AT THE HEART OF THE PERIPHERY: Teilhard de Chardin’s Effort to Escape the Dualistic Matrix

By Robert Colacurcio

In Teilhard’s view, however, evolution is necessarily benign because of the elemental influence that the Christic Incarnation has upon all matter. Cosmologically, in his view, the map allows for only one destination.

The development of my book will examine whether and to what extent the essential philosophical elements assumed by Teilhard’s science permit, foster, favor or inhibit the realization of the utopian vision.

Therefore, we will examine the thought of Teilhard de Chardin as exhibited principally in The Human Phenomenon as to its usefulness as a Big Map leading from the paramesium to paradise. The reader might find it helpful, in this extended examination, to keep Samuel Huntington’s five criteria in mind when examining a map, a model or a paradigm. Is it able to do the following:

1. order and generalize about reality;
2. understand causal relationships among phenomena;
3. anticipate and even predict future developments;
4. distinguish what is important from the unimportant;
5. show us what paths we should take to achieve our goal. (Huntington, p.30)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 21, 2024
• ISBN: 9798369418307

Robert Colacurcio

Robert Colacurcio has been practicing the methodology of the Buddha’s spiritual technology for over thirty five years under the guidance of some of the most accomplished meditation masters in the Vajrayana lineage of Buddhism. Earlier in his life he studied to become a Jesuit priest, and earned his PhD from Fordham University in philosophy. His spiritual background includes two years at the New York Zendo, extensive study in the Human Potential Movement under the direction of Claudio Naranjo and Oscar Ichazo. His journey then took him to a Sufi commune learning the disciplines of the Russian savant, G.I. Gurdjieff. He is also deeply indebted to the works of Carlos Castaneda, Robert Pirsig and Jane Roberts. He currently lives with his wife, Carol, in a suburb of Richmond, Virginia, and delights with pride in the growth and constant source of revelation that are his children and grandchildren

Book preview

Copyright © 2024 by Robert Colacurcio.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 03/20/2024

Xlibris

844-714-8691

www.Xlibris.com

858562

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Chapter One: Some Preliminary Thoughts and Questions

Chapter Two: What Problem is Teilhard Trying to Solve?

Chapter Three: A Science of Mind

Chapter Four: The Christification of All Things

Chapter Five: Rock Solid Reality

Chapter Six: The Existential Fault Line: Original Sin

Chapter Seven: Hobbled by the Cross

Chapter Eight: The Abyss Between Summits

Chapter Nine: The Virtual Self and the Absence of the Abyss

Chapter Ten: More: Less is More

Chapter Eleven: Complexity vs. Simplicity

Chapter Twelve: The Awareness Dimension of Mind

Chapter Thirteen: Is Evolution Always Benign?

Chapter Fourteen: Freedom in Pursuit of Evolution

Chapter Fifteen: Grace

Chapter Sixteen: Identity Authorizes Direction

Chapter Seventeen: Epilogue

Some Questions and After Thoughts

Final Dedication

To Dr. B. Alan Wallace

For his devotion and expertise in teaching the

Dharma with the warm, moist breath of the dakinis

and the piercing acuity of the sword of Manjushri

Preface

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a French Jesuit priest and world renowned paleontologist who died in 1955 at the age of 73. He is celebrated especially for his visionary forecasts that predict humanity’s future climaxing not in catestrophic collapse but in the Ultimate Unification of all creation in Christ. He grounds his prediction in his mystical/scientific depth of insight into the evolutionary dynamism of creation itself. While his book, The Divine Milieu is a kind of devotional manual, The Human Phenomenon will test and stretch any reader’s scientific acumen.

My book relates primarily to The Human Phenomenon. It is especially the implicit epistemology of this work that engages my special interest. This is my 20th publication, and all of my books have been in the genre of applied spirituality. By that I mean I try to articulate the basic principles that anyone can apply to go deeper into their own spiritual engagement with the Divine or All That Is. Full disclosure: I was schooled by the Jesuits, studied to become a priest in the Society of Jesus, earned a PhD in philosophy from Fordham University, but for the past forty years have been practicing the spiritual technology of the Buddha as it comes down to us from Tibet via the ancient Nyingmapa school of Tibetan Buddhism.

