The most significant, and the truly specific, movement of the cosmic system in which we are caught up, is not the formation of galaxies and stars; it is much more the genesis of large molecules, followed by that of cells and then by that of the higher living beings. In other words, the most exact definition for our intelligence of the nature of the universe is the process of ‘auto-arrangement’. It is in virtue of this latter that, in the course of a drift which affects the totality of space and time, ‘matter’ passes, locally and partially (though at the same time in an over-all operation) from more simple and less conscious states to states that are both physico-chemically more complex and psychically more interiorized.
If you have a cosmic stuff that is perfectly indifferent, then, however great the number of occasions envisaged, it is inconceivable that the play of chances may produce even the shortest linear progression in arrangement. Why is it, then, that right back to the furthest point at which matter concentrates and compresses upon itself—why is that, historically, it has persisted for tens of millions of years in introducing order into itself? In other words, how are we to justify this priority that has unswervingly been accorded, in a vast sector of things and throughout geological eras, to the improbable over the probable, to order over disorder, to life over death?
All over the earth the attention of thousands of engineers and economists is concentrated on the problem of world resources of coal, oil or uranium—and yet nobody, on the other hand, bothers to carry out a survey of the zest for life: to take its ‘temperature’, to feed it, to look after it, and (why not, indeed?) to increase it.
We are surrounded by a certain sort of pessimists who continually tell us that our world is foundering in atheism. But should we not rather say that what it is suffering from is unsatisfied theism? Men, you say, no longer want God; but are you quite sure that what they are rejecting is not simply the image of a God who is too insignificant to nourish in us this concern to survive and super-live to which the need to worship may ultimately be reduced?
No longer simply a religion of individuals and of heaven, but a religion of mankind and of the earth—that is what we are looking for at this moment, as the oxygen without which we cannot breathe.
Sustained and guided by the tradition of the great human mystical systems, along the road of contemplation and prayer, we succeed in entering directly into receptive communication with the very source of all interior drive.