How can seeing life through Teilhard’s ‘lens’ help to iive a life more open to the forces of evolution and bring us to ‘fuller being?

Today’s Post

     Last week we saw how we can train ourselves to be more open to the energy of evolution that Teilhard describes and which runs through our lives.

This week we take a closer look at some specifics.

The Aspects of ‘Fuller Being”

In addition to Paul’s list of the facets of ‘the Fruit of the Spirit’, he provides a longer list, this time of the manifestations of love in our lives (From 1 Corinthians 13:4-8)

Patience                               Calmness

Kindness                              Truthfulness

Self-confidence                 Trust

Humility                               Hope

Respect                                Non-egotistical

Perseverance

This list clearly parallels his list of the eight facets of ‘The Fruit of the Spirit’ that were addressed above but have the same reciprocal relation to our quest for ‘fuller’ life.  Both sets of characteristics identify what can be found in authentic human growth, but as commonly reflected in religious thinking, they are less ‘results’ than they are behaviors which must be practiced.

We have seen how Carl Rogers lists the facets of a ‘fuller’ life.

–more integrated hence more effective

– more realistic view of self

– stronger valuation of self

– increasing self-confidence

–more openness to experience, less denial or repression

–more accepting of others, seeing others as more similar

-clearer in communication

-more responsible for actions

-less defensive and anxious

Like Paul’s lists, these characteristics identify a ‘fuller’ life, but like Paul’s characteristics they also reflect the ‘work in progress’ necessary to get there.  Paul’s recommendation to ‘Put on Christ’ by adopting the behavior suggested by these lists is simply a method of training our neocortex brains to become more adept at dealing with reality.  Like Sacks’ ‘rewiring the brain’ by ‘rerouting the writing’, our success in dealing with life increases when we practice such behavior.

One distinct example can be found in one of the most fundamental human activities: relationships.  As we have seen many times, looking through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’, relationships (connections) are essential to the universe’s emergence in the form of increased complexity.  Connectivity between granules of ‘the stuff of the universe’ recurs endlessly in evolution to effect the increase in complexity which eventually manifests itself in the human person’s ‘awareness of consciousness’.

The ‘fly in the ointment’ suggested by almost every religion and reflected in Yuval Harari’s ‘Sapiens”, is that, with the human person, the previously infallible force of ‘instinct’, so successful in our pre-human ancestors, is potentially undermined by our two-edged ‘gift’ of ‘choice’.  While ‘choice’ might well continue our personal and cultural evolution, the making of it is frequently problematic.  Because of this, as we have seen, there is no guarantee that evolution will continue its fourteen billion year rise in the continuation of the human species.

Love and Fuller Being

Teilhard shows how the energy which has so faithfully raised the complexity of the universe thus far can be seen in that which energizes our human relationships: ‘love’.   We have explored the many aspects of this energy by which we are woven into the relationships necessary to our collective states.  In keeping with Teilhard’s convergent spiral of ‘being’ and ‘becoming’, ‘love’ can be seen as not only as a state of relationship but as the agency by which this state emerges.  As Confucius suggests, to get love we must give love, and that’s where ‘choice’ comes in.

Seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, love is quite distinct from the emotional or procreational impetus to unity, it is the ontological basis of the continuation of human evolution.  To love we must decide. Harari is correct when he intuits that with the human mode of consciousness in which we become aware of our awareness, choice is now necessary for its evolutionary continuation.  He is also correct that a dystopian facet of ‘belief’ has wound its way through our history, one which threatens a mode of belief which is more confident, more optimistic, and more conducive to our future.  ‘Belief’ and hence ‘love’ must therefore be consciously ‘chosen’.  Love is, in the human, ultimately a ‘decision’.

Thus, the ability to make decisions in favor of our continued evolution, both as persons continuing our quest for ‘fullness’ and societies continuing their fabrication of the noosphere, we must become more skillful in using our neocortex brains in modulating the instincts of our lower brains.  One way to hone this skill is to adapt the behavior which reflects the presence of the positive manifestations that we have explored thus far.  The lists that Paul and Rogers provide consist of basic practices which can move us in this direction.

