Levels of Being/Templates of Consciousness/Patterns of Society

Now the new age is here and creation is reborn. Humanity hath taken on new life. The autumn hath gone by, and the reviving spring is here. All things are now made new. Arts and industries have been reborn, there are new discoveries in science, and there are new inventions; even the details of human affairs, such as dress and personal effects—even weapons—all these have likewise been renewed. The laws and procedures of every government have been revised. Renewal is the order of the day.

And all this newness hath its source in the fresh outpourings of wondrous grace and favour from the Lord of the Kingdom, which have renewed the world. The people, therefore, must be set completely free from their old patterns of thought, that all their attention may be focused upon these new principles, for these are the light of this time and the very spirit of this age.
 (Abdu'l-Baha, Selections from the Writings of Abdu'l-Baha: 252)

I am continuing to elaborate the introduction to the four volume study I am writing tentatively titled, Restoring the Transcendent: Spiritual Principles in Cosmology, History, Civilization and Knowledge.

We live in an increasingly globalizing world, though, politically at least, the world remains more international than global.  Religion, too, like politics, remains in a divided state of affairs, carving the inner world into sovereign states of faith. Uniting the religions is a work of universal faith.  Bringing the political order and the religious order into a coherent state, the first global, the second universal, is the crux of most of the world’s endemic problems, for religion and government, the rulers of the inner and outer worlds of humanity, are the two most potent forces on the planet.  Their transition into a new and greater unity is tumultuous, to say the least.  But that is what is happening.  It is an Axial Age.  Humanity is in the throes of what Shoghi Effendi calls, “an organic change in the structure of present-day society, a change such as the world has not yet experienced.”(The World Order of Bahá’u’lláh: 43)

This declaration of Shoghi Effendi means to me that it is not that western civilization is in crisis—though that is obviously true.  Neither is it that civilization itself is everywhere in trouble: also true. I mean that civilization can’t be fixed, but it can be transformed.  It is that a certain order of the civilizing process, a certain kind of civilized life, has been fulfilled and, having reached utter exhaustion collapses into sickness and sterility, so that a new order can appear.  The types of civilization characteristic of the past few millennia can no longer promote human development.  A new order, a new kind of civilization, never before seen, but latent within the reality of social existence, has to emerge and be established.

Society is rooted in the fundamental experience of humanity which is the soul’s connection with the transcendent and sacred.  As dimensions of cosmological experience the interplay between spirit and matter is between the eternal and the temporal, as mediated through Persons, called by Bahá’is   Manifestations of God, Who are transcendentally gifted in spiritual perception and knowledge.  Thus, beside unifying the religious and political realms, the cosmological order must be coordinated and unified: the divine, the human and natural orders must achieve a kind of coherence in human understanding.  The recurring, which also means unfolding and progressing, eternal principles of Divine Revelation They propound provide a framework for human experience,  coordinate interactions between the spiritual and the temporal realms, give new direction and  ideals to human thought, and renew the organic powers of human social life to build civilization. 

Historically, as the primal experience of the sacred blossomed from pure inchoate overpowering experience into increasingly more complex conscious knowledge of the transcendent through templates of consciousness, another historical pattern emerged, namely, that the infinite Spirit given specific form in every Revelation provided patterns of growth, archetypes of social and intellectual progress that humanity grew into and then out of to grow into others.  These transcendent archetypes exist not only as creative forces outside of time in a region traditionally called eternity, but they also exist and are mirrored as higher potentials within the human reality and civilized society which the eternal forms connect to, infusing them with spiritual energy and power.   They become active forces which the human powers are receptive to.

These inner potentials are in need of awakening, of being educed or brought forth and trained.  That is the periodic work of Revelation and spiritual principles.  Unfolding from eternity, Revelation enfolds into the human experience to awaken latent moral patterns and energies which then unfold from human souls into new intellectual and social structures.  These templates of consciousness and patterns of society are the progressive divine message brought to humanity through a succession of Spiritual Luminaries. 

