Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

1:To see more is to become more. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

2:Joy is the sheer evidence of God. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

3:Faith has need of the whole truth. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

4:Everything that rises must converge. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

5:The whole life lies in the verb seeing. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

6:In the end, only the truth will survive. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

7:Research is the highest form of adoration ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

8:You must overcome death by finding God in it. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

9:The dog knows, but does not know that he knows. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

10:The future is more beautiful than all the pasts. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

11:Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

12:The world is so round, friendship may encircle it. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

13:The past has revealed to me the structure of the future. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

14:God is inexhaustibly attainable in the totality of our action. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

15:The task for us now, if we are to survive, is to build the earth. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

16:At the heart of our universe, each soul exists for God, in our Lord. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

17:It is the destiny of things real to destroy those that are artifice. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

18:Love is the most powerful and still most unknown energy in the world. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

19:The truth is, indeed, that love is the threshold of another universe. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

20:Love is a sacred reserve of energy; it is like the blood of spiritual evolution. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

21:Reach beyond your grasp. Your goals should be grand enough to get the best of you. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

22:There is almost a sensual longing for communion with others who have a large vision. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

23:More primordial than any idea, beauty will be manifest as the herald and generator of ideas. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

24:It doesnt matter if the water is cold or warm if youre going to have to wade through it anyway.
~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

25:The Age of Nations is past. The task before us now, if we would not perish, is to build the Earth. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

26:In the shadow of death may we not look back to the past, but seek in utter darkness the dawn of God. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

27:Science will, in all probability,
be increasingly impregnated
by mysticism. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, My Universe (1924),

28:The most satisfying thing in life is to have been able to give a large part of one's self to others. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

29:You have told me, O God, to believe in hell. But you have forbidden me to think...of any man as damned ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

30:Specialisation paralyses, ultra-specialisation kills. Palaeontology is littered with such catastrophes. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

31:The future is in the hands of those who can give tomorrow's generations valid reasons to live and hope. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

32:We are one, after all, you and I;together we suffer.together exist,and forever will recreate each other. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

33:The stars are laboratories in which the evolution of matter proceeds in the direction of large molecules. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

34:We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

35:The human person is the sum total of a 15 billion year chain of unbroken evolution now thinking about itself ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

36:Science, philosophy and religion are bound to converge as they draw nearer to the whole. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon Of Man,

37:By virtue of Creation, and still more the Incarnation, nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

38:Love is an adventure and a conquest. It survives and develops, like the universe itself, only by perpetual discovery. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

39:Our duty, as men and women, is to proceed as if limits to our ability did not exist. We are collaborators in creation. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

40:In no case does the energy required for synthesis appear to be provided by an influx of fresh capital, but by expenditure. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

41:What paralyzes life is lack of faith and lack of audacity. The difficulty lies not in solving problems but identifying them. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

42:The day is not far distant when humanity will realize that biologically it is faced with a choice between suicide and adoration. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

43:The creative operation of God does not simply mold us like soft clay. It is a Fire that animates all it touches...that gives life. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

44:Instead of standing on the shore and proving to ourselves that the ocean cannot carry us, let us venture on its waters just to see. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

45:the value...of life is not so much to do conspicuous things...as to do ordinary things with the perception of their enormous value. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

46:The whole future of the Earth, as of religion, seems to me to depend on the awakening of our faith in the future. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man,

47:Love is the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world. Love, in fact, is the agent of universal synthesis ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

48:Historically, the stuff of the universe goes on becoming concentrated into ever more organized forms of matter.
~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

49:Mankind is still embryonic ... [man is] the bud from which something more complicated and more centered than man himself should emerge. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

50:God is not remote from us. He is at the point of my pen, my (pick) shovel, my paint brush, my (sewing) needle - and my heart and thoughts. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

51:The history of the living world can be summarised as the elaboration of ever more perfect eyes within a cosmos in which there is always something more to be seen. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

52:Truth has to appear only once, in one single mind, for it to be impossible for anything ever to prevent it from spreading universally and setting everything ablaze. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

53: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,

54:The zest for life, which is the source of all passion and all insight, even divine, does not come to us from ourselves.... It is God who has to give us the impulse of wanting him. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

55:Knowledge for its own sake. But also, and perhaps still more, knowledge for power. ... Increased power for increased action. But, finally and above all, increased action for increased being.
~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

56:Each element of the cosmos is positively woven from all the others...The universe holds together, and only one way of considering it is really possible, that is, to take it as a whole, in one piece. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

57: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,

58:Blessed be you, mighty matter, irresistible march of evolution, reality ever newborn; you who, by constantly shattering our mental categories, force us to go ever further and further in our pursuit of the truth. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

59:Blessed be you, universal matter, immeasurable time, boundless ether, triple abyss of stars and atoms and generations: you who by overflowing and dissolving our narrow standards or measurement reveal to us the dimensions of God. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

60:The stuff of the universe, woven in a single piece according to one and the same system, but never repeating itself from one point to another, represents a single figure. Structurally it forms a Whole. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (1959),

61:There is almost a sensual longing for communion with others who have a large vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendship between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality impossible to describe. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

62:Love is an adventure and a conquest. It survives and develops, like the universe itself, only by perpetual discovery." ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, (1881 - 1955) French idealist philosopher and Jesuit priest, trained as a paleontologist and geologist, Wikipedia.,

63: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, (1881 - 1955) French philosopher, Jesuit priest, paleontologist, Wikipedia,

64:Stronger than every obstacle and counter-argument is the instinct which tells us that, to be faithful to Life, we must know; we must know more and still more; we must tirelessly and increasingly search for Something, we know not what, which will appear in the end to those who have penetrated to the very heart of reality.
~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

65:Is evolution a theory, a system, or a hypothesis? It is much more it is a general postulate to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must henceforward bow and which they must satisfy in order to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light which illuminates all facts, a trajectory which all lines of thought must follow this is what evolution is. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

66:Without you, without your onslaughts, without your uprootings of us, we should remain all our lives inert, stagnant, puerile, ignorant both of ourselves and of God. You who batter us and then dress our wounds, you who resist us and yield to us, you who wreck and build, you who shackle and liberate, the sap of our souls, the hand of God, the flesh of Christ: it is you, matter, that I bless. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

67: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 in a practical fashion we fix our gaze on the universal realities. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

68:They are now beginning to realise that even the most objective of their observations are steeped in the conventions they adopted at the outset and by forms or habits of thought developed in the course of the growth of research; so that, when they reach the end of their analyses they cannot tell with any certainty whether the structure they have reached is the essence of the matter they are studying, or the reflection of their own thought. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon Of Man,

69:By means of all created things, without exception, the divine assails us, penetrates us and moulds us. We imagined it as distant and inaccessible, whereas in fact we live steeped in its burning layers. In eo vivimus. As Jacob said, awakening from his dream, the world, this palpable world, which we were wont to treat with the boredom and disrespect with which we habitually regard places with no sacred association for us, is in truth a holy place, and we did not know it. Venite, adoremus. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu,

70:Man came silently into the world. As a matter of fact he trod so softly that, when we first catch sight of him as revealed by those indestructible stone instruments, we find him sprawling all over the old world from the Cape of Good Hope to Peking. Without doubt he already speaks and lives in groups ; he already makes fire. After all, this is surely what we ought to expect. As we know, each time a new living form rises up before us out of the depths of history, it is always complete and already legion. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon Of Man, The Birth of Thought, 186,

71:Above all, trust in the slow work of God. We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We should like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new. And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability- and that it may take a very long time. And so I think it is with you; your ideas mature gradually-let them grow, let them shape themselves, without undue haste. Don't try to force them on, as though you could be today what time (that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will) will make of you tomorrow. Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be. Give Our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.
~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

72:
An Informal Integral Canon: Selected books on Integral Science, Philosophy and the Integral Transformation
Sri Aurobindo - The Life Divine
Sri Aurobindo - The Synthesis of Yoga
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin - The Phenomenon of Man
Jean Gebser - The Ever-Present Origin
Edward Haskell - Full Circle - The Moral Force of Unified Science
Oliver L. Reiser - Cosmic Humanism and World Unity
Christopher Hills - Nuclear Evolution: Discovery of the Rainbow Body
The Mother - Mother's Agenda
Erich Jantsch - The Self-Organizing Universe - Scientific and Human Implications of the Emerging Paradigm of Evolution
T. R. Thulasiram - Arut Perum Jyothi and Deathless Body
Kees Zoeteman - Gaiasophy
Ken Wilber - Sex Ecology Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution
Don Edward Beck - Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership, and Change
Kundan Singh - The Evolution of Integral Yoga: Sri Aurobindo, Sri Ramakrishna, and Swami Vivekananda
Sean Esbjorn-Hargens - Integral Ecology: Uniting Multiple Perspectives on the Natural World
~ M Alan Kazlev, Kheper,

73:God reveals himself everywhere, beneath our groping efforts, as a universal milieu, only because he is the ultimate point upon which all realities converge. Each element of the world, whatever it may be, only subsists, hic et nunc, in the manner of a cone whose generatrices meet in God who draws them together-(meeting at .the term of their individual perfection and at the term of the general perfection of the world which contains them). It follows that all created things, every one of them, cannot be looked at, in their nature and action, without the same reality being found in their innermost being-like sunlight in the fragments of a broken mirror-one beneath its multiplicity, unattainable beneath its proximity, and spiritual beneath its materiality. No object can influence us by its essence without our being touched by the radiance of the focus of the universe. Our minds are incapable of grasping a reality, our hearts and hands of seizing the essentially desirable in it, without our being compelled by the very structure of things to go back to the first source of its perfections. This focus, this source, is thus everywhere. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu,

74:For invincible reasons of homogeneity and coherence, the fibers of cosmogenesis require to be prolonged in ourselves far more deeply than flesh and bone. We are not being tossed about and drawn along in the vital current merely by the material surface of our being. But like a subtle fluid, space-time, having drowned our bodies, penetrates our soul. It fills it and impregnates it. It mingles with its powers, until the soul soon no longer knows how to distinguish space-time from its own thoughts. Nothing can escape this flux any longer, for those who know how to see, even though it were the summit of our being, because it can only be defined in terms of increases of consciousness. For is not the very act by which the fine point of our mind penetrates the absolute a phenomenon of emergence? In short, recognized at first in a single point of things, then inevitably having spread to the whole of the inorganic and organic volume of matter, whether we like it or not evolution is now starting to invade the psychic zones of the world.... The human discovers that, in the striking words of Julian Huxley, we are nothing else than evolution become conscious of itself. It seems to me that until it is established in this perspective, the modern mind...will always be restless. For it is on this summit and this summit alone that a resting place and illumination await us.... All evolution becomes conscious of itself deep within us.... Not only do we read the secret of its movements in our slightest acts, but to a fundamental extent we hold it in our own hands: responsible for its past and its future. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

75:There is one point in particular I would like to single out and stress, namely, the notion of evolution. It is common to assume that one of the doctrines of the perennial philosophy... is the idea of involution-evolution. That is, the manifest world was created as a "fall" or "breaking away" from the Absolute (involution), but that all things are now returning to the Absolute (via evolution). In fact, the doctrine of progressive temporal return to Source (evolution) does not appear anywhere, according to scholars as Joseph Campbell, until the axial period (i.e. a mere two thousand years ago). And even then, the idea was somewhat convoluted and backwards. The doctrine of the yugas, for example, sees the world as proceeding through various stages of development, but the direction is backward: yesterday was the Golden Age, and time ever since has been a devolutionary slide downhill, resulting in the present-day Kali-Yuga. Indeed, this notion of a historical fall from Eden was ubiquitous during the axial period; the idea that we are, at this moment, actually evolving toward Spirit was simply not conceived in any sort of influential fashion.

But sometime during the modern era-it is almost impossible to pinpoint exactly-the idea of history as devolution (or a fall from God) was slowly replaced by the idea of history as evolution (or a growth towards God). We see it explicitly in Schelling (1775-1854); Hegel (1770-1831) propounded the doctrine with a genius rarely equaled; Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) made evolution a universal law, and his friend Charles Darwin (1809-1882) applied it to biology. We find it next appearing in Aurobindo (1872-1950), who gave perhaps its most accurate and profound spiritual context, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) who made it famous in the West.

But here is my point: we might say that the idea of evolution as return-to-Spirit is part of the perennial philosophy, but the idea itself, in any adequate form, is no more than a few hundred years old. It might be 'ancient' as timeless, but it is certainly not ancient as "old."...

This fundamental shift in the sense or form of the perennial philosophy-as represented in, say, Aurobindo, Hegel, Adi Da, Schelling, Teilhard de Chardin, Radhakrishnan, to name a few-I should like to call the "neoperennial philosophy." ~ Ken Wilber, The Eye Of Spirit,

76:reading :::
Self-Help Reading List:
James Allen As a Man Thinketh (1904)
Marcus Aurelius Meditations (2nd Century)
The Bhagavad-Gita
The Bible
Robert Bly Iron John (1990)
Boethius The Consolation of Philosophy (6thC)
Alain de Botton How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997)
William Bridges Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes (1980)
David Brooks The Road to Character (2015)
Brené Brown Daring Greatly (2012)
David D Burns The New Mood Therapy (1980)
Joseph Campbell (with Bill Moyers) The Power of Myth (1988)
Richard Carlson Don't Sweat The Small Stuff (1997)
Dale Carnegie How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936)
Deepak Chopra The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success (1994)
Clayton Christensen How Will You Measure Your Life? (2012)
Paulo Coelho The Alchemist (1988)
Stephen Covey The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989)
Mihaly Cziksentmihalyi Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (1991)
The Dalai Lama & Howard Cutler The Art of Happiness (1999)
The Dhammapada (Buddha's teachings)
Charles Duhigg The Power of Habit (2011)
Wayne Dyer Real Magic (1992)
Ralph Waldo Emerson Self-Reliance (1841)
Clarissa Pinkola Estes Women Who Run With The Wolves (1996)
Viktor Frankl Man's Search For Meaning (1959)
Benjamin Franklin Autobiography (1790)
Shakti Gawain Creative Visualization (1982)
Daniel Goleman Emotional Intelligence (1995)
John Gray Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus (1992)
Louise Hay You Can Heal Your Life (1984)
James Hillman The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling (1996)
Susan Jeffers Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway (1987)
Richard Koch The 80/20 Principle (1998)
Marie Kondo The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (2014)
Ellen Langer Mindfulness: Choice and Control in Everyday Life (1989)
Lao-Tzu Tao-te Ching (The Way of Power)
Maxwell Maltz Psycho-Cybernetics (1960)
Abraham Maslow Motivation and Personality (1954)
Thomas Moore Care of the Soul (1992)
Joseph Murphy The Power of Your Subconscious Mind (1963)
Norman Vincent Peale The Power of Positive Thinking (1952)
M Scott Peck The Road Less Traveled (1990)
Anthony Robbins Awaken The Giant Within (1991)
Florence Scovell-Shinn The Game of Life and How To Play It (1923)
Martin Seligman Learned Optimism (1991)
Samuel Smiles Self-Help (1859)
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin The Phenomenon of Man (1955)
Henry David Thoreau Walden (1854)
Marianne Williamson A Return To Love (1993)
~ Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Self-Help,

* WISDOM TROVE *

* NEWFULLDB 2.4M *

1:To see more is to become more. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

2:To see more is to become more. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

3:Joy is the sheer evidence of God. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

4:We are collaborators in creation. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

5:Faith has need of the whole truth. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

6:Joy is the sheer evidence of God. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

7:Faith has need of the whole truth. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

8:Everything that rises must converge. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

