Tag Archives: Teilhard de Chardin

July 12 – Mapping The Structure of The Noosphere

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Today’s Post 

Last week we took a look at Teilhard’s somewhat counter-intuitive perception of what’s going on in the noosphere.  This week we will summarize his observations into a list of its characteristics that we can then use to quantify how closely actual contemporary data resonate with his insights.

Outlining the Noospheric Structure 

From Teilhard’s insights into the mileu of human activity, the ‘noosphere’, we can begin to identify its structural components so that we can better navigate its complex geography.

It is very evident from last week’s post that Teilhard believed that humans are very well equipped to ‘navigate’ this uncharted Northern hemisphere into which we are beginning to inhabit.  This week we will outline his characteristics of this structure so that we can proceed to see how his concepts, and his forecast for the future, lines up with what we know today.

The Structure

Teilhard recognizes that, as a product of evolution, humans are subject to the same evolutionary pressures as our evolutionary precedents.  While every evolutionary step from the burst of energy at the big bang to the present is accompanied by risks to its continuation, Teilhard recognizes the ‘structural’ evolutionary agency of ‘increasing complexity’ which moves it forward.

He also recognizes that this rise of complexity is decidedly non-linear: each major step requires crossing some boundary by which the new entity differs considerably from its precedent, such as the emergence of matter from raw energy, the appearance of complex atoms from simple ones by the agency of gravity, the formation of complex molecules, the appearance of the cell, the rise of consciousness from neural networks and eventually, the appearance of ‘reflective consciousness’: consciousness aware of itself.

In traversing each of these boundaries, or as he calls them, ‘changes of state’, we can see that the ‘laws’ of the sphere which preceded the new entity are superseded by a new set of ‘laws’ by which the new sphere is governed.  The structure of the ‘biosphere’, for example, is quite different from that of the ‘lithosphere’, and the emerging understanding of living things requires a new grasp of how living things differ from ‘non-living’ (or as Teilhard would say, ‘pre-living’) things.

With the rise of complexity, not surprisingly, these laws themselves become more complex.  With the human, in addition to all the novelty of reflective consciousness, we have the added complexity of entities whose evolution is dependent on their understanding of the new set of laws.  Humans are effectively building a bridge on which they are trying to cross.

In effect, understanding the structure of the noosphere is essential to building it.

Teilhard’s Characteristics of Noospheric Structure 

  1. The Product of Evolution Teilhard’s first characteristic of the noosphere is that it fits into the sweep of evolutionary development.  While humans are definitely unique products of evolution, they are nonetheless products.  The insight here is that while this may be so, humans can expect the same phenomenon of ‘change of state’ to effect new capabilities in the human navigation of this new sphere.
  2. Persistence of Evolutionary laws His second characteristic is that the ‘laws’ of the previous spheres, while still at work in the human person (such as the instincts provided by our pre-human reptilian and limbic brain structures), need to be modulated by the new brain capacity provided by the human neo-cortex.  What worked in early human social structures must be slowly replaced by activities more appropriate to the noosphere.  As we become more aware of the structure of the noosphere, our activities must evolve in the direction of cohesion with them.
  3. Changes of State  His third characteristic applies this succession of ‘changes of state’ to the human when he recognizes that ‘noospheric compression’ can also effect ‘human complexification’.  The proximity of humans caused by their movement into the ‘Northern hemisphere’, while (like all such evolutionary steps) this may come with some risk (and we have seen the risk in our past), it also comes with progress.   As we saw last week, the human species is

“vitally forced to find continually new ways of arranging its elements in the way that is most economical of energy and space.”

  1. Inner Pull vs External Push In this enterprise, Teilhard sees a fourth characteristic: such compression can only succeed if the elements can find a new way of relating to each other.  This new way of relating requires persons to connect in such a way as to expand their person-ness, to become more of what they are capable of becoming.  This transition from an external force which pushes us ever closer, to an internal force which pulls us together by freeing us from our limited possession of our selves, allows compression to effect complexification.   Thus he understands Love as the latest manifestation of the basic force of evolution:  the only one capable of uniting us by what is most unique in us, but yet one rising from the depths of time, continuously uniting the products of evolution in such a way that they become ever more complex.
  2. Human Invention This characteristic isn’t from Teilhard, but from John McHale, The Future of the Future .  but fits in well with those of Teilhard.

