Monthly Archives: May 2021

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May 27, 2021 –  With Love, Evolution Becomes Conscious of Itself

   How is love the awareness of the flow of evolution through us?

Today’s Post

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

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

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

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

First, in many of his works he identifies ‘centration’ as a key aspect of ‘complexification’.  In other words, in evolution the more ‘centered’ an entity is, the higher it can be seen in the order of complexity and the later it appears in the history of evolution.  He offers examples such as nuclei in atoms, 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, increase in centration is the essential characteristic of evolved products, but this changes in the human when entities not only unite to produce more complex products, but they unite in order to increase their own complexity as well. In the human person, morphological evolution is no longer necessary to produce increased complexity: it now emerges within the entity in addition to among entities.   Paraphrasing Confucius, Teilhard and Karen Armstrong, with love we are now brought into a more complete possession of ourselves when we engage into deeper relations with each other.

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

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

But, It Ain’t Easy

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

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

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

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

So, in Teilhard’s understanding of the mechanisms of the energy of Love by which we are both ‘united’ (become closer) and the same time ‘differentiated’ (become more complete), we can see the energies of cosmic evolution at work in the human person just as they were at work in the first ‘atomicization’ 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.  The three ‘Theological Virtues’ offer ‘signposts’ for navigating these three activities.

Enter the ‘Theological Virtues’

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

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

The Next Post

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

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

May 20, 2021- Reorienting Love From Attracting to Becoming

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   How we become more as we learn to love more

Today’s Post

Last week we moved from seeing love as depicted in popular culture (as well as traditional religion) as emotionally  based, to seeing it through Teilhard’s 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, and recognizes it in the context of the wellspring of cosmic evolution.

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

Love as A Force of Evolution

   In Teilhard’s unique 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, and static.  Everything that we can see around us came into existence from such a process.

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

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

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

He notes, however, that science is unable to account for this vertical aspect, even though without it, as 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.  Again, from Haught

“Running silently through the heart of matter, a series of events that would flower into ‘subjectivity’ (the ‘person) has been part of the universe from the start. So hidden is this interior side of the cosmos from public examination that scientists and philosophers with materialist leanings usually claim it has no real existence.”

Teilhard devotes a significant amount of his writing to address this aspect of cosmology.  In doing so he notes that this dyadic activity, two entities joining in such a way as to produce a product of higher complexity, occurs at the very basis of cosmic becoming, as described in the fundamental scientific treatment of the Big Bang (Figure 1), and continues unabated all the way to the present day.  Therefore, he sees this simple but profound activity as still at work in human relationships and their resultant contribution to human evolution.  Our Love relationships aren’t unique to humans, they are simply the latest echo of the rise of this dyadic activity through each wave of evolution.

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

Excentration and Centration

We have frequently adverted to John’s classic assertion that “God is Love and he who abides in Love abides in God and God in him,” to address the nature of love as an ontological effector rather than just an emotion.  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 empirically correct) understanding of John is that God is the ground of being which manifests itself in the energy of love, and that when we love we are participating in our individual current of this universal flow of energy.  To Teilhard, as we saw, God is not a ‘person’ who ‘loves’, ‘He’ is the ultimate principle of the energy by which the universe unfolds and by which it eventually manifests itself in the evolutionary product of the ‘person’.

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

“Excentration” occurs when we are able to grow beyond our biases, assumptions and thought structures and become aware of different and more meaningful aspects of life: the “aha” moments in which we realize the limitation that incomplete presumptions or positions are imposing on us.  As this scaffolding of ego gradually falls away, excentration naturally leads to increased transparency, openness and honesty, and thus we become more ‘centered’.  In this new state, our capacity for relationship is also increased, as we saw when we addressed Psychology as Secular Meditation, as quantified by Carl Rogers.

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

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

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

The Next Post

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

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

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

May 13, 2021: – Love As The Continuing Energy of Evolution

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How does love create?

Today’s Post

Last week we took a first look at the so-called ‘Theological Virtue’ of Love by seeing it in the context of an emotion-based ‘act’ of personal relationship in which we are connected for procreation, social stability and ultimately salvation.  This week we will take a second look informed by Teilhard’s understanding of it as the universal energy of evolution become manifest in human life by which we continue the fourteen billion years of evolution’s process of increase in complexity.

