(crowd murmuring)
Good evening.
Good evening and welcome.
What a lively crowd.
Thank you so much for coming out tonight.
My name is Arlene Montevecchio,
and I am the director of the Center for Spirituality
here at Saint Mary's College.
The Center for Spirituality was founded in 1984
with generous support from the Sisters of the Holy Cross.
The Sisters, who have responded to
the needs of the times for over 175 years,
many of whom are here tonight,
and so we acknowledge them in gratitude.
(crowd applauds)
At this time, I ask you to silence your cellphones,
and encourage you to please stay
through the duration of our program.
Please join me in welcoming President Janice A. Cervelli
to the podium to give some remarks
on the behalf of the college.
(crowd applauds)
Thank you very much.
Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us tonight
for one of the great Saint Mary's moments of the year.
I've been looking forward to the Madeleva Lecture
for a long time, both for the opportunity
to hear from our distinguished speaker on a subject
that is central to all that we do at Saint Mary's,
and since I'm still technically a freshman,
to experience this wonderful college tradition
for the first time, and, yes, I still get lost on campus.
(crowd chuckles)
The essence of a Saint Mary's education is
a recognition of our quest for wholeness and direction
for each of the young women we educate here,
and helping them to learn for themselves
how to discover and how to achieve
that education for themselves.
We guide and we challenge our students to discover
the connections of mind, heart and soul.
Those indivisible parts of ourselves should grow together.
What makes our mission so distinct,
and what an enlightening evening like tonight highlights,
is a sense of discovery of what it means
to satisfy our hunger for wholeness.
That's the ultimate meaning of a Saint Mary's education.
At the heart of making that ideal a reality,
is the campus Center for Spirituality.
So I'm gonna ask Arlene if you could do us the honor
of introducing our honored guest, thank you.
(audience clapping)
Thank you, President Cervelli.
Many of you may know that the Madeleva Lecture
is named after Sister Madeleva Wolff,
a former president of Saint Mary's College,
who pioneered graduate theological training
for laywomen and men, from 1943 to 1970.
The lecture honors a distinguished
female theologian annually,
to give due attention to women's voices in theology.
And it is my distinct honor to introduce
our 32nd Madeleva lecturer, Sister Ilia Delio.
Ilia Delio is a Franciscan Sister of Washington DC,
and holds the Josephine C. Connelly
Endowed Chair in Theology at Villanova University.
A native of Newark, New Jersey, she earned doctorates
in Pharmacology from Rutgers University,
and in Historical Theology from Fordham University.
She is the recipient a Templeton Course in Science
and Religion Award and the author of 17 books.
Her recent Making All Things New:
Catholicity, Cosmology and Consciousness,
has been nominated for the prestigious
2018 Grawemeyer Award from the Louisville Institute.
Doctor Delio's research interests include
divine action in evolution,
science and metaphysics,
Christogenesis and cosmotheandrism,
and artificial intelligence and transhumanism.
The 32nd annual Madeleva Lecture titled
A Hunger for Wholeness: Soul, Space and Transcendence
is contracted for publication by Paulist Press.
Please join me in welcoming Sister Ilia Delio.
(audience applauds)
Thank you very much for that very kind introduction.
When I hear what my interests are,
it sounds like something from another age,
you know, cosmotheandrism.
And so a lot of my work does cut across
different disciplines of theology,
spirituality, culture and science.
And my talk this evening really will encompass these areas
as I continue to strive to find a new narrative,
a new vision, for our emerging human lives
and an emerging church.
And I might begin with something that,
Sigmund Freud in 1915 to 1917,
gave a series of lectures at the University of Vienna,
and interestingly he was trying to set the stage for
his own new discoveries on the mind and the human person.
And what Freud basically said is, you know,
given enough time, we humans will overcome
anything that we think we're distinguished from.
Whether it's the cosmos or nature or mind itself.
And so Freud sorta set the stage for what
Bruce Mazlish calls the four discontinuities.
And I wanna take that paradigm for my talk this evening
to ask this question:
can we move toward a new type of discontinuity,
where we are no longer separated from
but come to a new level of interaction and interrelation?
And here's the question I want to ask.
Can we transcend our world of individual persons,
autonomous persons, who often are in conflict
and competition, and can we arrive at a new level of
humankind, one that is co-reflective and co-evolving?
That is no small order.
(audience laughs)
Now, to begin my way into this question,
I like to begin with in a sense what we have known,
because that's where we are most comfortable.
And I think if I begin with the medieval cosmos,
it's not only that we are most comfortable still
religiously in that cosmos,
it is also to raise the question about cosmology.
Now, that's not something that we talk about
or think about often, but tell me your cosmology,
and I will tell you your anthropology.
Tell me how you conceive of the cosmos and its order,
and I'll know something about who you are in that order.
In the Middle Ages, truthfully, it was kind of nice,
because it was static, fixed, and geocentric.
The world wasn't really going anywhere,
except for it had a function, and basically,
part of that fixed universe was both the material reality
of belonging to the earth, and the spiritual reality
of being surrounded by the heavens.
And so, for the medieval person, there was in a sense
a space for the body and a space for the soul.
So there was a place for the soul to stretch, so to speak,
a place for the soul to imagine, to aspire.
And that was in a sense that longing
beyond what could be seen in those heavens,
towards what could not be seen.
That space was rattled in the 15th century,
as astronomers began to measure or observe
the movements of the planets.
And of course, I think we know the story fairly well,
that it was a good Polish Catholic astronomer
by the name of Nicolaus Copernicus,
who began to realize that perhaps this is not
a static earth-centered cosmos,
but it seemed that we could be moving
with other planets around the Sun.
Well, Nick had a hard time with his own discovery,
and wasn't so sure what to do with it.
But you know, others came along,
and of course, the famous one being Galileo,
who could affirm that discovery and say,
yes, we are moving with other planets around the Sun,
and this is a helio-centric cosmos.
That kind of discovery of space, a new discovery of space,
also began the rise of modern science and more and more,
as science began to emerge as a discipline,
it could begin to address questions that were otherwise,
in previous eras, relegated to religion.
And so God was in a sense pushed out,
more and more as the unnecessary hypothesis.
