TEILHARD ON ENERGETICS

                 Sunnie D. Kidd

Teilhard de Chardin is calling for a new energy:

Every day the reality of an ultra-human becomes more insistent;

and there is no possible way for our generation to enter into it

except with the help of a new form of psychic energy in which the

personalizing depth of love is combined with the totalization of

what is most essential and most universal in the heart of the stuff

of the cosmos and the cosmic stream-and for this new energy we

have as yet no name.1

Like the opening of a flower can be seen in animation by speeding up

the continuous movement of the projected image, the creative songs of the

universe can be seen accompanied by the dance of unraveling, unfolding

movements in time. Slowly a line of primates becomes axial or radial in a

complex evolutionary process and acquires an index of fuller consciousness,

which expresses itself through cephalization and a more intricate, highly

developed nervous system. In articulating these differences the role of these

continuously evolving and adapting primates assumes unique distinctiveness

and passes a critical threshold, the threshold of reflection. With the

appearance of the human being a totally new sphere emerged, the noosphere

or the sphere of thought.

Teilhard was clear and forthright, in critically important texts, that the

success of evolution was conditioned on human responsible free choice. The

sphere of thought brought about by human activity impregnates and embeds

a world of compressive socialization. The dynamic of this noosphere is

carried onward more often than not in a spirit of future optimism but, in

reaching out, it targets for divergent, dispersive individual fulfillment.

Teilhard speaks early in his work about the ultra-human as a desirable,

perhaps even unavoidable target position for humankind and visualizes it as

a growing field of unitive consciousness. He recognizes the urgency to enter

the core of this unitive process center, becoming more and more visible to

his eye, within this ultra-human environment and postulates a specific

psychic energy as a carrier and a morality of movement as a facilitator.

In an active and contemplative request for personal meaning Teilhard

sees personalizing love, positive commitment to convergent, yet differentiating

personal communion (or moral energy in its deepest form) merging with the

heart of the cosmos, the cosmic stream. This act of centration places the

seeking person in the core of the evolutionary process, where the cosmos

2 Energetics

embraces the human being and develops its specificity for uniqueness in the

full process of universal convergence.

Awakened from a mystical environment and strengthened by the

requirements demanded by scientific vigor, Teilhard brings human

fulfillment and the need for transcendence, two concepts that for centuries

had been taken to be fundamental in questions of philosophical ethics back

again in the cosmo-scientific realm of evolutionary growth. In doing this he

is offering hope to actually envision and see their congruence in the format

of an energetics of mind not only by himself but by the majority of people.

Teilhard’s deep worries about the inter educational aspects of human

relations was reflected by the notes he made after he was invited to supervise

the work on vertebrate and human fossils in China. He reports about the

cordiality of the gatherings, with members of the group almost all intimate

friends. He writes:

The table was strewn with apple-blossom, a sign of both spring

and of its storms; we each spoke in turn of friendship, of

collaboration, of our hopes for great and small things. I am

quite certain, for I can feel it or detect it continually in others,

that though the world is full of potencies, it is floundering and

suffocating; the reason is that there is no one at hand, not even

the Christian, to set an example and show how men may learn

to act and live in a way that will be human in the fullest sense,

passionately and actively receptive of everything good and

beautiful and true. There is only one contact charged with an

irresistible centripetal and unifying force, and that is the contact

of the whole of man, with the whole of man.2

From the foregoing, it can be seen that the language used to describe and

to reveal the new psychic energy of which Teilhard has spoken is crucial, for it

will be an initiating word in human energetics. It will simultaneously give a

name to and express that which will take humanity one more upward turn on

the evolutionary spiral-together. It is one new branch from this tree of human

life, one pathway of expression for the advent of this new and as yet unnamed

psychic energy, one which is already unfolding within us each.

With illumination of experience embracing organic matter through time

there developed a conscious desire for comprehensibility of the reflecting

flashes of creative information which it kept receiving. While organic evolution

does most of its creative work in silence, the human being, highest on the

ladder of consciousness, seeks to anchor and save the illuminative experience

firmly into time and space, to make it repeatable, testable and strong to

withstand the storms of life. Human beings need the word by which the

Energetics 3

experience of illumination was cooled down, attracted a fitting, describable

format and an existing shape, for as long as it was needed upon the road to

further enlightenment into the future. We carry on, from paradigm shift to

paradigm shift, building from the flashes of creative information we receive, a

substrate manageable by the brain in computer simulation models, in satellite

images and in self-created virtual environments.

This search continues and is never-ending as the human mind keeps

reformatting its experience in manageable, as well as useful, substructures

reflecting the time frame in which we live, converting its experience into tools

for personal development and with that, the development of life in a human

society. In embracing and embedding factual information about ourselves in a

process stream, which is cosmic by nature, we shall need to search for a unified

concept of the complete energy spectrum, which is essentially psychic. Our

goal would be to reintegrate, in genuine synthesis, the human reflective with its

originating Dynamic Core. Perhaps it is never totally in vain to repeat the word

by which the great religions have sought to protect this creative, evolutionary

structure, this psychic universe, from damage by pointing to each node of

supportive awareness in this infrastructure of change expressing the

evolutionary value of each human life.

Notes

1) Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Activation of Energy (New York: Harcourt,

Brace, Jovanovich, 1963), p. 227.

2) Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Letters from a Traveller (London: Collins

Fontana Books, 1973), p. 96.