Today’s Post
In the last two weeks, we have turned our focus to Teilhard’s ‘spiral evolutionary model’ of the sweep of evolution from the beginnings of the universe itself to the current manifestation of complexity on our planet today. We saw last week in Teilhard’s model of the converging spiral how complexity, his metric of evolution, could be seen as increasing in three facets: the unification of entities, resulting in the increased complexity of their offspring which in turn renders them more responsive to the ‘complexifying energy of evolution’. As ‘consciousness’ emerges as a measure of complexity, leading to ‘consciousness aware of itself’ (the human person), we can also see how such recognition can eventually lead us to awareness of the process by which we become persons.
The Presence of the Evolutionary Spiral in the Human Person
We noted how Teilhard’s spiral model encompasses the entire sweep of cosmic evolution. How can this be seen as reflected in the noosphere?
Such complexification can be seen in the phenomenon of personification. As we become more aware of the energies from which our personal evolution evolves and continues in us, we can become more aware of how cooperation with them can be enhanced.
As Teilhard points out, the energy by which entities move along the spiral unites them in such a way as to:
– advance their complexity (eg atoms into molecules)
– become less’ intrinisic’ (eg ‘built into’ the entities as in atoms-to-molecules)
– become less ‘instinctual’ (eg as in mammalian nurturing)
– and become more ‘volitional’ (eg as in humans-to-humans).
As can be seen in this brief list, the energy of evolution itself changes state from chemical principles to biological imperatives, to emergence in the human as the ‘energy of relationship’. In this series of transitions, love emerges as the current manifestation of the cosmic energy by which the universe evolves. As we saw in the post on love as energy, love is much more than an emotional encouragement for relationship and procreation as it effects not only an increase in complexity of human offspring, but has an ‘ontological’ influence in the evolution of the human person himself.
Hence, we can see the ‘spiral of evolution’ equally at work in the human person as it is in the universe. Learning to cooperate with the current state of evolutionary energy not only enriches our relationships, (which increases the complexity of our society), but enriches ourselves. Such enrichment in turn increases our ability to enrich our relationships. In such a way, the ‘universal spiral’ can be seen to be active in each human life.
However, as we saw, a successful relationship requires us to move from affection as an instinct to one which requires conscious decision. The practice of ‘centration’ and ‘excentration’ described in the May 10, 2018 post (referenced above) requires us to modulate our lower brain stimuli as well as the resultant egoism that we have seen in our treatment of ‘noospheric risks’. As the result of the ‘change of state’ seen in the energy of love, love becomes more a ‘decision’ than a response to an emotional imperative. It becomes more ‘volitional’ in the human than it was ‘instinctual’ in the mammal.
That said, knowing what we know about the universal spiral of evolution, how can we map it into human life so that we can better understand it and respond to its new manifestation of energy? What sort of ‘model’ can we use as a guide?
The Three Virtues Model
In the series of posts in which we looked at reinterpreting the concepts of Western theology, we addressed the idea of the Theological Virtues. Just as we addressed the unique quality of the energy of human evolution as ‘spirituality’ in the context of secular phenomenon, we saw these three familiar ‘virtues’ as three ‘stances’ that we can take as we go about trying to live our lives in cooperation with Teilhard’s ‘winds of the Earth.” Just as Teilhard’s model of the convergent spiral can be applied to better understand universal evolution, the ‘theological’ virtues can be seen as fitting into this model as a secular guide to applying it to human life
As we have seen, the ‘spiral’ model applies equally throughout the process of universal evolution. It works at the level of the atom just as it does at the level of the human. The ‘virtues model’, however, only works at the level of the human, but is an example of how universal processes can be seen at work in the ‘noosphere’. These three ‘virtues’ are the human equivalent of the three universal effects of the spiral: unity, response to evolutional energy and rise in complexity.
The first of the three human components of this converging spiral is ‘Love’, the component of unity. As we have addressed in many places in this Blog, Teilhard’s assertion that the idea of love must be freed from its popular understanding as a strong emotion and allowed to flower as the energy of the power of evolution to unite its products in ways that increase their complexity. Love is less an act of emotion or instinct that encourages our relationships and more one of uniting us in such a way that we become more what it is possible for us to become. To Teilhard, love is ‘ontological’: to love is to become. It is the energy which unites in such a way as to move us forward on the spiral.
The second component is that of ‘Faith’. Faith is the pull of our lives toward the axis of evolution and hence the human response to the universal evolutional principle of complexification.
As we become more adept at ‘articulating the noosphere’, we begin to better understand the structure and the workings of the reality in which we are enmeshed. Such articulations of the universe will be undermined, however, if they are not preceded by a ‘faith’ that they exist at all. While this sounds religious, imagine if Newton had not first believed that there was some objective, measurable and most of all ‘comprehensible’ force by which objects moved from their static state. Faith is the first step toward increasing our grasp of reality and enhancing our response to the energy of evolution.
The third of these three components is ‘Hope’, which encourages us on our journey toward our potential for increased complexity as we move forward on the spiral. One of the gifts of evolution in the human is the ability to look into the future, as murky and risky as that might be. If our look into the future is pessimistic and without hope, such negativity inhibits our movement up the spiral, toward a future in which the results of our growth are bleak, the fruit of our love is rejection, and sees us as hopelessly inadequate to build a full life. Without hope, the evolutionary power of love, itself guaranteed over the fourteen or so billion years of universal becoming, is diminished. Hope is that component of evolution by which we ‘rise’ as we move forward on the spiral.
The Next Post
This week we took another look at the mechanism of human evolution, and how recognizing and beginning to understand it is key to the important process of replacing ‘instinct’ with ‘volition’ as we begin to consciously take the helm of our evolution at the same time that we are beginning to better understand the winds, waves and tides that constitute our ‘noosphere’.
We saw how the three components of the ‘theological virtues’ can be seen in a purely secular context as the three components of our individual personal evolution. These three components are the personal instantiation of a cosmic process which takes us ever onward, upward and inward.
Next week we will look at yet another model, one which addresses a different but equally important skill of continuing our evolution as we get closer to understanding how we can begin to consciously respond to its agency.