How can Teilhard’s ‘lens’ help us become aware of the aspects of spirituality in our lives?

Today’s Post

Last week we traced the ‘spiritual ground of happiness’ to the ‘terrain of synergy’ between science and religion.  We saw that at the center of this terrain is the concept of ‘increasing complexity’ in evolution which opens the door to an overlap between science and religion and hence points the way to a truly integrated insight into human existence.

We saw again how Yuval Harari’s identification of the danger that our human capacities can alienate us from our evolutionary legacy connection with our environment.   But we also recognized that, contrary to his dystopian forecast, as we become more integrated and more whole in our individual lives and in our collective societies, we can come to recognize our true connection to the wellsprings of the cosmos.  Or, as Teilhard puts 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 made human in him.”

   This week we will look further into Teilhard’s insights into the structure of the cosmos in such a way which justifies such strong confidence.

Teilhard’s Simple Picture of Cosmic Evolution

As we saw how examining the structure of cosmic evolution through Teilhard ‘lens’, evolution can be seen as proceeding throughout the cosmos from the ‘big bang’ in the form of a ‘convergent spiral’.  As the products of evolution replicate themselves through joining and producing ‘offspring’ (eg atoms from groupings of electrons), they also experience a ‘rise’ in their complexity.  This increase in complexity endows future products with an increase in their potential to unite and thereby increasing the potential for further increases in complexity.

This increased potential of each product endows it with a greater capability for union, resulting in a spiral which ‘tightens’ as it ‘rises’.  The resultant increased potential is a third agent whose direction is ‘inward’, seen in the decreasing diameter of the spiral: its ‘convergence’.  From this simple model, Teilhard envisions that as these products become more complex as they rise, this complexity makes them more ‘resonant’ to the convergent nature of the ‘axis of evolution’.  Therefore, to Teilhard, a characteristic of a more evolved product can be seen in its increased sensitivity to the universal energy of evolution.   More evolved products of evolution evolve more quickly.

With these three forces, forward, upward and inward, applying as they do to every product of evolution in every age of the universe, Teilhard sketches the structure of cosmic evolution as it moves forward in the direction of increased complexity.

Teilhard also notes that not only does the diameter of the spiral decrease with time, it decreases ‘exponentially’.   The rate of convergence increases over time.  It takes some eight billion years for complex molecules to emerge from aggregates of atoms, but only five billion years for brains to emerge, then less than one million years for brains to become aware of themselves.

This is not, of course, religious teaching in any form.  It is simply a way of empirically looking at scientifically accumulated data in a different way.  The data by which the history of evolution is categorized becomes much more straightforward when the ‘characteristic of complexity’ is recognized, and, as we have seen, ultimately opens the door to science’s addressing of the human person.

Once the phenomenon of ‘increasing complexity’ is recognized in its universal context, all things in the cosmos become both inextricably linked and thus increasingly intelligible.  Humans therefore become a valid subject of science once their place in the universal ‘hierarchy of being’ is recognized.

That said, however, the problem still obtains that once the threshold of ‘consciousness aware of itself’ is crossed, it becomes difficult to study human evolution outside the conventional Darwinist paradigm of ‘Natural Selection”, which reduces humans to simple molecular activities under the influence of such things as ‘chance’ and ‘survival’.

Teilhard’s unique model of the ‘convergent spiral’ overcomes this barrier.  His three ‘vectors’ of ‘forward’, ‘upward’ and ‘inward’ apply equally to every stage of universal evolution and to every new state of energy and matter that results from it.

Science has little difficulty understanding the transition from pure energy (at the ‘big bang)’ through the evolution of complex molecules, as the ‘Standard Theory’ of Physics outlines.  The transition to the cell, and the latter (and quicker) transition to consciousness are more difficult, and by the time we get to ‘consciousness aware of itself’, all bets are off.  This is the main reason why the last stage is so poorly addressed by science.  Humans are either ‘epi-phenomenon’ or simply the random result of pure chance; either way they are outside the scope of scientific enquiry as such.

If science avoids addressing the human phenomenon, how can we apply Teilhard’s tri-vector conception of evolution to its rise through the human?

How Does Human Evolution Reflect the Evolutional Spiral?

If we believe that the universe is evolving along Teilhard’s three ‘vectors’, then we should be able to find examples of how they are playing out in human history.  As we have seen, science so far has been of little help.

Seeing our personal (and cultural) evolution through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, it emerges as a continuation of universal evolution as it

“…continually finds 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.”

   High minded words indeed.  Can we find examples?  Consider Johan Norberg’s book, “Progress”, which, in implicit agreement with Teilhard, does indeed offer both insight as well as articulation of these activities.

We first looked at Norberg’s ‘articulations of the noosphere’ last August, which clearly and objectively show an exponential increase in human welfare (a measure of human evolution) since 1850, and in which he cites many examples of Teilhard’s

“continual find(ing of) new ways of arranging (our) elements in the way that is most economical of energy and space”

  In all nine of the examples of Norberg’s increase in human welfare (Teilhard’s ‘arrangements’), he cites the Western value of human freedom as the underlying causality.

His findings illustrate the action of Teilhard’s three ‘vectors’ of the spiral:

–          Fruitful Unity: Each step of the exponential increase described by Norberg is precipitated by an action of human collective insight, a sharp and clear example of improved human relationships as the locus of the energy of evolution manifesting itself in the human.  Unity is the first vector: that which connects the products of evolution to move them ‘forward’.

–       Resulting complexity: As a result of each step, the complexity of society can be seen to increase in terms of more efficient organization, the reduction of human ills such as wars, famine, and disease, and increased human lifespan.  Increasing complexity is the second vector, the ‘upward’ component.

• Increasing response to the agency of universal complexification: Through the increases in education and communication since 1850, each new step of evolution provides a stage for the next as individual persons become better educated at the same time that collective society is raised to the next level.  In such results can be seen the action of the ‘inward’ component.

These three ‘vectors’ of human evolution, as they appear in our personal evolution, are a locus for human happiness.  In the alignment of our lives along the universal ‘axis of evolution’, we experience

• more complete and therefore increasingly satisfactory relationships
• which contribute to our personal growth
• which in turns enables us to deepen our relationships

Once again, we are reminded of Teilhard’s deep insight that

“Fuller being comes from closer union.  Closer union comes from fuller being”

The Next Post

This week we continued our exploration of the ‘spiritual’ ground of happiness, noting that this ‘ground’ is located within the ‘terrain of synergy’.  Once we begin to sense that the ‘ground of being’ is ‘on our side’, it becomes possible to build a level of confidence in the process of cosmic evolution as it rises through ourselves.

Having seen a clearer picture of this ‘terrain of synergy’ and its potential for a satisfaction with life that is grounded in a clear-headed, secular perspective, we can take our exploration of it yet a little further.

Next week we will outline the dimensions of the ‘terrain of synergy’, and how it can be seen as the center-ground for the two traditional ways of ‘telling the cosmic story’.

How can seeing ‘spirituality’ through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ help us to become happier?

Today’s Post

Last week we began a look at a third facet of the subject of ‘happiness’, this time from the perspective of ‘spirituality’.  We noted that from this perspective, we are using this term to refer to what Teilhard called ‘the sap of the axis of evolution’: the agency which increases complexity over time.  This distinguishes his use of the term from traditional religious terminology that refers to such things as ‘supernatural’.

In our use of it, we are referring to that which is active in our lives, here and now.  Paraphrasing Patricia Albere, author of Evolutionary Relationships, it is the latest evolutionary activity in the long history of rising universal complexity, the recognition of the evolutionary forces that are ready to “optimize what can happen in our lives and in humanity” if we but ‘listen”.

This week we will explore the phenomenon of ‘spirituality’ a bit further.

The Spiritual Ground of Happiness and the Terrain of Synergy

We have explored the concept of the terrain of synergy as the common ground between science and religion, quite small for centuries but as writers such as Jonathan Sacks, Teilhard, Richard Rohr, John Haught and Paul Davies insist, can be seen today as much larger than commonly thought.

