TEILHARD DE CHARDIN HELPED GROUND ME IN THE CHANGE OF COMPLEXITY AND CONSCIOUSNESS

I use the work and ideas of Teilhard de Chardin so much in my approach to Lay Cistercian spirituality that I thought it would be a good idea to give you some ideas about the source of my inspiration. I am no expert on Henri Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Jesuit priest and paleontologist. I take what I can absorb into my view of reality to make sense out of the dissonance of reality and how I think all creation is yearning for the resonance that comes from The Christ Principle.

https://teilharddechardin.org/teilhard-de-chardin/biography-of-teilhard-de-chardin/

Quotes from Teilhard de Chardin as found on http://www.azquotes.com

• “Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.” ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
• “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.” ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
• “Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit, you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge.” ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
• “Love is the most universal, the most tremendous, and the most mystical of cosmic forces. Love is the primal and universal psychic energy. Love is a sacred reserve of energy; it is like the blood of spiritual evolution.” ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
• “Love is the most powerful and still most unknown energy in the world.” ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
• “In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.” ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
• “Humanity has been sleeping-and still sleeps-lulled within the narrowly confining joys of its little closed loves. In the depths of the human multitude, there slumbers an immense spiritual power which will manifest itself only when we have learnt how to break through the dividing walls of our egoism and raise ourselves up to an entirely new perspective, so that habitually and practically we fix our gaze on the universal realities.” ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
• “Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen.” ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
• “You must overcome death by finding God in it.” ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
• “You are not a human being in search of a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being immersed in a human experience.” ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
• “Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves.” ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
• “The most empowering relationships are those in which each partner lifts the other to a higher possession of their own being.” ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
• “Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.” ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
• “Today, something is happening to the whole structure of human consciousness. A fresh kind of life is starting. Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world are seeking each other, so that the world may come into being.” ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

I add a map of Teilhard’s view of reality (unattributed) as a core against which I view all reality moving inexorably forward in consciousness and complexity. This map is at the core of my Catholicism and Lay Cistercianism. It gives me reason to hope in the direction of humanity, despite the shortcomings of others and particularly myself. When you look at this map, what do you see?

MY THOUGHTS BASED ON THE TEILHARD MAP

I use this map for many comparisons, which is all we have to know the mind and heart of God. One of them is how all life evolves, all matter changes in complexity and consciousness. Tomorrow is not today. Today is the only stage on which we act out what will go into our lives to make them active at that next level of evolution, spirituality. This is important for me because I believe that Jesus has gone to prepare a place for me (all of you) and that the Father has many mansions for us to dwell in, although they may not be what we expect. What I do in my life to become that adopted son or daughter of the Father, I can take with me to decorate that mansion. What I have control over is what my free will chooses to take with me to heaven. God provides the mansion, but it is up to me to decorate it with those people, life experiences, and relationships from this earthly world. Jesus came down to teach me what I can bring to heaven to decorate my rooms in the Father’s mansion. Jesus became human so that I can assimilate those values and my relationship with Jesus through the Holy Spirit and take them with me. There is no sin in heaven, but the Church Universal, guardian of how to increase Christ and reduce reliance on me, offers me the opportunity on earth to slough off those activities or thoughts that impede me from going to heaven. The Church is the vehicle in real time, but also the amalgam of past experiences, which give me the Eucharist, Penance, Baptism, Confirmation, and especially viaticum, or the last rites. All of it to help me, the individual, increase Christ and decrease me (dying to self to rise to new life in Christ) and prepare on earth what I will take with me to decorate my mansion after I die.

My last resource for you is the website I came across that features various authors and their ideas about the macro view of reality and how it is alive and ever-growing. You can make up your own mind as to its meaning for you. http://www.organism.earth

In all these ideas, I am no scholar or Teilhard expert; in fact, I don’t know a lot about most subjects. My abilities seem to try to link all reality together using the Divine Equation. I will leave you to look it up somewhere in my blogs, going back to 2017, at https://thecenterforcontemplativepractice.org

If you like this approach to Catholicism, I call My Catholicism, use it for meditation and maybe even contemplation. Remember, if we don’t dig for spiritual gold, all we will get from our Faith is what we always got. I will not settle for anything less than yearning for the deeper meaning of life, the meaning of love, and the truth that is beyond human comprehension. That is why I am a Catholic.

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