Arquivo para March, 2021
(Re) Building the Earth
17
Mar
Chardin’s text, dated at the medium of his life in the 30´s and compiled and published
after 1958 (are several extracts), said only in Building the Earth, but there was still no strong environmental imbalance, the growth of atomic plants (nuclear energy was used in the war for bombs) and the danger of a global cataclysm, threats present today, in addition to social imbalance.
He already knew about the crisis of democracy and the growth of totalitarian systems (fascism and communism), defined his belief in the future in three ways: passion for the people, for the universal and for the future itself, and seeing the planet as an organism gave its sentence: “Each cell thinks, due to the fact that it is free, that it is authorized to erect a center for itself” (Chardin, 1958), however it verified the dispersion of this false intellectual and social liberalism.
See, however, the contradictions in dialogue, these forces do not have the “merely destructive power, each one of them contains positive factors… unless these components talk, each of them contains positive components… each of them is the world itself is the world itself that defends itself and wants to reach the light ”, of course it is necessary to avoid conflicts of wars and extremism.
In the sense it gives to the “spirit of the Earth”, it was written combining extracts from 1931, while traveling through the Pacific Ocean, defined this spirit as “the passionate sense of the common destiny that drags the thinking fraction of Life further and further away” , and it gives meaning to our conscience in growing circles of families, homelands, races, discover at last that the only true human unit, natural and real, is the Spirit of the Earth ”.
Edgar Morin in his book “Homeland” created a similar concept as planetary citizenship, but it is necessary to give a “common soul” to this idea of a planet as everyone’s home.
In Chardin’s cosmology, he works insistently on this theme in his Noosphere (this thinking layer that creates this spirit capable of involving everyone), he will say that “love is the most universal, the most formidable and the most mysterious of the cosmic energies”, today with so many poles and so many forces in conflict, it is necessary to rediscover this essential point of convergence.
On the path of unity, “to the wonders of a common soul”, he wrote “these brief and pale ones must make us understand that the formidable power of joy and action still lies within human unity”, to rediscover this value and this cosmic force, like the defines, it is our destiny.
To develop this thought in the rest of the book, he puts in the foreground: “to our concerns an organization and a systematic exploration of our universe understood as a true human homeland” and he will say in Beijing 1937 writing, what are the conditions of this human energy capable to direct “collective emotions” towards a common force, and capable of repelling the worst of the negative energies: war.
Chardin, T. (1958) Construire la Terre. Paris: Editions du Soleil.
Healing, the soul and the law
16
Mar
The pandemic follows an even more dangerous path, which is the
production of new variants or new strains, all humanity wants a cure, even the so-called denialists, we all suffer and because the cure does not come, what is missing for science, or for understanding the virus that does not happen, in fact we have other diseases that are social comorbidities: hunger, misery, ignorance and intolerance that do not give respite too, and the disease of the soul that is not talked about.
Ah it was always like that, we have no other solution, we talked in the previous post about the next pandemic, if we do not cure ourselves, of course, there is a different and emblematic case.
In 1977, Ali Maow Maalin, who was a hospital cook in Somalia, caught smallpox, he didn’t know, but he was the last person in the world to naturally contract the disease, she infected 1 billion people and killed 300 million in the 20th century, when he was cured he went down in history, smallpox was considered eradicated, two things were needed: the vaccine and managing the disease.
Management must be global and WHO must play an essential role in this struggle, identify outbreaks and act quickly and firmly to prevent infectious diseases from spreading.
The disease that prevents this is the disease of the soul, we are almost always in radicalization poles and we do not allow a fraternal and general advance of all countries and in all countries by WHO, this problem of the human “soul” will not be solved only by law, politics and repression, it is necessary to educate.
Religions could play an essential role in this, created to make the human family the daughter of one Father and thus all his children, limited as we are in the face of sanitary and social diseases, cannot be fulfilled because the human soul remains ill, and only “law ”does not solve the need to change the mentality, only radicalization will produce more dictatorships and less fraternity.
n the Bible passage that Jesus heals a paralytic, and he goes out taking the bed, the Jews say that it was not allowed to carry the bed on the Sabbath (John 5: 10-13) and Jesus had already forgiven his sins, that is, healed his soul, and we remain sick with sin and new mentality.
Teilhard Chardin wrote “Construire la terre” (Ed. Soleil, 1958) where he speaks of the “common soul”, we will return to the theme.