“At this point, then, where man’s affairs reach the scale of potential disruption of the global ecosystem, he invents precisely those conceptual and physical technologies that may enable him to deal with the magnitude of a complex planetary society.”

   As he points out, while forecasting the future may difficult, we seem to always be able to invent what is needed to continue it.

  1. The Risk of Human Evolution In the sixth characteristic, Teilhard acknowledges the risk in such an undertaking.  If we are walking on the bridge while we are building it, and our grasp of our internal self is critical to the enterprise, what happens if we cannot commit to its continuation?  The pessimism that he saw still persists today.  Without faith in the future, there is no guarantee that human evolution will continue.   In his words:

“At this decisive moment when for the first time he (man, that is, man as such) is becoming scientifically aware of the general pattern of his future on earth, what he needs before anything else, perhaps, is to be quite certain, on cogent experimental grounds, that the sort of temporo-spatial dome into which his destiny is leading is not a blind alley where the earth’s life flow will shatter and stifle itself.”

   We will begin looking into such ‘cogent experimental grounds’ in the next post.

Taking the Measure of Human Evolution

As I outlined two posts ago, what’s the case for optimism?  It’s been some eighty years since Teilhard made his case for being optimistic about human future.  Since then human society has become ever more proficient at gathering data; we are drowning in it today.  With all the facts at our hand, we should be able to get some objective sense on whether Teilhard’s projections are proving true.

The Next Post

This week we have boiled down Teilhard’s observations and projections into six characteristics.

Next week we will begin a survey of the noosphere today to see how objective data can be brought to bear on his insights.

July 5 – Navigating the North Hemisphere- What Tools Do We Have to Work With?

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Today’s Post

Last week we concluded a two week look at crossing our metaphorical equator and progressing into a mileu in which the ground rules of antiquity which seemed to serve us so well as we moved Northward now seem to be less valuable in in this new stage of the journey. The new hemisphere is not seems less favorable to us in our favor but problems seem to mount more quickly as well.

Since it’s Teilhard’s metaphor, it seems reasonable to look at his insight into how the totality of cosmic evolution is playing out on our planet, and his take on what tools we may have available to us in maneuvering among the many rocks into which we seem to be carried.

“Everything Which Rises Must Converge”

This quote from Teilhard (The Future of Man) is rather well known, but given the curvature of his metaphorical sphere, it can now appear as threatening.  The quote we saw last week applies just as well here:

“Surely the basic cause of our distress must be sought precisely in the change of curve which is suddenly obliging us to move from a universe in which the divergence, and hence the spacing out, of the containing lines still seemed the most important feature, into another type of universe which, in pace with time, is rapidly folding-in upon itself.”

   As it is the very basic force of evolution that is compressing us on our planet with its finite surface, does this imply that at the heart of cosmic evolution lies a convergence which threatens to extinguish the very flame of rising complexity that it has, thus far, nourished?

And as Teilhard sees it, the source of the damping of this flame can not only be found in the crushing force of convergence from without, but in our response to it from within.  He notes the danger that looms when humans begin to feel helpless in its wake:

“At this decisive moment when for the first time he (man, that is..) is becoming scientifically aware of the general pattern of his future on earth, what he needs before anything else, perhaps, is to be quite certain, on cogent experimental grounds, that the sort of temporo-spatial dome into which his destiny is leading is not a blind alley where the earth’s life flow will shatter and stifle itself.”

What we need, he is saying, is a hermeneutic to be able to interpret the new and strange dimensions found North of his ‘equator’.  Such a hermeneutic, a lens for interpretation, a context for making sense, is precisely what Teilhard offers.

Teilhard’s Hermeneutic For Understanding Human Evolution

Teilhard firstly restates the need for such a hermeneutic:

“…the more mankind is compressed upon itself by the effect of growth, the more, if it is to find room for itself, is it vitally forced to find continually new ways of arranging its elements in the way that is most economical of energy and space.”

