© 2013 French-speaking Association of Readers of the Urantia Book
6. … For a century we have undergone, without really realizing it, a remarkable transformation in the intellectual order. Discovering, knowing, had always been a deep tendency of our nature. Do we not already recognize it in the Caveman? But it was only yesterday that this essential need to know was made explicit and transformed into an autonomous vital function, taking precedence in our existence over the preoccupation with eating and drinking. Well, if I am not mistaken, this phenomenon of individualization of our highest psychological functions, not only is far from having reached its limits on the terrain of pure thought, but it also tends to spread to a neighboring domain, which has remained practically formless and unexplored: the “terra ignota” of affective powers and love.
Paradoxically, love (I mean love in the strict sense of “passion”), despite (or perhaps precisely because of) its ubiquity and violence, has until now been left outside any rational systematization of Human Energy. Empirically, morals have managed to codify its use, come what may, in relation to the maintenance and material propagation of the race. But who has seriously thought that beneath this troubled power (and yet, as we knew, the animator of geniuses, the arts and all poetry) a formidable creative thrust remained in reserve, - such that Man would only be Man from the day he had not subdued it, but transformed, used, liberated it?.. Today, for our century eager to lose no force, and to get its hands on the most intimate springs of psychology, it seems that light is beginning to dawn. Love, as well as thought, is always growing in the Noosphere. The excess becomes more flagrant each day of its growing energies on the needs each day more restricted of human propagation. It is therefore that it tends, this love, in its fully humanized form, to fulfill a much broader function than the simple call to reproduction. Between man and woman, a specific and mutual power of awareness and spiritual fertilization probably still sleeps, which asks to be released in an irresistible surge towards all that is beauty and truth. It will awaken. Blossoming, I said, of an ancient power. The expression is undoubtedly too weak. Beyond a certain degree of sublimation, by the unlimited possibilities of intuition and interconnection that it brings with it, spiritualized love penetrates the unknown: it will join in our eyes, in the mysterious future, the expected group of new faculties and consciences.
… The union, the true union upwards, in the spirit, completes the constitution, in their own perfection, of the elements that it dominates. The union differentiates. By virtue of this fundamental principle, the elementary personalities can, and can only affirm themselves by accessing a higher psychic unity or Soul. But this however on one condition: that the higher Center to which they come to join without mixing has itself its autonomous reality. Since there is neither fusion nor dissolution of the elementary persons, the Center where they join must necessarily be distinct from them, that is to say have its own personality.
Hence finally, for the supreme Term towards which Human Energy tends, the following figure: “An organized plurality whose elements find in a paroxysm of mutual union and transparency the consummation of their own personality; the entire Body finding itself suspended from the unifying influence of a distinct Center of suprapersonalization.”
This last condition or restriction has considerable importance. It means in fact that the Noosphere physically requires, for its maintenance and its functioning, the existence in the Universe of a real Pole of psychic convergence: Center different from all the centers that it “over-centers” by assimilating them; Person distinct from all the people that it completes by uniting them. The World would not function if there did not exist, somewhere ahead of time and space, “a cosmic Omega point” of total synthesis. The consideration of this Omega will allow us to define more completely, in a last chapter, the secret nature of what we have called until now in a rather vague manner “Human Energy”.
¶ Love, higher form of human Energy
… In us and around us, we were able to conclude, the elements of the World are constantly becoming more personalized, by accession to a term, itself personal, of unification: so that from this term of ultimate confluence radiates, and towards this Term flows back, ultimately, the essential Energy of the World, - that which after having confusedly agitated the cosmic mass, emerges to form the Noosphere.
What name should we give to such a kind of influence? Only one: Love.
Love is, by definition, the word we use to designate attractions of a personal nature. Since, in the Universe become thinking, everything, in the end, moves in and towards the Personal, it is necessarily Love, a kind of love, which forms, and which will form more and more, in its pure state, the fabric of Human Energy.
Is it possible to verify a posteriori this conclusion which is imposed on us a priori by the conditions of functioning and maintenance of thinking activity on the surface of the Earth?
Yes, I imagine. And this in two different ways:
Psychologically first, by noting that love brought to a certain universal degree by the perception of the Omega Center is the only power capable of totalizing, without internal contradictions, the possibilities of human action.
