Matter is spirit moving slow enough to be seen — Teilhard de Chardin

Teilhard hyphenated the words spirit and soul to read spirit-soul because, as a synthesis thinker, he saw the human interior life not as two separate entities (as in classical dualism), but as a single, unified interior axis, a dual-aspect monad with two poles:

~ Soul (psyche), the personal, psychological, experiential center of intellect, emotion, and will

~ Spirit (pneuma), the transpersonal, convergent, cosmic center

The hyphen was his way of saying that the cosmic and experiential, quantum and classical, visible and invisible worlds are not two things, but inseparable attractors, like dance and dancer, male and female energy. Not only are they two seamless components of the entire created order (spirit inhabiting matter from within) but are the goal and fulfillment of the entire interiorization process of evolution (spirit and soul) toward Omega. Their nexus and merger are the fulfillment of the evolutionary convergence of cosmic light energy in the human interior life, Alpha becoming Omega, the spiritualized self/identity in persons (Cosmic Christ) unfolding in an evolutionary trajectory, completed in the transfiguration stage of the Pleroma. Though the character and content of transformation/transfiguration that occurs in the interior life may differcross-culturally. However, process wise the interior formation of God-self along these lines is common across religious traditions (see part 5 for details).

Review: Light (Spirit) as the radial (invisible) and tangential (visible) energy of creation

Spirit is the radial energy, or uncreated light from Source that creates and animates the soul (psyche), the material body, and all material forms (various densities) in nature and the cosmos. Its spectrum of vibrating light energy increases in both density and visibility as it decreases in frequency vibration, appearing everywhere in creation as material form.

Light can carry energy across space, acting as a transfer mechanism. It is convertible into electricity, heat, or chemical energy. Examples included solar panels, photosynthesis in plants, lasers in industrial cutting/scanning, fiber-optic internet cables, and solar water heaters converting light to heat. Spirit is uncreated light energy (radial light energy/consciousness) emanating from Source that transforms and transmutes into tangential energy. Following the burst of intense light and heat in the Big Bang event, it cooled and converted to plasma, then took solid form making all things visible in space-time. Light = Spirit = consciousness is fundamental and prior to all created things, embodying them in space-time by infusion, thereby making them tangible and visible. In humans, spirit also animates, renews, and sustains the soul (psyche) and all living things from within, developing its hidden celestial blueprints into the cosmic order like a photograph.

It is the Spirit (radial energy) that first creates and later awakens the soul in spiritual enlightenment and transformation, reorienting it from its exclusive and limited sense-bound adaptation to space-time, making it part of a broader, more inclusive bandwidth of frequency vibrations on a spiraling stairway of descending/ascending light from Source (God-of-the-Whole). The activity of Spirit in the interior life (Source consciousness) elevates, aligns, super-animates, and sanctifies consciousness, influencing perception, thought, and behavior along the way.

Everything that exists is vibrating, only in different frequencies (oscillations). Being of a higher order, both the human spirit and soul (spirit-soul) reside in the field of space-time but are not of it. The spirit-soul is the essence of the interior life, 4D life creating, merging, congealing, and residing within its 3D counterpart (the body), a dual-aspect monad that inhabits the material body and survives the body on physical death.

What Teilhard didn’t do

Teilhard never identified the substance of the spirit-soul in a scientific sense. He described its function (interiorization, convergence, centration, reflection, and unification in the interior life) but not its ontology. That is, he avoided specifying:

~ what spirit-soul is made of

~ how it interfaces with the body (soma) and matter

~ whether it has measurable energetic correlates

~ whether it evolves in discrete stages

He kept it phenomenological (as conscious experience) and theological, not physical.

Why he stopped short

Teilhard believed that future science, what he called ultra physics or ultra science, would one day supply the missing codex. As science has begun to realize, Teilhard intuited correctly, as of late science is discovering that extrasensory, interdimensional, and paranormal dimensions of reality are governed by laws and principles beyond the known laws of classical physics. While mystics have been saying this for centuries, academia and science are not much ready to integrtate the mystical (unitive consciousness) into their their design; nor are the traditional and post-modern places of worship, at least in the western world.

Teilhard explicitly stated that the deepest interior of humans would eventually be understood in terms of energy, complexity, and convergence, but he didn’t have the tools to define it. He anticipated the day when this enigma could be solved, but in his time couldn’t answer it. Actually, this enigma had the potential to be solved in his time, circa 1940, had he and contemporaries Einstein and Tesla studied each other’s work, and cross-pollinated ideas. Though all three geniuses were alive at that time, there is no evidence they ever met, so collaborationthen was not to be. Nonetheless, any idea whose time has come will be fulfilled in its time and season. As for establishing a more complete spirit-science synthesis, that season appears to be of the moment.

