The Next Big Step for Humanity
Updated: Aug 26
Louis Savary's third video session on Harnessing the Energies of Love - The Next Big Step for Humanity focused on Teilhard de Chardin's principle that love is energy and that union differentiates — meaning that when people form true relationships or teams, both the group and its individual members develop new capacities that would never emerge in isolation. The session drew on chemistry, sports, music, and classroom research to illustrate how unions generate emergent properties and drive human evolution forward.
Core Concepts
Love as energy: Teilhard defines love not as a quality to attain, but as the fundamental cosmic force — first expressed as attraction at the Big Bang, continuing through atomic, molecular, and human bonding.
Evolutionary formula: Attraction → Connection → Complexity → Consciousness — the law guiding evolution from the geosphere through the noosphere toward the cardosphere (a layer of love energy).
Axiom of union: "Love draws people together and unites them. And in uniting them, it differentiates them."
Union differentiates (two processes):
The team as a new being develops emergent properties belonging only to the group.
Individual members discover latent abilities that would not surface without the team context.
Emergent Properties Explained
A true union produces abilities that none of its individual members possess alone — called emergent properties.
Chemical example: Sodium (corrosive) + Chlorine (poisonous gas) = NaCl (table salt), which can season food, preserve it, and treat wounds — none of which either element can do alone.
Human examples: Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Apple, and Google each originated from two-person partnerships whose combined energy produced outcomes neither founder could achieve solo.
Broadway musicals, jazz combos, and NASA mission control are cited as team entities whose core output only exists through collective interaction.
The Third Self & The Realm of Between
Every true relationship creates a "third self" — a distinct entity with its own identity, purpose, and emergent capacities beyond those of either partner.
Relationships have a life cycle (birth, strength, weakness, death) and benefit from shared purpose, quality time, and even a name to anchor their identity.
Martin Buber's concept of "The Between" identifies where love energy actually operates — in the interaction space, not within either individual.
Buber's I-Thou vs. I-It distinction marks the boundary between true relationship (person-to-person) and mere transaction (person-to-object).
Classroom Research: Union Differentiates in Action
Professor Christopher Bache observed that students working in small bonded teams of 3–4 displayed abilities never shown when working individually.
Teams developed collective consciousness — shared thinking where good ideas were rapidly recognized and implemented with minimal conflict.
Savar identified Bache's phenomenon as Teilhard's "union differentiates," coined nearly 100 years earlier.
Individual emergent properties observed in music/dance camp participants included: self-discipline, overcoming shyness, improvisation, team-building skills, and lasting self-confidence.
Implications for Evolution & Human Purpose
Unions counteract entropy: while physical energy depletes, psychic/love energy in relationships generates new forms of energy (medical breakthroughs, scientific discoveries, new technologies).
Teilhard's evolutionary law is a law of nature — like gravity — describing how love energy operates and how to maximize it.
For Teilhard as priest: God uses relationships as the primary pathway to fullness of life.* "Thy will be done on earth" is fulfilled through evolving how we love.
Practical takeaway: The best way to develop your own talents is to enter relationships and teams with a shared purpose — the union becomes the driver of individual identity and growth.
The next big step for humanity is to realize an evolutionary worldview and participate in the development of the noosphere toward the cardisphere (a layer of love energy)! Join the team. This is a collective action.
In my March 28, 2025 post, I noted that Programs in Earth Literacies offers on-demand videos of Savary's four-part series Harnessing the Energies of Love. The Next Big Step for Humanity (originally recorded Jan 17 - Feb 7, 2024). Only $60 Canadian.
Note: Zoom's AI generated a useful summary and transcript of Savary's lecture that I used and edited to prepare this post. I have named my ChatGPT "Theo", who also helps answer my questions.
Footnote: The Aramaic/Syriac word for “salvation” is ܦܘܪܩܢܐ, whose basic sense is to release, free, deliver, rescue, or redeem into the "wholeness of life." So its original semantic field is broader and more concrete than the way modern Christians sometimes hear the English word salvation — not merely “going to heaven after death.” In other words, salvation originally carries the sense of deliverance into freedom, healing, restoration, and wholeness under God - what Teilhard was pointing to as a noospheric, evolutionary process toward Omega.
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