WIE: This is something that we've been thinking about a lot in putting together this issue of the magazine. Often in the Eastern traditions, the focus is solely on the "awakening to eternity" that you were just describing. Yet in Teilhard's work, there is another call. There is a call for the perfection of the Absolute to be manifest in form—for there to be greater and greater complexity, greater and greater order, greater and greater perfection, in form, in time, in space, in matter. Teilhard seems to bring together the absolute and the manifest in a truly nondualistic vision that does seem unique.

BS: That's right. I love his orientation and his view of the traditional religions. He says that the future of the spiritual traditions on our planet will be determined by the degree to which they enhance the divinization process. And he makes the point that one of the difficulties is that, up until the present moment, we have tended to see ourselves inside of these traditions. But now, he says, it's the universe that is our home. So it's a way of valuing them but seeing them from the proper perspective of the ultimate context—which is the universe as a whole.

WIE: Teilhard is probably best known for his idea of the "omega point." The term has become quite popular, but it seems that few people really understand what he meant by it. Can you explain Teilhard's omega point?

BS: By the "omega point," Teilhard meant a universe that had become God. He meant God in embodied form. He regarded the omega point as two things. It's an event that the universe is moving toward, in the future. But what he also imagined, which is difficult for us to really conceive, is that even though the omega point is in the future, it is also exerting a force on the present. When we think of the omega point, in our Western consciousness it's hard to escape thinking in terms of a line with the omega point at the end of the line. His thinking wasn't that way; it was that the omega point permeates the whole thing. He imagined the influence of the omega point radiating back from the future into the present. In some mysterious way, the future's right here. Teilhard regarded that the way in which the future is right here is in the experience of being drawn or attracted, or in our "zest." That's his word, and I love that so much. We—"we" meaning anything in the universe—are drawn forward, and this attractive power is what begins a process that eventuates in deeper or greater being. That attraction he regarded as love, and it is evidence of the presence of the omega point. When you experience that attraction, that zest, you're experiencing the future. You're experiencing the omega point. You're experiencing God. You're experiencing your destiny.

WIE: What does it mean for the universe to become God?

BS: Because we're in the midst of this process, at the best we can have crude images, metaphors. We have little glimmers and insights. The image that I like is this: You have molten rock, and then all by itself, it transforms into a human mother caring for her child. That's a rather astounding transformation. Of course, it takes four billion years. You've got silica, you've got magnesium. You've got all the elements of rock, and it becomes the translucent blue eye and beautiful brown hair and this deep sense of love and concern and even sacrifice for a child. That is a deep transfiguration. Love and truth and compassion and zest and all of these qualities that we regard as divine become more powerfully embodied in the universe. That would be an image of how I think about the universe becoming divine.

WIE: So it's a process of God becoming more and more explicit or embodied in the forms of the universe?

BS: Yes, exactly. Teilhard also spoke in terms of "giving birth to person." For example, your colleague Craig is there across the room. But if you go back five billion years, all of the atoms in Craig's body were strung out over a hundred million miles. The process, as mysterious as it is, of matter itself forming into personality or personhood, is what Teilhard regarded as the essence of evolution. Evolution isn't cold. He saw the omega point as that same process of giving birth to or actualizing this new, encompassing Divine Person—through not just all the atoms interacting with one another, but also the 'persons' of all the humans and other animals. All of us together are part of this same process, so that the entire universe becomes God's body. To really get how radical Teilhard's view is, think about an animal and dissolve the animal back in time in your imagination, back into individual cells. There weren't any multicellular organisms until about seven hundred million years ago. For over three billion years, there were just single-cell organisms. If you get to know an animal well, the animal really has a personality. But the personality is something that is evoked by the cells of the animal. It's truly mysterious. The animal's personality is real, but that personality is evoked by the cells. So in Teilhard's view, the individual members of the universe are actually in a process of evoking a Divine Person. We are actually giving birth to a larger, more encompassing, mind-spirit-personality.

WIE: In one sense, that was no less true sixty-five million years ago than it is now. But at the same time, humans are now becoming conscious of our own evolution and our conscious participation in this larger process. How do you think that has changed this process?

BS: Well, I think the difference is that while every member of the universe participates in the construction of the cosmos, that participation proceeds without a conscious reflection upon it. We, too, are participating in constructing the cosmos, but we have the awareness that we're doing that. That's the essential difference of being human. We recognize this process as happening, and we can actually awaken to the fact that we are actively doing it. We're not just doing it. We're awakened to the fact that we're doing it.

This then calls for spiritual development so that we can find our way between the two extremes of how we tend to respond to this. On the one hand, we can be so overwhelmed by what that means, so frozen by the responsibility, that we divert ourselves from really embracing that destiny. And I think that happens a lot. Right now it's what our civilization is about, for the most part. But the other extreme actually is just as bad. We become so inflated with the thrill of that role that we lopside into thinking that we are the real action of the universe and that the human, and human enlightenment, is all that really matters. But I think it's not that. It's rather that we're participating in this huge, vast, intricate event, and we're a member of the community, but we seem to be especially destined to reflect upon this and to participate in it consciously. So I try to emphasize the fact of uniqueness here—but at the same time there's an equality. There's both. We're unique in our particular role. But on an ontological level, there's an equality. We're not somehow superior to the moon or to the phytoplankton or to the spiders or to anything else. Everyone is essential.

WIE: What is the importance of Teilhard's understanding of evolution and the role of the human being for our current planetary crisis?

BS: There are two points I'd want to make. First, Teilhard's thoughts on evolution enable us to begin to appreciate the true significance of our moment. It's extremely difficult for us to really understand what it means to make decisions that will have an impact on the next ten million years. Even if you understand the idea, it's only at one level of your mind. So studying Teilhard's thought and his work can be considered a spiritual practice for beginning to think at the level that is required of humans today—to think in chunks of ten million years, for example. It's so hard for people to get that.

The second thing I would say is that much of ecological discussion is framed in negatives because the destruction is so horrendous that anybody with any intelligence whatsoever, once she or he looks at it, becomes gripped by just how horrible it is. One of Teilhard's great contributions is that he enables us to begin to imagine that this transition has at least the possibility of eventuating in a truly glorious mode of life in the future, and his vision provides the energy that we need for enduring the difficulties of this struggle. That, to me, is extremely important. He can activate the deep, deep, deep zest for life and existence that I think is required for true leadership in our time.