Apr 19, 2021
The Noosphere
The rise of planetary consciousness
The New Mindscape #12–6.
The Second Axial Age
Karen Armstrong and other scholars have claimed that the period we now live in could be called the “Second Axial Age”.[1] Armstrong stated that
All over the world, people are struggling with these new conditions and have been forced to reassess their religious traditions, which were designed for a very different type of society. They are finding that the old forms of faith no longer work for them; they cannot provide the enlightenment and consolation that human beings seem to need. As a result, men and women are trying to find new ways of being religious. Like the reformers and prophets of the first Axial Age, they are attempting to build upon the insights of the past in a way that will take human beings forward into the new world they have created for themselves.[2]
The concept of the “Axial Age” describes the appearance of the idea of transcendence in the civilisational centres of China, India, Greece and Israel. These Axial teachings and ideals were critical of local values and customs. A new level of self-consciousness appeared during this period.
Another interesting aspect of the Axial age is religious circulation and interpenetration. In the time of the Buddha, there were many spiritual teachers who promoted Axial teachings; only the Buddha remains famous today as the founder of a world religion. In his time, the whole society of his time, together with its old culture, was collapsing. There were more and more people circulating throughout India, leaving their local homes and villages, and their local customs behind. Trade routes were expanding. There was greater communication and interconnection between different parts of India and even with other parts of the world, which led to the outburst of new ideas and spiritual teachers.
The same thing was happening during Axial periods in China, in Greece and in Palestine. For example, there were many new religious movements emerging in the Roman Empire at the time of Jesus, which were breaking out of the traditional Roman-style pagan religion, or trying to reform Judaism.
According to Armstrong, we are now in a similar kind of “Axial” condition. Traditional and conventional religious worldviews have been challenged, they have collapsed, or they have found themselves in crisis. The old boundaries between communities have broken open. And there is a greater circulation and communication between different parts of the world. Many new and reformist spiritual and religious movements have appeared. At the same time, old religious movements and teachings have been fiercely criticised. It’s hard to say now, but out of the bubbling diversity and emergence of different ideas, perhaps a new form of spiritual or religious culture will emerge.
One dimension of this “Second Axial Age” is a greater social consciousness. While the first Axial Age saw the emergence of individual reflexivity — to become critically aware and detached from yourself as an individual — the current “Axial” condition seems to be characterised by a greater sense of collective reflexivity — we become aware of our collective identity as human beings, and we critically reflect on the type of collective society and culture we are creating through the way we live, think and act in society.
Humanity is currently undergoing the greatest transformation in its evolutionary history, characterised by an exponential multiplication of our level of intercommunication, interconnectedness and interdependence, and the possibility of permanently altering the evolutionary course of life on our planet, including our own. Is there any deeper meaning, significance, direction or purpose to these changes?
From a materialist perspective, evolution is a process without any intrinsic direction or purpose. Religion, on the other hand, typically considers that there is a moral and spiritual meaning to the direction of change. The environmental and social “day of reckoning” our species faces as a consequence of our collective choices; the emergence of increasing levels of global consciousness, self-reflexivity and sense of responsibility for our collective well-being and for our planet — all of these manifestations of the current moment of human evolution, can be understood as spiritually and religiously meaningful.
From this perspective, we need to consider the significance of the time we live in, and ask ourselves if we have a moral or spiritual imperative to act for the wellbeing of our species and life on Earth.
Teilhard de Chardin and the “noosphere”
One vision that can be associated with the idea of the second Axial age is the thought of the French Catholic palaeontologist and theologian, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Derijin 德日进, 1881–1955). He is famous in China as one of the discoverers of Peking Man (Beijing yuanren 北京猿人). In the early 20th Century, a number of European and Chinese archaeologists and palaeontologists conducted excavations in the vicinity of Beijing, who discovered the bones of an early ancestor of the human race, who has been called Peking Man. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was one of these scientists.
He was also a very religious man, a Catholic priest. Although he was well known in China for his discoveries in the field of palaeontology, he is also famous for his theory about the evolution of human consciousness. He wrote many books about how humanity evolved in the context of the Earth’s planetary evolution, and how he saw humanity evolving in the future. However, the Catholic Church banned his books, because they were considered to be not in alignment with Catholic dogma.
