I recall a popular witticism from Voltaire, that if God didn’t exist, it would have been necessary to invent him. As for the devil, we might have had to invent him too in order to have a scapegoat for the imperfections of God, or else something to create tension and obstructions so that the perfect relationship with God wouldn’t be so easy to attain and thus become boring. Yes, the devil.. that peculiarly Christian bugaboo that has persisted to “bedevil” humans in every way imaginable.. whether comically; wittily, in snake oil fashion, using the art of the con; or in more scary, sinister ways luring people to sin or perdition. For some, he sits on one shoulder or looms as an ever-present shadowy figure as real as the guardian angel on the other. There is just something about him that has captured the popular imagination and evokes very strong emotions, and he makes very regular appearances in the literary, art, and film world.
So ingrained in consciousness is this figure that it might for some of us come as a welcome surprise or relief to see this creature treated in a completely novel way, to give him an entirely different pedigree and reason for existence in the mind of Man, other than the stereotypical one of tempting and leading people into sin and the fires of hell. That is what the great futurist writer Arthur C. Clarke did in his book Childhood’s End first published in 1963 and quickly to become something of a counterculture and sci-fi phenomenon. And you might also be surprised by the “devilish” workings of the book itself, something I found both disturbing and brilliant.
Childhood’s End further deals with other equally fascinating, and arguably more important and enduring issues as well, such as the theory of relativity in practice; the nature of utopia with its obvious positives and interesting problematic implications for humans and particularly art. and the ultimate end of evolution for humans and perhaps all forms of life everywhere. Of special interest is the way that entertaining plot elements, along with the serious treatment of the seemingly important issues in the creation of a utopian global society, work as though one big con or magical sleight in preparation for the evolutionary whammy that it’s all leading to. So yes, there is great discussion of the impact of benevolent and very powerful and advanced alien Overlords on the human life, mind, and psyche; Overlords who have a form so long familiar in human life that they spend fifty years just preparing the human world for their appearance from the space ships looming over Earth creating the conditions of a perfect society; and there is wonderful weaving of the paranormal in the plot with its use in a séance and speculation on its workings and the human mind. But if you were to think that this would be the ultimate antidote to T. S. Eliot’s view of the world’s end, you would be sadly wrong. If Eliot’s world ends not with a bang but a whimper, Clarke’s utopian world ends with a mighty double bang, one made by the children of evolutionary destiny as they open up the Earth and use the energy of its core to fulfill that fate, and one employed by the adults left behind to otherwise live their lives in utopian paradise as the last generation of humans, for it is the young that have moved on.
Thus, at the novel’s true core is the nature of evolution and how it relates to mind and universe. Since such evolution must also have a higher driving force, you could further say that the book does not disappoint in giving us an original take on that force, not exactly as “god” but rather as the Overmind of the Universe directing and propelling beings and events in the effort to move the sentient .. in this case humans.. towards a shared destiny. Hints of that destiny start showing up in the fits and starts of incomplete or temporary mind sharing – seen as the paranormal – and then presenting as more complete and permanent merging of minds with concomitant synergistic abilities to literally move mountains, rivers, and worlds as they grow into Oneness with the Overmind and allow that mysterious entity to sense and experience the wonders of the Universe as they glide through it Those newly merged minds become the consciousness of the Universal Mind, much as Joseph Campbell said that humans are the consciousness of the Earth in his work The Power of Myth.
Evolution as a growth of mind and supernormal powers, with a collective synergy as an ultimate end, did not just spring up out of whole cloth from Arthur C. Clarke’s fertile imagination. It had its roots, oddly enough, in Catholic theological circles seeking to reconcile Darwinian, biological evolution with traditional religious dogma and thought, with God and the nature of the human soul, if you will. Here the work of the French Jesuit theologian, philosopher, paleontologist, and all-round futurist,Teilhard de Chardin, plays an esteemed role. Chardin’s book The Phenomenon of Man deals generally with the kind of evolution that occurs in Childhood’s End, acting as a kind of Frankensteinian galvanic force on that new and composite creature, the evolutionary model imagined by Clarke in a more precise if very fantastic way. Clarke in essence takes de Chardin’s views to an extreme conclusion, to show us the amazing possibilities before us, with roots in science and real world observations and events.
Thus, it might be worthwhile and most interesting to explore the worlds of psychology and theology in order to more accurately and realistically arrive at the questions that Childhood’s End engenders, and then explore the possible answers and the even more problematic dilemmas that these new ideas pose for us modern or postmodern humans.