Where Homo spiralis goes further

The Homo spiralis model does what Teilhard only gestured toward, it identifies the substance of the interior, treating the spirit-soul as a real energetic substrate (see diagram at the top).

Here, the interior is not just a phenomenological depth but a coherent light-based generative energy and information field, something that can be:

~ described

~ modeled

~ diagrammed

~ correlated with physics (biophotons, coherence, and electromagnetic [EM] resonance)

This is precisely the “ultra-science” Teilhard foresaw but could not articulate, giving the spirit-soul an evolutionary taxonomy (detailed in Parts 7 & 8).

Teilhard had no taxonomy beyond Homo sapiens. Homo spiralis introduces:

~ stages of interiorization

~ thresholds of coherence

~ a lineage culminating in Homo spiralis omega

This is the first attempt to extend biological taxonomy into interior evolution by defining the interior in scientific-philosophical terms. Where Teilhard said “spirit-soul,” Homo spiralis specifies:

~ informational integration

~ coherence of mind and matter

~ light-based interiority

~ spiraled developmental geometry

Though he did identify the mysterious substance manifests integrally as spirit-soul, the above is the codex Teilhard predicted, naming the phenomenon but not its substrate. He left the ontology open, expecting future science to fill it in.

Homo spiralis completes Teilhard’s unfinished spirit-science “symphony” (synthesis)

It provides the missing ontological layer, a model in which spirit-soul is not metaphor but energetic, coherent, evolutionary structure — not just compatible with Teilhard, but the continuation of his synthesis project and work, whose premise pivots on the evolutionary convergence of all things, “everything that rises must converge.”

Does the digital, information, and AI age help or hinder cosmogenic evolution?

Teilhard’s evolutionary arc is centripetal: energy converges, interiorizes, and complexifies toward higher unity. Digital technology and AI, by contrast, seem centrifugal: dispersing attention, externalizing cognition, and scattering (sapping) psychic energy outward into an ever-expanding infosphere.

But the real story is more nuanced, and far more interesting because the digital age doesn’t oppose Teilhard’s ascent, rather it amplifies both sides of the evolutionary tension.

Teilhard’s direction: upward and inward (click-onto blue Resource at top for video short)

Teilhard’s vector of evolution is unmistakable:

~ convergence —> toward unity

~ interiority —> deepening consciousness

~ centration —> coherence around a higher center

~ complexification —> more integrated wholes

This is the ascending arc of the phi-spiral (double-spiral), the movement toward Omega, where consciousness becomes more unified, luminous, and interiorly coherent.

Digital Tech & AI: downward and outward

The digital age tends to:

~ externalize cognition (memory -> cloud -> attention -> feeds)

~ diffuse interiority (constant distraction, fragmentation)

~ flatten depth (everything becomes surface-level stimuli)

~ accelerate dispersion (infinite scroll, infinite choice)

This is descending or centrifugal movement, the outward expansion of the technosphere. So at first glance, the vectors oppose each other. But here’s the Teilhardian twist:

The Digital Age does not oppose evolution, it intensifies the evolutionary pressure

Teilhard always insisted that evolution advances through the paradox of opposites creating tension:

~ between divergence (dispersion) and convergence

~ between exteriority and interiority

~ between complexity and chaos

~ between inner (psycho-spiritual) and outer (physics) worlds

The digital age massively increases the rate and amplitude of that tension. In other words, the outward explosion of digital information forces a corresponding inward (convergent) response.

Humanity cannot remain at the surface without psychological instability and breakdown. The technosphere becomes so overwhelming that the only sustainable adaptation is:

~ deeper interiority

~ stronger coherence

~ more conscious centering of self

~ higher-order integration

This is exactly what the Homo spiralis model adds and captures: the need for a new mode of consciousness capable of metabolizing the informational overload of the digital age, enabling the center to not only hold, but to converge and congeal. Here’s the paradox Teilhard would have recognized and understood:

AI externalizes lower-order cognition so that higher-order consciousness can emerge

When machines take over:

~ retrieval

~ pattern detection

~ optimization

~ surface-level reasoning

.  .  . human consciousness is freed for:

~ synthesis

~ meaning making and reflection

~ interior coherence

~ spiritualization

~ unitive awareness

AI becomes the “exoskeleton” of thought, allowing the inner skeleton, the spirit-soul axis, to evolve. This is not downward distraction; it is preparatory for creating upward/inward thrust.