An example of such practice can be found in nearly every human relationship.  In our most intimate relationships, found in the lives of committed partners, we profess to ‘love’ each other.   But there are clearly times when the ‘feeling’ of love is absent.  The increasing divorce rate in the West is evidence that this state frequently leads to dissolution of the union.  The recognition that it is possible to continue the relationship is a ‘choice’, one not easy to make but frequently resulting in a deeper relationship.

It is obvious that conflicts are inevitable as two persons pursue their own growth as they are fashioning their relationship.  Faith in one’s unearned capacity to grow and in the ‘grace’ (The flow of energy in human evolution) that comes with this capacity is necessary to cross this bridge while we are building it.  The ‘putting on’ of Jesus that Paul recommends is a straightforward step towards the other side.

In a society which values such appearances of maturity as Paul and Rogers list, their translation into the aspects of human welfare documented by Johan Norval is clear.   If the trends he identified continue, the emergence of a welcoming future becomes certain.  The skills required to continue them, to build a bridge over which we are crossing, are ones in which we must also become proficient.

As we have seen, a welcoming future is not guaranteed.  There are tendrils woven into the complex fabric of the human species that are very capable of resulting in , as Harari predicts, an early demise of Homo Sapiens.  But as Teilhard sees it, while we might be early in the game of making sense of things, the tools for doing so are nonetheless taking shape.  Norberg’s articulation of the shape that they are taking might be an early one, but his articulations are nonetheless examples of what can be seen as we learn to open our eyes to the true immensity of the universe and its path to a future into which we are constantly being welcomed.

The Next Post

This week we took a closer look at how we can posture ourselves to become more open to the energy of evolution as it manifests itself in human life.  While such a practice might saturate most religious teachings, Teilhard shows how they also are intuitive attempts to align life with the flow of evolution that rises through it.  Once again, we are reminded of his poetic observation that

“Those who spread their sails to the winds of life will always be borne on a current towards the open sea.”

   Next week we will take yet another look at this activity to see how Teilhard’s insight can be reflected in individual human life.

   How can seeing life through Teilhard’s ‘lens’ help us to be more open to the forces of evolution which can bring us to ‘fuller being?’

Today’s Post

     Last week we saw how Teilhard’s ‘spiral of evolution’ depicts the process by which the rudimentary elements described by physics reciprocally unite, complexify and re-unite as evolution rises in the universe.

This week we continue our focus on universal evolution to address how it continues in human life.

The Noosphere as the Catalyst to Human Evolution

Teilhard offers a second venue for such reciprocation with his concept of the ‘noosphere’ (July 14, 2022).  In its more common understanding, the noosphere is simply the aggregation of human lore, innovations built up over centuries of human cultural evolution.

But to Teilhard (and to some extent, Richard Dawkins in his concept of accumulated ‘memes’) the noosphere not only exists as a passive ‘bank of ideas’ but as an active agent in human evolution.  Along with the treasure trove of technology that it provides as it increases the individual and collective welfare of our societies, it is the underlying and ever clarifying quantum of guideposts to our behavior.  As Johan Norberg notes, while the innovations and inventions we have seen clearly contribute to our increasing welfare, they are not possible without the cultural insistence on the importance of the human person and the betterment of human relationships.

Thus, the noosphere, as Teilhard sees it, is a key reciprocal agent to our evolution.  As we better understand ourselves and enhance our relationships, we contribute these insights into a collective wisdom that increases our capacity for a clearer understanding that will continue to further our personal as well as our cultural evolution.

Thus, we are back to the ‘chicken-egg’ conundrum proposed by Sacks last week.  Do we act because we evolve, or do we evolve because we act?  Considering the universal convergence that Teilhard sees in the noosphere, the answer is ‘yes’.  The actions of generations of Westerners, demanding more freedom by way of many cycles of ‘charters’ and ‘constitutions’ has contributed cultural ‘DNA’ to an evolutionary process resulting in a society in which increased freedom leads to increased welfare.  While Sacks’ connection between action and neurology might not be strongly suggested here, there seems to be little doubt that the world today (as Norberg documents in posts from Feb 20, 2020 ) is strikingly different from that experienced only a few generations ago.  Actions can lead to consequences which enable further actions.

But the question still remains: how do we keep this recursive cycle going?  How do we assure a future in which the unprecedented progress documented by Norberg will continue?  Put another way, what is required at the unique granularity of the human person to foster the increasing convergence of the aggregate species in such a way that our personal and collective growth to ‘fuller being’ is ensured?

