INTRODUCTION
Hi, my name is Maureen O'Sullivan and welcome to my website! I hope you find the ideas presented on these pages thought-provoking and inspiring. I believe Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was one of the greatest visionaries of the last century. The depth and range of his vision are truly astounding. Today we're living in a time when some of his ideas are beginning to actualize. His concept of the Noosphere (a thinking envelope around our Earth) for example, is now coming into being via the internet and an electronic communications grid that can put any two (or more) people in touch with each other, anywhere in the planet; almost instantaneously. A species-wide psychic solidarity is also growing among our kind - transcending national boundaries - of people who share a passionate commitment to the well-being of our planet and all our relations.
Though he lived only into the 1950's, Teilhard de Chardin's insights are lighting the path into our evolutionary future. His concept of Planetization specifically, has great 'heuristic' value. A totally new idea to enter into our human awareness has 'heuristic' value when it has the capacity to branch out, over time, into ever new ways of thinking. Freud's discovery of the unconscious, for example, is said to have heuristic value because it branched out into any number of various psychological disciplines. It ultimately gave rise to Jungian psychology, cognitive psychology, educational psychology (to name just a few) and a myriad of individual and group psychotheraputic orientations. In like fashion, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's insight into the evolutionary process he termed Planetization, is the dynamic seminal root for seedlines of inspiration that can branch out into ever newer conceptual territory and understanding.
Like orthodox Freudians, some academics believe Teilhard de Chardin's writings should be 'set in stone', endlessly re-interpreted by scholars in academic journals - but not actualized in any real world sense, or elaborated on in any organic way, like Freud's writings were, or used as a blueprint for our continuing evolution.
What are my qualifications for the creative extrapolations on Planetization that I've put up here...? Who am I? I grew up in Queens, N.Y.C., but now live in Kingston NY. I have a Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology from Fordham University and one year of study in a two year MSW graduate program. I'm an artist and poet, who has had a lifelong interest in the writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. His visionary insights resonate within me. I feel on a gut level the truth his ideas embody, and the relevance they have for our lives today as we stand on the precipice of an evolutionary watershed mark for our species.
For many years I kept notebooks, jotting down quotes from various authors from certain books I read. Sometimes I couldn't tease out the relevance of the passage I copied into my notebook, but sensed they all somehow fit together into the whole of some larger vision. They all hinted at some aspect of an as yet unarticulated worldview. It wasn't until I started work on this website that I realized how all these quotes I'd saved in old notebooks over the decades 'hung together' within the paradigm of Planetization. I hope you find your journey here fruitful, and that these pages will inspire you to begin to participate in the evolutionary process of Planetization in ways most meaningful to you. Planetization is going on around you silently, often namelessly, like the current in an underground stream. You probably won't hear mention of it in the corporate media, but the process is moving irrevokably, inexorably and inevitably foreward to an almost unimaginably beautiful conclusion.
One in Light,
Maureen O'Sullivan