The Cosmic and the Christly       The core of Teilhard's spiritual life is laid bare in its primary colour by the reminiscence he has left to us of his earliest religious experience. He1 writes:   "I was certainly no more than six or seven when I began to feel myself drawn by Matter - or more strictly by something that 'shone' at the heart of Matter. At this age when I suppose other children feel their first 'sentiment' for a person or for art or religion, I was affectionate, well-behaved, even pious. That is, catching it from my mother, I loved 'the little lord Jesus' dearly. But in reality my genuine self was elsewhere. To find out about this you wo

Towards a Vedantic Christianity: the Individual, the Universal, the Transcendental       About the "pantheistic experience...that the Divine is everywhere and is all", a letter by Sri Aurobindo1 pronounces: "it is a very common thing to have this feeling or realisation in the Vedantic sadhana2 - in fact without it there would be no Vedantic sadhana. I have had it myself on various levels of consciousness and in numerous forms and I have met scores of people who have had it very genuinely - not as an intellectual theory or perception, but as a spiritual reality which was too concrete for them to deny

-012_The Fundamentals of Teilhard's Faith The True Nature of his Christianity.htm         Part Two THE BASIC TEILHARD DE CHARDIN AND THE MODERN RELIGIOUS INTUITION         I The Fundamentals of Teilhard's Faith: T. he True Nature of his Christianity       (1)       It is our thesis that among contemporary Europe's religious thinkers Teilhard de Chardin is a case sui generis calling us beyond easy and exclusive labels to a truth at once of the present-day West and of the ancient East.   He is not only complex but also puzzling - and he is a puzzle to his own being no less than to o

Faith in the World and Faith in God       No doubt, "the human, the Christly" answered to an authentic need of Teilhard's soul. Yet the concentration of the "cosmic sense" in it does not ever seem to have been a complete success. For, we cannot overlook the now-notorious passage commencing Part One of How I Believe (Comment je crois) which was written in 1934 and which became the target of a grave criticism in the Vatican's mouthpiece, Osservatore Romano, in June 1962 but which has subsequentlv been interpreted by most Roman Catholics as not necessarily a slip from orthodoxy. Teilhard1 writes:   "If, as a result of some interior revolution, I

III Teilhardism and the Modern Religious Intuition       (1)       We have tried to show Teilhard's "apologetics" in its proper bearings. We have distinguished it from the classical form with which it is equated by admirers who wish to assimilate him into traditional Christianity. True, Teilhard has a missionary aim inasmuch as he wants to bring the modern world to Christ. But we must never forget that the Christ he preaches is one who is in accord with the demand of that world and differs from the traditional version of the God-Man of Judea. And his missionary aim backfires on the Church to which he belongs, for he want

    TEILHARD DE CHARDIN AND OUR TIME             Teilhard de Chardin and our Time         AMAL KIRAN (K. D. SETHNA)                 Clear Ray Trust Pondicherry INDIA First Published 2000 (Typeset in 10.5/13 Palatine)                 © Clear Ray Trust 2000 Published by Clear Ray Trust, Pondicherry Printed at Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, Pondicherry (J51/4.5.98/10O0)

FOREWORD       Part One "The Real Religion of Teilhard de Chardin - His Version of Christianity and Sri Aurobindo's Expose of the Ancient Vedanta" appears for the first time in print.   Part Two "The Basic Teilhard de Chardin and the Modern Religious Intuition" brings together the articles published in Mother India, Monthly Review of Culture, an organ of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, from July 1973 to May 1974.   The two parts have as their starting-points either interpretative studies of Teilhard de Chardin or his own multi-aspected writings or else both at the same time. Their aim is to consider Teilhardism from all possible sides and converge upon a

The Vedantic Vision, the Historical Christ and Soul-Evolution       Thus the ancient Vedantic vision is inclusive of all possible aspects of divinity and can harmonise the diverse currents of thought running through Teilhard's philosophy. Even the idea of the Incarnation the historical Christ-figure, can be a part of it; for the Avatar stands out in the Bhagavad Gita, a development of the Ishwara-aspect. But, of course, the uniqueness, so dear to the Christian, of Christ's avatarhood would be set aside. Instead, we would have a divine phenomenon repeating itself at several stages of human history, a guiding companionship of

Christian Pantheism, Panpsychism, Omega Point, the Cosmic Christ         Teilhard makes no bones about his "deepest 'pantheist' aspirations"1 nor does he hesitate to speak of "the essential religious tendency which impels man towards some sort of 'pantheism'."2 In the same vein he mentions "the sense of the whole, which is the life-blood at all mysticism"3 and asks: "what in truth is the 'cosmic sense' from which germinates the whole organism of my faith but precisely this same faith in the universe which animates modern pantheisms?"4   But time and again he qualifies such statements by an assertion like: "I

-005_Faith in the world,the concept of omega,the vision of Christ's Parousia.htm Faith in the World, the Concept of Omega, the Vision of Christ's Parousia       Perhaps the champions of Christian Orthodoxy will bring up the confession Teilhard makes in the Phenomenon of Man when, towards the close of the book, he considers "The Christian Phenomenon", The confession is apropos of his concept of Omega.   We may first summarise this concept. According to Teilhard, evolution produces, in the course of time, systems ever more complex in the sense that a larger and larger variety of elements are organised around a more and more distinct centre: the atom, the mega-molecule, the virus, th