We will see Love from Teilhard’s insight, as less emotional than ontological. 

The Ontological Side of Love

Maurice Blondel articulated what had long been experienced by the great mystics when he asserted that:

“It is impossible to think of myself…over here, and then of God, as over against us.”

  He goes on to explain why he asserts this:

“This is impossible because I…have come to be who I am through a process in which God is involved.”

   This process by which we “come to be who we are” is part of Teilhard’s essential insight: Love is the manifestation of the energy of universal evolution as it rises through the human person.  He compares love to the phenomenon of gravity which pulls the grains of matter together to effect higher forms of reality when he asks:

“Can we not say quite simply that in its (love’s) essence it is the attraction exercised on each unit of consciousness by the center of the universe in course of taking shape?”

   This process by which we “come to be who we are” is part of Teilhard’s essential insight: Love is the manifestation of the energy of universal evolution as it rises through the human.  He saw a distinctive facet of this energy of evolution at work in every step of the universe’s emergence, such as the forces which forge atoms from particulate electrons, electro-chemical forces forging millions of types of molecules from a few hundred types of atoms, the energies escorting molecules across seemingly impenetrable thresholds to cellular formation and so on to those forces which unite us in such a way that we are ‘differentiated’ into distinct but highly ‘connectable’ persons.  Every change of state that can be seen to have occurred in cosmic evolution has been powered by a more complex facet of the single integrated energy by which the universe unfolds.  In the case of the ‘change of state’ that saw conscious entities (the higher mammals) evolving into entities that were not only conscious, they were conscious of their consciousness, the aspect of the universal evolutionary force that we know as love was necessary for the transition to this new mode of being.

This brings us back to Teilhard’s ‘articulation of the noosphere’.  The entire history of science can be seen as the quest for (and the success of) understanding both the entities produced by evolution (such as molecules) and the energies by which their component parts are united in such a way as to increase the resultant complexity (such as the electro-chemical forces).  Teilhard simply extrapolates this past history into a future in which the process of evolution continues to effect more complex entities through more comprehensive energies.

In scientific parlance, the amount of ‘information’ contained in an emergent product of evolution is not only substantially larger than that present in the entities whose interconnection produced it, the potential of the new entity to parent offspring of similarly increased complexity is itself increased.

Teilhard’s ‘articulation of the noosphere’ simply recognizes that, just as there are electro-chemical ‘laws’ by which atoms are combined into molecules, expressed in terms of descriptions of matter and rules of combination (‘information’), humanity is in the early stages of understanding our nature as human persons and the energies of both individual and collective human ontology.   As saw in Chapter 20, these ‘human laws’ can be expressed in terms of sacraments and morals.

Simply put, just like the electrons, atoms, molecules and cells before us, we are simply the latest products of evolution, and are capable of moving forward in complexity by cooperation with the energies which Teilhard insists can be found in these ‘articulations of the noosphere’.

Just as Teilhard expands evolution both rearward and forward from ‘natural selection’ to ‘universal complexification’, he expands ‘love’ from ‘emotion’ to ‘ontological energy’.

”So as long as our conceptions of the universe remained static, the basis of duty remained extremely obscure.  To account for this mysterious law (love) which weighs fundamentally on our liberty, man had recourse to all sorts of explanations, from that of an explicit command issued from outside to that of an irrational but categorical instinct.”

  We have seen how Christianity has reduced John’s assertion that “God is love and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him” from a highly intimate expression of the relationship between God and Man to a belief that we need to love as God loves us if we are to merit the afterlife.  Teilhard restores John’s astounding assertion to its ontological and non-metaphorical truth: among the multifaceted manifestations of the energy by which the universe evolves is a principle by which its increasing complexity eventually manifests itself in the personal.

The less metaphorical understanding of John proposed by Teilhard 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, expanding John, , God is not a ‘person’ who ‘loves’, ‘He’ is the ultimate principle of the energy by which the universe unfolds and by which it eventually manifests itself in the ‘person’.

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 by which we become persons and so continue the rise of complexity in human evolution.

Next week we will take a third look at Love as al force of continuing evolution by seeing how Teilhard understands its action in assuring our continuing ‘complexification’.

