Thor Among the Giants. Part VII: Driven by the Forces of Love
/Driven by forces of love, the fragments of the world are seeking one another so the world may come to be. Teilhard de Chardin
What world is it that, as Teilhard de Chardin says “may come to be”? Clearly, he doesn’t mean the one we live in now – besides already being here, this world is the location of the “fragments” who are charged with the job of creating the new place. We humans are those fragments of consciousness, scattered across the planet like mosaic pieces tossed into a random heap, while the forces of love are embarked on arranging us into a new and more coherent pattern. Teilhard’s name for the world waiting in the wings is the noosphere, (from the Greek nous, meaning thought), a sphere of consciousness he claims is even now layering over the geosphere and the biosphere of our planet and will, when complete, so transform the way we exist on earth that one day we will think of the current world as just a dry run for the real thing.
Teilhard de Chardin, who lived until 1955, made evolution his life work. Being both a Catholic priest and a paleontologist, he saw evolution not as an alternative to the biblical notion of creation, but as a working scientific model for the unfolding of divine love in the world – which annoyed his bosses in the church no end, and probably bugged the scientists too. As he saw it, physical evolution has reached its apex in humans – and its leading edge has now moved into the cultural and spiritual development of humanity:
The human is not the center of the universe, as we once naively believed, but something much finer, the rising arrow of the great biological synthesis. The human alone constitutes the last-born, freshest, most complicated and subtly varied of the successive layers of life. The Human Phenomenon
Teilhard sees our role in this transition from physical evolution to spiritual evolution as a movement from passive to active. In physical evolution we just had to let the forces of natural selection play on us as we adapted to different habitats, but now we have the chance to become active players in our own game:
It is not surprising that from this moment on, and thanks to the characteristics of this new milieu, that the flowering of heredity is reduced to the pure and simple transmission of acquired spiritual treasures.
From being passive, as it probably was before reflection, in becoming hominized, heredity springs up to become supremely active in its “noospheric” form. The Human Phenomenon
For Teilhard, we are “hominized” matter, regular matter that has reached the very specialized form of being human. This hominized matter is now on the brink of another step forward, into a “noospheric” form, where we will reach a still greater level of organization, and become “supremely active,” as participants in a global consciousness. The building blocks of this future us might be seen in the “New Earth” that Eckhart Tolle speaks of in his book of the same name; the New Earth is the place we inhabit when our hearts have opened, our senses have sharpened, and we become more present to ourselves and one another. We tend to think of that kind of opening as happening for one person, as is the case sometimes during a trip or, say, on the return from a long meditation retreat, but the thought that we might reliably reach this state of mind communally, or even globally, is a revolutionary stretch. Right now, as we remain under the control of the survival/aggrandizement rule book of life, our vision of a workable trust/cooperation rulebook is bound to be limited to guesswork, intuitions, and hippy-based pilot projects.
You could make the case that in some ways Teilhard is overly rigid and behind the times in his thinking, and I don’t believe that would be entirely wrong. Like any good anthropocentric person, he privileges human consciousness above all other kinds, presumably because that’s the one he knows best. He seems to be saying that we have little to learn from other life forms, like the distributive consciousness of the octopus or the possibility that trees might be much better meditators than we are, and so on, endlessly through the species. But I think his central point is undeniable: life evolves from simple to complex, and with greater complexity comes greater self-awareness. A sea cucumber is more complex than a single-celled organism, an armadillo is more complex than a sea cucumber, and we are more complex and self-aware than an armadillo, I think. Terence Mckenna, who said that “It’s time to be up and about the great and exciting business of being truly human for the first time,” called us the “point species” in the journey of life into spirit.
This is what it’s like when a species prepares to move on to the next dimension. The entire destiny of all life on the planet is tied up in this. We are not acting for ourselves or from ourselves; we happen to be the point species in a transformation that will affect every species on this planet at its conclusion.
What factors will help a random bunch of fragments like us get it together to meaningfully cohere into a new world? And how can we help the forces of love act on us in a way that will foster this process? When we apply the psychedelic magnifying glass of high levels of concentration onto our usual surroundings, we become aware that the physical world is the spirit world: the sky becomes a blue beyond all possible blues, the earth smells more deep and rich than we have ever conceived of, and life pulses brilliantly all around us. We enter this exulted state by the deepening of sense perceptions, or, you could say, by noticing what’s there. William Blake put it this slightly roundabout way:
The ancient tradition that the world will be consumed in fire
At the end of six thousand years is true, as I have heard from Hell.
For the cherub with his flaming sword is hereby commanded to
Leave his guard at the tree of life, and when he does, the whole
Creation will be consumed, and appear infinite and holy whereas
It now appears finite and corrupt. This will come by an improvement of sensual enjoyment.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
If Teilhard comes to us as a sort of holy scientist, Blake arrives as an out-and-out prophet. The cherub with the flaming sword stands at the gates of Eden making sure no one sneaks back in, after we were all kicked out. Blake’s next statement is interesting: when the cherub is relieved of his post (presumably making it then okay for us to re-enter Eden) “the whole of creation will be consumed.” Or will it? We are told that creation will appear as “infinite and holy whereas it now appears finite and corrupt,” suggesting that it’s not the world that will be annihilated or engulfed in fire and brimstone. Instead, our current manner of perceiving the world is what will be “consumed,” and most crucially, Blake says that this destroying of old ways of perception “will come about by an improvement of sensual enjoyment.” I don’t believe by “sensual enjoyment” he means a better appreciation of fine wines and having more fun in bed – at least not only those things – but that our physical senses will be a portal to spiritual joy, in just the same way as the full-hearted, mind-blown tripper experiences ecstatic states with reasonable regularity. That is when straight people, trapped as they are in normal consciousness, may snicker at someone who is tripping and entranced by a privet hedge or a spider web, or for that matter, the back of their own hand.
What brings about the improvement of sensual enjoyment? Exposure to the forces of love. And in this day and age, psychedelics are a primary operative agent for those forces, through the action of material chemicals on physical bodies. This improvement of sensual pleasure that happens in tripping is an education program for hominized matter, a sneak preview of the infinite and holy world that Blake visions, and the noosphere that Teilhard predicts. It is what you might get when a bunch of disparate musicians wake up one morning and realise that they could play together “in concert,” and be an orchestra.
Blake goes on to say:
But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his
Soul is to be expunged; this I shall do, by printing in the
Infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and
Medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.
If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is: infinite.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’
Narrow chinks in his cavern.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
It’s pretty non-dualistic of 18th century William Blake to say that “the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul has to be expunged,” and I believe that this matches with the experience we have when we enter a psychedelic trance-like state of deep perception: the mind/body distinction becomes rather wavy. In fact in another part of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Blake says, “Man has no Body distinct from his soul; for that called Body is a portion of a Soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.” You would be tempted to say that he is a thinker way ahead of his time, except that these issues have been confronted by all people across all ages. The corrosives that Blake talks about are the acids that dissolve away portions of the printing plates in his relief etching method, by which he creates his illuminated manuscript-style books. But the corrosives are also his uncompromising thoughts, words and illustrations, which will bite into our complacent and ingrained habits of self-limited perception, helping us – even if unwillingly – cleanse our senses, our doors of perception, and see into the infinite. We need a little waking up and shaking up:
How do you know but every Bird that cuts the airy way
Is an immense world of delight, closed by your senses five?
Marriage of Heaven and Hell