    He then asks us to relook at what is actually happening with human evolution from his expanded and unified context of universal evolution:

“(is it possible that) the individual human brain has, since the end of the Quaternary, really arrived at the limit set by physics and chemistry to its progress in complexity?  Even then, it would still remain true that since that time, as a result of the combined, selective and cumulative operation of their numerical magnitude, the human centers have never ceased to weave in and around themselves a continually more complex and closer-knit web of mental interrelations, orientations and habits just as tenacious and indestructible as our hereditary flesh and bone conformation.  Under the influence of countless accumulated and compared experiences, an acquired human psychism is continually being built up, and within this we are born, we live and we grow- generally without even suspecting how much this common way of feeling and seeing is nothing but a vast, collective past, collectively organized.”

   In this succinct statement, Teilhard  pinpoints the potential of the evolutionary product of the human neo-cortex, which expands the playing field of evolution from the actions of chromosones to the actions of humans.  While the curvature of our planet may well force us into increasingly uncomfortable proximity, the ‘sphere’ of the human ‘psychism’ offers a seemingly infinite surface onto which it is possible to expand:

“…the more mankind is compressed upon itself by the effect of growth, the more, if it is to find room for itself, is it vitally forced to continually find new ways of arranging its elements in the way that is most economical of energy and space.”

   Thus, instead of finding danger in the mechanical compression imposed by the Earth’s ‘sphericity’, he sees opportunity:

“…what appeared at first no more than a mechanical tension and a quasi-geometrical re-arrangement imposed on the human mass, now takes the form of a rise in interiority and liberty within a whole made up of reflective particles that are now more harmoniously interrelated.”

   He sees a cycle in which human person functionality increases with increasing population compression:

“…This increase in mental interiority and hence of inventive power (in which man’s compression upon our planet is ultimately expressed) simultaneously and inevitably increases each human element’s radius of action and power in penetration in relation to all the others; and in proportion as it does so, it has as its direct effect a super-compression itself of the noosphere.  This super-compression, in turn, automatically produces a super-organization, and that again a super-‘consciousisation’: that in turn is followed by super-super-compression and so the process continues.”

   To Teilhard, therefore, this external compression effects an internal complexification in which new levels of both consciousness and relationships are possible:

“Thus through the combined influence of two curves, both cosmic in nature- one physical (the roundness of the earth) and one psychic (the reflective’s self attraction), mankind is now caught up, as though in a train of gears, at the heart of a continually accelerating vortex of self-totalisation.”

   So, not unlike how the stars compress simple atoms into complex ones more capable of even more complex arrangements in the form of molecules, instead of the impersonal crush of human masses he notes:

“Man is now realizing that this cosmic spindle corresponds, on the contrary, to the concentration upon itself of a force that is destined to find in the very heart released by its convergence sufficient strength to burst through all the barriers that lie ahead of it- whatever they may be.”

   This is the heart of Teilhard’s  great optimism,  that the agency of evolution, the principle by which evolution increases the complexity of its products, steadily increasing its irradiance through billions of years, and is still alive and well and working in the human species.  As he puts it a bit more poetically:

“Like those translucent materials
which can be wholly illumined
by a light enclosed within them,
the world manifests to the christian mystic
as bathed in an inward light
which brings out its structure,
its relief, and its depths…
a tranquil, mighty radiance.”.

I Read The Newspapers.  Is Such Audacious Optimism Warranted?

This is a perennial criticism of Teilhard.  Conventional science shows no ‘improvement’ in the human as an evolutionary product with time, so surely evolution, if it still continues, isn’t changing us in any particular direction.  And even the most casual glance at daily news offers any consolation.  So it can be legitimately asked, “is there really anything to such increased complexification via Teilhard’s ‘psychism?”

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The Next Post

This week we took a look at Teilhard’s somewhat counter-intuitive perception of what’s going on.  Next week we will continue casting the net for other counter-intuitive perceptions, but this time by looking at current events.

June 28 – The Future of the Past

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Today’s Post

Last week we took a first look at the future.  As we noted, on the surface, it’s not necessarily pretty.  Even though we are some eighty years out of a global quagmire from which, for a while, seemed capable of destroying civilization as we knew it, other threats seem to incessantly loom.  Last week we considered, “with all this, can there be a basis of optimism?”

This week, we will continue to explore Teilhard’s metaphor of the sphere as a surface that we must navigate is we move increasingly Northward from open territories and plentiful resources into a space that closes up on us even as we continue to multiply and consume.

