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LOVE, THE TOTALIZING PRINCIPLE OF HUMAN ENERGY.
LOVE, THE TOTALIZING PRINCIPLE OF HUMAN ENERGY
Those who greet with the greatest skepticism any suggestion tending to promote a general coordina tion of thought on earth are precisely the first to recognize and deplore the state of division in which human energies are vegetating: disconnected ac tions by the individual, disconnected individuals in society. It is evident, they say, that a vast power is neutralized and lost in this unordered movement. But how can you expect dust like this to cohere? Themselves already divided by nature, these human particles continue to repel one another irremedia bly. You might perhaps force them mechanically together. But to infuse a common soul into them is a physical impossibility.
The strength and weakness of all these objections to the possibility of some eventual unification of the world seem to depend on the fact that they insidi ously exaggerate appearances which are only too real, without being willing to take into account cer tain new factors already perceptible in humanity. The pluralists always reason as if no principle of connection existed, or tended to exist, in nature outside the vague or superficial relations habitually examined by common sense and sociology. They are at bottom juridicists and fixists who cannot imagine anything around them except what seems to them always to have been there.
But let us see what will happen in our souls the instant there emerges, at the moment fixed by the march of evolution, the perception of an animated universal center of convergence. Let us imagine (this is no fiction, as we shall soon state) a man who has become conscious of his personal relations with a supreme personality, to whom he is led to add himself by the entire play of cosmic activities. In such a man, and starting with him, a process of unification has inevitably begun, which will be di vided into the following stages: totalization of each operation in regard to the individual; totalization of the individual in regard to himself; and finally, total ization of individuals in collective humanity. All this "impossibility" taking place naturally under the in fluence of love.
A. Totalization by Love of Individual Actions
In the divided state in which the pluralists con sider us (that is to say outside the conscious influ ence of Omega) we most often act only from a tiny portion of ourselves. Whether eating or working, or doing mathematics or a crossword puzzle, man is only partially engaged in his activity, with only one or another of his faculties. His senses, or his limbs, or his reason function, but never his heart itself. Human action but not the action of a whole man, as a scholastic would say. That is why after a life of highest effort, a scientist or thinker may end up impoverished and desiccated disillusioned; his mind but not his personality has worked on inani mate objects. He has given himself; he has not been able to love.
Let us now observe the same forms of activity in the light of Omega. Omega, in which all things converge, is reciprocally that from which all things radiate. Impossible to place it as a point at the peak of the universe without at the same time diffusing its presence within each smallest advance of evolu tion. The meaning of this is nothing less than this: that for him who has seen it everything, however humble, provided it places itself in the line of progress, is warmed, illumined, and animated, and conse quently becomes an object to which he gives his whole adhesion. What was cold, dead, impersonal for him who cannot see, becomes charged for those who see not only with life but with a stronger life than theirs; in such a way that they feel themselves seized and assimilated, as they act, to a far greater degree than they themselves are seizing and as similating. Where the former only finds an object with limited reactions, the latter are able to expand with the totality of their powers to love the lowest of their tasks as passionately as if they could touch or caress it. In the external appearance of the opera tion there is no change. But what a difference in the stuff of the action, in the intensity of the gift! The whole distance between consumption and communion.
And this is the first step in totalization. Within a world of personal and convergent structure, in which attraction becomes love, man discovers that he can give himself boundlessly to everything he des. In the least of his acts he can make an entire contact with the universe, with the whole surface and depth of his being. Everything has become a complete nourishment to him.
B. Totalization of the Individual on Himself by Love
That each of our separate pursuits can become total under the animating influence of Omega is already a marvelous utilization of human energy. But no sooner has this first transfiguration of our activities taken shape than it tends to enlarge into another more profound metamorphosis. By the very fact that they become total, each one in itself, our activities are logically led to totalize, merged together in a single act. Let us see how.
