We are distressed and pained when we see modern attempts at human collectivisation ending up, contrary to our expectations and theoretical predictions, in a lowering and an enslavement of consciousness. But so far how have we gone about the business of unification? A material situation to be defended; a new industrial field to be opened up, better conditions for a social class or less favoured nations -- those are the only and very mediocre grounds on which we so far tried to get together. There is no cause to be surprised if, in the footsteps of animal societies, we become mechanised in the very play of association. Even in the supremely intellectual activity of science (at any rate as long as it remains purely speculative and abstract) the impact of our souls only operates obliquely and indirectly. Contact is still superficial, involving the danger of yet another servitude. Love alone is capable of uniting living things in such a way as to complete and fulfil them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves.
...all we may well need is to imagine our power of loving developing until it embraces the total of men and of the earth.
It may be said that this is the precise point at which which we are invoking the impossible. Man's capacity, it may seem, is confined to giving his affection to one human being or to very few. Beyond that radius the heart does not carry, and there is only room for cold justice and cold reason. To love all and everyone is a contradictory and false gesture which only leads in the end to loving no-one.
To that I would answer that if, as you claim, a universal love is impossible, how can we account for that irrestible instinct in our hearts which leads us towards unity whenever and in whatever direction our passions are stirred? A sense of the universe, a sense of the all, the nostalgia which seizes us when confronted by nature, beauty, music -- these seem to be an expectation and awareness of a Great Presence. The 'mystics' and their commentators apart, how has psychology been able so consistently to ignore this fundamental vibration whose ring can be heard by every practised ear at the basis, or rather at the summit, or every great emotion? Resonance to the All--the keynote of pure poetry and pure religion. Once again : what does this phenomenon, which is born with thought and grows with it, reveal if not a deep accord between two realities which seek each other; the severed particle which trembles at the approach of the 'the rest'?
We are often inclined to think that we have exhaused the various natural forms of love with a man's love for his wife, his children, his friends and to a certain extent for his country. Yet precisely the most fundamental form of passion is missing from this list, the one which, under the pressure of an involuting universe, precipitates the elements one upon the other in the Whole -- cosmic affinity and hence cosmic sense. A universal love is not only psychologically possible; it is the only complete and final way in which we are able to love.
-- snippets from 'Love As Energy' section in chapter, 'Beyond the Collective: The Hyper-Personal', The Phenomenan of Man, by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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