Values and Virtues as ‘Training for the Future’

We saw in the posts beginning April 8, 2021, how Paul masterfully summarizes what Jefferson refers to as “The Morals of Jesus”.  To some extent, Paul addresses Richard Dawkins’ ‘de-baggaging’ of the gospels in his summaries of Jesus’ precepts.  Focusing less on the ‘Stories of Jesus’ found in the gospels, Paul extracts and summarizes the teachings themselves into such lists as the three ‘Theological Virtues’ and the eight examples of the ‘Fruit of the Spirit”.

One of his metaphors is the admonition to “Put on Christ”.  A traditional interpretation is to understand such an action as ‘armoring’ one’s self against unbelievers, but a more direct interpretation is simply to see Jesus as a model for correct behavior.  Of course, the rationale for ‘correct behavior’ as evolved in Western Christianity has traditionally been satisfying God’s criteria for ‘salvation’ as promotion into the next life.  From Teilhard’s insight, however, ‘correct behavior’ involves that which positions us for ‘closer union through fuller being, and fuller being through closer union’, the two essential steps of both human evolution and personal growth.

We saw in the above reference how Paul’s concepts of the ‘Theological Virtues’ and the ‘Fruit of the Spirit’ translate easily into the insights of Teilhard as aspects of human evolution.  We can do likewise as we explore situating ourselves more securely into the ‘tree of evolution’.

We have suggested frequently that a necessary aspect of human evolution is developing the skill of using the neocortex brain to modulate the instinctual stimuli of the ‘lower’ reptilian and limbic brains, and further learning to use the two (left and right) thinking modes of the neocortex harmoniously in dealing with reality.  As we saw last week, Sacks observes how the performance of skills such as writing sharpens our mental ability to think more clearly.  This reflects one of the most common adages in history, ‘Practice makes Perfect”.  Athletes train, scholars and linguists memorize, children are taught to read, pilots train in simulators.  All anticipate an increase in the skills to which they train.
We have seen how Paul’s eight facets of the ‘Fruit of the Spirit’ can be understood as facets of the ‘happiness’ that is possible as we move toward Jesus’ ‘fuller being’.  They can also be seen as both aspects of behavior which reflect an inner maturity and acts of ‘training’ which can lead to the ‘fuller being’ that Jesus suggests is possible for us.  As in all ‘training’, repetition of an action enhances our ability to act.  Thus, when Paul tells us to “Put on Christ”, he suggests that acting out the behavior that he identifies as resulting from ‘an indwelling of the spirit’ will lead to the ‘fullness of being’ in which these facets can be found.

The Next Post

This week we moved from an approach to understanding evolution as it proceeds in the universe to looking at its traces on human existence.  As Teilhard suggests (and echoed by Haught and others) a rising awareness of this phenomenon in our personal lives is not only critical to the quality of life, but also to the continuation of our species.

Next week we will continue this approach to see how Paul’s insights into such aspects of human life are echoed in today’s psychology.

   How does seeing evolution through Teilhard’s ‘lens’ help us to participate in it?

Today’s Post

For the past several weeks we have been exploring the slippery phenomena of human happiness, concluding that a clearer understanding of our fit into our evolutionary process can bring us into ‘fuller being’ and hence greater satisfaction.

This week we will begin a closer look at how such a clearer understanding of this process can help us to do this.

How Did We Get Here?

We have seen how Teilhard and other contemporary thinkers offer insight into the critical process of ‘making sense of things.’  Very few thinkers from the full spectrum of these insights believe that humans are near the end of their process of becoming what it is possible for them to become.  The materialists at one end of the spectrum cite the ongoing mutations of the genomes that are the machinery for our future morphological manifestations.  Those at the other end take note of the incompleteness of our understanding of the universe and our role in it.

At the same time, there seems little agreement between these two poles of thought on what is essential to the continuation of the evolution of our species.  We can paraphrase Carl Rogers’ insight on personal maturity into recognition of the potential of our species to

“… reorganize itself at both the personal and cultural levels in such a manner as to cope with life more constructively, more intelligently, and in a more socialized as well as a more satisfying way”.

   This is deeply resonant with Teilhard’s assertion that we must

“…continually find 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.”