The immediate effect of universal love, rendered possible by Omega, is to attach to each of our ac tions a root identity of passionate involvement and gift of self. What will the influence of this common ground (one might call it this new climate) be on our inner life? Shall we dissolve under its pleasant warmth? Will it blur the clear outline of the objects around us with an atmosphere of mirage? Will it take our attention from the individual and tangible, to absorb us in a confused sense of the universal? If we fear this, it is because we have again forgotten that in the direction of spirit union differentiates. It is undoubtedly true that once I have discovered Omega, all things become for me in some ways the same thing; so that whatever I do I shall have the impression of doing one and the same thing. But this fundamental unity has nothing in common with a melting into homogeneity. In the first place, far from weakening, it accentuates the outline of the elements it assembles; for Omega, the sole object of desire, only forms for our eyes and offers itself to our touch in the completion of those elementary advances by which the fabric of evolution is empiri cally taking shape. But there is more to it than this. Love not only impregnates the universe like an oil that will revive its colors. It does not simply bind the clouded dust of our experiences into a common lucidity. It is a true synthesis which operates on the grouped bundle of our faculties. And this is indeed the point that it is most important to understand. In the superficial course of our existences, there is a difference between seeing and thinking, be tween understanding and loving, between giving and receiving, between growing and shrinking, be tween living and dying. But what will happen to all those contradictions once their diversity has re vealed itself in Omega as an infinite variety of forms of a single universal contact? Without any sort of radical disappearance they will tend to combine into a common sum, in which their still recognizable plurality will burst forth in ineffable riches. Not any sort of interference, but a resonance. Why should we be surprised? Do we not know, at a lesser de gree of intensity, a similar phenomenon in our own experience? When a man loves a woman with a strong and noble passion that exalts his being above its common level, that man's life, his powers of feeling and creation, his whole universe, are defi nitely held and at the same time sublimated by his love of that woman. But however necessary the woman may be to that man, to reflect, reveal, trans mit, and " personalize*' the world for him, she is still not the center of the world! If therefore the love of one unit for another is powerful enough to melt (without fusing) the multitude of our perceptions and emotions into a single impression, how great must be the vibration drawn from our beings by their encounter with Omega?
Indeed we are called by the music of the universe to reply, each with his own pure and incommunica ble harmonic. When, as love for the All advances in our hearts, we feel stretching out beyond the diver sity of our efforts and desires the bounding simplic ity of an urge in which the innumerable shades of passion and action mingle in exaltation without ever becoming confused, then, within the mass formed by human energy, we shall each approach the pleni tude of our powers and personality.
C. Totalization by Love of Individuals in Humanity
The transition from the individual to the collec tive is the present crucial problem confronting human energy. And it must be recognized that the first steps towards its solution only increase our con sciousness of its difficulties. On the one side the ever tighter network of economic links, together with an indubitable biological determinism, inevitably presses us against one another. On the other, in the course of this compression, we seem to feel the most precious part of ourselves our spontaneity and lib erty perishing. Totalitarianism and personalism: contrary to our theoretical expectations, must these two functions necessarily vary in inverse proportion to one another? In order to build the future (for we must certainly go forward) have we to choose be tween the Charybdis of collectivism and the Scylla of anarchy, between a mechanizing symbiosis and a devitalizing dispersion, between a termite colony and the Brownian movement? This dilemma, long evident to the clear-sighted, seems now suddenly to be entering the field of public notice. For the last year there has been no review or conference in which the question has not been broached. But the outline of a good solution has, alas, never been put forward.
The reason, in my opinion, for the disturbing checks suffered by humanity during the last century in its efforts to organize itself is not to be attributed to some natural obstacle inherent in the undertak ing itself, but to the fact that the attempts at group ing are made by inverting the natural order of fac tors of the projected union. Let me explain.
To totalize without depersonalizing. To save the assemblage and the units at the same time. Every one agrees that this is the dual task to be accom plished. But how do present-day social groups (democrats, communists, fascists) rate the values they theoretically agree in wishing to preserve? They all consider the individual as secondary and transitory, and place the primacy of the pure totality at the head of their programs. In all the systems of human organization battling before our eyes, it is assumed that the final state towards which the noosphere is tending is a body without an individualized soul, a faceless organism, a diffuse humanity, an Impersonality!
Now once this point of departure is accepted, it vitiates the whole subsequent progress of the opera tion, to the extent of making it impractical. In a synthesizing process, the character finally impressed on the unified elements is necessarily that which permeates the active unifying principle. The crystal gives geometrical form to, the cell animates the matter that joins it. If the universe is tending finally to become something, how can it keep a place in itself for Someone? If the peak of human evolution is re garded as impersonal by nature, the units accepting it will inevitably, in spite of all efforts to the con trary, see their personality diminishing under its influence. And this is exactly what is happening. The servants of material progress or of racial enti ties may try their hardest to emerge into freedom, but they are fatally sucked in and assimilated by the determinisms they construct. Their own machinery turns them into machines. The true Hindu karma. And at this moment all that remains to control the machinery of human energy is the use of brute force the same force that is very logically being offered us at present as an object of worship.
Now this is treason against spirit, and at the same time a grave mistake in human technology. A sys tem formed of elements of consciousness can only cohere on a basis of immanence. Not force but love above us; and therefore, at the beginning, the recog nized existence of an Omega that makes possible a universal love.
