"After mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And then, for the second time in the history of the world, man [sic] will have discovered fire." —Teilhard de Chardin
"They're putting us in identical little boxes/
No character just uniformity.
They’re trying to build a computerized community,
But they’ll never make a zombie out of me."
—The Kinks Muswell Hillbilly
In this piece I want to explore the theoretical construct of the noosphere as first articulated systematically by (Fr.) Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit priest and scientist. From there I want to look at how I believe Teilhard’s genuine vision of the noosphere came to be weaponized and perverted to become a philosophical justification for a surveillance state.
There’s some debate about whether Teilhard coined the term noosphere or whether Verdansky did (or maybe Henri Bergson). But either way, the term is most popularly associated with Teilhard so it’s to his understanding of noosphere that I want to turn first and then show how Teilhard’s vision of the noosphere became corrupted by those intent on control.
The term noosphere derives from the Greek word nous. For The Neoplatonists nous meant a combination of heart and mind. It was heart-affective consciousness and mental-cognitive consciousness simultaneously. So a sphere or dimension of nous (noo-sphere) is meant to be a place of a heart and mind.
Teilhard defined the noosphere as a sphere or envelope of self-reflective consciousnes; it’s imperative to remember that consciousness here means both affective as well as intellectual cognition. This sphere of self-reflective consciousness envelopes the earlier spheres of life (e.g. biosphere) and inorganic matter (physiosphere). Just as the biosphere envelopes the physiosphere.
With its emphasis on self-reflective consciousness, the noosphere brings self-reflective thought and feeling and will into a greater concentration and integration. Just as the Earth creates a spherical boundary for living beings, the noosphere was similarly envisioned as having boundaries within which creativity came into fuller flowing due to the evolutionary pressure of being within a bounded spherical geometry.
Teilhard saw humanity and specifically human activities like technological development, the sciences, the arts, and spiritual endeavors all taking place within the noosphere.
Teilhard would sometimes refer to the noosphere as a “higher” form of humanity but he did not mean that the collective noospheric consciousness would override human autonomy and individuality/diversity. This point is a critical one and will return to it later when we look at the perversion of the noosphere. Teilhard’s vision is fundamentally rooted in his Christian theology and for orthodox Christianity the deepest personhood is found in and through the deepest relationality. The Trinitarian Persons of the Christian Godhead—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—are persons vis a vis their communion, i.e. their (inter)oneness with each other. That oneness does not subsume their individuality but neither do their unique individualities ever exist separate from their interrelationality.
Teilhard’s view then is one where deeper interconnection between human beings in love brings out greater and greater degrees of individual sovereignty, uniqueness, and diversity which in turn themselves open up space for ever-deeper layers of relationally. Please note Teilhard’s emphasis on love being the ground of relationality and freedom.
Nous however often became translated into English as mind (similarly so for other Western languages). So noosphere becomes a sphere of human mental consciousness, potentially with or without the strong emphasis on love so central to Teilhard. The noosphere then could be a “global brain”, as in a head brain not an integrated heart-head-gut brain.
To distinguish these visions of the noosphere, Teilhard would sometimes refer to the theosphere (sphere of the divine). He also spoke of the Christification of the cosmos. Christ for Teilhard is the Eternal Wisdom of the Universe (The Logos or Nous) who guides and urges all creation towards its consummation in greater and greater degrees of diversity, depth, and communion.
For Teilhard the sphere of nous enveloped the prior spheres of life: the physiosphere (rocks, mineral world) and the biosphere (sphere of plants, animals, biological life). Teilhard is very much in line with animistic principles here (see Ezekiel73’s piece for more on Christian animism and magic). Each subsequent layer creates a membrane around the prior. Each subsequent sphere has a degree of freedom relative to the prior one(s) and therefore has a greater degree of responsibility vis a vis those spheres.
For Teilhard this greater freedom and greater responsibility is most especially the case in the noosphere which has self-consciousness and therefore more choice and agency and consequently a higher degree of ethical responsibility. This noospheric self-consciousness takes on a very specific flavor in the human being.
Teilhard sees humans as the prime exemplars of self-conscious noospheric consciousness. To update Teilhard we might see other sentient beings equally (though perhaps differently) participating in nooospheric consciousness: e.g. horses (see equine therapy), trees, and potentially (and weirdly) the UFO Phenomenon. One of the core dangers of the weaponization of the noosphere is the attempt to bring algorithms, artificial intelligence, “humanized” robots, and “robotized” humans into the noosphere. (More on that point to come.)
Teilhard’s vision—the vision of traditional Christian theology in fact—is one of the divinization of the cosmos. It’s a vision very similar to (though distinct in some ways perhaps) from that of the Supramental of Sri Aurobindo, a contemporary of Teilhard’s, a topic explored elsewhere on the site.
