© 2013 French-speaking Association of Readers of the Urantia Book
Immediately, the effect of universal love, made possible by Omega, is to underlie each of our actions 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 individual to absorb us in a confused sense of the Universal?.. — To fear it, one would have to forget once again that, in the direction of the spirit, union differentiates. It is true, no doubt, that if I have discovered Omega, all things become in some way the same thing to me; so that, whatever I do, I can have the impression of doing the same thing. But this fundamental unity has nothing in common with a dissolution in the homogeneous. In the first place, it accentuates, far from weakening it, the relief of the elements that it brings together: because Omega, the only one desired, is formed before our eyes and offered to our contact, only in the perfection of the elementary progress by which Evolution is experimentally woven. — But there is more. Love does not only impregnate the Universe like an oil that revives its colors. It does not simply connect in a common transparency the opaque dust of our experiences. It is a true synthesis that it operates on the grouped bundle of our faculties. And this is ultimately the point that it is important to understand well.
In the superficial course of our existences, it is a different thing to see or to think, to understand or to love, to give or to receive, to grow or to diminish, to live or to die. But what will become of all these oppositions when, in Omega, their diversity is discovered as the infinitely varied modalities of the same universal contact? Without vanishing in the least in their roots, they will tend to combine in a common result, where their plurality, always recognizable, springs forth in an ineffable richness. Not interference, but resonance. Why should we be surprised? Do we not know, to a lesser degree of intensity, a phenomenon quite similar in our experience? When a man nobly loves a woman with that vigorous passion which exalts the being above itself, the life of this man, his power to create and to feel, his entire Universe, find themselves distinctly contained at the same time as sublimated, in the love of this woman. And yet woman, however necessary she may be for man to reflect, reveal, communicate and “personalize” the World to him, is not yet the center of the World!
If therefore the love of an element for the element proves so powerful to merge (without confusing it) into a single impression the multitude of our perceptions and our emotions, what will not be the vibration drawn from our beings by their encounter with Omega?..
In truth, each of us is called to respond, with a pure and incommunicable harmonic, to the universal Note. When, through the progress in our hearts of the Love of the Whole, we feel extending, above the diversity of our efforts and our desires, the exuberant simplicity of an impulse where the innumerable nuances of passion and action mingle and exalt themselves, without getting lost, it is then that, within the mass formed by Human Energy, we will each approach the fullness of our efficiency and our personality.
c) Totalizations through love, of individuals in Humanity.
The transition from the individual to the collective is the current and crucial problem of Human Energy. And we must recognize that the first steps taken towards its solution only increase our awareness of its difficulties. On the one hand, the ever tighter network of economic ties, combined with some undeniable biological determinism, inevitably presses us against each other. On the other hand, during this compression, we believe we feel the most precious part of ourselves being lost: our spontaneity and our freedom.
Totalitarianism and Personalism: would these two functions, contrary to the predictions of the theory, necessarily vary in the opposite direction of each other? And do we have to choose, to build the future (since we must move forward), between the Charybdis of collectivism and the Scylla of anarchism? between the symbiosis which mechanizes and the dispersion which devitalizes? between the termite mound and Brownian motion?.. It seems that the dilemma, obvious for a long time to clear-sighted minds, has just suddenly entered the field of public consciousness. No Review, nor Congress, where, for a year, the question has been raised. And without the elements of a good answer, alas, ever being clearly posed.
In my opinion, the reason for the troubling failures suffered over the past century by humanity in its efforts to organize itself is not to be found in some impossibility of nature, inherent in the attempted operation, - but in the fact that attempts at grouping continue by inverting the natural order of the factors of the union envisaged. Let me explain:
Totalize without depersonalizing. Save both the whole and the elements. Everyone agrees on this dual goal to achieve. But how do current social groups (democrats, communists, fascists) arrange the values that they agree in theory to want to preserve? Always by considering the person as secondary and transitory, and by placing at the head of the programs the primacy of pure totality. In all the systems of human organization that confront each other before our eyes, it is implied that the final state towards which the Noosphere tends is a body without an individualized soul, an organism without a face, a diffuse Humanity, — an Impersonal.
Now this starting point once admitted, vitiates, to the point of making it impracticable, the whole subsequent progress of the operation. In a process of synthesis, the character finally imprinted on the unified terms is necessarily the same one which characterizes the active principle of the union. The crystal geometrizes, the cell animates the matter which approaches it. How, if the Universe tends finally to become something, would it keep in itself the place for someone? If the summit of human evolution is regarded as of an impersonal nature, the elements which accept it will inevitably see, in spite of all efforts to the contrary, their personality decrease under its influence. And this is exactly what happens. Servants of material progress or of racial entities do their best to emerge in freedom: they are fatally sucked in and assimilated by the determinisms which they construct. Their own mechanisms mechanize them. The true Hindu Karma. — And, at this moment, all that remains to control the workings of Human Energy is the use of brutal force, — the force that, very logically, we would like to start making us worship again today.