The expansion of this ground comes through seeing evolution through Teilhard’s ‘lens’.  From his perspective, evolution expands from the biological, Earth-centric scope of the Darwinists to the universal, all-encompassing vision sought by both scientists and religionists today.  Not only does the current scope of evolution expand in this enterprise, but the insight into how science and religion can contribute to a better understanding of the human condition becomes clearer.  As Brian Swimme, Professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies, sees it, the study of ‘cosmology’ is focused on such expansion.

“The sciences will just separate the human off and focus on the physical aspects of the universe and the religious traditions will shy away from the universe because that’s reserved for science. So cosmology is an attempt to deal with the whole and the nature of the human in that.”

   In exploring this ‘terrain of synergy’ we are really exploring the nature of existence from an integrated understanding of the universe, its unfolding, and if it is to be truly ‘cosmological’, our part in it.

Such understanding is the starting place for situating ourselves into the true context of evolution, which is the same thing as understanding how we fit into the fourteen or so billion years of the rise of complexity: Teilhard’s ‘axis of evolution’.

As we have seen, such placement also recognizes the consequence of failing to do so, as was recognized by Yuval Harari in his suggestion that we have broken the bond that our ancestors enjoyed with their environment and have hence doomed ourselves to a future of unhappiness leading to a quick extinction.  While Harari fails to recognize the recent (by evolutionary standards) trend towards increased human welfare outlined by Johan Norberg (“Progress”) our current levels of anxiety indicate that at the personal level, we still have a long way to go.

Happiness and the Terrain of Synergy

How can recognition of the ‘terrain of synergy’ be a factor in human happiness?

Consider that understanding the ‘axis of evolution’, the universe’s tendency to increase complexity over time, offers science a way to begin to address the human person on the one hand, and on the other a way for religion to understand the workings of the ‘Ground of Being’ in universal evolution.

Quantification of complexity, therefore, is a filter through which Western religious teachings can be strained to remove their supernatural and magical content.  By the same token, defining it can extend the more advanced subjects of science, such as quantum physics, into the study of the human person.

The epicenter of the ‘terrain of synergy’ is therefore the common ground between science and religion.  It is the recognition that the human person is the latest manifestation of the ‘complexification’ of the ‘stuff of the universe’: evolution become aware of itself.  This perspective recognizes both the increase in complexity acknowledged (at least tacitly) by science and the importance of the human person in the scheme of things asserted by Western religion.   This perspective emerges when we come at the understanding of the cosmos from science’s recognition that the ‘axis of universal evolution’ is ‘complexification’ and from religion’s intuition that God exists as the underlying agent of such ‘complexification’.

The journey to such an integrated perception is outlined by Teilhard’s description of his own vision of his roots in the ‘axis of evolution’ that we saw in our series on psychology as ‘secular meditation’.  Such ‘rootedness’ is essential to our recognition of the part we play in the cosmic sweep of evolution.  And this recognition is at the core of Patricia Albere’s assertion that we must become aware of the “evolutionary forces that are ready to optimize what can happen in our lives and in humanity”.

Such recognition is echoed by Teilhard as he describes his experience of 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.”

   This echoes one of Maurice Blondel’s ‘reinterpretations’ of Western religion’s understanding of God:

“That ‘God is Father’ means that human life is oriented towards a gracious (eg ‘grace filled”) future- God is ‘on our side’ “

   To a person who believes that they are being held “In God’s hand”, and that the ground of being “is on their side” the possibility of happiness moves from being a possibility to being a probability.

The Next Post

This week we continued our exploration of the ‘spiritual’ ground of happiness, noting that this ‘ground’ can be recognized in the idea of the ‘terrain of synergy’.  Once we begin to sense that the ‘ground of being’ is ‘on our side’, it becomes possible to build a level of confidence in the process of cosmic evolution as it rises in each of us.

Having seen a clearer picture of this ‘terrain of synergy’ and its potential for a satisfaction with life that is grounded in a clear-headed, secular perspective, we can take our exploration of it a little further.  Next week we will look a little deeper into the structure of this ‘terrain of synergy’ for some signposts to such exploration.

April 4, 2024 – Teilhard and The ‘Spiritual’ Ground of Happiness

How can Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ help to reveal the ‘spiritual’ nature of human happiness?

Today’s Post

Last week we took a second look at the slippery subject of happiness, this time from the perspective of universal evolution.  We saw how Yuval Harari, in his book, Sapiens, suggested that we have “dug our own grave” due to our uniquely evolved human characteristic of ‘consciousness aware of itself’  Because of this, he concludes, our potential for true happiness is accordingly diminished.  With this speculation, Harari sees the appearance of human consciousness as an ‘evolutionary mistake’, a mistake for which we must pay with an unavoidable existential unhappiness.

In looking at this further, we agreed that humans have indeed departed from the evolutionary ‘accommodation with environment’ delivered by ‘Natural Selection’ and assured by the instincts in our evolutionary predecessors.   Perhaps our current state is indeed a result of this discontinuity, but as we saw, not necessarily the whole picture.

While disagreeing with Harari’s dystopic conclusion, we saw the merit in acknowledging that our species has nonetheless broken the instinctual bond enjoyed by our evolutionary predecessors and that this breach is indeed a source of the ‘pain of our evolutionary convergence’.  But when looking through Teilhard’s evolutionary ‘lens’, such pain is not unexpected in the ‘rise of complexity’ embedded in the sap of the tree of evolution.  From his perspective, all human advances, such as those documented in Johan Norberg’s book, “Progress”, come about due to discomfort with the ‘status quo’.  Any perfect, static serene accommodation with our environment would require absolute perfection of both ourselves and this environment.  Even the simplest scientific understanding of reality shows this to be a fantasy in a universe whose most common feature is ‘constant change’.

Understanding the dynamic nature of existence, Patricia Albere, author of Evolutionary Relationships, sees the long history of rising universal complexity as suggesting that we have only to allow ourselves to be “lifted by the evolutionary forces that are ready to optimize what can happen in our lives and in humanity”.  To do this, “we only have to begin to pay attention”.

This week we will look at a third facet of happiness; a look which involves such ‘paying of attention’.  In doing so we will begin a look at happiness from the perspective of ‘spirituality.’

What is ‘Spirituality’? 

As Teilhard addressed ‘spirituality’, the term is framed with apostrophes in recognition of the freight that this term carries with its religious overtones of ‘the supernatural’.  It can reflect the eons of religious teaching which seemed to widen the gap between the ‘material’ lives we live and the ideal ‘spiritual’ life which lies far above us, attainable only in a ‘next’ life in which we are compensated for the pain experienced in this one.

A problem arises when we try to address the underlying agency of evolution, that which causes the universe to become more complex over time.  What term do we use to discuss it?  Teilhard used the term ‘complexification’, which certainly is accurate, but he also uses the term ‘spiritual’ as well.  From his point of view, ‘spiritual’ simply refers to the agency which is present in all matter and causes it, over time, to organize itself into ever more complex arrangements.  Paul Davies refers to it as the ‘software’ embedded in the ‘hardware’ of matter.  Other scientists refer to it as simply the quanta of ‘information’ in every particle of matter by which it is ushered into connections which result in more complex configurations.  An example of such an action can be seen in how the information contained in DNA guides RNA to produce the proteins necessary for the growth and functionality of the cell.  Without such presence in all things, evolution would be unable to proceed and simply replicate itself endlessly at a static level of complexity. To Teilhard, therefore, ‘spiritual’ is ‘natural’, but only if the term ‘natural’ is understood in its widest, most universal, context.

We have seen several times how this concept can be found apart from religion.  We have seen several times how Paul Davies, in his book, “The Cosmic Blueprint” understands universal evolution, including its extension into human life, to be underscored by increasing complexity.

But a less likely proponent of this position is Richard Dawkins, famous atheistic evolutionary biologist. Dawkins, in his anti-religious book, “The God Delusion” nonetheless suggests the idea of a “first cause of everything”.  He suggests the viability of such a concept as the “basis for a process which eventually raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence”.  In the next breath, he insists that “we must very explicitly divest it of all the baggage that the word ‘God’ carries in the minds of most religious believers.”  He is suggesting that there is clearly something afoot in universal evolution, but that it must be addressed from a secular perspective if we want to make sense of it.