And of course, Descartes grappled with this,
with this shift and the discoveries of space.
Descartes being Jesuit,
not that that was a problem for him,
but you know, Jesuit trained,
and severely Catholic, being a French Catholic,
really struggled with, how can we know?
What kind of knowledge can we have,
if God is now being pushed out, if the earth is shifting?
And so Descartes ingeniously really, came up with a solution
by separating the mind from matter
in his self-thinking subject.
So the soul became for Descartes the thinking self,
the thinking conscious self.
Whereas the body became an extension of the material world.
And while I think Descartes really sought
to safeguard the human person in a changing world,
what he did inadvertently was in a sense
to create a distinction and a gap
where what holds the gap together between body and soul,
for Descartes, would be God.
So Descartes thinking gives rise to,
gave rise rather, to a mechanical philosophy,
which really paved the way for natural science to rise.
And after Descartes, we see all sorts of
discoveries in science, because it's just inert stuff,
stuff without sacred meaning,
stuff without any mind attached to it.
Now, the difficulty for Descartes is that what we lost
with this rise of modern science and mechanical philosophy,
we lost a place for transcendence.
Where does the soul stretch, where does it yearn,
if now this space is conquered and measured?
And so I think we begin to see, you might say,
sort of a shrinking of the soul,
this kind of movement certainly,
in religious circles into interiority.
But Ken Wilber the American philosopher says that
in a sense, this self-thinking subject created
a crisis of transcendence, insofar as the human person
sought symbolic substitutes for transcendence,
through money, sex, food, fame, knowledge and power,
all of which became substitutes for,
he says, true release in wholeness.
In other words, the true sense of body soul,
pulling that person into a new wholeness beyond.
And since that time of the 17th century,
we have still had this kind of conflict of transcendence.
By the 17th century, the world just became a world
of measurable stuff and a world of measurable growth.
With mind separate from matter,
there was in a sense an extension of space
that gave rise to this world as a vast machine.
And so Newton's world emerged,
and in a sense it's our world, right?
The world where we can build things.
We build buildings and we build schools,
and we build systems that are autonomous,
self-functioning, and sort of related to
one another by some kind of lawfulness.
For all practical purposes,
I think we are still quasi Newtonians.
We live as autonomous units governed by
some physical laws of motion and gravity.
But at the same time, I think that shift
from the Middle Ages into the modern era,
where the mind became separate from the cosmos,
and we lost transcendence,
we kind of went into a split-brain syndrome.
We became very left-brain, logical, analytical,
data-oriented, and we sort of lost the right brain.
The right brain that's,
the brain that's attached to the body,
the body that's attached to the world.
And so Teilhard de Chardin,
who has been my guide to the 21st century,
that wonderful Jesuit scientist,
said in one of his writings,
"The artificial separation between humans and cosmos
"is at the root of our contemporary moral confusion."
We became detached several centuries ago,
and to this day, we do not quite know where we are going.
Part of that reason I think is that modern science
took a dramatic turn in the early 20th century,
but science became more and more specialized.
You had to belong to the Vienna circle, so to speak,
to know what was going on.
But it was Einstein who was in a sense unhappy
with Newton's concepts of space and time.
So if you're unhappy with space and time today,
don't feel bad, you're in good company.
Einstein did not like Newton's notions of space and time,
and began to wonder how can we unify the laws of motion,
and the laws of electromagnetism.
So what did he do, he thought about light.
Light, not the light bulb but just the light
that permeates every aspect of our lives.
And what Einstein came to realize
is that there is no absolute space and absolute time,
in fact, time is sort of a dimension of space itself,
and space is something that is unfolding, being created.
And we have still yet to get our heads around this.
But Einstein basically altered
how we even thought about gravity,
that gravity is in a sense that massive objects,
that in a sense, bend space.
So contrary to Newton,
who thought we lived in a universe that was more like Legos,
where you put it together block by block,
Einstein said no, our universe is more like Gumby,
or Bazooka bubblegum, it can stretch or shrink.
And so we live in a universe where we have been able
in a sense, to trace the beginning of spacetime
back to a point that we call the singularity,
since we don't know what the heck that beginning is, right?
It's just that point of who knows what,
and that's about 13.8 billion years ago.
That is a very, very long time.
And we can't get our heads around that, because we have,
I know this comes as a shock, we have finite minds,
and we can't even deal with these kind of numbers.
But what we do know is that this universe
has been gradually unfolding, in other words,
space is being created as this universe
in a sense, continues to dynamically expand.
And so what scientists tell us
is our universe will continue on
for about maybe nine billion years,
if the Sun doesn't burn out,
if we don't have other suns to fill in,
and maybe a hundred trillion years,
or maybe indefinitely.
Now, for religious thinkers this is shocking,
since the psalmist says 80 for most,
70 for most, 80 if you're strong,
90 with good drugs, right, so?
(audience laughs)
We have yet to really deal with the fact
that this universe continues to unfold.
But we know it's expanding, because we ourselves
are part of the expansion at times.
(audience laughing)
What science has also shown us however,
is that what we call matter is really strange stuff.
Niels Bohr once said,
"If you think you understand quantum physics,
"give it up," right, it's very strange.
And what we now know today from science,
scientific experiments done in the early 20th century,
is that what we call particles have wavelike properties,
and so the stuff we call matter
lives in a pluralistic existence.
Plurality is intrinsic to materiality.
And so the stuff of matter is both wave and particle.
And what scientists tell us is that
it requires the presence and the active movement of the mind
in the measurement of the event to say what something is.
Now, these experiments done in
the early 20th century were radical.
Radical in the sense that science, even to this day,
has always been done with the exclusion of mind
from the measurement of matter, right?
Because we don't wanna get any kind of subjectivity
involved there, we want true objectivity.
But quantum physics says no.
The scientist, the observer must make a measurement.
So mind is part of the measurement.
In fact, that's what makes it happen.
So what quantum physics tells us is the path,
what is real comes into existence only when we observe it.
This was a radical move and we have yet to deal
with the presence of mind in matter.
But what science, what quantum physics also told us,
and more and more we're beginning to realize is,
is that the stuff of life is not
individual stuff like billiard balls,
but rather our prime source of materiality is energy.