Crossing the Equator

   Let us focus for a moment on that critical point, the ‘equator’ of the sphere: the point at which each new wave of expansion is met by a reduction of space and an increase in tension.  The massive two ‘world wars’ of the past century certainly seem to reflect the inevitable conflagration that occurs when literally the whole world, with all of its arms of expansion, seems to be bent on conquest.  The sheer size of the conflict intensified by the destructive efficiency enabled by advancements in technology, made the carnage so unbelievable that still, some eighty years later, it is very difficult to put it all into perspective.  Literally every family in our United States was impacted by the loss of life or property that resulted from these wars.  In Europe and Asia, the effects were even more devastating.  Although it may be true that ‘literally’ the whole world was not bound up in them, they were significant enough to register as true ‘world’ conflicts.
Can we say with some confidence that the past few hundred years mark the ‘crossing’ of Teilhard’s ‘equator’?  The histories of clashing civilization in antiquity all point to an increase in human conflict as time goes on.  Now that we can forecast the loss of space and resources to be expected as we enter the North half of our metaphorical sphere, it seems safe to expect yet more of what we have come so vividly to see in the past.  Is the future of the past the past?  As the tensions of the increasing pressures from human expansion continue to grow, can we expect even more such ‘world wars’?

As Teilhard sees it, the perception that we are surely moving into uncharted territory is well warranted:

“Surely the basic cause of our distress must be sought precisely in the change of curve which is suddenly obliging us to move from a universe in which the divergence, and hence the spacing out, of the containing lines still seemed the most important feature, into another type of universe which, in pace with time, is rapidly folding-in upon itself.”

   As Teilhard points out, it’s not just that things are becoming tighter and less comfortable as we cross over into this new mileu, it’s that they are happening at an increasing rate.  No sooner do we become inured to some new and uncomfortable aspect of our society than some new innovation is discovered to have a negative impact on our lives.  Our homes become more comfortable as our environment is endangered, our wealth increases even as the number of people dissatisfied with life increases, those behaviors that, in retrospect, brought us safely through adolescence into responsible adulthood, now seem to have become antiquated, even injurious, to our children.  Our acquisitions, now easier to acquire, offer less and less satisfaction.  While such changes have always occurred in history, never before have they seemed to be so drastic so quickly.  In a single lifetime, we now see, it seems that the world we live in has changed drastically from the one into which we were born.

Then, the problem seems to be greater with ‘resources’.  It seems today that we are ‘running out of everything’.  Even more importantly, as Richard Rohr frequently observes, we are running out of ‘love’.   Even the most casual review of current events reveals a seemingly endless increase in scorn, bullying and disdain in our social norms.  It has become commonplace to revile competitors, demonize enemies (a class in which more and more others seem to belong) and disparage those not in our ‘class’.

This ‘casual review’ also surfaces another aspect of our new Northern Hemisphere.   The increasing cheek-to-jowl packing of the noosphere speeds up the dissemination of information.  As a commodity, to compete for the eyes and ears of subscribers, the news must be increasingly ‘clickworthy’.  ‘Bad news’ sells much better than ‘good news’.  Not only do we get much more of it, but what’s alarming about life (and there is much to cause us alarm) occupies an increasing percentage of what we read.

Indeed, the ‘tightening’ of the noosphere as we cross over into this uncharted territory seems to be squeezing the capacity for forbearance, patience. out of our lives.  As the news is so quick to print, such breakdown of tolerance shows up frequently in acts of personal violence.  The ownership of half the world’s billion guns by the citizens of a single nation, especially one evidentially so irritable, surely is a recipe for instability.

Given all this, such aspects of life as Paul’s ‘fruits of the spirit’ (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, and faithfulness) now seem antiquated, suitable for another time when seen in the light of current events, even at the exact time when they are most needed.

The Next Post

   This week we took a closer look at this unique and danger-filled era of human history when we seem to be crossing Teilhard’s metaphorical equator.   Teilhard cites the error of looking to the past for the ‘articulations of the noosphere’ that will serve our navigation of this new, Northern hemisphere.  As we saw last time:

 “…so many human beings, when faced by the inexorably rising pressure of the noosphere, take refuge in what are now obsolete forms of individualism and nationalism.”