As we have seen previously, Teilhard would have agreed at this level.  His take on ‘spirituality’ also eschewed terms like ‘supernatural’, as he understood (as did Dawkins), such ‘process’ to lie in the plane of natural existence.

“…spirit is neither super-imposed nor accessory to the cosmos, but that it quite simply represents the higher state assumed in and around us by the primal and indefinable thing that we call, for want of a better name, the ‘stuff of the universe’.  Nothing more; and also nothing less.  Spirit is neither a meta- nor an epi- phenomenon, it is the phenomenon.”

   Richard Dawkins’ concept offers yet another empirical insight into the issue of ‘information’ in human evolution.  Like Teilhard, he recognizes the difference between evolution in society and as understood as ‘Natural Selection’ by biology.  In his book, “The Selfish Gene”, he proposes that evolution continues through human society by way of ‘memes’, packets of cultural information, as the cultural parallel to biological genes.  Such ‘memes’ are echoed in Teilhard’s concept of the ‘noosphere’, which is the body of human thoughts, ideas and inventions which accumulate in human lore, rituals, books, schools, and networks over time, and is thus ‘spiritual’ (by his definition) in nature.

By identifying spirit as phenomenal and affirming its existence as neither outside (epi) nor above (meta) nature, Teilhard is referring to science’s observation that the universe increases in complexity over the course of its evolution.  This observation assumes that there is an agency, folded into matter, which assures the increase in complexity that marks every evolutionary step from energy to matter, simple matter to quarks, quarks to protons, protons to atoms to molecules to complex molecules to cells to neurons to brains to consciousness.  As Jonathan Sacks observes, in each step the new evolutionary products display a collective complexity that is a property of the new product, not just aggregated properties of the individual products that comprise them.

Thus ‘spirituality’ is simply a word which refers to this tendency of ‘the stuff of the universe’ to ‘complexify over time’.  As Teilhard goes on to say

“Spirituality is not a recent accident, arbitrarily or fortuitously imposed on the edifice of the world around us, it is a deeply rooted phenomenon, the traces of which we can follow with certainty backwards as far as the eye can reach.   The phenomenon of spirit is not therefore a sort of brief flash in the night; it reveals a gradual and systematic passage from the unconscious to the conscious, and from the conscious to the self-conscious.”

   Therefore, the acknowledgement of the existence of this ‘deeply rooted phenomenon in all things offers us a perspective on how our species fits into the sweep of evolution, even if it does so in a way different from the environmental ‘accommodation’ enjoyed by our predecessors.  If, as Patricia Albere asserts, the ‘forces of evolution’ are such that they can, as they have done for fourteen billions of years, ‘optimize what can happen in our lives and in humanity’ if we only begin to ‘listen’, then listening to the ‘voice’ of this ‘cosmic spark’ as it exists in our lives can permit human life to be more harmoniously intertwined with our environment.

By Teilhard’s definition, therefore, ‘spirituality’ is indeed a third ground of ‘happiness’.  Given his understanding of ‘spirituality’ as the term which refers to the underlying cause of the universal phenomenon of ‘complexification’, this suggests that some measure of our personal happiness is dependent on how well we listen to the ‘cosmic spark’ as it exists in each of us.  Patricia Albere suggests that such ‘listening’ can open us to the ‘optimization that can happen in our lives’.  In simpler terms, we can trust the agency of universal evolution as it is in work in ourselves.  But as Albere recons, we must first learn to ‘listen’ to it.

“Easier said than done”, goes the old adage.  Humans may now represent the most advanced stage of evolution so far on this planet, but how in this stage do we find this spark so that we can indeed ‘listen’, and then how it is possible to make sense of what we hear and put it to use in life?  Any success in either of these endeavors is certain to bring us into increased ‘accommodation’ with our environment, one in which we are better aligned with evolution and hence closer to our goal of ‘thinking with the whole brain’.

The Next Post

This week we began a look at a third facet of the slippery subject of happiness, this time from the perspective of ‘spirituality’.  However, we took Teilhard’s understanding of this equally slippery term from his recognition of the agency of universal ‘complexification’.

Next week we will take another step in this exploration of ‘the spiritual’ facet of happiness, this time exploring our accumulated lore of such searching and deciding.

   How can seeing the human person through Teilhard’s ‘lens’ highlight the potential for happiness?

Today’s Post

Last week we took a broad overview of the subject of ‘happiness’ and noting its vagueness, began to place it into Teilhard’s context of ‘universal evolution’.   In this overview, we looked at several ‘material’ aspects from the viewpoints of science (such as surveys of this highly subjective topic as well as genetic influences) and saw that while all these searches for the ‘seat of happiness’ provide insights, the ‘bottom line’ still evades us.

This week we will look at human happiness from a second viewpoint, that of cosmic evolution.  If, as we have maintained throughout this blog,

• Teilhard’s insight that the underlying manifestation of universal evolution, from the ‘big bang’ to the present can be seen in the increase of complexity,
• and this increase of complexity can be measured by the increase of consciousness which leads to the human person.
• then, the fourteen or so billions of years of universal evolution of which we are products must be still somehow active in our own personal and social evolution.

Whatever it is that has been at work in the rise of complexity of the ‘stuff of the universe’ it must be active in each of its products.  As one of these products, it must therefore be active in us.  If it is, it can be trusted to continue in us, and our ‘happiness’ is in some way related to it.

Teilhard summarizes universal evolution as

“Fuller being in closer union and closer union from fuller being.”

   The attribute of ‘fuller being’ itself implies ‘better fit’, and in this ‘fit’ lies the evolutionary aspect of happiness.

Can Humans, As an Evolved Species, Ever be Happy?

Teilhard insists that we understand our evolution as individual persons as well as the aggregate of society   from the context of universal evolution.  This suggests that our happiness, or at least our potential for happiness, must be understood in this way as well.  How can our potential for happiness be understood in such an evolutionary context?

Paraphrasing Patricia Albere, author of “Evolutionary Relationship”, this long history of rising complexity suggests that, as its latest product, we have only to allow ourselves to be “lifted by the evolutionary forces that are ready to optimize what can happen in our lives and in humanity”.  To do this, “we only have to begin to pay attention”.

Yuval Harari, in his book, “Sapiens”, suggests a less optimistic outcome.  From his perspective, humans have not only evolved much faster than their environment but are ruining the environment from which we are becoming increasingly estranged.  He notes that our predecessor species enjoyed long periods of florescence, on the order of several millions of years, because their pace of evolution matched the pace of the evolution of their environment.  This ‘fit’ with their environment insured, as he sees it, a continuing and long lasting ‘fruitful accommodation’ between species and their environments; an accommodation that humans have lost in their ongoing estrangement.  The result, in his opinion, is the existential unease that makes it almost impossible for us to be ‘happy’ and the resulting unhappiness will erode our survival instincts, eventually resulting in an untimely extinction.

He notes that in our quest to assure our continued evolution, we are becoming more and more dependent upon technology.  He sees the resulting explosion of technology becoming more damaging to the environment on the one hand, and on the other eroding our natural sense of ourselves.

Where Teilhard saw a ‘convergent spiral’ raising us to higher levels of complexity and ‘fuller being’, Harari sees our increasing reliance on technology as a ‘divergent’ factor which will reduce our sense of ourselves and lead to ‘lesser being’.  With humans, he suggests, ‘evolution’ will lead to ‘devolution’.

In mapping our estrangement from nature, he notes that every step humanity has taken from our animal predecessors’ hunter-gatherer state has come with increased emotional discomfort and dissatisfaction.  As populations increased, culture became sedentary, farms became necessary, requiring laborers, storage buildings, roads, and trade, which in turn saw the rise of cities and soul-less machines leaving us today as anxious, dependent on technology and widely divided between ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’.

While this dystopian conclusion is clearly orthogonal to Teilhard’s optimism, the observation that we have broken the implicit bonds with our environment is unquestionable.  How can happiness be possible if our evolution requires us to abandon our ancestor’s close relationship with nature?  As Gerard Manley Hopkins put it succinctly

“Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

    And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.”

