Teilhard de Chardin and

the Omega Point

An excerpt from the Encyclopedia Britannica:

Teilhard's attempts to combine Christian thought with modern science and traditional philosophy aroused widespread interest and controversy when his writings were published in the 1950s. Teilhard aimed at a metaphysic of evolution, holding that it was a process converging toward a final unity that he called the Omega point. He attempted to show that what is of permanent value in traditional philosophical thought can be maintained and even integrated with a modern scientific outlook if one accepts that the tendencies of material things are directed, either wholly or in part, beyond the things themselves toward the production of higher, more complex, more perfectly unified beings. Teilhard regarded basic trends in matter – gravitation, inertia, electromagnetism, and so on – as being ordered toward the production of progressively more complex types of aggregate. This process led to the increasingly complex entities of atoms, molecules, cells, and organisms, until finally the human body evolved, with a nervous system sufficiently sophisticated to permit rational reflection, self-awareness, and moral responsibility. While some evolutionists regard man simply as a prolongation of the Pliocene fauna – an animal more successful than the rat or the elephant – Teilhard argued that the appearance of man brought an added dimension into the world. This he defines as the birth of reflection: animals know, but man knows that he knows; he has "knowledge to the square."

Another great advance in Teilhard's scheme of evolution is the socialization of mankind. This is not the triumph of herd instinct but a cultural convergence of humanity toward a single society. Evolution has gone about as far as it can to perfect human beings physically: its next step will be social. Teilhard saw such evolution already in progress; through technology, urbanization, and modern communications, more and more links are being established between different peoples’ politics, economics, and habits of thought in an apparently geometric progression.

Theologically, Teilhard saw the process of organic evolution as a sequence of progressive syntheses whose ultimate convergence point is that of God. When humanity and the material world have reached their final state of evolution and exhausted all potential for further development, a new convergence between them and the supernatural order would be initiated by the Parousia, or Second Coming of Christ. Teilhard asserted that the work of Christ is primarily to lead the material world to this cosmic redemption, while the conquest of evil is only secondary to his purpose. Evil is represented by Teilhard merely as growing pains within the cosmic process: the disorder that is implied by order in process of realization.

http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/8/0,5716,73418+1+71560,00.html

"God is the nest we build together."

        – Gene Wolfe, 

           The Book of the New Sun

"He no longer saw the face of his friend Siddhartha. Instead he saw other faces, many faces, a long series, a continuous stream of faces—hundreds, thousands, which all came and disappeared and yet all seemed to be there at the same time, which all continually changed and renewed themselves and which were yet all Siddhartha… He saw all these forms and faces in a thousand relationships to each other, all helping each other, loving, hating, and destroying each other and become newly born. Each one was mortal, a passionate, painful example of all that is transitory. Yet none of them died, they only changed, were always reborn, continually had a new face: only time stood between one face and another."

        – Hermann Hesse, 

           Siddhartha

 

Anything we do randomly and frequently
starts to make its own sense
and changes the world into itself.
Anything you want there to be more
of,
do it randomly.
Don't wait for reasons
        – Ann Herbert, Margaret M. Pavel, and Mayumi Oda
           Random Kindness & Senseless Acts of Beauty

 

As a prelude to The Fall of Hyperion:

"Can God play a significant game with his own creature? Can any creator, even a limited one, play a significant game with his own creature?"

        – Norbert Winer, 

           God and Golem, Inc.

 

"…May there not be superior beings amused with any graceful though instinctive attitude my mind may fall into, as I am entertained with the alertness of a Stoat or the anxiety of a Deer? Though a quarrel in the streets is a thing to be hated, the energies displayed in it are fine… By a superior being our reasonings may take the same tone – through erroneous they may be fine– This is the very thing in which consists poetry…"

        – John Keats, 

           In a letter to his brother

 

"The imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream – he awoke and found it truth."

        – John Keats, 

           In a letter to his brother

 

 

As a prelude to Endymion:

We must not forget that the human soul

however independently created

our philosophy represents it as being,

is inseperable

in its birth and in its growth

from the universe into which it is born

    – Teilhard de Chardin

 

Give us gods. Oh give them us!

Give us gods.

We are so tired of men

and motor power.

    – D.H. Lawrence

 

 

As a prelude to The Rise of Endymion:

 

We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.

    – Norbert Wiener,

       Cybernetics, or Control and

       Communication in the Animal

       and the Machine

 

The universal nature out of the universal substance, as if it were wax, now moulds the figure of a horse, and when it has broken this up, it uses the material for a tree, next for a man, next for something else; and each of these things subsists for a very short time. But it is no hardship for the vessel to be broken up, just as there was none in its being fastened together.

    – Marcus Aurelius,

       Meditations

 

But here is the finger of God, a flash of the will that can,

Existent behind all laws, that made them and, lo, they are!

And I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man,

That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but

a star.

        – Robert Browning,

           Abt Vogler

 

If what I have said should not be plain enough, as I fear it may not be, I will but [sic] you in the place where I began in this series of thoughts—I mean, I began by seeing how man was formed by circumstances—and what are circumstances?—but touchstones of his heart—? And what are touch stones?—but proovings [sic] of his heart [sic]? —and what are the proovings [sic] of his heart but fortifiers or alterers of his nature? And what is his altered nature but his soul? —and what was his soul before it came into the world and had These provings and alterations and perfectionings? —An intelligences [sic]—without Identity—and how is this Identity to be made? Through the medium of the Heart? And how is the heart to become this Medium but in a world of Circumstances?—There now I think what with Poetry and Theology you may thank your Stars that my pen is not very long-winded—

    – John Keats,

       In a letter to his brother

 

For further reading:

"The Private Sea" by William Braden, Chapter 10 – The Death of God

http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/braden10.htm

 

A New Religion?

Are we all part of God – everything, everywhere, simultaneously? Do things not exist just because we cannot see them? Are time, chaos, and coincidence artificial constructs created out of our ignorance? Why do we kill things that are ugly or that we don’t understand? Do feelings of love have physical power? Are we really the most intelligent life form, when we don’t even understand the language of other creatures on our own planet? Is it possible to make God proud of us through our own accomplishments? Would these collective accomplishments lead to further evolution? Do organized religion and money hold us back from evolution? Would our ultimate evolution bring us into true consciousness and oneness with God? Is life a dream?

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