Interrelationships from the Beginning

In the last posting I referred to Teilhard”s “the universal relationships of interdependence” and that it was becoming more real in our own time and therefore, with the possibility of being better understood. But this notion is misleading if it is read to mean that this universal relationship is only happening now, in the present. I meant “more real” to us, in the sense that we are becoming more conscious of it, because its effects are more and more visible to us. But that interrelationship began at the very origin of our planet. In his great work The Human Phenomenon* Teilhard describes matter in its most primordial beginnings and locates in that same matter our own beginning as humans. Because, however, of the particular complexity in human evolution, we were destined to achieve higher consciousness and thought. But in our remote origins we were constituted with much the same chemical elements as all other "granular and dusty elements" of the planet. (In “PreLife,” the first part of The Human Phenomenon, Teilhard develops in detail how seeds of life were already present in the very first “stuff” of the universe.) Although human evolution is unique in that it is directed toward ever more fuller consciousness, we are nonetheless interrelated with all else on our planet because we share the same origin.

I realize this is an abhorrent idea to many. For myself, I find it convincing and thrilling. It does not deny the unique place of the human in this universe, but as we move towards “globalization” in its many manifestations, this common origin is the fundament from which it can and must go forward. It is not, however, the origin, hidden in the obscurity of what geologists call “duration”—those billions and billions of years in which matter was formed and life began— that is as important as as the purpose and goal towards which this planet is now directed. Here we move towards another unknown, but which this time we can bring thought and consciousness to bear.

*The Phenomenon of Man, (1959) has been replaced by The Human Phenomenon, with a new translation and many corrections by Sarah Appleton-Weber (Sussex Academic Press, 1999).

Teilhard de Chardin's faith

I believe that the universe is in evolution
I believe that evolution proceeds towards spirit.
I believe that in man, spirit is fully realized in a form of personality.
I believe that the supremely personal is the universal Christ.
Teilhard de Chardin, “How I Believe” in Christianity and Evolution, 1934


While The Human Phenomenon* is considered his signature work, in “How I Believe” Teilhard de Chardin writes not as a scientist, much less theologian, or metaphysician, but personally, about those convictions which were absolutely central to his thinking and from which he never wavered throughout his life. Such convictions, he wrote, are accessible to us by means of “religious psychology”—through the reality of human subjectivity. Experienced personally, they can be known only through the willingness of individuals to reveal their particular experiences. Teilhard “confesses” as one such individual who “for a number of accidental reasons” finds his own case significant and therefore “worth recording.” Later he notes again that in explaining what he believes, he does so “on a strictly psychological plane.”

A scientist and priest, Teilhard found the truth of his beliefs not first and foremost in theology and or science, but in what is common and accessible to all of us. It is his fundamental thesis, he tells us: “It is through that which is most incommunicably personal in us that we make contact with the universal.” He was brought up in two “domains of life” —in the Catholicism of his family and schooling and as such, he was a “child of heaven,” but by temperament and through his professional studies, he was “a child of earth.” Although these two domains were often antagonistic to each other, he never built defenses against either of them, allowing both to have full freedom to influence him one way or another. After some thirty years devoted to “the pursuit of interior unity” he felt he had realized a synthesis between the two. “The one has not destroyed, but reinforced, the other. Today, I believe probably more profoundly than ever in God, and certainly more than ever in the world.”

But, if, for whatever reason, Teilhard would lose his faith in Christ, a personal God, or in spirit itself, he would, he believed, continue “to believe invincibly in the world. The world (its value, its infallibility and its goodness)— that, when all is said and done, if the first, last and the only thing in which I believe. It is by this faith that I live. And it is by this faith I feel, that at the moment of death, rising above all doubts, I shall surrender myself.” He identifies himself first and foremost with what is universal and common to all. As he described it, “In its most deeply buried form, faith in the world (as I experience it) is seen in a particularly live sense of universal relationships of interdependence.” Because the universe is a “system endlessly linked in time and space,” these relationships are not only personal, they are cosmic in nature. To this knowledge Teilhard attributes the origin of his faith. Understood psychologically, “Faith,” Teilhard explained, is “any adherence of our intelligence to a general view of the universe.” Again, he says “ To believe is to effect an intellectual synthesis.”