   It is not so much that humans have become unable to be happy, but more that our instinctive reactions to our surroundings, kept in play for eons by the instincts of reptilian and limbic brains, no longer work as well for us as well as they did for our ancestors.  This is true for our potential for happiness as well.

So, What’s The Alternative?

  Most commentators cite Hopkin’s view of our relationship with the environment in their critique of current affairs, but few follow with his next lines:

“And for all this, nature is never spent;

    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”

    As we have seen, in Teilhard’s vision of Hopkins’ eternal upward current, he charts the many ‘changes of state’ that the ‘stuff of the universe’ undergoes in its journey towards increased complexity, such as energy to matter, simple building blocks evolving into more complex atoms, then molecules, then cells, then neurons, then brains, then consciousness.  In this upward current, each new product emerges from its predecessors’ state of complexity by way of such a change of state.   With them new capacities appear, ones that were not in play in the precedent products, but ones neither completely free of the characteristics of their predecessors.  Teilhard notes the example of the cell evolving from the increasingly complex assemblies of molecules: “the cell emerges ‘dripping in molecularity’”.  It takes some time before new cellular capacities fully emerge, and the next rung of complexity can be mounted.

In this transitory state that we find ourselves today, humans can be seen as still, to some degree, ‘dripping in animality’.  Humans may have a new capacity in the neocortex brain, but the skill of using it to advance our evolution and actualize our new potential in this new ‘change of state’ is still early in undergoing development.

An example of such a new ‘skill’ has been mentioned several times.  The skill of ‘thinking with the whole brain’ can be seen in the intellectual process of overcoming the dualisms that infect our lives by simply using the neocortex to ‘ride herd’ on the stimuli of the ‘lower’ (reptilian and limbic) brains.  It is not a matter of ignoring these stimuli; they have evolved to enrich mammalian existence and enhance the capacity for ‘survival’.  It is more a matter of becoming aware of them, understanding them to be able to manage them to enrich human existence and enhance our own unique dimensions of survival.  This skill can be further enhanced by balanced use of the ‘right’ and ‘left’ brain hemispheres as addressed earlier.  These are skills which we are still learning.

Thus, the key to understanding ‘happiness’ from an evolutionary perspective is to understand what is indeed unique about the human person and how it can work (or should work) in the context of an evolving universe.

Put another way, human life is most enriched when it engages harmoniously with the ‘forces of evolution’.  Both humans and their environment have evolved in an evolutionary sweep of over fourteen billion years in which products have steadily increased their complexity.  Most recently this increase in complexity has been quickened by a ‘natural selection’ in which products and their environments are able to ‘fit together’ in increasingly varied combinations.

The excellent and insightful activities of science have certainly been able to quantify such things as universal time spans, the structures and configurations of evolutionary products which reflect this ‘complexification’, and details of the history of living things as well as our ontological and sociological part in it.

However, as we have seen, and as Teilhard, Sacks, Haught and Davies have pointed out, science is ‘marking time’ (Teilhard’s phrase) before it addresses what is unique about human existence: the person.  As Teilhard points out (and Davies, Haught and Sacks restate)

“Up to now, Man in his essential characteristics has been omitted from all scientific theories of nature.  For some, his “spiritual value” is too high to allow of his being included, without some sort of sacrilege, in a general scheme of history.  For others his power of choosing and abstracting is too far removed from material determinism for it to be possible, or even useful, to associate him with the elements composing the physical sciences.  In both cases, either through excessive admiration or lack of esteem, man is left floating above, or left on the edge of, the universe.”

   This, however, does not mean that humans cannot reflect upon themselves and their unique place in cosmic evolution, and begin to discern ways to use their unique capacities to better ‘fit’ into life and hence to enhance their enjoyment of it.

In addition to the ‘material’ and ‘evolutionary’ grounds of happiness, there is also a ‘spiritual’ ground to be explored.  While acknowledging that our species has nonetheless broken the bond of instinct enjoyed by our evolutionary predecessors, and that this breach is indeed a source of the ‘pain of our evolutionary convergence’ we can see how, in Teilhard’s grand vision of universal evolution, these consequences are neither unexpected nor injurious to the potential to happiness.

The Next Post

This week we looked at second of four facets of the slippery subject of happiness, this time from the perspective of universal evolution.

Next week we will begin a look at a third facet of the subject of happiness as we continue our exploration of ‘happiness’ as we address a ‘spiritual ground’.

How can seeing reality through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ lead to experiencing it ‘joyfully’?

Today’s Post

Last week we moved from addressing the many aspects of religion which combine to not only aid us in our continuing journey to the future but can enrich us on our way.  We have seen how three ‘Theological Virtues’ represent attitudes, stances that we can take along this journey which open us up to a clearer, and therefore more meaningful, and ultimately fuller life.

Thus far, we have outlined the insights of Teilhard, Rohr, Rogers and Haught as we have followed the trail of increasing complexity as it flows through human life.  These thinkers all contribute unique and profound insights into the ‘human psyche’, as well as signposts to a future in which human evolution can continue to unfold.

Such ‘survival’ is clearly important to our future as a species, and the part we play, as outlined by these thinkers, is indeed critical to it.  But, as we have seen many times on our journey, our personal confidence in the future, our accepting of, even our embracing of our lives is also critical.  All this evolution, if it is to be authentic, must somehow be compatible with satisfaction with life: our ‘happiness’.

The Slippery Subject of Happiness

A common term for accepting and embracing life is ‘happiness’.  Like the term ‘love’, the term ‘happiness’ is somewhat overused in Western society today.  This overuse belies a clear understanding of what it consists of and how it can be found in our lives.  The aspect of ‘happiness’ in the human person, while much to be desired, is both difficult to quantify, and if common belief would have it, difficult to attain.

This week we will look at this slippery subject through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, to see how Teilhard’s practice of placing a subject into the context of universal evolution, as has been done for other ‘slippery’ subjects, will help us to see it more clearly as well.

This approach to ‘happiness’ will address it in five facets.

This week we will address the ‘material’ facet: how human happiness is commonly addressed.

We will then address it from an ‘evolutionary’ perspective, in terms of how humans ‘fit into’ the universal evolutionary flow that Teilhard tracks from the ‘big bang’ to the current day.

In the ‘spiritual’ facet, we will then address how Teilhard’s reinterpretation of ‘spirit’ opens the door to a more intimate mode of satisfaction with life.

From the ‘psychological’ facet, we will then look at how psychology understands a person whose approach to life is mature, and hence better aligned with reality.

In the last facet we will explore religion’s approach to happiness and how it can be seen to align with the other facets.

What Is Happiness?

Not that happiness gives up its secrets willingly.  Teilhard takes note of our difficulty in finding a vantage point from which to address it.

“What, in fact, is happiness?  For centuries this has been the subject of endless books, investigations, individual and collective experiments, one after another; and, sad to relate, there has been complete failure to reach unanimity. For many of us, in the end, the only practical conclusion to be drawn from the whole discussion is that it is useless to continue the search. Either the problem is insoluble; there is no true happiness in this world or there can be only an infinite number of particular solutions: the problem itself defies solution. Being happy is a matter of personal taste. You, for your part, like wine and good living. I prefer cars, poetry, or helping others. “Liking is as unaccountable as luck.””

   He goes on to suggest a basic impediment to human happiness.

“Like all other animate beings, man, it is true, has an essential craving for happiness. In man, however, this fundamental demand assumes a new and complicated form for he is not simply a living being with greater sensibility and greater vibratory power than other living beings. By virtue of his “hominization” he has become a reflective and critical living being and his gift of reflection brings with it two other formidable properties, the power to perceive what may be possible, and the power to foresee the future. The emergence of this dual power is sufficient to disturb and confuse the hitherto serene and consistent ascent of life. Perception of the possible, and awareness of the future- when these two combine, they not only open up for us an inexhaustible store of hopes and fears, but they also allow those hopes and fears to range far afield in every direction. Where the animal seems to find no difficulties to obstruct its infallible progress towards what will bring it satisfaction, man, on the other hand, cannot take a single step in any direction without meeting a problem for which, ever since he became man, he has constantly and unsuccessfully been trying to find a final and universal solution.”