   While surely a daunting task, we saw back in August how Johan Norberg, in one of the first attempts to gather data on such a process as these two thinkers propose, offers a relatively unambiguous picture of our potential for evolutionary advancement.  Building the bridge upon which we are travelling is surely risky, but if we understand how to put our history into an objective perspective (as Norberg suggests above), we can’t help but be encouraged in its construction.

Therefore, a recalibrated look at the past helps to see how far we’ve come and to extrapolate to a future which we can see as ‘welcoming’.  We have seen John Haught’s’ insight that such a recalibration helps us to read

“… nature, life, mind and religion as 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.”

   For all that, then, how are we to go about Roger’s ‘reorganization’ and Teilhard’s ‘rearrangements’ to ensure Haught’s realization of a ‘richer and fuller’ future?

Thinking With The Whole Brain

We saw in our look at human history how it can be seen to unfold as humans began to supplement the long legacy of reasoning through ‘right brain intuition’ by introducing the skill of ‘left brain empiricism’.  Jonathan Sacks traces this ‘neurological’ path through the slow reversal from ‘right to left’ writing (primarily written by the left hand) to that of writing in a ‘left to right’ direction (primarily written by the right hand).  He tracks this transformation as seen in the evolution of writing from the Phoenicians in the tenth century BCE to that of the Greeks by the sixth century BCE.   While this might initially be seen as simply a change in custom, Sacks goes further as he correlates this ‘custom’ with the unprecedented rise of empiricism seen in the explosion of Greek thinking with the appearance of Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, and many others whose empirical thoughts laid the ground for the later emergence of science.  He cites the neurological aspect of this evolution by noting that not only did the ‘handedness direction’ change, so did the hand commonly used to do the writing.  Right-to-left writing is done by the left hand, but left-to-right writing is done by the right hand.  Since such ‘handedness’ is controlled by brain hemispheres the shift that Sacks notes indicates a shift in the brain activity which controls the writing.

The period from the emergence of Greek empiricism to the first stirrings of Western Science, (approximately two thousand years, a blink of the evolutionary eye) is evidence of the slowly emerging skill of ‘thinking with both sides of the brain’.  The practice of using of the neocortex brain to modulate the stimuli of the ‘lower’ reptilian and limbic brains predates this relatively new skill, as can be seen in nearly every ‘pre-empirical’ society in their growing awareness that a conscious relationship to both the environment and to our fellow humans is necessary for social stability.  The many expressions of ‘correct’ human relationships can be seen as evolving from the basic axiom of Confucius,

“Do not do to others what you would not like done to yourself”.

   However, the many historic examples of human activity which are orthogonal to this axiom offer evidence of how difficult it is to practice.

The Reciprocal Nature of Evolution

Such difficulty is much in evidence as the ability to address ‘self’ emerges in human culture.  In our rapidly increasing access to ‘news’, afforded by the exponential growth in communication technologies, we are constantly inundated with evidence of the ills of our times.  As we saw in April 2020, there is a tendency towards a ‘moral lassitude’ which presents itself as a diminishing confidence in the future.  To many (as can be seen frequently in history), belief in an ‘end times’ offers the ‘promise’ of a supernatural intervention in which God will finally repair the mistakes of his creation.

Such dystopia is clear evidence of the difficulty of practicing Confucius’ axiom.  What’s the alternative?

We can start by recognizing the reciprocal nature of the evolutionary process in which we are enmeshed.  An example of such a phenomenon can be found in Sacks’ example of the relation of thinking to writing.  In his example above, a ‘chicken-egg’ question arises.  Did the practice of writing change from left-to-right because the skill of using the left brain emerged, or did the left- brain practice emerge because the ‘handedness’ of writing changed?  Either way, we can see a cultural norm and a neurological capability change in concert with each other.  This suggests that the use of a skill supplements its facility, which in turn enhances the use of it.

We can see another example in the common cycle of intuition-to-empiricism activity found in the human pursuit of the concept of ‘energy’.  Newton began this cycle with the intuition of the existence of an agency of motion.  He goes on to articulate this agency as ‘force’, framing it in an equation which equates the mass of an object to its rate change of velocity to determine the force.  This in turn leads to other intuitions of how this force can be ‘employed’, which leads to further application of Newton’s articulation into designs of machinery which supplement human work.  This blossoms into standards of conduct for the human activity which employs these machines.