The unpredictable future of the pandemic
15
Mar
It is becoming increasingly clear that the future of the pandemic
may be far from what everyone imagines, the number of variants of the virus, scientists are beginning to identify the small variations it makes in its genetic code, and for years epidemiologists have said that we should be prepare for a next pandemic, if we haven’t done it before, now more than ever should be done.
Meanwhile, the epidemic shows no signs of cooling, despite the number dropping, in Europe for example, there was a considerable increase this week, of every 100 infections registered in the world, 41 are from Europe, the Brazilian case we have already revealed is tragic due to the records infections and deaths higher than last year’s data.
The studies on the variants also find a change in its genetic code that is frightening because with each transmission, changes in the genetic code can influence the efficiency of the vaccine (we have already explained the efficacy rates that depend on the “type” of the vaccine), that is it may happen that the next epidemic is the coronavirus itself in one of its mutations.
What to do for now, increase the vaccine and combine it with lockdown, is a cultural fact that will be difficult in Brazil and the restrictions are highly unpopular, but there is nothing else to do, and it needs to be combined with increased rates. vaccination.
Another problem is the humanitarian crisis that can occur, limiting the movement of people means limiting trade, consumption of goods, etc., which in 2020 had a positive fact, since the little circulation of vehicles and the use of non-renewable energies, it caused CO2 emissions to drop by an average of 6% across the planet, and some signs of nature rehabilitation appeared, the presence of dolphins close to the coast, which means an abundance of fish, improved levels of pollution in large cities.
However, it is important to say that the number of deaths grows that had started to decrease, returns to very worrying levels, and new bouts happen again due to the virus variants.
The economy must also be a worrying factor because there are already signs in many countries of social problems, unemployment, poverty levels and related issues: income distribution and impoverishment.
We can learn from this cruel lesson, but still most people care little about what hasn’t directly affected them yet, but it will gradually affect everyone.
Chardin’s clearing
12
Mar
The word is in Heidegger’s philosophy, but studying German
etymology we come to the word Lichtung, where the meaning is of a clearing in the forest, while Licht is the word for light, that is, to remove hidden things and unveil them so that the truth come up.
In Chardin it means looking at the Cosmos in its complexity and acquiring awareness of an immense and infinite universe in which Alpha (origin) and Omega (end) are present, but with the meaning of giving the complexity-consciousness the necessary light to understand the life process.
It starts with the Human Phenomenon and will be clearer in your book “The divine environment” where he talks about the inner life, not in the intimate sense, but in the sense of reconnecting it to God and to others.
Explaining better by reading Chardin: “In their effort towards mystical life, men often gave in to the illusion of brutally opposing spirit and flesh, body and soul, as if it were good and evil. from certain current expressions, this Manichaean tendency was never approved by the church… “(p. 117), but it is resistant and is always present in everyday religious discourse,. the purely economic and political views of religion led to this state.
For this reason Chardin will insist on an “interior” life, one capable of achieving divine designs within human realities, hence “the divine environment”.
But what is the divine means, is that permanent tension: “slowly accumulated between Humanity and God will reach the limits fixed by the possibilities of the World, and then it will be the end” (p. 177), we must hope not as a catastrophe or a great sign, but an ´outgoing´ for the world that is heading for a civilizational crisis, and to which we must collaborate that it passes, with all our Christian forces, of other religions or of “good faith”, without fear of the world,
The light came into the world, says the evangelist João (1,20-21), but those who do evil reject it, “But those who act according to the truth, approach the light, so that their actions are carried out. in God ”, and thus carry out our actions within the“ divine environment ”where everything is connected to the Cosmos.
CHARDIN, Teilhard. O meio divino: ensaio sobre a vida interior. Lisboa: Editorial Presença, s/d.
The human future and unity
11
Mar
Several points of Teilhard Chardin’s thought coincide with the new 
theological currents that arise in the religious milieu, especially in the Catholic, but Chardin opened his spirit even more when he practically migrated to China, the environment and Eastern philosophy influenced him.
His originality is as much in the evolutionary synthesis of his vision, as in several aspects of a futuristic eschatology that covers the entire Cosmos and whose convergence he calls “Omega”, which is an individualized but not isolated force, different from authors who stop at criticism to the problem of contemporary individualism without understanding that individuation tends to this “Omega point” futuristic, evolution chases.
Some authors understand the Cristosphere as a recapitulation of everything, say some theologians, but the evolutionary process culminates like man, but it does not end with man, the universe, man and woman, the historical trajectory, everything responds to a path for the Parusia of the Lord, and it is inevitable and the highlight of a Christian eschatology, and to deny the end of everything is to deny the eschatological process or at least not fully understand it.