It is not surprising that Teilhard was not understood in his own time, especially, but not exclusively, in Catholic circles. But our situation is radically different. Take just one idea of his— “the universal relationships of interdependence.” Already a fact of modern life, it is actively present wherever we turn—to politics, the economy, or the environment, in the proliferation of nuclear weapons, in the migrations of peoples, in the arts and literature, in the sciences and technology—one could go on. This idea is or becoming more real now, than was the case in Teilhard’s lifetime. But “the universal relationships” is not a particularly new idea. What is startling is Teilhard’s making it a fundamental to faith. Teilhard takes us further than we might be prepared —or want —to go.

*The Phenomenon of Man, (1959) has been replaced by The Human Phenomenon with a superb translation and many corrections by Sarah Appleton-Weber (Sussex Academic Press, 1999).

To what End?
The Evolution of Human Consciousnesss

Sometime ago, I wrote:

To compensate for our condition, alone as we are in the vast, mysterious, and ultimately hostile cosmos, we tell stories. Christianity is one such story but there are no end of others. Of course, we believe our stories to be true, otherwise they would not be functional. They would not assuage our radical loneliness but in fact, they do, at least for many. It is these stories that give meaning to our lives. Although we tend still to look beyond ourselves for meaning and purpose, it is we who invent or discover them. There are those who contend that meaning which does not come from a transcendent elsewhere can only be meaningless. We are told that such and such a story is not “true” is “make believe,” is “myth,” or “Meaning” (with a capital M). Some look for “evidence”, scientific, historical or otherwise. But if the story is experienced as true, it is, as Jung would say, psychologically true and therefore serves a human purpose. Meanwhile, we go on questioning our stories, comparing them to other stories, enhancing them or debunking them, confirming them or abandoning them to replace them with other stories. If that is the case, we then come up with still other stories, like this one—that there are only stories. When you think about it, there is something close to the infinite in human creativity. Why then is it not possible for us and indeed, logical and instinctual in us, that such creativity should find its own meaning or meanings.

Do I still believe what I wrote then ? Yes, except that I have come to believe there is a greater story in which our stories unfold, that embraces all of them, from those first uttered by our earliest ancestors or drawn by them upon the walls of their caves, to the stories now being told and those still to be told in the future. The story I have in mind is the story of human consciousness which evolves through time and which does so by means of our stories. Does this process direct us to a certain, ultimate goal? There are those who think so and those who doubt it. I find myself on the side who think so.

I believe that the course of human history is teleological; it has a purpose which unfolds in time and is directed, therefore, towards the future. This notion began in the West, with the Greeks and later affirmed by Christianity and (arguably) in its secular form with the notion of “progress.” But the purposefulness of human history, revealing itself as it unfolds in aeons of time past, present and to come would not make sense if it did not embrace the totality of human history and not only that of the West.

Contrary to what we thoughtlessly assume, the process of evolution continues, although so slowly over time that we are unaware of it. As we learn from our own history, which enables us to look back into the past, there has been an evolution in human consciousness. Although we don’t know in what direction it will continue to evolve, this evolutionary process says to me that we have been and continue to be agents in our own history. These two factors provide me with a Narrative which doesn’t explain everything, but gives a credible context to which particular and concrete experiences contribute.

I did not come to these ideas on my own, of course. There were many influences, Jung foremost among them. He had little to say about evolution, but his great theme was human consciousness both individual and collective in the unfolding of the history of humankind.

During a visit to a game preserve near Nairobi, Kenya, Jung had a revelation of what he called “the cosmic meaning of consciousness.”

