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ACTIVATION OF ENERGY

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Contents

The Atomism of Spirit

p. 24 - On either side of the middle zone of the world on the scale of which our humanity is busy and active, objects, as presented to our experience, are arranged in two natural series of size &endash; either indefinitely growing larger, or indefinitely growing smaller: towards the nebulae, or towards the atoms. Above lies the immense, below lies the infinitesimal. Since all time man has been vaguely conscious of being imprisoned in this limitless framework: so much so, that after an initial moment of bewilderment we now feel almost at home in between microns and light-years, in the new world of modem physics. What, however, still remains much less familiar to our minds is the strangeness, as yet hardly disclosed, of the two abysses between which we float. In a famous passage, Pascal imagined within a cheese mite another universe containing other mites. We are now finding ourselves obliged to think on lines that contradict this idea of a space that expands or contracts and yet retains the same characteristics. just as the brilliance of light and the forms of life are transformed in the eyes of an observer moving along a terrestrial meridian, or descending into the depths of the ocean - so, and even much more radically, we must conceive the universe as changing shape if we try in our minds to change our position either towards the uppermost, or towards the lowest, of its two extreme zones.

p. 26 - Let us now withdraw our attention from the immense and the infinitesimal, and turn to another scene, apparently of a dif-ferent order. Leaving atoms and nebulae, let us take a look, in the vicinity of our own middle latitude, at living matter.

Armed with ever more subtle and powerful instruments provided by science, biology is constantly pressing home its attacks on this object, so close to us and at the same time so extraordi-nary, which is our own flesh. Chemical analyses and syntheses of incredible delicacy; every sort of trituration, under the influence of the 'dead' or 'living' reagents which today make up the weaponry of research; finally, direct observation under the microscope, with magnifications thathave now suddenly just risen from two thousand diameters to a hundred thousand - this is not the place to enumerate the exciting results to which these investigations, still hardly begun, are leading. What, on the other hand, does matter in this connexion, is to note that, dominating the vast corpus of experimental data already accumulated by biophysics and biochemistry, one general fact is emerging, which is more important for our intelligence than any particular fact.By this I mean the incredible complexity of organic beings.

p. 29 - Let us, then, bring together and combine the two facts to which this preliminary essay has introduced us. On the one hand, as we began by noting, the stuff of things is transformed - there is a change in its properties - when we follow its main axis in space and either climb up towards extremely great or descend towards extremely small magnitudes. On the other hand, as we have just pointed out, there is a second way in which bodies can oscillate between the infinitesimal and the immense. While they are capable of becoming extremely small or extremely big, they can also follow another axis which runs athwart the first, and so become either ultra-simple or ultra complicated in their internal structure. We observed, further, that the high forms of complexity appear in the zone of living substances.

p. 30 - As we were saying, a new dimensional zone brings with it new properties. Once the special domain or special compartment of the ultra-synthetic is recognized in the universe, life no longer comes as an explosion into the scientific picture of the real. It simply fills up what would, without it, remain a gaping void in our outlook. Life is the property that is peculiar to large organized numbers, it is the specific effect of matter carried to an extreme degree of internal structuration, and as such it falls smoothly into the position of an expected phenomenon. Following on the immense and the infinitesimal, the large complex (since it does in fact exist) cannot but have its own proper character. What that is, we shall now see.

p. 31

We have just seen that, under the operation of this structural formula (which may be read in either direction at will), the universe expands at a point half-way between the infinitesimal and the immense. At its equator it swells out in a layer sui generis, on which the distance between two points is no longer measurable in size but in degrees of organization - or, which comes to the same thing, of psychism.

p. 32 - A qualitative scale (but involving a qualitative factor that is still measurable) running across the quantitative scale of cosmic particles. Such is the overall shape assumed by the real around us.

This first view, taken as a 'still', is obviously no more than an instantaneous, infinitesimal, section of the phenomenon we are trying to picture to ourselves. Whether it is a question of atoms, of stars, or of living beings, every natural series immediately and irresistibly makes itself felt, for minds like ours that are awake to the sense of the evolutionary, as a trail of movement.

Our first fundamental relationship (i.e. (1) above) takes this form if we transpose it to the only scientifically real setting of a space that is indissolubly linked with time.

And it is here, I believe, that the light definitely bursts through.

In the 'common-sense' view and even, too often, in that of a certain sort of scientist, the universe is still divided into two water-tight compartments: the domain of matter and the domain of life; the atomic world of molecules and the cellular world of plants and animals.

Now, it is precisely the surface we imagine as separating these two worlds which begins to disappear for us when we apply relationship (2) -just as does the shimmering meniscus between the liquid and the gaseous portions of a body that lias reached its point of vaporization.

Beyond the albumens and proteins, but still a long way this side of cells, there are (as we discover every day more unmistakably) certain extremely large particles. From the external, chemical, point of view, we find it of absorbing interest to consider these new objects. Have we, however, given sufficient thought:to the fact that if these particles are hyper-complex the reason, necessarily and correlatively, is that they are hyper-centred, and that in consequence they hold a germ of consciousness? Below life, then, there is pre-life. We have the molecular branch and the cellular branch of matter: these two segments, hitherto, treated as divergent or heterogeneous, are now tending to come closer together as we examine them. From. end to end they run on in line. And at this point there appears a single curve which expresses the progress of one and the same physico-biological process: noogenesis.

p. 35 - In the case of human molecules considered in isolation, no positive result emerges from this inquiry. This is a point on which I have made my position clear elsewhere. For the last twenty thousand years during which we have known it (for that is all) there appears to have been no appreciable change either in the structure or in the functioning of the brain of Homo sapiens. When, however, we leave aside the individual and turn to the collectivity of man, something new comes to light.

At this moment we have an earth spreading far and wide before us; but its geographically limited surface is being visibly compressed beneath the swelling multitude of a population whose pressure upon itself is continually being increased, not nearly so much by its numerical growth as by the multiplication of inter-connexions of all kinds and the amazing speeding-up of their development. We look at this vast spectacle without understanding it - we are miles from even dreaming that it can have anything in common with the organic processes of life. 'Social relationships', we think, 'an accidental and ephemeral phenomenon: superficial modifications that can be reversed. Once brains have been developed, of course, they change no more. There can be no comparison with collective structures, which are incessantly destroying and replacing one another'.

Habitually we still refuse to sec in human civiliza-tion anr thing more than a monotonous series of reversible oscillations.

But is this in fact true? Let us rather weigh up the changes that are taking place, and try to determine the nature and the significance of their successive appearance.

A first result of the 'mass-setting' which mankind is gradually undergoing at this moment is that every one of us, taken in isolation, is becϝng less and less materially selfsufficient. A series of new needs, which it would be puerile and anti-biological to regard as superfluous and affificial, is continually making itself felt in us. It is no longer possible for us to live and develop without an increasing supply of rubber, of metals, oil, electricity and energy of all sorts. No individual could henceforth manage to produce his daily bread on his own. Mankind is more and more taking the form of an organism that possesses a physiology and, in the current phrase, a common 'metabolism~. We may, if we please, say that these ties are superficial, and that we will loose them, if we wish. Meanwhile, they are growing firmer every day, under the combined action of all the forces that surround us; and history shows that, as a whole, their network (woven under the influence of irreversible cosmic factors) bas never ceased to draw tighter.

p. 37 - Henceforth man is less capable than ever before of thinking alone. We have only to consider the series of our modem concepts in science, philosophy and religion, and it will be obvious that the more general and fruitful any one of these notions is proving, the more it, too, is tending to assume the form of a collective entity: we can, it is true, individually cover one angle of it, we can make a portion of it our own and develop it, but it rests in fact on a vault of mutually buttressed thoughts. The idea of the electron or the quantum, or the cosmic ray - the idea of the cell or of heredity - the idea of humanity or even the idea of God -no single individual can claim these as his preserve or dominate them in such things, what is already thinking, just as what is already working, through man and above man, is again mankind. And it is inconceivable, in virtue of the very way in which the phenomenon works, that the movement initiated should not continue in the same direction, tomorrow as today, becoming more pronounced and increasing in speed.

p. 38 - From all this we can draw only one conclusion, that the quantity of activity and consciousness contained in mankind, taken as a whole, is greater than the mere sum of individual activity and consciousness. Progress in complexity is making itself felt in a deepening of centricity. It is not simply a sum, but synthesis. And this is precisely what we were justified in expecting, if, in the domain of the social, the forward march of universal moleculization is indeed being continued (as my thesis maintained) to a point beyond our present brains.

Until man, we may say that nature was working to con-struct 'the unit or grain of thought'. It would now seem undeniable that, obeying the laws of some gigantic hyperchemistry, we are now being launched towards 'edifices made up of grains of thought', towards 'a thought made up of thoughts'- travelling ever deeper into the abyss of the infinitely complex.

The synthesis of man - a magnificent enterprise, but at the same time, we must be careful to note, a long and delicate operation; and (like all life's other efforts) it can succeed only through innumerable tentative gropings and after much suffering. In the case of hearts and brains, much more than in that of atoms, we must remember that not every form of combination can be good. For one human stem that has succeeded in forcing the threshold of reflection, how many milions of other 'phyla' are there which have come to grief! Thus the problem which faces modern man, economically and socially (since, irrespective of his wishes, synthesis is his destiny), is to discover which of the various possible forms of collectivization open to him is the good form, in other words the form that most directly prolongs the psychogenesis (or noogenesis) from which he emerged. Man must avoid the blind alleys and faid where the issue of evolution lies ahead.

p. 39 - Granting that, we then have the problem of determining, in an initial approximation, the higher term, still to come, towards which we are being led by the transformation in which, in common with the world, we are involved. We can see it (for any other picture would contradict the law of moleculization) only as a state of unanimity: such a state, however, that in it each grain of thought, now taken to the extreme limit of its individual consciousness, will simply be the incommunicable, partial, elementary expression of a total consciousness which is common to the whole earth, and specific to the earth: a spirit of the earth.

p. 42 - The more the centuries succeed one another, as I recalled earlier, the more men are forced against one another on our round planet, and so assume the form of elements within a unit of a higher order, now undergoing concentration. This great process of synthesis has its reaction in the intimate domain of our personal activities. Hitherto (except for the vague instinct that causes them to reproduce their kind) men were able to try at all costs to forget death by engrossing themselves in the cares and joys of an existence to which a definite limit was set. If we consider the matter, we shall find that it is this loophole which is gradually tending to close up for us. At the same time as mankind is forming one single body in space, it is necessarily, in step with that process, doing the same thing in time. The idea of a total human work to be accomplished is surely the inevitable corollary to a totalized mankind. As a consequence of this, a radical modification is insidiously altering the balance of our activities. Without realizing it, every man is becoming accustomed to fear, to entertain ambitions, to breathe in an atmosphere of universality -as though his sole support were the global success of mankind that lies ahead. Thus the bulkhead collapses which seemed to isolate our human 'career' from that of our descendants. The centre of gravity of our most tangible interests is shifted as though to an infinite distance ahead. Thereby, too, not only does the prospect of a death of man begin to fill our horizon: there is the farther threat and horror of a death of mankind.