The mistake, as we have said, of modern social doctrines is to present enthusiasts for human effort with an impersonal humanity. What would happen on the day we recognized, instead of this blind di vinity, the presence of a conscious center of total convergence? Then by the opposite determinism to the one against which we are struggling, in dividualities, caught in the irresistible current of human totalization, would feel themselves strength ened by the very movement that brings them to gether. The more they grouped themselves under a personality, the more forcibly they would them selves become personal And quite naturally, with out effort, by virtue of the properties of love.
We have already several times stressed the capital truth that " union differentiates." Love is only the concrete expression of this metaphysical principle. Let us imagine an earth on which human beings were primarily (and even in a sense exclusively) concerned with achieving global accession to a pas sionately desired universal being, whom each one would recognize as a living presence in the most incommunicable features of his neighbor. In such a world, constraint would become useless as a means of keeping individuals in the most favorable condi tion for action, of guiding them in free competition towards better social groupings, of making them accept the restrictions and sacrifices imposed by a certain human selection, of deciding them once and for all not to waste their power of love but to raise it carefully and husband it for the final union. Under these conditions life would finally escape (supreme liberation) from the tyranny of material coercions; and a personality of increasing freedom would grow up without opposition within the totality.
''Love one another." Those words were pro nounced two thousand years ago. But today they sound again in our ears in a very different tone. For centuries charity and fraternity could only be pre sented as a code of moral perfection, or perhaps as a practical method of diminishing the pains or fric tions of earthly life. Now since the existence of the noosphere, on the one hand, and the vital necessity we are under of preserving it, on the other, have been revealed to our minds, the voice which speaks takes on a more imperious tone. It no longer says only: "Love one another in order to be perfect," but adds, "Love one another or you perish." "Real istic" minds are welcome to smile at dreamers who speak of a humanity cemented and armored no longer with brutality but with love. They are wel come to deny that a maximum of physical power may coincide with a maximum of gentleness and goodness. Their critical skepticism cannot prevent the theory and experience of spiritual energy from combining to warn us that we have reached a decisive point in human evolution, at which the only way for ward is in the direction of a common passion, a "conspiration."
To go on putting our hopes in a social order obtained by external violence would simply mean to abandon all hope of carrying the spirit of earth to its limits.
Now human energy, being the expression of a movement as irresistible and infallible as the uni verse itself, cannot possibly be prevented by any obstacle from freely reaching the natural goal of its evolution.
Therefore, despite all checks and all improbabili ties, we are inevitably approaching a new age, in which the world will throw off its chains and at last give itself up to the power of its inner affinities.
Either we must doubt the value of everything around us, or we must utterly believe in the possi bility, and I should now add, in the inevitable conse quences, of universal love.
What are these consequences?
So far, in our study of the socio-totalizing love of human energy, we have principally considered its singular property of joining and articulating the thinking molecules of the noosphere without turn ing them into machines. But this is only the negative face of the phenomenon. Love has not only the virtue of uniting without depersonalizing, but in uniting it ultra-personalizes. From this pass that we have reached, what horizons appear before us in the skies of humanity?
Here, we must first of all look backwards, to the point where we left the individual human nucleus, at the completion of its transformation by love. Under Omega's influence, we said, each separate soul becomes capable of breathing itself out in a single act into which the incalculable plurality of its perceptions and activities, its sufferings and desires, passes without confusion. Well, the sum of elemen tary energies constituting the global mass of human energy seems to be moving towards an analogous metamorphosis of a far higher order. We have fol lowed, in the individual, the gradual assumption of the emotions, aspirations, and actions in an indefina ble operation sui generis, which is all these things at once and something more as well. The same phe nomenon, on an incomparably greater scale, tends to take place under the same Omega influence in terrestrial thought collected as a whole. And indeed when the whole of humanity, operating and ex periencing at the same time with its exploratory surface, the center towards which it is converging; when the same fluid passion suffuses and connects the free diversity of attitudes, points of view and efforts, each represented in the universe by a partic ular unit of the human myriad; when the overflow ing multitude of individual contradictions harmo nizes in the profound simplicity of a single desire, what is all this but the genesis of a collective and
unique action, in which, in the sole conceivable form of love, the powers of personality comprised in the noosphere are realizing themselves, as they ap proach maturity, that is to say, their final conflu ence?
Totalization of total human energy in a total love.
The ideal glimpsed in their dreams by the world technicians.
This, psychologically, is what love can do if car ried to a universal degree.
But is this miracle really moving towards realiza tion?
If it is, some traces of this prodigious transforma tion must be perceptible in history. Can we recognize them? This is what I have still to seek and show.
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