9:Everything that rises must converge. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

10:The whole life lies in the verb seeing. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

11:In the end, only the truth will survive. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

12:The whole life lies in the verb seeing. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

13:Above all, trust in the slow work of God. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

14:In the end, only the truth will survive. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

15:Research is the highest form of adoration ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

16:Research is the highest form of adoration ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

17:You must overcome death by finding God in it. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

18:You must overcome death by finding God in it. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

19:The dog knows, but does not know that he knows. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

20:The dog knows, but does not know that he knows. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

21:The future is more beautiful than all the pasts. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

22:El pasado me ha revelado la estructura del futuro ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

23:Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

24:The future is more beautiful than all the pasts. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

25:Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

26:Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

27:The world is so round, friendship may encircle it. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

28:The world is so round, friendship may encircle it. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

29:To love is to approach each other center to center. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

30:We are spiritual beings, having a human experience. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

31:The world is round so that friendship may encircle it. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

32:The past has revealed to me the structure of the future. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

33:The past has revealed to me the structure of the future. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

34:God is inexhaustibly attainable in the totality of our action. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

35:God is inexhaustibly attainable in the totality of our action. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

36:The task for us now, if we are to survive, is to build the earth. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

37:The task for us now, if we are to survive, is to build the earth. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

38:At the heart of our universe, each soul exists for God, in our Lord. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

39:It is the destiny of things real to destroy those that are artifice. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

40:A rich and potent pattern of variety-in-unity. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

41:At the heart of our universe, each soul exists for God, in our Lord. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

42:It is the destiny of things real to destroy those that are artifice. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

43:Love is the most powerful and still most unknown energy in the world. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

44:The truth is, indeed, that love is the threshold of another universe. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

45:Love is the most powerful and still most unknown energy in the world. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

46:The truth is, indeed, that love is the threshold of another universe. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

47:Rien ne vaut la peine d'être trouvé que ce qui n'a jamais existé encore. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

48:The future belongs to those who give the next generation reason for hope. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

49:God loves everyone in the world who doesn't love himself. Does God love God? ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

50:The universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

51:From an evolutionary point of view, man has stopped moving, if he ever did move. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

52:Isolation is a blind alley....Nothing on the planet grows except by convergence. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

53:Love is a sacred reserve of energy; it is like the blood of spiritual evolution. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

54:Love is a sacred reserve of energy; it is like the blood of spiritual evolution. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

55:The world can no more have two summits than a circumference can have two centres. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

56:All minds in a single planetary effort. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phyletic Structure of the Human Group,

57:Reach beyond your grasp. Your goals should be grand enough to get the best of you. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

58:Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven't committed. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

59:It often happens that what stares us in the face is the most difficult to perceive. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

60:Reach beyond your grasp. Your goals should be grand enough to get the best of you. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

61:There is almost a sensual longing for communion with others who have a large vision. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

62:There is almost a sensual longing for communion with others who have a large vision. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

63:Science, philosophy and religion are bound to converge as they draw nearer to the whole. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

64:The Noösphere, in short, is a stupendous thinking machine. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Formation of the Noösphere,

65:More primordial than any idea, beauty will be manifest as the herald and generator or ideas. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

66:A state, let me add, that is totalized but not totalitarian. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Convergence of the Universe,

67:Love is the most universal, the most tremendous and the most mysterious of the cosmic forces. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

68:More primordial than any idea, beauty will be manifest as the herald and generator of ideas. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

69:The spirit of research and conquest is the permanent soul of evolution. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

70:And this is the best success I can dream for my life: to have spread a new vision of the world. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

71:I am not a human being enjoying a spiritual life, I am a spiritual being enjoying a human life. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

72:It doesn't matter if the water is cold or warm if you're going to have to wade through it anyway. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

73:A sphere of reflection, of conscious invention, of the union felt by souls. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

74:It doesnt matter if the water is cold or warm if youre going to have to wade through it anyway.
~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

75:The Age of Nations is past. The task before us now, if we would not perish, is to build the Earth. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

76:He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend must have a long head or a very short creed. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

77:The Age of Nations is past. The task before us now, if we would not perish, is to build the Earth. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

78:A consciousness not merely reflecting upon itself, but rejoicing in so doing. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

79:In modern scientific man, evolution was at last becoming conscious of itself. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

80:In the shadow of death may we not look back to the past, but seek in utter darkness the dawn of God. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

81:The most satisfying thing in life is to have been able to give a large part of one's self to others. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

82:In the shadow of death may we not look back to the past, but seek in utter darkness the dawn of God. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

83:Not everything is immediately good to those who seek God; but everything is capable of becoming good. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

84:The most satisfying thing in life is to have been able to give a large part of one's self to others. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

85:Science will, in all probability,
be increasingly impregnated
by mysticism. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, My Universe (1924),

86:The personalisation of the individual by the ‘hominisation’ of the whole group. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

87:The reality of spirit-matter is inevitably translated into and confirmed by a structure of the spirit. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

88:You have told me, O God, to believe in hell. But you have forbidden me to think...of any man as damned ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

89:Specialisation paralyses, ultra-specialisation kills. Palaeontology is littered with such catastrophes. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

90:The future is in the hands of those who can give tomorrow's generations valid reasons to live and hope. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

91:When humans truly discover the power of love, it will prove more important than the harnessing of fire. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

92:You have told me, O God, to believe in hell. But you have forbidden me to think...of any man as damned ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

93:For in the nature of things everything that is faith must rise, and everything that rises must converge. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

94:Specialisation paralyses, ultra-specialisation kills. Palaeontology is littered with such catastrophes. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

95:The future is in the hands of those who can give tomorrow's generations valid reasons to live and hope. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

96:The stars are laboratories in which the evolution of matter proceeds in the direction of large molecules. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

97:We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

98:We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

99:We are one, after all, you and I;together we suffer.together exist,and forever will recreate each other. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

100:We find a triumph of multiplicity organically contained within a minimum of space. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

101:The stars are laboratories in which the evolution of matter proceeds in the direction of large molecules. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

102:We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

103:We are one, after all, you and I, together we suffer, together exist and forever will recreate each other. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

104:We are one, after all, you and I, together we suffer, together exist, and forever will recreate each other. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

105:We are one, after all, you and I, together we suffer, together exist and forever will recreate one another. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

106:A breeze passes in the night. When did it spring up? Whence does it come? Whither is it going? No man knows. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

107:The human person is the sum total of a 15 billion year chain of unbroken evolution now thinking about itself ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

108:The mind, seen from our side, is essentially the power of synthesis and organisation. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

109:A new way of seeing, combined with a new way of acting—that is what we need. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Convergence of the Universe,

110:Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come to being. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

111:The entire phenomenal universe, including man, was revealed as a process of evolution. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

112:The human person is the sum total of a 15 billion year chain of unbroken evolution now thinking about itself ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

113:The more we split and pulverise matter artificially, the more insistently it proclaims its fundamental unity. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

114:The universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

115:La vrai physique est celle qui parviendra à intégrer l’Homme total dans une représentation cohérente du monde. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

116:We are not physical beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a physical experience. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

117:Science, philosophy and religion are bound to converge as they draw nearer to the whole. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon Of Man,

118:À l’échelle du cosmique (toute la physique moderne nous l’apprend) seul le fantastique à des chances d’être vrai. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

119:The consciousness of each of us is evolution looking at itself and reflecting upon itself. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

120:By virtue of Creation, and still more the Incarnation, nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

121:Every pair of hands freed means a brain freed for thought. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Place of Technology in a General Biology of Mankind,

122:By virtue of Creation, and still more the Incarnation, nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

123:The Phyletic Compression of Sapiens and the Self-Rebounding of Evolution. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phyletic Structure of the Human Group,

124:Your creatures can come into being only, like shoot from stem, as part of an endlessly renewed process of evolution. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

125:Love is an adventure and a conquest. It survives and develops, like the universe itself, only by perpetual discovery. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

126:Our duty, as men and women, is to proceed as if limits to our ability did not exist. We are collaborators in creation. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

127:Our duty, as men and women, is to proceed as if limits to our ability did not exist. We are collaborators in creation. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

128:Each elect soul ... possesses God directly and finds in that unique possession the fulfillment of his own individuality. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

129: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,

130:It becomes more and more necessary to us, in order to live, to understand man. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phyletic Structure of the Human Group,

131:A universal love is not only psychologically possible; it is the only complete and final way in which we are able to love. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

132:In no case does the energy required for synthesis appear to be provided by an influx of fresh capital, but by expenditure. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

133:Man only progresses by slowly elaborating from age to age the essence and the totality of a universe deposited within him. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

134:In no case does the energy required for synthesis appear to be provided by an influx of fresh capital, but by expenditure. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

135: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,

136:The only universe capable of containing the human person is an irreversibly ‘personalising’ universe. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

137:What paralyzes life is lack of faith and lack of audacity. The difficulty lies not in solving problems but identifying them. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

138:What paralyzes life is lack of faith and lack of audacity. The difficulty lies not in solving problems but identifying them. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

139:Surely it is natural that life, as it just emerges from matter, should be ‘dripping with molecularity.’ ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

140:You are not a human being in search of a spiritual experience. You are are spiritual beings immersed in a spiritual experience ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

141:Now that life has placed us in this critical situation, how are we going to react to the test? ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Convergence of the Universe,

142:Mankind is now caught up, as though in a train of gears, at the heart of a continually accelerating vortex of self-totalisation. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

143:The day is not far distant when humanity will realize that biologically it is faced with a choice between suicide and adoration. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

144:The day is not far distant when humanity will realize that biologically it is faced with a choice between suicide and adoration. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

145:The most telling and profound way of describing the evolution of the universe would undoubtedly be to trace the evolution of love. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

146:Instead of standing on the shore and proving to ourselves that the ocean cannot carry us, let us venture on its waters just to see. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

147:The creative operation of God does not simply mold us like soft clay. It is a Fire that animates all it touches...that gives life. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

148:The inner face of the world is manifest deep within our human consciousness, and there reflects upon itself. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

149:Instead of standing on the shore and proving to ourselves that the ocean cannot carry us, let us venture on its waters just to see. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

150:the value...of life is not so much to do conspicuous things...as to do ordinary things with the perception of their enormous value. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

151:Love is the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world. Love, in fact, is the agent of universal synthesis ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

152:One possible interpretation: a super-organization of the matter around us. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, A Great Event Foreshadowed - The Planetization of Mankind,

153:The whole future of the Earth, as of religion, seems to me to depend on the awakening of our faith in the future. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man,

154:Mankind is still embryonic ... [man is] the bud from which something more complicated and more centered than man himself should emerge. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

155:The whole phenomenon of the automatic stratification of a cosmos in a state of cosmogenesis! ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phyletic Structure of the Human Group,

156:From the threshold of reflection onwards, we are at what is nothing less than a new form of biological existence. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

157:Mankind is still embryonic ... [man is] the bud from which something more complicated and more centered than man himself should emerge. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

158:Historically, the stuff of the universe goes on becoming concentrated into ever more organized forms of matter.
~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

159:God is not remote from us. He is at the point of my pen, my (pick) shovel, my paint brush, my (sewing) needle - and my heart and thoughts. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

160:for certain limited purposes it may be useful to think of phenomena as isolated statically in time, they are in point of fact never static: ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

161:God is not remote from us. He is at the point of my pen, my (pick) shovel, my paint brush, my (sewing) needle - and my heart and thoughts. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

162:That we must proceed slowly and critically in this attempt to construct an “anatomy” of society is evident. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Formation of the Noösphere,

163:Those who spread their sails in the right way to the winds of the earth will always find themselves born by a current towards the open seas. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

164:In the spiritual life, as in all organic processes, everyone has their optimum and it is just as harmful to go beyond it as not to attain it. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

165:Studied in its basic connexions, the Noösphere behaves like a normal protuberance of the Biosphere. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phyletic Structure of the Human Group,

166:We had thought that we were human beings making a spiritual journey; it may be truer to say that we are spiritual beings making a human journey. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

167:Man only progresses by slowly elaborating from age to age the essence and the totality of a universe deposited within him. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

168:The quintessential good and beauty in life is what each has to offer to others valuing the gesture ourselves into confluence with the Word of God. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

169:Human history develops between two points of reflection, the one inferior and individual, the other superior and collective. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

170:When for the first time in a living creature instinct perceived itself in its own mirror, the whole world took a pace forward. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

171:But this quantum only takes on its full significance when we try to define it with regard to a concrete natural movement — that is to say, in duration. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

172:That there is an evolution of one sort or another is now common ground among scientists. Whether or not that evolution is directed is another question. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

173:From the sociological point of view, mankind is not an aggregation, but forms a structural whole. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Place of Technology in a General Biology of Mankind,

174:East and West are culturally complementary, and that both are needed for the further synthesis and unification of world and thought. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

175:The cell has become ‘someone.’ After the grain of matter, the grain of life; and now at last we see constituted the grain of thought. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

176:The only way forward is in the direction of a common passion, for nothing in the universe can ultimately resist the cumulative ardor of the collective soul. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

177:How is it that we are not more sensitive to the presence of something greater than ourselves moving forward within us and in our midst? ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

178:From now on we envisage, beside and above individual realities, the collective realities that are not reducible to the component element. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

179:The farther and more deeply we penetrate into matter, by means of increasingly powerful methods, the more we are confounded by the interdependence of its parts. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

180:Do not forget that the value and interest of life is not so much to do conspicuous things...as to do ordinary things with the perception of their enormous value. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

181:Life and consciousness are no longer chance anomalies in nature; rather, we find in biology a complement to the physics of matter. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Formation of the Noösphere,

182:The history of the living world can be summarised as the elaboration of ever more perfect eyes within a cosmos in which there is always something more to be seen. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

183:Consciousness properly so-called is the property specific to very large complexes; it is a result of them. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Place of Technology in a General Biology of Mankind,

184:The history of the living world can be summarised as the elaboration of ever more perfect eyes within a cosmos in which there is always something more to be seen. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

185:Truth has to appear only once, in one single mind, for it to be impossible for anything ever to prevent it from spreading universally and setting everything ablaze. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

186: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,

187:Truth has to appear only once, in one single mind, for it to be impossible for anything ever to prevent it from spreading universally and setting everything ablaze. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

188: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,

189:That is why we are so often horrified, or terrified, by the modern world: a machine for destroying the individual or mechanizing him. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Convergence of the Universe,

190: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,

191:La única religión aceptable para el hombre es la que le enseñará ante todo, a conocer, amar y servir apasionadamente al Universo del cual es el elemento más importante. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

192:Love is the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world. Love, in fact, is the agent of universal synthesis"
-Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

193:Industry is not accidental but constitutes an event that can entail the most far-reaching spiritual consequences. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Place of Technology in a General Biology of Mankind,

194:A universe which, under the influence of an ever more advanced organic arrangement, concentrates and reflects psychologically upon itself. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Convergence of the Universe,

195:To see life properly we must never lose sight of the unity of the biosphere that lies beyond the plurality and essential rivalry of individual beings. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

196:We may, perhaps, imagine that the creation was finished long ago. But that would be quite wrong. It continues still more magnificently, and at the highest levels of the world. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

197:Ya dominamos la energía del viento, de los mares, del sol. Pero el día que el hombre sepa dominar la energía del amor será algo tan importante como el descubrimiento del fuego ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

198:Our century is probably more religious than any other. How could it fail to be, with such problems to be solved? The only trouble is that it has not yet found a God it can adore. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

199:Do not forget that the value and interest of life is not so much to do conspicuous things . . . as to do ordinary things with the perception of their enormous value. PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN ~ Philip Yancey,

