I’ve been rereading The Phenomenon of Man, because it was very important to me a while back. I don’t list it in the Bibliography of The Feminine of History is Mystery, but I can see its influence in the passage quoted below. But I was unaware of its influence, because left hand writing I listen for, but don’t consciously create.
I’m reading Teilhard de Chardin’s writing about how cells develop out of large molecules and he says that’s the first appearance of consciousness because the cells are spheres with nuclei — matter has curled around itself to create a new dimension. (This is Section C. The Cellular Revolution, pp86-90) My own words from a left-hand writing come to me: “from the within of the web to the out skirts of the galaxy…”
I found the lines on the lefthand page facing righthand page 27. It starts “susurration… cerebration… celebration, serrated, sierra nevada, nevada, nirvana… patterns enfold unfolding from the within of the web to the out skirts of the galaxy … the structure vibrating, radiating, stabbing straight and outward, and the sticky spiral, fibrous, magnetic, hurling inward particles and stars, dust and brightness sucked to the center.”
The sequence is susurration = whispering, cerebration = thinking, celebration, serrated = jagged edge… whispering leading to thinking, leading to celebrating, changing to jagged, mountain, snowy, sacred… Teilhard de Chardin talks about tangential energy as physical energy, and radial energy as spiritual or psychological. “Radial” energy seems to relate to energy that comes from a center (radius of a circle or sphere), so it somehow makes sense that when a complex molecule curls into a sphere with a nucleus in the center, that it might gain a lot of “radial” energy. I see see a similar difference in the images of “structure stabbing outward” and “sticky spiral hurling inward.”
This all feels more poetic than scientific to me, which doesn’t make it less true. I think about the concept of “emergence” where something completely new can come out of the self-organization of diverse elements.
Something else I wrote, that may depend on Teilhard De Chardin’s ideas acting deep in my unconscious is:
“The arc of the moral universe…” is paraphrasing something first said by Theodore Parker, an abolitionist minister in 1853. An interesting study appears in the Huffington Post. I have taken it and turned it into words for me to hang on to: The arc of the physical universe is long, but it bends toward consciousness and compassion.” My evidence is the Dalai Lama. I do not believe that he could exist, if consciousness were not implicit in the first hydrogen atom.