Now this is a betrayal of the Spirit, at the same time as a serious error in human technique. In a system formed of conscious elements there can be no cohesion except on the basis of immanence. Not the force above us, but Love, — and therefore, to begin the recognized existence of an Omega which makes possible a universal Love.
The vice, we have said, of modern social doctrines is to present an impersonal Humanity to the ambitions of human effort. What would happen the day when, in place of this blind divinity, we would recognize the presence of a conscious center of total convergence? Then, by a determinism inverse to that against which we struggle, the individualities, caught in the irresistible current of human totalization, would feel reinforced by the very movement which brings them together. The more they would group themselves under a Personal, the more by force they would themselves become personal. And this quite naturally, without effort, by virtue of the properties of Love.
We have already insisted several times on this capital truth that “union differentiates”. Love is only the concrete expression of this metaphysical principle. Let us imagine an Earth where humans would be above all (and even in a sense, only) interested in realizing their global accession to a passionately desired universal being, in which each would recognize, in what is most incommunicable in his neighbor, a living participation. In such a World, coercion would become useless to maintain individuals in the order most favorable to action, — to orient them, within a free competition, towards better combinations, — to make them accept the restrictions and sacrifices imposed by a certain human selection, — to decide them, finally, not to waste their power to love but to sublimate it jealously with a view to the final union. Under these conditions, Life would finally escape (supreme liberation) from the tyranny of material coercions; and an ever freer personality would be constructed without contradiction within the Totality.
“Love one another.” These words were spoken two thousand years ago. But today they ring again in our ears with a very different tone. For centuries, charity and fraternity could only be presented to us as a code of moral perfection, or as a practical method for reducing the friction and pains of earthly life. Now, since the existence of the Noosphere has been revealed to our minds, on the one hand, and the vital necessity in which we find ourselves to save it, on the other, the voice that speaks has become more imperious. It no longer says only: “Love one another to be perfect,” but it adds: “Love one another or you will perish.” “Realistic” minds may well smile at the dreamers who speak of a Humanity cemented and clad, no longer with brutality, but with love. They may well deny that a maximum of physical power can coincide with a maximum of gentleness and goodness. This skepticism and criticism cannot prevent the theory and experience of Spiritual Energy from being in agreement in warning us that we have reached a decisive point of human revolution, where the only way forward is in the direction of a common passion, of a “conspiracy.”
To continue to place our hopes in a social order obtained by external violence would simply be tantamount to us abandoning all hope of pushing the Spirit of the Earth to its limits.
Now, expression of an irresistible and infallible movement like the Universe itself, Human Energy cannot be prevented by any obstacle from freely reaching the natural end of its evolution.
So, despite all the failures and all the improbabilities, we are necessarily approaching a new age when the world will throw off its chains and finally surrender to the power of its internal affinities.
Either we must question the value of everything around us. Or we must believe, without limits, in the possibility, and I will now add, in the necessary consequences of a universal love.
What are these consequences?
Until now, in the study of the social totalizing love of human Energy, we have mainly considered the singular property that it possesses of joining and articulating, without mechanizing them, the thinking molecules of the Noosphere. But this is only the negative facade of the phenomenon.
Not only does love have the virtue of uniting without depersonalizing, but it ultra-personalizes by uniting. — From the pass we have reached, what horizons appear before us, in the sky of Humanity?
Here we must first look back, to the point where we left the individual human nucleus, at the end of its transformation by love. Under the influence of Omega, we were saying, each particular soul becomes capable of exhaling itself in a single act, where the innumerable plurality of its perceptions, its operations, its sufferings, its desires pass without confusion. Well, it is towards an analogous metamorphosis, but of a much higher order, that the sum of the elementary energies constituting the global mass of Human Energy seems to be directed. — We have followed, in the individual, the gradual taking of emotions, aspirations, acts in an inexpressible operation “suigeneris”, which is all these things at once, and something even more. It is the same phenomenon, on an incomparably larger scale, which tends to continue, under the same influence of Omega, in the whole of terrestrial Thought. And in fact, all of Humanity operating and undergoing at the same time, by the surface of its gropings, the Center towards which it converges: - the same passionate fluid running through and connecting, at each moment, the free diversity of attitudes, points of view, efforts each represented, in the Universe, by a particular element of the human Myriad; - the multitude, brought to their peak, of individual oppositions harmonizing in the profound simplicity of a single desire: what is all this, if not the genesis of a collective and unique act, in which, under the only conceivable form of a love, would be realized, as they approach their maturation, that is to say their final confluence, the powers of personality included in the Noosphere?
The totalization, in total love, of total Human Energy. The ideal glimpsed in dreams by the technicians of the Earth.
This is, psychologically, what love can do, if carried to a universal degree. But, does this miracle really tend to come true?
If so, some traces of this prodigious transformation must be perceptible in History. — Can we recognize them? That is what remains for me to seek and show.
(to be continued)
Teilhard de Chardin