By the same token that a later evolutionary sphere has greater agency, possibility and impact, that later sphere may end up colonizing in a shadowy-negative form the earlier forms of life. In other words, a later sphere may become parasitic upon the earlier ones. Earlier spheres are more foundational insofar as later evolutionary growths depend on the former whereas the reverse is not true. In other words, kill off all the bacteria on Earth and there goes every species of plant and animal (human animals included). On the flip side, however, if all mammalian species were to go extinct, the bacteria would be just fine. In fact, life on earth has experienced multiple forms of mass extinction and the bacteria are still with us.
This point about the potential parasitism of later evolutionary spheres upon former ones is an absolutely crucial that we’ll return to to so please bear it in mind.
I began this piece quoting this famous passage from Teilhard:
After mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And then, for the second time in the history of the world, man [sic] will have discovered fire.
The first thing I want to point out in this quotation is the very eerie synchronicity that Teilhard named (in the 1920s-1930s!) all the major forms of renewable energy: wind, water, tidal. He then mentions gravity and the mastering of gravity is evident in the UFO Phenomenon, taking us back to contemporaries of Teilhard’s like Tesla, Thomas Townsend Brown, and John Keely (among others)—all interested in anti-gravitic technologies.
The mastery of gravity reference takes us to what I’ve discussed earlier as the shell game of Universal Basic Income (UBI) schemes, which I believe are meant to hide the possibility of zero-point/“free energy” in both technology and finance. I’ve made a similar case that the recent admission by the US military of the existence of UFOs is part of a larger psychological operation meant to control the narrative of the release of breakthrough technology and energy.
Note here the very precise formulation of Teilhard’s statement….
“after mastering the wind, the wave, the tides (i.e. renewables) and gravity (i.e. zero point/free energy), we shall harness for God the energies of love. And then, for the second time in the history of the world, man [sic] will have discovered fire.”
The second discovery of fire only takes place upon harnessing the power of love which for Teilhard happens after the mastering the winds, waves, tides, and gravity. Note that the first verb is mastering (winds, waves, tides, gravity) but the act of love is harnessing for God. There is no mention of God in the first half of the sentence. It does not say that humans will have mastered for God the winds, wave, tides, etc. It simply notes humans mastering those forces. Then the harnessing for God the energies of love which results in the second discovery of fire.
What happens however if the mastering of the winds, waves, tides, and gravity does not naturally lead to the harnessing for God of the energies of love? Harnessing involves working with a pre-existing reality in a co-operative way. Mastering could indicate much more direct overt domination. The assumption that seems to be built into Teilhard’s vision is the mastering of the waves, winds, tides, and gravity opens up the space and conscious bandwidth to then go about the journey of harnessing (for God remember!) the energies of love.
I argued in my previous piece on The Great (P)Reset that I believe much of the fogginess of the present moment is to obscure the liberatory possibilities of the coming Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies and instead deploy them in a weaponized surveillance-oriented manner. The primary way to do that is to create inherent and chronic instability in society leading to a call for a “return to normal” (or to “build back better”), thereby not wasting the opportunity of this present “crisis”. Or in the old psychological warfare playbook, create the problem, control the reaction, and have the people call for the solution you wanted from the beginning (problem —> reaction —> solution).
In other words, what if green/renewable technology does in fact master the waves, winds, and tides but deploys those mastering capacities in a domination oriented way? Would that forestall or even negate the possibilities of harnessing for God the power of love?
Remember Teilhard’s vision is one where the noosphere (“mastering the winds, waves, tides”) leads naturally to the theosphere ("harnessing the energies of love for God"). But as we saw earlier with the (mis)translation of noosphere into English as the realm of rational-analytic mind only versus the original meaning of the term as heart-mind, the noosphere could be hived off from the theosphere. A mental-analytic noosphere is a very different beast from a heart-mind noosphere. It is the analytic-mental only noosphere, cut off from the heart and empathy, that becomes parasitic on the earlier forms of life (as well as most members of noosphere itself).
That line of inquiry brings us to this quotation from the World Economic Forum’s website on the Fourth Industrial Revolution (quoted in my previous piece on the subject):
The Fourth Industrial Revolution represents a fundamental change in the way we live, work and relate to one another. It is a new chapter in human development, enabled by extraordinary technology advances commensurate with those of the first, second and third industrial revolutions. These advances are merging the physical, digital and biological worlds in ways that create both huge promise and potential peril.
The merging of the physical, digital, and biological worlds envisioned by groups like the World Economic Forum is the inverted, weaponized version of the noosphere. It’s a vision of an augmented reality overlay on top of physical material existence leading to further social isolation, digital tracking, and human-machine chimeras. All of those tracks are precisely running opposite to Teilhard’s vision of a noosphere rooted in love, greater communion and creating the technological, philosophical, cultural, artistic, economic, scientific, and political basis for the great adventure of harnessing the energies of love for God (i.e. helping embody the theosphere).