   Thus, to Teilhard, in seeming agreement with Juval Harari (“Sapiens”), the evolutionary emergence of the human interjects what Teilhard saw as “disturb(ing) and confuse(ing) the hitherto serene and consistent ascent of life”.  This disturbance brings about an inability in us to “bring satisfaction”.

The long current of human thinking in our literature, philosophies and religions presents us with a wide spectrum of stances that we can take in response to Shakespeare’s “slings and outrages” as inflicted by life.  At one end of this wide spectrum lies a simple acceptance and endurance of endless rounds of ‘fate’ and ‘fortune’, as the Easterners would have it.   At the far other end lies the ‘joyous embrace’ of the phases of life, which may well recur, but also tend to ‘raise’ us over time, as envisioned in the West.  Not surprisingly, most of us (and our literature, philosophy and religion) occupy the terrain closer to the center.  Most approaches to happiness contain a combination of some level of acceptance (or denial) of those things over which we have no power, mixed with some level of confidence (or despair) that whatever our lot, it is amenable to some improvement.

Happiness, to some extent, is related to the degree of acceptance with which we respond to these cycles mixed with some degree of expectation that the future can be better.

Thus, happiness is difficult to pin down.  Circumstances which would depress one person might be tolerated by another.  Personal welfare that would cause satisfaction in one might not be enough to satisfy others.  Our news is filled daily with stories of people who remain un-consoled by their good fortune, as well as those that manage some degree of life satisfaction without significant material welfare.

In other words, not only is the concept of happiness slippery but recognition of it in reality is highly subjective.

Still, the search for its dimensions continues.  Psychologists conduct surveys, biologists explore chemicals, and religionists look to faith.  Does this level of often contradictory activities mean that there’s nothing that can be said?  Let’s look at a few aspects:

• Surveys: For decades, psychologists have been searching for a process for conducting surveys free of cultural, economic, gender, religious and racial bias.  Not only do the continuing waves of surveys show a wider range of reported states of happiness than statistics suggest, but many of them are contradictory.
• Biology: Many biologists suggest that happiness results directly from our chemistry.  They can measure that chemicals such as dopamine and serotonin in the brain are direct causes of the sensation of happiness but minimize the influence of those experiences that lead to their secretion in the brain.  Thus, in the ‘nature vs nurture’ spectrum, in their view nurture is clearly a secondary influence.
• Genetics: All of us know persons who are generally cheerful, even under difficult circumstances. We also know those whose ‘glass is always half empty’.  From this view, we are all predisposed by our generic heritage toward some fundamental level of happiness or unhappiness.  The ‘wiring of our brains’ is always complicit in our emotional reaction to reality.
• Religion: The religions of the world all aim at some level of accommodation with reality, from (as above) acceptance to embrace.  Their beliefs and practices are clearly myriad, and often very contradictory.

For all this, neither religion nor science can be seen to have an unequivocal grasp of happiness, contentment, or any of the ‘states’ of well-being.

A more nuanced approach to happiness falls into the realm of relative measures.  For example, if a very poor person comes into a large sum of money, the impact on their happiness is directly related to the improvement in their situation that the money enables.  They can be safely said to have increased the level of their happiness by a large amount.

For a wealthier person, even a large amount of money will have much less impact as it did in the case of the one less well off.  In the first case, the impact will likely be longer lasting as well, as the money can also be put to use in caring for family and assuring a comfortable future.  In the second case, the money will most likely have little effect on the person’s sense of well-being, much less that of the family.

The ‘Satisfaction Paradox’

A curious take on this subject, as reported by the Economist in the issue of July 11, 2019, involves generally comfortable people who nonetheless report that they are unhappy, a phenomenon which is relatively new in human evolution, breaking a long-sensed bond between ‘comfort’ and ‘happiness’.  This new ‘dualism’ occurs in the evolutionarily recent group of individuals who are relatively well-off and well-educated: the ‘middle class’.  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.

This involves the dissociation between two longtime political partners: personal well-being and incumbent political parties.  As the Economist relates, the re-election of an incumbent party has historically been the result of a general feeling of ‘well-being’ among the population.   Today, we are seeing a surge in ‘developed’ countries of angry ‘Populist’ and ‘Nationalist’ parties elected by populations who consider themselves as ‘well off’.

The Economist article traces one possible cause of this phenomenon, prevalent in the ‘developed’ world, as the result of aging populations.  Certainly, this demographic feels uncomfortable being caught up in the rapid changes precipitated by the swift advances of technology.  As an example, many of us ‘old folks’ were taught by our parents, just as we taught our children, how to use a dial phone.  This same group, in many cases, are now being taught the often-bewildering complexities of ‘smartphones’ by their grandchildren.

The reliance on ‘habits’, those learned since birth to enable us to smoothly function, can become a liability, as the necessity for a rapid learning curve seems to be increasingly prevalent.  The ‘fruits of our labor’, pensions, investments and assets built up over a lifetime of cultivating productive ‘habits’, may well have provided us with much quality of life, but do not necessarily constitute a comfortable emotional bulwark against today’s turbulence.

This certainly leads to an increase in indignation, a level of personal life satisfaction which is nonetheless deeply critical of others.  We have seen how indignation can induce pleasant feelings, but this phenomenon also brings us back to the insights of Yuval Harari (‘Sapiens’) concerning the ‘fit’ between the human person and his environment.

Harari notes that in the human person, consciousness such as ours, aware as it is of itself, speeds up evolution in an environment which becomes increasingly subject to our influence.  This recursive spiral of ‘upset,’ is not unlike that found in weather, where a stable air mass becomes unstable, leading to the emergence of patterns unforeseen in the stable state.  Can the tension between a changing environment caused by humans who are themselves rapidly changing have such a future?  Harari questions the possibility that the incessant but more frequently recurring cycles of harmony and disharmony that we see today can result in a future plateau of harmony.

And, on top of this, what is the forecast for a level of accommodation, even happiness, for the human person caught up in such a dynamic milieu?  Is the very increasing speed of our evolution a material impediment to our happiness?

If Teilhard understood it correctly, and the energy which unites human persons is no more (but no less, as he would say) than the current manifestation of the fourteen billion years of energy by which the cosmos has risen to its current complex state, then how can we fail to recognize the potential for fulfillment, both at the personal level as well as the level of society?

More germane to the topic of happiness, how can Teilhard’s ‘lens’ be used as a signpost to happiness?   If the energy of increasing complexity and emerging consciousness can be seen in human relationships (love, in its most universal manifestation) and consciousness aware of itself, how can we better understand how we fit into it?  What is the appropriate niche for the human person in this grand process of universal evolution?

The Next Post

This week saw a broad overview of the subject of ‘happiness’ and its vagueness, and began to place it into Teilhard’s context of universal evolution.  If the energy of increasing complexity and emerging consciousness can be seen in human relationships (love, in its most universal appearance) and consciousness aware of itself, how can we better understand how we fit into it?

Next week we will begin to explore such ‘universal accommodation’ and attempt to locate the appropriate niche for the human person is this grand process of universal evolution.

How can living the Theological Virtues lead to finding joy in the noosphere?

Today’s Post

Last week we concluded our look through Teilhard’s ‘lens’ at the three so-called “Theological Virtues”- Faith, Hope and Love- by seeing how Cynthia Bourgeault’s reinterpretation of Paul encapsulated the workings of these virtues in our most intimate relationships.

This week we will conclude our look at Values, Morals and Sacraments as ‘articulations of the noosphere’ and see how the ‘Theological Virtues’ of Faith, Hope and Love serve as attitudes, stances that we can take not only in living them out, but in experience the joy of existence.

The Articulation of the Spheres

Two things on which nearly everyone can agree are the intelligibility of reality and the human’s ability to comprehend it.  Science depends on them, and religion offers a long history of human inquiry into the nature of existence and our response to it.  Both require a belief that whatever the universe is, we can make sense of it.

The current state of religion is a many faceted, often contradictory, but fervently felt set of beliefs about the world and our place in it.

