Carl Jung and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
“Teilhard de Chardin and Carl Jung never met. Dr. Jung did finish reading The Phenomenon of Man less than a month before his death.
The book had both a great and visible impact upon Dr. Jung according to Michael Serrano.
It must have been satisfying for Dr. Jung to see Teilhard de Chardin from the perspective of a paleontologist and Jesuit Priest for each the same empirical conclusions about the evolution of consciousness that Dr. Jung found in his empirical research in Depth Psychology.
It is a peculiar oddity that both Teilhard de Chardin and Dr. Jung stressed the empirical nature of their work yet often find their books categorized under “Philosophy” and “New Age.”
This in itself justifies the importance of this great book as the recognition of consciousness and the reality of the inner world of the soul is far from recognized even at the dawn of the 21st century”
Carl Jung was reading Teilhard de Chardin during the last few days of his life. According to Miguel Serrano, when he visited Jung on May 10, 1961, “On the small table beside the chair where Jung was sitting, was a book called The Human Phenomenon by Teilhard de Chardin.
I asked Jung whether he had read it. ’It is a great book,’ he said. His face was pale, but seemed strangely illuminated by an inner light.”
(Miguel Serrano, C.G. Jung and Hermann Hesse: A Record of Two Friendships [New York: Schocken Books, 1968] pp.100-101)
Jung died on June 6, 1961
Beyond the frontier of sensible appearances
“All around us, to right and left, in front and behind, above and below, we have only to go a little beyond the frontier of sensible appearances in order to see the divine welling up and showing through. But it is not only close to us, in front of us, that the divine presence has revealed itself. It has sprung up universally, and we find ourselves so surrounded and transfixed by it, that there is no room left to fall down and adore it, even within ourselves.
By means of all created things, without exception, the divine assails us, penetrates us and moulds us. We imagined it as distant and inaccessible, whereas in fact we live steeped in its burning layers. In eo vivimus. As Jacob said, awakening from his dream, the world, this palpable world, which we were wont to treat with the boredom and disrespect with which we habitually regard places with no sacred association for us, is in truth a holy place, and we did not know it.”~Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Mankind and A Change of Age
The Phenomenon of Man (Harper Perennial Modern Thought)
We are, at this very moment, passing through a change of age.
The age of industry the age of oil, electricity and the atom; the age of the machine, of huge collectivities and of science — the future will decide what is the best name to describe the era we are entering. The word matters little. What does matter is that we should be told that, at the cost of what we arc enduring; life is taking a step, and a decisive step, in us and in our environment.
After the long maturation that has been steadily going on during the apparent immobility of the agricultural centuries, the hour has come at last, characterized by the birth pangs inevitable in another change of state. There were the first men — those who witnessed our origin. There are others who will witness the great scenes of the end. To us, in our brief span of
life, falls the honor and good fortune of coinciding with a critical change of the noosphere.
In these confused and restless zones in which present blends with future in a world of upheaval, we stand face to face with all the grandeur, the unprecedented grandeur, of the phenomenon of man. Here if anywhere, now if ever, have we, more legitimately than any of our predecessors, the right to think that we can measure the importance and detect the direction of the process of Hominization. Let us look carefully and try to understand. And to do so let us probe beneath the surface and try to decipher the particular form of mind which is coming to birth in the womb of the earth today.
Our earth of factory chimneys and offices, seething with work and business, our earth with a hundred new radiations — this great organism lives, in final analysis, only because of, and for the sake of, a new soul. Beneath a change of age lies a change of thought. Where are we to look for it, where are we to
situate this renovating and subtle alteration which, without appreciably changing our bodies, has made new creatures of us? In one place and one only — in a new intuition involving a total change in the physiognomy of the universe in which we move — in other words, in an awakening.
What has made us in four or five generations so different from our forebears (in spite of all that may be said), so ambitious too, and so worried, is not merely that we have discovered and mastered other forces of nature. In final analysis it is, if I am not mistaken, that we have become conscious of the movement which is carrying us along, and have thereby realized the formidable problems set us by this reflective exercise of the human effort. ~Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; The Phenomenon of Man; Pages 214-215.
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