Superficially, this would appear to be no more than a change of scale; but here again it is precisely a change that had necessarily to be made (as in the case of all the other properties of the infinitesimal, the immense and the complex) if what we were looking for was to become unmistakably clear. We experience no immediate shock at the idea of annihilation applied to a single grain of thought; or if we do, it comes from so nice a process of introspection that we may well be doubtful about the value of our evidence. On the other hand, when the same idea is extended to the planetary dimensions of the 'noosphere' we immediately recognize that it wipes out simultaneously the whole of the world's past and the whole of its present so completely that we have no alternative but to reject it. In a universe which, through the way in which it functions, is continually concentrating the vital interests of its elements on a collective term to be attained ahead, the whole structure collapses if that upper term is found to be precarious or non-existent. Thus, in step with the progress of hominization, a need for the absolute is born in man and grows more pronounced. If nothing of what we create (or even more, if all that is best in what we create) does not win through the disintegrations of matter, then evolution, struck at its very heart by self-disgust, automatically comes to a halt in a meaningless universe.

p. 43 - Life - and so reflection - and so foresight - and so, the demand for super-life. These four terms are linked together in a biological chain, and they increase simultaneously. In consequence what the future presages for us is neither volatilization nor senescence. The possibilities, therefore, that confront Our minds are greatly narrowed. No term can be appropriate to the growing series of molecules which is not, by its nature, positive and a maximum. This means that in one way or another we are able to escape the decrepitude of the star that holds us. Beyond the spirit of the earth, something greater, more complex and more fully centred than mankind is looming up before us.

But what?

p. 44 - As I was saying, the conjunction of thinking stellar units would allow moleculization to get off to a fresh start; the end of the process would be postponed to a higher stage. However, while the problem of death would momentarily have been dismissed, it would reappear at this higher degree of complexity with even greater urgency. And it is precisely this shadow of a death (even were it still thousands of millions of years away) that we must now and for ever banish from our horizon, if we are to be able to continue to act ever more consciously.

What way out, then, can we find?

The more I study these prospects the more I am convinced that the only way in which the spirit of the earth can , is by disappearing in depth through excess of centration upon itself - whether it does this alone or with the support of other spirits it has met during its journeying. When observed in its external mechanism of complication, it is possible that the moleculization of matter may come up against some higher value which it cannot exceed (as, for example, a moving mass cannot exceed the speed of light). In any case, this moleculization -an eddy of improbability within a current whose over-all tendency is to bring bodies back to their most simple states - undoubtedly cannot be continued indefinitely: is not the network it weaves made up of the 'perishable'? By contrast, if it is observed in its internal aspect (that is to say, the rise of consciousness), the process appears to know no limiting-value to its developments. Every reflective act, by its nature, initiates a higher form of reflection (so that there is no point at which the continuity of the chain can be broken); but what is more, as we have just seen, the very faculty of thought demands, if it is not to be stifled, the existence of a completely free atmosphere ahead of it.

We can draw but one conclusion from this evolutionary conflict between the without (which is limited) and the within (which knows no limit) of the noosphere: that we must foresee an internal break between the two aspects of the phenomenon. We are forced to conceive that beyond a certain critical value, centration can in some way or other continue independently of the physico-chemical synthesis that was necessary, in a first phase, for its initiation: the centre throwing off its original shell of complication.

Can it break away like this?

It can-but on one condition: that we presuppose at the extreme limit of the axis of the syntheses and of time, the existence of a centre of the second species-not emerging and moved -but a centre, already emerged and actively moving, of universal convergence. As soon as we recognize such a centre, Which I shall call Omega, it becomes reasonable to conclude that the grains of consciousness produced evolutively by noogenesis (once the 'human' point of reflection has been passed) fall into a new field of attraction: the pull is exercised on the basic foundation of the grains, and it now acts not only on the complexity of their structure but directly on their centre, independently of the structure.

p. 46 - From this point of view, what we have called 'moleculization' is thus seen to be a more complicated but at the same time more radical process than we thought. In a first stage (up to hominization) there is a succession of fragile units, suspended over the void that lies behind them: there is a rising centration, but no true centre as yet perfected in nature. In a second stage (after hominization) there is a mixed state; there is a continued progress of external.complexity and beneath this the universe, which henceforth carries grains of thought, begins to be inverted upon itself - like a cone that has reached its apex. An intangible physics of centres succeeds the tangible physics of centration. Lastly, in a third and final phase, there is the complete turning back of spirit (now collectively centred) upon an interior pole of consistence and total unification: hyper-centration following upon centration.

Escape in depth (through the centre), or, which comes to the same thing, ecstasis.

If we look at it in this way, which is an accurate expression of Christian faith and hope, we see that all sorts of difficulties are readily solved.

...we discover in what perfect form it becomes possible, without falling into absurdity or the unthinkable, to conceive for our beings the natural and irreversible term of their aggregation: seeing it not simply as a polycentric mankind, arrested at the 'colony' stage, but as a mankind totalized, more perfectly than any known living being, under the influence of a single higher soul -not collectivized man, but super-personalized man.

p. 47 - On an earth that is in process of irresistible compression, we see that the great problem for man is coming to be to find out how to control in himself the inevitable but supremely dangerous work of the forces of unification.

...how can we come together in such a way as to free ourselves? In virtue of the laws of moleculization, the problem obviously consists in finding the way of grouping ourselves together not 'tangentially', in the nexus of anextrinsic activity or func-tion, but 'radially', centre to centre; how to associate in such a way as, by synthesis, to stimulate deep within ourselves a progress that is directly centric in nature. In other words, what we have to do is to love one another - because love is equally by definition the name we give to 'inter-centric' actions. By its nature, love is the only synthesizing energy whose differentiating action can super-personalize us. But just how can one ever contrive to love a multitude? If we set the two words side by side, love and multitude, surely they enclose a contradiction?

The antinomy provides its own solution as soon as we see that in a centre of our own centres it is possible for us to meet together.

What makes collectivity so monstrous is that, being by nature multiple, it bas no thinking mind, no heart, no face which we can fasten on to through the depths of our being. For all that 'society' may stifle us in its countless arms, it can still not reach us in the core of our beings or bring us closer together. Mankind, so extolled for the last two centu-ries, has been brought to a halt at the collective, which is now a terrifying Moloch. We can neither love it, nor love one another within it. That is why instead of fulfilling us, it mechanizes us. Once, however, the warm glow of one and the same common soul lights up in each element of the human throng, distinct from. each and yet the same in each: then, in this personalizing centre, itself endowed with supreme personality, as each par-ticle strives to fulfil itself it finds itself flung upon all the others. We were saying earlier that a redoubtable affinity, neutralized by great numbers, still lies dormant in the human mass. We now see that under the rays of Omega it must undoubtedly one day waken into activity, no longer rendered powerless but this time multiplied by the plurality of spiritual particles.

p. 48 - The salvation of the spirit of the earth (which is the only thing that really matters to us) is seen to depend upon the developments - now recognized as possible - of a close affective relationship, cosmic in dimensions.

And with this discovery we find that the question moves into a different context. Our having become intellectually aware, when confronted with the plurality of man, of the fact that we represent structurally the natural continuation of the atoms, transposes the problem of cosmogenesis into an interior domain. By themselves the most amazing advances of science and technology are no more than a preparation and a beginning. When all is said and done, the future of the world depends entirely upon the emergence in us of a moral conciousness of the atom, culminating in the appearance of a universal love.

Without our noticing it, a disturbing gap is constantly widening between our moral life and the new conditions created by the progress of the world. This does not mean, of course, that as a result of the hard work of the great religions we have not already succeeded in determining certain definite axes of justice and holiness. Nevertheless, however admirable and progressive these codes of interior perfection may be, they generally have the defect of having been developed, and of being kept alive, outside the perspectives of a universe in evolution. From this stems the obstinate conflict between science and religion; and from. this, above all, the slowness of Christianity itself to transpose its precepts and counsels to the dimensions of a mankind which has become conscious of the historic vastness, and the collective potentialities or demands, of its development.

In the course of this last section I would like to give some idea of how the most traditional human moral system takes on a new form, new coherence and urgency - how smoothly it is integrated, and so becomes dominant in the great body of cosmic energies, once man, in regulating his behaviour, leaves behind the individualist position 'of the monad' and resolutely adopts, in judgment and action, the point of view of the atom. The idea, developed above, of a spiritualizing moleculization of matter does more than throw light on the stuff of the universe, in its internal structure. The same shaft of light correspondingly brings out, in their main lines, a whole new philosophy of life, a whole new ethical system, and a whole new mysticism.

a. Philosophy of Life

With the increase in his consciousness of his collective strength and duration, man experiences an exactly proportionate increase in his need to find a tangible objective for his activities. Why, he asks, are we born in chains, bound in the fetters of toil? Why do we have to search ever further afield? Why slave away in our quest? Why continue to build? Why even continue to reproduce our kind? A man does not need to have lived very long to realize how insistently this question con-fronts even the most humble folk at this moment - how it affects more and more of us, so that it is now becoming acute. The agony of being alive is increasing in intensity in us, given new force and super-stimulated by the recent revelation we have been given of time and space. Now, it is this anxious uncertainty about the meaning and value of existence that the notion of noogenesis enables us to dispel. As soon as we realize that there is an organic relationship between our busyness as elements and the success of the world that bears us - as soon as a God awaits us in his own person at the top of the tower that, held up by him, we can build if we unite - then, indeed, we find the impulse to live, the essential joy of living.

p. 50 - With Omega, it is a supreme goal and a supreme attraction that rise up, to animate and direct human endeavour. And, as a sub-sidiary consequence, there are three other reputedly insoluble problems that vanish from our horizon.