Science, coming into play much later, also offers an approach to understanding existence, although coming at the enterprise from an entirely different perspective.  While religion relies on the intuitions developed, passed down and modified in many ways into metaphors, practices and expectations, science, at least nominally, constrains itself to a collegially empirical approach, with heavy dependence on objective data, which is itself a product of independently verifiable observations.

Both of these two spheres of thought have developed significant ‘articulations’ of their respective spheres of thought.  Physics, the mainstay of the science of matter, has laboriously effected its ‘Standard Model’, which underpins many of the modern discoveries of, and applications to, the reality which surrounds us.  Biology, the investigation of living things, through development of the theory of Natural Selection, has brought a profoundly deep understanding of living things, and more importantly, how we and they interact.

The Duality of the Spheres

As is commonly known, while these two profound modes of thought both address the single reality in which we all live, they are frequently seen to be in conflict.  Like nearly every human enterprise, they fall into different sides of an underlying ‘duality’, a dichotomy demarked by a deeply conflicting understanding of the human person.

Physics, with its ‘Standard Model’ can be seen to have developed an ‘articulation of the lithosphere’, and Biology with its theory of Natural Selection an ‘articulation of the biosphere’.  Psychology steps in as the first attempt at a secular ‘articulation of the noosphere’.   But, as discussed in our look at psychology, it seems no more united in addressing the human person than are science and religion.  Science would seem, in its empiricism, to be in competition with religion in its basis of intuition, for a comprehensive ‘articulation of the noosphere’.

The Unity of the Spheres

As Teilhard sees it, it is not the evolutionary perspective that provides the wedge that is evident not only between science and religion, but also among the various ways these beliefs play out within their respective spheres.  He sees these dualities as due to the lack of a comprehensive and universal understanding of evolution itself.  Such an integrative and universal approach to evolution would afford the possibility of bringing these cornerstones of belief into a coherence that begins to erase the dualities that plague them, leading to greater relevance to human life.

From this unique insight Teilhard sees any attempt to articulate the noosphere as requiring a perspective in which matter, life and the person can all be seen in a single context.  Such an integrated perspective will provide the light on reality that we need to successfully manage our habitation of it.  He understands this ‘sphere’ of human existence as needing our grasp of its structure, expressed in our beliefs of its ‘nature’ and the calls to action that such beliefs require.   In his words

 “The organization of personal human energies represents the supreme (thus far) stage of cosmic evolution on earth; and morality (the articulation of the noosphere) is consequently nothing less than the higher development of mechanics and biology.  The world is ultimately constructed by moral forces; and reciprocally, the function of morality is to construct the world.” (Parentheses mine)

   More to the point, he goes on to say

“,,,to decipher man is essentially to try to find out how the world was made and how it ought to go on making it.”

  with the goal, as identified by Jesus, for us to

“.. have life, and have it abundantly.” (John 10:10)

Navigating the Noosphere

In a frequently seen quote, Teilhard remarks that

“Those who set their sails to the winds of life will always find themselves borne on a current to the open sea.”

  As we saw in our treatment of ‘grace’, Teilhard sees the ‘abundant life’ to which Jesus refers as requiring us to develop the skills of reading the wind and tending the tiller.   As he sees it:

“And, conventional and impermanent as they may seem on the surface, what are the intricacies of our social forms, if not an effort to isolate little by little what are one day to become the structural laws of the noosphere.

   In their essence, and provided they keep their vital connection with the current that wells up from the depths of the past, are not the artificial, the moral and the juridical simply the hominized versions of the natural, the physical and the organic?”

Understanding how his three facets of life are reflected in the three aspects of Paul’s Theological Virtues is a starting place for learning how to ‘trim our sails’.

Paraphrasing Teilhard, this ‘trimming our sails to the winds of life’, is nothing more (and as he would add, ‘nothing less’) than aligning our lives with the axis of evolution.  This alignment is where the ‘articulations of the noosphere’ that we have been addressing come in.

The Joy of the Noosphere

As we addressed the virtue of “Hope”, the wonderful facets of the ‘Fruit of the Spirit’ promised by Paul resonate strongly with Carl Rogers’ empirical insights into personal growth.  Seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’ they are not ‘rewards from God’ for following ‘His laws’, but the direct result of first understanding the ‘noospheric articulations’ and then orienting our lives (living the Theological Virtues) to living them out.  While Teilhard’s metaphor of sailing is a poetic way to contemplate the journey of life, it is significant to see his critical point that when we are employing such ‘sailing skills’, it is ‘alignment to the winds’ that makes it possible to be ‘borne by the current’.  The articulations that we humans are developing (thus far still early in the construction stage) are necessary for undertaking the journey of life, but it is the quality of the life, the abundance of it, the richness of it which is enhanced by the attitudes and stances that we have seen in the ‘Theological Virtues’.

The Next Post

In the last several weeks we have been addressing the structure of the noosphere, looking at its ‘articulations’ from the perspective of sacraments, morals, and values, and from the additional perspective of how it is that we can orient ourselves to navigate it.  The goal is not only navigating it successfully, but abundantly: not only are we to manage our lives, but fully partake of the joy that is possible in life.

But there is yet another aspect to these articulations and attitudes, and next week we will begin to explore it by looking at where evolution is taking us.

   How do Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution echo Paul’s insights on love?

Today’s Post

Last week we looked more closely at Teilhard’s recognition of how Love is active in our personal lives as the manifestation of the energy of universal evolution.  We saw that when we decide to act, we bridge the gap between what we believe we can do and what we hope will ensue by cooperating with the flow of energy that we now recognize as love.

This week we will take a final look at Love from Paul’s perspective, seeing a familiar passage in a new way.  In doing so this illustrates how familiar things can take on a new light when we look at them differently.  As T. S. Eliot sees it

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

Reinterpreting Paul

Now that we have looked at the ‘Theological Virtues’ from several secular perspectives, we can return to Paul, the first theologian, who recognized that Love was primary in the teachings of Jesus.

Cynthia Bourgeault is a faculty member of Richard Rohr’s ‘Center for Action and Contemplation’.  In her book, “Love Is Stronger than Death: The Mystical Union of Two Souls” she beautifully uses a well-known passage from Paul to describe growth in “conscious love”:

“Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Corinthians 13:7)

Bourgeault interprets Paul’s four assertions into secular terms which not only expand our treatment of the ‘Theological Virtues’, but weave Teilhard’s ‘articulations of the universe’ into the fabric of our relationships.

Love bears all things  “This does not mean a dreary sort of putting-up-with or victimization. There are two meanings of the word bear, and they both apply. The first means “to hold up, to sustain”—like a bearing wall, which carries the weight of the house. . . . To bear [also] means “to give birth, to be fruitful.” So love is that which in any situation is the most life-giving and fruitful.”

• Here we can see a tangible reminder of the facet of Love that Teilhard refers to as ‘ontological’. Above the biological ‘fruitfulness’ of love there exists the power of love by which we ourselves are born and reborn.

Love believes all things  “. . . .  [This] does not mean to be gullible, to refuse to face up to the truth. Rather, it means that in every possible circumstance of life, there is . . . a way of perceiving that leads to cynicism and divisiveness, a closing off of possibility; and there is a way that leads to higher faith and love, to a higher and more fruitful outcome. To “believe all things” means always to orient yourselves toward the highest possible outcome in any situation and strive for its actualization.”

–    Here we can see the interpolation of Faith being carried into the extrapolation of Hope

Love hopes all things   ”. . . In the practice of conscious love you begin to discover . . . a hope that is related not to outcome but to a wellspring . . . a source of strength that wells up from deep within you independent of all outcomes. . . . It is a hope that can never be taken away from you because it is love itself working in you, conferring the strength to stay present to that “highest possible outcome” that can be believed and aspired to. “

–    Here we can see that the recognition of the flow of energy that we now recognize as Love is not only a foundation for Faith and a basis for Hope, but the very ‘wellspring’ of the agency by which we act.

Finally, Love endures all things   .” . . . Everything that is tough and brittle shatters; everything that is cynical rots. The only way to endure is to forgive, over and over, to give back that openness and possibility for new beginning which is the very essence of love itself. And in such a way love comes full circle and can fully “sustain and make fruitful,” and the cycle begins again, at a deeper place. And conscious love deepens and becomes more and more rooted. . . .”