Whether we of modern mind – now sophisticated in some of the formerly counter-intuitive phenomena of quantum and string theory – can appreciate the futuristic notions of the sixties, arising out of the comparatively antiquated theory of relativity and those concerned with the ultimate destiny of humans impelled through the evolution of mind, is a question well worth looking at in all its dimensions. After all, paranormal experiences still occur on a regular basis; and they still confound us enough to want to know more about them, just as they did fifty years ago and more. Clairvoyance, telepathy, second-sight, the movement of the planchette, and weird synchronicities still arouse the wonder and curiosity of many, and the desire to know what’s behind them still exists. We want to know how mind works and where mind is taking us. This quest presupposes a Weltanschauung, a worldview, that is open-ended in its direction but finite in its goal: to know the nature of the Universe and where It is taking us. We therefore move well beyond the physical world of objective science and the five senses, into the radical universe of noös and futurology. We depend on mind to explore the mind of God, and we use mind to create the nexus of phenomena and imagination, which in turn creates the conundrum implicit in the idea of using mystery to solve a mystery about mystery. How metaphysical is that?
Yet we still try, and the quest and exploration itself teaches us and unfolds for us a world of discovery that can then lead us to new ideas and quests, a merry and neverending chase cycle .. a heuristic uroborus if you like. Thus, it sits as an endeavor worth pursuing to take our open minds back to the future of those radical and curious sixties to see what we can learn as mind flowers out like a hothouse orchid on psychedelic steroids.
At some point in history, humans started looking inward to see what they could see, to map out the inner workings by projecting them on the outer world. The language of the ultimate metaquest came up with words like psyche from the Greeks and soul from the Catholic theologians so we could ask the ultimate question about the part of us that holds the most mystery. What is soul .. or its metaphysical equivalent, as in Childhood’s End, mind? The answer to that question has been a subject of search and inquiry since humans invented dreams and myth and the art to express them.
In Christian terms, the soul is defined very narrowly; but in the modern Jungian view, soul has no specific theology. Rather, as Jungian analyst James Hollis writes, “Soul is our intuited sense of our own depth, our deepest running, purposeful energy, our longing for meaning, and our participation in something much greater than ordinary consciousness can grasp. Whatever the soul is, we suffer when we ignore its needs. But the flip side of suffering isn’t necessarily happiness. The goal of life isn’t happiness, but meaning.” [J. Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life] This idea of the paramount importance of meaning in life was also discovered and propounded by Viktor Frankl, whose books Man’s Search for Meaning, and Jesus and Logotherapy, represent seminal works on the search for meaning and the role of noös in a person’s life.
Frankl liked to focus on the Greek word noös which means mind or spirit. Traditional psychology wants us to deal with psychodynamics in order to reduce psychological tension; but Frankl preferred to have us center our vision on “noödynamics,” premised on the idea that tension is essential, especially when it comes to meaning. People desire the tension involved in striving for some worthy goal. Frankl can thus be seen as the spiritual mentor for psychic expansion, gained by valuing and becoming aware of the spiritual side of life.
Thus the idea of the noös and “noödynamics” seques nicely into the thought of Teilhard de Chardin, who originated the idea of the “noösphere.” That notion of course strongly impacted Clarke’s futuristic Childhood’s End, which in fact took much from de Chardin’s book The Phenomenon of Man to show its futurological implications in a storied setting, with a very unusual look at the devil and the way he entered human consciousness as a kind of paranormal memory of the future. So devil meets mind.
Even while Christian theology was in its infancy, the ancient Greeks gave us the legend of Cupid and Psyche, which later morphed into the post-Renaissance Germanic fairytale, East o the Sun and West o the Moon. It can be seen as a cautionary yet magnificent tale of the dangers and pitfalls involved in the impossible but compelling quest for perfect love and unity with the divine, the archetypal projection of the soul’s deepest desire. Then the Greeks also gave us the energies of the faun and the satyr, dancing to the tune of the great god Pan. And it was, remember, the personification of this energy which became transmogrified later into the European Christian devil, with his huge bestial body, goatlike in appearance, with faunlike ears and barbed tail… and holding negative energies which are the expression of that part of the psyche that Christians consider evil and scary. And we have learned, as Jung tells us, that that energy will be expressed one way or another because the psyche is always looking to achieve a kind of balance between competing energies.
But.. as in the case of Childhood’s End.. what if we are directed to look at the devil another way, as a prescient projection or psychic element of our distant future, looking forward to a time when he and his like cohorts play a part in preparing humans for the next stage of evolution, that of mind? The devil as the agent of Psyche’s quest, unity with the divine.. what a concept and what an amazing avenue through the labyrinth of history to have Greek myth and Catholic theology meet on common ground!