His theory about the evolution of humanity includes some of the following concepts. The planet Earth is called the geosphere in geology. Around the planet, there is the biosphere, which is made up of all the biological life on this planet, and which forms the outer living coating of the planet Earth. If you consider all of the interconnections between all these different living beings, they form a single living system, which completely covers the surface of the world. For Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, in the first stage of planetary evolution, the geosphere came into being. Then, through the course of millions of years, the biosphere also came into being. Then, what is happening now, is the emergence of what he called the noosphere — which means a “mental sphere”.
Over thousands of years of evolution, as human beings have spread over the surface of the Earth, the communication between human beings has gradually spread over the surface of the Earth. For most of human history, the communication between human beings was largely localised. But in the present day, the spread of human beings, the consciousness of human beings, and the communication between humans has completely covered the earth. This communication is going on all the time at intense levels and in all directions. The intense communication creates a planetary consciousness that transcends each individual. This communication and consciousness forms the noosphere, which covers the entire planet.
Although each of us has our individual consciousness, we collectively form one single system of consciousness, which is constantly communicating. In a sense, that can be compared to the brain itself. The human brain is made of trillions of cells, each of which has its own life. Yet, the intense intercommunication between all these cells forms the consciousness of one single human being. So what Teilhard de Chardin said is that this is the situation of our planet — collectively, we are moving in that direction through the increasingly intense communication and consciousness between human beings. As we think of the internet and cyberspace, we can understand his idea. But he said this almost 100 years ago. This was a rather radical concept in those days.
How did he describe the idea of the noosphere? It is the coming into being of a planetary thinking network — the interlinking system of consciousness and information, of a global net of self-consciousness, and of instantaneous feedback and planetary communication. At some point in the future, he thought, this intercommunication and interconnection would become increasingly intense to the point that what emerged would be a single consciousness. In his mystical, religious worldview, he considered that this point of consciousness is the point where humans would come into union with the transcendental vision of God. He called this the Omega Point. Teilhard de Chardin considered that the increasingly integrated consciousness of the human race will approach the universal consciousness of God. It is, in a sense, a very mystical and religious understanding of the future evolution of humanity.
Given this overall trend of evolution, we have a choice between what he called “divergent individualism” and “convergence.” In divergent individualism, which is the same as the “spiritual individualism” I discussed above, meaning and purpose can only be found inside our own selves. To find my true self, I have to find my freedom from others, not to subject myself to the influence or control of others. Therefore, it is in my individuality, in my own uniqueness and difference that I can find my true meaning and purpose. For Teilhard de Chardin, if everybody goes along the way of divergent individualism, what we will end up with is a highly individualistic society, in which individuals, with their absolutely unique meaning and consciousness, have no connection with each other.
On the other hand, he presented another choice, that of convergence. He proposed that in communication with others, we seek to find unity or union with others. So, every one of us should consider how to find the point of convergence that we have with others. He called this the general direction of evolution.
But perhaps Teilhard de Chardin assumed too great a dichotomy between the collective and the individual. On the one hand, we cannot find our own meaning in isolation. All the meaning that we get in our own lives, even when we create our own meaning, emerges through our conversation with other people and our interaction with the world. Paradoxically, our individualistic meaning-making requires a certain level of integration, communication and interaction with others. As the world becomes increasingly interconnected with even greater interaction between people, on the one hand, it leads to greater integration, but on the other, it makes it possible to have even more divergent individual meanings, because we can be exposed to so many different people and ideas. Every one of us will have different circles of friends, different things to read, exposure to different ideas, and experience of different places. This greater interconnectedness actually leads to an ever-greater diversity of individual consciousness, which, in turn, leads to further interconnectedness. So, in fact, individualisation and convergence actually go hand-in-hand.
This essay and the New Mindscape Medium series are brought to you by the University of Hong Kong’s Common Core Curriculum Course CCHU9014 Spirituality, Religion and Social Change, with the support of the Asian Religious Connections research cluster of the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
[1] Armstrong, The Great Transformation.
[2] Roemischer, “A New Axial Age,” para. 19.