So says U. Zilles about Chardin: “It is the risen Christ, who incorporates the world and humanity into the Mystical Body, in the finish of the Total Christ”, so this means that the Earth and the Universe will be prepared for the Parusia of the Lord (or the return of Christ), in full eschatology.
As a force of individualized action Omega is not subject to time and space (current physics has already shown these concepts as not absolute), so properties such as autonomy, actuality, irreversibility and transcendence are not subject to temporal actions, but to Omega.
Chardin explains that the multiple ecological, physiological, psychological factors that bring living beings together, especially human beings, and that especially environmental, physical and spiritual conditions are extension and expression, at a level of complexity-consciousness energies that they can bring Omega closer together.
Let it be said in passing that everything is in the various passages of Jesus (approaching the humble, dialogue with public sinners and finally handing over to the hands of the bad religious and politicians of his time), what Chardin wants to say is even further, that if we understand complexity-awareness, we help humanity to make a leap in quality that brings us closer to the Omega point.
Chardin’s phenomenology is radical because Creation is the beginning of phenomena, and the divine always operates in it, present in the actions and laws that govern organisms and living beings: God is at birth and in growth and at the end of all things, […] It does not mix or be confused with the participatory that sustains, animates and connects.” (Rideu, p. 271).
Thus, looking at the phenomena of the universe is looking at greatness and human development. It is not by chance that scientists look for comets, stars and stars from all over the cosmos for signs of life and the origin of life. Creator.
Zilles, U. (2001) Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: Fé e Ciência (Chardin: faith and science). EDIPUCRS, pag. 59-60.
Rideau, E. (1965) O pensamento de Chardin (Teilhard de Chardin’s thought), Ed. Duas Cidades, 1965, p. 271.
Deepening Chardin’s Spirituality
10
Mar
In all of his writings and works, Chardin develops two laws that
are perfectly dialogeable and connected to the recent advances in the different sciences and the process he calls “hominization”, that is, to give the world an increasingly human and more loving face.
So he does not look at human progress with disdain or with the commonplace of criticizing any modern advance, for him the evolutionary movement follows an increasing complexity, from simple to complex, from atoms and molecules, passing through cells the formation of a range of beings living with a clear and successive complexification, but another law should accompany it.
The law of interiorization or complexification, so consciousness must be integrated into the increasingly deeper process of complexifying the life of living beings, and this requires a process of interiorization, it must correspond to each specific moment of complexification.
Explaining in simpler words, if we use advanced techniques and knowledge, it is necessary that consciousness accompanies each step of evolution, criticizing it or creating repulsion for what is complex is to walk the path of denial of evolution and thus not having the proper every historic step, in terms of cultural and even civilizational crisis, the step needs to be a leap.
His reading of the complexification process does not ignore the development of the “person”, or what in philosophy is called “ipseidade” or singularity, but refers to itself and contemporary philosophy contemplates this when reflecting on the Other, which has existed since philosophical reflections like a “go beyond” by Gabriel Marcel or Paul Ricoeur, until Papal Encyclicals, the recent Fratelli Tutti quotes these authors as well as Gaudium et Spes states that fullness cannot be found “except in the sincere gift of oneself ”.
Chardin speaks of the personalization of the universe (in the sense of the presence of the person), with the evolution of living beings until the arrival of the human, it must bring to light what each has in itself an unrepeatable: its uniqueness, which in philosophy is “ipseidade” or singularity, but launched beyond itself: “What we have of ourselves,“ the height of our originality, is not our individuality, it is our person [the being for some philosophers]; and this, due to the evolutionary structure of the world, we can only find it by joining together ”(Chardin, 1965, p. 289), the brackets are our inclusions.
To understand this meaning for Chardin is to penetrate his deep philosophy united to others, to the cosmos and to the Absolute Being, beginning and end of the universe and of life: “The cosmic process of personalization aims to realize personalization, the existence of more and more people people, until they integrate, without ceasing to be people, in the last communion with the absolute Person ”(Chardin, 1965, p. 266), who is God.
CHARDIN, T. (1965) O fenômeno humano [1956]. Brazil, São Paulo: Herder.
Teilhard de Chardin and spirituality
09
Mar
I often quote the fact that Chardin was sent by the Jesuits to 
China because they considered his thinking a little advanced for the time, to say the least, his first trip was in 1923, but there were so many between the years 1923 and 1945 that he considered it his “second homeland, and says about it: I prove for China, my adopted country, a great recognition. China was the luck of my life. It contributed, with its immensity and the norm of its dimensions, to broaden my thinking and elevate it to a planetary scale ”(apud Teixeira, 2012, p. 171), that is why I say that China“ confirmed ”its theses and its spirituality.
