PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN--BEYOND THE CROSSWORD PUZZLE

I don't know if Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) ever attempted a crossword puzzle but I do think that his life and writings dealt with puzzles in much the same way we try to solve them. Crossword puzzles are traditionally laid out in a grid of horizontal and vertical rows and solving the puzzle is a matter of following the clues. In some puzzles there is a good bit of wordplay where the clues are puzzles in themselves and anagrams, homophones, and embedded words are often employed. When I was thinking about Chardin's life and works I envisioned part of his life lived on the horizontal and part lived on the vertical. Chardin was a Jesuit priest whose career as a paleontologist kept him on the ground, excavating and exploring, and eventually contributing to the discovery of Peking Man (1934), one of our ancestors in the Australopithecus line (believed to be about 750,000 years old). There were many puzzles for him to solve as he worked away at various sites in Asia, dusting and digging. His philosophical musings, most especially in his The Phenomenon of Man (1955), were the vertical component of his puzzle-solving. The vertical in his life combined his background in paleontology and his priestly life within the Catholic tradition. The Church was threatened in some way by his innovative ideas and didn't allow any of his written works to be published in his lifetime. He also was criticized by the scientific community for not being rigorous enough in his paleontological work (he was at one point involved in the hoax of the Piltdown Man) and so he worked away, not really fitting into any rigidly constructed community. It is this outlier aspect to his life that draws me to his story to this day, having been exposed to his writings when I was in high school. I think, in retrospect, that I was attracted to him because of how he thought.

How we think is far more important than what we think at any given moment. We can learn so much about our cognitive powers as human beings if we focus more on how to think. Once we have committed to the work of thinking (and it does take energy and work), then we can more clearly determine what to think and to discern the value of what others want us to think. With Chardin, I was struck by how he thought about both the horizontal and the vertical. Neuroscientists believe that one of our first cognitive experiences in life is to perceive how each of us occupies space. We build on how it is that we are standing here in this place and move to that place over there. We know about the boundaries of glasses that hold water, about our references to our parents as we are held and contained by them. Space/time becomes a single concept for us and we never really think about it much, if at all. But the embeddedness of space/time affects how we think about the world. For Chardin, there was the duality of external life in the world (his paleontology) and the inner life, the sense of some ephemeral presence or place that didn't have the clearly defined borders of materiality.

The horizontal aspect of life brings to mind the progress of history and how we measure the occurrence of events in the flow of time. We go back and forth in our mind, visiting memories stored in our mental banks. We contemplate the past and look to the future, as if they were solid entities. Chardin believed that human existence was more than milestones in history but was, in fact, an evolutionary process about which there was an element of impermanence. The slow incremental changes of evolution are an ongoing process about which there are no fixed or predictable effects. Even though his field work identified punctuations in the history of human evolution, nothing about them at the moment of their appearance was predictable. And what they led to in the next iteration was also unpredictable, as was the next step into the future of a species. Along the horizontal line of evolution there were many subtle alterations in the physical appearance and capabilities of what was to become the human species we are accustomed to know today.

If one can think of evolution as a journey along a horizontal line, then one can envision all of humanity in all of history traveling individual paths, step by step. Once we enter the period of our history in which individuals begin to assert themselves as singular entities and no longer just part of an evolving crowd, then we take on distinct identities, we become aware of the effects our egos have on who we think we are and what we do. Our lives continue to be linear and we assume they will remain so as we navigate space/time. Human activities are then movements toward something; we are working towards something we think of as progress. Each of us has a particular history, a history of memories, experiences and achievements. We feel we are on a horizontal path that we picture on a line from birth to death. Within our history we have all the individuals that have contributed to our appearance on earth. We have a lineage of ancestors who have lived along the same horizontal line we are presently treading.

Chardin had a very broad perspective of space/time that included not only the horizontal lines of the crossword puzzle, but also the vertical lines. The vertical lines were connected to the horizontal ones in an evolutionary continuum. This is how he thought about the human existential experience. And we, with our developed sense of our own space/time, also appreciate the differences between our horizontal concept of life and its vertical component. Think for a moment how we refer to aspirations as desires for “high” achievements, how we grow “up,” how we look “up” to our elders, how we sometimes look up when we pray, how we grow from a baby on all fours to the vertical position (and what that means for our ability to accomplish what we do, how we run and climb “up”), how we imagine a world beyond the horizontal one we inhabit (this thought is especially contemporary as we celebrate the 50^th anniversary of the Apollo 11 flight to the moon and what this has meant for further interplanetary exploration--”up” in space beyond earth's atmosphere), and how we think of a transcendent presence some refer to as God (and the references to the devil “down under,” still on the vertical). It was this last reference to God that Chardin incorporated into his thinking about evolution. Just as there is a horizontal element to our evolutionary past, there is also a vertical extension to it. He felt humans were evolving physically in a paleontological context, culturally in an anthropological sense, but also evolving in an upward spiritual context as well.