Each of these steps involves a collaboration between states of ‘imagining’ (right-brained intuition) and processes of ‘implementing’ (left-brained empiricism) in a spiral which leads from less complex results to ones that are more complex.

We can see this reciprocal nature of evolution at work in the very essence of universal evolution.  In the post of June 2, 2022 we outlined Teilhard’s ‘convergent spiral’ in which the union of grains of matter can result in new grains whose enhanced complexity further enhance their capacity for future union.  This reciprocity recurs in the convergent spiral of history, with the ‘coefficient of complexity’ increasing in each cycle and thus increasing the potential for union all the way up to the evolutionary phenomena of the human person.

The Next Post

Putting our evolution into the context offered by Teilhard, Jonathan Sacks, Richard Rohr and John Haught is essential for ‘making sense’ of things in such a way that we can begin to ‘pay attention’ to how evolution emerges in our lives.  This week we took a first look at how evolution can be seen on a ‘macro’ level.  Next week we will narrow the focus to how these forces play out in human life, and, more importantly, how we can posture ourselves to better cooperate with them.

 

Today’s Post

For the past nine weeks we have been exploring the phenomenon of ‘human happiness’ from reaction to the ‘pain of convergence’ caused by the facets of our evolution to outlining the eight facets of happiness that occur when we manage to open our lives to it.

This week we’ll sum up these nine posts.

Why Pain?

Richard Rohr frequently mentions a basic goal of religion as ‘reconnecting our individual parts to the whole’, as seen in the name itself, ‘re-ligio’.

The problem arises, however, when such a connection becomes difficult, seemingly impossible, and we are caught up in what is often referred to as ‘existential angst’, pain which is unfocussed and leaves us feeling alienated and alone.  In such a state, ‘better’ is always the enemy of ‘good enough’, “yesterday was the best day of the rest of our life”, and the ability to feel satisfied denied us.

In addition, we are caught up in the inevitable side effect of human evolution: compression.  With the crowding that we see increasing every day, on our streets, in our schools, in our neighborhoods, our personal space increasingly dwindles.   The need for re-connection is countered with the seeming need for de-connection.

As Yuri Harari points out in his book, “Sapiens”, these articulations of our existential angst can be traced to our breaking of the ‘evolutionary covenant’ that ancestors enjoyed in their millions of years on this planet: the evolution of their species proceeded at the same pace as the evolution of their environment.  Yuval notes that, distinct from our pre-human ancestors, we have evolved much faster than our skills of accommodation with the environment could develop.

To make matters worse, we exacerbated this disconnect by degrading the environment itself.  And even worse, our ancestors dealt with population growth by simply disseminating, a tactic that we can no longer employ as once-empty spaces disappear.
According to Harari, this has robbed us of the evolutionary balance that our ancestors enjoyed with their environment, and thus opening us up to a future of continued disconnect with not only our environment but to ourselves as well.  This ‘evolutionary singularity’, as he sees it, prevents us from experiencing true happiness as the goal of ‘re-ligio’ becomes unobtainable.

Toward Happiness

We went on to consider this dystopian conclusion in the light of three perspectives on happiness that show a different outcome to our evolution:

• Happiness from the material perspective

There is much in contemporary society, news, religious lore and scientific theory which address the human experience of ‘happiness’, but as we noted, very little of it is consistent, and much is contradictory.  Other than being highly subjective, and subject to physiological stimulation, one does not come away with a comprehensive understanding of what happiness is and how to come by it.

• Happiness from the evolutionary perspective

We noted that if Teilhard’s perspective on evolution is applied, and the ‘rise of complexity’ from the big bang to the present is still alive in human evolution, then some optimism in the future can be justified.  Therefore, such an insight into the process of evolution is a facet of ‘being happy’.  Just ‘belief in the future’ alone contributes to our happiness.   As Patricia Albere, author of “Evolutionary Relationship”, puts it, this long history of rising complexity suggests 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”.

• Happiness from the ‘spiritual’ perspective

We noted that Teilhard’s use of this term differs considerably from that of traditional religion.  Key to his perspective is the ‘terrain of synergy’ in which the insights of science and religion can be seen to overlap.  As we have addressed many times, science and religion have much to offer each other, and the subject of happiness is no exception.

