Theos-Talk Archives (July 1994 Message tl00004)

This is by Brenda Tucker. It is part two of three parts
taken from THE HEART OF MATTER  by Teilhard de Chardin.

     If you can overcome ingrained intellectual habits and
anatomical illusions, you can distinguish a Noosphere which is
like a halo around the Biosphere. The question, among those who
acknowledge a Noosphere, is whether or not this corona of
reflective, pari-terrestrial substance has or has not finished its
planetary evolution. de Chardin proved in a former work, HOW I
BELIEVE, how clearly mankind is involved in some state of higher
unification. However, not to suggest completion, we could say
that hominization is still going on. TDC is definitive on this.
He has taken a decisive attitude where prior his thoughts were at
a standstill on this question.
     If we were to believe others in the field, we might think
that human evolution or involution was at a standstill since
thousands of years ago. How can we make anything superior to
Plato or Beethoven?  On the contrary, convergence is continuing to
envelope us, grip us, under the folds of a gigantic planetary
contraction. The cementing of a thinking mass of mankind is
becoming more compressed on itself by simultaneous multiplication
and expansion of its individual elements. Surely you can feel
this in the very fiber of your being. We can all see the
fantastic anatomical structure of a vast phylum whose branches,
instead of diverging as they normally do, are ceaselessly folding
in upon one another, ever more closely like some monstrous
inflorescence.
     The global physiology within the organism, in the legacy of
heredity, builds up to planetary dimensions. It is impossible to
obtain economic and intellectual self-sufficiency. We are blind
to the cosmogenesic significance of phenomena. We do not
recognize the accelerating totalization against which we are
struggling, but recognize that we are simply the normal
continuation at a level above ourselves of a process which
generates thought on earth. This is a continuing process of
cerebration. With the belief that 30 or 40,000 years ago the
individual power to feel and think reached its peak as a
possibility, and with that belief that hominization, in its
essence concentration upon itself of global terrestrial psychism,
should now come to a final halt. In my mind, this is formally
contradicted by the fantastic spectacle of a rapidly rising
collective reflection moving in step with an increasingly unitary
organization. Look around and you'll see how complexity, under
compression, and psychic temperature are still rising, not on the
scale of the individual, but on that of the planet. I can say
that the evolution of my inner vision culminates in the acceptance
of this relevant fact:  that there is a creative urge carrying the
human metamolecules towards an almost unbelievable quasi-
monomolecular state and in that state as the biological laws of
union demand, each ego is destined to be forced convulsively
beyond itself into some mysterious superego.

(Comment by BT: I'm glad this is written so threateningly because
one of my new fears is in regard to the theory of morphogenetic
fields, which you can read about in THE AMERICAN THEOSOPHIST
magazine in a four-part article by Dora Kunz and Eric Peper,
published from 1982-1984. The reason that the concept suddenly
became scary was that the field theory could be misused. It is
written about in a beneficial manner, of course, that learning
becomes easier as more people become acquainted with the ideas,
and also a warning is given as in the example where anger directed
by parents at each other unknowingly(?) affects the child, but in
the long run if we are being directed to learning instead of
making original gains, we are in a sense under hypnotic control by
stronger intellects.)

     Ever since TDC saw the balance of the world reverse from
what lies behind to what lies ahead, he has had a feeling that at
the head of the cosmogenesis is a pole, not of attraction, not of
arrangement, but of consolidation, a pole which imparts the
quality of irreversibility. This mysterious focal point demanded
by man's maturing, that cannot biodynamically reach its final
critical point of ultra-reflection unless there is a hope of
immortality. This focal point of Noogenesis became real as a
result of convergence, the incorruptible was simultaneously
becoming universalized and personalized.
     A piece of iron was forgotten and in its place was found
consistence of the universe, the omega point. All held
concentrated into one single indestructible center which he could
love. The cosmic properties of omega, the complex unit in which
the organic sum of the reflective elements of the world becomes
irreversible within a transcendent superego, would have led TDC to
recognize in an incarnate God the true reflection on the Noosphere
of the ultimate nucleus of totalization and consolidation that is
biopsychologically demanded by the evolution of a reflective
living mass.
     The cosmic sense and the christic sense, two axis, which
through and beyond the human were linked together, converged upon
one and another, were in fact, one and the same. The omega point
always lay just outside his grasp because of a logical
reconstruction which presented him with a deduced and conjectural
entity rather than one entered into and experienced; one thought
of and studied versus one entered into, ultimately becoming and
being one with as far as the knowledge that experience can convey.

