Theos-Talk Archives (September 1996 Message tl00110)

In my own piece on theos-roots headed "Psychogenesis and the VOS", I said

>I have just done a search on the Internet for the single word
>"psychogenesis" using the AltaVista engine, and I came up with 42 different
>articles or books that contained the word somewhere. .... Most of the
>titles looked pretty much in the psychological field, excepting for one
>about Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. That one looked deeply fascinating and so
>theosophical in its ideas of unity and brotherhood (sic), that I shall post
>some extracts from it in a later message.

Well, this is the later message. As I said, this appears to be a study
guide, but what grips me is the intuition of unity and connectedness, coming
as it does from a Catholic scientist/priest/mystic.

Beginning of quote -------------------------------------------------------
1.Quotes from "The Activation of Energy" by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

At the root of the major troubles in which nations are today involved, I
believe that I can distinguish the signs of a change of age in
mankind.

It took hundreds of centuries for man simply to people the earth and cover
it with a first network: and further thousands of years to build up, as
chance circumstances allowed, solid nuclei of civilizations within this
initially fluctuating envelope, radiating from independent and antagonistic
centres. Today, these elements have multiplied and grown; they have packed
themselves closer together and forced themselves against one another -to
the point where an over-all unity, of no matter what nature, has become
economically and psychologically inevitable. Mankind, in coming of age,
has begun to be subject to the necessity and to feel the urgency of forming
one single body coextensive with itself. There we have the underlying cause
of our distress.

......

After identifying this cause of great unrest and psychological upheaval,
Pierre proposes:

The more one considers this infinitely urgent problem of finding an over-all
plan for building up the earth, the clearer it becomes that if we are to
avoid the road of brute material force, there is no way out ahead except
the road of comradeship and brotherhood - and that is as true of nations
as it is of individuals: not jealous hostility, but friendly rivalry: not
personal feeling, but the team spirit.

......

Bearing this in mind, the ultimate form to be assumed by mankind should
not be conceived on the lines of a stem that is swollen with the sap of all
the stems it killed as it grew. It will be born (for born it cannot but be)
in the form of some organism in which, obeying one of the universe's most
unmistakable laws, every blade and every fascicle, every individual and
every nation, will find completion through union with all the others. No
longer a succession of eliminations, but a confluence of energies -
'synergy'. Such, if we have ears to hear, is the message of biology.

......

 From all this we can draw only one conclusion, that the quantity of
activity and consciousness contained in mankind, taken as a whole, is
greater than the mere sum of individual activity and consciousness.
Progress in complexity is making itself felt in a deepening of centricity.
It is not simply a sum, but synthesis.

.......

Until man, we may say that nature was working to construct 'the unit or
grain of thought'. It would now seem undeniable that, obeying the laws of
some gigantic hyperchemistry, we are now being launched towards 'edifices
made up of grains of thought', towards 'a thought made up of thoughts' -
traveling ever deeper into the abyss of the infinitely complex. P38

Page 39 "to discover which of the various possible forms of
collectivization open to him is the good form, in other words, the form that
most directly prolongs the psychogenesis (or noogenesis) from which he
emerged."

End of quote -------------------------------------------------------------

      From   http://www.iac.net/~dlature/united/ph2paper/pierretdc.html

Notice the "nuclei", "unity", "comradeship", "brotherhood", "synergy", "a
deepening of centricity" and finally the topical "psychogenesis".

I think it is good to see these basic insights put together in different
language now and then - if only because it helps us to appreciate the more
familiar sources and keeps our minds from the dreaded theosophossilization.

:-)

Murray Stentiford
Member TI and of the TS in NZ