And in a sense,
the fundamental fabric of the world
is like fields and fields of interlocking energy,
so that on the fundamental levels of the universe,
we can say that the nature of the universe
is undivided wholeness.
To such an extent that the physicist Paul Dirac,
when he was, he received the Nobel Prize in 1933,
and they had a little dinner for him,
like we had this evening for the Madeleva Lecture,
and he gave a little talk,
luckily I didn't have to give a talk,
and he said our material universe is so interwoven
that if you pick a flower on Earth,
you will move the farthest star.
In other words, there's no such thing as a discrete action.
There's no such thing as a privatized action.
That everything we do is interacting
with everything else in the universe.
We add to that understanding now of the physical universe
as of unfolding space and interlocking energy fields.
The fact that we are moving,
we are in a process of change that comprises life.
The word evolution best describes how life unfolds.
It's that word that still has people slightly on edge.
Or as people say, "Do you believe in evolution?"
I said, "It's not a belief system."
It's the best description, from the point of science,
that we can say about how life diversifies.
And so what we are saying is that life is not
static or fixed, it's dynamic and changing.
It is not so much a mechanism but a process.
That means it follows lawfulness and orderliness,
but there's also openness, spontaneity.
Basically saying nature has fun while it's being nature.
(audience chuckles) You know.
But if you look at this encyclopedia of life,
this process of evolution, on an earth that's really
a relative newcomer in the solar system,
about 4.2 billion years old or so, but,
here we are in the evolution of life where,
I know we're among people who like books, alright,
so 30 volumes of the evolutionary story.
Each volume 450 pages and each page a million years.
That's a lot of bedtime reading, by the way.
Volume One: the Big Bang.
Volume 21: the Earth.
Volume 29: the Cambrian Period.
Now, two weeks ago, I was in the Pittsburgh airport,
and I saw this brontosaurus skeleton.
I mean, it was huge.
Well, that's our nearest, one of our nearer relatives.
Volume 30, the dinosaurs go extinct on page 385.
We are volume 30, the last page, the last line,
and the last two words of the last line, human beings.
Here's the sobering reality, there's no period.
There's no period at the end of the sentence.
We are in evolution.
I know it's hard to get our heads around.
I mean, I don't think you'll see a relative here,
but evolution is not a background to our story,
it is our story, which means we have a past
and we will have a future.
It means that we are unfinished.
We live in an unfinished universe.
It is not completely fixed.
We are being created as we create.
Which means life moves towards newness.
Newness is perhaps our greatest reality,
because as far as we know, time is irreversible,
which means life is in a sense emerging
by a process of creativity, of novelty and future.
So what Teilhard said is that
we are not simply in evolution,
we humans are here, not at the center of the universe,
we are in a sense, as the arrow of the universe,
the arrow of this whole process.
So what Teilhard said is we are
evolution now conscious of itself.
We can step apart from this process,
and we can understand and reflect on the very process
that has made thinking possible.
It's pretty amazing.
But, you know.
It's hard for us to get our heads around evolution,
but in California, they get evolution and they're,
in a sense, technology is our fastest evolver today.
I grew up in New Jersey where we had the cellphone.
The AT&T came out in the '70s
with the cellphone, it was this big.
And we used to have a phone on the wall,
I don't know what you did in South Bend here,
but we had a phone that had a cord and someone said,
"You're not gonna believe this, they're making phones
"that you'll be able to walk around with."
I said, "You're kidding, a phone you can walk around with?"
By the '80s, someone said, "They're gonna make computers
"that you could hold in your hand."
I said, "No, that's impossible.
"What's a computer?"
(audience laughs)
Here we are today, someone emailed me yesterday
and said computers will be obsolete.
Google, Facebook rather, is now into brain messaging.
Brain messaging.
You will have a though and your thought
will in a sense, carry the message electronically.
That's not my talk this evening though.
So what Teilhard began to recognize,
evolution is not, sometimes we limit this discussion
too much to some type of evolution of,
when I say personhood, I mean we're all caught up,
on the human body, which is great,
but what he realized, actually in dialogue with physicists
is that evolution is really the rise of consciousness,
and that's where a lot of my remarks
will take off from in this talk.
Consciousness is the name of the game.
Even in 1950, James Jean, an astrophysicist says,
"Mind no longer appears as an accident intruder
"into the realm of matter.
"Mind may be the creator and governor
"of the realm of matter."
He said, "The quantum phenomenon
"makes it possible to propose that the background
"of the universe is mind-like."
Up till this point, we have kept mind out of matter.
We have kept it as a distinct human phenomenon.
But even physicists are recognizing today
that this doesn't hold.
Some are calling it the hard problem of matter.
Even Bertrand Russell said this, he says,
"We know nothing about the intrinsic quality
"of physical events, except when they are mental events
"that we can directly experience."
He says, "In having conscious experience,
"we learn something about the intrinsic nature
"of physical stuff, for conscious experience
"is itself a form of physical stuff."
We cannot see anything about matter without mind,
which has lead, it's a humble moment,
quite honestly, in physics, because it means
letting go and making some room now
for consciousness in relation to matter.
And so what some scientists are suggesting
is that consciousness may be part of the cosmos itself.
So that in the beginning, is consciousness.
And by consciousness here, I mean the flow of information
that will eventually lead to what we know as awareness.
But what some are saying is that
mind then may be an emergent process.
Mind may be the field where this activity
of informational flow takes place.
So things that we have up till now said this is,
we're humans, and we have minds, and we're conscious.
What scientists begin to say, hmm, the whole universe
seems to have mind and consciousness.
So that what we can say accounts for the human mind
seems to be active in the universe.
Uh-oh, we may not be as special as we thought.
Now, Teilhard was,
he was a scientist, he was actually a paleontologist,
but he was in dialogue with the physicists of his day,
and he was intrigued, actually,
by this notion of consciousness in the material world,
and what he posited was two types of energy.
Now, I take his notion on energy as descriptive.
I mean, we're not talking hardcore physics here.
So he says, look, there's a type of energy
where things keep coming together.
