Pierre Teilhard De Chardin (1881-1955)
The Phenomenon Of Man
【summary by AI
The Omega Point is the ultimate destination of cosmic evolution where the universe achieves maximum complexity, consciousness, and divine unity, as theorized by the French Jesuit paleontologist and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
Core Concepts of the Theory:
Cosmic Evolution:
Teilhard believed the universe constantly moves from simple matter toward higher levels of material complexity.
Rise of Consciousness:
As physical structures (like atoms, cells, and nervous systems) become more complex, consciousness naturally increases.
The Noosphere:
Human thought and collective intelligence form a mental layer enveloping the Earth, which continues to grow more connected and coherent.
The Final Attractor:
The Omega Point is the final goal (telos) drawing all creation toward itself. It represents a supreme, self-aware super-consciousness that Teilhard closely identified with the divine and the cosmic Christ.】
CHAPTER TWO: BEYOND THE COLLECTIVE, THE HYPER-PERSONAL
1. The Convergence Of The Person And The Omega Point
A. The Personal Universe
The universe, without losing any of its immensity and thus without suffering any anthropomorphism, begins to take shape : since to think it, undergo it and make it act, it is beyond our souls that we must look, not the other way round. In the perspective of a noogenesis, time and space become truly humanised — or rather super-humanised. Far from being mutually exclusive, the Universal and Personal grow in the same direction and culminate simultaneously in each other. It is therefore a mistake to look for the extension of our being or of the noosphere in the Impersonal. The Future-Universal could not be anything else but the Hyper-Personal - at the Omega Point.
p.260
CHAPTER THREE: THE ULTIMATE EARTH
3. THE ULTIMATE
Always pushing forward in the three directions we have just indicated, and taking advantage of the immense duration it has still to live, mankind has enormous possibilities before it. Until the coming of man, life was quickly arrested and hemmed in by the specialisations into which it was forced to mould itself so as to act, and became fixed, then dispersed, at each forward bound. Since the threshold of reflection, we have entered into an entirely new field of evolution-thanks to the astonishing properties of 'artifice' which separate the instrument from the organ and enable one and the same creature to intensify and vary the modalities of its action indefinitely without losing anything of its freedom; and thanks to the prodigious power of thought to bring sogether and combine in a single conscious effort all the human particles. In fact, though the study of the past may give us some idea of the resources of organised matter
in its dispersed state, we have as yet no idea of the possible magnirude of 'noospheric' effects. We are confronted with human vibrations resounding by the mullion—a whole layer of consciousness exerting simultaneous pressure upon the future and the collected and hoarded produce of a million years of thought. Have we ever tried to form an idea of what such magnitudes represent ?
In this direction, the most unexpected is perhaps what we should most expect. Under the increasing tension of the mind on the surface of the globe, we may begin by asking seriously whether life will not perhaps one day succeed in ingeniously forcing the bars of its earthly prison, either by finding the means to invade other inhabited planets or by getting into psychical touch with other focal points of consciousness across the abysses of space. The meeting and mutual fecundation of two noospheres is a supposition which may seem at first sight crazy, but which after all is merely extending to psychical phenomena a scope no-one would think of denying to material phenomena. Consciousness would thus finally construct itself by a synthesis of planetary units. Why not, in a universe whose astral unit is the galaxy ?
Without in any way wishing to discourage such hypotheses — whose realisation, though enormously enlarging the dimensions, would leave unchanged both the convergent form and hence the final duration of noogenesis- I consider their probability too remote for them to be worth dwelling on.
The human organism is so extraordinarily complicated and sensitive, and so closely adapted to terrestrial conditions, that it is difficult to see how man could acclimatise himself to anorher planet, even if he were capable of navigating through interplanetary space. The sidereal durations are so immense that it is difficult to see how in two different regions of the heavens, two thought systems could co-exist and coincide at comparable stages of their development. For these two reasons among others I adopt the supposition that our noosphere is destined to close in upon itself in isolation, and that it is in a psychical rather than a spatial direction that it will find an outlet, without need to leave or overflow the earth. Hence, quite naturally, the notion of change of state recurs.