   For this new hemisphere, he sees the need for new articulations, more appropriate to the new terrain that we are entering.  Next week we will continue our exploration of this new terrain, not by looking further into the dangers that lie ahead, but into the human capabilities for managing life that we are only recently (in evolutionary terms) becoming aware of.

June 21 – Where Is All This Taking Us?

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Today’s Post

Last week we concluded our series of posts on the structure and navigation of the milieu in which we are immersed, the noosphere.  We followed the sacraments, values and morals which humans have (so far) fabricated in an attempt to order the seeming cacophony of personal human energies in ways beneficial to both the person and society on the one hand, and the attitudes and stances that can be taken in order to receive the maximum benefit of our noospheric navigation on the other.  The question can be asked, however, “To what end?”
This week we will begin to take a look at the future.  Although Teilhard’s mystical experience of the ground of being was balanced by a strong empiricism, heavily informed by his deep scientific bent, he applied both of these strengths in a vision of how those religious and scientific perspectives can be seen as guides to moving us towards the future.

Surveying the Status

A good way to begin to look at the future is to understand the past and the present.  Teilhard offers a wonderful use of metaphors in his writings, and one excellent example is that of ‘the sphere’.  He develops this metaphor to peer into the future at the end of his book, “Man’s Place in Nature”, which he presented as a somewhat simplified rewrite of his “Phenomenon of Man”.

Consider, he proposes, a geometric sphere with north and south poles, meridians from south to north, and an equator ‘round the middle.  In this metaphor, the axis from south to north represents time, with the south pole representing the past, and the north the future.

In this metaphor, he sees the human race beginning as a small population at the south pole, and as it branches  into its various (‘manifold’) manifestations of families, tribes, cities, states and countries, it ‘ramifies’, spreads out, seeking unsettled territory and available resources as it enlarges, and as it grows it progresses towards the equator.

As this wave of human expansion approaches the equator, due to the curvature of the surface of the sphere, the amount of available territory necessarily decreases with the increase in human population.  This of course increases the tensions among the branches of human population as they begin to compete with each other for the remaining space and resources.

At the same time, consider, he suggests, that the individual human entity (the ‘person’) does not appear as a finished product of evolution, with any particular expertise in utilizing the unique capability with which he has been endowed, the neo-cortex brain.  Just as with the cell at its birth resembles the molecule from which it evolved (“it arrives ‘dripping in molecularity’”), an onlooker at this first moment of human evolution would have been hard pressed to distinguish the new human ‘person’ from its predecessor ‘higher anthropoids’.

As a result, it should not be surprising that in these early years, the human was more subject to the influences of the same instinctual stimuli which served ancestors so well, than able to modulate these stimuli with actions stemming from the new level of brain which is unique to the human species.   And, further, given the slow increase in the tensions resulting from closer contact with humans from other, alien. and potentially dangerous, social units, it’s not surprising that the instinctual needs for resources and survival would outweigh any thoughts of cooperative engagement at this early stage of development.

Then, there is the agency of basic human mistrust.  We do not seem to ‘naturally’ seek closeness with those outside our closely-knit family or clan groups.  We recoil from being forced into closeness with others that we did not initiate ourselves.  And, as a result, when it becomes more necessary for our small, familiar groups to federate into larger states, the problem of ‘cohesion vs aggression’ begins to rise.  As Jonathan Sacks points out:

“Reciprocal altruism creates trust between neighbors, people who meet repeatedly and know about one another’s character.  The birth of the city posed a different and much greater problem: how do you establish trust between strangers?”

One answer, repeated over and over in history, is that you don’t.  In order to assure the stability of a society which grows in size as it increases in diversity, one tactic is total control over the individuals that make it up.  The objective is not ‘trust’, which comes from within, it is ‘control’, which is imposed from without.  The police state, which insures order at the expense of personal autonomy, has been common to nearly all civilizations going back to antiquity, and still can be found today.   Even in those societies which have tried to equitably accommodate the person and the state, there are many who abhor the ‘closing in’ of outsiders.   As Teilhard remarks, in terms that are as applicable to  today’s Western societies as they were when he expressed them seventy years ago:

“…so many human beings, when faced by the inexorably rising pressure of the noosphere, take refuge in what are now obsolete forms of individualism and nationalism.”