I mean, look at evolution, look at this whole cosmic life,
13.8 billion years and we're here, right?
We, with our thinking selves and our complex bodies.
So he calls this this tangential energy,
or an energy of attraction.
But he says, you know, there's another energy,
and that's the energy of transcendence.
So he says things come together,
and as they come together, they go beyond.
And he began to identify therefore,
this tangential energy as the energy of love.
Love not as an emotion or a sentiment,
but love as the deep center-to-center attraction.
Now, here's a novel idea.
If you fall in love, your mind will change.
If you fall in love, consciousness changes.
You don't have to be a scientist to figure that out, right?
Love and consciousness belong together.
As love deepens, consciousness rises.
And that's essentially what Teilhard posited,
not as the human person,
but as the structure of the universe.
Now having said that, I thought, well,
I think what Teilhard is really talking about
are in a sense two universes of space.
An outer universe that we all know,
the universe we love to talk about in terms of
Big Bang and physics and the one we observe.
But there is another universe going on.
The inner universe, the universe of the mind,
the universe of what we used to call the soul.
But this universe is in tandem with the outer universe.
And so basically I think what Teilhard is saying is this.
There's an inner dimension of matter,
and there is an outer dimension of matter.
I think we have only tended to the outer dimension,
and we sort of relegated the inner dimension
to something, like, spirituality, you know.
And it's like, oh, you're in spirituality?
Well, we're in physics. (audience laughs)
So it's get translated as we're in the hardcore stuff,
and you're in that fluffy stuff world, right?
But what we're saying is that,
if consciousness is the inside of matter,
and religion or spirituality is a function of consciousness,
then that's what Teilhard reasoned.
Religion experience is part of
the inside story of the universe.
And this is like, huh?
Where is she going with this?
Teilhard expanded what we have known
in light of modern science, and he says,
"Religion is biologically the necessary counterpart
"to the release of the Earth's spiritual energy."
That is, religion has a biological function.
It has a function larger than the human person alone.
And we have not tended to that aspect of religion.
But this is what Teilhard saw as sort of
the problem in the 20th century.
He said, "Religion and evolution
"should neither be confused nor divorced,
"because they are destined to form one single
"continuous organism," in other words,
this universe has an energy of transcendence.
It's moving towards something.
And that towards something is in a sense
what the religious dimension of the universe is about.
And so therefore religion and evolution,
he says, need each other.
And he says this is our problem today.
We're looking for a religion of humankind
and of the Earth which gives meaning to human achievements.
A religion that will kindle cosmic and human evolution,
and a deep sense of commitment to the Earth.
We need a religion that takes seriously
the inner dimension of the universe.
But we have not been there.
We have in a sense stayed with Descartes.
We have stayed with minds separate from matter.
We have parceled out consciousness from the material world,
and we have been in a crisis of transcendence.
Until the mid 20th century,
when artificial intelligence emerged.
It emerged,
computer technology and artificial intelligence,
emerged after a bloody century of war.
And I think what we are beginning to realize
is that nature will always,
always invent itself in a new way.
Nature is malleable, nature is protean,
nature can change, and nature will always seek
to transcend any barriers that prevent it from being nature.
And so we have invented artificial intelligence,
I think, as a way of a new transcendence.
Margaret Wertheim says, "Modern science has systematically
"dismantled our Western understandings of sacred space,
"leaving God, heaven, and the souls of the dead
"with no particular place to go."
She says, "The understanding of and mastery over
"physical space, from astrophysics to genetics,
"has meant a loss of spiritual place in the physical world."
And what has that in a sense propelled us to do?
Find a new space of transcendence.
Technology today is more than just utilitarian devices.
They're more than just I can connect faster,
or reach out and touch someone from AT&T.
There's something about the cyberspace
that's a new cosmology of space.
It allows us to stretch, to lose ourselves,
to creatively imagine, imagine ourselves
out of our boring earthly lives, our biological lives,
and to recreate ourselves in a virtual space.
You can even fall in love online.
But you know,
in a sense, cyberspace is now fulfilling
a psychological and religious void in modern life.
I don't think it's just coincidence
that as the churches lose members,
virtual reality is gaining members.
There's something that's being transferred
from the biological sphere into the techno sphere.
But the difficulty of this translation
is that it is in a sense a new digital dualism.
We are in a sense not regaining ourselves in a new way,
we are more divided than ever.
And we know that when we, and I mean,
as I walk across campus here, as I do at Villanova,
every 20-year-old has, everyone has a phone.
Right, no one looks at anyone.
You don't talk to people, by the way.
That's not a cool thing to do.
You have to have a device before you.
Because the device is like a self extension, right?
It's an exoskeletal self.
And, so, as one writer says,
"We are in the process of making one another disappear
"by living more of our lives apart from other humans
"in the company of machines."
But we love our technologies because
they are a new space of transcendence.
We can in a sense, we can dream
and become something else in these spaces.
So we are as Sherry Turkle says, alone together.
And if we think this is a problem,
Ray Kurzweil, the Google developer,
posits that in about 30 more years,
we will be so wedded with our technologies,
we will exit homo sapiens.
We will become in his view, techno sapiens.
And what someone like Hans Moravec posits is that,
we will in a sense overcome mortality.
We will be able to download our brains
into new mediums, into new chips.
And we have a whole language that goes with this:
Mindclones, Mindfiles, Mindware.
So you have your credit cards, you'll have your mindfile.
And you will show your mindfile,
we can put that into new whatever medium,
whatever you wanna be, we'll just insert it,
and you'll be good to go.
Now, we think, you know,
I'm sure you're going, what, oh my god?
I thought this was supposed to be on spirituality,
(audience laughs)
and here we are with mindfiles.
This is happening.
This research is happening as we sit here.
So this is not just some science fiction fancy stuff.
This is like, I had a phone on the wall in New Jersey,
and now I have a cellphone, this will happen.
Unless, we don't want it to happen.
And maybe that's where I want to
take the last part of this talk.
What we realize today is that technology
promises to fulfill what religion promised.
Technology is in a sense a new type of religion.
It fulfills, in fact, it builds on
the basic tenets of Christianity.
Immortality, personal salvation and happiness.