200: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 ~ Dean Koontz,

201: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. ~ Dean Koontz,

202:The zest for life, which is the source of all passion and all insight, even divine, does not come to us from ourselves.... It is God who has to give us the impulse of wanting him. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

203:The zest for life, which is the source of all passion and all insight, even divine, does not come to us from ourselves.... It is God who has to give us the impulse of wanting him. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

204:The animal, it would seem, only knows: while man ‘knows that he knows.’ It is a case, as it has sometimes been described, of ‘consciousness squared.’ ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Convergence of the Universe,

205:Added together, the hundreds of thousands of names in our catalogues do not amount to one millionth of the leaves that have sprouted so far on the tree of life. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

206:As a result, man is the only successful type which has remained as a single interbreeding group or species, and has not radiated out into a number of biologically separated assemblages ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

207:Mechanism rapidly overflowing the limits of the individual, provincial and national work, to rise to the dimensions of a planetary operation. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phyletic Structure of the Human Group,

208:The history of the living world can be summarised as the elaboration of ever more perfect eyes within a cosmos in which there is always something more to be seen. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

209:All the communions of a life-time are one communion.All the communions of all men now living are one communion.All the communions of all men, present, past and future, are one communion. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

210:The progress of the nervous system (individual and collective)—is it not on the point of falling under the extended beam of our inventive power? ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phyletic Structure of the Human Group,

211:Something will explode if we persist in trying to squeeze into our old tumble-down huts the material and spiritual forces that are henceforward on the scale of a world. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

212:He recognized with absolute certainty the empty fragility of even the noblest theorizings as compared with the definitive plenitude of the smallest fact grasped in its total, concrete reality. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

213:The manifest property of living matter to form a system in which ‘terms succeed each other experimentally, following constantly increasing degrees of centro-complexity.’ ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

214:Knowledge for its own sake. But also, and perhaps still more, knowledge for power. ... Increased power for increased action. But, finally and above all, increased action for increased being.
~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

215:I can feel, again—and this time much more distinctly—a multitude of the independent and spontaneous—atoms, molecules, cells—in turmoil beneath the unity of my own organic structure. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Cosmic Life,

216:With hominisation, in spite of the insignificance of the anatomical leap, we have the beginning of a new age. The earth ‘gets a new skin.’ Better still, it finds its soul. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

217:Though we take it apart, we still cannot understand how the machine works. This may well be, but the machine is meanwhile standing in front of us; and it works all the same. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

218:By means of all created things, without excaption, the divine assails us, penetrates us, and molds us. We imagined it as distant and inaccessible, when in fact we live steeped in its burning layers ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

219:Each element of the cosmos is positively woven from all the others...The universe holds together, and only one way of considering it is really possible, that is, to take it as a whole, in one piece. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

220:Each element of the cosmos is positively woven from all the others...The universe holds together, and only one way of considering it is really possible, that is, to take it as a whole, in one piece. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

221:Love is the internal, affectively apprehended, aspect of the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world... Love, in fact, is the expression and the agent of universal synthesis. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

222:A collective memory in which a common inheritance of Mankind is amassed in the form of accumulated experience and passed on through education. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, A Great Event Foreshadowed - The Planetization of Mankind,

223:It is we, without any doubt, that constitute the active part of the universe; we are the bud in which life is concentrated and is at work, and in which the flower of every hope is enclosed. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Cosmic Life,

224:This fundamental discovery that all bodies owe their origin to arrangements of a single initial corpuscular type is the beacon that lights the history of the universe to our eyes. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

225: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,

226:Left long enough to itself, under the prolonged and universal play of chance, matter manifests the property of arranging itself in more and more complex groupings. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phyletic Structure of the Human Group,

227: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,

228:Some day, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love. Then for the second time in the history of the world, we will have discovered fire. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

229:Individual human beings are so subtly developed through the centuries that it is strictly impermissible to compare any two men who are not contemporaries-that is to say are taken from two quite different times. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

230:Blessed be you, mighty matter, irresistible march of evolution, reality ever newborn; you who, by constantly shattering our mental categories, force us to go ever further and further in our pursuit of the truth. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

231:Blessed be you, mighty matter, irresistible march of evolution, reality ever newborn; you who, by constantly shattering our mental categories, force us to go ever further and further in our pursuit of the truth. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

232:Life, we have just said, is in some way an extension of matter. With the elements, it retains some of the habits of matter. It can even, we shall see, copy it and mimic it by making itself mechanical. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Cosmic Life,

233:Man not only knows; he knows that he knows. He reflects. But this power of reflection, when restricted to the individual, is only partial and rudimentary. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, A Great Event Foreshadowed - The Planetization of Mankind,

234:The fundamental vision is that of plurality and the multitude, the multitude that surrounds us and the multitude that constitutes us, that is in restless motion around us, and that shelters within us. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Cosmic Life,

235:Each one of us is perforce linked by all the material, organic, and psychic strands of his being to all that surrounds him. Not only is he caught up in a network, he is carried along, too, by a stream. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Cosmic Life,

236: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,

237:Man is a being characterized by hands and a brain: he is a cerebro-manual—and cannot we recognize this character of cerebrality and manuality in global mankind? ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Place of Technology in a General Biology of Mankind,

238:Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we shall harness . . . 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 ~ Brian L Weiss,

239:The grand phenomenon which we are now witnessing represents a new and possibly final division of Mankind, based no longer on wealth but on belief in progress. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, A Great Event Foreshadowed - The Planetization of Mankind,

240:We must not forget that the human soul, however independently created our philosophy represents it as being, is inseparable in its birth and in its growth from the universe into which it is born. - Teilhard de Chardin ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

241:Algún día cuando hayamos dominado los vientos, las olas, las mareas y la gravedad, aprenderemos a utilizar las energías del amor. Entonces por segunda vez en la historia del mundo, la humanidad habrá descubierto el fuego. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

242:The great human machine is designed to work and must work—by producing a super-abundance of mind. If it does not work, or rather if it produces only matter, this means that it has gone into reverse. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

243:Blessed be you, universal matter, immeasurable time, boundless ether, triple abyss of stars and atoms and generations: you who by overflowing and dissolving our narrow standards or measurement reveal to us the dimensions of God. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

244:Blessed be you, universal matter, immeasurable time, boundless ether, triple abyss of stars and atoms and generations: you who by overflowing and dissolving our narrow standards or measurement reveal to us the dimensions of God. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

245:evolutionary phenomena (of course including the phenomenon known as man) are processus, they can never be evaluated or even adequately described solely or mainly in terms of their origins: they must be defined by their direction, ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

246:He refers to the noösphere as a new layer or membrane on the earth’s surface, a ‘thinking layer’ superposed on the living layer of the biosphere and the lifeless layer of inorganic material, the lithosphere. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

247: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,

248:Nothing could stop humanity in its advance to social unification, towards the development of machinery and automation (liberators of the spirit), towards ‘trying all’ and ‘thinking all’ right to the very end. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

249:The day will come when, after harnessing the ether, the winds, the tides, gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And, on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

250:There is almost a sensual longing for communion with others who have a large vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendship between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality impossible to describe. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

251:There is almost a sensual longing for communion with others who have a large vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendship between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality impossible to describe. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

252:The stuff of the universe, woven in a single piece according to one and the same system, but never repeating itself from one point to another, represents a single figure. Structurally it forms a Whole. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (1959),

253:The world, this palpable world, which we were wont to treat with the boredom and disrespect with which we habitually regard places with no sacred association for us, is in truth a holy place, and we did not know it. Venite, adoremus. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

254:We, mankind, contain the possibilities of the earth's immense future, and can realise more and more of them on condition that we increase our knowledge and our love. That, it seems to me, is the distillation of The Phenomenon of Man. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

255:If progress is a myth, that is to say, if faced by the work involved we can say: ‘What’s the good of it all?’ our efforts will flag. With that the whole of evolution will come to a halt—because we are evolution. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

256:Once they have attained their definite form at the end of each verticillate ray, the elements of a phylum tend to come together and form societies just as surely as the atoms of a solid body tend to crystallise. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

257:From the moment when the monad acquires the dimensions and superior spontaneity of a cell, and tends to be individualised at the heart of a pleiad, a more complicated pattern appears in the stuff of the universe. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

258:How does he unify it? By partially immersing himself in things, by becoming element, and then, from this point of vantage in the heart of matter, assuming the control and leadership of what we now call evolution. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

259:And now, as a germination of planetary dimensions, comes the thinking layer which over its full extent develops and intertwines its fibres, not to confuse and neutralise them but to reinforce them in the living unity of a single tissue. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

260:Life is apparently nothing but the privileged exaggeration of a fundamental cosmic tendency (as fundamental as entropy or gravitation) which may be called the ‘Law of complexity/consciousness.’ ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phyletic Structure of the Human Group,

261:The day will come when,
after harnessing the winds, the tides and graviation,
we shall harness for God the energies of love.
And on that day,
for the second time in the history of the world,
man will have discovered fire. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

262:We need to look down from a great height and contemplate, in their widest, most general aspect, the organic relationships linking consciousness and complexity within the Universe. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, A Great Event Foreshadowed - The Planetization of Mankind,

263:Religion and science are the two conjugated faces or phases of one and the same complete act of knowledge—the only one which can embrace the past and future of evolution so as to contemplate, measure and fulfil them. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

264:The moment when H. sapiens, having achieved (principally by way of agriculture) stable groupings in considerable clusters, really began to establish a permanent network of thinking centres on earth. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phyletic Structure of the Human Group,

265:There is almost a sensual longing for communion with others that have a larger vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendships between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality almost impossible to describe. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

266:And here I am thinking of those astonishing electronic machines . . . by which our mental capacity to calculate and combine is reinforced and multiplied by the process and to a degree that herald . . . astonishing advances.” —Pierre Teilhard de Chardin ~ Erik Brynjolfsson,

267:In man, and starting with man, we have a folding back and a general convergence upon itself (both in its mechanism and in its products) of evolution’s most axial nucleus. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Transformation and Continuation in Man of the Mechanism of Evolution,

268:Every new war, embarked upon by the nations for the purpose of detaching themselves from one another, merely results in their being bound and mingled together in a more inextricable knot. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, A Great Event Foreshadowed - The Planetization of Mankind,

269: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,

270:If the power of attraction between simple atoms is so great, what may we not expect if similar bonds are contracted between human molecules? Humanity, as I have said, is building its composite brain beneath our eyes. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Formation of the Noösphere,

271:It has become very difficult, in the world’s present state of upheaval and distraction, to form any idea of the significance of what is going on except by rising above the individual level. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, A Great Event Foreshadowed - The Planetization of Mankind,

272: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,

273:Knowledge is basic. It is knowledge which enables us to understand the world and ourselves, and to exercise some control or guidance. It sets us in a fruitful and significant relation with the enduring process of the universe. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

274:There is no such thing as the ‘energy of despair’ in spite of what is sometimes said. What those words really mean is a paroxysm of hope against hope. All conscious energy is, like love (and because it is love), founded on hope. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

275:For some time, under our very eyes, a great double phenomenon has been taking shape: I mean an assumption of general contact within itself of the whole human mass, with no trace of a slowing down of evolution. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phyletic Structure of the Human Group,

276:Thanks to its characteristic additive power, living matter (unlike the matter of physicists) finds itself ‘ballasted’ with complications and instability. It falls, or rather rises, towards forms that are more and more improbable. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

277:To an increasing extent every machine comes into being as a function of every other machine; and, again to an increasing extent, all the machines on earth, taken together, tend to form a single, vast, organized mechanism. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Formation of the Noösphere,

278:(Evolution) general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which they must satisfy henceforward if they are to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light which illuminates all facts, a curve that all lines must follow. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

279:in the course of the growth of research; so that, when they reach the end of their analyses they cannot tell with any certainty whether the structure they have reached is the essence of the matter they are studying, or the reflection of their own thought. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

280:A new form of evolution will become possible and begin for terrestrial reflexion after the era of passive evolutions: the era of self-evolution, opening in the direction of some ultra-humanity for organised matter. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phyletic Structure of the Human Group,

281:It is a matter of bringing together a large enough number of minds that are sufficiently open and in tune with influences of the cosmic order to perceive, record and amplify a movement of the noösphere in relation to itself. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Convergence of the Universe,

282:It is becoming more evident every day that the transformation of human energy is not tending towards the form of rest nor the form of war, but with all its natural weight towards a third form: the form of research. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phyletic Structure of the Human Group,

283:Above all trust in the slow work of God. Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be. Give our Lord the benefit of believing that His hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

284:Energy is the measure of that which passes from one atom to another in the course of their transformations. A unifying power, then, but also, because the atom appears to become enriched or exhausted in the course of the exchange, the expression of structure. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

285:The growth, through the interaction and ever-increasing concentration of individual viewpoints, of a faculty of common vision penetrating beyond the continuous and static world of popular conception. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, A Great Event Foreshadowed - The Planetization of Mankind,

286:There is an almost sensual longing for communion with others who have a larger vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendships between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality almost impossible to describe. PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN Why ~ James Fadiman,

287:What is the work of works for man if not to establish, in and by each one of us, an absolutely original centre in which the universe reflects itself in a unique and inimitable way? And those centres are our very selves and personalities. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

288:Has man reached his ceiling? What about the future? It is here that we meet the vast phenomenon of the almost unlimited power of disposition over matter that man is beginning to acquire in his environment. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Place of Technology in a General Biology of Mankind,

289:From the early earth onwards, we have followed going upwards the successive advances of consciousness in matter undergoing organisation. Having reached the peak, we can now turn round and, looking downwards, take in the pattern of the whole. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

290:It is done. Once again the Fire has penetrated the earth, not with the sudden crash of thunderbolt, riving the mountain tops: does the Master break down doors to enter His own home? Without earthquake, or thunderclap: the flame has lit up the whole world from within. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

291:The development, through the increasingly rapid transmission of thought, of what is in effect a generalized nervous system, emanating from certain defined centers and covering the entire surface of the globe. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, A Great Event Foreshadowed - The Planetization of Mankind,

292:We have only to believe. And the more threatening and irreducible reality appears, the more firmly and desperately we must believe. Then, little by little, we shall see the universal horror unbend, and then smile upon us, and then take us in its more than human arms. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

293:If the co-operation of some thousands of millions of cells in our brain can produce our consciousness, the idea becomes vastly more plausible that the co-operation of humanity, or some sections of it, may determine what Comte calls a Great Being. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

294:The age of nations has passed. Now, unless we wish to perish, we must shake off our old prejudices and build the Earth. The more scientifically I regard the world, the less can I see any possible biological future for it except in the active consciousness of its unity. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

295:A strange vision, no doubt, this vision of a universe in which each thinking planet would represent, at its term, by concentration of its Noösphere, a point of penetration and escape from the temporo-spatial envelope of things. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phyletic Structure of the Human Group,

296:Seen from afar, elementary life looks like a variegated multitude of microscopic elements, a multitude great enough to envelop the earth, yet at the same time sufficiently interrelated and selected to form a structural whole of genetic solidarity. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

297:The noösphere incorporates ever more facts of the cosmos, including the facts of its general direction and its trends in time, so as to become more truly a microcosm, which (like all incorporated knowledge) is both a mirror and a directive agency. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

298:Science has grounds for recognising another phenomenon of a reflective nature co-extensive with the whole of mankind. Here as elsewhere in the universe, the whole shows itself to be greater than the simple sum of the elements of which it is formed. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

299:We now know from neural-net technology that when there are more connections between points in a system, and there is greater strength between these connections, there will be sudden leaps in intelligence, where intelligence is defined as success rate in performing a task. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

