Consciousness Evolves: Science, Spirituality and Human Destiny

what if science and spirituality weren't enemies but were two sides of the same Cosmic coin that's the groundbreaking idea explored by a French Jesuit priest and a renowned scientist named Pierre tahar de Sharden I've always been interested in Consciousness in this intersection of philosophy spirituality and science shardan lived through two world wars and was a leading paleontologist in his time but his biggest impact was through his writings on Evolution Consciousness and the Divine to today o

n our beyond the book series we're diving into his most famous work the phenomenon of men he had a broad grasp of other Sciences outside of paleontology and had a real affinity for Geology and the history of the Earth the text of this book was written in the 1930s but it didn't get published until just after his death in 1955 uh due to protest by the Jesuit order and I think that's just one more example of the Catholic Church impeding progress and forward-leaning thought and this wasn't way back

when in the 16 or 1700s this was in the 20th century his aim in this work is to get behind Consciousness and bridge the gap between science and spirituality his position as a scientist and a Jesuit priest kind of put him in this really unique position to at least attempt this he argues and rightly in my opinion that scientists and theologists aren't that dissimilar if we open our minds to Poss abilities we can uncover these Mysteries of the universe the fact this book initially bothered both th

e Catholic church and scientist I think says something about its content it's probably something that is really useful for us because it made two distinct camps two very important different camps uh Angry his work has been hugely influential uh for other scientists environmentalists spiritualists and philosophers from the mid 20th century uh on through Modern Times much of this book deals with the origin and evolution of humankind and how we came to be as a species all the various things going i

nto that from the subatomic level through the celestial bodies around us and then everything in between it's detailed and sometimes maybe a little too detailed but he's a scientist and I think that's forgivable some questions that came up as I read this is where does Consciousness start and does it start with anything living a single cell where was Consciousness before that and science deeply struggles to explain the existence of life and that jump that happened from The Big Bang to the formatio

n of Earth and to that goo or soup that the creation of Life came out of and I think when you look back at that this thing that science has a difficulty explaining it's easy to understand why spirituality or religion stands in and walks us through how we came to be and we know that life could have formed at multiple points in the timeline of creation and that complicates things as well shardan examines the without of man and this external world around us and he seems even as he explores that he

goes into great detail about it he seems more compelled by the within of man what's inside of us and although he moves between the without and the Within throughout this book he believes that what's inside offers the key to everything he understands that science can't adequately explain Consciousness but it didn't stop him from trying to at least get some explanation both through science and through metaphysics and I think that he understood that to get where he had to get he had to take some le

aps that weren't fully backed by science even if he used science to get as far as he could and I really appreciate when science scientists do this and there's another scientist that I have deep respect for the father of quantum physics his name is Max Plank and Max plank talks about Consciousness and how important it is to science he he also says that science can't get behind Consciousness but that everything that they see everything that they've examined postulates the existence of Consciousnes

s and that matter itself sits on top of Consciousness so if you've if you've ever familiarize yourself with Max plank I'd say go out there and read the philosophy of physics by Max plank it's a great book and it really does the same thing that this book does and bridge that gap between the religious and the spiritual the philosophical and that hard science before we move on Please Subscribe by hiding the watermark in the lower right hand corner and share this with any friends or family who you t

hink might benefit from it chardon's main Theory on humankind's Evolution and existence is that if we were created out of the big bang and then eventually on Earth from this sludge of original life that it wasn't just our physical forms that were created and evolved he postulates that Consciousness also formed alongside us at this very low level and that with the lower life forms Consciousness also evolved in and of itself as all of these different beings physically invol evolved and he says tha

t Consciousness must be made up of the stuff of the universe that even if we can't explain it it's still natural and Consciousness evolved and as it evolved it became more and more linked to humankind due to our Advanced and unique standing within and on Mother Earth and I understand what he's getting at here and I think there's portions of that that really resonate with me and make a lot of sense but but I don't think that I don't agree with him necessarily that we have this place at the Apex o

f this conscious pyramid of Nature and I think that's more tenuous than than he may think because a lot of people a lot of cultures believe that we're relatively young beings in the terms of this natural hierarchy you know indigenous Traditions including many Native American beliefs align with this idea that we aren't in nature but we are nature and if you check out our episode on breing sweet grass by Robin wal Kimmer you can get a really beautiful idea of what this is all about and we're going

to go ahead and Link that in a card in the upper right hand corner that you can click on if you want to watch that shardan believes we're collectively progressing with Consciousness and that eventually we're going to all be this Collective unified seamless human consciousness and that we're going to ascend to this Omega endgame of life in the universe and by the Omega endgame or or Omega end point it's like he sees this Collective Enlightenment point for Humanity where we all kind of evolve int

o this wholly unified seamless Collective Consciousness it's way more complicated than that in the book but that's probably the best that I can explain it here in short form and this isn't necessarily an easy book to summarize it's both scientific uh deeply scientific and it's also deeply metaphysical and Theological at points and when you have philosophy and Theology and Science and metaphysics all thrown together you know it it gets complicated that's a good thing that's a kind of a beautiful

thing I think if you look at his theory of collective Consciousness evolving you can see some kind of overlap with multiple religious Traditions around the world so if you if you see that he's saying we're going to collectively evolve our Consciousness together until we reach this end point which is kind of like this Collective Enlightenment that's almost like you know reaching Enlightenment uh in the Hindu tradition or in the Buddhist tradition or even you know becoming one with the The Da or t

he way and I think when we look at it like that we can really appreciate this Theory and and and that it's probably drawn not just from his own thought but it's from Collective thought that humans have been kind of putting forward uh for thousand thousands of years he does have some problematic theories and although I would eventually only rate this three stars out of five there was a lot to learn from it and I really appreciate his optimism about life and humankind I sincerely believe that we'r

e going to be okay I have great hope in humanity I talk about that a lot on this channel and there's a number of theor of his theories that I can get behind and I think that every book and author should be taken in the context of the time that it was written but even in doing so he briefly touches on Eugenics as a viable method of advancing humankind from this evolutionary perspective it was less uh it felt less World War II Germany and more kind of GAA in nature but that's still not cool and I

think Jude Law and Ethan Hawk showed us how this ends badly and if you haven't seen gataka I would say go find it on a streaming service somewhere and check it out because it's a it's a cautionary Tale on things that we do with like uh how we manipulate how humans uh are born and uh raised so just go check it out he also really lost me on his dire opposition to pantheism he rejects that the Divine could be in each of us and that we could find our own salvation there and if you don't subscribe to