Even as Antje Jackelen says,
"You know, what else can we say?
"The lame walk, the blind see, the deaf hear,
"and the dead are at least virtually alive."
Right, technology seems to fulfill the gospel.
Maybe it is.
But here is really, on a more serious note,
what has taken place.
I think mind, what we are saying now from science,
is that mind is integral to nature.
Nature is transcendence because
there's something at the heart of nature.
If we remove mind from biological nature,
nature will find a means to transcend itself.
To me you might say,
its religious needs, its inner dimension.
There's something about technology
that has in a sense escaped our everyday eye.
It has co-opted the inner dimension of the universe,
and we have allowed that to happen.
And, in a sense, it may account for why
the ecological movement has not gone far in over 40 years,
because our minds are not in bio nature,
our minds are in techno nature,
because that is our space of transcendence.
And therefore, what's at stake here?
I think several things.
One, we are becoming more and more cosmically dislocated,
because in a sense, technology creates wormholes, right?
Even as I walk across this beautiful campus,
I take in the beauty of the grass, the trees, the buildings,
but when I text someone,
I in a sense, move from point A to point B
without walking across the campus.
Studies show even among the Inuit Indians,
that once the GPS was inserted into the Inuit tribe,
they started losing a consciousness,
or mindfulness of belonging to the Earth.
I mean, if you have a GPS system, what'd you do?
You listen to the computer.
You're not attentive.
I could be driving in Alaska.
All I know it says make a right, make a left and stop here.
Second thing is, we're getting shallower in our thinking.
As we export the human self onto technology,
we know that the human brain is changing,
that our memory capacity is thinning out,
and we're also thinning out our frontal cortices.
Because in the past, we used to ask a person
about a book or a movie, now we Google everything.
Third, I think this kind of space of transcendence
has become the space of religious transcendence,
where in a sense we seek to live out, you might say,
our deepest longings and desires.
The problem however with technology
is that it really is an illusion.
It is doing no more than extending the modern self.
The modern dualistic self.
Mind separate from matter.
Henri Bergson the French philosopher was not happy actually
with Darwinian biology and he said,
"Our natural capacity for combining biology
"and technology has not gone far enough.
"It remains in the grip of closed societies."
He says, "Nature is conservative,
"and what living beings do most is to cling and resist."
And it's true, we don't like change.
He says, "the evolutionary tendency to change
"is the creative power of life as radical becoming."
So he says while nature resists change,
there is an openness in nature to change.
But he says in order for that change to really take place,
something other than nature must in a sense,
be at the heart of nature.
And so Bergson points to what he calls sort of a
supernatural, he doesn't quite use that language,
but he says we must loosen the bonds
of nature preserving itself, toward nature birthing itself.
Well, this became very influential on Teilhard,
who said, yes, there is one at the heart of nature
that is other than nature, and he called that Omega.
Omega first as that principle of absolute oneness,
or absolute love, that is completely other, divine,
and yet completely within.
And so he sees Omega as God.
The god present within is the god present ahead.
Even, however, the Ancient Greeks,
I think here Teilhard follows the Ancient Greek
tradition that there's always been conceived
a sense of otherness at the heart of this-ness.
From all the Greek philosophers down,
from Heraclitus to Plato to Plotinus,
there's a sense of a unity, a oneness, a fire,
something that is in a sense dynamizing this life,
inspiring it and kindling it.
Plotinus, happy guy that he was,
said, you know, this One
"is not external to anyone, but present within all things,
"but they are ignorant that he is."
Ignorant, something present within,
wholly other within, that we are not mindful of.
Thomas Merton spoke of le point vierge, right?
"That virgin point at the center of our being
"is a point of nothingness, untouched by sin and illusion,
"a point of pure truth, a point or a spark
"which belongs entirely to God,
"which lies inaccessible to the fantasies of our mind,
"or the brutalities of our will."
He says, "This little point of nothingness in us,
"as our poverty, is the pure glory of God in us."
An absolute oneness, an absolute center of love,
wholly within, wholly beyond.
That, in a sense, led me to begin to rethink the soul.
Because I think we need to,
just as we've given a lot of attention to science,
we need attention now to the science
of the inner dimension of the universe.
I went back and found the Victorine scholar.
Thomas Gallus in the 13th century,
spoke of the structure of the soul
as having this tip, this point,
this apex mentis, this openness to God,
and yet a part of the soul that could know,
and a part that could be oriented toward the good.
What I liked about Gallus is
he likened the structure of the soul
to the structure of the cosmos in his day,
so that the soul's ordering
is the same as the cosmic ordering.
Now, that got me thinking,
what if we were to rethink our soul in light of our cosmos?
So that we think of the soul as the mind,
the field of mind, or the ground of consciousness,
that place of inner freedom,
that place that is self-determining and co-creative,
which means that the soul is not some
abstract thing that we have.
The soul would follow then the same characteristics
as our expanding universe.
The soul has, you might say, a capacity to expand.
The soul has a light.
The soul has a gravity of love.
The soul is centered in Omega
as the universe is centered in Omega,
so that what's happening in the outer world
is in a sense happening in the inner world.
Are you with me?
This is a long way around to get to something
that's gotta be fairly straightforward.
(audience laughs) I know.
Well, I had to take up an hour.
(audience laughs) No, I'm only kidding.
So that, I imagine it this way.
Here is our universe that has two sets,
two universes, two levels to this universe:
an inner universe and an outer universe.
And I would, fair to say that
it's the inner dimension that moves the outer dimension.
It's consciousness that in a sense moves space.
Now, I'm gonna add to this mix the fact that
there is one at the heart of this process
that Teilhard names Omega, that we name as God,
that we claim as Christians that this Omega
becomes evolution, enters into materiality.
As Teilhard said, "The self of God
"is in the self-emptying of God."
This is a god who gets wholly involved.
This is a god who is not found in opposition to matter,
but through matter, so that, you might say,
we take hold of God in the finite.
Now, why is that important?
It's important I think when we get to Jesus.
Because here's a process of evolution
in which Jesus of Nazareth emerges.
But he emerges with a new structure of consciousness.
There's something in Jesus that is not like everyone else.
