I like to think this all has meaning, this grand scope of things from the birth of stars to the greening of earth to the emergence of mankind to me. And even beyond me. To whatever lies beyond my passing or circles around me like a cocoon, just out of reach or past memory. What emerges next? I like to think there’s “more to us than time allows to be,” as I wrote in Epitaph for a Tombstone. That “exploring infinity” is not just a real option, but a certainty.

That’s why this quote about philosopher-scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin resonates with me.

For Teilhard, development through time is the primary revelation. It is the fundamental source of meaning in the universe. By development he means the cosmic and organic evolution as discovered by scientists, but he includes his conviction that the process of evolution is entwined with the process of love, an idea he attempts to capture in his neologism, ‘amorization.’

Teilhard’s thinking is that a complete annihilation at death cannot be the case because in order for humans to embrace the evolutionary challenges, they must have the sense that there is a way forward, that the future is open. If humans came to regard death as their end, they could still find value in caring for their families and others in need, certainly, but it would be nothing like what they would experience were they convinced their actions had eternal significance.

In his later years, Teilhard’s deep concern became the activation of energy. He saw nihilism not as a moral mistake but as a cosmological dead end. His primary objection to the notion that the universe is meaningless is that such a conviction enervates humanity.

There you have it. Teilhard’s faith in the universe’s development leads to his sense of immortality. Teilhard felt humanity as a whole will one day achieve a deep conviction of immortality and this will be on the order of a major evolutionary achievement, along the lines of aerobic respiration or photosynthesis. It will lead to a massive influx of energy into the human adventure.

from Cosmogenisis, An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe by Brian Swimme

I love the idea that the process of evolution is entwined with love. How could it not be? All this budding forth, all these repeating patterns, all this superabundance of being bursting out so gloriously, endlessly.

I like to think that I and everyone I know is part of it, and essential to it, and that what brought us into being here and now will carry us forth to there and then, as it has already done every nanosecond of our lives.

Immortality. Eternity. Such lush words fraught with so many religious and spiritual connotations, we rear away from them—they seem too rare and precious to utter beyond a whisper. Yet, lush they remain. They fit right in to what we see all around us—the lushness of the Earth, of the universe, of each one of us, our bodies teeming with countless atoms and so much energy we could set the world afire is only we knew how to tap into it.

What is more rare and precious and mysterious than a single human being?

I like to think that this “deep conviction of immortality” that Teilhard likens to “a major evolutionary achievement” is well on its way. And that I’m part of it.