300:At a finite distance in the future, a critical state of encounter will occur, an ultimate co-reflective Center. A focused conspiration will allure individual persons to identify with others in profound affinity. Because of thinking altogether, love will grow into Divinity. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

301:He coined the term noösphere to denote the sphere of mind, as opposed to, or rather superposed on, the biosphere or sphere of life, and acting as a transforming agency promoting hominisation (or as I would put it, progressive psychosocial evolution). ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

302: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. All we need is to imagine our ability to love developing until it embraces the totality of men and the earth. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

303:Since once again, O Lord, in the steppes of Asia, I have no bread, no wine, no altar, I will raise myself above those symbols to the pure majesty of reality, and I will offer to you, I, your priest, upon the altar of the entire earth, the labor and the suffering of the world. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

304:Talk about love openly. If you can do that, your life will come alive. As Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said, “Someday, after mastering winds, waves, tides and gravity, we shall harness the energy of love; and for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire. ~ Brendon Burchard,

305:Tomorrow? But who can guarantee us a tomorrow anyway? And without the assurance that this tomorrow exists, can we really go on living, we to whom has been given—perhaps for the first time in the whole story of the universe—the terrible gift of foresight? ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

306:Our mind, by the very fact of being able to discern infinite horizons ahead, is only able to move by the hope of achieving, through something of itself, a supreme consummation—without which it would rightly feel itself to be stunted, frustrated and cheated. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

307:Is there after all such a great difference from the point of view of the expansion of life between a vertebrate either spreading its limbs or equipping them with feathers, and an aviator soaring on wings with which he has had the ingenuity to provide himself? ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

308:The culmination of two major evolutionary trends—the trend towards more extreme individuation, and that towards more extensive interrelation and co-operation: persons are individuals who transcend their merely organic individuality in conscious participation. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

309:As Christian mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin once said: “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.” He was right. If we recognize the soul lesson, we can grow beyond suffering, and there is no stress in this state of understanding. ~ Brian L Weiss,

310:I doubt whether there is a more decisive moment for a thinking being than when the scales fall from his eyes and he discovers that he is not an isolated unit lost in the cosmic solitudes, and realises that a universal will to live converges and is hominised in him. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

311:I have tasted too deeply the joy of expanding my being to the dimensions of all that lives to be able henceforth to confine myself to the limits of my own self; I have been too conscious of the thrill of universality in my soul, to accept a bliss that leaves me in isolation. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Cosmic Life,

312:The conditions of advance are these: global unity of mankind’s noetic organisation or system of awareness, but a high degree of variety within that unity; love with goodwill and full co-operation; personal integration and internal harmony; and increasing knowledge. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

313:This, we must never forget, is the dynamic condition essential to survival for a biogenesis that has definitively passed in us from the state of passively experienced evolution to the state of auto- or self-evolution. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Transformation and Continuation in Man of the Mechanism of Evolution,

314:Research students are numbered in the hundreds of thousands-soon to be millions -and they are no longer distributed superficially and at random over the globe, but are functionally linked together in a vast organic system that will remain in the future indispensable to the life of the community. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

315:To jolt the individual out of his natural laziness and the rut of habit, and also from time to time to break up the collective frameworks in which he is imprisoned, it is indispensable that he should be shaken and prodded from outside. What would we do without our enemies? ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

316:We have reached a crossroads in human evolution where the only road which leads forward is towards a common passion. . . To continue to place our hopes in a social order achieved by external violence would simply amount to our giving up all hope of carrying the Spirit of the Earth to its limits. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

317:For brief as water falling will be death, and brief as flower falling, or leaf, brief as the taking, and the giving, breath; thus natural, thus brief, my love, is grief. —CONRAD AIKEN It doesn’t matter if the water is cold or warm if you’re going to have to wade through it anyway. —PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN ~ Guillermo del Toro,

318:Let us keep the discoveries and indisputable measurements of physics. But ... A more complete study of the movements of the world will oblige us, little by little, to turn it upside down; in other words, to discover that if things hold and hold together, it is only by reason of complexity, from above. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

319:(“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. And “Greater love hath no man than this: that he lay down his life for his friends”—The Gospel According to Saint John.) ~ Dean Koontz,

320:It is only just today that, armed with all our sciences, we are beginning to grow familiar with a universe in a state of ‘cosmogenesis’—and, more remarkable still, with the idea that, at its most vital point, the future of this cosmogenesis may be in our hands. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phyletic Structure of the Human Group,

321:It is not, you see, enough to hear what science has to tell us, and to observe from outside the cosmic currents taking shape, in their individual eddyings or their over-all drifts; it is those currents that make us what we are, it is through us that they run, and we must be able to feel them. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Cosmic Life,

322:The least molecule is, in nature and in position, a function of the whole sidereal process, and the least of the protozoa is structurally so knit into the web of life that its existence cannot be hypothetically annihilated without ipso facto undoing the whole network of the biosphere. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

323:The dream upon which human research obscurely feeds is fundamentally that of mastering, beyond all atomic or molecular affinities, the ultimate energy of which all other energies are merely servants; and thus, by grasping the very mainspring of evolution, seizing the tiller of the world. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

324:No one can deny that a network (a world network) of economic and psychic affiliations is being woven at ever increasing speed which envelops and constantly penetrates more deeply within each of us. With every day that passes it becomes a little more impossible for us to act or think otherwise than collectively. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

325:Over every living thing which is to spring up, to grow, to flower, to ripen during this day say again the words: This is my Body. And over every death-force which waits in readiness to corrode, to wither, to cut down, speak again your commanding words which express the supreme mystery of faith: This is my Blood. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

326:Psychogenesis has led to man. Now it effaces itself, relieved or absorbed by another and a higher function-the engendering and subsequent development of the mind, in one word noogenesis. When for the first time in a living creature instinct perceived itself in its own mirror, the whole world took a pace forward. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

327:Surely the most urgent task confronting the genius of man at this moment is to conceive and undertake the construction of another ‘Palomar’—but this one would be designed to bring out not an expansion of the universe in space but a psychogenic concentration of the universe upon itself. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Convergence of the Universe,

328:Up to now we have been looking at matter as such, that is to say according to its qualities and in any given volume—as though it were permissible for us to break off a fragment and study this sample apart from the rest. It is time to point out that this procedure is merely an intellectual dodge. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

329:I am thinking, of course, in the first place of the extraordinary network of radio and television communications which, perhaps anticipating the direct syntonization of brains through the mysterious power of telepathy, already link us all in a sort of “etherized” universal consciousness. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Formation of the Noösphere,

330:From the aspect of energy, renewed by radio-active phenomena, material corpuscles may now be treated as transient reservoirs of concentrated power. Though never found in a state of purity, but always more or less granulated (even in light) energy nowadays represents for science the most primitive form of universal stuff. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

331:No time must be lost, and no opportunity missed. However trifling it be, part of life’s ultimate success depends upon the diligence with which I examine the world and make it more perfect in my own self. Awareness of this task spurs me on, and at the same time consoles me for my insignificance and obscurity. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Cosmic Life,

332:What fire can you expect to animate my good will? If I am to devote myself ardently and sincerely to the work of the cosmos, if I am to be able to compete on equal terms with the children of the earth, I must be convinced not only of the merit of what I do but of its value. I must believe in what I am doing. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Cosmic Life,

333:Stronger than every obstacle and counter-argument is the instinct which tells us that, to be faithful to Life, we must know; we must know more and still more; we must tirelessly and increasingly search for Something, we know not what, which will appear in the end to those who have penetrated to the very heart of reality.
~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

334:A certain sort of common sense (the same ‘common sense’ which has again and again been corrected beyond all question by physics) tells us that with man biological evolution has reached its ceiling: in reflecting upon itself, life has become stationary. But should we not rather say that it leaps forward? ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

335:If there were no internal propensity to unite, even at a prodigiously rudimentary level - indeed in the molecule itself - it would be physically impossible for love to appear higher up, with us, in hominized form... Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come into being. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

336:The man who has determined to admit love of the world and its cares into his interior life finds that he has to accept a supreme renunciation. He has sworn to seek for himself outside himself, in other words to love the world better than himself. He will now have to realize what this noble ambition will cost him. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Cosmic Life,

337:The time has come to realise that an interpretation of the universe—even a positivist one—remains unsatisfying unless it covers the interior as well as the exterior of things; mind as well as matter. The true physics is that which will, one day, achieve the inclusion of man in his wholeness in a coherent picture of the world. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

338:Even under the spur of immediate fear or desire, without the taste for life, mankind would soon stop inventing and constructing for a work it knew to be doomed in advance. And, stricken at the very source of the impetus which sustains it, it would disintegrate from nausea or revolt and crumble into dust. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

339:That there is an evolution of one sort or another is now, as I have said, common ground among scientists. Whether or not that evolution is directed is another question. Asked whether life is going anywhere at the end of its transformations, nine biologists out of ten will today say no, even passionately. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

340:No brutal shock, no, nor no gentle caress can compare with the vehemence and possessive force of the contact between ourselves as individuals and the universe, when suddenly, beneath the ordinariness of our most familiar experiences, we realize, with religious horror, that what is emerging in us is the great cosmos. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Cosmic Life,

341:We only have to look around us to see how complexity and psychic 'temperature' are still rising: and rising no longer on the scale of the individual but now on that of the planet. This indication is so familiar to us that we cannot but recognize the objective, experiential, reality of a transformation of the planet 'as a whole.' ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

342:If there were no internal propensity to unite, even at a prodigiously rudimentary level — indeed in the molecule itself — it would be physically impossible for love to appear higher up, with us, in hominized form. . . . Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come into being. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

343:What has not yet been sufficiently taken into account, although it explains everything, is the extent to which this process of mechanization is a collective affair, and the way in which it finally creates, on the periphery of the human race, an organism that is collective in its nature and amplitude. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Formation of the Noösphere,

344:On the one hand the individual unit is lost in number, on the other it is torn apart in the collectivity, and in yet a third direction it stretches out in becoming. This dramatic and perpetual opposition between the one born of the many and the many constantly being born of the one runs right through evolution. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

345:Is not something, itself analogous to a brain, being produced within the totality of human brains? When we think about means of communication, we notice most of all their commercial side; but the psychological side is much more important, and brings with it far-reaching effects. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Place of Technology in a General Biology of Mankind,

346:It is not only that in man, as Julian Huxley has said, evolution becomes conscious (that is, reflectively inventive); what is more, by the gathering together and concentration of all its forces and all its strands, from being divergent it is becoming convergent. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Transformation and Continuation in Man of the Mechanism of Evolution,

347:This fundamental discovery that all bodies owe their origin to arrangements of single initial corpuscular type is the beacon that lights the history of the universe to our eyes. In its own way, matter obeyed from the beginning that great law of biology to which we shall have to recur time and time again, the law of "complexification." ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

348:There appears to be no doubt that in the almost indecipherable web of cultures, nations, states, etc., constantly being woven around us, we must see an organic system of perfectly ‘natural’ unities, issuing biologically from the normal play of chromosomes in an exceptionally ‘psychised’ milieu. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phyletic Structure of the Human Group,

349:The apparent restriction of the phenomenon of consciousness to the higher forms of life has long served science as an excuse from eliminating it from its models of the universe. A queer exception, an aberrant function, an epiphenomenon—thought was classed under one or other of these heads in order to get rid of it. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

350:Why, before I act, should I be concerned to know whether my effort will be noticed or appreciated? Why should I feed my appetite for action with the empty hope of prestige or popularity? The only reward for my labour I now covet is to be able to think that it is being used for the essential and lasting progress of the universe. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Cosmic Life,

351:It seems to me that the Russian prestige is declining and that America holds in its hands the immediate future of the world: as long as America knows how to develop the sense of the earth at the same time as her sense of liberty." [Written from Peking, October 1945, on the eve of departure, after having been stuck there since the war began.] ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

352:My life may be unknown, monotonous, commonplace, boring, hidden from all men’s eyes … but I shall carry out its duties in the consciousness that I am effectively collaborating in the absolute evolution of Being. Lowly atom though I am, I shall fulfil an imperceptible function as such with a heart as all-embracing as the universe. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Cosmic Life,

353:No one can deny that a network (a world network) of economic and psychic affiliations is being woven at ever-increasing speed which envelops and constantly penetrates more deeply within each of us. With every day that passes it becomes a little more impossible for us to act or think otherwise than collectively. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Formation of the Noösphere,

354:Only one reality seems to survive and be capable of succeeding and spanning the infinitesimal and the immense: energy—that floating, universal entity from which all emerges and into which all falls back as into an ocean; energy, the new spirit; the new god. So, at the world’s Omega, as at its Alpha, lies the Impersonal. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

355:As a result of changes which, over the last century, have modified our empirically based pictures of the world and hence the moral value of many of its elements, the "human religious ideal" inclines to stress certain tendencies and to express itself in terms which seem, at first sight, no longer to coincide with the "christian religious ideal". ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

356:The biological change of state terminating in the awakening of thought does not represent merely a critical point that the individual or even the species must pass through. Vaster than that, it affects life itself in its organic totality, and consequently it marks a transformation affecting the state of the entire planet. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

357:The monads of our universe are not simply and solely the centres that emerged within a vast, immobile, homogeneous mass. As happens with the eddies in a river, their birth is accompanied by a more far-reaching movement which not only carries them along beyond themselves but is also, in some way, the actual cause of their emergence. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Cosmic Life,

358:Life is never mistaken, either about its road or its destination. No doubt, it does not define intellectually for us any God or any dogma; but it shows us by what road we may expect all that are neither delusions nor idols; it tells us towards what part of the horizon we must steer if we are to see the light dawn and grow more intense. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Cosmic Life,

359:The outcome of the world, the gates of the future, the entry into the super-human - these are not thrown open to a few of the privileged nor to one chosen people to the exclusion of all others. They will open only to an advance of all together, in a direction in which all together can join and find completion in a spiritual renovation of the earth. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

360:At the cost of what we are enduring, life is taking a step, and a decisive step, in us and in our environment. After the long maturation that has been steadily going on during the apparent immobility of the agricultural centuries, the hour has come at last, characterised by the birth pangs inevitable in another change of state. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

361:If an organism (whether natural or artificial) is to be perfect, it must combine with the plurality and differentiation of its parts, a maximum of lightness and simplicity. Side by side with the complication which makes a thing unwieldy, there is useful (or centered) complexity. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Transformation and Continuation in Man of the Mechanism of Evolution,

362:It is no longer the simple isolated reflection of an individual upon himself, but the conjugate and combined reflection of innumerable elements, adjusting and mutually reinforcing their activities, and so gradually forming one vast mirror—a mirror in which the universe might one day reflect itself and so fall into shape. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Convergence of the Universe,

363:Evolution is gaining the psychic zones of the world... life, being and ascent of consciousness, could not continue to advance indefinitely along its line without transforming itself in depth. The being who is the object of his own reflection, in consequence, of that very doubling back upon himself becomes in a flash able to raise himself to a new sphere. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

364:Is evolution a theory, a system, or a hypothesis? It is much more it is a general postulate to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must henceforward bow and which they must satisfy in order to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light which illuminates all facts, a trajectory which all lines of thought must follow this is what evolution is. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

365:Is evolution a theory, a system, or a hypothesis? It is much more it is a general postulate to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must henceforward bow and which they must satisfy in order to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light which illuminates all facts, a trajectory which all lines of thought must follow this is what evolution is. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