With new and advanced awareness, we cannot help but notice strong hints that there is much more to mind than the biological evolution of the brain, and there seems to be something in humans that tells us that the world and the universe are somehow the work or product of mind, of intelligence, however that might work or operate. That we might be moving away from the childish, ego-centered mind that sees itself as the center -- as though “I” were a single planet at the heart of the universe around which everything else revolves -- into a more mature and wider idea of ourselves as both containing the universe and contained by it, working in synergy with other minds as observed by an Overmind and then merged with it, that is the foundation of Clarke’s book. And contemporaneous with that scenario was the work of de Chardin, as previously mentioned, which certainly played its part in driving the narrative of Clarke’s epic.
So let’s dig deeper into the roots of our futurological congress with mind exploring mind by continuing with the concept and movement of time and growth. Humans could not simply remain locked in their childish notions of personifying energies and dancing to and around them. If life evolves, so must knowledge and the mind to encompass it, which has led us to look at the old childish symbols in a new way, and even to express them in a different kind of theology and art. Even the boundaries of space and time have enlarged nigh unto infinity as humans have grown the tools to discover and describe an infinite universe and the ideas of futuristic possibilities that stretch both mind and cosmos.
When theology and futurism meet at the cusp of universal knowledge and infinite possibilities, then we are blessed with the expressions of writers like Clarke in science fiction and de Chardin in theology and the nature of futuristic evolution. It’s a heady and wondrous mix, and it gives us humans an opportunity to look at old notions and symbols – like that of the devil – in a way that completely turns them on their heads: a brave new view for a brave new world that moves past Genesis and harsh medieval fears into the light of postmodern evolution and a universe of other worlds.
** Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End has roots in Teilhard de Chardin’s Phenomenon of Man **
First, de Chardin. At this site, http://www.gaiamind.com/Teilhard.html, de Chardin is described as “a visionary French Jesuit, paleontologist, biologist, and philosopher, who spent the bulk of his life trying to integrate religious experience with natural science, most specifically Christian theology with theories of evolution” and as one who spoke eloquently for “the possibilities for humankind, which he saw as heading for an exciting convergence of systems, an Omega Point where the coalescence of consciousness will lead us to a new state of peace and planetary unity. Long before ecology was fashionable, he saw this unity as being based instrinsically upon the spirit of the Earth.”
~~ The Age of Nations is past. The task before us now, if we would not perish, is to build the Earth. ~~
Chardin even coined a term, noösphere, to envisage what he believed to be “a new organ of consciousness,” which he said was “analogous on a planetary level to the evolution of the cerebral cortex in humans. The noösphere is a ‘planetary thinking network’ -- an interlinked system of consciousness and information, a global net of self awareness, instantaneous feedback, and planetary communication.”
It does please the mind to be able to see both a bridge and a correlative between the mind and the planet. It recalls Campbell’s statement that humans are the consciousness of the Earth, and now indeed the Universe, with the additions that the Earth is also itself conscious and both reflective of, and synergistically connected with, the human mind… the psyche… the soul. [For further exploration into these possibilities with regard to planetary soul and intellilgence, and its relation to humans, look at Tarkovsky’s film Solaris and read Lem’s book of the same title upon which the film is loosely based. Wondrous.]
So yes, I can believe that we humans are a consciousness and a medium for expression – of ourselves and something greater than ourselves, the Earth, and surely well beyond even that now as we explore further reaches of our universe and even other universes, from the nano and infinitesimal to the macro and infinite. Thus it seems most reasonable to accept or entertain the notion that we have evolved the brain, mind, soul, and heart to give us the capacity and the curiosity, the wonder, to reach beyond our grasp.
Thankfully, de Chardin does not neglect the ~heart,~ writing that: “It is not our heads or our bodies which we must bring together, but our hearts…. Humanity … is building its composite brain, beneath our eyes. May it not be that tomorrow, through the logical and biological deepening of the movement drawing it together, it will find its heart, without which the ultimate wholeness of its power of unification can never be achieved?”
Now let’s consider the where of evolution, not just the when, because that might be the future which also needs further description. About de Chardin, Tom Wolfe writes: “With the evolution of man,’ he [de Chardin] wrote, ‘a new law of Nature has come into force – that of convergence.’ Biological evolution had created step one, ‘expansive convergence.’ Now, in the twentieth century, by means of technology, God was creating ‘compressive convergence.’ Thanks to technology, ‘the hitherto scattered’ species Homo sapiens was being united by a single ‘stupendous thinking machine,’ a unified consciousness that would cover the earth like ‘a thinking skin,’ a ‘noösphere,’ to use Teilhard’s favorite neologism. And just what technology was going to bring about this convergence, this noösphere? On this point, in later years, Teilhard was quite specific: radio, television, the telephone, and ‘those astonishing electronic computers, pulsating with signals at the rate of hundreds of thousands a second.’ [Tom Wolfe, Hooking Up]
There you have it. Welcome to the noösphere, everyone. It is here, and you are there.
