Thor Among the Giants: Part V
/THE NOOSPHERE
The 20th century paleontologist and spiritual philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin created a mythology that can help us in a different way to William Blake’s system. Where Blake saw the human enterprise as restoring what has been lost, Teilhard saw it more as creating the as-yet uncreated. Teilhard was a Catholic priest who believed in evolution at a time when such ideas were not in vogue with his church, so they sent him from his native France to China and forbade him from lecturing or publishing. Twenty-three years later the exile had clearly backfired, since Teilhard had absorbed Asian philosophy and it was in China that he co-discovered Home Erectus, a vital “missing link” in the chain of human evolution.
But Teilhard didn’t please his fellow scientists either. Rather than seeing evolution on the usual materialist grounds of random mutations he viewed it as the unfolding of divine love. To him, as matter moves into ever greater complexity, the divine is expressing itself more and more fully and accurately. Our planet started as a rocky sphere with a molten core, out of which evolved a hydrosphere of water, an atmosphere, and eventually a biosphere of organic life. This transition from inorganic to organic was of course a great leap forward, as was the emergence of consciousness and self-reflection from, say, pond weed into us. Up until now, says Teilhard, evolution has been divergent, creating multiple different life forms, but now it has become convergent, as the self-aware spirit, in the form of humans, seeks to connect and cohere towards a planetary mind:
Are we not experiencing the first symptoms of an assembling of an even higher order, the birth of some kind of unique focal point from the converging fires of millions of elementary focal points scattered over the surface of the thinking earth?
The Human Phenomenon
This “assembling” is the evolving of a new sphere around us, beyond the geosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere and biosphere, and Teilhard calls this new one the noosphere, from the Greek noos, meaning thought or mind:
From day to day the human mass is “setting”; it is building itself up; it is weaving around the globe a network of material organization, of communication, and of thought. Submerged as we are in this process and accustomed to regard it as nonphysical, we pay little attention to it. Suppose that we at last come to look at it as we would a crystal or a plant: we immediately realize that, through us, the earth is engaged in adding to its lithosphere, its atmosphere, its biosphere and its other layers, one more envelope – the last and the most remarkable of all. This is the thinking zone, the “noosphere.” Humankind…is indeed the “hominized” earth – we might even say “hominized” nature.
The Human Phenomenon
The noosphere is not tangible like, for instance, the hydrosphere, but it is perceptible, just as radio waves and light are:
For an imaginary geologist who might come in the distant future to inspect our fossilized globe, the most astounding of revolutions experienced by the Earth would unequivocally be put at the beginning of what has been so aptly called the Psychozoic Era. And at that very moment, for some Martian capable of analyzing sidereal radiations psychically as much as physically, the primary characteristic of our planet certainly would not seem to be how blue it is with seas or green with forests – but how phosphorescent with thought.
The Human Phenomenon
From his earliest days as a child the mystic in Teilhard saw, as he recounts it, “the divine radiating from the blazing heart of matter,” something that the thoughtful tripper might relate to with some ease. It is this divine spark which has been driving evolution forward, realizing itself more and more completely as we evolve. Aldous Huxley saw this divine spark in the humblest example of matter when, as he recounts in The Doors of Perception, he looks at the painting “Judith” by Botticelli:
My attention was arrested and I gazed in fascination, not at the pale neurotic heroine or her attendant, not at the victim’s hairy head or the vernal landscape in the background, but at the purplish silk of Judith’s pleated bodice and long wind-blown skirts.
This was something I had seen before – seen that very morning, between the flowers and the furniture, when I looked down by chance, and went on passionately staring by choice, at my own crossed legs. Those folds in the trousers – what a labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity! And the texture of the gray flannel – how rich, how deeply, mysteriously sumptuous! And here they were again, in Botticelli’s picture.
The Doors of Perception
Cleaned up doors of perception create a different state of being in the perceiver, in this particular case, Aldous. To Teilhard, the insight of the mystic is not that spirit is superior to matter and we should all fly away to God Land, but that spirit is the energized dimension of matter which we have been mulishly disregarding all along. Blake said it too:
Man has no Body distinct from his Soul, for that called Body is
A portion of the Soul discerned by the five Senses, the chief inlets
Of Soul in this age.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Given that today you can be in an online chat including people from all the inhabited regions of the earth, it has been natural for some commentators to equate the noosphere with the emergence of the internet. You might at first question that, since so much of the content of our global communication is nonsense, triviality and hate speech, but the fact that we can talk to one another from far and wide has significance for planetary mind. Human civilization does best when we are packed in together, as with the first Mesopotamian city of Ur, while the Renaissance kicked off in the close-knit cultural centers of a few small Italian city states, and the intensity of modern science came when we massed into huge industrial cities. More people talking to more people generates a vital intensity of innovative thinking.
But Teilhard is saying something more. He suggests that besides exchanging fresh ideas with one another, global connectivity generates a literal planetary mind, of which we individuals are constituent “grains”. Or, as Blake would have it, an awakened Albion is a new consciousness composed of our many consciousnesses, an emergent property of coherently collected individuals. When he rises from his spiritual slumber, Albion’s consciousness will be made from all of us, just as we are made of cells which at an earlier evolutionarily stage were once individual micro-beings. What force is pitching us into this increasing coherence? Teilhard names this the Omega Point, and that’s what we will look at in the next section.