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.