[ad_1]
“Matter delights in music, and have become Bach,” Ronald Johnson wrote in a surprising prose poem. The way it did — how we turned, within the poetic phrases of the physicist Richard Feynman, “atoms with consciousness… matter with curiosity” — would be the supreme thriller of existence. And but right here we’re, every of us having triumphed over staggering odds in an effort to exist in any respect, all of us shifting by the sliver of spacetime we have now been allotted as materials creatures animated by wealthy non secular lives, ruled by entropy, craving for eternity.
Few folks have given voice to this existential stress between our materiality and our spirituality extra superbly than the French paleontologist, Jesuit priest, and thinker Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Might 1, 1881–April 10, 1955) — an unusual bridge determine between the scientific and the sacred, who felt deeply at dwelling on this planet of gravity and gluons, and took half within the discovery of the Peking Man fossil that helped illuminate the evolutionary historical past of our species, however who additionally thought deeply and wrote superbly about probably the most immaterial and transcendent areas of our expertise.
An epoch earlier than the poetic physicist Alan Lightman launched the notion of non secular materialism, Teilhard de Chardin took up these questions in The Coronary heart of Matter (public library), titled after his lengthy autobiographical essay chronicling his non secular awakening to the surprise of actuality and materiality.
In language of ravishing vibrancy and vitality, he contours his providing:
I shall strive… to indicate how, ranging from the purpose at which a spark was first struck, some extent that was constructed into me congenitally, the World progressively caught hearth for me, burst into flames; how this occurred all throughout my life, and because of my entire life, till it fashioned an amazing luminous mass, lit from inside that surrounded me.
This changing into, he argues, is accessible to each individual totally awake to their very own life and the lifetime of the Earth:
Inside each being and each occasion there was a progressive enlargement of a mysterious inside readability which transfigured them… Crimson gleams of Matter, gliding imperceptibly into the gold of Spirit, in the end to grow to be remodeled into the incandescence of a Universe that’s Particular person… The Diaphany of the Divine on the coronary heart of a glowing Universe, as I’ve skilled it by contact with the Earth — the Divine radiating from the depths of a blazing Matter.
On the coronary heart of this luminous totality, Teilhard de Chardin locations what he calls “the sense of plentitude.” He writes:
To be utterly at dwelling and utterly joyful, there have to be the information that “One thing, important by nature” exists, to which all the pieces else is not more than an adjunct or maybe an decoration… which it’s inconceivable (as soon as one has skilled it) to confuse with another non secular emotion, whether or not pleasure in information or discovery, pleasure in creation or in loving: and this not a lot as a result of it’s totally different from all these feelings, however as a result of it belongs to a better order and accommodates all of them.
Trying again on the best discoveries of science — “the huge cosmic realities (Mass, Permeability, Radiation, Curvatures, and so forth) by which the Stuff of Issues is disclosed to our expertise” — he sighs:
I discover it troublesome to specific how a lot I really feel at dwelling in exactly this world of electrons, nuclei, waves, and what a way of plentitude and luxury it offers me.
Observing that the fruits of the non secular is to be present in “what’s most tangible and most concrete within the Stuff of Issues,” he displays on his personal awakening between the ages of thirty and fifty:
Even on the peak of my non secular trajectory I as by no means to really feel at dwelling except immersed in an Ocean of Matter.
[…]
Matter and Spirit: these had been not two issues, however two states or two features of 1 and the identical cosmic Stuff, in line with whether or not it was checked out or carried additional within the course wherein…. it’s changing into itself or within the course wherein it’s disintegrating.
Teilhard de Chardin closes his lengthy reflection with a poetic “Hymn to Matter” — a type of secular prayer for and to actuality, wherein he writes:
Blessed be you, harsh matter, barren soil, cussed rock: you who yield solely to violence, you who pressure us to work if we’d eat.
Blessed be you, perilous matter, violent sea, untameable ardour: you who except we fetter you’ll devour us.
Blessed be you, mighty matter, irresistible march of evolution, actuality ever new-born; you who, by consistently shattering our psychological classes, pressure us to go ever additional and additional in our pursuit of the reality.
Blessed be you, common matter, immeasurable time, boundless ether, triple abyss of stars and atoms and generations: you who by overflowing and dissolving our slender requirements or measurement disclose to us the size of God.
Blessed be you, impenetrable matter: you who, interposed between our minds and the world of essences, trigger us to languish with the need to pierce by the seamless veil of phenomena.
Blessed be you, mortal matter: you who someday will endure the method of dissolution inside us and can thereby take us forcibly into the very coronary heart of that which exists.
[…]
I bless you, matter, and also you I acclaim… I acclaim you because the common energy which brings collectively and unites, by which the multitudinous monads are sure collectively and wherein all of them converge on the way in which of the Spirit.
[…]
This I now perceive.
If we’re ever to succeed in you, matter, we should, having first established contact with the totality of all that lives and strikes right here beneath, come little by little to really feel that the person shapes of all we have now laid maintain on are melting away in our fingers, till lastly we’re at grips with the single essence of all consistencies and all unions.
[…]
Increase me up then, matter, to these heights, by battle and separation and demise; increase me up till, in the end, it turns into attainable for me… to embrace the universe.
Complement The Coronary heart of Matter with Leo Tolstoy on science, spirituality, and our seek for that means and John Burroughs’s splendid century-old manifesto for spirituality within the age of science, then revisit the pioneering neuroscientist Charles Scott Sherrington on surprise and the spirituality of nature.
[ad_2]
Source link