Photo by Dylan Katz from The University of Calgary
Today is Remembrance Day, a day to honour our war dead and all those who have served in
war in pursuit of peace. It is a rainy day in Victoria with intervals of clear sunshine. Now that the
sun is getting up later and setting earlier, the movement in our reality is into more darkness,
with beautiful sometimes spectacular flashes of light. People I see walking about in Victoria do
not seem to be sleepwalking. I feel that many people are awake and excited about the change
that is upon us now. Something new.
For seven weeks this fall I participated once a week with about a hundred other people in a live
video course called: ‘Science, Spirituality and the Noosphere.’ Our teachers were Matthew Fox,
“Renowned Spiritual Pioneer and Author of more than 35 Books,” and Brian Thomas Swimme,
“Professor, Author and Director of “the Third Story of the Universe.” Matthew and Brian say
that we are in a ‘Renaissance,’ a rebirth that is coming out of our civilization’s past but is
actively creating a new future which is based on spiritual initiative.
Brian uses the word, ‘Cosmogenesis ‘. He says that our calling is to live with the tension of
earth’s shift to its being a ‘primordial intelligence.’ Our hope is that we will trust the primordial
intelligence of the universe enough that the powers of creativity will envelop us.
Matthew says that our rebirth based on spiritual energy has resonance with our biblical
understanding that God loved us from before the beginning. He says that there is resonance
between the scientific discovery Hubble made, which is that, from the beginning, in some sense
the universe knew where it was going, and the mystical understanding that reality cannot be
divorced from the cosmic. Our growing in consciousness is our awareness kinship.
Along with our feelings of excitement around this work of coming into consciousness, we
wonder how much of the daily news showing horrific barbarous acts of war and hatred we are
called to witness. Karl Barth, perhaps the most significant protestant theologian of the last
century, told his students to first read the daily newspaper and then live out their faith. But Karl
Barth did not have television. If we are going to witness truthfully to what is going on in the
world, are we to witness what comes across our tv screens into our homes? Friends we know
who have lived through previous wars in the middle east say that the film footage shown in
middle eastern countries is even more graphically horrific than is ours here in North America.
We also question the truth of what is being shown us. These things are challenges for us.
Some of us understood as we grew up that part of our task in the presence of horrors of human
violence towards our brothers and sisters is ’to not turn away.’ As we more closely examine our
history of turning away from what have been called “inconvenient truths,” we hope we will
become stronger in our compassion and ability ‘to not turn away.’ Our growing understanding
of and participation in the “Noosphere” seems to be a place where we will grow in relationship,
kinship and compassion.
Brian used the word. ’bond.’ to describe the concept of Noosphere. (I know the term, ‘bond of
Love’ to describe the Holy Spirit in Christian thought and ritual.) Brian told us that, in 1923,
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin realized that humanity was giving birth to a planetary mind, a super
organism spread over all the earth, a sphere of human thought. We are now in the process of
understanding the Noosphere and shaping it.
Matthew says that the question for us is, since we are participating in this thinking layer of
consciousness, how can we extend it to awaken humanity to a cosmic sense of ‘all.’
The ideas I have shared here are from Module one of ‘Science, Spirituality and the Noosphere.’ I
hope they are helpful for your journey. Thank you for reading.
A friend sent me the following poem by Father Thomas Keating. It is a prayer of letting go.
The Welcoming Prayer (by Father Thomas Keating):
Note. See my older blogs for “My Early Experience with the Cosmic or Integral Conscious
Movement” and “Building the Earth,” which is about Teilhard de Chardin.
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