Spiritual archetypes as causative forces interact with human, social, and natural causes to organize human history into cycles or periods of consciousness and social development.  This is the basis of all thinking on universal history.    Different metaphors for the social and material unfolding of human potential include Spengler’s organic cycles for civilization and Toynbee’s challenge and response of civilizations and religions.  The Hegelian Absolute Spirit unfolding in periodizations of history which are moments of consciousness, or Marx’s triad of feudal, capitalist and socialist relations of economic production, are, too, examples of what I mean, though on different levels of social analysis.  Vico’s age of gods/age of heroes/age of men, Sorokin’s societies cycling through Idealistic/Ideational/Sensate stages or Voegelin’s schema of the search for order in history in the history of order, can also be brought forward.

But universal history is understood fully only in that on-going stimulus/response relation of a progressive revelation giving spiritual impetus and shape to a responding humanity to build, from the foundations to the final structures of time, an ever-advancing civilization.  To be ever-advancing means that civilization is built upon increasingly complex templates of consciousness into increasing complex social structures that embrace ever more disparate members of the human family within one organic system. This building passes historically through distinct stages of growth until it achieves a sort of permanence which Christians call the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, a stable universal/global form that will go from perfection to perfection without going through the valley of abrogation and annihilation.

Revelation, then, is never just spiritual energy and plan for personal salvation, but also, and increasingly, as humanity approaches the present day, as complex social pattern, coded information for human social, intellectual and moral evolution.  Muhammad’s revelation was the most complex union of sacred and secular life up until the modern age, but with the revelation of Baha’u’llah in the mid-nineteenth century a full, though not yet fully developed, social Order is delivered that humanity can see as a model for its own further development.  It is the divine Order, the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, the crowning Golden Age of human evolution.

Every Revelation brings forth from the human reality new powers and capacities to advance civilization. The greatest Revelations also bring forth new levels of being.  These are not new social and intellectual qualities, but ontological revelations about the human reality—i.e. our unfolding essential being into complete manifestation, which corresponds in some of its aspects with the spiritual cosmology or fundamental structure of the cosmos.   All societies are held together by inner spiritual powers and moral capacities that are the foundation of its social virtue.  These capacities and powers are expressions of our fundamental being.  Bahá’u’lláh’s spiritual templates of consciousness are the qualities that must emerge from human nature into today’s world in order to guide the ship of state and to build a world civilization that fully manifests the oneness of humanity.  These qualities and their corresponding leading social virtues are justice, unity and peace, all states of being wrapped up within the human reality awaiting the proper social conditions for their emergence into structures of governance.  We shape our institutions and thereafter they shape us, same with thoughts, same with the natural environment.  The building of those outer social structures and mental relations are both the receiver of spiritual impulse and bring them forth and channel them into the world of social appearances where they are shaped into social structures.

Reminder to all interested Kindle owners who are also signed up for Amazon Prime to borrow one or more of my books (seen on the right) online through the Kindle Owners Lending Library. It is free for you, and every page that you read provides me a small royalty. Thanks so much.

A Sincere Request

Dear Friends,

I am asking for your help, and it will cost many of you nothing.  I am asking you to borrow one or more of my books:

Renewing the Sacred: A New Vision of Education;

Gettin’ Through Hard Times Together: Creating Prosperity Through Sharing, Service and Sacrifice;

Terra in Cognita: Voyages and Discoveries on the Ocean of Knowledge).

How can I help? you ask?  Excellent question.

Kindle Direct Publishing Select is an optional program through Amazon all my books are enrolled in.  It is to reach more readers and gives me the opportunity to earn more money. You need not buy the book to read it.  By enrolling in this program the books are also included in Kindle Unlimited (KU) and the Kindle Owners' Lending Library (KOLL).

Kindle Unlimited is a subscription service that lets customers read as many books as they like, and keep them as long as they want. Any customer can choose whether to subscribe to Kindle Unlimited. They don't have to be Amazon Prime members, but they do need to pay a subscription fee.  All pages read by individual readers from the Start Reading Location (SRL) to the end of the book are counted. Amazon typically sets SRL at chapter 1 so readers can start reading the core content of your book as soon as they open it.