–    Here Bourgeault restates Teilhard’s vision of the recursive act in which centration and excentration can work to effect our continued ‘compexification’: the continuation of the agency of cosmic evolution through our individual lives.

The Next Post

This week we took a final look at Love, this time by returning to a familiar text of Paul but seeing it through Teilhard’s ‘lens’.  Next week we will overview our travel from ‘the Sacraments’, through Teilhard’s ‘Articulation of the Noosphere’, in Values, Morals and Sacraments and finally in the attitudes captured in Paul’s so-called “Theological Virtues’.

Next week we will; conclude by summing up the process of ‘articulating the noosphere’ and living the ‘Theological Virtues’.

   How can seeing love through Teilhard’s lens help us to use faith to become more hopeful?

Today’s Post

In the past several weeks we have addressed the three so-called “Theological Virtues”, Faith, Hope and Love, from the perspective of the evolutionary ‘lens’ of Teilhard de Chardin.  We have seen them as ‘attitudes’ or ‘stances’ that we can take as we ‘articulate the noosphere’, a mapping of the implicit laws of humanity that move our species forward in the increase of complexity that Teilhard saw as the key metric of continuing evolution.

We saw Faith as the confidence that we build in our capacity to act based on extrapolation of experience of the past.  Looking at Hope in a similar manner, we saw how Hope is manifested in an extrapolation of this experience to a hoped-for result of the act that we undertake.

This week we will take a final look at Love, this time seeing it as the hinge on which the belief afforded by Faith becomes an act whose outcome is anticipated by Hope. 

Present, Past and Future

What does it mean to say that we “live in the present”?  To neurologists, what we know about what we sense is by definition ‘the past’.  Considering that it takes between forty and eighty milliseconds for any sensory information to be introduced to the brain, anything that we’re aware of is by definition, ‘the past’; it has already occurred.  Considering the additional time it takes to make a decision to act on the sensed information, the neurological activation of a physical response (‘acting’) requires an additional delay, and our ultimate response to any external stimulus falls ‘in the past’ of the stimulus itself.  So, neurologically speaking, we cannot live ‘in the present’.  By this reckoning, the ‘present’ is an ephemeral concept which is already in the past by the time we are aware of it.

Yet there is a distinct transition between the past and the future that we perceive, either validly or invalidly, as the ‘present’, and it is in this transition that we act.

So, then, what does it mean when we say that we ‘act’?  What is involved in gathering sufficient motivation to act, to ‘decide’ to act, and then to engage our psychomotor system to carry out the decision?

From Past Faith to Future Hope By Way Of Present Love

Seeing the “Theological Virtues” through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, we saw Faith as an extrapolation of our past which provides us with the confidence, the ‘push’, to act on the one hand, and Hope as a ‘pull’ from the future as we envision a successful outcome of the act on the other.  But what gets us across the divide?

This idea of an ‘energy of activation’, by which we make this transition, is echoed in Teilhard’s collection, “Activation of Energy”.  This collection of articles focuses on the universal energy potential that over time effects increasing complexity in its products, but the application to human life is inescapable.  Each human act carries the potential of raising our ‘human complexity’ to a higher level.  And no human act, as we have seen in the last few weeks, carries more potential for our fulfillment than the act of love.  But this act requires a previous step, and that is, as we have seen, the decision to love.  Such a decision may well indeed be stimulated by sexual attraction, a need for companionship, or a response to a moral imperative, but whatever the source a decision is ultimately required.

Those of us that are engaged in deep commitments are no doubt fully aware of those times in the relationship in which one does not feel ‘in love’.  Early in any relationship, when this occurs there may be a panic that one is no longer “in love”, and that the relationship has thus failed.  The recognition that this emotional reaction may be premature, and that honest self-assessment, open communication with the other, and faith in the relationship is required, is a dramatic and often painful.  It is, however, always a necessary step not only toward strengthening the relationship but in increasing one’s personal maturity as well.  Such a recognition can only come from a ‘decision’, an action of the human neocortex to modulate the instinctive stimuli of the reptilian and limbic brains which may shout, “Danger!  Run!” or “Pain!  Hide!”.  As we have discussed frequently, it is a skill most essential for our personal evolution.

So now we see another role for love in the triad of the ‘Theological Virtues’.  Love may well be, as Teilhard asserts, the only energy that can “unite while differentiating”, bringing us together in such a way in which we become more complete.  But, as the energy of evolution become manifest in our personal lives, it is also the energy that makes it possible for us to make such risky decisions as ‘excentration’ so that we can reap the rewards of our resultant ‘centration’.

We certainly may be able to understand our past well enough to have confidence in ourselves and foresee the future well enough to be enticed by it, but until we engage this flow of universal energy within us, nothing will happen.  Love is indeed the hinge on which Faith results in the outcome promised by Hope.   It is the precise moment of ‘the present’ in which the potential of ‘the past’ can become actualized in the fruit of the ‘future’ in which, as Karen Anderson puts it, “We are in greater possession of ourselves”.

The Next Post

This week we have looked at Love from another perspective, seeing it as the hinge on which the door of Faith is opened to the promises of Hope.  Next week we will take a final look at love, returning to Paul for insight into the works of love in our lives.

  How does Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ show love as the the flow of evolution through us?

Today’s Post

Last week we saw how, in Teilhard’s insights into evolution as a truly universal process, he understood each step of evolution as resulting from a union which produced something new.  He refers to this critical step (without which the universe would be static, unchanging, and effectively ‘still born’) as ‘complexification’.  From such an interpolation of the past, he extrapolates to the future of human love as ‘nothing more’ (and he would add, ‘nothing less’) than the continuation of such a universal dynamic in each human life.

This week we will continue our exploration of this dynamic, seeing how, while such a process indeed continues in our lives, it nonetheless becomes more complex in itself.

Excentration and Centration As The Continuation of Evolution in the Human Person

Teilhard’s insight into love’s excentration-centration recursive activity is drawn from two of his other insights.

First, in many of his works he identifies ‘centration’ as a key aspect of ‘complexification’.  In other words, in evolution the more ‘centered’ an entity is, the higher it can be seen in the order of complexity and the later it appears in the history of evolution.  He offers examples such as nuclei in atoms, atoms in molecules, molecules in cells, central nervous systems in animals, and brains in higher animals.

Second, he notes that

“. .in a converging Universe each element achieves completeness ..  by a sort of inward turn towards the Other (as) its growth culminates in an act of giving and in excentration”.

   Effectively, increase in centration is the essential characteristic of evolved products, but this changes in the human when entities not only unite to produce more complex products, but to increase their own complexity as well. In the human person, morphological evolution is no longer necessary to produce increased complexity: it now emerges within the entity in addition to among entities.   Paraphrasing Confucius, Teilhard and Karen Armstrong, with love we are now brought into a more complete possession of ourselves when we engage into deeper relations with each other.

Teilhard wasn’t the first thinker to understand such reciprocal forces at work in human relationships, but he seems to be the first to understand our uniue human activity of ‘relationship’ in the context of the upsweep of evolution in the universe.

For this spiral to take place, in which human growth results from relationships which enrich growth, we must become conscious of it.  This requires us to be able to see the energy of evolution as it rises within us to be able to fully cooperate with it.

But, It Ain’t Easy

That said, if the current state of the world offers any clue, this is not a trivial undertaking.  As many of our popular love songs suggest, ‘if it were easy they’d be more of it; if there ain’t more of it, it must not be easy’.

Love as understood by Teilhard does not come without work: it requires a conscious decision to rise above the comforting scaffolding of ego, as nearly all religious beliefs express.  As the Marriage Encounter movement stresses, “Love is a decision”, and such decision requires trust that the energy of love will carry us forward to more completeness.  As we have suggested previously, one of the principle mechanisms of our personal ‘complexification’ is development of the skill of using our neocortex brains to moderate the instinctual stimuli of our reptilian and limbic brains, Such skill in ‘decision making’ is a critical facet of this evolutionary skill.