May 6, 2021 – Love as Cooperating With the Energy of Evolution

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   How can human love be understood as the key structural link in human evolution?

Today’s Post

Last week we saw how the Theological Virtues of Faith and Hope intersect in an ‘extrapolation/interpolation’ spiral that extends our knowledge of the past to confidence in the future.

This week we will continue with a look at the third Theological Virtue, Love as it is a manifestation of the universal energy of evolution.

The Traditional Approach to Love

Paul, who first delineated the three ‘attitudes’ of the ‘Theological Virtues’, saw Love as the primary of the three, mainly because it was essential to Jesus’s message.  While he saw Faith and Hope as necessary to fullness of being, he understood that Love was that which brings the whole picture together.  Paul goes into some detail in his description of Love in 1 Corinthians 13:4:

“Love is patient and kind, Love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude.  Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right.  Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”

As is commonly understood in contemporary society, the traditional theological approach to Love treats as an ‘act’.  We are to “love one another” as one of the many criteria for eternal life after death.  As Jesus taught, we are to love God, love ourselves and love our neighbors as ourselves, restating and building on Confucius’ statement of the Golden Rule from some 500 years earlier.

As Teilhard insists, however, even though humanity may be only in the early stages of such ‘articulations of the noosphere’, at least in the West the values of the uniqueness of the person and the necessity of relationships that enhance this uniqueness are paramount.  Any approach to regulation or enhancement of this relationship that impedes this understanding of personal growth also impedes the continuation of the evolution of the human species.

Nearly all the ancient thinkers recognized that a key to human maturity lay in the person’s rise above “egoism” both as a building block for personal growth and as a necessary component of relationship.  The concept of “losing” oneself, overcoming ‘ego’, as a step toward spiritual fulfillment is common in many venerable systems of thought.  The actual practice in which these results occur varies significantly among the religions and philosophies in which they are critical, but all the thinkers of the “Axial Age” recognized that you needed other people to elicit your full humanity; self-cultivation was a reciprocal process. As Confucius put it:

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

   Karen Armstrong sees this perspective as common to the thinkers of the Axial Age.

“In one way or the other, their programs were designed to eradicate the egotism that is largely responsible for our violence, and promoted the empathic spirituality of the Golden Rule.  They understood that this reciprocal process required that we treat others as we would be treated.  This requires us to be able to rise above the limitations of our self, to become less focused inward and more open to “the other”: the overcoming of egoism.”

   Gregory Baum rephrases Blondel on this process

“At the moment when we shatter our own little system and recognize another person, we become more truly a person ourself.  What takes place here is a conversion away from self-centeredness to the wider reality of life and people.”

Understanding Love – From Relating to Becoming

Of course, even the most emotional treatment of love would acknowledge its effect on our personal development, but the traditional approach tends to emphasize the action itself over the effect.  As we have seen in the two posts on Love, John proposes a more fundamental understanding of Love as both the nature of God and the nature of man in his astounding assertion (1 John 4:16) that:

“God is love; and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him.”

   As Teilhard asserts and Richard Rohr frequently observes in his Weekly Meditations, this ‘ontological’ aspect of Love has been less stressed in favor of Christianity’s seemingly endless need for the promulgation of rules and society’s need for the stability that it affords.  As a result, it is far more common to see Love treated by religion as an act which gains favor with God than as a natural facet of the evolutionary forces with which we can cooperate to assure our personal growth towards wholeness.      The intimacy asserted by John, even though it has been diluted by Christianity’s love affair with Plato, is nonetheless the perspective which not only fosters a reinterpretation of the venerable religious concept of ‘immanence’ but provides a much more universal context to the idea of Love itself.

The Next Post

This week we followed Paul’s assertion that Love was the most important of the three ‘Theological Virtues’ and explored the historical development of this undeniable but bewildering aspect of human life.  We saw how the popular concept of Love focusses on the ‘act’ of personal relationship in which we are connected by instinct and emotion for procreation, social stability and ultimately salvation.  We also saw how Teilhard’s insight opens it up to be recognized as the most recent manifestation of the energy of evolution.

Next week we will continue our shift from seeing Love as simple relationship to follow Teilhard’s expansion of Love 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.