First, the problem of evil. Whether it be physical or moral, evil repels us only in so far as it appears to be useless or gratuitous. Suffering and sin are the expression of the delays, the mistakes, the 'pain and labour', which are necessary in terms of energetics for the synthesis of spirit: they become intelligible and acceptable in so far as they appear as the condition of evolution and the price to be paid for it. Provided the peak is actually there and the game is worth the candle what mountaineer is surprised or complains at having to be injured as he climbs, or even at having to risk a fatal fall? Taken as static facts and in isolation, pain and perversity are meaningless. Taken as dynamic factors, in a system that is fluid and feeling its way, they are both vindicated and transfigured.

Secondly, the problem of inequality. If the universe culminated in mankind, in the form of isolated or divergent conscious minds, nothing could console a man for not possessing the health, the qualities, or the social opportunities accorded to others more fortunate than he. In such a universe, the more the 'have-nots' or the failures reflected clearly on their inferiority, the more they would be justified in experiencing a mounting fury for levelling-down and destruction directed against their misfortune and against the 'haves'. Here again, there is a complete transformation if, however unequal they may be in strength and status, the different thinking elements; of the earth form but one single convergent mass, destined to find communion and equality in a final triumph. When the attack is in full swing, does any soldier dream of envying his commander at the head of the assault wave?

Finally, the problem of the individual and society. Is the in-dividual for society, or society for the individual ? - an ex-asperating question, constantly being dinned into our cars: and a bloody question, too, the inspiration at this very moment of a merciless crusade between the opposed forces of Marxism and the democracies. At the same time, it is, basically, a nonexistent question if only we can apprehend, in its reality and mechanism, the great phenomenon of noogenesis that is taking place around us. In a universe that is in course of centration (provided the centration be carried out in the right way) the individual and the collectivity never cease to reinforce and complete one another. The more the individual on his side associates himself in an appropriate way with other individuals, the more, as an effect of synthesis, does he enter deeper into his own being, become conscious of himself, and in consequence personalize himself. And the more the collectivity on its side concentrates itself, in an appropriate way, upon elements for whose fuller personalization it is itself responsible, the more, again, is it 'humanized' and per-sonalized, and the more does it allow Omega point to be divined. The two terms are equally essential: they are inseparable. When the limit is reached, it is true - at the moment, that is, when the supreme conjunction is effected -the last step will be taken from the element towards the whole. It is the whole that will have the last word. In the final analysis (or rather 'in the final synthesis') we may say, therefore, that ultimately the person is for the whole, and not the whole for the human person. The reason for this, however, is that at the final moment the whole itself has become person.

b. Ethics

Since the preaching of the Gospel it was possible to believe that man had at last found a definitive and exhaustive expres-sion of inner rectitude, and in consequence of salvation. 'Love one another': it seemed as though all that was finest in morality must have reached its peak and be summed up in that precept once and for all. Today, however, after twenty centuries of experience, it would seem that we have acquired nothing from the Gospel formula. As the years go by not only does mankind seem to be as divided against itself as ever; but, what is more, a new ideal, the ideal of conquering force, has continually, for the last two generations, been increasing in strength and mesmeric power, in opposition to doctrines of gentleness and humanity.

p. 53 - From the point of view of noogenesis, in the first place, it is perfectly clear that if, all together, our cosmic destiny is to become one, then the fundamental and operative law of our activity is to encourage this synthesis by associating more closely. The 'Lord's precept' does not disappear under the harsh light of modern criticism: rather does it leave the domain of sentiment, to become the leading instrument of evolution. 'It leaves the world of dreams, to enter into the system of universal energies and essential laws'. We saw, did we not, that a love is the only milieu in which the stuff of the universe can find equilibrium. and consistence at the peak of its complication and centration.

Among fixed and extrinsically associated monads, it may well be that the supreme virtue consists in easing mutual friction. It is a completely different story in the case of incomplete elements that cannot exist fully except by drawing closer to-gether. For such particles, sympathy becomes the driving impulse to force all obstacles and open up every issue that can lead to unity. From the moment man discovers that, as an atom, he has a responsibility towards a mankind and is in solidarity with a mankind in which he is personally fulfilled, he possesses more than a motive and a driving force for loving 'his neighbour'. There is something much more: there opens out wide before him an unlimited domain of tangible operation into which he can introduce the things he feels. He has the whole vast battlefield of the earth in which to release, to expend and continually to rejuvenate the passion that animates him. To have to fight, to be able to fight, throughout our life, in order to create what we love! An astonishing fulfilment indeed, in which force, purified of violence, emerges from gentleness and loving-kindness, as their climax.

C. Mysticism

No moral system can hold together without religion. Or, to put it more precisely, no moral system can live without developing a nimbus of worship. The measure of an ethics is its ability to flower in mysticism. From this point of view, dynamized charity is without a rival.

p. 54 - ... since the construction, the maintenance and further advancement of human unity is in fact the operation and continuation of the whole play of universal forces, the man in question ...is soon guided to an ascent to the reasoned sense of a basic solidarity with the whole of life and the whole of matter in motion.

Finally, because this vast system, convergent by nature, holds together only through its impulse towards some supreme pole of synthesis, the thinking atom definitively becomes submerged in the omnipresence and omni-action of a supreme consciousness.

Sense of man; then sense of the earth; and finally sense of an Omega: three progressive stages of one and the same illumina-tion.

p. 55 - More or less consciously (and however convinced we may be that life has a meaning) we all experience in ourselves the saddening feeling of the fragmentation and insignificance of our own lives. With the dawn of every new day, the same obligations confront us; their monotony is heartbreaking, their multiplicity exhausts us, their apparent futility discourages us. Dispersion, routine, and above all boredom - if only we could feel that we were doing something really worth-while.

Now, it is in fact this very dust-cloud of ourselves which is illuminated and animated under the influence of Omega. At a lower level of consciousness (as long, that is, as we are un-aware of our condition and function as individual atoms) we can never do more than one thing or another thing, with one part or another of our body or of our soul. We are eating, or thinking, or working, or loving; and nothing of all that we do, taken in isolation, satisfies us, because nothing seems to be important. On the other hand, at a higher stage of initiation (Once, that is, we have appreciated the relationship that links the spiritualization of the world to its complication) this multiplicity, without ceasing to be just what it is, is resolved into something new and unique: and into that new thing there flow together, as they acquire value, all the results (no matter how trifling they may be) of our efforts, and all that colours (in however intimate and private a way) our activity. At this high level a transcendent form of action begins to emerge, which embraces and fuses together, in one and the same illumination, the whole medley of things which, seen from lower down, appear to us to conflict with and neutralize one another. all that we know under the different names of activity and passivity, renunciation and possession, understanding and love. The truth is that if a man's vision can extend beyond the immense and the infinitesimal almost into the complex, a way of acting opens up for him which has the power to synthesize and transfigure every other form of activity: by that I mean the specific act of experiencing and advancing, in and around himself - through the whole expanse and the whole depth of the real - the unification of the universe upon its deep-seated centre, with the consciousness of that unification it acquires as a consequence: the total and totalizing act (if I may so call it, for I can find no other name) of omegalization.

And it is this that leads us directly, in 'bliss-as-atoms, to the high peaks of worship.

Already, in the social and biological field, the fact of our recognizing that, as a result of the properties of love, the universe becomes personalized as it concentrates, was enabling us to avoid both fragmentation through individualization and mechanization through collectivism. Now, in the domain of mys-ticism, the same light shows us the channel between two equally dangerous reefs. Ever since man, in becoming man, started on his quest for unity, he has constantly oscillated, in his visions, in his ascesis, or in his dreams, between a cult of the spirit which made him. jettison matter and a cult of matter which made him deny spirit: omegalization allows us to pass between this Scylla and Charybdis of rarefaction or the quagmire. Detachment now comes not through a severance but through a traversing and a sublimation; and spiritualization not by negation of the multiple or an escape from it, but by emergence. This is the via tertia that opens up before us as soon as spirit is no longer the opposite extreme but the higher pole of matter in course of super-centration. It is not a cautious and neutral middle course, but the bold, higher road, in which the values and properties of the two other roads are combined and correct one another.

From this, as a final summary, I draw the following conclusion. To have become conscious of our condition as 'atoms patient of synthesis' is not merely to have attained a new vision of the general relationship which links matter to, thought, and thought to God. It is in addition, and by that very fact, to redefine the line followed by the immutable axis of holiness.

A neo-spirituality for a neo-spirit, in a universe whose convergent nature has been recognized.

Peking, 13 September 1941

contents

The Rise of the Other

p. 67 - Scientifically speaking, everything in the world behaves as though the stuff of the universe (whose properties change, we know, in the two spatial directions of the infinitesimal and the immense) were able similarly to vary (in this case, in time) in a third direction, that of the complex: life being simply the 'specific effect' attaching to extreme complexities. So long as a cosmic particle contains no more than some thousands of arranged atoms, it still appears to be dead. But if this 'corpuscular figure' rises to several tens of thousands, it begins to be animate (as in the case of the viruses). In the cell and, beyond it, among the higher living beings, the mere number of chemical elements involved in the organism (without taking into account their built-up, combinations) leaps to astronomical values. This evident variation of life as a direct function of synthesized large numbers can readily be explained if we admit that the more matter is organized, the more it is centred (and, in consequence, the more 'conscious' it is). In the case of simple, or relatively simple, particles the centration is low and the psychism, is accordingly imperceptible, By contrast, in the case of high complexities, the centre gains in depth and concentrates, as an effect of organization: and thereby, too, the phenomena of introspection and spontaneity appear and become more marked. From this point of view, consciousness would appear to be a physical property linked simultaneous1y to the centration and complication of matter upon itself. Thus, depending on the side from which we look at evolution, we would see it either (from. outside) as a chemical arch-synthesis or (from. inside) as a 'noogenesis'

Bearing that in mind, let us confine our attention to man.