From a low hill in a broad savanna a magnificent prospect opened out to us. To the very brink of the horizon we saw gigantic herds of animals: gazelle, antelope, gnu, zebra, warthog and so on. Grazing, heads nodding, the herds moved slowly forward like slow rivers. There was scarcely any sound save the melancholy cry of a bird of prey. This was the stillness of the eternal being, the world as it had always been, in the state of non-being; for until then no one had been present to know that it was this world. I walked away from my companions until I had put them out of sight, and savored the feeling of being entirely alone. There I was now, the first human being to recognize that this was the world, but who did not know that in this moment he had first really created it. (MDR, 255.)

During that brief moment, Jung experienced an epiphany. He envisioned himself incarnated as the first human being who understood “that this was the world.” More mysteriously, he sees himself as the creator of that world. Jung is not taking God’s place here but affirming that the human being is the only species on this planet that is endowed with a reflective consciousness.

Wolfgang Giegerich was also a significant influence as well, for his insights into the evolution of consciousness, especially in his pivotal essay,”The End of Meaning” about which I wrote in this weblog.

In recent years, the idea of the evolution of human consciousness has permeated my thinking about almost everything else from religion, to politics, to death, our place in the universe. My initiation, however, began nearly fifty years ago when shortly after his death Teilhard de Chardin’s The Human Phenomenon became available in English. A Jesuit priest and paleontologist by profession, Teilhard was passionately committed to reconciling religion with science and with evolution especially. Teilhard envisioned as inseparable the unfolding of human consciousness—and Christianity — within the natural evolution of the cosmos. Not surprisingly, during his lifetime the Church forbade the publication of his writings. Quite soon after his death, however, they were widely translated and rushed into print, but none carried the imprimatur. In the Catholic circles in which I then moved, The Human Phenomenon ( titled in the first English edition, The Phenomenon of Man) was declared unintelligible. The Divine Milieu, published around the same time, caused a mild stir because it was more “religious.”

Although I was no more enlightened than anyone else, and for reasons I could not have explained then, I was attracted to his ideas despite the fact I had only the vaguest notion of what they were about. Over the years, I held on to these books, obscurely sensing that one day I would want to return to them. In the years that followed their publication, others followed, but on the whole Teilhard’s ideas were largely marginalized, ignored, denounced and even ridiculed. Today, as we celebrate the 200th birthday of Darwin, evolution is widely accepted, despite resistance among fundamentalist believers. We now know more about evolution and have begun to explore its implications not only for science, but in other fields as well, such as religion, psychology, ecology. Ahead of his time, Teilhard de Chardin may finally be coming into his own.

“Age only defines one’s boundaries.”
“I grow more intense as I age.”
“Now that I have withdrawn from the active world,
I am more alert to it than ever before.”
Florida Scott-Maxwell, The Measure of My Years



Well into my eightieth decade, I am aware of changes in my psyche that have to do with old-age. There are, to begin with, so many projects I start and do not finish, like reading Charles Taylor’s, monumental The Secular Age, a subject I am deeply interested in. It is not just the more than 800 pages that faze me, it is the density and subtlety of his thought that exhausts me after reading of few of those pages. But that did not help me resist tackling Jean Gebser’s monumental The Ever-Present Origin: A Contribution to the History of the Awakening of Consciousness, another equally complex work, about another subject that I ponder. 600 pages, smaller print, but it does take me into our present condition and arouses my curiosity. So I will give it a good try.

Reading is much more than a diversion. I still need to be nourished by the thoughts and imaginings of others. But it is still too easy for me to lose myself in someone’s else’s thought because (1) I am always looking for a new revelation I somehow have missed and (2) it is much more difficult to articulate one’s own thoughts, about which I have less confidence. And so having entered this side of old age, this is the goal I set for myself: to give form and clarity to these thoughts, bringing them forward into consciousness, so as to be able to say: Yes, this is what I think, this is what I believe. I cannot truly explain why I want to do this or of what use it will be. It is partly curiosity. What has been their trajectory during the course of my life time? Where have I come from, and where am I now? It is partly a need to bring things to a conclusion, tying up loose ends—it is that—but more. I believe with Montaigne that “each man [and woman!] carries the entire form of the human condition.” Each of us, in is or her own way, participates, not just passively, either consciously or unconsciously, in the history of the time in which we are destined to live.