Noogenesis rises upwards in us and through us unceasingly. We have pointed to the principal characteristics of that movement: the closer association of the grains of thought; the synthesis of individuals and of nations or races; the need of an autonomous and supreme personal focus to bind elementary personalities together, without deforming them, in an atmosphere of active sympathy. And, once again: all this results from the combined action of two curvatures — the roundness of the earth and the cosmic convergence of mind — in conformity with the law of complexity and consciousness.
Now when sufficient elements have sufficiently agglomerated, this essentially convergent movement will attain such intensity and such quality that mankind, taken as a whole, will be obliged - as happened to the individual forces of instinct - to reflect upon itself at a single point; that is to say, in this case, to abandon its organo-planetary foothold so as to shift its centre on to the transcendent centre of its increasing concentration. This will be the end and the fulfilment of the spirit of the earth.
The end of the world: the wholesale internal introversion upon itself of the noosphere, which has simultaneously reached the untermost limit of its conplexity and its centrality.
The end of the world: the overthrow of equilibrium,detaching the mind, fulfilled at last, from its material matrix, so that it will henceforth rest with all its weight on God-Omega.
The end of the world: critical point simultaneously of emergence and emersion, of maturation and escape. We can entertain two almost contradictory suppositions about the physical and psychical state our planet will be in as it approaches maturation.!
According to the first hypothesis which expresses the hopes towards which we ought in any case to turn our efforts as to an ideal, evil on the earth at its final stage will be reduced to a minimum. Disease and hunger will be conquered by science and we will no longer need to fear them in any acute form. And, conquered by the sense of the earth and human sense, hatred and internecine struggles will have disappeared in the ever-warmer radiance of Omega. Some sort of unanimity will reign over the entire mass of the noosphere. The final convergence will take place in peace. Such an outcome would of course conform most harmoniously with our theory.
But there is another possibility. Obeying a law from which nothing in the past has ever been exempt, evil may go on growing alongside good, and it too may attain its paroxysm at the end in some specifically new form.
There are no summits without abysses.
Enormous powers will be liberated in mankind by the inner play of its cohesion: though it may be that this energy will still be employed discordantly tomorrow, as today and in the past.
Are we to foresee a mechanising synergy under brute force, or a synergy of sympathy? Are we to foresee man seeking to fulfil himself collectively upon himself, or personally on a greater than himself? Refusal or acceptance of Omega? A conflict may supervene. In that case the noosphere, in the course of and by virtue of the process which draws it together, will, when it has reached its point of unification, split into two zones each attracted to an opposite pole of adoration. Thought has never completely united upon itself here below. Universal love would only vivify and detach finally a fraction of the noosphere so as to consummate it - the part which decided to 'cross the threshold', to get outside itself into the other. Ramifications once again, for the last time.
In this second hypothesis, which is more in conformity with traditional apocalyptic thinking, we may perhaps discern three curves around us rising up at one and the same time into the future: an inevitable education in the organic possibilities of the earth, an internal schism of consciousness ever increasingly divided on two opposite ideals of evolution, and positive attraction of the centre of centres at the heart of those who turn towards it. And the earth would finish at the triple point at which, by a coincidence altogether in keeping with the ways of life, these three curves would meet and attain their maximum at the very same moment.
The death of the materially exhausted planet; the split of the noosphere, divided on the form to be given to its unity; and simultaneously (endowing the event with all its significance and with all its value) the liberation of that percentage of the universe which, across time, space and evil, will have succeeded in laboriously synthesising itself to the very end.
Not an indefinite progress, which is an hypothesis contradicted by the convergent nature of noogenesis, but an ecstasy transcending the dimensions and the framework of the visible universe.
Ecstasy in concord; or discord; but in either case by excess of interior tension: the only biological outcome proper to or conceivable for the phenomenon of man.
pp.286-289