Considered individually, man is, both quantitatively and qualitatively, the most highly complicated of cosmic particles, and in consequence the most fully centred; by that very fact, again, he is the most conscious. But this is not the whole story. Man can never be apprehended in the state of an isolated particle. He is essentially multitude; he is increasing multitude; and above all, thanks to his astonishing power of physical and psychic inter-fertilization, he is organizable multitude. We are so accustomed to this spectacle of the plu-rality of thinking molecules that we never dream of finding it astonishing. Nevertheless, may it not have a profound signifi-cance? Why, for example, should we not conceive that, in conformity with the whole history of past life, it represents the possibility and contains the potentiality of a further, trans-human, synthesis of organic matter? We habitually look on the human individual as a closed unit, lost in the gregarious throng of other units, equally locked in on themselves. May he not, rather, be the element, not yet impregnated, of a natural whole still in the course of organization?

The very first time we meet it, the idea of a super-human or-ganism seems fantastic. We are so thoroughly used to refusing to admit that anything could exist in nature higher than ourselves! Nevertheless, if, instead of rejecting a priori what upsets the accustomed routine of our thinking (and in particular the dimensional limits within which we think), we are willing to entertain it, and then begin to examine it more deeply, it is surprising what order and clarity is introduced into our outlook on the universe by a hypothesis that at first seemed crazy.

The first thing we find is that the actual flow of evolution, which, against all probability, was assumed to have come to a halt on earth with the appearance of man, resumes its normal course. If the terrestrial grains of thought can still combine among themselves, man is no longer an inexplicable deadend in the cosmic process of noogenesis: in him, and through him, the rise of consciousness is continuing beyond man himself.

Secondly, the rise of number all around us loses its disquieting and senseless appearance. Crushed together on the earth's restricted surface, we were looking anxiously for a field in which to expand. We can now see that that field does not lie in the direction of an escape in space, but can be found in the form of an internal harmonizing in which the multiplication of the other ceases to be a threat and becomes a support, a solace, and a hope for the fulfilment of each individual. By divergence, the multitude can only become a greater evil; -on the other hand, by unification upon itself it is effortlessly and limitlessly resolved. We were trying to escape through the circumference: it is only through the axis (by convergence, that is) that we can be released from tension.

The third thing to be transfigured is the spectre of rising collectivization. judging the future of man from the example of the insects and from certain modern experiments on totalitarian lines, we had grounds for believing that we were caught up in an irresistible mechanism of depersonalization. But if it is indeed the law of 'centration by synthesis' that continues to operate in us through the advances and under the cloak of human socialization, then we should be reassured. Assuming that an ultra-human synthesis is really being produced, then (provided it be properly carried out - and I shall show how that can be done) it can only end, from physical and biological necessity, in causing the appearance of a further degree of organization, and therefore of consciousness, and therefore, again, of freedom. Whatever may have been the shortcomings or deviations of our first attempts at association, we are hazarding nothing in surrendering ourselves actively and intelligently to the invasion of the forces of collectivization. They are not, in fact, working to mechanize us but to supercentre and so super-personalize us.

p. 70 - In this direction, everything depends on the aptitude we can reasonably assume in mankind for developing among its members an appropriate form of 'universal love'.

Love is power of producing inter-centric relationship. It is present, therefore (at least in a rudimentary state), in all the natural centres, living and pre-living, which make up the world; and it represents, too, the most Profound, most direct, and most creative form of inter-action that it is possible to conceive between those centres. Love, in fact, is the expression and the agent of universal synthesis.

p.71 - Love, again, is centric power. Thus, like a light whose spectrum is continually enriched by new, more brilliant and warmer lines, it constantly varies with the perfection of the centres from which it emanates. Man is the only known element of the universe in which noogenesis has advanced far enough to allow the appearance of a closed centre, reflected upon itself; and in him, therefore, we can appreciate that the ,synthesizing properties of love operate under exceptional conditions and with exceptional effectiveness and clarity. While infra-human beings can converge and associate only in a diffuse common action, at the level of thought it is the psychic nuclei themselves that come out into the open and begin to unite. Organization of imperfectly centred elements gives way to direct synthesis of centres. From this results the extraordinary totality and fullness of vital contact - and from this, in consequence, in conformity with the synthesizing mechanism of the rise of consciousness, the extraordinary growth of personality that can any day be observed in the particular and limited case of a great human affection.

p. 73 - The discovery of time

From whichever end we now tackle the problem of man, the influence inevitably makes itself felt of a mental revolution which, without our suspecting it, is making us radically different from preceding generations, separated from us by less than two hundred years. When, towards the end of the eighteenth century, the ideas of evolution and progress began to come to the fore - often in over-simplified and naive forms - it was possible to believe (as some still do) that it was no more than the infatuation of natural scientists with an ephemeral hypothesis. Today the notion of duration has covered the whole horizon spanned by the mind of man: physics, sociology, philosophy, religion - all the branches of knowledge are now impregnated by this subtle essence. In fact, the limited and the static have disappeared from our outlook, and we are already thinking only in terms of space-time. It is not a question of 'hypothesis', indeed! The only way in which we can interpret such an event is to recognize that, like children awakening to a sense of depth and relief, we have just collectively arrived at the perception of a new dimension. As a direct accompaniment of this, a world of new possibilities is opening up, not only for the speculative constructions of our reason but even more (and this is the important point) for the development of human energy.

Until now, one might say, men were living both dispersed and at the same time closed in on themselves, like passengers in a ship who have met by chance below decks with no idea of its mobile character and its motion. They could, accordingly, think of nothing to do on the earth that brought them together but to quarrel or amuse themselves. And now, by chance, or rather as a normal effect of growing older, we have just opened our eyes. The boldest of us have found their way to the deck. They have seen the vessel that was carrying us along. They have marked the creaming of her bow wave. They have realized that there are boilers to be stoked and a wheel to be manned. And most important of all, they have seen the clouds floating overhead, they have savoured the sweet scent of the Western Isles, over the curve of the horizon: it ceases to be the restless human to-and-fro on the same spot, it is no longer a drifting - it is the voyage.

p. 74 - Another mankind must inevitably emerge from this vision, one of which we have as yet no idea, but one which I believe I can already feel stirring through the old mankind, whenever the chances of life bring me into contact with another man whom. however alien he may be to me by nationality, class, race or religion, 1 find closer to me than a brother, because he, too, has seen the ship and he, too, feels that we are steaming ahead.

The sense of a common venture, and in consequence of a common destiny: the sense of an evolution in common that we can see with ever increasing clarity to be a genesis (and even a 'noogenesis'): what forms of action, hitherto impossible to realize - what forms of association, hitherto utopian - what revelation from on high, hitherto misunderstood, may we not anticipate in the special richness of this new milieu and in its special curvature! If charity has so far failed to reign upon earth, may not the reason be simply that in order to establish itself it was necessary for the earth first to have become conscious of its spiritual cohesion and convergence? If we are to be able to love one another must we not first effect a change of plane?

Everything, in short, locks and knits together in our outlook provided the rising warmth of a sense of man can be distinguished, by certain signs, beneath the fever from which the world is suffering at this moment. This warmth is evidence of a coming together, a concentration, and in consequence of an ultra-centration of the earth's thinking molecules, and it enables us to recognize that the psychic synthesis of the universe is continuing to be effected through the human mass. That being so. there is undoubtedly no longer anything that should alarm us either in the increased pressure of number or in the growing bonds of collectivization: because, in this instance, the irresistible rise of the other all around us, and its intrusion even into our individual lives, is without any possible doubt the expression and the measure of our own ascent into the personal.

Peking 20 January 1942

Centrology

p. 99 - INTRODUCTION

In spite of all the theoretical objections that would seek to discourage the belief, our minds remain invincibly persuaded that a certain very simple fundamental rule lies hidden beneath the overpowering multiplicity of events and beings: to discover and formulate this rule, we believe, would make the universe intelligible in the totality of its development.

The instinctive tenacity with which man's thought tries to reduce the world to unity, combined with the fact that all the efforts hazarded in this direction by the greatest philosophers, one after another (Aristotle, Spinoza, Leffiniz, Hegel, Spencer), coincide in following this line, surely this is in itself an indication that the problem is patient of solution? Carried, then, on the shoulders of our predecessors and, at the same time, in a better position than they were to perceive the mechanism of a universe whose structure and dimensions modem science is beginning to form an idea of, are we not bothjustified and well placed to resume their attempts, if only, at least, in order to take one more forward step?

I believe that we are: and that is why 1 am so bold as to offer here, in the form of a series of linked propositions, an essay in universal explanation - not an a priori geometric synthesis starting from some definition of 'being', but an experiential law of recurrence which can be checked in the phenomenal field and can appropriately be extrapolated into the totality of space and time.

It is not an abstract metaphysics, but a realist ultraphysics of union.

1. Centres and centro-complexity

p. 101 -

1. As the foundation for the whole edifice of propositions that follow we have an intuition and two observations:

a. The intuition: In the swarming multiplicity of living elements (Monocellular and polycellular) which make up the biosphere, we find an authentic continuation of the granular (atomic, molecular) structure of the universe. In consequence, if the human body is restored to its position in the cosmic corpuscular series, it is simply a 'super-molecule': once we see it in this light, we are in the happy position of being able to distinguish in that super-molecule, the properties, in a 'magnified' state, of every molecule.

b. The observations: Man, the final product of planetary evolution, is both supremely complex in his physico-chemical organization (measured by the brain), and at the same time, viewed in his psychism, supremely free and conscious.