He is the faithful Jew and yet he has this
kind of inward liberation, and he says
accept the responsibilities of your freedom,
accept in a sense, you know,
the fact that the reign of God is within you.
So what is it about Jesus in this process of evolution?
What is it about his inner life
that you might say moves the outer life?
Well, first thing is, we can say,
(clears throat) Jesus was a cyborg.
No, I know you know that.
But what we are saying is that he tells us
what now science tells us about nature.
Guess what, nature can by hybridized.
Nature can be altered.
One scholar speaks of Jesus as a mutation.
In other words he is so, you might say in tune,
with the one, with God at the heart of his life,
he comes to a radically new consciousness,
and therefore a new center of love.
He is within biological evolution and different from it.
He is in a sense something like a strange attractor.
And so I think we see in Jesus, here is the key,
a new structure of existence.
A new structure of existence and a sense,
this is what the gospels are about.
The reign of God is within you.
You will do the works that I do,
but you will do even greater works than these.
We are in the Easter season, resurrection.
What has changed about us?
Where are our minds?
Pre-Easter, post-Easter?
Because I think if you follow this trajectory of story,
what we are saying is that mind moves matter.
Mind in union with God, Omega, love,
brings us to a new level of consciousness.
That's I think what the resurrection story is about,
a new sense of selfhood,
a new sense of belonging to the cosmos.
And as much as I like science,
I have to eventually say that
the mystics teach me a lot more.
Because what we begin to realize through the mystics
is that our minds create the world,
not the other way around, and this is something that science
is beginning to understand from a different perspective,
and it's a little bit resistant to it.
But truthfully, if you look at,
I would not call these the great mystics of our tradition,
but look at the Buddha and Saint Francis.
I had to include Francis here somewhere.
So there he is, right?
What do they do, they focus their minds.
They slow down, they gather their minds,
and they train them for centeredness and love.
And that's in a sense what Wilbur sees.
The mystics he says are in a sense,
the higher levels of evolution,
through an expansion of their consciousness.
He speaks of this as a movement from
the subconsciousness of matter,
to the self-consciousness of mind
to the superconsciousness of soul and spirit.
And what we learn from the mystics is in a sense consonant
with what science is telling us today.
When inner reality is stronger than outer reality,
one can act from choice, creating one's own life.
Isn't that what Jesus was about?
You know, operating from an inner reality
by which he can then confront
and engage the world in a new way.
And that's I think what we are being called into today,
if we tend to the inner universe
as source of the outer universe.
Or what Maria Rainer Rilke called the outer space within.
"Through every being single space extends.
"Outer space within.
"Through us the birds fly silently.
"Oh, I who'd grow, I look outside and in me grows the tree."
That seamless space from outer, inner, outer.
The flow of mindful love that creates the space of unity.
We have work to do because we have
allowed ourselves to become brain-fatigued.
We are couch potatoes.
We have information coming at us from every portal
and we don't know how to slow down.
But what we do know is that the brain can change.
We can train the brain to focus
on a higher level of consciousness.
We can in a sense expand our inner space.
And what I am suggesting is that
as we expand inner space in union with the One,
or God or love, our outer space changes as well.
In other words, our disconnect in the outer world
is reflective of our disconnect in the inner world.
And so my wondering is can we move towards
a new discontinuity between inner-outer, mind and matter,
soul and universe, person to person?
One thing I want us to just appreciate
is that we're undone, unfinished.
In fact, the I is not something that God did in the past
and sort of left us here to fend on our own.
You know, get a degree and get a job and hope you make it.
It is God's creative activity, right?
The I is God's acting, God's loving in the present moment.
The I is the now of God's creative love.
Which means that the more we can come
into the authenticity of self,
the more we come to the authenticity of God.
So even as the Islamic mystic Mansur Al-Hallaj says,
"I saw my Lord with the eye of my heart,
"and I said 'who are you?' and he said yourself."
There is one at the heart of us that is our source,
our life, our hope and our future,
and what in a sense we are saying here in light of Jesus
is that the more we can enter into this oneness,
the more we are free in a sense, liberated,
from what we think we're supposed to be,
or our fragmentations,
and therefore we come to a level
of what Beatrice Bruteau called, you might say,
an act of living out of spondic energy,
living at the point where the next person
is also in the act of being created.
So that you might say,
you're being created and I'm being created,
and we meet one another on a threshold of emerging life.
And so rather than saying, hey, you need to think like me,
can we say, may you be,
that we are in a sense being created together.
And what we are seeing is that when the inner universe
is consonant with the outer universe,
that we are not living in some kind of
functional dualism or a cognitive dissonance.
Truthfully, I think we have global schizophrenia.
We are functionally, you know, a split-brain.
But we have the capacity in a sense
to come to a new level of inner-outer expansion,
where we can move to more love,
more unity, more consciousness,
a type of personhood that takes creativity seriously
as the act of making a future together.
And that's what Beatrice says.
"If we really accept creation as ever new,
"and we see ourselves actively participating
"in this ever new creating,
"then we are always facing the future."
That is our reality.
The future is our reality.
And this is in a sense what we're about.
So Teilhard looked at this whole thing and he says,
we have the capacity to unite.
We have the capacity in a sense
to go forward in a new unity and we must, he says.
This is in a sense our survival,
otherwise we're not going to make it.
He did say either we unify or we annihilate.
And therefore he saw the role of technology,
not as sort of diverting our minds
into another altered transcendence state,
but drawing us in a new mind and heart,
to a new collective mind, what he called the noosphere.
But he said technology must in a sense
work in the service of love.
Are we using technology to deepen what we are as persons?
In a sense, is it pulling us together
in this inward rise of God?
So the term he used was ultrahumanism.
Can we use technology to move towards
a level of shared thinking and an expansion
of community through greater unity?
And by ultrahumanism, what he meant was more being.
More justice, more peace, more forgiveness,
more mercy and compassion.
In other words, we are constantly being created.
And being created toward what?
Toward more life together.
And he called that planetization.
And he saw that technology could in effect,
lead us to a new type of thinking,
a co-reflective thinking, that could eventually
lead to a co-evolving deepening of heart.
