Pierre Teilhard de Chardin once wrote, "The future belongs in the hands of those who can give tomorrow's generations valid reasons to live and hope." I tend to believe we fit that role. I don't feel that to be a boastful claim, but rather an acceptance of responsibility."
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PHOTO.. www.mythicjourneys.org/
"Love alone can
unite living beings so as to complete and fulfill them... for it alone joins
them by what is deepest in themselves. All we need is to imagine our ability to
love developing until it embraces the totality of men and the
earth."
It is our duty as men and women to proceed as though the limits of our abilities do not exist."
~~Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a French Jesuit priest trained as a paleontologist and a philosopher, and was present at the discovery of Peking Man. Teilhard conceived such ideas as the Omega Point and the Noosphere.
"We are not human beings having a spiritual experience.
We are spiritual beings having a human experience."
Teilhard's primary book, The Phenomenon of Man, set forth a sweeping account of the unfolding of the cosmos. He abandoned a literal interpretation of creation in the Book of Genesis in favor of a metaphorical interpretation. This displeased certain officials in the Roman Curia, who thought that it undermined the doctrine of original sin developed by Saint Augustine. Teilhard's position was opposed by his church superiors, and his work was denied publication during his lifetime by the Roman Holy Office. Teilhard writes of the unfolding of the material cosmos, from the creation to the development of the noosphere in the present, to his vision of the Omega Point in the future. He was a leading proponent of orthogenesis, the idea that evolution occurs in a directional, goal driven way. To Teilhard, evolution unfolded from cell to organism to planet to solar system and whole-universe, Gaia Theory.
"The most satisfying thing in life is to have been able to give a large part of one's self to others."
Jesuit training
From 1905 to 1908, he taught physics and chemistry in Cairo, Egypt, at the Jesuit College of the Holy Family. He wrote "...it is the dazzling of the East foreseen and drunk greedily... in its lights, its vegetation, its fauna and its deserts." (Letters from Egypt (1905–1908) — Éditions Aubier)
Teilhard studied theology in Hastings, in Sussex (United Kingdom), from 1908 to 1912. There he synthesized his scientific, philosophical and theological knowledge in the light of evolution. His reading of l'Évolution Créatrice (Creative Evolution) by Henri Bergson was, he said, the "catalyst of a fire which devoured already its heart and its spirit." His views on evolution and religion particularly inspired the evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky, who wrote the essay, "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution" (The American Biology Teacher 35 [March 1973]: 125-129). Teilhard was ordained a priest on August 24, 1911, aged 30.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Teilhard_de_Chardin
"In the final analysis,
the questions of why bad things happen to good people
transmutes itself into some very different questions,
no longer asking why something happened,
but asking how we will respond,
what we intend to do now that it happened."
Teilhard predicts the evolution of a machine that
hardly even existed in his time beyond being a glorified abacus: the computer.
"Here I am thinking," he writes in Man's Place in Nature, "of those astonishing
electronic machines (the starting-point and hope of the young science of
cybernetics), by which our mental capacity to calculate and combine is
reinforced and multiplied by a process and to a degree that herald as
astonishing advances in this direction as those that optical science has already
produced for our power of vision." Teilhard's vision of what computers would do
for us is twofold. First, computers will achieve the completion of our brains,
in that there would be the instantaneous retrieval of information around the
globe. Second, computers will improve our brains by facilitating processes more
quickly than our own resources can achieve them.
It is also interesting that Chardin predicts the use of the prefix "cyber" in
regards to the computer/human matrix, since "cyber" is all the rage in
computering circles. In fact, what can be seen as the progenitor of Teilhard's
Noosphere is now being termed "Cyberspace" by the computer press, in reference
to that mystical field of inter-connecting computer pathways wherein all of the
exchanges are made. As Michael Benedikt describes it in his Collected Abstracts
from the First Conference on Cyberspace, "Cyberspace is a globally networked,
computer-sustained, computer-accessed, and computer-generated,
multi-dimensional, artificial, or Virtual' reality. In this world, onto which
every computer screen is a window, actual, geographical distance is irrelevant.
Objects seen or heard are neither physical nor, necessarily, presentations of
physical objects, but are rather;in form, character, and action;made up of data,
of pure information. This information is derived in part from the operation of
the natural, physical world, but is derived primarily from the immense traffic
of symbolic information, images, sounds, and people, that constitute human
enterprise in science, art, business, and culture."
In light of developments such as computer bulletin boards and
"super- information highways" like the Internet, Teilhard's fantastic notions
don't seem so fantastic. He is, it turns out, the unsung prophet of our
collective future. It is time that we begin to look forward to what these
developments are going to mean to us personally, developmentally. Chardin says
that "Humankind is now caught up, as though in a train of gears, at the heart of
a continually accelerating vortex of self-totalization." We need to consider how
the inevitable changes in our nature are going to affect us as individuals,
spiritually, psychologically, and pathologically. One advantage, though, to
facing what is happening to us is that we can stop "groping about" in the dark,
and take conscious control of our evolution to speed it on its way.
"We are one, after all, you and I. Together we suffer, together exist, and forever will recreate each other."
John R. Mabry is a doctoral student at the California Institute of Integral Studies and former managing editor of Creation Spirituality magazine. The previous article appeared in Creation Spirituality Magazine, Summer 1994 issue (this text was downloaded from America Online) http://theoblogical.org/dlature/united/ph2paper/noosph.html
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