2.. Taken in sequence, these three primary evidential data immediately bring out the three following derived data:

a. At every degree of size and complexity, cosmic particles or grains are not simply, as physics has recognized, centres of universal dynamic radiation: all of them, in addition (rather like man), have and represent a small 'within' (however diffuse or even fragmentary it may be; cf. section 8), in which is reflected, at a more or less rudimentary stage, a particular representation of the world: in relation to themselves they are psychic centres - and. at the same time they are infinitesimal psychic centres of the universe. In other words, consciousness is a universal molecular property; and the molecular state of the world is a manifestation of the pluralized state of some potentiality of universal consciousness.

b. Consciousness increases and grows deeper throughout the series of cosmic units, in proportion with the organized cornplexity of those units. While it is completely imperceptible to our observational methods below an atomic complexity of the order of 10 to the power 5 (the virus),' it can be plainly detected when we reach that of the cell (10 to the power 10); but it enters into its major developments only in the brains of large mammals (10 to the power 20), in other words when we have atomic groupings astronomic in order.

c. From this it follows that the most essential, the most significant, characteristic of any of the units whose association makes up the universe, is distinguished in those units by a certain degree of interiority - that is to say of centricity (soul), which is itself a function of a certain degree of complexity (body, and, more particularly, brain). This coefficient of centrocomplexity (or, which comes to the same thing, of consciousness) is the true absolute measure of being in the beings that surround us. That, and that alone, can be the basis for a truly natural classification of the elements of the universe.

p. 110 - Such, at this very moment, is the situation of the cosmos that surrounds us. Mankind, the leading wave of a universe which becomes luminous as (under the influence of complication) it contracts upon itself, encloses within its moving circle the still formless future of things, the secret of the final syntheses. What will emerge from this still fluid nucleus of the world? If our law of recurrence is correct, what can be distinguished on the horizon is nothing but, and nothing less than, a continual increase of organization and of centricity - and this time on the scale not of the particle but of the sphere: the accelerated impetus of an earth in which preoccupation with production for the sake of well-being will have given way to the passion for the discovery for the sake of fuller being - the super-personalization of a super-humanity that has become super-conscious of itself in the increasing light of Omega.

III. OMEGA POINT

18. If the law of centro-complexity is extended indefinitely backwards along the axis of past aeons, it affords us a glimpse of progressively more diffuse zones, in which more and more fragmentary elements of consciousness float in a state of more and more unorganized heterogeneity. In this direction there is no lower limit to 'recurrence' .... There is an indefinitely continued widening of the lower surface of the cone. On the other hand, if it is carried in the opposite direction, that is, into the future, the extrapolation of the series defines a peak. The existence of a cosmic Omega point became apparent to us .... from the moment when our minds had to accept the evidence that the universe was psychically convergent. We must now be at pains to determine the properties of this supreme focus point of evolution.

19. Genetically speaking (that is, when observed from the position we occupy in space-time), Omega appears to us fundamentally as the centre which is defined by the final concentration upon itself of the noosphere - and indirectly, therefore, of all the isospheres that precede it. In Omega, then, a maximum complexity, cosmic in extent, coincides with a maximum cosmic centricity.

20. In itself, the idea that the universe is moving towards some form of final unity has haunted the minds of all the philosophers; and there is nothing new in the idea. What gives the notion of centro-complexity its originality and fruitfulness is that it imposes on the term of cosmic synthesis, in virtue of its very structure, a series of positive determinants; the effect of these is to bring home to us its existence in terms not only of intellectual apprehension but also of action. Indeed, if Omega, as revealed to us by our law of recurrence, is to satisfy the conditions attached to its position and function, we can readily appreciate that it must present itself to us when we examine it, as at the same time: personal - individual - already partially actual - and also partially transcendent.

21. That, first, it is personal goes without saying; since it is centricity that makes beings personal and Omega is supremely centred.

22. Secondly, individual: in other words distinct from (which does not mean cut off from) the lower personal centres which it super-centres (a very different thing from confusing together) as it associates them in its unity (...). Omega possesses an ego proper to itself and distinct from ours. This results from the mechanism of a centrogenesis which, at every degree, allows the higher centres to emerge only if they respect, and even complete, the centric plurality of the elements on which their complexity is built (...).

23. It is partially actual, too - that is to say, it is already capable of acting upon us as an object that is present. Omega, in the form that the evolutionary structure of the world demands for it, is much more than the 'real' image which is destined to take shape in the future at the focus point of the convergent universe. It is as a source of light that it acts. Is it not Omega that causes to spring up and maintains here and now the fascicle of radial ties (...)? And is it not Omega again, as we shall see later, whose love, felt at this moment (for there is no love except in the present), is the only agent that can polarize the collectivity of man without mechanizing it?

24. Finally, it is partially transcendent, which means that it is partially independent of the evolution that culminates in it. If Omega were not in some way emancipated from the conditions of time and space, it could neither be present for us - nor (since it would itself be completely subject to inexorable entropy) could it be the basis for the hopes of irreversibility without which centrogenesis, from man onwards, would cease to function (...). Thus it is through one aspect of itself, different from that in which we see it take shape, that it has been emerging since all time above a world from which, seen from another angle, it is nevertheless in process of emerging. And it is precisely in the meeting of these two halves of itself (the emerged and the emergent) that uni- versal unification, in the form of a 'bi-polar' union, moves towards its completion.

25. So defined in its nature and properties, Omega in very truth stands radiant in the heaven of the future as that which provides the momentum for centrogenesis and serves to make it completely total. Drawn by its magnetism and formed in its image, the elementary cosmic centres are constituted and grow deeper in the matrix of their complexity. Moreover, gathered up by Omega, these same centres enter into* immortality from the very moment when they become eu-centric (that is. personal) and so structurally capable of entering into contact, centre to centre, with its supreme consistence (...).

p. 115 - 27. The laws of union. From one extreme to the other of evolution, as we have defined it, everything in the universe moves in the direction of unification: but this it does with a train of concrete modifications which correct or give particular accuracy to the theoretical ideas of union we might entertain.

a. In the first place, union (true, physical union) creates. Where there is complete disunity in the stuff of the cosmos (at an infinite distance from Omega), there is nothing. And when consciousness takes a step or a leap ahead (the appearance of life through association of fragments of centres, deepening of phyletic centres, emergence of reflective centres, birth of mankind, dawn of Omega) this progress is invariably linked with an increase of union. It is not, of course, that the coming together and ordered arrangement of the centres are by themselves sufficient to increase the world's being; there can be no doubt, however, that they succeed in doing so under the influence of the radiation of Omega.

b. Secondly, union differentiates. By that I mean that by reason of their association under the influence of a centre higher in order (n+ 1), the centres of the order n do not tend to become blurred and confused together: on the contrary, their own nature is reinforced: just Eke the working parts of a mechanism which can be adjusted to one another only if they are constructed in a large number of exactly determined shapes. Such are the multiple cells that make up a metazoon, and such again the nervous fibres of a brain, and the various members of an insect colony. Organization not only presupposes but also produces the complexity upon which its unity flowers. This is a fact of universal experience.

c. In consequence, union, when operating in the eu-centric domain of the reflective. personalizes. Since personalization is a creative differentiation (is creative differentiation), this third law of union does no more than sum up, link together and clarify the other two. It does this not only in the sense that the grain of thought emerges from the perfect centration on itself of complexity, but in the further sense that through centre-to-centre (that is, personal) aggregation with other grains of thought, it is super-personalized. Such again' as experience shows, is indeed the result on our human consciousness of unanimity. Whether it is a matter of a team, or of a pair of lovers, or, even more, of a mystic absorbed in divine contemplation, the psychological result is invariably the same. Far from tending to be confused together, the reflective centres intensify their ego the more, the more they concentrate together. They become progressively more super-centred as they come closer to one another in their convergence on Omega This, I insist, is a fact of experience: and at the same time a simple re-affirmation of the law of centro-complexity.

28. The evolution of the personal. 'Union personalizes.' Expressed in this new form, the principle of centrogenesis enables us to formulate, in its most intimate essence, the nature of cosmic evolution. Earlier (...), we started by defining it as the 'transition from a lower to a higher state of centro-complexity~. We can now put it in words that are both clearer and more profound and simply call it 'a cosmic process of personalization'.

Indeed, whether we consider the initial appearance of living centres from their disconnected segments, or follow, within the phyletic centres, the gradual isolation of the nuclear within the peripheral, or observe the reflective transition of the nucleus to personal eu-centrism, - or whether, finally, we extrapolate the effects on man of hominization - the direction and significance of the movement we note remain identically the same. Throughout time (of which, just like centro-complexity, it can serve to provide an absolute measure) the personal - considered quantitatively no less than qualitatively - is continually on the upgrade in the universe.

p. 118 - From this point of view there is nothing disturbing in the irresistible concentration that forces us, more and more, mutually to penetrate one another on the closed surface of our planet. It is no more than a manifestation, vaster than the others, of the cosmic forces that have always been at work to unify and give profundity to the world by making it more complex.

29. The function of love. It is clear that the forces of love occupy a dominant position in a world whose formula is 'towards personalization through union' - since love is precisely the bond that brings persons together and unites them.

This, indeed, is confirmed by observation.

Strictly speaking, love does not as yet exist in the zones of the pre-living and the non-reflective, since the centres are are only imperfectly centred. Nevertheless there can be no doubt that it is something in the way of love that is adumbrated and grows as a result, of the mutual affinity which causes the particles to adhere to one another and maintains their unity during their convergent advance. In any case, the least one can say is that, through the critical threshold of reflection, the transformation undergone by this vague inter-sympathy between the first atoms or the first living beings, as it becomes hominized, is a transformation into love. In the case of sexuality, of the family, and of the race, the transition is apparent. For a careful observer, however, the phenomenon extends much further. For the last two thousand years there has been much talk (though it often raises a smile) about a love of human kind. Is it not finally such a love that, logically and in fact, is now rising and taking distinct shape on our horizon? As soon as men have woken to explicit consciousness of the evolution that carries them along, and begin as one man to fix their eyes on one and the same thing ahead of them, are they not, by that very fact, beginning to love one another?

In truth, the rise in warmth on the surface of the contracting noosphere is not confined to a small group of specially favoured associations, but extends to the whole of inter-human relationships. And, with that, we find love emerging into the fullness of its cosmic function. To the psychologist and the moralist love is simply a 'passion'. To those who, following Plato, look in the very structure of beings for the explanation of its ubiquity, its intensity, and its mobility, love appears as the higher and purified form of a universal interior attractive power.

In a universe whose structure is centro-complex, love is essentially nothing other than the energy proper to cosmogenesis.

That is why, alone of all the world's energies, love displays the power of carrying cosmic personalization, the fruit of centrogenesis, right to its term. Union, we were saying, personalizes. We must never forget, however, that this is on one condition: that the centres it associates must come together not in some indeterminate way (whether by compulsion or indirectly) but spontaneously, centre-to-centre: in other words, by mutual love.

p. 120 - In short, only love, by virtue of its specific and unique power of 'personalizing complexes'. can achieve the miracle of super-humanizing man through and by means of the forces of collectivization; and, in a still more decisive phase, only love can open for man the door to Omega.