The noospshere requires the technosphere

Teilhard explicitly predicted that:

~ a global network of information

~ instantaneous communication

~ planetary interconnection

.  .  . would all be necessary scaffolding for the noosphere. The technosphere is the outer nervous system of the planet. The noosphere is the inner nervous system. Together they create a tensional integrity (tensegrity) via of the geometric architecture (phi-spiral) that balances inner and outer, celestial and terrestrial worlds.

AI is the first system that begins to bridge the two.

The real risk: losing the center

The danger is not the digital age itself, as many would suggest. The danger is failing to interiorize at the same rate that technology exteriorizes. If outward expansion accelerates faster than inward convergence, we get:

~ fragmentation

~ polarization

~ psychic exhaustion

~ loss of meaning

~ collapse of interior unity

This is the “downward and outward” drift many are concerned about. But evolution has always been a race between opposites in a paradox — dispersion and contraction, scattering and gathering, divergence and convergence, life and death, diastole and systole, inhalation and exhalation, etc.

The Homo spiralis interpretation

This framework makes the dynamic explicit:

~ the descending arc = proliferation of information, complexity, and chaos

~ the ascending arc = coherence, interiorization, and unitive consciousness

Digital technology accelerates the descent. AI accelerates the need for ascent toward reconciling the tension of their opposite pulls, part of the oneness-separateness, contemplation-action balance and choregography that the spiritual disciplines encourage between inner and outer worlds.

Thus: Like warfare, the digital age is the pressure that forces the emergence of Homo spiralis, that evolved and evolving remnant of light beings/workers operating, by contrast, to the contrary (unawakened) powers of darkness beneath them who embrace dualistic thinking. Such is not the opposite of Teilhard’s process, it’s the crucible that makes the next stage necessary.

Why the word “crucible”?

Heat and friction are usual agents (catalysts) of transformation and change in both physical (outer) and metaphysical (inner) worlds. Significant change along transformational lines won’t usually happen with them.

So what is the net effect?

~ digital tech disperses attention —> requiring stronger interior discipline

~ AI externalizes cognition —> freeing consciousness for higher integration

~ the info sphere overwhelms the psyche —> forcing the emergence of coherence

~ the technosphere globalizes humanity —> enabling planetary convergence

~ the tension between outward and inward —> drives the spiral upward

Though all things are not good, they work together for the good of the whole over time. Hence, the digital age is not a deviation from Teilhard’s trajectory, it’s the accelerant.  

How does Thomas Berry’s “Great Work” (ethical mandate) as ecological responsibility jive with (a) Teilhard’s cosmogenic model, (b) the Great Commission of the Cosmic Christ, (c) the perennial principles and process theology of the world’s religious traditions, and (d) the Homo spiralis framework? 

This is perhaps the most profound tension to reconcile in cosmogenic thought, and reconciling it requires a spiral-level synthesis, to be detailed in the next blog entry. These five positions are not contradictory, but can be integrated (nested) without collapsing their distinctive truths.

Briefly, Teilhard provides the depth, Berry the breadth, holy books the height and mechanics, and the Homo spiralis taxonomy provides the evolutionary energy, stage nuancing, and geometric structure to reconcile those components and views.

The proposed Homo spiralis model checks all those boxes with universal application. Details to follow in the next blog entry.

About the Author

Joseph C. Masterleo, LCSW-DCSW, is a clinical social worker in private practice in Syracuse NY, and Rockledge FL. His half-century of service in the mental health care field includes faith-based counseling and psychotherapy, with an emphasis on psycho-spiritual integration. His subspecialty involves developing a novel paradigm for the synthesis of science, religion, and psychology, identifying the energy and geometric patterns that connect the quantum world with space-time, inner and outer worlds. His model explains how spirit and matter can co-exist as two facets of one reality in a unified field, dissolving the walls of partition between previously siloed disciplines. Inspired by the writings of Thomas Merton (ecumenism), Teilhard de Chardin (synthesis), Thomas Berry (ecotheology), Nikola Telsa (electromagnetism), Richard Rohr (Cosmic Christ), Ilia Delio (christogenesis) and others, his objective is to tell a new, future-looking story for the Ecozoic Age, one that forms a connecting bridge between the biblical story of creation, modern science, and ancient cosmologies. His columns on these and related subjects have appeared on websites such as The Center for Christogenesis, Progressive Christianity, and in newsprint via The Goodnews Paper, the Syracuse Post Standard, and the Syracuse Sports Magazine, where he comments on sports as reflecting the best and worst of American character and culture. Further information about Joe and his Spirit-Science model can be found in his book, The Ambient Christ, the Untold Story of God in Science, Scripture, and Spirituality, listed on Amazon Books, Barnes & Noble, and on his website www.joeknowsgod.com