When noosphere means “mind only” (sphere of mind) then the heart can be cut off. The noospheric realm then becomes one devoid of soul and meaning. As the mind becomes mapped (and hacked) by neuroscience then the soul becomes nothing but digital bits, ones and zeroes. Those digital bits will be surveilled and then disaggregated from each other and sent across the spatial web in the internet of bodies. They will be digitized soul fragments, a monstrous updating of the ancient shamanic insight concerning soul loss. To use the language of Rudolf Steiner this is the ultimate (evil) goal of the energy of Ahriman—the desire to enslave humanity into non-material materiality, i.e. digital, virtual, or augmented (pseudo)materiality.
This dystopic nightmare is a parasitic noosphere preying upon human autonomy, on animals and all sentient beings, down to the very rocks and mineral themselves. Teilhard’s vision of greater individuality and greater interrelationship mutually reinforcing and necessitating each other becomes perverted towards the vision of a Global Brain, a techno-fascist super-organism supra-ordinate to human individuality and relationship (and their healthy balance). This techno-fascist Global Brain will be “artificially” intelligent in nature.
As I’ve written about previously, the philosophical premise of transhumanism weirdly has its roots in traditional Christian theology. The term transhumanism was updated and promoted by Julian Huxley as a rebrand of eugenics after the horrors of the Nazis. Huxley did write the forward to the English translation of Teilhard’s magnum opus: The Phenomenon of Man. In that foreword, Huxley essentially strips the Christian emphasis on love out of Teilhard’s cosmic vision and thereby elides the difference between his ultimately technocratic and cybernetic version of transhumanism versus Teilhard’s Christian vision.
For the transhumanists, how we go “beyond” (trans) being human is through exterior digital technologies interfacing with human carbon life. A kind of monstrous chimerical parody of the Christian teaching of the Incarnation—God becoming flesh. Here the transhumanists claim they will become God (or gods) through digital “flesh”. Their vision is ultimately a Luciferian one in that it teaches spiritual bypassing.
Teilhard’s vision—like Aurobindo’s—is about the bringing down of the spiritual fully into the material reality such material reality evolves into more perfect submission and surrender into the Divine. The material becomes therefore divinized (theosis). This Christian alchemy, as it were, requires the profound conversion (metanoia) of biological, emotional, mental, and energetic conditioning to be turned towards the Divine. It requires personal transformation in other words. The fundamental energy that brews that alchemical cauldron being the force of Conscious Love.
In Steiner’s language the transhumanists are a horrifying hybrid of both Luciferians (spiritual bypasses intent on “ascending” or “transcending” human-ness) and Ahrimanic (via soulless, machine, digital interfacing). Worse still, as I’ve written about previously, this grotesque fusion is a Luciferian vision for elites but a Satanic one for the masses (i.e. enslavement).
In 2021 the word meta verse entered the vocabulary (see my review of 2021 for more on this trend). Metaverse, however new the term, is actually simply the updated coinage for the noosphere. It is however a noosphere stripped of love and communion. The Metaverse is Huxley’s vision of a de-souled, technocratic transhumanism, not Teilhard’s harnessing of the energies of love for God.
Ezekiel73 has written an excellent piece exploring the weaponization of social scientific research in mind control experiments like MK-Ultra. In this scenario we see the weaponization of philosophy and theology and its terrifyingly dark potentials.
(Certain) Humans might well master the winds, waves, tides and gravity—or not honestly. But if such humans do master such forces but do not deploy that mastery to the harnessing of the energy of love for God we have a serious problem on our hands.
Teilhard declared that only when the energies of love are harnessed for God will there be a second discovery of fire. The story of the Prometheus stealing fire from the gods forms the mythological imaginary around the initial discovery of fire. Transhumanists see themselves as the followers of Prometheus (as do all Luciferians)—fighting back and stealing from the gods/cosmic order. Prometheus is Uranus, the social revolutionary. Arrayed against Uranus-Prometheus is Saturn: the old guard, conservatism, dogmatism, and the tyrannical order.
In their fight against the perceived stinginess of the Saturnian church/old guards, the Promethean transhumanists have ultimately become that which they fought—their theology has been weaponized by elites hell bent on controlling the Promethean fire. Rather than seeking to destroy the Promethean energy as they did before, the elites will co-opt the Promethean fire and keep it for their own secret (dark) Saturnian brotherhood. Saturn is Lord of Karma, also the Lord of The Rings, and lastly The Lord of Saturnalia.
Teilhard offer a way out of this demonic dialectic: namely the harnessing of the fire of love for God. May we walk in that pathway.