366:We see not only thought as participating in evolution as an anomaly or as an epiphenomenon; but evolution as so reducible to and identifiable with a progress towards thought that the movement of our souls expresses and measures the very stages of progress of evolution itself. Man discovers that he is nothing else than evolution become conscious of itself. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

367:When studied narrowly in himself by anthropologists or jurists, man is a tiny, even a shrinking, creature. His overpronounced individuality conceals from our eyes the whole to which he belongs; as we look at him our minds incline to break nature up into pieces and to forget both its deep inter-relations and its measureless horizons. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

368:With H. sapiens it is the axial vitalisation of matter arriving under the veil of socialisation at a new stage; not simply the reflexion of an individual on himself, but millions of reflexions seeking and reinforcing one another. The dawn of a collective reflexion. The emergence of reflexion into the collective state…. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phyletic Structure of the Human Group,

369:What disconcerts the modern world at its very roots is not being sure, and not seeing how it ever could be sure, that there is an outcome-a suitable outcome to evolution. Half our present uneasiness would be turned to happiness if we could once make up our minds to accept the facts and place the essence and the measure of our modern cosmogonies within a noogenesis. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

370:Man discovers that he is nothing else than evolution become conscious of itself, to borrow Julian Huxley’s striking expression. It seems to me that our modern minds (because and inasmuch as they are modern) will never find rest until they settle down to this view. On this summit and on this summit alone are repose and illumination waiting for us. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

371:Comparative study makes it clear that higher animals have minds of a sort, and evolutionary fact and logic demand that minds should have evolved gradually as well as bodies and that accordingly mind-like (or ‘mentoid,’ to employ a barbarous word that I am driven to coin because of its usefulness) properties must be present throughout the universe. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

372:Humanity is, if I have not gone astray in these pages, an object of study of unique value to science for two reasons. (i) It represents, individually and socially, the most synthesised state under which the stuff of the universe is available to us. (ii) Correlatively, it is at present the most mobile point of the stuff in course of transformation. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

373:It is not our heads or our bodies which we must bring together, but our hearts. . . . Humanity. . . is building its composite brain beneath our eyes. May it not be that tomorrow, through the logical and biological deepening of the movement drawing it together, it will find its heart, without which the ultimate wholeness of its power of unification can never be achieved? ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

374:A world that is in equilibrium upon instability, because it is in movement: and a world whose dynamic consistence is increasing in exact proportion with the complexity of its arrangements, because it is converging upon itself in as many sidereal points as there ever have been, as there are now, and as there ever will be, thinking planets. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Convergence of the Universe,

375:Now from this point of view and in the present condition of things, there are two ways, through two stages, in which we can picture the form mankind will assume tomorrow—either (and this is simpler) as a common power and act of knowing and doing, or (and this goes much deeper) as an organic superaggregation of souls. In short: science or unanimity. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

376:What more do we need to convince ourselves of the vital error hidden in the depths of any doctrine of isolation? The egocentric ideal of a future reserved for those who have managed to attain egoistically the extremity of ‘everyone for himself’ is false and against nature. No element could move and grow except with and by all the others with itself. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

377:To write the true natural history of the world, we should need to be able to follow it from within. It would thus appear no longer as an interlocking succession of structural types replacing one another, but as an ascension of inner sap spreading out in a forest of consolidated instincts. Right at its base, the living world is constituted by conscious clothes in flesh and bone. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

378:Until now it was enough to consider in nature a simple vibration on a wide front, the ascent of individual centres of consciousness. What we now have to do is to define and regulate harmoniously an ascent of consciousnesses (a much more delicate phenomenon). We are dealing with a progress made up of other progresses as lasting as itself; a movement of movements. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

379:The situation is clarified and can be seen with accuracy if we envisage, as the basis of cosmic physics, the existence of a sort of second entropy (or anti-entropy) which, as an effect of chances that are seized, draws a portion of matter in the direction of continually higher forms of structurization and centration. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Transformation and Continuation in Man of the Mechanism of Evolution,

380:Without you, without your onslaughts, without your uprootings of us, we should remain all our lives inert, stagnant, puerile, ignorant both of ourselves and of God. You who batter us and then dress our wounds, you who resist us and yield to us, you who wreck and build, you who shackle and liberate, the sap of our souls, the hand of God, the flesh of Christ: it is you, matter, that I bless. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

381:Without you, without your onslaughts, without your uprootings of us, we should remain all our lives inert, stagnant, puerile, ignorant both of ourselves and of God. You who batter us and then dress our wounds, you who resist us and yield to us, you who wreck and build, you who shackle and liberate, the sap of our souls, the hand of God, the flesh of Christ: it is you, matter, that I bless. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

382:If it is really true that an ultra-human can be distinguished ahead of us, to be attained by ultra-evolution, it is equally true that this ultra-evolution, operating henceforth in a reflective medium, can only be (at least in its most seminal and central axis) an auto- or self-evolution: in other words, it must be a consciously and passionately willed deliberate act. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Convergence of the Universe,

383:When every certainty is shaken and every utterance falters, when every principle appears doubtful, then there is only one ultimate belief on which we can base our rudderless interior life: the belief that there is an absolute direction of growth, to which both our duty and our happiness demand that we should conform; and that life advances in that direction, taking the most direct road. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Cosmic Life,

384:If, again, the whole of my labour were harvested, if the whole of my suffering were meaningful and fruitful, if all the betterment achieved by my work were made permanent and handed on, then I might perhaps be able to take comfort. All that was best of me would survive in the lasting evidence of my passage, for in it would be preserved and made eternal all the effective value of my life. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Cosmic Life,

385:My starting point is the fundamental initial fact that each one of us is perforce linked by all the material organic and psychic strands of his being to all that surrounds him. . . . If we look far enough back in the depths of time, the disordered anthill of living beings suddenly, for an informed observer, arranges itself in long files that make their way by various paths towards greater consciousness. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

386:Confined within the geometrically restricted surface of the globe, which is steadily reduced as their own radius of activity increases, the human particles do not merely multiply in numbers at an increasing rate, but through contact with one another automatically develop around themselves an ever denser tangle of economic and social relationships. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, A Great Event Foreshadowed - The Planetization of Mankind,

387:Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come into being. ... the universal gravity of bodies, ... is merely the reverse or shadow of that which really moves nature. Love in all its subtleties is nothing more, and nothing less, than the more or less direct trace marked on the heart of the element by the psychical convergence of the universe upon itself. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

388:In the last century and a half the most prodigious event, perhaps, ever recorded by history since the threshold of reflection has been taking place in our minds: the definitive access of consciousness to a scale of new dimensions; and in consequence the birth of an entirely renewed universe, without any change of line or feature by the simple transformation of its intimate substance. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

389:After having been completely occupied for a long time in the work of constructing organisms, life is only now beginning to see to its internal dispositions; it is concentrating its attention and care on advances and refinements of a finally perfected consciousness. At present, evolution is continuing much more through improvements of the psychological order than through organic transformations. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Cosmic Life,

390:From this point of view, the rise of civilisation is nothing but the organo-psychical aspect adopted by a colossal biological operation never before attempted in nature: the independent arrangement, not only (as in the insects, for example) of a simple family group, but of a vast group of living groups: I mean, of a whole phylum (and a phylum of planetary extension). ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phyletic Structure of the Human Group,

391:Under the combined force of the multiplication (in numbers) and expansion (in radius of influence) of human individuals on the surface of the globe, the noösphere has for the last century shown signs of a sudden organic compression upon itself and compenetration. This is without any doubt the most massive and the most central of the events the earth has experienced in our day. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Convergence of the Universe,

392:We can go on for years arguing about the way in which the enormous organism could have come into being. As we look closer at the bewildering complexity of the mechanism, our brains begin to reel. How are we to reconcile this persistent growth with the determinism of the molecules, the blind play of the chromosomes, the apparent incapacity to transmit individual acquisitions by generation? ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

393:Mother Earth. Like children who have grown up, we must learn to walk by ourselves and give active help to the mother who bore us. If, then, we make up our minds to accept wholeheartedly the manifestations of the divine will registered in the laws of nature, our obedience must make us throw ourselves into positive effort, our cult of passivities must ultimately be transformed into a passion for work. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Cosmic Life,

394:His understanding of the method by which organisms become first individualised and then personalised gave him a number of valuable insights. Basically, the process depends on cephalisation — the differentiation of a head as the dominant guiding region of the body, forwardly directed, and containing the main sense-organs providing information about the outer world and also the main organ of co-ordination or brain. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

395:Some biologists, indeed, would claim that mind is generated solely by the complexification of certain types of organisation, namely brains. However, such logic appears to me narrow. The brain alone is not responsible for mind, even though it is a necessary organ for its manifestation. Indeed an isolated brain is a piece of biological nonsense, as meaningless as an isolated human individual. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

396:Cells still seem to resemble one another more as molecules do than as animals do. We are right to look on them as the first of living forms. But are we not equally entitled to view them as the representatives of another state of matter, something as original in its way as the electronic, the atomic, the crystalline, or the polymerous? As a new type of material for a new stage of the universe? ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

397:If we wish to settle this question of the ‘superiority’ of man over the animals (and it is every bit as necessary to settle it for the sake of the ethics of life as well as for pure knowledge) I can only see one way of doing so—to brush resolutely aside all those secondary and equivocal manifestations of inner activity in human behaviour, making straight for the central phenomenon, reflection. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

398:On the one hand we have a single brain, formed of nervous nuclei, and on the other a Brain of brains. It is true that between these two organic complexes a major difference exists. Whereas in the case of the individual brain thought emerges from a system of nonthinking nervous fibers, in the case of the collective brain each separate unit is in itself an autonomous center of reflection. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Formation of the Noösphere,

399:This sudden deluge of cerebralisation, this biological invasion of a new animal type which gradually eliminates or subjects all forms of life that are not human, this irresistible tide of fields and factories, this immense and growing edifice of matter and ideas—all these signs that we look at, for days on end—to proclaim that there has been a change on the earth and a change of planetary magnitude. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

400:If we look at it far enough back in the depths of time, the disordered anthill of living beings suddenly, for an informed observer, arranges itself in long files that make their way by various paths towards greater consciousness. Seen from a sufficient distance and in a particular light, individuals (principles, in appearance, of egocentrism and permanence) are recognized as no more than staging-posts in a movement. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Cosmic Life,

401:The concentration of a conscious universe would be unthinkable if it did not reassemble in itself all consciousnesses as well as all the conscious; each particular consciousness remaining conscious of itself at the end of the operation, and even (this must absolutely be understood) each particular consciousness becoming still more itself and thus more clearly distinct from others the closer it gets to them. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

402:The end of the world: the wholesale internal introversion upon itself of the noosphere, which has simultaneously reached the uttermost limit of its complexity and its centrality . . . the overthrow of equilibrium, detaching the mind, furfilled at last, from its material matrix, so that it will henceforth rest with all its weight on God-Omega . . . critical point simultaneously of emergence and emersion, of maturation and evasion. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

403:Evolution takes on a new character: it becomes primarily a psychosocial process, based on the cumulative transmission of experience and its results, and working through an organised system of awareness, a combined operation of knowing, feeling and willing. In man, at least during the historical and proto-historical periods, evolution has been characterised more by cultural than by genetic or biological change. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

404:Evolution, from being initially selective, cannot but make itself elective in higher living beings, as a direct effect of complexity: until the time comes when, with the appearance of the faculty of thought, it reflects definitively upon itself and so ‘takes off’ and suddenly opens out into planned invention (technology) and higher co-consciousness (civilization). ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Transformation and Continuation in Man of the Mechanism of Evolution,

405:On this new psychosocial level, the evolutionary process leads to new types and higher degrees of organisation. On the one hand there are new patterns of co-operation among individuals—co-operation for practical control, for enjoyment, for education, and notably in the last few centuries, for obtaining new knowledge; and on the other there are new patterns of thought, new organisations of awareness and its products. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

406: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 in a practical fashion we fix our gaze on the universal realities. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

407: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 in a practical fashion we fix our gaze on the universal realities. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

408:What paralyzes life is lack of faith and lack of courage. The difficulty lies not in solving problems but in expressing them correctly; and we can now see that it is biologically undeniable that unless we harness passion to the service of spirit there can be no progress. Sooner or later, then, and in spite of all our incredulity, the world will take this step— because the greater truth always prevails and the greater good emerges in the end. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

409:...The very fact of our becoming aware of this profound ordering of things will enable human collectivization to pass beyond the enforced phase, where it now is, into the free phase: that in which (men having at last understood that they are inseparably joined elements of a converging Whole, and having learnt in consequence to love the preordained forces that unite them) a natural union of affinity and sympathy will supersede the forces of compulsion. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

410:Geographically, since 1939, a vast expanse of the earth, the region of the Pacific, hitherto in the fringe of civilization, has for practical purposes entered irrevocably into the orbit of industrialized nations. Mechanized masses of men have invaded the southern seas, and up-to-date airfields have been permanently installed on what were until yesterday the poetically lost islands of Polynesia. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, A Great Event Foreshadowed - The Planetization of Mankind,

411:Progressively saved by the machine from the anxieties that bound his hands and mind to material toil, relieved of a large part of his work and compelled to an ever-increasing speed of action by the devices which his intelligence cannot help ceaselessly creating and perfecting, man is about to find himself abruptly plunged into idleness. This is the situation. From a scientific point of view, what is to be done? ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phyletic Structure of the Human Group,

412:There was something more: around this sentient protoplasmic layer, an ultimate envelope was beginning to become apparent to me, taking on its own individuality and gradually detaching itself like a luminous aura. This envelope was not only conscious but thinking, and from the time when I first became aware of it, it was always there that I found concentrated, in an ever more dazzling and consistent form, the essence or rather the very Soul of the Earth. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

413:We would be mistaken in regarding the totality of human brains as forming no more than an added sum. There is something more: these united brains build up a sort of dome, from which each brain can see, with the assistance of the others, what would escape it if it had to rely solely on its own field of vision. The view so obtained goes beyond anything the individual can compass, nor can he exhaust it. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Place of Technology in a General Biology of Mankind,

414:Without the slightest doubt there is something through which material and spiritual energy hold togehter and are complementary. In the last analysis, somehow or other, there must be a single energy operating in the world. And the first idea that occurs to us is that the 'soul' must be as it were the focal point of transformation at which, from all the points of nature, the forces of bodies converge, to become interiorised and sublimated in beauty and truth. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

415:It is no longer possible to maintain that science and religion must operate in thought-tight compartments or concern separate sectors of life; they are both relevant to the whole of human existence. The religiously-minded can no longer turn their backs upon the natural world, or seek escape from its imperfections in a supernatural world; nor can the materialistically-minded deny importance to spiritual experience and religious feeling. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

416:They are now beginning to realise that even the most objective of their observations are steeped in the conventions they adopted at the outset and by forms or habits of thought developed in the course of the growth of research; so that, when they reach the end of their analyses they cannot tell with any certainty whether the structure they have reached is the essence of the matter they are studying, or the reflection of their own thought. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon Of Man,

417:Seen from outside and materially, the best we can say at the moment is that life properly speaking begins with the cell. For a century science has concentrated its attention on this chemically and structurally ultra-complex unit, and the longer it continues to do so the more evident it becomes that in it lies the secret of which we have as yet no more than an inkling—the secret of the connection between the two worlds of physics and biology. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

418:Through the discovery yesterday of the railway, the motor car and the aeroplane, the physical influence of each man, formerly restricted to a few miles, now extends to hundreds of leagues or more. Better still: thanks to the prodigious biological event represented by the discovery of electro-magnetic waves, each individual finds himself henceforth (actively and passively) simultaneously present, over land and sea, in every corner of the earth. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