Death and Everyman

To pick up where I left off many months ago, motivated by two pieces which appeared in the October 23 issue of the Nation, Richard Goldstein 's "Death Trip" and Walter Mosley's "Cultural Famine: A Cycle." I don't know if the editors planned it this way, but they were were aptly juxtaposed. Walter Mosley, best known for his Easy Rawlins mysteries, is troubled by the disjunction between world-wide famine and "another kind of famine: a dearth in the human soul", " a spiritual famine;" "psychic anexoria." He writes of "the barren emotional landscape" which exists among " our people" as well as elsewhere in the world. For Mosley "our people" means Black Americans but not only, we're all included. He observes a cynical and hopeless apathy among us even while "we are surrounded by riches and blessed with potential unequaled in human history." What has gone wrong he asks, hoping to generate a conversation about it with his readers.

As if saying "Amen!" to Mosley, Richard Goldstein's "Death Trip" focuses on two celebrated authors, Joan Didion and Philip Roth, who, in their most recent books, exhibit, he says, the same "self-obsession" and "the self-enclosure" which afflict the rest of our nation. This was not always the case, for both are known for their nonconformist views. But when it comes to facing death they disappoint us, leaving us with the sense that death is an entirely private experience of no meaning or significance outside of or beyond itself. The rest of the world is shut out. In her memoir, "The Year of Magical Thinking," Didion recounts the sudden death of her husband and the (ultimately mortal) illness of her only child. (See previous posting). Didion leaves the impression that she had at no time contemplated death, that of her husband and child, or her own. It is hard to believe that she did not, but if she had, we are never let in on what those thoughts might have been. Instead, we learn she turned to those who supposedly could instruct her on the subject—Freud, Sherwin Nuland, and Emily Post (whom she found the most satisfying). Although the book was hailed among her literary peers as "an act of consummate literary bravery", the ordinary reader will learn more about the lifestyle and stiff upper lip of a literary celebrity than of what it feels like or means (to her) to have lost a loved one in death.

As does every reviewer of Philip Roth's Everyman, Goldstein compares it with Tolstoy's masterpiece, The Death of Ivan Ilyich. In that story we have "still the most powerful account we have of death amid prosperity, the spiritual and the social come together at the moment when a moribund civil servant, filled with bitterness at his fate and family, realizes that living well means living for others." The closest Roth's Everyman (he has no name) comes to it, says Goldstein, is in his sentimental attachment to his mother and father, now long dead.

Although belatedly, Everyman tries to reach out to others. Realizing that his retirement had become a "self-generated form of confinement" he decides to do something about it. He organizes painting classes for the Jersey shore retirement community to which he moved after 9/ll. But his students are as obsessed as he is in their own declining health and thoughts of their own demise. "He tried to be generous to them all, even the hopeless ones usually those very ones who came in and said right off, 'I had a great day', I feel inspired today." He encourages and befriends one woman, the best of all his students, who unable to bear unremitting pain any longer commits suicide. He has a loving relationship with his daugher Nancy. As he grows older and sicker and nearer to death himself, he gets in touch with each of his old friends from the advertising agency where he had worked when he learns that they too are ill and perhaps dying.

But he has much to regret and is tormented with guilt especially about his first two wives. His sons by his first marriage, will not forgive his having abandoned them and their mother for another woman. His second, relatively content and stable marriage to Phoebe ends when she learns of his affair with a model, half his age. Envious of his older brother's good health, he spurns his brother's good will and attentiveness towards him. He feels guilty about this, but only as he gets sicker does he try to make amends.

