The Noosphere and Cosmic Christ: Happy Birthday Teilhard de Chardin
Happy birthday, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (May 1, 1885 – April 10, 1955). Give a listen to this excellent biographical podcast with Ursula King, Andrew Revkin, and David Sloak Wilson.
King: “The human is not finished yet!”
Tippet: “He sees evolution both on a physical… and spiritual… that evolution proceeds towards spirit. Even as he looks towards Peking Man, and see himself as a 21st century human, he imagines future man looking back and seeing a primitive spirituality. He imagines this flowering of consciousness; this evolutionary consciousness.
King: “It’s mind blowing! The whole region of cyberspace… They say Teilhard is the patron saint of the world wide web. He used to say that we will intensify our communication: but what are we doing with it? That’s the big question. We have to create it.”
Though banned from publication in his lifetime, Teilhard’s posthumous writings went on to influence brilliant thinkers in their own right like media theorist Marshall McLuhan, scifi [1] writer Philip K. Dick, and more recently, Rev. Matthew Fox, Thomas Berry, Brian Swimme, and theologian Elizabeth Johnson‘s ecological thought and “growing forward tradition.”
Read the Mass on the World here.
[1] In Dan Simmon’s Endymion, a future Catholic pope takes the name Teilhard 1st.
Evolutionary Landscapes 
When Teilhard de Chardin speaks of spiritual evolution he is really speaking of involution
Teilhard de Chardin sees “evolution” proceeding toward the spiritual, which is really the Inward Path of involution, whereas real evolution precedes toward the supermaterial in the Outward Path. Evolution is more than the evolution (really involution) of a spiritual consciousness. Consciousness as well as the Spirit-Will are encased in a material body and both evolve toward super-materiality, and eventually to Godhood, if we are successful enough in evolution.
The Inward State of the Father Within is just that, an Inward State, which brings bliss as a consequence of complete non-attachment to all material passions. But evolution requires desires and passions, that is, those that are selected for upward evolution, not devolution, and not selected for the Father Within which is not evolution but involution. Yes, we retain the Father Within in the Twofold Path, but only as the symbolic experience of the Godhood reached in material/supermaterial evolution, while also being shaped by the outside forces natural selection and evolution.
http://civilizingthebeast.blogspot.com/
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Reblogged this on Teilhard de Chardin.
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Thanks William!
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