We also noted the insights from John Haught which clearly delineates this terrain from that of traditional religion and science.  Such delineation also opens the subject of happiness to understanding it from the perspective of Western religion.  This insight provides further articulation to how Albere’s suggestion of ‘paying attention’ can take place.

We ended our look at happiness by proceeding with the process of ‘reinterpretation’ of traditional Christian tenets.  Once again, we saw how Teilhard’s ‘principle of evolutionary context’ makes it possible to understand anew how our religious lore can become more relevant to our lives, and hence our continued evolution.

We first looked at how Teilhard’s three ‘vectors’ of universal evolution: ‘forward’, ‘inward’ and ‘upward’, manifest in every step of evolution from the big bang to the human person, can be seen as active in us when we reinterpret Paul’s essential actions of ‘faith’, ‘hope’ and ‘love’.

Finally, we reinterpreted Paul’s ‘Fruit of the Spirit’ into articulations of nine facets of human life which underlie the dimension of human happiness.  While the subject of human happiness might well be a ‘slippery subject’, the facets of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control certainly offer an outline for a relationship to life that brings us ‘happiness’.

In this search for Harari’s ‘accommodation to evolution’, we have generally taken two approaches to Patricia Albere’s suggestion to ‘pay attention’ so that we can learn to trust evolution, one from Maurice Blondel and the other from John Haught.

From Blondel,

“In the light of evolution, religious tenets can be reinterpreted in terms of human life.”

   Then Haught,

Family do you have any Tylenol yes Would you let me know get some town off for you Yes I have some Tylenol would you like me to get it for you well I’m i’m out and the one I had was outdated anyway I mean it worked but I don’t have anymore would you like me to go get up and get you some well you don’t you don’t have to do it right now is it in your drawer can I find it in now i’ve got it in a bottle an older model because the bottle let it came in in a broken cap so I just put it in the bottle that I got the Tylenol out of so if it’s got a date on it ignored OKOK so I’ll book a lady who get it for you No it’s ok I 0 ok“…every aspect of religion gains new meaning and importance once we link it to the new scientific story of an unfinished universe.”

   Haught proposes that such an approach to the nature of the cosmos can also bring about a profound sense of ‘belonging’ once we begin to trust the upwelling of wholeness warranted by fourteen or so billion years of ‘complexification’.

“An anticipatory reading of the cosmic story therefore requires a patient forbearance akin to the disposition we must have when reading any intriguing story.  Reading the cosmic story calls for a similar kind of waiting, a policy of vigilance inseparable from what some religious traditions call faith.  Indeed, there is a sense in which faith, as I use the term…, is patience”.

   Thus, the anticipatory approach to the cosmic story requires a certain patience with the ongoing process of complexification, certain in confidence in a future that somehow will be better than the past.  Placing the universe into the context of becoming requires us to understand that

I think I’m going to go out and try to take a little walk I don’t know if that’s going to work or not it’s very beautiful outside did you walk to Daniel’s from Stevenson or did you go afterwards after I got the car I drove to Dave that’s it’s a little too far to walk“Not-yet, however, is not the same as non-being.  It exists as a reservoir of possibilities that have yet to be actualized.  It is a realm of being that has future as its very essence.”

   Albere’s “paying attention” is echoed in Haught’s tapping into this ‘reservoir of possibilities”.  As Teilhard puts it, “Those who set their sails to the winds of life will always find themselves borne on a current to the open sea”.

Therefore, seeing happiness through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution shows that it is not only possible in our species, but to a large extent it is both necessary for our continued evolution and the payoff for the finding of our place in it.

The Next Post

This week we wrapped up our look at the experience of human happiness, tracing it from “The Terrain of Synergy’ to a practical way to relook at our religious lore and seeing it through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’.

Next week we move on to the idea of living life in a way in which Albere’s “paying attention” can bring us into a closer resonance with the energy of evolution that Teilhard asserts rises in us.

     How can Teilhard’s ‘lens’ help us extrapolate religion and psychology into human happiness?

Last Week

For the last several weeks we have been addressing human happiness from the perspectives of materiality, evolution, and spirituality.  This week we will look at two last facets, those of psychology and religion.