30. Physical energy and psychic energy. ....

The behaviour of these two energies (physical and psychic) is so completely different, and their phenomenal manifestations are so completely irreducible, that we might believe they derive from two entirely independent ways of explaining the world. Nevertheless, since they both carry through their evolution in the same universe, in the same temporal dimension, there must surely be some hidden relationship which links them together in their development.

p. 126 -

33. Are there other spheres ? At the psychological root of all the difficulties that men of science still raise against a spiritual interpretation of the world, there certainly lies an acute sense of the cruel lack of proportion between physical energy and psychic energy within the universe. Whether we consider the infinitesimal quantities of cosmic matter, motion and heat involved in the whole body of biological operations - or whether we concentrate our attention on the haphazard way in which the solar system (and, in consequence, organic matter) seems to have been formed -a sort of conviction seems to overwhelm the mind: the conviction of man's insignificance in the presence of the rest of nature. How can one have the courage to look in the direction of life for an explanation of things, when everything proclaims so unmistakably that life is no more than a local, momentary, accident - an unforeseeable by-product of evolution ?

The considerations outlined in this essay will, I hope. have helped the reader to break the spell of this false evidence. The notion of centro-complexity provides us with a sure criterion by which to judge, in their 'absolute magnitude', the cosmic value of beings, and in consequence objectively to establish the primacy of spirit: but it does even more -it explains to us (through the links it discloses both between quality and quantity, and between finality and chance, (....) why consciousness, this unique essence of things, can appear in the history of the world only in the form of a rarity and an accident, without thereby being an accessory or an incident.

To complete our rescue from the vertigo induced by our own insignificance, and at the same time in order to drive right home the explanatory power of centrology, I cannot do better than to conclude by recalling this fact: in spite of the extraordinary coincidence of chances (two stars in collision) which the birth of planets presupposes, there is no proof that the same chance has not been at work, or may not still occur on more than one occasion in the immensities of time and space: there is no proof, in consequence, that in conformity still with some law of large numbers many obscure stars, many earths besides our own, may not already be scattered, or may not still be expected, among the galaxies.

In this hypothesis, which has positive likelihood on its side, the phenomenon of life and more particularly the phenomenon of man lose something of their disturbing loneness. And at the same time it is the vistas of centrogenesis that are fantastically magnified, without distortion, to a further order. Indeed, if there have been, if there are, if there are going to be, n earths in the universe, then what we have earlier called 'spheres', 'isospheres', and 'noospheres' no longer embraces the whole but applies only to an isolated element (a mega-particle) of the total phenomenon. With centro-complexity dealing not simply, now, with grains of thought upon a single planet but with as many noospheres as there will be thinking planets in the firmament, the process of personalization takes on a decisively cosmic aspect. It is almost more than our minds can dare to face.

The law of recurrence, however, remains the same. And there can still be only one single Omega.

Unpublished, Peking

13 December 1944

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 The Analysis of Life

p. 132 - I. THE PROBLEM

Nothing in the world around us is more obvious than the existence - indeed, the fact - of life: and nevertheless nothing is more elusive, more difficult to pin down, than this same life when we try to handle it by the general methods of science. As experienced in ourselves, and as it seems to develop in the course of time, the living being is consciousness, freedom, and finality. As soon, however, as we try to look at it under the microscope, or to submit it to instruments of measurement, all that we can distinguish even in the very depths of this same living being is a pyramid of associated chances and interwoven mechanisms, without apparently a single crevice in which to accommodate the intervention of the conscious and guiding action of the least free factor. In the eyes of the modem biologist, the orthogenesis of living groups tends to be reduced to a random interaction of chromosomic encounters, and the most spontaneous animal seems to be no more than a 'sumtotal of assembled reflexes'. Thus the whole phenomenon of consciousness, when submitted to scientific investigation, gives the impression of dissolving and melting away, like an illusion. in the uniform flood of a universal determinism: as well might one try to grasp a rainbow.

II. A GENERAL ANSWER

Many biologists, baffled by this singular capacity that life displays of dissolving into non-life, believe that they are now forced to jettison it, as a pseudo-reality and a mirage. Surely, however, this is simply because their eyes are still closed to the fundamental and mutually opposed operation of synthesis and analysis in the general structure of the universe. In every field, the mere organic combination of a number of elements inevitably brings about the emergence in nature of something completely new (something 'higher'). Conversely, the suppression of a combination, no matter what it be, causes something to disappear. Seen under too great a magnification, the finest of paintings is reduced to shapeless blotches, the purest curve to divergent strokes, the most regular of phenomena to disordered turbulence, the most continuous movement to jerks. Bearing that in mind we can hardly wonder that under the solvent, 'occulting', influence of analysis the living being, in turn, is reabsorbed into unconsciousness, chance and determinisms, while all the rest all, I mean, that is specifically living - slips through the mesh of the filter. The analogy between the two cases is too obvious to allow any doubt. In both the 'trick" is certainly the same.

It would be naïve, therefore, to believe that if we are to solve the matter-life antinomy each of the two must be sacrificed to the other. All we have to dot in fact, is to establish an acceptable structural relationship between the two opposed terms, which will explain how there can, by synthesis, be an ascent from one to the other and, reciprocally, a descent by analysis.

There we have the whole problem.

III. THE EMERGENCE OF LIFE

Reduced to its essence, the scientific problem of life may be expressed as follows.

Having admitted the two major laws of the conservation and dissipation of energy (to which physics may be reduced), the problem we have is to superimpose upon them, without contradiction, a third universal law (in which the whole of biology is summed up), that of the organization of energy. In the language of the atom, science tells us, cosmic evolution represents, for the indestructible grains of energy which make up the universe, the transition from an initial heterogeneous distribution (improbable, but nevertheless without order) to a final homogeneous (that is to say the more probable) distribution. How are we to conceive that in the course of this process, at once conservative and entropic, a portion of the grains of energy is gradually withdrawn, in such a way as, for a time, to build up the organic associations, progressively more improbable, which living beings constitute? and this in such a way, again, that beneath the biological arrangement so produced the physico-chemical arrangement be respected, so that at any moment it may again be revealed by analysis?

Let us see what we can do to solve this problem.

In order to do so, it is not, I believe, necessary to modify the starting point accepted by modem atomic science, which is the initial existence of a mass of granular energy, distributed in a way which is at once without order and improbable; all we have to do is slightly (but even so decisively) re-touch the picture which is normally drawn of the primordial grain of energy itsel£ Hitherto this elementary grain has always been regarded as without any vestige either of consciousness or of freedom. Supposing, however,we define it as possessing the three following properties:

i. A rudimentary 'within' (or immanence).

2. A radius and effective angle (both as narrow as you please) of self-determination.

3. A psychic polarization, producing a fundamental tendency to associate with other particles in such a way as to form with them progressively more complex units: the effect of this complexity being (in virtue of a primordial and essential property of cosmic being) to increase simultaneously the degree of immanence in the particle which develops it, and its possibilities of choice.

It will be noted that, initially at least, this threefold correction in no way alters the universe of the physicists.

What happens is that on the one hand, in virtue ofthe play of large numbers, the orderless multitude of elementary consciousnesses, taken as one mass, behaves exactly as though it were devoid of any 'within'; in other words it develops exactly the same over-all determinisms as those produced by the primordial granular energy of the physicists.

On the other hand, the radius of choice allowed to each elementary particle can be drawn short enough to remain within the sphere of indeterminacy recognized by the most extreme determinist science as a specific attribute of the infinitesimal. To put it in another way, the 'creation' of energy involved in the choice (what we may call in this context 'choice-energy' or 'choice-quantum') can be conceived as being of an order of magnitude so small that it has no appreciable effect on the sum total of universal energy.

At the starting point, then, there is no measurable change in the conditions of the universe. With time, however, the effects produced by the three corrections we have applied will gradually make themselves felt. Initially, the play of chance which shuffles the grains of energy continues unaltered; but once two particles of appropriate psychic affinity happen to brush against one another within their 'radius of choice' (and in its effective angle), then, exercising choice, they will fasten on to one another. And so a movement is triggered off which nothing can then halt. Gradually, step by step, an organic heterogeneity develops around this first nucleus of improbability; it extends itself -always, it is true, at the whim of chance, but constantly in a definite direction: the direction of a continually increasing complication and unification. It is a phenomenon that would be inconceivable if the particles were completely 'inanimate', but is perfectly intelligible if they are both rudimentarily free and polarized.

Now let us consider a little more closely how the double play of determinisms and of chance is respected around and within the growing nuclei of complexity and consciousness, and how it adapts itself to them. In this context, three observations are called for, and they must be carefully understood.

First observation

During the building up of organic complexes, there is no necessity for the quantity of 'choice-energy' to increase with the degree of consciousness. A greater variety and a wider radius of indeternunacy become apparent as one rises higher up the scale of beings. but neither the one nor the other is ever obtained except through the amplifying action ofmechanisms which Oust as industrial servo-motors do) make it possible to produce, from an extremely small initial impulse, effects as exact as they are powerful. There is nothing therefore to forbid the notion that 'choice-energy' represents an invariable cosmic quantum - the same in the atom and the human brain. This, when the whole question has been weighed up, would explain the paradoxical, fact that freedom can grow indefinitely in the universe without producing any appreciable increase in the output of universal energy. In short, the development of life does not interfere with the release of the material energy of the cosmos. because it can ultimately be reduced to a series of infinitesimal arrangements, each one of which calls for only an infinitesimal impulse - and all this within a fringe of indeterminacy which molecular physics itself recognizes in material reactions."

Second observation

As, under the influence of a growing complexity, the 'radius of choice' increases and opens up to a wider angle, so the cosmic organic centres exercise a continually more effective control over the chance in which they are adrift; but it is always only with the chances they make use of that they gradually build up the fabric of their finality. This explains two things: first, the localization of the phenomenon of life in the narrow confines of time and space; and secondly, the enormous part played in biological evolution by tentative probing. Traces of this can be seen everywhere in nature (think of all the trial and error, all the oddities, all the uselessness, all the setbacks, in the zoological world), and in the mechanism that is still at work at the very core of our spirituality (recognizable even in the birth and maturing of our loftiest concepts). In truth, if we study it carefully, all life, and all thought, is simply the seizing and organizing of chance.

Third observation

p. 137 - If, then, we take an over-all view of the cosmic process of vitalization on the earth, we must distinguish absolutely two principal phases in the phenomenon.