But deeper than guilt is regret at the loss of his "male allure" that he is now no longer "capable of germinating the masculine joys." "No hocus pocus about death and God or obsolete fantasies of heaven for him. there was only our bodies, born to live and die on terms decided by the bodies that had lived and died before us. If he could be said to have located a philosophical niche for himself, that was it—he'd come upon it early and intuitively, and however elemental, that was the whole of it. Should he ever write his autobiography, he'd call it The Life and Death of a Male Body." As his health wanes, his isolation and loneliness intensifies. "There's no remaking reality," his daughter Nancy had reminded him, at the funeral of his mother. "Just take it as it comes. Hold your ground and take it as it comes." Bleak advice, but what else is there to do to say? Or to think? Nevertheless, Roth's Everyman thinks about death a great deal and has done so since he was a child. He also has many questions, but they go unanswered and lead nowhere. There are no personal epiphanies, no consoling insights.

Unlike Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich, Didion and Roth's Everyman have no spiritual resources to guide them through death and grief. In this they are not typical, but certainly not alone. There are countless individuals who do not have or want the comfort and hope that religion offers. Goldstein credits Roth and Didion for refusing to "gild the grief with any higher purpose." What he misses in them however is that there is no reflection at all on how "each death is situated in a suffering community" and no awareness of how every death "reveals the conditions of life." With Didion and Roth, the encounter with death is experienced as solely personal, self-enclosed. The idea, Goldstein observes, that "embracing life around you" in which you can find solace, doesn't seem credible to them. The only references, in Roth's Everyman, to the world beyond himself and his immediate family are, in passing, to the Korean War (in which he had served) and to September 11. It was that fatal day which made him decide to leave New York and move to a retirement community in New Jersey. But what his thoughts might have been about that day we are not told.

An awareness of death as our common human experience, and not just a personal one, as Goldstein suggests, may not bring the solace that religion brings to believers, but can be a means of transcending isolating, self -absorption. Ironically, it comes too late to Everyman. Roth seems to give a hint of this, if ambiguously. Going under anesthesia for his last surgical procedure, Everyman has a blissful, nearly ecstatic moment:

Oh, the abandon of it, and the smell of the salt water and the scorching sun! Daylight, he thought, penetrating everywhere, day after summer day of that daylight blazing off a living sea, an optical treasure so vast and valuable that he could have been peering through the jeweler's loupe engraved with his father's initials at the perfect, priceless planet itself—at his home, the billion-, the trillion-, the quadrillion-caret planet Earth! he went under feeling far from felled, anything but doomed, eager again to be fulfilled, but nonetheless, he never woke up again. Cardiac arrest. He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it. Just as he'd feared from the start.

Grief as a Best Seller

Life changes fast.
Life changes in the instant.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

So goes Joan Didion's mantra in her best-seller The Year of Magical Thinking, in which she writes about the sudden death of John Gregory Dunne, her husband of nearly forty years from a massive heart attack and the terrible (and eventually fatal) illness of their only daughter, Quintana. This highly acclaimed work won the 2005 National Book Award and was named one of the ten best books of the year by the NY Times. It will be produced as a play to be directed by David Hare. The blurb for the book in a full page-ad in the New York Times tells us that it is ". . . about the power of grief to bring on a true madness. She writes of her strange and moving journey back to reality in the year of "magical thinking." The ad includes tributes from, among others, Michiko Kakutani ("an indelible portrait of loss and grief. . ."), Gideon Lewis-Kraus ("achingly beautiful"), John Leonard,("I can't think of a book we need more than hers"), and Lev Grossman, ("an act of consummate literary bravery.")

Who can fault such a book? Any person who not only has endured such loss, and who feels compelled to tell the story, deserves, at the very least, to be listened to without prejudice. Although I felt admiration for Didion, I was not moved by her story as I should have been. Why was this so?

Didion's story had been pitched by reviewers and publisher as a revelation of the highest order. But as I read the book (the second time as well) it seemed to me that her experience as painful and awful as it was, is experienced by thousands of people every day. What had been different about Didion's experience?

