During the 1920s and 30s, the scientific mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin saw that we can only understand evolution as a whole by studying the mental and spiritual qualities of the human phenomenon. At the end of the 1930s, he put his thoughts and vision onto paper writing Le phénomène humain, published posthumously in 1955 because the Christian authorities thought that his spiritual writings offended Catholic doctrine.
This pathbreaking book was translated into English in 1959 as The Phenomenon Man and in 2003 as The Human Phenomenon, causing a furore in scientific circles as well. For instance, Peter Medawar, a Nobel Prize-winning laureate, called the book an ‘incoherent rhapsody’.
Nevertheless, there is much sense in this rhapsodic prose, which we discover when we ourselves study the human phenomenon by looking inside ourselves, as evolution becomes ever more conscious of itself within us.
In my case, in 1982, when helping to design and implement a new management accounting system in Kuwait, I realized that in just two years since resigning from my marketing job with IBM in London, all the divergent streams of evolution had converged within me, much as Teilhard had prophesied.
However, while I realized that I had reached the Omega Point of evolution by conducting a thought experiment that started afresh at the very beginning at evolution’s Alpha Point, this experience was so exhilarating and terrifying, it has taken me half a lifetime to understand what actually happened to me in the early 1980s.
Furthermore, as I appear to be the first person on the planet to have been consciously carried to evolution’s glorious culmination, I have needed to find a quite new language to describe both my experiences and the psychodynamics of society as a whole, from conception to death.
However, communicating this language and exploring what these evolutionary studies mean for the future of our species involves more work than I am able carry out on my own. So I would much welcome any assistance that anyone reading this blog feels that they could give me.