A reemergence of feeling for one another,
and feeling for the Earth in a new way.
And I love this picture because this is a single face
with you might say a global mind.
The key to it really is rediscovering our inner universe.
We've had a spirituality for centuries,
but that term has undergone
many iterations and many understandings.
In our culture, we tend to marginalize,
we tend to relegate spirituality to some kind of sphere
that's not quite in the center of what's really important.
You know, the hard science is really important.
Economics, really important.
Spirituality, that's nice, but Teilhard says, no, that,
niceness, that's what's driving the whole of evolution.
We need to shift our priorities and our attentions,
and in doing so to find a new unity
and a new freedom, a new kind of spondic energy,
a liberating energy where we can act in relation to
the one who is within us and who goes before us.
Here is in a sense what I see
through this kind of complex iteration
from the Middle Ages into the 21st century.
We have split apart, body and soul,
mind and spirit, from reality.
We have allowed our attention to be diverted,
caught up, almost mesmerized by our technologies.
We find ourselves exhausted.
We are weighed down.
We are more fragmented today than in a sense ever before,
at least because we know more today.
We're more aware of things because of the internet.
But we're not going anywhere.
The Earth continues to suffer.
The poor continue to be poor,
and what we don't realize is that
we have the capacity to change.
That's what nature teaches us.
Nature is transcendent.
Nature is malleable.
Nature is tech nay.
I think this is what Jesus was
trying to tell us in his own way.
We have the capacity to become new beings.
We have the capacity to become
a new type of community that all may be one.
If we want a different world,
then we must become a different people, thank you.
(audience applauds)
Thank you, Sister Ilia, for your incredible insights.
We have about 15 minutes for questions,
after which, we'll have a reception in the lobby
and announce our 2018 Madeleva Lecture.
So there are microphones that will be circulated,
and then we will thank Sister Ilia one more time.
Anyone have a question?
Ah, it's exciting.
Anyone have a question?
Oh, hey, you got it. (laughs) Can I ask a question?
Thank you so much, I guess I have a live microphone.
I wondered if you could say something more about
the things you said about technology,
particularly its sort of alienating functions,
resonates with the people you're talking to,
we get that, and that's really important,
but you also refer to technology as something
that is opening us to the future in some ways.
I just wondered if you could,
could you unpack that in some way?
I mean, what really is,
there's a lot of genuinely liberating things there,
and I wondered if in some way,
the opening of technology might be, you used,
you talked about Teilhard and religion,
and sometimes that was religion,
sometimes it's spirituality, sometimes it's God,
but I wondered if the technology as a new religion
is simply an awkward and baby religion
that is still struggling to find its feet in some way.
Right, so, okay.
That's good, good question, I mean,
so let's try to unpack those comments.
First of all, technology is in a sense ambivalent in value.
We create the technologies.
So the value of technology is in a sense
the values we give to technology.
And therefore I think it's a question of
what do we want with our technologies.
Why are we creating them?
What do they hope they'll do for us?
Second is technology is an extension of biology.
It's not something that's antithesis
to what we are biologically,
it is in a sense an outgrowth of the biosphere.
In fact, if you look biologically,
biology is always tech nay, right?
It will always create, find means of tools, toolmaking.
What's different is this.
We have in a sense shifted in our use of technology
from something as an aid or tool for development,
to in a sense, co-opting us, but when I say that,
let me just qualify that.
We have given our allegiance to,
we give our minds and souls to technology.
There's something about technology that
grasps us beyond the utilitarian level.
And by that I mean, when we start to spend 24/7
of our waking hours emersed in our technologies,
which may be good, it may be not.
The good part is we can connect, right?
We can connect with people around the world.
We can text message.
The bad thing is when someone comes to your door,
and they knock and say do you have 10 minutes time,
we are preoccupied, our minds are elsewhere.
Our bodies are in our rooms, our minds are elsewhere.
We are not really wholly there.
That's the kind of dislocation I'm talking about,
where we allow our minds to wander into vast fields
of cyberspace, where our earthly lives can be boring,
and there are all sorts of studies on this.
Studies where people have had,
they had boring lives, they go onto cyberspace,
and second life and they get an avatar.
You can become a palm tree.
You can become an elephant in a circus.
And if you do that or I do that,
I can spend a lot of my free time in the circus,
and people love me, right?
In my real life, I can be this crabby person.
So it's a disconnect.
Is it willful, I don't know,
but what it is doing, it disconnects us,
and therefore, our minds are not on the earth.
Our minds are even, we're not even conscious sometimes
that we're running water excessively.
We're not conscious of how we are acting in the biosphere.
And that's what I'm trying to say here.
Consciousness affects space.
That's what we're saying.
And what the mystics show us is that
consciousness can unify space.
Every, in a sense, whether.
Across the traditions, the mystics come to a more unified
interior space by focusing their minds,
and that interior focus shifts the space
of their outer world to a new level of unity.
Technology does not afford that.
And I don't know if I said this here,
but the techno movement and the Eco movement
have been growing, I mean,
they emerged around the same time.
Technology, 1956 is when the term
artificial intelligence was coined.
We have 1962 with Rachel Carson,
if we take her as the tipping point of the Eco movement.
1962 to 2017,
not much has changed in the ecological movement.
Global warming is getting worse.
It's not getting better.
We are still unmindful that our daily practices
are having environmental consequences that are irreparable.
In that same period of time,
we have gone from the phone on the wall
to the computer in my hand,
to soon we'll have the implanted chips,
and robots interspersed with us.
So there's something about the gravity of technology,
and that's why when I speak of it
as a type of religious transcendence,
we are giving in a sense our allegiance to it,
because it pulls us beyond ourselves
in a way that ecology does not.
Thank you so much for your talk.
I found your analysis really persuasive.
And speaking as someone who's not in the heart
of the Millennial generation, but you know,
at the beginning of it, it really resonates with the
experience that many of us have of
feeling disconnected from the world around us.
I went on a run this afternoon on this beautiful campus,
and I had to stop and take photographs (laughs) of things.
But that tension there,
so I did feel deeply connected to the place.
Actually, it was a profoundly spiritual experience
of my feet falling where the feet of the saints,
so to speak, have fallen.