Such was his luck, that he told a friend, Father Leroy, who recorded in a book: “I can tell you that I now live permanently in the presence of God”, Chardin made his passage precisely at the Easter of 1955, in New York, at the age of 74
I put three works as fundamental to understand your spirituality: The Human phenomenon, the Divine Environment and the Human Zoological Group (1948), unfortunately part of your personal correspondence and your diary were lost, and could very well complement your thinking.
As an intellectual rejects the naive theological-philosophical thinking that almost always falls into the traps of pure Devotion (devotion is important), of superficial dogmatism (religion has dogmas) and seeks to make a reading more suitable to contemporary man.
It refuses the tendency towards extreme specialization and thus walks with other current thinkers towards the so-called “paradigm of complexity”, in the human phenomenon sees man as the process of complexification of life developed in the Biosphere, what led many to see him as an evolutionist and some theologians as a pantheist.
The deplorable situation in which Christianity finds itself was one of his constant concerns and at the same time he had a desire to return to his origins, how to update it in contact with a modern world that has undergone cultural and social transformations, he wrote:
“… The great objection of our present time against Christianity, the true source of mistrust that makes whole blocks of humanity watertight, is not precisely historical or theological difficulties. It is the suspicion that our religion renders its faithful inhumane (CHARDIN, 2014, p. 35).
Says a Portuguese cardinal-poet José de Tolentino Mendonça: ““ Being a Christian is a risk, a human being is a great risk ”, he also seeks a realistic view of the modern world and as a poet seeks to integrate himself with him, the divine environment is also the human environment in Chardin and is immersed in the universe, the great mystery of the Love of God and the great divine environment in which life emerged.
TEILHARD DE CHARDIN, Pierre. The Divine Environment: rehearsal of inner life. 2. ed. Petrópolis, RJ: Vozes, 2014.
LockDown of Brazil calamity and the P1 variant
08
Mar
We could have mitigated the most critical periods of the 
pandemic since the beginning of the pandemic with phases of lockdown and opening. However, it almost always faltered due to the unpopularity of the measure, mainly to trade and some environments that prioritize profits over lives, because several non-essential sectors they could have closed, not to mention the irresponsibility of parties and agglomerations for some kind of “party”.
Now almost every country in the red phase that indicates the exhaustion of hospitals and record numbers of contamination and deaths, we still hesitate in harsh but necessary measures.
The Brazilian variant of the virus, called P1, is more contagious and for which the Coronavac vaccine is even less effective, and AstraZeneca, which is more efficient, is still in the slow phase of vaccination, in total we have not yet vaccinated 10% of the population and the reduction of 8 million vaccines was announced by the government itself.
Countries that have increased vaccination efficiency have combined lockdown with vaccination, because vaccine contact with researchers at Imperial College London and the University of Leicester explains that contact between vaccinees and variants can give rise to “superpowering” mutations that are capable of circumvent the immunizing action, and this in Brazil can become a pandemic bomb.
The calamity in which almost all states and most cities are located, can put a little judgment in the minds of those who manage the crisis, not only the central government, but also the state governments and the mayors of Brazilian cities.
The P1 variant is already feared, many countries are already taking care of Brazilian migration, fearing that the variant will spread and contaminate the process that in many countries is already reducing the pandemic, it is sad for Brazil, but we must understand these measures as necessary.
It is true that some services cannot stop, there are essential services and they must be active so that there is no shortage, an even greater loss of purchasing power, some are already observed in everyone, but life precedes gains and they are necessary measures that guarantee the minimum sacrifice, especially to the poorest.
A tough measure is necessary and without it, even vaccination can be compromised, and it is also necessary to take care of the effectiveness against the P1 variant already present in most Brazilian cities.
It will be a tough week and we should all be more careful and understand if the authorities have to take restrictive measures, the scenario is practically a war.
It is almost impossible in the Brazilian context to ask for this, but it would be good to have greater and genuine solidarity to face the most critical moment of the pandemic.
The cosmos and divine wrath
05
Mar
The rational / idealistic universe model was of a cosmos working
like a clock, reality and the cosmos showed themselves beyond the idea of the modern ones (the Greek eidos is something else), it showed itself as a quantum model where there is a third included (model Barsarab / Lupasco) and in which time and space are no longer absolute and matter is energy.