During a first phase, the grains of consciousness arrange themselves spontaneously in mechanisms, in such a way as to construct the selector-switches and amplifiers (the 'servomotors') required to widen the 'angle and radius of choice' around psychic centres: the consciousness of these latter, moreover, increasing in direct ratio with their field of action. At this stage, since the elementary consciousness is still too imperfectly centred, one can join. up with another only superficially, in some external common function; thus their association can as yet result in producing no more than a syn-ergy (the most finished example of which is the human brain).

During a later phase, on the other hand, which starts with man, the psychic nuclei are sufficiently centred to be able to come into direct contact and communication, that is to say from one consciousness to another; in consequence a new sphere of complexity and a new form of energy are introduced into nature:

- the sphere of syn-psychic arrangements and associations (which are not simply a grouping together of activities, but one of souls); of these, so far as we can see at present, a planetized mankind would appear to be the highest term.

- and then, to control this immanent network of 'intercentric' operations, spiritual energy : the energy of sympathy and attractive power in which, to some degree, there is a continuation of the play of chance and the materializing effects of large numbers. It is an energy, however, whose law is no longer conservation in dissipation but an intensification that increases until the complete organization of the 'centrified' portion of the world in the unity of the 'focus-point Ornega': this latter is the ultimate source of the impulse that drives the initial dust of the cosmos in the upward, improbable, direction of higher complexes.

It is conceivable that at the term of this evolution (at the death, that is, of each individual man, and at the death of mankind) the hominized essence of man may be released from, and continue to subsist outside of, the machinery of physical energies within which it developed-for those energies, far from representing the fibres from which consciousness is born, are on the contrary no more than a veil which provides a statistical integument for the interplay of conscious centres. We should note, moreover, that this escape of spirit or its volatilization outside matter can ultimately be reduced to no more than the disappearance of a group of 'points or quanta of indeterminacy' in the cosmos; it cannot therefore produce any perceptible repercussion on the general behaviour of universal determinism.

CONCLUSION

A world such as we have just been envisaging satisfactorily meets the conditions of the problem of life and matter in the form we expressed it in. While such a world possesses immanence. the power of choice, and finality, both in its totality and in its most elementary terms, nevertheless it displays these properties only in virtue of an infinite number of chances and mechanisms which are imperceptibly selected and associated: thus scientific analysis can break it down completely without meeting the least measurable vestige or intervention of consciousness, freedom, or finality.

This answers our original question.

Here we should note (and this is well worth while) the close kinship that links together two intellectual attitudes to the problem of life that are considered to be irreconcilable. In spite of the apparent paradox, the man who believes in the creation of fixed species and denies the evolution of life on the ground that if it is examined in detail over very short periods of time it can be reduced to stable segments, falls into exactly the same sort of mistake as the materialist evolutionist who denies consciousness and freedom on the ground that the living being can be broken down into a system of elementary mechanisms. In both cases we can detect file effects of the same 'analytical illusion' - in one it materializes spirit, in the other it immobilizes movement. For all the difference in the consequences, the principle behind the mistake is the same. If we restore 'the effect of synthesis', then the two contradictory points of view immediately combine in the perspective of a vitalist evolutionism - the only evolutionism that embraces the whole of the Phenomenon of life considered at all its levels simultaneously.

Peking 10 june 1945

Outline of a Dialectic of Spirit

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I - First Stage : The Phenemenon of Man, and the Existence of a Transcendent God

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p. 144 - So far as our experience extends, it is in the individual human organism that the law of complexity and consciousness culminates at this moment in the world. Now, even if (through the appearance of the phenomenon of reflection) it does momentarily so culminate, everything goes to show that it has not reached its term at this point. Is there not in fact, beyond the isolated brain, a still higher possible complex: by that I mean a sort of 'brain' of associated brains ? And, if we look at the problem carefully, is it not in this direction that the continually more unified mass of mankind is evolving organically, under the irresistible influence of a cluster of geographic, ethnic, economic and spiritual factors? From this point of view, the natural evolution of the biosphere is not only continued in what I have called the noosphere, but assumes in it a strictly convergent form which, towards its peak, produces a point Of maturation (Or of collective reflection).

If we now turn to this apex of the cone of terrestrial evolution and examine it, we shall see in it two groups of remarkable and contradictory properties.

In the first place, it is unique, and therefore final. Unless we are to imagine (a thing that is supremely improbable) that our noosphere may one day come into contact with other sidereal noospheres, collectively reflective mankind confronts nothing but itself In these circumstances, it is impossible to conceive a further complexification which would determine a higher consciousness. Our law of recurrence automatically ceases to operate.

At the same time, however, this apex can be seen to bear within it a fundamental demand for irreversibility. In the case of an isolated human consciousness, really close introspection will already detect the radical incompatibility of 'total death' and 'reflective action'; this grows more pronounced and becomes glaringly obvious in the case of a collective, disinterested, human effort - and in consequence it tends to attain its maximum in a mankind that has become fully conscious both of the vast burden of its toil and of the value of its achievements.

It follows from this that, precisely in virtue of the process that draws him along, man sees himself drifting towards a final position in which :

a. organically, he cannot go further (even collectively) in complexity, nor therefore in consciousness;

b. psychically, he cannot accept the possibility of retreat;

c. and cosmically, he cannot even remain where he is, since in our 'entropic' universe, to cease to advance is to fall back.

This can mean only one thing, that when the curve of the phenomenon of man reaches this ultra-critical point of maturation, it breaks through the phenomenal system of the cosmos, and asserts the existence, ahead and beyond, of some 'extra-cosmic' pole : in this is integrally gathered into one and definitely consolidated all the reflective incommunicability that has successively been formed in the universe (and more particularly on earth) during the course of evolution.

Seen as we ascend, from our side of things, the peak of the evolutionary cone (Omega point) stands out at first on the horizon as a centre of purely immanent convergence: mankind totally reflected on itself On closer examination it is evident that if this centre is to hold together it presupposes behind it, and deeper than it, a transcendent - a divine - nucleus.

II. Second Stage : Evolutionary Creation and the Expectation of a Revelation

God (the transcendent aspect of Omega), in the first rough picture we form of him when we follow the road on which we set out, is seen to be, in short, not simply a hyper-centre but at the same time necessarily an auto-centre. Since through at least one, and that the most central, part of himself, he is transcendent (that is, independent of evolution), it means that in virtue of this centre of himself he subsists in himself, independently of time and space. This is as much as to say that, as experienced by us, he behaves as an ultra-centre of convergence which is not simply potential but eminently actual.

In consequence, it is the humano-cosmic phenomenon which, by reaction, is profoundly modified in our eyes. Initially, we could only see in it (or we could not but see in it) an autonomous spontaneous movement producing a rise of consciousness. We now find that this flux is a tide produced by the action of a supreme star. If the multiple is unified, it is ultimately because it is subject to a pull.

III. Third stage : The Christian Phenomenon and Faith in Incarnation

p. 147 - And it is at this point, at the heart of the phenomenon of man, that the problem of Christianity makes itself felt and demands our attention. Historically, starting with the Man-Christ, a phylum of religious thought appeared in the human mass, and its presence has never ceased to have an ever wider and deeper influence on the development of the noosphere. Nowhere, outside this remarkable current of consciousness, has the idea of God and the deliberate act of worship attained such clarity, such richness, such coherence and such flexibility. And all this has been sustained and fostered by the conviction of responding to an inspiration, a revelation, from on high. At the source of this mystical 'vortex' which possesses such remarkable vitality, should we not recognize the creative flux at its maximum intensity - the spark leaping the gap between God and the universe through a personal milieu? The word, in fact, that we were justified in expecting.

It is, in very truth, a crucial choice, and one upon which everything else depends. just, indeed, as our refusal to appreciate the organic value of the fact of society would (in the first stage of this dialectic) remove any reason for our believing in an ultra-human continuation of evolution, so here again our

p. 155 - Hitherto, in our anticipations of fuller-being we had proceeded entirely by the way of reason, our successive intuitions remaining within the scientific framework of 'hypothesis'. As soon, however, as we admit the reality of a reply coming from on high, we in some way enter the order of certainty. This, however, comes about only through a mechanism not of mere subject-to-object confrontation but of contact between two centres of consciousness: it is an act no longer of cognition but of recognition: the whole complex inter-action of two beings who freely open themselves to one another and give themselves ~ the emergence, under the influence of grace, of theological faith.

IV. Fourth Phase : The Living Church and Christ-Omega

Once we have recognized the fact of the Incarnation (not, I repeat, by the way of pure inference but by acceptance of an affirmation received from on high), then we are in a position again to return to what is more known and so see more deeply into the nature of the Christian phenomenon: not just the teaching Church, now, but the living Church: the seed of super-vitalization planted at the heart of the noosphere by the appearance in history of Jcsus Christ: not a parasitic organism, duplicating or distorting the evolutionary cone of man, but an even more interior cone, impregnating, taking possession of, and gradually uplifting the rising mass of the world, and converging concentrically towards the same apex.

This takes us in conclusion, by a final ascent to the less known, to a last and supreme definition of Omega point: the centre, at once one and Complex, in which, bound together by the person of Christ, may be seen enclosed one within the other (One might say) three progressively deeper centres: on the outside, the immanent ('natural') apex of the humano-cosmic cone; further in, at the middle, the immanent ('supernatural') apex of the 'ecclesial' or Christic cone; and finally, at the innermost heart, the transcendent~ triune, and divine centre: The complete Pleroma coming together under the mediating action of Christ-Omega.

The Place of Technology in a General Biology of Mankind

p.155 - Man has entered the age of industry, and this brings with it socialization. Let us examine the significance of this great fact which is inaugurating a new era.

Should we see in it a sort of dead weight bearing down on the shoulders of mankind, crushing it beneath the mass of processes it has discovered, something that calls to mind the gigantic phenomena of animal forms, the infinitely prolonged tusks of the great elephants, the huge shells which the molluscs build around themselves, to name only a couple?

Or, so far from being a parasitic adjunct, a meaningless step, may not the fact of industrial development have a profound significance; may there not be beneath it a biological reality which can serve as a signpost to our minds?

It is this reality that I hope to bring out by showing that the progress of industry is not accidental but constitutes an event that can entail the most far-reaching spiritual consequences.