The Psychological Articulation of Happiness

As we addressed the idea of meditation as a search for the ‘cosmic spark’ that lies at the core of each product of evolution, and therefore at the core of ‘personness’, we recognized the practice of psychology as a science-based approach to facilitating this search.

Specifically, we noted the approach taken by Dr. Carl Rogers as he introduced an approach to this facilitation in which the ‘therapist’ acted as a guide to the ‘client’ in undergoing such a search.  We listed many of the outcomes that Rogers records in such ‘facilitations’ and how they are examples of the results of the searching.  In all cases, Rogers records a path from ‘less whole’ to ‘more whole’.

As nearly all religions and most psychological schools assert, such a journey, if successful, will result in an increased degree of ‘happiness’.  Thus, Rogers’ articulation of the journey’s discrete steps and distinct outcomes offers an articulation of the concept of happiness itself.

As we saw, Rogers starts with a basic belief that humans are capable of happiness, and that the client can

“… reorganize himself at both the conscious and deeper levels of his personality in such a manner as to cope with life more constructively, more intelligently, and in a more socialized as well as a more satisfying way”.

   This potential to ‘reorganize himself’ in such a way as to ‘cope with life’ in a ‘more satisfying way’ is clearly one of the essentials of human happiness.  In the actualizing of this potential, we begin to move from the position that happiness ‘comes from without’ and that we are dependent on circumstances for our happiness, to the position that happiness can indeed result from our readiness to ‘reorganize ourselves’. We can become responsible for our own happiness.

Rogers goes on to list the characteristics of such reorganized life:

–more integrated hence more effective

–more realistic view of self

– stronger sense if valuation of self

– increasing self-confidence

–more openness to experience, less denial or repression

–more accepting of others, seeing others as more similar

-clearer in communication

-more responsible for actions

-less defensive and anxious

   He summarizes the characteristics of such a person:

– Increasingly open to personal experience, permitting less defensiveness

– Increasingly “existential”; living more fully in each moment, in touch with experiences and feelings

– Increasingly trusting of his own organism, able to trust those feelings and experiences

– Increasingly able to function more completely

   In Rogers we see ‘articulations of happiness’: objective measures of the presence of maturity that is possible in human life and surely constitute many of the dimensions possible in human happiness.

The Religious Articulation of Happiness

All religions in some way address ‘how we should be in order to become what we can be’.  Many stress the necessity to undergo ‘diminishments’ in ‘this life’ in order qualify for ‘reimbursement’ in ‘the next’, which suggests that, as Yuval Harari (“Sapiens”) does, we should not expect much in the way of human happiness.  Others insist that real happiness in this life consists of a ‘mystical’ disassociation with society so that an ecstatic union can be consummated with the divine.  Still others suggest that since life is such an unfair proposition, all that is left is resignation.  Christianity, put into the context of Jewish tradition, can be seen to reflect most of these positions.

But not in all of its manifestations. The New Testament, with its insistence on the potential of intimacy with the ‘ground of being’, contains an articulation of what can happen in the human person when they become aware of the ‘indwelling’ of ‘the spirit’.

For the most part, as Christian theology has evolved, this has suggested a reward ‘in this world’ for ‘faith’.  From the vantage point of Blondel, and then Teilhard, the evolutionary approach to understanding makes this facet of belief, as it makes many others, ripe for reinterpretation.

The ‘Fruit’ of the Cosmic Spark

The ‘Fruit of the Spirit’ is Paul’s term that lists nine attributes of a person or community living ‘in accord with the Holy Spirit’.  Chapter 5 of Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians lists them:

 “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”

   As we saw in the series on the ‘Theological Virtues’, reinterpreting the concept of the ‘Spirit’ involves understanding ‘spirit’ in Teilhard’s terms of the natural vein of energy that rises in us as a manifestation of the universal energy of evolution.  As we saw, Teilhard understands spirituality as

“… 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’.

    Thus ‘spirituality’ can be seen, as Paul Davies puts it, as the ‘software’ by which the ‘hardware’ of matter increases in complexity over time.

This is the ‘hermeneutic’ which we have used throughout to ‘reinterpret’ the tenets of Western religion as we approach the ‘filtering’ of it in search of how this ‘software’ is at work in our lives.