Thus, the old harmony model was modified by current physics, called Standard Model Physics which, from particle physics, developed a unified model for the forces acting on matter, including the strong, weak and electromagnetic and gravitational forces unifying them quantum field theory, quantum mechanics and special relativity.
The recent discovery of the Higgs Boson, incorrectly named the God particle assuming that it would be responsible for attributing matter to bodies, this model explained the magnetic attraction of planets, light and the various forms and divided matter into many particles.
After the creation of the universe and its expansion certain laws developed bodies, planets and planetary systems in formation and decline, current studies show the development of stars comes from interstellar gas and cosmic dust and hydrogen that at low temperatures collapse and form molecules that give protostars, these under pressure and rotation form the stars.
In addition to our knowledge, this expanding universe acts in an often surprising way and today we know that not only what happens on the planet has internal but also external influences, solar flares and the approach of celestial bodies for example, in short we are a tiny grain of sand in a much more complex and wandering universe.
This entire celestial body acts with its own harmony and not necessarily as the current laws that we know are thought, so a surprise is always possible, for example, today we are looking for the ninth planet (Pluto was demoted to a dwarf planet) that would have an orbit external to the our planetary system and would now be approaching the system, affecting for example the Kuiper Belt, and would have a translational orbit of 14,000 years and there would be other outer bodies of the Solar System.
Within this new logic of the universe, aorganic movements (from the inorganic to organic life) are not only possible but easily explainable, the environment around the biosphere is a living organism and it is within a larger universe and subject to its laws.
What happens in the human sphere also has its unstable and unbalanced balances, so it is no longer possible to think of everything as a “harmony”, in the Cartesian sense, but as what tends to favor the functioning of the universe as a whole and for the which forces tend to push before their own laws and determinations in human eyes may be divine wrath, or “perfect divine harmony”, but different from that explained as a clock movement.
So it is not a Kronos, but a Kairós, “opportune moment” or “right” in the divine perspective in which everything that is at odds collapses and that in human eyes is “wrath of God”, when in reality it is a correction of cosmos governed by its own laws.
The noosphere: from primary matter to complexification.
04
Mar
Teilhard Chardin thus describes the complexification from the
first developments of life, the critical transition from the life of cells to an ultra-complex life:
“We will probably never find out (unless, luckily, the science of tomorrow manages to reproduce the phenomenon in the laboratory) – History alone, in any case, will never directly discover the material traces of this emergence – appearance – of microscopic out of the molecular; from the organic out of the chemical, from the living out of the pre-living. ” (Chardin, 1965, p. 63)
Although it may seem that nature would have done this preparation alone, it draws attention to the essential originality of the cell, producing something entirely new, and composing an organic multiplicity in a minimum space, although the process may have taken years, each cell has long been prepared to be something original.
It will be through discreet but decisive mutations that occurred for thousands and millions of years, that the complexity of cells and living beings began to be formed, making it possible to perceive “the irresistible developments that are hidden in the weakest slowness, the extreme agitation that is hidden under the resting veil, the entirely new that insinuates itself in the monotonous repetition of the same things ”(Chardin, 1965, p. 8).
It was through the complexification of life that the human emerged, in the beginning God made it from inorganic materials, metaphorically the Bible says about clay, but it is certain that the universe was born before.
So the world of physis (Chardin sees physics in the Greek sense of the word) would be linked to biology, and thinks:
“Could we hesitate for a moment to recognize the evident kinship that links, in its composition and aspects, the world of the proto-living to the world of physical chemistry? I mean, are we not yet, in this first stage of life, but at the core, at least on the very edge of ‘matter’? ” (Chardin, 1965, p. 66)
At the birth of human life, after billions of years after the formation of the universe, a great and decisive mutation will occur, the birth of thought and consciousness, and what Chardin calls interiorization, which in religious terms means the individual soul that is also linked to the collective, the principle of association from the first cells.
The thought and the conscience the notion of person develops, this experience was given thanks to the cerebral development of man, and to the developments of what Chardin calls the Noosphere, the last stage after the Biosphere, the creation and development of life.
Developing and explaining the Chardanian cosmogenesis is a long process that not even fully developed in life, many advances in current astrophysics (many discoveries try to explain the origin of life) help understanding, what is important to emphasize is that the evolution panorama cosmos, not just the Earth, is linked to the development of human consciousness and capacity to connect with the harmony of life.
Chardin, T. (1965). O fenomeno humano (Phenomenous Human). BR, São Paulo : Herder.