As we only need to look into our own lives to verify, these dynamics of excentration and centration are not without cost.  The process of excentration, traditionally of “loss of one’s self”, “transcendence of egoism”, or even more descriptive of the difficulty, “dying to self”, does not come easy.  As Khalil Gibran says, “The pain you feel is the breaking of the shell which encloses your understanding”.  One aspect of a secular approach to sin can be seen in the resistance, even the avoidance that we offer to such a painful undertaking.

The acknowledgement of the difficulty of such an undertaking better delineates the domains of the ‘Theological Virtues” that we addressed in recent weeks.  In order to take the risks that Love requires, we must have Faith in our power to do so and Hope in the ensuing outcome before we can take the necessary and potentially dangerous leap that Love requires.

So, seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, the mechanisms of the energy of Love by which we are both ‘united’ (become closer) and the same time ‘differentiated’ (become more complete), the energies of cosmic evolution work in the human person just as they were at work in the first ‘atomicization’ of electrons.   However, there are, in the human, two significant exceptions.

The first can be seen in that, while primitive particles could unify in such a way as to increase the complexity of their products, human ‘particles’ can unify in such a way as to increase the complexity of themselves.

The second, which is much more important, is that these human entities must first understand, then trust and finally consciously cooperate with this complex energy to effect such complexity.  The three ‘Theological Virtues’ offer ‘signposts’ for navigating these three activities.

Enter the ‘Theological Virtues’

As we have seen, the ‘Theological Virtues’ have an importance that goes far beyond the conventional religious goal of qualification for the next life. Now seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, they represent the stances, the attitudes that are necessary for us to take on our continued evolution both as persons and as a species.

Teilhard stresses the need for Faith in this process of understanding and cooperating in the excentration/centration interplay: belief that the self will not be lost in this journey from past to future; it will be enhanced.  The true, underlying, core nature of the human person that results from the long rise of consciousness mapped by our knowledge of the past continues to follow the thread of cosmic evolution which leads to the Hope of greater possession of ourselves, fuller being, in the future.  This thread of complexity has manifested itself in the current which runs through life, awareness, and consciousness.  It now continues in us as the Love which powers the engine of our becoming.  While the ‘articulations of the noosphere,’ as mapped by the concepts of sacraments, values and morals, can be seen as the early markers of the pathway of the axis of evolution as it rises in our lives, the ‘Theological Virtues’ offer an increased understanding of how these articulations can be ‘lived out’ in our personal ‘complexification’.

The Next Post

This week we continued to follow Teilhard’s expansion of love from the traditional understanding as an emotional energy which connects us for procreation, social stability and ultimately salvation to a more universal perspective in which Love can be seen as the energy by which we become ‘fuller’ and so continue the rise of complexity in human evolution.

Next week we will take a fifth look at the Theological Virtues by seeing how Love can be seen as the hinge on which the belief afforded by Faith becomes an act whose outcome is anticipated by Hope.

   How does seeing love through Teilhard’s ‘lens’ help us to see it as an aspect of evolutional energy?

Today’s Post

Last week we moved from seeing love as depicted in popular culture (as well as traditional religion) as emotionally based, to seeing it through Teilhard’s ‘lens’ as ontologically based.  To Teilhard, love is much more than an emotional stimulus to procreation, the stability of society, or an act that qualifies us for the next life.  To him, Love was nothing more (and as he would add, “nothing less”) than the current manifestation of the universal energy of evolution as it rises in the human person.   Without denying the significance of love as an ‘act’, Teilhard asserts that it must be understood as an ‘energy’ with which we can cooperate to increase our wholeness, and recognizes it in the context of the wellspring of cosmic evolution.

This week we will move on to address how such an energy can be seen to work among humans to energize our increasing ‘complexification’, both as a species as well as in our individual lives.

 Love as A Force of Evolution

   In Teilhard’s unique ‘lens of universal evolution’, he notes that each step of evolution results from an action and a consequence which effects the increase of complexity in a product. He understands such increase as the primary metric of evolution.  Without this metric, as he points out, universal evolution would have been still born, stagnant, and static.  Everything that we can see around us came into existence from such a process.

The action in each evolutive step going back to the Big Bang is simply the joining of two products of like complexity in a way which results in the consequence of a new product of increased complexity.  John Haught sees this as

“The obvious fact of emergence- the arrival of unpredictable new organizational principles and patterns in nature”

Effectively, in this process, two ‘parent’ entities join on a ‘two dimensional’ plane of common complexity, but the result occurs ‘vertically’, in a third dimension of increased complexity, turning what started out as a two-dimensional activity into three dimensions.  Teilhard sees this simple but profound process underlying the appearance of everything that we can see in the universe.

He notes, however, that science is unable to account for this vertical aspect, even though without it, as he notes, the universe remains static.  Next to the “vast material energies” studied by science, this agent of complexity “adds absolutely nothing that can be weighed or measured”.  Hence there is no branch of science that acknowledges it, much less addresses it.  Again, from Haught

“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.”

   Teilhard devotes a significant amount of his writing to address this aspect of cosmology.  In doing so he notes that this dyadic activity, two entities joining in such a way as to produce a product of higher complexity, occurs at the very basis of cosmic becoming, as described in the fundamental scientific treatment of the Big Bang, and continues unabated all the way to the present day.  Therefore, he sees this simple but profound activity as still at work in human relationships and their resultant contribution to human evolution.  Our love relationships aren’t unique to humans, they are simply the latest echo of the rise of this dyadic activity through each wave of evolution.

How did Teilhard understand how love between humans can be seen to reflect such activity?

 Excentration and Centration

We have frequently adverted to John’s classic assertion that “God is Love and he who abides in Love abides in God and God in him,” to address the nature of love as an ontological effector rather than just an emotion.  Seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, this statement by John speaks volumes about God, about us and about our ongoing genesis as humans.

As we saw last week, Teilhard’s less metaphorical (and more empirically correct) understanding of John is that God is the ground of being which manifests itself in the energy of love, and that when we love we are participating in our individual current of this universal flow of energy.  To Teilhard, as we saw, God is not a ‘person’ who ‘loves’, ‘He’ is the ultimate principle of the energy by which the universe unfolds and by which it eventually manifests itself in the evolutionary product of the ‘person’.

    Teilhard articulates this dynamic further, seeing it in the light of cosmic evolution and particularly in its continuation in the human person.  In relationships between persons, Teilhard sees the workings of love coming about through the dynamics which he refers to as “excentration” and “centration”.

“Excentration” occurs when we are able to grow beyond our biases, assumptions and thought structures and become aware of different and more meaningful aspects of life: the “aha” moments in which we realize the limitation that incomplete presumptions or positions are imposing on us.

“Centration” occurs when this scaffolding of ego gradually falls away and excentration naturally leads to increased transparency, openness, and honesty.   Thus as we, in Jesus’ metaphor, ‘die to ourself’ we become more authentically ourself.  In this new state, our capacity for relationship is also increased, as we saw when we addressed ‘Psychology as Secular Meditation’, as quantified by Carl Rogers.

Engaging in a deep relationship, or deepening the relationship that already exists, enhances not only our self but also our relationships, and contributes to the ability of those that we love to “excentrate”, and thus increase their own maturity and capacity for love.  As their level of person is enhanced and the love returned, this results in an increased level of self-understanding in both persons.

Seen ‘ontologically’, love is a way of making ourselves by making others.  As we have seen, Confucius seems to be the first to have discovered this ontological essence, when he said

“If you would enlarge yourself, you must first enlarge others.  When you enlarge others, you are enlarging yourself.”

The Next Post

This week we followed Paul’s assertion that Love was the most important of the three ‘Theological Virtues’ by following Teilhard’s expansion of love from the traditional understanding as an emotional energy which connects us for procreation, social stability and ultimately salvation to a more universal

perspective in which love can be seen as the energy of universal evolution become manifest in the energy by which we become persons, and so continue the rise of complexity in human evolution.

Next week we will take a fourth look at Love, going a little deeper into how Teilhard’s mapping of ‘excentration’ and ‘centration’ as the principle actions of the dynamic of Love can contribute to our personal ‘complexification’.