The difference cannot be in the feeling of disorientation which follows such a loss, such as wanting, even expecting, the dead to return.(Didion insisted, she tells us, on keeping her husband's shoes in case he may need them even though she knew he was dead. ) She calls it "magical thinking," but it too is not an unusual phenomenon. Surely her publishers stretch it quite a bit to translate "magical thinking" into "true madness."

Joan Didion is a highly regarded novelist, essayist, screen-writer and journalist. She is, in short, a celebrity. When something so devasting happens to a celebrity, it takes on a nearly archetypal significance. Even more so, when that celebrity is also a writer. Unlike the rest of us, she can give expression to what it was that happened to her. That is important to us, for perhaps there is something she can tell us of the meaning of that experience which on the surface seems to be so meaningless.

It is in this respect that the book failed, for me anyway. Not that Didion can be expected to provide meaning where she herself found none. But far from being caught up in magical thinking, Didion remains the journalist, recording the facts of the situation. She relies on the facts, the meticulous detailing of events to tell the story. And she does her research. She reads medical reports in the hope that they will enlighten her more than the doctors can about her daughters strange sickness. In long passages and quotes, she turns to the specialists on death, sickness, and mourning, citing Freud, Melanie Klein, Sherwin Nuland, Emily Post and others. What she doesn't do, is let us come close to her at all. She will only direct us and obliquely at that, towards what it is going on deep inside her. We are not allowed to feel anything with her.

In the book, Didion quotes from one of her novels: "The point is that Elena remained remote most of all to herself, a clandestine agent who had so successfully compartmentalized her operation as to have lost access to her own cutouts." And then adds: "I realize that Elena's situation is my own." She writes this in another context, but the remark is more telling than she realizes. Didion remains remote not only to us the reader, but, in a curious way, to her own story.

I was glad to learn that "The Year of Magical Thinking" will be made into a play. We can expect then that the story will be once again lived, and in that medium, come closer to the truth of Didion's story as she herself lived it, but which she could not in her book really share with us, her readers.

The Fear of Extinction

Susan Sontag once took part in a panel discussion at the university I attended as a graduate student. I do not remember what the discussion was about, but I will never forget Sontag who was not only beautiful but brilliant. The combination was irresistible. She was just twenty-nine but a rising star in the cultural and intellectual world to which she belonged. I became an admirer and read much, although not all, of the books she eventually wrote which were always original and challenging.

Written during a time when she was herself fighting cancer, Illness as a Metaphor was one of her most widely read and influential works. In that book (and in a later one, AIDS and its Metaphors,) she sought to free the sick from the sense of shame, embarrassment and guilt which often accompanies a grave illness. Sontag died at age seventy, following her third and last futile fight against cancer. Her son, the journalist David Rieff, described her fierce struggle to survive in an article poignantly titled "Illness as More Than Metaphor" (New York Times Magazine, December 4).

Sontag was determined not to die, believing she could beat the odds. She insisted on submitting herself to brutal treatments which held out little hope of extending her life, much less curing her disease. The final treatment, involving a bone marrow transplant, Rieff candidly tells us, would not have been available to Sontag except for the fact that she was able to pay for it herself. Neither Medicare or her medical insurer were willing to do so. Although he was grateful that she was able to receive that treatment, he admits "I cannot honestly say that there was anything fair about it."

In this moving account of Sontag's last heroic struggle with her disease, her son tells us: "My mother, who feared extinction above all else, was in anguish over its imminence. Shortly before she died, she turned to one of the nurses'aides-a superb woman who cared for her as she would have her own mother-and said, "I'm going to die,"and then began to weep." Death, when it finally came, was merciful. "She simply went."

That Sontag "feared extinction above all else" is the most haunting revelation. Perhaps because it is the fear that gnaws at us all, consciously or not. It is too dreadful, for most of us, to contemplate. We cannot even imagine no longer being, no longer existing. The great religions of the world have offered their own myths to enlighten and console us about death but the mystery of death and our dread of it remains.