From this vantage point, we can reinterpret Paul’s ‘Spirit’ as simply that which lifts us into ‘fuller being’ as we evolve.  And in this uplifting, we can see yet more facets of the potential for human happiness.

Love –  We have addressed the attribute of love several times, noting the significant difference between the traditional understanding of it as the emotion by which we are attracted to each other and Teilhard’s insight that it is a manifestation of the universal evolutive energy by which things become more complex, and hence more united over time in such a way as they become more complete.  By participating in love we become more complete, more whole.  As Teilhard puts it

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

Peace –  It is hard to imagine something more conducive to happiness than peacefulness.  Such a state can arise in us when we realize that our efforts to grow more complete are assured by a universal energy which rises unbidden and unearned within us.  God, as Blondel understood ‘Him’, is on our side. Life, as it is offered to us as a gift, is guaranteed to be open to our strivings, and is welcoming to our labors.  As the Ground of Being is uncovered as our own personal ground of existence, it is understood more as father than as fate.

Patience – Patience becomes more than long-suffering, teeth gritting endurance necessary for ‘salvation’, but the natural acceptance of what cannot be changed in light of Teilhard’s “..current to the open sea” on which we are carried when we ‘…set our sails to the winds of life.”

Recognition of the Cosmic Spark within us, the ‘gifted’ nature of it, and confidence in where it is taking us, can instill a patience with the vagaries of life that would have been previously considered to be naive.  It is the state that can be experienced as we “awaken to the coming of more-being on the horizon” (John Haught).

Kindness – As an essential building block of both society and personal relationships, kindness is prescribed by nearly every religion in their variations of the ‘Golden Rule’.  Beyond this prescription is the natural emergence of kindness as a recognition that not only is the Cosmic Spark active in ourselves, but in others as well.  Treating others as we would be treated ourselves requires us to be aware of how our own Cosmic Spark is the essence of being by which we all reflect Teilhard’s ‘axis of evolution’.

Johan Norberg attributes the building of human welfare that he documents in his book, “Progress” to the improvement of human relationships which underpins it.  Kindness is one of the building blocks to the effectiveness of relationships.

Goodness –  Goodness, of course, is that tricky concept which underlays all the ‘fruits’ of Paul.  In Paul, as echoed by Teilhard, that which is ‘good’ is simply that which moves us ahead, both as individuals and members of our societies.  If we are to have ‘abundance’ of life, whatever contributes to such abundance is ‘good’.

Faithfulness – As we saw in our look at the Theological Virtues, faith is much more than intellectual and emotional adherence to doctrines or dogmas as criteria for entry into ‘the next life’.  Faith has an ontological character by which we understand ourselves to be caught up in a ‘process’ which lifts us from the past and prepares us for a future that, while it might be unknown, is nevertheless fully manageable.

Gentleness – As a mirror to ‘goodness’, ‘gentleness’, once we have become aware of the Cosmic Spark not only in ourselves but in all others, becomes the only authentic way of relating to others.

Self-Control – Self-control acknowledges that while we might be caught up in a process by which we become what it is possible to become, this process is dependent upon our ability and willingness to choose.  Being carried by Teilhard’s ‘current towards the open sea’ (‘Patience’, above) still requires us to develop the skills of ‘sail setting’ and ‘wind reading’.  The instinctual stimuli of the reptilian and limbic brains do not dissipate as we grow, but the skill of our neocortex brains to modulate them must be judiciously developed.

Next Week

This week we took a second look at how traditional Western religious insights into human life can be extracted from their traditional religious vernacular and understood anew when seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’.  This week, just as we saw last week, those insights proposed by Paul are easily placed into an evolutionary context when seen from the perspective of Teilhard’s evolutionary world view.

This, of course, is another example of Blondel’s approach to religion: in the light of evolution, religious tenets can be reinterpreted in terms of human life.  Or, as John Haught puts it

“…every aspect of religion gains new meaning and importance once we link it to the new scientific story of an unfinished universe.”

This permits us to move, as John Haught suggests, from the “nonnatural mode of causation” fostered by traditional religion to one which not only is “.. linked ..to the scientific story” but retains traditional religion’s emphasis on the human person.  This emphasis can, in turn, sharpen the focus with which the human person is treated by traditional science.

Next week we will sum up our exploration of the human attribute of ‘happiness’.

   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.