Evolution and Metamorphosis - an Easter Reflection

Two influential writers come together in an extraordinary way in a story that Jean Houston relates in her autobiography, A Mythic Life. She tells (p.142) of befriending an elderly man in Central Park, New York. Unable to pronounce his name, she called him "Mr Tayer". Mr Tayer asked her...

"Jeanne, can you feel yourself to be a caterpillar?"

"Oh, yes," I replied with the baleful knowing of a gangly, pimply-faced teenager.

"Then think of your own metamorphosis," he suggested. "What will you be when you become a butterfly. Un papillon, eh? What is the butterfly of Jeanne?"

What a great question for a fourteen-year-old girl, a question of puberty rites, initiations into adulthood, and other new ways of being. His comic-tragic face nodded helpfully until I could answer.

"I...don't really know anymore, Mr Tayer."

"Yes, you do know. It is inside of you, like the butterfly is inside the caterpillar." He then used a word that I heard for the first time, a word that became essential to my later work. "What is the entelechy of Jeanne? A great word, a Greek word, entelechy. It means the dynamic purpose that is coded in you. It is the entelechy of this acorn on the ground to be an oak tree. It is the entelechy of that baby over there to be a grown-up human being. It is the entelechy of the caterpillar to undergo metamorphosis and become a butterfly. So what is the butterfly, the entelechy of Jeanne? You know, you really do."

That is Jean Houston's (b. May 10, 1937) teenage encounter with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (May 1, 1881 - April 10, 1955). Two thinkers who have affected me intensely: Teilhard de Chardin the paleantologist priest and Jean Houston the transformational psychologist. In Houston's story we have the coincidence of evolution and transformation: metamorphosis!

Shortly before passing away on the 10th April 1955 Teilhard said, "If in my life I haven't been wrong, I beg God to allow me to die on Easter Sunday". April 10 was Easter Sunday.

A glow ripples outward from the first spark of conscious reflection. The point of ignition grows larger. The fire spreads in ever widening circles till finally the whole planet is covered with incandescence. - Teilhard de Chardin

For more see:
Teilhard de Chardin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Teilhard_de_Chardin
The Phenomenon of Man
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phenomenon_of_Man









Jean Houston
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Houston











©Colin G Garvie
HomePage: http://www.garvies.co.za