For our starting point, let us go a long way back. If we are to understand the place of technical skills in human society, we must begin with the general progress of the world's evolution. We may look on this evolution as a development of life that includes a progressive rise of consciousness; consciousness for which, before it became reflective, the way was paved by the 'interiority' of things: things have a small-scale 'within'.

The rise of consciousness can be explained by a very simple and very clear law which I call the law of complexity and consciousness. It is necessary to emphasize the relationship between organic complexity and consciousness. For a long time there seemed to be an irreconcilable opposition between life and matter. It used to seem impossible to build a bridge between physics and biology, but a deeper appreciation of their relationship is now tending to eliminate that impossibility.

p. 156 - Why should we not apply the same idea to life, as follows: supposing we divide the world into two parts - on 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'?

p. 157 - Along the line of evolution or of the rise of consciousness, the most advanced term is man. It is in his brain that the two foci attain their obvious maximum of complexity, in that organ where thousands of millions of cells are grouped in such a way as to constitute a transmitting and receiving and coordinating centre of which we can form only a very imperfect idea. Can nature show us, outside the human brain, a quantity of organic matter contained in a smaller volume? Hardly! But can there possibly be anything more complex outside the individual man?

p. 158 - From the sociological point of view, mankind is not an aggregation, but forms a structural whole. The more closely science studies the problem of man, the more he seems to have appeared in the same way as the other species, in the form of a cluster of types all extremely close to one another. While, however, in the case of the other species, the different modalities of the form that has just come into being tend to diverge, man's behaviour, by reason of his high degree of psychism., is quite different. What happens is that at the level of man, the cluster folds in on itself around the planet, so that mankind forms a bulb-shaped fascicle in which individual leaves are recognizable. Numbers of potential species appear within this mass, continually forming a whole whose closing-in on itself produces a completely determined structure. The fact that man represents the system produced by the closing-up of all the leaves, would bring about another cluster. This is one reason for recognizing the natural element in the social phenomenon.

p. 158-159 - 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.

This cerebroid system, discussed by Julian Huxley, presents enormous differences in comparison with an individual brain, inasmuch as the latter is governed by a thinking ego; but it is nevertheless true that 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.

p. 160 -In quantity and intensity, I said: is it beyond the bounds of possibility that we should one day succeed in constructing certain instruments capable of recording the rays emitted by thinking brains, and channelling the whole of the energy of these highly charged brains in a given direction? From the psychic point of view the earth would seem to be becoming progressively hotter, continually even more incandescent. If we consider not its harmony but its general intensity, the earth has never been through a phase to equal the present.

We can appreciate, too, that this human energy is rising in quality. 1 am thinking of the phenomenon of the generalization of research among men. A century ago it was a practically unknown avocation. Today a large number of men have been enthralled by the daemon of discovery, and 'observation domes'- incomplete as yet- are being built which work together and develop common views. Here we have energy properly qualified as spiritual.

From this emerges a very simple idea: through man evolution is making a fresh bound. At this moment it is like those devices in which a first rocket is launched and then a second fires and continues the movement. That, when we look at the whole body of evolutionary phenomena, is how nature acts. It reached the point of producing man, while at the same time providing, through other launching pads, for the use of other energies. And now the phenomenon seems to be starting again towards a new rise of spirit.

If, through technology, evolution is making a fresh bound, at the same time it is becoming reflective. HuxIey 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 the 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.

p. 162 - Two ideologies now confront one another: a materialist ideology which defines its meaning as follows: organization is everything; in other words only the first of our two foci is truly important and real; the focus of consciousness is secondary. This view, which would appear basically to be that of marxism, seems to me completely inadequate as a solution of the problem. It does not determine the direction to be followed: maximum organization is not a direction, it is not necessarily the road towards the optimum. If everything is put into organization, the individual feels that he is jeopardizing something that is essential. To confide the whole problem of man to organization is to lead us to a total, inevitable, death, for the more complex the arrangement the more unstable and reversible it becomes. The individual man can advance only in an irreversible direction, for otherwise he loses his zest for action; and that is the supreme criterion by which technology must be judged.

The other, the ideology of the spirit, asserts: of the two foci$ it is the spiritual which is the more important and controls the other. From this point of view there is a complete change: we now have a means of judging the goodness or badness of arrangements. The individual is protected in the midst of technology because his focus of consciousness is still clearly recognized; life is safe, because while it is true that the focus of complexity is unstable, the other focus centres upon itself and acquires irreversibility.

This spiritual view must be pushed to its extreme limit. It is here that Christianity intervenes with a contribution of extreme value. It is, in fact, a spiritual ideology which offers a divine centre at once emerged and immersed; by its immersion this centre is in continuous contact with energy. The more one reflects on the deep harmony which the idea of incarnation displays with the relationships disclosed by the other phenomena, the more one becomes convinced that Christianity meets all the conditions necessary for it to become the religion of progress.

These conclusions are a complete confirmation of the relationship bctween technology and consciousness, the impact of technology being such as to make us develop powers of a grander order - of a spiritual order - and to force us to make up our minds on the question of a religion.

16 January 1947

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The Psychological Conditions of the Unification of Man

p. 171 - If there is one event that is insidiously and irresistibly engrossing our thoughts, adding every day a further complication, it is undoubtedly that of the unification of man. All around us the tide of the world's economic, political and psychic socialization is continually invading, and even submerging, the life of even the humblest.

What exactly does this strange and disturbing phenomenon represent and what is its purpose?

For a long time we could believe (we preferred to believe) that in mankind's increasing aggregation upon itself nothing was going on except a superficial adjustment of the thinking units in relation to one another, a process that would have no difficulty in finding its correct equilibrium.

Today, however, as a result of a more accurate survey of time and space, another idea is forming in our minds: that beneath the veil of the phenomenon of society, a fundamental drift of the universe towards ever more organized states may well be making itself felt: it is no longer the mere spatial movement of the earth (Galileo's) but the continuation, overhead, of an involution of the universe upon itself, an involution that first produced each one of us individually and is now collectively carrying on in the direction of the future its advance towards complexity and interiorization.

p. 179 - The world, our terrestrial world, is more and more irresistibly assuming before our eyes the form of a gigantic and gigantically complicated engine, ready for every sort of operation and every sort of conquest; but it will be able to function as such on only one condition: this is that if we are to get its mechanism under way, we must find and burn exactly the type and quality of fuel that suits it. In other words, if man's earth is still undecided today in its movement - if there is a danger that tomorrow it may come to a halt - this is simply for lack of a vision of sufficient width, a vision commensurate with the vastness and variety of the effort that has to be produced.

In these circumstances, mankind must in future devote an increasing part, the major part, of its attention - without, of course, neglecting material technology, but in an effort that goes hand in hand with its progress - to the maintenance and development of its psychic energies (the indispensable animating forces behind physical energy in a universe that has become a thinking universe); it must concentrate on the exploration and exploitation of its true, and truly noble, cosmic 'libido'.

That is why, in conclusion, I urge you to the quest for a faith that will truly serve as a driving force for the world, to pave the way for that faith and to distil its essence: nor must I forget to remind you that nowhere can the elements, the seed, or even the initial realization of that faith be found more distinctly (quite apart from any consideration of dogma, and simply from the point of view of psychology) than in a properly understood Christianity: Christianity, let me emphasize, which, more vigorously and realistically than any other spiritual current in sight, never ceases to persist practically alone in the world - in preserving and sharpening its ardent vision of a universe that is not impersonal and closed, but opens out, beyond the future, upon a divine centre.

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A Phenomenon of Counter-Evolution in Human Biology

p. 183 - By this phrase 'existential fear' I do not mean simply the fear that is accidentally experienced by this or that particularly timid individual man when he is confronted by material or social dangers which his life holds in store for him. Taking the words in a much wider and deeper sense, I use them here to designate the anguish not so much 'metaphysical' (as the expression goes) as 'cosmic' and biological, that may possess every man who is sensible enough - or rash enough - to try to locate and sound the abysses of the world around him.

This is a point which cannot be emphasized too repeatedly and forcibly. Within a universe that is in a state of genesis, what is being initiated by the intellectual phenomenon of reflection is not only a revolutionary change in the very mechanism of evolution (the appearance of foresight and invention); it is also a dangerous twofold moral crisis. In the first place it is undoubtedly a crisis of emancipation, stemming from the birth of freedom; but at the same time it is a crisis of panic, akin to the psychological shock of being suddenly woken in the middle of the night.

p. 185 - a. Fear in confrontation with Matter

It is, rightly enough, through the staggering vastness of its dimensions that the universe deals us the first and most violent shock that tends to overwhelm us. Of old, when the earth was still believed to be stationed at the centre of a small number of spheres revolving in a perfectly stable and well-ordered fashion around it, the starry heavens could still be contemplated with serene admiration. But since the whole of this fine system was robbed of its centre in our eyes, was expanded and flung explosively into space - since we began to reckon in thousands of light-years and in galaxies - since, too, at the other extreme from astronomical magnitudes, the immense has reappeared, for our better equipped vision, in the incomprehensible swarming of the infinitesimal - since all this opening of our eyes, the feeling of our absolute insignificance and the dismay that accompanies it are continually becoming more pronounced. Pascal's two abysses, now more accurately sounded, and complicated by two others which that great seer could not, in the seventeenth century, as yet distinguish: the abyss of number, a terrifying flood-tide all around us of bodies and particles; and the abyss of time, an endless axis around which are carried out the coilings and uncoilings of space ... Is there anything left of ourselves - or, rather, how can we fail to feel that we are simply annihilated, wiped out - in the midst of these enormous magnitudes and this vast multitude? It is without any doubt, as each one of us knows by experience, by the shadow of its ever growing immensity that the cosmos first introduces anxiety into the modem soul. Soon, however, this initial cause for spiritual unease is reinforced by another, even more subtle and dangerous: and this one derives from the way in which the cosmos presents itself to our experience as 'a scaled system'.

Sealed, I repeat. That the world should be so large and so multitudinous' that we can have the distressing feeling of vanishing in it, is already serious enough. But it would be much worse if we could feel not only that, because of our insignificance, we were lost in this ocean for a first time, but that we were lost again for a second time because we were hermetically scaled inside it. And is not that exactly what is now happening? Until the dawn of the present era, one could say that man still had the illusion of living 'in the open air' in a