419:The phrase 'Sense of the Earth' should be understood to mean the passionate concern for our common destiny which draws the thinking part of life ever further onward. The only truly natural and real human unity is the spirit of the Earth. . . .The sense of Earth is the irresistable pressure which will come at the right moment to unite them (humankind) in a common passion.The Age of Nations is past. The task before us now, if we would not perish, is to build the Earth. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

420:What has made us in four or five generations so different from our forebears (in spite of all that may be said), so ambitious too, and so worried, is not merely that we have discovered and mastered other forces of nature. In final analysis it is, if I am not mistaken, that we have become conscious of the movement which is carrying us along, and have thereby realised the formidable problems set us by this reflective exercise of the human effort. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

421:We pick up the problem again at the point at which the realisation of the confluence of human thoughts had already led us. Being a collective reality, and therefore sui generis, mankind can only be understood to the extent that, leaving behind its body of tangible constructions, we try to determine the particular type of conscious synthesis emerging from its laborious and industrious concentration. It is in the last resort only definable as a mind. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

422:Technology has a role that is biological in the strict sense of the word: it has every right to be included in the scheme of nature. From this point of view, which agrees with that of Bergson, there ceases to be any distinction between the artificial and the natural, between technology and life, since all organisms are the result of invention; if there is any difference, the advantage is on the side of the artificial. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Place of Technology in a General Biology of Mankind,

423:The outcome of the world, the gates of the future, the entry into the super-human—these are not thrown open to a few of the privileged nor to one chosen people to the exclusion of all others. They will open only to an advance of all together, in a direction in which all together can join and find completion in a spiritual renovation of the earth, a renovation whose physical degree of reality we must now consider and whose outline we must make clearer. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

424:The being who is the object of its own reflection, in consequence of that very doubling back upon itself, becomes in a flash able to raise itself into a new sphere. In reality, another world is born. Abstraction, logic, reasoned choice and inventions, mathematics, art, calculation of space and time, anxieties and dreams of love—all these activities of inner life are nothing else than the effervescence of the newly-formed centre as it explodes onto itself. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

425:With our knowledge of hormones we appear to be on the eve of having a hand in the development of our bodies and even of our brains. With the discovery of genes it appears that we shall soon be able to control the mechanism of organic heredity. And with the synthesis of albuminoids imminent, we may well one day be capable of producing what the earth, left to itself, seems no longer able to produce: a new wave of organisms, an artificially provoked neo-life. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

426:So many things which once had distressed or revolted him — the speeches and pronouncements of the learned, their assertions and their prohibitions, their refusal to allow the universe to move — all seemed to him now merely ridiculous, non-existent, compared with the majestic reality, the flood of energy, which now revealed itself to him: omnipresent, unalterable in its truth, relentless in its development, untouchable in its serenity, maternal and unfailing in its protectiveness. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

427:Though for certain limited purposes it may be useful to think of phenomena as isolated statically in time, they are in point of fact never static: they are always processes or parts of processes. The different branches of science combine to demonstrate that the universe in its entirety must be regarded as one gigantic process, a process of becoming, of attaining new levels of existence and organisation, which can properly be called a genesis or an evolution. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

428:By virtue of individual and collective human reflection, evolution— overflowing the physico-chemical organisation of bodies—turns back upon itself and thereby reinforces itself with a new organising power vastly concentric to the first—the cognitive organisation of the universe. To think ‘the world’ (as physics is beginning to realise) is not merely to register it but to cofer upon it a form of unity it would otherwise (i.e. without being thought) be without. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

429:The multiple factors (ecological, physiological, psychic…) combining to assemble and firmly unite living beings in general (and human beings more especially) are merely the extension and expression on this level of the forces of complexity/consciousness, always working, as we have said, to construct (as far back as possible and everywhere possible in the universe), in opposition to entropy, corpuscular combinations of an ever higher order. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phyletic Structure of the Human Group,

430:It is a remarkable leap forward (involving, indeed, a change of order) in arrangement—one that is accompanied by another, no less remarkable, whether it be in the reduction of chance in the world (planned and co-operative invention) or in the biological interiorization of consciousness (all the individual reflective particles of the earth being impelled to associate planetarily in one single reflective system). ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Transformation and Continuation in Man of the Mechanism of Evolution,

431:As mankind lives longer, not only does it increase numerically and spread out geographically; but, what is more, economically, politically, and mentally it is daily more thoroughly pounded together and intermixed and more closely bound into one. We can see connexions of all sorts continually—and in geometric progression—multiplying and intensifying between each human individual and all the others on the surface of the globe. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Transformation and Continuation in Man of the Mechanism of Evolution,

432:The farther and more deeply we penetrate into matter, by means of increasingly powerful methods, the more we are confounded by the interdependence of its parts. Each element of the cosmos is positively woven from all the others: from beneath itself by the mysterious phenomenon of ‘composition,’ which makes it subsistent through the apex of an organised whole; and from above through the influence of unities of a higher order which incorporate and dominate it for their own ends. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

433:The machine not only does it relieve us mechanically of a crushing weight of physical and mental labor; but by the miraculous enhancing of our senses, through its powers of enlargement, penetration and exact measurement, it constantly increases the scope and clarity of our perceptions. It fulfills the dream of all living creatures by satisfying our instinctive craving for the maximum of consciousness with a minimum of effort! Having embarked upon so profitable a path, how can Mankind fail to pursue it? ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

434:Out of pain can come strength and a deeper sense of connection —if we can learn to use the power of love. “Someday, after mastering winds, waves, tides and gravity, we shall harness the energy of love, and for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire,” wrote the French Christian mystic and writer Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. This “fire” is not the one that burns and terrifies, but the one that gives light and warmth. It is love that can change not just our relationships, but our world. ~ Sue Johnson,

435:We see why modern ‘human unities’ now only mix and bunch ever more tightly together; to form, as a whole, a zoological system of a completely new type, to which it is simply impossible to apply any of the terms in use in vegetable or animal systems;—since these various terms have been created to describe a hierarchy among phyletic derivations, while here (in the case of H. sapiens) we are faced with an in-furling on itself of a phylum that is active as a whole. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phyletic Structure of the Human Group,

436:Hominization, instead of spreading out at random (as we had at first thought) would be given a direction; and in consequence we would awake scientifically to the idea that in the form of some critical point of ultra-hominization (or of complete and final reflection), some issue to—that is, some justification of—life may well be waiting for us at the term of existence: because, physically and biologically, the process is convergent! ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Transformation and Continuation in Man of the Mechanism of Evolution,

437:The human ‘species’ has succeeded in covering the earth: and not only spatially—on this surface that is now completely encircled mankind has completed the construction of a close network of planetary links, so successfully that a special envelope now stretches over the old biosphere. Every day this new integument grows in strength; it can be clearly recognized and distinguished in every quarter; it is provided with its own system of internal connexions and communications. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Convergence of the Universe,

438:We are faced with a harmonised collectivity of consciousnesses equivalent to a sort of super-consciousness. The idea is that of the earth not only becoming covered by myriads of grains of thought, but becoming enclosed in a single thinking envelope so as to form, functionally, no more than a single vast grain of thought on the sidereal scale, the plurality of individual reflections grouping themselves together and reinforcing one another in the act of a single unanimous reflection. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

439:By means of all created things, without exception, the divine assails us, penetrates us and moulds us. We imagined it as distant and inaccessible, whereas in fact we live steeped in its burning layers. In eo vivimus. As Jacob said, awakening from his dream, the world, this palpable world, which we were wont to treat with the boredom and disrespect with which we habitually regard places with no sacred association for us, is in truth a holy place, and we did not know it. Venite, adoremus. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu,

440:There is for science a particular class of facts to be considered—specifically the most important because the rarest and most significant—those which depend neither on direct observation nor experiment, but can only be brought to light by a very authentic branch of ‘physics,’ the discovery of the past. And, to judge by our repeated failures to find its equivalent around us or to reproduce it, the first apparition of living bodies is clearly one of the most sensational of these events. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

441:Of course there exists in living organisms a selective mechanism for the play of consciousness. We have merely to look into ourselves to perceive it—the nervous system. We are in a positive way aware of one single ‘interiority’ in the world: our own directly, and at the same time that of other men by immediate equivalence, thanks to language. But we have every reason to think that in animals too a certain inwardness exists, approximately proportional to the development of their brains. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

442:The idea is that of the earth not only becoming covered with myriad grains of thought, but becoming enclosed in a single thinking envelope so as to form, functionally, no more than a single vast grain of thought on the sidereal scale, the plurality of individual reflections grouping themselves together and reinforcing one another in the act of a single unanimous reflection...A new domain of psychical expansion- that is what we lack. And it is staring us in the face if we would only raise our heads to look at it. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

443:It would certainly appear that, even if our perceptions are still irrevocably enclosed within certain limits of greatness and smallness, we can at least flatter ourselves that we have discovered and established experimentally the law of recurrence that governs the structure of the cosmos. The analysis of matter is making us see it as a limitless aggregation of centres taking over and mastering one another in such a way as to build up, by their combinations, more and more complex centres of a higher order. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Cosmic Life,

444:There are really only two ways, it seems to me, in which we can think about our existence here on earth. We either agree with Macbeth that life is nothing more than a “tale told by an idiot,” a purposeless emergence of life-forms including the clever, greedy, selfish, and unfortunately destructive species that we call Homo sapiens—the “evolutionary goof.” Or we believe that, as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin put it, “There is something afoot in the universe, something that looks like gestation and birth.” In other words, a plan, a purpose to it all. ~ Jane Goodall,

445:Supposing we divide the world into two parts—on the one side, matter which has no roots in mass consciousness, and on the other side the living being. Would we not be justified then in saying, “But—interiority, the rudiment of consciousness, exists everywhere; it is only that if the particle is extremely simple, the consciousness is so small that we cannot perceive it; if there is an increase in complexity, this consciousness comes out into the open and we have the world of life?” ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Place of Technology in a General Biology of Mankind,

446:I looked around and I saw, as though in an ecstasy, that through all nature I was immersed in God. The whole inextricably tangled and compressive network of material interconnexions, the whole plexus of fundamental currents once again confronted me, just as it did when first my eyes were opened; but now they were animated and transfigured, for their dominance, their charm and their appeal, all beyond number or measure, appeared to me in a glow of illumination and I saw them hallowed and divinized in both their operation and their future. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Cosmic Life,

447:Man came silently into the world. As a matter of fact he trod so softly that, when we first catch sight of him as revealed by those indestructible stone instruments, we find him sprawling all over the old world from the Cape of Good Hope to Peking. Without doubt he already speaks and lives in groups ; he already makes fire. After all, this is surely what we ought to expect. As we know, each time a new living form rises up before us out of the depths of history, it is always complete and already legion. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon Of Man, The Birth of Thought, 186,

448:If man is to come up to his full measure, he must become conscious of his infinite capacity for carrying himself sill further; he must realize the duties it involves, and he must feel its intoxicating wonder. He must abandon all the illusions of narrow individualism and extend himself, intellectually and emotionally, to the dimensions of the universe: and this even though, his mind reeling at the prospect of his new greatness, he should think that he is already in possession of the divine, is God himself, or is himself the artisan of Godhead. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Cosmic Life,

449:The development of humanity has operated through the appearance, multiplication and extension of a scattering of semi-independent ‘cultural patches’ on the continental surface. And up to the most recent times one can say that between these different patches there still lay some free tracts or at least loose articulations. But now, by a generalised peripheral fusion, the system has suddenly become one. Economically and spiritually speaking, the age of civilisations has ended, and that of one civilisation is beginning. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phyletic Structure of the Human Group,

450:He has crossed the threshold of self-consciousness to a new mode of thought, and as a result has achieved some degree of conscious integration—integration of the self with the outer world of men and nature, integration of the separate elements of the self with each other. He is a person, an organism which has transcended individuality in personality. This attainment of personality was an essential element in man’s past and present evolutionary success: accordingly its fuller achievement must be an essential aim for his evolutionary future. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

451:The population on the limited surface of this planet which bears us is increasing in almost geometrical progression; while at the same time the scope of each human molecule, in terms of movement, information, and influence, is becoming rapidly coextensive with the whole surface of the globe. A state of tightening compression, in short; but even more, thanks to the biological intermingling developed to its uttermost extent by the appearance of reflection, a state of organized compenetration, in which each element is linked with every other. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Formation of the Noösphere,

452:For no exact scientific reason, but simply as a result of impression and routine, we have formed the habit of separating the psychic from the material, as if they belonged to two different worlds, the arrangement of individuals and the arrangement of cells; only the latter being regarded as organic and natural, in contrast to the former, which is relegated to the domain of the moral or artificial. Society (human society especially) is a matter for historians and jurists rather than biologists. Is not that what we too often think? ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phyletic Structure of the Human Group,

453:We should consider interthinking humanity as a new type of organism, whose destiny is to realise new possibilities for evolving life on this planet. Accordingly, we should endeavour to equip it with the mechanisms necessary for the proper fulfilment of its task—the psychosocial equivalents of sense-organs, effector organs, and a co-ordinating central nervous system with dominant brain; and our aim should be the gradual personalisation of the human unit of evolution—its conversion, on the new level of co-operative interthinking, into the equivalent of a person. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

454:In its external shape, in its internal processes, in its powers of fermentation, and in its readiness to enter into aggregations of a higher order, the monocellular being behaves in many ways like a molecule. Life appears in phenomenal continuity with the network of material determinisms and constructions. When the individualization of organic and conscious monads produces folds in the basic fabric of the cosmos, it does not tear it, any more than does the separation of the atomic centres. Already, through the matter that is common to them, all living beings are but one being. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Cosmic Life,

455:We see Nature combining molecules and cells in the living body to construct separate individuals, and the same Nature, stubbornly pursuing the same course but on a higher level, combining individuals in social organisms to obtain a higher order of psychic results. The processes of chemistry and biology are continued without a break in the social sphere. This accounts for the tendency, which has been insufficiently noted, of every living phylum (insect and vertebrate) to group itself towards its latter end in socialized communities. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, A Great Event Foreshadowed - The Planetization of Mankind,

456:Are we not at every instant living the experience of a universe whose immensity, by the play of our senses and our reason, is gathered up more and more simply in each one of us? And in the establishment now proceeding through science and the philosophies of a collective human Weltanschauung in which every one of us co-operates and participates, are we not experiencing the first symptoms of an aggregation of a still higher order, the birth of some single centre from the convergent beams of millions of elementary centres dispersed over the surface of the thinking earth? ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

457:If, through technology, evolution is making a fresh bound, at the same time it is becoming reflective. Huxley has said that man is evolution become conscious of itself. Evolution has now to make its own choice. So long as true freedom did not exist life seemed to grope its way forward; now that man has become conscious, reflective, and responsible for dispositions on which the rest of the process is based, a direction must be found: life can no longer proceed at random—technology brings with it the inescapable necessity of an ideology. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Place of Technology in a General Biology of Mankind,

458:You truly contain within your gentleness, within your humanity, all the unyielding immensity and grandeur of the world. And it is because of this, it is because there exists in you this ineffable synthesis of what our human thought and experience would never have dared join together in order to adore them—element and totality, the one and the many, mind and matter, the infinite and the personal; it is because of the indefinable contours which this complexity gives to your appearance and to your activity, that my heart, enamoured of cosmic reality, gives itself passionately to you. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Cosmic Life,

459:Now we can see the tree of life standing before us. A strange tree, no doubt. We could call it the negative of a tree, for contrary to what happens with our great forest trees, its branches and trunk are revealed to our eyes only by ever-widening gaps; an almost petrified tree, as it appears to us, so long do the buds take to open. Many that are half-opened now we shall never know in any other state. A clearly drawn tree, none the less, with its superimposed foliage of living species. In its main lines and vast dimensions, it stands there before us covering all the earth. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