Chardin envisioned the processes of life, horizontal and vertical, as complex systems of interdependent forces that had implications for the earth and its environs as well as for man's consciousness, leading ultimately to a place of supreme consciousness he called the Omega Point. All of these events fall on a continuous line of development where oscillations between the horizontal consciousness and the vertical occur all the time. We are inside ourselves courting our egos, then we are back in the world engaged with others on the horizontal paths. Cognitive neuroscientists are now able to delineate specific areas of the brain where those oscillations are believed to occur. These areas correspond to how we are able to focus our attention in meditation, for instance. The circuits involved in concentrative attention are intentional and voluntary and focused on singular items, objects, and ideas and are believed to be spread symmetrically in the brain itself. Other defined circuits get us “out of ourselves” and are focused on “the other.” They are reflexive, automatic, and unconscious (open on all sides and often associated with upward gazing). These occur primarily in the right brain, the hemisphere often described as more receptive and less analytical and ordering like the left brain functions. Of course, circuits overlap and more sophisticated technology will reveal more of their interdependence as time goes along and our knowledge of the brain evolves. But if the horizontal is an egocentric path, then the vertical is allocentric or other-directed. It is perhaps possible to see that the priest in Chardin envisioned both the horizontal and the vertical as essential components of human evolution. Thinking in this way offers us the opportunity to see self and other as interdependent and parts of a greater unity, no matter one's religious, scientific, or spiritual affiliation or persuasion.

What is also significant about Chardin's work is how it relates to our present circumstances. I believe that all the notables of history that have presented different ways of thinking make available to us methodologies that impact how we see our own world. If one believes, as Chardin did, that we are in a process of continual evolution and that humans are not the end-point of that process (and not the versions we now see around us, but actually seeing ourselves as a species with a history that extends back farther than 750,000 years ago), then are we not humbled by how far we have come? Are we not awed by the technological achievements that have brought us such marvels as computers and spaceflight?

If one thinks that human consciousness and the human brain have co-evolved with our physical bodies, then it seems possible that our spiritual beings are also a part of that process, an ongoing process as is all of evolution. If one does not believe in the process of evolution, then how one thinks will affect what one thinks of enveloping life. Chardin offers us his version of how to think about human life and how to explain what he has observed about its development over time. How do we think about a whole life with horizontal and vertical components, with inner and external aspects, with physical (soma—tangible, linear) and spiritual (psyche—intangible, non-linear) elements? What do we notice and how does that help us think about the rich experience of existence? Are humans all about ego or is there some accommodation for “the other”? Are we locked into Buber's I/It or is there also an I/Thou part of who we are and how we see the world? These questions have no fixed answers but are only meant to generate deeper thought about the crossword puzzle that is each of our lives. There are the ups and downs and also the linear clues offered to us. There are the dualities that challenge us to see our lives as components of a whole piece.

Chardin somehow needed to describe his vision of the world, how to think about the world, by using newly minted words, another way to describe how he thought and another feature of crossword puzzles. His wedding of the horizontal and the vertical he called “convergence,” a balance of trends to oppose fragmentation of soma and psyche and to support differentiation in both spheres. Noosphere was the sphere of mind. Noogenesis was the gradual evolution of mind or mental properties. Cosmogenesis is the process by which the original proto-humans (paleontology again) became more truly human as we know humans today. Complexification referred to the genesis of increasingly elaborate life systems (and foretelling of the discipline of complex adaptive systems that now extends from ecosystems to artificial intelligence). It is no wonder that these innovative words reflected Chardin's admiration for the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, one of his favorite writers and a poet whose own word combinations could be described as “complexifications.”

If how one thinks is important, and I think it is vital to our ability to discern the truths of our existence, then it is worth the hard work and the expenditure of energy to apply broad methods of thought to the spheres and realms of human experience. No one method is necessarily more fruitful than another, but developing a broad perspective that includes as many vectors and streams of inquiry as possible is the only way we will avoid the pitfalls of opinions, fixed ideologies, and the resultant prejudices that now lead us down the path of fragmentation. Chardin offers just such a methodology for examining our lives with an upward gaze from the horizontal to the vertical, to a point of ultimate clarity. Who wouldn't want to try to solve this existential crossword puzzle? Who wouldn't want to explore the capacities of the human psyche and soma? Are we up to the challenge?