     TDC finds it easy, in contrast to many great thinkers, to
conceive of the super hominized love. He wonders if the Noosphere
is sensitive to the influences of omega in the vicinity of the
christian axis. He never found it difficult to address God, he
had a love of the invisible. Whatever it was, it went through a
process of universalization, in two phases, 1) materialization of
divine love and 2) energizing of divine love.
     A conflict in TDC's development is the sense of the divine
and the sense of plenitude. He is unable to worship anything
except from a starting point in the tangible. He had to make an
adjustment, therefore the supernatural had to be assimilated by
the natural. The heart of Jesus was a symbol for which he felt
great devotion. Within this heart, there was an effect of
convergence and concentration on the whole spiritual and physical
reality of Christ.
     There is a definite resemblance of this new milieu with the
metallic or mineral, which still at the same time was dominant in
the child TDC. The more he tried to pray, the more deeply did God
materialize in a reality spiritual and tangible. The great
synthesis was taking place, the synthesis of the above with the
ahead. By immersing the divine in the corporeal, the
transfiguration of the corporeal was one of an incredible energy
of radiation. The solids lit up and exploded from within. The
divine was able to insinuate itself everywhere, to be
metamorphosed into no matter what. And so in the future the
divine could force its way into and so amorize the cosmic milieu
in which he was engaged: the making of his home.
     On one side there was a universe becoming personalized
through convergence, on the other side there was a person, Christ,
who was becoming universalized through radiation. All the life
around him was becoming one, the Biosphere heading for the
Noosphere, and in the other sense, this Christ or this God was
making itself felt in every particle of matter and in every object
in his existence. A struggle between the God of the above and a
certain new God of the ahead was being produced by the coexistence
and meeting in his heart of the cosmic sense and the christic
sense. God is in heaven as we all know. He is only more or less
indirectly found here below.
     As a junior in college, he even thought of giving up geology
to devote himself entirely to supernatural activities. Pere T,
the novice master, showed him that while the God of the Cross was
looking deeper into him, what he was looking for was the natural
expansion of his being as well as its sanctification. He writes
that he is still learning of the dangers involved in the seeking
in the direction of heaven for a road where matter and flesh are
directed to spirit by synthesis.
     Suppose a man makes up his mind to seek for wholeness and he
allows the ascensional faith in God and the forward driving faith
in the ultra-human, to react freely upon one another in the depths
of his being. At times he will not be able to shake off a feeling
of terror. He will find paradoxical potentialities of attitudes
within himself, such as: obtain heaven by bringing earth to its
fulfillment. The Christifying of matter is so powerful that the
force with which the levels of the universal and personal come
together, closed up over his head to form one single vault. Now
the heart of Christ could spread unchecked. It was becoming
rapidly important by sense of the will of God to establish
fidelity to the divine will. By divine will he means a directed
and realized omnipresence, both directed and realized: his love of
Christ and his love of things. This will can be apprehended in
every element of the world and in all its events. If he were to
mold and experience Christ in all things, all he had at hand for
this purpose were the details of events and beings.
     His mind came to understand one vast psychogenic involution
of the whole of matter upon itself, giving solidity to the divine
ascendancy and being helpful to him in making him more tangibly
conscious of its grasp. There were two tendencies that might
cause progress to deviate. If TDC followed the eastern and pagan
line, he might allow his being to relax and dissolve into the
universal sphere. Or the opposite extreme could delay progress:
trying to escape from the sphere of unity, tearing himself away or
making a sharp cleavage. He managed to avoid them both. It was
because he saw that a world, which had already been recognized as
essentially convergent, offered a third road and the right road
for him. Reach the mysterious double point at the heart of the
cosmic sphere, where the multiple is reflected upon itself and
emerges from within itself into a transcendent being. Here
remarkably, the cosmic, the human, and the christic meet and open
up a new domain, the centric domain. There, the oppositions which
constitute anxiety and unhappiness in our life begin to disappear.
     Under the pressure of a planet that is contracting upon
itself there is heightening of antagonism between the tangential
forces that make us dependent upon one another and the radial
aspirations that urge us toward obtaining the incommunicable core
of our own person. Totalization threatens to imprison us in a
sort of secondary matter. Mechanization may bring an end that is
as much to be dreaded as death through disintegration and return
to prime matter. It does not dissolve nor subordinate the
elements, but the centric personalizes them. The rays of a
universal center of convergence and attraction, the bonds that
make us one whole reach the upper limit of their complexity and
tend to merge into the magnetic force that pulls our ego into what
lies ahead. At these high latitudes of the universe and the
center, totalization reduces the multiple to the one by synthesis
and acts as a liberating agent. In other words, matter becomes
spirit at just the same pace that love begins to spread
universally. The effect of total amorization is dazzling, because
at the peak of evolution you merely note the appearance of the
personal and the universe is something that loved and could be
loved. From the point of view of convergent evolution, the whole
cosmic event may be reduced to one single vast process of
arrangement.
     At every moment it releases a given quantity of events that
cause distress, failures, disintegration, death and in this
attraction of things, it draws us out of our own centers to
Christ. Christ installed at the omega point, two sides by flood
of unitive force. On the other side, the things that it adds,
centrify us for Christ. Through this a current of love is
released to spread over the whole breadth and length of the world.
If God metamorphized the world from the depths of matter to the
peaks of spirit, so the world must inevitably and to the same
degree endomorphize God.