Most people probably regard Buddhism as a religion, being a minor religion relative to the number of its adherents, and principally finding voice today through His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. However, there is no word in Tibetan for religion. That category is a western, colonial impositon. Tibetan Buddhists call themselves Insiders, not because they claim special inside knowledge, but because their approach to reality, moral behavior, and understanding itself is from the inside. In this book I coin the expression the objectivity of subjectivity. Like the American Indian cultures, Tibet was/is not enamored of the objectified approach that nets technological prowess and progress through objective measurement and manipulation.

Chardin also places great stress on what he calls interiority or the inside nature of things. Because the generation and continuing presence of what he calls complexity-consciousness is so integral to his understanding of evolution’s dynamic teleology, how we know what we know (a.k.a. epistemology) is critical to his entire prophetic vision. It is for the Buddhists also. Shakyamuni Buddha’s opening salvo upon exiting from his forest retreat and enlightenment experience 2500 years ago is loaded with epistemological implications. He said all suffering is predicated on a perceptual mistake that leads to confusion about what is real. That’s a spot on challenge to examine how we know what we think we know. So as a philosopher specializing in epistemology my appreciation and/or reservations of Teilhard’s vision will be grounded in a careful critique of his philosophic fundamentals, especially as those fundamentals are grounded in consciousness’ ability to understand what and how it does what it does in reaching conclusions that elicit our allegiance because of their claims to be the truth.

The Human Phenomenon is a challenging read. It repays the effort. There is much gold to be mined there. The question each reader must decide for themselves, however, is this: will the gold actually pay for the glorified result that it predicts and promises?

Introduction

Recently Teilhard de Chardin’s early work, The Mass on the World celebrated the 100th anniversary of its publication. I was pursuing my scholastic studies towards becoming a Jesuit priest in the ‘60s and finished them with a doctorate in philosophy from Fordham University before leaving the Society of Jesus. Teilhard was in vogue then; well, at least among certain Catholic circles. I read The Phenomenon of Man and The Divine Milieu at that time, and remember sharing the excitement among my Jesuit graduate student brothers in Christ.

Although I left the Jesuits in the early ‘70s, I did so quite amicably. Teilhard’s Jesuit experience wasn’t as luxurious as mine. Both the Church and his monastic order were concerned he had strayed beyond the strict bounds of orthodoxy in his writings. He was summoned to Rome for questioning, sent to China where I guess his superiors felt he could do no harm, ended his life as a persona non grata within the Society of Jesus, his publications and opportunity to teach denied, and he died in NYC at an out of the way Jesuit facility and was buried in a small cemetery adjacent to a Jesuit novitiate. The only restriction ever imposed on my writing was the topic of my doctoral dissertation; it was considered too theoretical. The ideas I had first conceived at that time had to gestate for another forty years before I published them in The influence of the Imagination on the Knowledge of God.

Recently translated as The Human Phenomenon by Sarah Appleton-Weber, Teilhard’s profound and provocative ideas as derived from, among many other sources, paleontologic science, socialization and the human scene as it has evolved over eons of time are not an easy read. The well-read and devoutly interested reader will find them challenging. In this regard it is telling, I think, that the person selected to write the Foreward is Brian Swimme, a recently resigned Professor of math and science seeking spiritual guidance from the savant Thomas Berry (see his The Great Work and his co-authored book The Universe Story). Swimme had read Teilhard as a high school student, and when Berry told Swimme to read it again, slowly this time, he was downcast, fully expecting Berry would have offered him something more important to read. He quotes Berry making this remarkable statement:

To see as Teilhard saw is a challenge, but increasingly his vision is becoming available to us. I fully expect that in the next millenium [sic] Teilhard will be generally regarded as the fourth major thinker in the western Christian tradition. These would be St. Paul, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and Teilhard. (cf. The Human Phenomenon, Sussex Academic Press, 2003, p. xiv. Here after HP).