Historically then, by observing that such universal love really presents itself to our experience as the higher term of a transformation already begun in the mass of the Noosphere.
Let’s try to show it.
¶ I) Love, the totalizing principle of human energy
Those who welcome with the most skepticism any suggestion tending to promote a general coordination of Thought on Earth are the first to recognize and deplore the state of division in which human forces vegetate: dust of acts in the individual, dust of individuals in society… Obviously, they say, an immense power finds itself neutralized and lost in
this agitation without order. But how do you expect such ashes to ever cohere? Already naturally divided within themselves, human particles still repel each other without remedy. You can perhaps force them mechanically onto each other. But infusing them with a common soul is physically unrealizable.
The strength and weakness of all the objections made to the possibility of some future unification of the world seem to me to be due to the fact that they insidiously exaggerate appearances that are too real without wanting to take into account certain new factors already perceptible in Humanity. Pluralists always reason as if no principle of connection existed, or tended to exist in Nature outside of the vague or superficial relations usually considered by “common sense” and sociology. They are basically jurists and fixists who can imagine nothing around them other than what seems to them to have always been.
But let us see what will happen in our souls, if only there emerges, at the moment regulated by the march of Evolution, the perception of an animated Center of universal convergence. Let us imagine (this is not a fiction, we will say it soon) a man who has become conscious of his personal relations with a supreme Personnel, to whom he is led to join by the entire play of cosmic activities. In such a subject and from him, it is inevitable that a process of unification is initiated, marked step by step by the following stages: totalization of each operation in relation to the individual; totalization of the individual in relation to himself; finally totalization of individuals in the human collective. — All this “impossible” being realized naturally under the influence of love.
a) Totalization, through the love of individual acts
In the divided state in which pluralists consider us (that is to say, outside the conscious influence of Omega), we most often act only through a tiny portion of ourselves. Whether he eats or works, whether he does mathematics or crosswords, Man engages in his works only partially, through one or the other of his faculties only. His senses function, or his limbs, or his reason, but not the heart itself. Human action, but not the action of the whole Man, the Scholastic would say. This is why a scholar or a thinker, after a life of sublime efforts, can find himself impoverished, dried up, — disappointed: on inanimate objects his intelligence has worked, but not his person. He has given himself: he has not been able to love.
Let us now observe the same forms of activity in the light of Omega. Omega, the one in whom everything converges, is reciprocally the one from whom everything radiates. It is impossible to place it as a focus at the summit of the Universe without at the same time diffusing its presence to the depths of the least step of Evolution. What does this mean, if not that, for the one who has seen it, everything, however humble it may be, provided that it places itself in the line of progress, warms up, lights up, comes to life, and consequently becomes the object of total adhesion. What was cold, dead, impersonal, for the one who does not see, is charged for those who see, not only with life, but with a life stronger than their own, — so that they feel themselves taken and assimilated, in acting, much more than they themselves take and assimilate. Where the first encounters only an object with limited reaction, the second can spread out the totality of their powers, — to love passionately, like a contact or a caress, the most obscure of their tasks. In the external mechanism of the operation, nothing has changed. But in the fabric of the action, in the intensity of the gift, what a difference! All the distance between a manducation and a communion.
And this is the first step in totalization. Within a World with a convergent personal structure, where attraction becomes love, Man discovers that he can give himself without limits to everything he does. With the universe, in the least of his acts, he can make integral contact, through the entire surface and depth of his being. Everything has become complete nourishment for him.
b) Totalization through the love of the individual for himself
That, under the animating influence of Omega, each of our particular gestures can become total is already a marvelous use of Human Energy. But here, barely sketched, this first transfiguration of our activities tends to extend into another even more profound metamorphosis. By the very fact that they become total, each for itself, our operations are logically led to totalize themselves, taken all together in a single act. Let’s see how.
Immediately, the effect of universal love, made possible by Omega, is to underpin each of our actions with a fundamental identity of passionate interest and giving. What will be the influence of this common ground (one could say: of this new climate) on our inner life? Will it dissolve us in its gentle warmth? Blunt the clarity of future objectives in an atmosphere of mirage? Distract us from the tangible? (to be continued)
Teilhard de Chardin
