Monthly Archives: May 2018

May 24 – A Final Look at Love, From Paul

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Today’s Post

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

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

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

Reinterpreting Paul

Now that we have looked at the ‘Theological Virtues’ from several secular perspectives, I’d like to go back to a very familiar passage from Paul, our first theologian, who recognized that Love was primary in the teachings of Jesus.

Cynthia Bourgeault is a faculty member of Richard Rohr’s ‘Center for Action and Contemplation’.  In her book, Love Is Stronger than Death: The Mystical Union of Two Souls (Monkfish Book Publishing: 2014, 2007, 1999, 1997), 171-174), she beautifully uses a well-known passage from Paul to describe growth in “conscious love” in her sermon, given at her daughter’s wedding.  The passage is:

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

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

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

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

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

–    Here we can see the interpretation of Faith being carried into the anticipation of Hope

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

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

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

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

The Next Post

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

Next week we wil; conclude this phase of the blog by summing up the process of ‘articualting the noosphere’ and living the ‘Theological Virtues.

May 17 – Virtues: Love, Part 5, As the Intersection Between Faith and Hope

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Today’s Post

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

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

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

Present, Past and Future

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

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

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

From Past Faith to Future Hope By Way Of Present Love

In our secular approach to the “Theological Virtues”, we saw Faith as an interpolation of our past which provides us with the confidence, the ‘motivation’, to act on the one hand, and Hope as a ‘pull’ from the future as we envision a successful outcome of the act on the other.  But what gets us across the divide?

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

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

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

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

The Next Post

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

May 10 – Virtues: Love, Part 4, Evolution Become Conscious of Itself

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Today’s Post

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

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

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

The Excentration-Centration reciprocal activity is drawn from two Teilhard insights.  First, in many of his works he identifies ‘centration’ as a key aspect of ‘complexification’.  In other words, in evolution the more ‘centered’ an entity is, the higher it can be seen in the order of complexity and the later in the history of evolution.  He offers examples such as nuclei in atoms, nuclei in cells, central nervous systems in animals, and brains in higher animals.  Second, he notes that “. .in a converging Universe each element achieves completeness.. by a sort of inward turn towards the Other (as) its growth culminates in an act of giving and in excentration”.
Effectively, centration is the essential characteristic of evolved products, but this changes in the human when entities not only unite to produce more complex products, but they unite in order to increase their own complexity as well. This recursive action, such increase in ‘centricity, however,’ requires an increase in ‘excentricity’ in order to effect the increased complexity of both partners.

Teilhard wasn’t the first thinker to understand such reciprocal forces at work in human relationships.  Such a dynamic seems to have first been recognized by Confucius some five hundred years BCE,

  “In order to establish oneself, one should try to establish others.  In order to enlarge oneself, one should try to enlarge others.”

   Jesus himself asserted that we must ‘lose’ ourselves in order to ‘find’ ourselves.

In such a dynamic, “excentration” can be seen to foster a renewed “centration“, which in turn fosters a continued “excentration” and so on.  In this rich recursive rondo, both persons become more complete, more “realized of their potentials” than before.  Essentially, in this way our relationships are the fertile ground for our growth. This growth in turn fosters the deepening of our relationships, which further fosters our growth.

Such a process goes far beyond responding to instinctive urges to procreate, or to fulfilling emotional needs for comfort.  It is the essential act by which we become what it is possible for us to become.

But, It Ain’t Easy

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

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

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

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

So, in Teilhard’s understanding of the mechanisms of the energy of Love by which we are both ‘united’ and ‘differentiated’, we can see the energies of cosmic evolution at work in the human person just as they were at work in the first assemblages of electrons.  There are, in the human however, two significant exceptions.

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

The second, which is much more important, is that these human entities must first understand, then trust and finally consciously cooperate with this complex energy to effect such complexity.  This is where the three ‘Theological Virtues’ come in.

Enter the ‘Theological Virtues’

As we have seen, the ‘Theological Virtues’ have an importance that goes far beyond the conventional religious goal of qualification for the next life.  In our secular reinterpretation, they represent the stances, attitudes that are necessary for our continued evolution both as persons and as a species.

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

The Next Post

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

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

May 3 – Virtues: Love, Part 3 – Love: From Attracting to Becoming

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Today’s Post

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

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

Love as A Force of Evolution

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

The action in each evolutive step going back to the Big Bang is simply the joining of two products of like complexity and the consequence is a new product of increased complexity.  Effectively, the two ‘parent’ entities join on a ‘two dimensional’ plane of common complexity, but the result occurs ‘vertically’, in a third dimension of increased complexity, turning what started out as a two-dimensional activity into three dimensions.  Teilhard sees this simple but profound process underlying the appearance of everything that we can see in the universe.

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

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

How did Teilhard address how Love between humans can be seen to reflect such activity?

Excentration and Centration

We have frequently adverted to John’s classic assertion that “God is Love and he who abides in Love abides in God and God in him,” to address the nature of Love as a force rather than just an emotion.  As Teilhard understands it, this statement by John speaks volumes about God, about us and about our ongoing genesis as humans.

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

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

“Excentration” occurs when we are able to grow beyond our biases, assumptions and thought structures and become aware of different and more meaningful concepts of life: the “aha” moments in which we realize this or that presumption which holds us back.  As this scaffolding of ego gradually falls away, excentration naturally leads to increased transparency, openness and honesty, which are necessary for a deep relationship.

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

The Next Post

This week we followed Paul’s assertion that Love was the most important of the three ‘Theological Virtues’ by following Teilhard’s expansion of love from the traditional understanding as an emotional energy which connects us for procreation, social stability and ultimately salvation to a more universal perspective in which Love can be seen as the energy of universal evolution become manifest in the energy by which we become persons, and so continue the rise of complexity in human evolution.

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