Earlier in one of the prefatory testimonials, Berry extols Teilhard’s writing for its lyricism, nuance and subtlety. He also believes Teilhard was the first to see the universe in a new way. Any attempt to understand Teilhard that does not begin with the entire complex of civilizations as well as the vast panorama of the evolutionary universe is doomed to failure for it is simply too small to grasp what he is all about. (HP, p. xii-xiv) Emphasis mine.

Now as extraordinarily sweeping and all comprehensive as that statement intends to be, my first criticism is to point out that Teilhard cannot possibly be the first to see the universe in a new way, because novelty and fresh perspective have been showing up in the West (to say nothing of the East) since Plato and Lucretius thought about the universe as a whole. Secondly, think about what materialist science has been able to outline--leaving out for the moment the spiritual vision informing Teilhard’s science as the entire complex and vast panorama of the universe. Now compare it to see how extremely partial it is when the acute observations from contemplative science are omitted. More about contemplative science later, but for now it refers to the strict scientific methods developed in India for the past 2500 years since the time of Shakyamuni Buddha, including in addition the 2000 years of contemplative observations using the methods of shamata practice that preceded him, and the 1000 years of university study and confirming observations that obtained in India hundreds of years before our first western universities at Bologna, Paris and Oxford were founded!

I’d like the reader to think of Teilhard’s work as essentially a kind of cosmological map. I still use a good AAA Road Atlas to supplement my GPS. I like to see the big picture and magic marker my own route. The overview is very satisfying.

Teilhard’s work, in The Human Phenomenon at least, can be thought as a useful and satisfying map. Some maps are better than others; it depends on the detail you need. Too much detail and the big picture is lost; too little showing perhaps just the Interstate Highways and our ability to find alternate routes is missing. And, of course, such a map is only useful if you want to go somewhere by car. By train or flying your own plane requires a totally different kind of map.

Now Teilhard’s map also represents a paradigm shift. Consider, for example, how the Cold War paradigm was a highly simplified but nonetheless very useful map of international relations for the forty years preceding the collapse of the Soviet Union. Today, according to Samuel P. Huntington in his benchmark bestseller, The Clash of Civilizations: and the Remaking of the World Order (Simon & Schuster, 1996), we have yet to agree on a map that simplifies the clash of civilizations today as well as the international scene during the Cold War era. He writes,

Simplified paradigms or maps are indispensable for human thought and action.... We may explicitly formulate theories and models and consciously use them to guide our behavior. Alternatively we may deny the need for such guides...that we will act only in terms of specific objective facts.... If we assume this however, we delude ourselves. For in the back of our minds are hidden assumptions, biases and prejudices that determine how we perceive reality.... (Ibid. p. 30)

In my opinion, hidden assumptions, biases and prejudices need to be recognized not just in whether and how we follow a map or paradigm, but even more so in the construction of the map and paradigm itself. I plan to make use of this strategy regarding Teilhard’s cosmological map both in its creation and its practical execution as a model for behavior.

If there is a design problem with Teilhard’s map, it’s in the plethora of details. The reader is faced not only with Teilhard’s lyricism, nuance and subtlety, but with such copious detail that the big picture can be lost sight of. It is as if wanting to go from NYC to LA one had only a Road Atlas that shows on successive pages the details of each intervening state between NYC and LA, but no single page pictures the entire map of the US. Such a map would make it hard to grasp an overview. It must be acknowledged, however, that Teilhard subdivides the 226 pages of The Human Phenomenon into only four main parts: Part I: Prelife (40 pages), Part II: Life (69 pages), Part III: Thought (53 pages) and Part IV: Superlife (58 pages). And somewhat like a good symphonic composition, there is a natural development leading to the magnificent crescendo in the last movement. Still, like an elaborate symphony by Beethoven perhaps, the climax can only be fully comprehended and appreciated if close attention has been paid to the preceding three movements.

Nevertheless, according to Sarah Appleton-Weber, Teilhard’s editor, we each have a call from within ourselves; it resonates with pathos because of the structural reality of our human condition has us locked in a cruel conflict. This conflict endemic to the