And then also this need to share this,
and to pray in public, if you will, with others.
So I'm wondering if you can maybe flush out
some of what you're saying with some practices.
What ought we do in relation to technology?
I don't hear you saying, now, let's just get rid of
all of our devices and chuck things out.
But what kind of practical vision
could you offer in light of that?
Right, so I love technology.
I should probably just preface with that.
I'm not a Luddite by any means.
But we do need to be conscious about our use
and development of technology.
In other words, we have the capacity for choice
at every moment of our lives.
Everything from should I answer my cellphone
every time I get a message or I get an email?
Can I unplug?
Do we have cyber Sabbaths?
That would be number one.
Do we have one day of the week
where we actually unplug all our devices
and make a conscious effort not to tend to those devices,
say, and here's a novel idea,
go talk to another person, right?
Or go on a bike ride, or just sit in nature.
You know?
It's very simple, right?
We attend to what we love.
Love is, and so love and consciousness go together.
Right?
And it's where we find love that
we will place our minds and our hearts.
So cyber Sabbaths would be one.
I think monitoring how often
we have to look at our phones every day.
Do we have, every time, you know?
You do know that every ding is a dopamine rush, right?
Every time it dings, you get a little drop of dopamine.
Now, dopamine's a little high, right?
It's like woo, so, you know, it's like ooh,
like someone emailed me, right?
And then you go, oh god, I don't wanna answer that.
That's another neurotransmitter.
We won't go there.
So what we are saying is that these little dings
have neurophysiological effects on us.
They become as addictive as any drug.
I mean, we should just take note of that, right?
So there are things we can do.
First of all, to be aware that this is not just
innocuous piece of hardware,
it's affecting me biologically, physiologically,
and as I'm affected, I affect the world around me.
How I am, how I choose, and how I relate to others.
Thank you for challenging us all to kind of look at the
innerness of our being here with you and in our world.
You said much about artificial intelligence,
and I'm not sure if you mean just generally speaking
what our technology is developing,
or if you're looking at, or if you're speaking,
maybe you could be more specific about
the artificial intelligence that gets reflected
in some of the development,
of the developmental edges of our technology,
almost as mirrors of our expanding consciousness.
And do we, I mean, is there
a way in which we're placing a trust, maybe a blind trust
in the development of that artificial intelligence
to be our salvific experience?
I think my short answer would be yes.
Insofar as, again, we're building, we're creating.
These devices, this artificial intelligence,
is emerging out of our capacity,
our conscious capacity to think, to reason and to create.
So there's something of that in this intelligence
that's of us, so in a sense, it is a mirror.
Technology's like a mirror of who we are and what we are.
So in a sense we could ask mirror, mirror on the wall,
(laughs) who's the fairest of them all, right?
And so are we place, well, again,
your question is in a sense where I was trying to go.
We are placing a trust in this technology
that in past centuries, we would have placed
in a higher being, namely God.
But, you know, I asked my students this question.
Is technology a new religion for you?
One said, you know, in a sense it is.
Because it's a lot easier.
I can access it quicker.
I get quicker answers.
(audience laughing) You know, I can look up--
So religion is in a sense where we place our trust,
where we place our hope, where we place our allegiance,
what pulls us onward, right,
to something beyond ourselves, that transcendent nature.
So it does in a sense, technology does in a sense
fit those criteria for religious phenomenon.
One more question.
Oh, yes?
The last time I read some of Teilhard,
it was a long time ago, but one of the parts
that impressed me, he said,
he talked about evolution for man,
that we are almost fully evolved accept in our mind.
So that should be an important process.
Yes, right.
It seems to me that the use
or maybe abuse of some of this newer technology
actually may keep us from evolving that way.
Right, so your question is good.
It's consonant with where I was trying to go.
So in other words, what Teilhard would say is
we're at the end of biological evolution.
We will not evolve anymore, well, maybe we will.
But what he saw is that the next level of evolution
be psychosocial, in other words,
it would be consciousness and social evolution,
which is what he would call as the level of the noosphere.
In a sense, in a sense, technology has lead us there,
but we have not been conscious.
Several things, we are not conscious of our evolution
with technology on a new level of mind,
nor are we conscious that that new level of mind
requires a new level of soul, you might say,
a new level of being.
We have sort of allowed ourselves,
and here's part of the problem.
Technology has evolved exponentially.
Very quickly in 40, 50 years.
Almost at a breathless rate.
We can hardly keep up with it.
If you have a 3G phone, you're way out of date, right?
So we need to step back.
Technology is not the problem.
Let me just put this right out there.
It's not the problem.
In a sense, we're the problem.
Insofar as we use it, we develop it,
and then we are a sense allowing ourselves
to be lured by it in a way that is unhealthy
and unhelpful to, you might say,
the dynamics of cosmic evolution.
What do we do with the biosphere?
What does the planet do as we, you know?
Now, not to draw too much of a line
between planet and tech nay, or bio and tech nay.
Some technologists would see,
for example mind cloning, as if we get better minds,
perhaps we'll take better care of the Earth.
If we can live longer, perhaps we might relate more.
So they might see this kind of
renewal of the Earth through technology.
I think that's a stretch, because what I see happening is
we are mindless, we are mindless of the Earth
that is the very source of our lives.
So Teilhard would say, yes, evolution to a new level
of the mental, the conscious and the social,
but not to the exclusion of the biosphere.
The biosphere comes with us.
What we evolve into must be for the planet itself.
It cannot be only for the perfection of the human person,
because God is one, that one is at the heart of all life,
Big Bang onward.
Okay, I think that's it.
(audience applauds)
Thank you, Sister Ilia, so much.
That was truly incredible.
I figure if she can do all of this without notes,
I can do my little closing without notes.
Please join us in the lobby for refreshments.
We also have a few, 30 flyers
with coupons on it, of Sister Ilia's books.
And hopefully you'll join us next year
in April 2018 for our 33rd Madeleva Lecture,
Mercy Amba Oduyoye, who is former deputy general secretary
of the World Council of Churches and a leader
in the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians.
So thank you very much for coming out tonight.
(audience applauds)
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