460:What we then see is a flood of sympathetic forces, spreading from the heart of the system, which transforms the whole nature of the phenomenon: sympathy in the first place (an act of quasi-adoration) on the part of all the elements gathered together for the general impulse that carries them along; and also the sympathy (this time fraternal) of each separate element for all that is most unique and incommunicable in each of the co-elements with which it converges in the unity, not only of a single act of vision but of a single living subject. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, A Great Event Foreshadowed - The Planetization of Mankind,

461:Noögenesis 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. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

462:Our earth of factory chimneys and offices, seething with work and business, our earth with a hundred new radiations—this great organism lives, in final analysis, only because of, and for the sake of, a new soul. Beneath a change of age lies a change of thought. Where are we to look for it, where are we to situate this renovating and subtle alteration which, without appreciably changing our bodies, has made new creatures of us? In one place and one only—in a new intuition involving a total change in the physiognomy of the universe in which we move—in other words, in an awakening. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

463:A sense of collectivity, arising in our minds out of the evolutionary sense, has imposed a framework of entirely new dimensions upon all our thinking; so that mankind has come to present itself to our gaze less and less as a haphazard and extrinsic association of individuals, and increasingly as a biological entity wherein, in some sort, the proceedings and the necessities of the universe in movement are furthered and achieve their culmination. We feel that the relation between Society and Social Organism is no longer a matter of symbolism but must be treated in realistic terms. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Formation of the Noösphere,

464:Regardless of the country, creed or social status of the person I approach, provided the same flame of expectation burns in us both, there is a profound, definitive and total contact instantly established between us. It matters nothing that differences of education or training cause us to express our hopes in different ways. We feel that we are of the same kind, and we find that our very differences are a common armor, as though there were a dimension of life in which all striving makes for nearness, not only within a corporate body but heart to heart. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, A Great Event Foreshadowed - The Planetization of Mankind,

465:A glow ripples outward from the first spark of conscious reflection. The point of ignition grows larger. The fire spreads in ever widening circles till finally the whole planet is covered with incandescence. Only one interpretation, only one name can be found worthy of this grand phenomenon. Much more coherent and just as extensive as any preceding layer, it is really a new layer, the ‘thinking layer,’ which, since its germination at the end of the Tertiary period, has spread over and above the world of plants and animals. In other words, outside and above the biosphere there is the noösphere. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

466:May there not really be a way, for a scientifically alert observer, of detecting around us the signs of an ultra-evolution (we might say ‘a wind of reflection’) in a whole series of psychic phenomena, still incompletely identified and yet patient of statistical study? For example, the general rise, at this very moment, in the most advanced areas of human thought, of a certain distress—or, on the contrary, of a certain excited anticipation—both specifically connected with the gradual awakening in us of the consciousness that the universe is not only in movement but is carrying us with it? ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Convergence of the Universe,

467:By its very nature, as the cosmic stuff’s power of self-arrangement is realized more fully, so there tends to be a gradual interiorization of its driving force and the methods it uses. As a universal experience of things teaches us, the increasing complexification of matter, while in its origins principally the effect of chance, is gradually shot through and loaded with ‘choice.’ When the process first appears, in monocellular beings, it is forcibly imposed or automatic; but among highly cerebralized beings it tends irreversibly to become one of active preference. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Transformation and Continuation in Man of the Mechanism of Evolution,

468:The process of evolution on earth is itself now in the process of becoming cephalised. Before the appearance of man, life consisted of a vast array of separate branches, linked only by an unorganised pattern of ecological interaction. The incipient development of mankind into a single psychosocial unit, with a single noösystem or common pool of thought, is providing the evolutionary process with the rudiments of a head. It remains for our descendants to organise this global noösystem more adequately, so as to enable mankind to understand the process of evolution on earth more fully and to direct it more adequately. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

469:Of the two or three natural dogmas that mankind, after long centuries of debate and after ceaseless critical examination, is now definitely establishing, the most categorical and the dearest to us is certainly that of the infinite value of the universe and its inexhaustible store of richness. ‘Our world contains within itself a mysterious promise of the future, implicit in its natural evolution.’ When the newborn mind surveys the grandeurs of the cosmos, those are the first words it falters; and that is the final assertion of the scientist as he closes his eyes, heavy and weary from having seen so much that he could not express. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Cosmic Life,

470:Modern thought is at last getting used once more to the idea of the creative value of synthesis in evolution. It is beginning to see that there is definitely more in the molecule than in the atom, more in the cell than in the molecule, more in society than in the individual, and more in mathematical construction than in calculations and theorems. We are now inclined to admit that at each further degree of combination something which is irreducible to isolated elements emerges in a new order. And with this admission, consciousness, life and thought are on the threshold of acquiring a right to existence in terms of science. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

471:He saw with his mind’s eye that ‘the banal fact of the earth’s roundness’—the sphericity of man’s environment—was bound to cause this intensification of psychosocial activity. In an unlimited environment, man’s thought and his resultant psychosocial activity would simply diffuse outwards: it would extend over a greater area, but would remain thinly spread. But when it is confined to spreading out over the surface of a sphere, idea will encounter idea, and the result will be an organised web of thought, a noetic system operating under high tension, a piece of evolutionary machinery capable of generating high psychosocial energy. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

472:What paralyzes life is lack of faith and lack of courage. The difficulty lies not in solving problems but in expressing them correctly; and we can now see that it is biologically undeniable that unless we harness passion to the service of spirit there can be no progress. Sooner or later, then, and in spite of all our incredulity, the world will take this step— because the greater truth always prevails and the greater good emerges in the end. The day will come when, after mastering the ether, the winds, the tides, gravity, we shall master the energies of love, for God. And then, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have made fire his servant. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

473:From the advent of man difficulties appear. We cannot fail to be aware of the extreme confusion which prevails concerning the significance and the distribution of the extremely varied groups into which mankind divides up under our very eyes—races, nations, states, countries, cultures, etc. In these diverse and constantly shifting categories, people as a rule only care to see heterogeneous units—some natural (race), others artificial (nations)—overlapping irregularly on different planes. It is an unpleasing and unnecessary irregularity, and one which vanishes as soon as we give its proper place to the within as well as the without of things. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

474:The first veil of organised matter spread over the earth could neither have established nor maintained itself without some network of influences and exchanges which made it a biologically cohesive whole. From its origin, the cellular nebula necessarily represented, despite its internal multiplicity, a sort of diffuse super-organism. Not merely a foam of lives but, to a certain extent, itself a living film. A simple reappearance, after all, in more advanced form and on a higher level of those much older conditions which we have already seen presiding over the birth and equilibrium of the first polymerised substances on the surface of the early earth. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

475:I allowed my consciousness to sweep back to the farthest limit of my body, to ascertain whether I might not extend outside myself. I stepped down into the most hidden depths of my being, lamp in hand and ears alert, to discover whether in the deepest recesses of the blackness within me, I might not see the glint of the waters of the current that flows on, whether I might not hear the murmur of their mysterious waters that rise from the uttermost depths and will burst forth no man knows where. With terror and intoxicating emotion, I realized that my own poor trifling existence was one with the immensity of all that is and all that is still in process of becoming. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Cosmic Life,

476:We can envisage a world whose constantly increasing ‘leisure’ and heightened interest would find their vital issue in fathoming everything, trying everything, extending everything; a world in which giant telescopes and atom smashers would absorb more money and excite more spontaneous admiration than all the bombs and cannons put together; a world in which, not only for the restricted band of paid research-workers, but also for the man in the street, the day’s ideal would be the wresting of another secret or another force from corpuscles, stars, or organised matter; a world in which, as happens already, one gives one’s life to be and to know, rather than to possess. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

477:Reflection is, as the word indicates, the power acquired by a consciousness to turn in upon itself, to take possession of itself as of an object endowed with its own particular consistence and value: no longer merely to know, but to know oneself; no longer merely to know, but to know that one knows. By this individualisation of itself in the depths of itself, the living element, which heretofore had been spread out and divided over a diffuse circle of perceptions and activities, was constituted for the first time as a centre in the form of a point at which all the impressions and experiences knit themselves together and fuse into a unity that is conscious of its own organisation. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

478:The evolution of life becomes a comprehensible phenomenon. It is an anti-entropic process, running counter to the second law of thermodynamics with its degradation of energy and its tendency to uniformity. With the aid of the sun’s energy, biological evolution marches uphill, producing increased variety and higher degrees of organisation. It also produces more varied, more intense and more highly organised mental activity or awareness. During evolution, awareness (or if you prefer, the mental properties of living matter) becomes increasingly important to organisms, until in mankind it becomes the most important characteristic of life, and gives the human type its dominant position. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

479:What does that amount to if not (and it is quite credible) that the stuff of the universe, by becoming thinking, has not yet completed its evolutionary cycle, and that we are therefore moving forward towards some new critical point that lies ahead. In spite of its organic links, whose existence has everywhere become apparent to us, the biosphere has so far been no more than a network of divergent lines, free at their extremities. By effect of reflection and the recoils it involves, the loose ends have been tied up, and the noösphere tends to constitute a single closed system in which each element sees, feels, desires and suffers for itself the same things as all the others at the same time. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

480:Although this force is indeed my own in the sense that it is I who concentrate it and experience it, I am quite unable to pin it down, whether I try to decipher any part either of its past or of its future. Behind the unity it assumes in my consciousness there lies hidden the dense multitude of all the succession of beings whose infinitely patient and lengthy labour has carried to its present stage of perfection the phylum of which I am for a moment the extreme bud. My life is not my own: I know this from the inexorable determinism contained in the development of overpowering emotions, in pain and in death. And I feel this, not only in my bodily members but in the very core of what is most spiritual in my being. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Cosmic Life,

481:A radical process of differentiation and segregation is taking place within the human mass. And it is following precisely the course we would expect: the spontaneous individualization and separation of that which moves and rises from that which remains immobile: the irresistible multiplication and aggregation, over the whole extent of the globe, of elements activated by a (hominized) reawakening of the phyletic sense; the gradual formation and emergence, at variance with former categories, of a new noöspheric zone in which human collectivization, hitherto enforced, is at last entering its sympathetic phase under the influence of the newly manifest Sense of Evolution. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, A Great Event Foreshadowed - The Planetization of Mankind,

482:The individual shrinks to an imperceptible centre; we might say that he is no more than an observation post, a sentient focus-point of repulsions and attractions; he makes his choice from among the countless energies that radiate through him; he seeks, casting to and fro; he turns back upon himself and directs himself so that he may breathe in more or less fully according to the direction he takes, the energizing atmosphere that surrounds him, in which he is one single, conscious point. This is the external condition imposed on us: we are, we may say, more outside ourselves in time and space than we are inside ourselves, every second of our lives. The person, the human monad, is, like every monad, essentially cosmic. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Cosmic Life,

483:If there is a future for mankind, it can only be imagined in terms of a harmonious conciliation of what is free with what is planned and totalised. Points involved are: the distribution of the resources of the globe; the control of the trek towards unpopulated areas; the optimum use of the powers set free by mechanisation; the physiology of nations and races; geo-economy, geo-politics, geo-demography; the organisation of research developing into a seasoned organisation of the earth. Whether we like it or not, all the signs and all our needs converge in the same direction. We need and are irresistibly being led to create, by means of and beyond all physics, all biology and all psychology, a science of human energetics. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

484:We begin to catch sight of it in the study of an all too familiar phenomenon, disquieting in appearance, but in fact highly revealing and reassuring—the phenomenon of unemployment. Owing to the extraordinarily rapid development of the machine a rapidly increasing number of workers, running into tens of millions, are out of work. The experts gaze in dismay at this economic apparatus, their own creation, which instead of absorbing all the units of human energy with which they furnish it rejects an increasing number, as though the machine they devised were working to defeat their purpose. Economists are horrified by the growing number of idle hands. Why do they not look a little more to biology for guidance and enlightenment? ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Formation of the Noösphere,

485:Practically all of us, again under the influence of ‘anatomical’ preconceptions, live with the impression (and some scientists even develop, as a principle, the conviction) that the human individual is not organically affected by the multiple links that act upon him from all sides to associate him ‘symbiotically’ with his fellows. For more than twenty thousand years, we now know, there has been no appreciable change in the shape of his cranium; his elementary instincts have remained the same. Is not this a conclusive proof that civilization and culture produce in us no more than temporary and superficial modifications, from which primitive man would emerge unchanged if, by chance, the forces of collectivity were to slacken their grip on him? ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Convergence of the Universe,

486:From the social point of view, the human monad presents itself to an observer, whether he examines it from the outside or from within, as a sort of molecule or cell essentially destined to be integrated in a higher structure or organism. Not only is the nourishment of numerous material perceptions and assimilations indispensable to its make-up; if it is to attain its full development it must also be complemented by other monads similar to itself. It can be completely itself only by ceasing to be isolated. Like molecules whose coming together stimulates dormant properties, so human beings fertilize and complete one another by making contact; and the association necessary to the multiplication of the human race is no more than a lower and extremely feeble prototype of the rich developments produced by the intercourse of the souls. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Cosmic Life,

487:Understanding, discovery, invention… From the first awakening of its reflective consciousness, humanity has been possessed by the demon of discovery; but until a very recent epoch this profound need remained latent, diffused and unorganized in the human mass. In every past generation true seekers, those by vocation or profession, are to be found; but in the past they were no more than a handful of individuals, generally isolated, and of a type that was virtually abnormal—the “inquisitive.” Today, without our having noticed it, the situation is entirely changed. In fields embracing every aspect of physical matter, life, and thought, the research-workers are to be numbered in hundreds of thousands, and they no longer work in isolation but in teams endowed with penetrative powers that it seems nothing can withstand. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Formation of the Noösphere,

488:Let the theorists consider themselves. How are they capable of reasoning at all if not because within them their visceral system has been taught to function automatically, while around them society is so well organized that they have both the strength and the leisure to calculate and reflect? What is true for each individual man is precisely what is happening at this moment on the higher level of mankind. Like a heavenly body that heats as it contracts, such, and in a twofold respect, is the Noösphere: first in intensity, the degree in which its tension and psychic temperature are heightened by the coming together and mutual stimulation of thinking centers throughout its extent; and also quantitatively through the growing number of people able to use their brains because they are freed from the need to labor with their hands. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Formation of the Noösphere,

489:In the course of a few generations all sorts of economic and cultural links have been forged around us and they are multiplying in geometric progression. Nowadays, over and above the bread which to simple Neolithic man symbolised food, each man demands his daily ration of iron, copper and cotton, of electricity, oil and radium, of discoveries, of the cinema and of international news. It is no longer a simple field, however big, but the whole earth which is required to nourish each one of us. If words have any meaning, is this not like some great body which is being born—with its limbs, its nervous system, its perceptive organs, its memory—the body in fact of that great Thing which had to come to fulfil the ambitions aroused in the reflective being by the newly acquired consciousness that he was at one with and responsible for an evolutionary All? ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

490:Above all, trust in the slow work of God. We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We should like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new. And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability- and that it may take a very long time. And so I think it is with you; your ideas mature gradually-let them grow, let them shape themselves, without undue haste. Don't try to force them on, as though you could be today what time (that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will) will make of you tomorrow. Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be. Give Our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.
~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