Now you might ask, how does the argument for the noösphere resolve the problem of preserving the privacy of each mind as it forms? This only matters if the convergence, the mind merge, is not benevolent as it clearly wasn’t in the case of Star Trek’s Borg; if we assume that minds have something to hide, which is predicated on the belief in original sin and the impossibility of perfectibility. These problems have plagued Catholic theology for quite some time, but there is a way that postmodern deconstructionists enter the picture too. As a professor pointed out, “Derrida and his gang present a case that makes that ultimate union a necessity for communication.” I can see their point in that perfect communication would be subject to an absolute ability to hide nothing and an inability to conceive of limits.
In my view, the noösphere is here in the Internet where the possibilities for ultimate communication grow with the number of minds merging there. The internet provides instant worldwide communication through satellites, cables, the Ethernet, and computer hubs where something akin to universal knowledge exists. Privacy of mind can be maintained if it is an issue, and minds can be subsumed within each other without harm to the individual or the collective.
In Childhood’s End, the process of moving from physical life on Earth to the life of the mind and then of Mind alone to merge all minds in synergy with the Overmind, out into the universe, did not appear to be so benign for those left behind; but as for the new lives involved, it simply represented the fulfillment of an ineluctable evolution. It’s clear that the Overmind had no intention of harming or distressing the adults who could not evolve further, and emissaries were employed to facilitate and ease the process for them. Still, there was a kind of profound sadness there, seeing all of history and memory come to an end… though the expansion of the human mind into the universe, and the universe into Mind, made a marvelous denouement.
So, in this still evolving physical world of the early 21st century, we have the Internet as our collective noösphere. That Internet is more than spirit though; it is fact. However, it is far from perfect, neither as a totality or as an expression of God. The professorial voice continues to resonate, “As I understand de Chardin’s idea of crystallization, and as that moves us towards the perfection of the noösphere, minds merge in love. Thomas Aquinas dealt with this in his treatment of the soul after death; without body, there is nothing to separate the souls, since all of us are one species [unlike,he says, the angels, each of which is a separate species.] Aquinas maintains that without a direct act of God, required to keep the souls separate, they must merge together, de Chardin’s point I believe. Whether or not one believes this, Aquinas’ reasoning and de Chardin’s suggest the ultimate union of minds, a union that can obviously take place only under the condition of perfect love. It is that ultimate perfect love towards which we evolve, says de Chardin. The psychological result of a perfect union in love is the inability to hide anything from others – and not the slightest desire to do so. I am certainly not there yet, and the society isn’t either. In the case of the Borg, beings were forced to join the hive mind, a conception entirely alien to the love required for de Chardin’s extrapolation. If the will of one person is exactly the will of the other – as in love – the individual is not harmed, s/he is rather perfected, but we are not ready for that by any means.” Maybe not, but the possibility is what counts.
Certainly, the language that describes the potential for perfect love, the merging of souls and the union of minds, is most sublime. This notion brings to mind Walt Whitman’s poem about the spider, casting out filament upon filament in its neverending quest to make connections… as people between people, and planets between planets. Perhaps mystics and poets move towards perfection and union with the collective unconscious, as Jung would have it; or with Spiritus Mundi, of which our much beloved Yeats wrote. They might wish to expresss their experience in a way that speaks for the potential of all humans.
The question is: can a person achieve perfect love and union by willing it and wanting it: or is it something that can only be attained through the grace of God or through some external equivalent like an intelligent noösphere or Clarke’s idea of the Overmind?
Also, if perfect love results in the union of minds… though this union would not occur by force if we are still to have free will… wouldn’t will itself disappear? It’s something of a conundrum to see the separate minds of individuals transmuted and subsumed into the One – as those of the children are in Childhood’s End – which must be the eternal, infinite, unchanging, perfect mind of God. The dilemma in my mind is that then there would be nothing as well. That’s because I love the distinctions and separations, the continuing changes and varieties that life has to offer, which gives art and language so much possibility. I’m starting to think that this dilemma cannot be resolved by the dichotomous nature of Western thinking, but rather perhaps by Eastern philosophy, by embracing all of it.
Does this conclusion arrive at de Chardin’s Omega Point, or as a new Alpha Point from which to launch a further evolution or even a whole new universe in which being and consciousness begin anew? If we think like a Hegelian, life would be a never-ending movement from alpha to omega to a new alpha. If we think like Buddha, it wouldn’t ultimately matter because we are where we are now… bathing in rays eternal, as C. S. Lewis put it. And if we think like a Western theologian, it will always be a perfect dilemma.