing’ of this mystical stimulation as he says

 ” 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 in him.”

   He further suggests that when we

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

Next Week

This week we concluded a several week look at the human mental phenomenon of ‘mysticism’, particularly how it can be addressed and understood from the application of the ‘Evolutionary Lens’ of Teilhard de Chardin.
Next week we will shift to a re-edit of this blog, based on feedback and other inputs over the past two years of its publication.