491:I referred to the unparalleled complexity of the human group—all those races, those nations, those states whose entanglements defy the resourcefulness of anatomists and ethnologists alike. There are so many rays in that spectrum that we despair of analysing them. Let us try instead to perceive what this multiplicity represents when viewed as a whole. If we do this we will see that its disturbing aggregation is nothing but a multitude of sequins all sending back to each other by reflection the same light. We find hundreds or thousands of facets, each expressing at a different angle a reality which seeks itself among a world of groping forms. We are not astonished (because it happens to us) to see in each person around us the spark of reflection developing year by year. We are all conscious, too, at all events vaguely, that something in our atmosphere is changing with the course of history. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

492:What are the minimum requirements to be fulfilled before we can say that the road ahead of us is open? There is only one, but it is everything. It is that we should be assured the space and the chances to fulfil ourselves, that is to say, to progress till we arrive (directly or indirectly, individually or collectively) at the utmost limits of ourselves. This is an elementary request, a basic wage, so to speak, veiling nevertheless a stupendous demand. But is not the end and aim of thought that still unimaginable farthest limit of a convergent sequence, propagating itself without end and ever higher? Does not the end or confine of thought consist precisely in not having a confine? Unique in this respect among all the energies of the universe, consciousness is a dimension to which it is inconceivable and even contradictory to ascribe a ceiling or to suppose that it can double back upon itself. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

493:Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

494:As particular positions and functions are assigned in the body to the cells, so, in society, the skills of individuals are defined and distributed, and provide one another with mutual support. Childish though it is to exaggerate the analogies with the organic presented by social groups, it is equally superficial to see in them only the arbitrary and contingent. Although they never produce a network sufficiently close-knit and unified for us to be able to speak of a true collective soul, yet the interrelations of men represent an essential, cosmic, work ‘of nature’; they are an indispensable link in the series by which the universe moves towards its perfection. To co-operate in their establishment is much more than a superficial occupation, a pleasant or supererogatory pastime: it is truly to contribute one’s effort to the fundamental work that has determined the movement of the universe ever since the beginning; it is to forward life’s further developments. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Cosmic Life,

495:What does my freedom represent other than an imperceptible point buried in an indeterminate mass of laws and relationships that I cannot, by and large, control? All I can do is shrewdly to make what use I may of them, follow their slant, sail with their wind, appear to master them and bend them to my will—when all I am doing, in fact, is to set them off one against the other. Each one of us can distinguish in the depth of his being a whole system of deep-seated tendencies—a law of his own individual evolution—that nothing can suppress and that persists through every stage of greater perfection. This personal driving force is prior to and higher than free will; it is written into our character, into the rhythm of our thoughts, and into the crude surge of our passions; and it is life’s heritage to us, it is the conscious evidence in us of the vast vital current, one trickle of which forms us, it is our subjection to the great task of development of which we, for one brief hour, are no more than the artisans. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Cosmic Life,

496:Ever since he saw the swarming of the multitudes and recognized the flow of the cosmic current, the petty well-being of his own person has ceased to appear to him the central concern of the universe, and is no longer of paramount importance to him. He no longer believes now that he is the only person in the world, there to enjoy himself and grow greater. Countless others, all around him, also have the right to be happy and successful. He sees them struggling on all sides; and he can discern, infinitely more important than any private undertakings, the development of a vast work that calls for all his good will and fills him with enthusiasm. He has, quite literally, shifted the axis of his life outside himself; he has, one might say, de-centred himself; in some way it is no longer himself that he cherishes in himself, but the great thing of which he is a constituent particle and an active element; it is the immanent Goddess of the World that rests her foot on him for a moment, to rise, with his support, a little higher still. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Cosmic Life,

497:
An Informal Integral Canon: Selected books on Integral Science, Philosophy and the Integral Transformation
Sri Aurobindo - The Life Divine
Sri Aurobindo - The Synthesis of Yoga
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin - The Phenomenon of Man
Jean Gebser - The Ever-Present Origin
Edward Haskell - Full Circle - The Moral Force of Unified Science
Oliver L. Reiser - Cosmic Humanism and World Unity
Christopher Hills - Nuclear Evolution: Discovery of the Rainbow Body
The Mother - Mother's Agenda
Erich Jantsch - The Self-Organizing Universe - Scientific and Human Implications of the Emerging Paradigm of Evolution
T. R. Thulasiram - Arut Perum Jyothi and Deathless Body
Kees Zoeteman - Gaiasophy
Ken Wilber - Sex Ecology Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution
Don Edward Beck - Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership, and Change
Kundan Singh - The Evolution of Integral Yoga: Sri Aurobindo, Sri Ramakrishna, and Swami Vivekananda
Sean Esbjorn-Hargens - Integral Ecology: Uniting Multiple Perspectives on the Natural World
~ M Alan Kazlev, Kheper, #reading list,

498:God reveals himself everywhere, beneath our groping efforts, as a universal milieu, only because he is the ultimate point upon which all realities converge. Each element of the world, whatever it may be, only subsists, hic et nunc, in the manner of a cone whose generatrices meet in God who draws them together-(meeting at .the term of their individual perfection and at the term of the general perfection of the world which contains them). It follows that all created things, every one of them, cannot be looked at, in their nature and action, without the same reality being found in their innermost being-like sunlight in the fragments of a broken mirror-one beneath its multiplicity, unattainable beneath its proximity, and spiritual beneath its materiality. No object can influence us by its essence without our being touched by the radiance of the focus of the universe. Our minds are incapable of grasping a reality, our hearts and hands of seizing the essentially desirable in it, without our being compelled by the very structure of things to go back to the first source of its perfections. This focus, this source, is thus everywhere. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu,

499:This book is not specifically addressed to Christians who are firmly established in their faith and have nothing more to learn about its beliefs. It is written for the waverers, both inside and outside; that is to say for those who, instead of giving themselves wholly to the Church, either hesitate on its threshold or turn away in the hope of going beyond it.

As a result of changes which, over the last century, have modified our empirically based pictures of the world and hence the moral value of many of its elements, the "human religious ideal" inclines to stress certain tendencies and to express itself in terms which seem, at first sight, no longer to coincide with the "christian religious ideal."

Thus it is that those whose education or instinct leads them to listen primarily to the voices of the earth, have a certain fear that they must be false to themselves or diminish themselves if they follow the Gospel path.

So the purpose of this essay--on life or on inward vision--is to prove by a sort of tangible confirmation that this fear is unfounded, since the most traditional Christianity, expressed in Baptism, the Cross and the Eucharist, can be interpreted so as to embrace all that is best in the aspirations peculiar to our times. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

500:Since once again, Lord - though this time not in the forests of the Aisne but in the steppes of Asia - I have neither bread, nor wine, nor altar, I will raise myself beyond these symbols, up to the pure majesty of the Real itself; I, your priest, will make the whole earth my altar and on it will offer you all the labours and sufferings of the world.

Over there, on the horizon, the sun has just touched with light the outermost fringe of the eastern sky. Once again, beneath this moving sheet of fire, the living surface of the earth wakes and trembles, and once again begins its fearful travail. I will place on my paten, O God, the harvest to be won by this renewal of labour. Into my chalice I shall pour all the sap which is to be pressed out this day from the earth’s fruits.

My paten and my chalice are the depths of a soul laid widely open to all the forces which in a moment will rise up from every corner of the earth and converge upon the Spirit. Grant me the remembrance and the mystic presence of all those whom the light is now awakening to the new day . . .

Over every living thing which is to spring up, to grow, to flower, to ripen during this day say again the words: ‘This is my Body’. And over every death-force which waits in readiness to corrode, to wither, to cut down, speak again your commanding words which express the supreme mystery of faith: ‘This is my Blood’. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

501:I'd be willing to bet that the notion of the end of time is more common today in the secular world than in the Christian. The Christian world makes it the object of meditation, but acts as if it may be projected into a dimension not measured by calendars. The secular world pretends to ignore the end of time, but is fundamentally obsessed by it. This is not a paradox, but a repetition of what transpired in the first thousand years of history.

... I will remind readers that the idea of the end of time comes out of one of the most ambiguous passages of John's text, chapter 20...

This approach, which isn't only Augustine's but also the Church Fathers' as a whole, casts History as a journey forward—a notion alien to the pagan world. Even Hegel and Marx are indebted to this fundamental idea, which Pierre Teilhard de Chardin pursued.

Christianity invented History, and it is in fact a modern incarnation of the Antichrist that denounces History as a disease. It's possible that secular historicism has understood history as infinitely perfectible—so that tomorrow we improve upon today, always and without reservation... But the entire secular world is not of the ideological view that through history we understand how to look at the regression and folly of history itself. There is, nonetheless, an originally Christian view of history whenever the signpost of Hope on this road is followed. The simple knowledge of how to judge history and its horrors is fundamentally Christian, whether the speaker is Emmanuel Mounier on tragic optimism or Gramsci on pessimism of reason and optimism of will. ~ Umberto Eco,

502:For invincible reasons of homogeneity and coherence, the fibers of cosmogenesis require to be prolonged in ourselves far more deeply than flesh and bone. We are not being tossed about and drawn along in the vital current merely by the material surface of our being. But like a subtle fluid, space-time, having drowned our bodies, penetrates our soul. It fills it and impregnates it. It mingles with its powers, until the soul soon no longer knows how to distinguish space-time from its own thoughts. Nothing can escape this flux any longer, for those who know how to see, even though it were the summit of our being, because it can only be defined in terms of increases of consciousness. For is not the very act by which the fine point of our mind penetrates the absolute a phenomenon of emergence? In short, recognized at first in a single point of things, then inevitably having spread to the whole of the inorganic and organic volume of matter, whether we like it or not evolution is now starting to invade the psychic zones of the world.... The human discovers that, in the striking words of Julian Huxley, we are nothing else than evolution become conscious of itself. It seems to me that until it is established in this perspective, the modern mind...will always be restless. For it is on this summit and this summit alone that a resting place and illumination await us.... All evolution becomes conscious of itself deep within us.... Not only do we read the secret of its movements in our slightest acts, but to a fundamental extent we hold it in our own hands: responsible for its past and its future. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

503:We have noticed that, since man’s advent, there has been a certain slowing down of the passive and somatic transformations of the organism in favour of the conscious and active metamorphoses of the individual absorbed in society. We find the artificial carrying on the work of the natural; and the transmission of an oral or written culture being superimposed on genetic forms of heredity (chromosomes). Without denying the possibility or even probability of a certain prolongation in our limbs, and still more in our nervous system, of the orthogenetic processes of the past, I am inclined to think that their influence, hardly appreciable since the emergence of Homo sapiens, is destined to dwindle still further. As thought regulated by a sort of quantum law, the energies of life seem unable to spread in one region or take on a new form except at the expense of a lowering elsewhere. Since man’s arrival, the evolutionary pressure seems to have dropped in all the non-human branches of the tree of life. And now that man has become an adult and has opened up for himself the field of mental and social transformations, bodies no longer change appreciably; they no longer need to in the human branch; or if they still change, it will only be under our industrious control. It may well be that in its individual capacities and penetration our brain has reached its organic limits. But the movement does not stop there. From west to east, evolution is henceforth occupied elsewhere, in a richer and more complex domain, constructing, with all minds joined together, mind. Beyond all nations and races, the inevitable taking-as-a-whole of mankind has already begun. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,

504:There is one point in particular I would like to single out and stress, namely, the notion of evolution. It is common to assume that one of the doctrines of the perennial philosophy... is the idea of involution-evolution. That is, the manifest world was created as a "fall" or "breaking away" from the Absolute (involution), but that all things are now returning to the Absolute (via evolution). In fact, the doctrine of progressive temporal return to Source (evolution) does not appear anywhere, according to scholars as Joseph Campbell, until the axial period (i.e. a mere two thousand years ago). And even then, the idea was somewhat convoluted and backwards. The doctrine of the yugas, for example, sees the world as proceeding through various stages of development, but the direction is backward: yesterday was the Golden Age, and time ever since has been a devolutionary slide downhill, resulting in the present-day Kali-Yuga. Indeed, this notion of a historical fall from Eden was ubiquitous during the axial period; the idea that we are, at this moment, actually evolving toward Spirit was simply not conceived in any sort of influential fashion.

But sometime during the modern era-it is almost impossible to pinpoint exactly-the idea of history as devolution (or a fall from God) was slowly replaced by the idea of history as evolution (or a growth towards God). We see it explicitly in Schelling (1775-1854); Hegel (1770-1831) propounded the doctrine with a genius rarely equaled; Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) made evolution a universal law, and his friend Charles Darwin (1809-1882) applied it to biology. We find it next appearing in Aurobindo (1872-1950), who gave perhaps its most accurate and profound spiritual context, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) who made it famous in the West.

But here is my point: we might say that the idea of evolution as return-to-Spirit is part of the perennial philosophy, but the idea itself, in any adequate form, is no more than a few hundred years old. It might be 'ancient' as timeless, but it is certainly not ancient as "old."...

This fundamental shift in the sense or form of the perennial philosophy-as represented in, say, Aurobindo, Hegel, Adi Da, Schelling, Teilhard de Chardin, Radhakrishnan, to name a few-I should like to call the "neoperennial philosophy." ~ Ken Wilber, The Eye Of Spirit,

505:reading :::
Self-Help Reading List:
James Allen As a Man Thinketh (1904)
Marcus Aurelius Meditations (2nd Century)
The Bhagavad-Gita
The Bible
Robert Bly Iron John (1990)
Boethius The Consolation of Philosophy (6thC)
Alain de Botton How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997)
William Bridges Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes (1980)
David Brooks The Road to Character (2015)
Brené Brown Daring Greatly (2012)
David D Burns The New Mood Therapy (1980)
Joseph Campbell (with Bill Moyers) The Power of Myth (1988)
Richard Carlson Don't Sweat The Small Stuff (1997)
Dale Carnegie How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936)
Deepak Chopra The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success (1994)
Clayton Christensen How Will You Measure Your Life? (2012)
Paulo Coelho The Alchemist (1988)
Stephen Covey The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989)
Mihaly Cziksentmihalyi Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (1991)
The Dalai Lama & Howard Cutler The Art of Happiness (1999)
The Dhammapada (Buddha's teachings)
Charles Duhigg The Power of Habit (2011)
Wayne Dyer Real Magic (1992)
Ralph Waldo Emerson Self-Reliance (1841)
Clarissa Pinkola Estes Women Who Run With The Wolves (1996)
Viktor Frankl Man's Search For Meaning (1959)
Benjamin Franklin Autobiography (1790)
Shakti Gawain Creative Visualization (1982)
Daniel Goleman Emotional Intelligence (1995)
John Gray Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus (1992)
Louise Hay You Can Heal Your Life (1984)
James Hillman The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling (1996)
Susan Jeffers Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway (1987)
Richard Koch The 80/20 Principle (1998)
Marie Kondo The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (2014)
Ellen Langer Mindfulness: Choice and Control in Everyday Life (1989)
Lao-Tzu Tao-te Ching (The Way of Power)
Maxwell Maltz Psycho-Cybernetics (1960)
Abraham Maslow Motivation and Personality (1954)
Thomas Moore Care of the Soul (1992)
Joseph Murphy The Power of Your Subconscious Mind (1963)
Norman Vincent Peale The Power of Positive Thinking (1952)
M Scott Peck The Road Less Traveled (1990)
Anthony Robbins Awaken The Giant Within (1991)
Florence Scovell-Shinn The Game of Life and How To Play It (1923)
Martin Seligman Learned Optimism (1991)
Samuel Smiles Self-Help (1859)
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin The Phenomenon of Man (1955)
Henry David Thoreau Walden (1854)
Marianne Williamson A Return To Love (1993)
~ Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Self-Help,

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