   Given this state of affairs, what sort of light does Teilhard see ahead?  Can there be a basis for optimism?

The Next Post

This week we took a first look at where the flow of evolution which we have been addressing may be taking us.  At first glance, it might well seem that the future of an increasing human population on a world of decreasing space and resources is one to be considered with some trepidation.  Is the future of the past the past?  Do we anticipate ‘more of the same, only moreso’?

As we will see in the remaining posts of this blog, however, based on the picture we have constructed, anchored firmly on Teilhard’s clear-headed foundations, there is indeed a strong case for optimism in both our lives as persons who make up this population and the organization of our human energy which makes up our societies.

June 14 – Summing Up: “Articulating the Noosphere” and Living the “Theological Virtues”- Part 2

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Today’s Post

Last week we saw how Teilhard understood  the ‘spheres’ of existence (and the difficulty that both science in religion have dealing with them) as the first part of summing up the last fifteen posts.  This week we will review how he saw overcoming the duality in such traditional approaches and how such an understanding can lead to our navigation of the noosphere not only successfully, but joyfully.

The Unity of the Spheres

As Teilhard sees it, it’s not the evolutionary perspective that provides the wedge that is evident between all the different perspectives of the spheres of existence,, but the lack of a more comprehensive and universal understanding of evolution.  Such an integrative and universal approach to evolution affords the possibility of bringing all four of these cornerstones of belief into a coherence that begins to erase the dualities that plague them.  (See the posts on “The Teilhardian Shift” for a more comprehensive treatment of his unique insights).

So from this unique insight Teilhard sees the noosphere in need of a perspective in which matter, life and the person can all be seen in a single context.  If this can be done, it is possible that whatever structure which underpins this context will provide the light that we need in order to successfully manage our habitation of it.  He understands this ‘sphere’ of human existence to be in need of our grasp of its structure, expressed in our beliefs of its ‘nature’ and the calls to action that such beliefs require.   In his words

 “The organization of personal human energies represents the supreme (thus far) stage of cosmic evolution on earth; and morality (the articulation of the noosphere) is consequently nothing less than the higher development of mechanics and biology.  The world is ultimately constructed by moral forces; and reciprocally, the function of morality is to construct the world.” (Parentheses mine)

   More to the point, he goes on to say

“,,,to decipher man is essentially to try to find out how the world was made and how it ought to go on making it.”

  with the goal, as identified by Jesus, for us to

“.. have life, and have it abundantly.” (John 10:10)

Navigating the Noosphere

In a quote I have frequently used, Teilhard remarks that

“Those who set their sails to the winds of life will always find themselves borne on a current to the open sea.”

  As we saw in the post on “Grace and the DNA of Human Evolution”, Teilhard sees the ‘abundant life’ that Jesus offers as requiring us to develop the skills of reading the wind and tending the tiller.   As he sees it:

“And, conventional and impermanent as they may seem on the surface, what are the intricacies of our social forms, if not an effort to isolate little by little what are one day to become the structural laws of the noosphere.

In their essence, and provided they keep their vital connection with the current that wells up from the depths of the past, are not the artificial, the moral and the juridical simply the hominized versions of the natural, the physical and the organic?”

Paraphrasing Teilhard, this ‘trimming our sails to the winds of life’, is nothing more (and as he would add, ‘nothing less’) than aligning our lives with the axis of evolution.  This alignment is where the ‘articulations of the noosphere’ that we have been addressing for the past fifteen weeks, come in.

The Joy of the Noosphere

As we saw in the posr on “Hope” those wonderful ‘Fruits of the Spirit’ which are promised by Paul resonate strongly with Carl Rogers’ empirical insights into personal growth.  In our secular context, they are not ‘rewards from God’ for following His (sic) laws’, but the direct result of first understanding the ‘noospheric articulations’ and then orienting our lives to living them out.  While Teilhard’s metaphor of sailing is a wonderful way to contemplate the journey of life, it is significant to see his critical point that when we are employing such ‘sailing skills’, it is ‘alignment to the winds’ that makes it possible to be ‘borne by the current’.  The articulations that we humans are developing (thus far still under construction) are necessary for undertaking the journey of life, but it is the quality of the life, the abundance of it, which is enhanced by the attitudes and stances that we have seen in the ‘Theological Virtues’

The Next Post

In the last fifteen posts we have been addressing the structure of the noosphere, looking at its ‘articulations’ from the perspective of sacraments, morals and values, and from the additional perspective of how it is that we can orient ourselves to navigate it.  The goal is not only navigating it successfully, but abundantly: not only are we to manage our lives, but fully partake of the joy that is possible in life.