Salvation and I'm not talking about in a Christian sense you can call it kind of whatever you want but he says that we can't find Salvation within that we could only find it working together as a collective and but this argument for me gets very semantical and it just doesn't flow uh with a lot of the religious and spiritual thought from around the world he actually would go on in his epilogue to say that A variation of Christian pantheism would be superior and that that struck me as both and k

ind of massively hypocritical you know but he was a Jesuit priest in addition to being a scientist so I think we have to keep that in mind but regardless I really myself am in am very much into this Universal Oneness of everything and this very pantheistic nature of things if I am that and you are that you know we are that together he scientifically argues throughout this work and he makes all this effort to be legitimate from a scientific perspective almost painstakingly so at times and then in

the epilogue he makes the case that in an attempt to unify human consciousness and have a further advancement as a species that it would be best undertaken through this construct of Christianity and that kind of turned me off from this whole thing in the last few pages I think he had a great conversation and a great argument going throughout this whole book and then he just kind of lost me there I don't think he actually even believed that Christianity was the answer it's like his argument was

mainly that Christianity was best positioned to unify humankind and Collective thought because of how widespread it was but I don't think that he's taking into account how jaded people are with Christianity around the world people who aren't Christians and his argument that we could use it to meld our Collective Consciousness more closely together and lift up the whole world again that makes sense outside of Christianity outside of any specific construct or religion so the base theory is probabl

y solid if you strip away Christianity as the container but again I've said it before but say it again he was a Jesuit priest so and we don't know part of he had a hard time getting this published because the Catholic church was so against his work and it's possible like we've seen from other philosophers and theologians and great thinkers throughout time they've had to make compromises to what they thought just to get their work uh recorded and published and so maybe he didn't even believe that

necessarily but he had to put it in the epilog to get his work uh seen by the world I don't know I'm just throwing that out there as it may be because we know that happens I do subscribe to his concept of a sphere of shared and interactive Consciousness around the planet it's no less important than our atmosphere around Earth and he called this Collective conscious the the neosphere and he imagined it as this Global thinking layer emerging from our interconnectedness of humankind and I find thi

s very complimentary to the concept that I believe in which is that our individual Consciousness and reality interact with other people's individual Consciousness and reality to form this Collective Consciousness and this is how we exist and move through the real world every day and we have a good video on this Theory and how we create our own reality through our own individual Consciousness and we're going to link that in the card in the upper right hand corner there seemed to me to be a simila

rity in some respect to chardon's advancement of the collective human consciousness to this Omega end point and this Jewish concept of the fact that these good acts or these Mitzvah collectively Advance humankind to the light and I really think that there's a beautiful overlap there and I always I always love that about the Jewish faith that these Good Deeds that are done are lifting humankind up towards this place of light and it's this beautiful thing and if you don't know much about that we a

ctually have a video on Judaism and I would encourage you to check it out shardan believes our species hit a critical point in evolution especially from the perspective of the development of our Advanced Consciousness when we became self-aware and that we were able to reflect on ourselves Ponder ourselves and we started asking these critical questions about our existence and our place in the universe and that this would have occurred sometime far before Antiquity going back into the Neolithic er

a or before he essentially postulates the evolution of this kind of psycho human internet we're all interconnected this neosphere that he talks about around the planet and that we're all communicating with each other via energy chardin says we need and are irresistibly being led to create by means of and beyond all physics all biology and all psychology a science of human energetics and energy is this amazing thing it's a thing that we can feel even if science can't explain it science can explai

n a lot about energy science is often a lot almost completely about energy in many respects but they can't always explain the energy that we feel around us we can feel the energy of a room when we walk into it we can feel the energy of that same room change by a single person of energetic influence walking in or out of that room energy connects us with others in and love and relationships we we call it the vibe or the flow or many other names from around the world and throughout time and some ca

ll it magic I believe reading material above our knowledge or education level that challenges our intellect it only makes us stronger it elevates our Consciousness I think anyone interested in Consciousness and general spirituality would appreciate the thoughts outlined of this book even if you don't fully subscribe to his endgame all these great men and women throughout history have advanced humankind it hasn't just been from a scientific perspective but from the advancement of our divine knowl

edge as well the knowledge of the metaphysical and the philosophical and the spiritual and I I think at that point div the hole against what you don't believe to only take a piece that fits your universal view it kind of puts us on ous ground and if you always only believe what you can see or what you can prove I think you're going to be left wanting and waiting shardan said it is in the course of that creation already obscurely begun that science by being led to concentrate on man will find its

elf increasingly face to face with religion or spirituality if you want to think of it like that most of us with open minds Open Hearts and open Spirits will'll find ourselves at this Crossroads of science art religion spirituality philosophy and much more and it's at this intersection where we can ask better questions we may find better answers we can see that things change and also that the questions and answers themselves will change so if you enjoy this conversation and if you're looking for

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