But there is yet another aspect to these articulations and attitudes, and next week we will begin  explore it as we begin to conclude this blog by looking at where evolution is taking us.

June 7 – Summing Up: “Articulating the Noosphere” and Living the “Theological Virtues”- Part 1

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Today’s Post

Last week we concluded our secular look at the three so-called “Theological Virtues”- Faith, Hope and Love- by seeing how Cynthia Bourgeault’s reinterpretation of Paul encapsulated the workings of these virtues in our most intimate relationships.

This week we will conclude this segment of the blog in which we have looked at Values, Morals and Sacraments as ‘articulations of the noosphere’ and saw how the ‘Theological Virtues’ of Faith, Hope and Love serve as attitudes, stances that we can take, in living them out.

The Articulation of the Spheres

Two things that nearly everyone can agree are the comprehensiveness of reality and the human’s ability to comprehend it.  Science depends on it and Religion offers a long history of human inquiry into the nature of existence and our response to it.

The current state of religion is a many faceted, often contradictory, but fervently felt set of beliefs about the world and our place in it.   The ten posts on the ‘History of Religion ‘ (http://www.lloydmattlandry.com/?m=201509) offers a brief and somewhat superficial overview of religion and its quest for insight into the human condition.

Science, coming into play much later, also offers an approach to understanding existence, although coming at the enterprise from an entirely different perspective.  While religion relies on the intuitions developed, passed down and modified in many ways into metaphors, practices and expectations, science, at least nominally, constrains itself to a collegially empirical approach, with heavy dependence on objective data, which is itself a product of independently verifiable observations.

Both of these powerful modes of thinking have developed significant ‘articulations’ of their respective spheres of thought.  Physics, the mainstay of the science of matter, has laboriously effected its ‘Standard Model’, which underpins many of the modern discoveries and applications by which we are surrounded.  Biology, the investigation of living things, through development of the theory of Natural Selection, has brought a profoundly deep understanding of living things, and more importantly, how we and they interact.

The Duality of the Spheres

As is commonly known, while these two profound modes of thought both address the single reality in which we all live, they are frequently seen to be in conflict.  Like nearly every human enterprise, they fall into different sides of an underlying ‘duality’, a dichotomy divided by a deeply conflicting understanding of the human person.

Physics, with its ‘Standard Model’ can be seen to have developed an ‘articulation of the lithosphere’, and Biology with its theory of Natural Selection an ‘articulation of the biosphere’.  Psychology steps in as the first attempt at a secular ‘articulation of the noosphere’.   But, as I have discussed in the four posts addressing psychology beginning with “November 24 – Relating to God: Part 5- Psychology as Secular Meditation- Part 2: The Transition”, (http://www.lloydmattlandry.com/?p=302), psychiatry seems no more united in addressing the human than are science and religion.  All three would seem, sharing as they do an adherence to the concept of evolution,   to be in competition with Religion, and its basis of intuition and scripture, for a comprehensive ‘articulation of the noosphere’.

The Next Post

This week we took a first look at summarizing the last fifteen posts in which we have addressed 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 will conclude this summary by seeing how Teilhard understood uniting the Noosphere to the spheres of matter and life, and how his ‘articulations’ can lead to their successful inhabiting..

 

 

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’.

April 26 – Virtues: Love, Part 2 – As The Continuing Energy of Evolution

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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 energy 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 by a process in which God is involved” 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 energy at work in every step of evolution, such as the atomic forces in forging atoms from electrons, electro-chemical forces forging molecules from 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 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 to a future in which the process of evolution continues to effect more complex entities through more comprehensive energies.  His ‘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, humanity is in the early stages of understanding our nature as human persons and the energies of both individual and collective human ontology.   As we have discussed in the past several posts, these ‘human laws’ can be expressed in terms of sacraments, values 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 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.”

In traditional religion, John’s assertion that “God is love and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him” has been reduced 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, 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’.

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 contuing ‘complexification’.