The Kindle Owners' Lending Library is a service for those with Amazon Prime.  With an Amazon Prime membership, Kindle owners can choose from thousands of books to read for free once a month, with no due dates.  But you can borrow only one book per month. 

Kindle Unlimited and Kindle Owners’ Lending Library are only for those owning any Kindle device.  It does not work with a Kindle app for iphone.

I will earn a share of the KDP Select Global Fund based on how many pages KU or KOLL customers read of my books.  Currently, Kindle Unlimited is available to customers in Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.es, Amazon.fr, Amazon.it, Amazon.mx, Amazon.ca, and Amazon.com.br. The Kindle Owners' Lending Library is available for readers in the following marketplaces: Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr, and Amazon.co.jp

So, for example, if this month you borrow Terra in Cognita, from the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library and read 200 pages of it and return it, I will get royalties for those 200 pages.  If you borrow it again next month and finish it, I will only get royalties for the pages read after page 200.  But there are three books of mine that you could borrow—again these are free to borrow and read with no due date.  You do NOT have to buy the books, unless, of course, you want to.

If you don’t know how to borrow the books, you can Google “KU or KOLL”.  Scroll down and there is a link that will show you.  It is easy.

Again, this opportunity is limited to those with Kindle reading devices and, for the lending library, those who have Amazon Prime.
  

Harmonizing the Inner and Outer Powers

Revelation, then, is either the fabulous clothing in which intelligible truth presents itself to people who have a low I.Q.; or it is the religious name for the process which is essentially the growth of reason in history.

(H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture: 111)

For my money, Revelation is the second description, but it is also more than that.  Revelation is the means by which reason grows in history by infusing the human intelligence with the energies of faith and vision and asking reason to examine and clarify their discoveries.  We often don’t see this, because of a crabbed scientistic view, which, until recently and to protect a heavy-handed materialistic bias, dismissed all other modalities of knowing and understanding besides those of the senses and logic as atavistic holdovers from other times and lesser minds.  Thank God, this is changing.  But it is exactly to overcome several centuries of conditioning that we must restore the transcendent and reawaken our spiritual faculties. (I also examine intuition and inspiration as modes of knowing in Terra in Cognita)

The core principle of the rational faculty is ratio, harmony and proportion.  This implies that each created thing and every human means of their apprehension, from the senses up through the spiritual faculties, has its own ratio (i.e. vibration or frequency) When the object and its means of apprehension are in harmony understanding occurs.  Thus, every physical sense is a kind of reason as much as every cognitive power is.  The senses, the mental powers, and the spiritual faculties have their own rationality.  The rational faculty is able to move freely among all realms of rationality and reason, creating harmony and coherence between them, for it is a faculty of discovering, expressing and harmonizing ratios, and not any one ratio.  Therefore all possible ratios are within it.

As we are endowed with the capacities, through our senses, of apprehending the material world (the world and our senses being, in Wordsworth terms “admirably fitted” to each other) and since we, too, are capable of grasping, through our minds, the world of ideas and thought, so we are, through spiritual faculties, able to understand the spiritual world and the Word of God.  Bahá’u’lláh wrote in this regard: “He hath endowed every soul with the capacity to recognize the signs of God. How could He, otherwise, have fulfilled His testimony unto men, if ye be of them that ponder His Cause in their hearts.” (Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh: 105-106)  Again He confirms this view when He writes: “Even as He hath revealed: "We will surely show them Our signs in the world and within themselves." Again He saith: "And also in your own selves: will ye not, then, behold the signs of God?" (Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh: 177)

Thus we know the world and ourselves.  But there is yet a higher receptive use of the rational faculty.  ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, in The Secret of Divine Civilization, discusses the attributes of the spiritually learned.  He wrote of “those famed and accomplished men of learning, possessed of praiseworthy qualities and vast erudition, who lay hold on the strong handle of the fear of God and keep to the ways of salvation. In the mirror of their minds the forms of transcendent realities are reflected, and the lamp of their inner vision derives its light from the sun of universal knowledge.” (The Secret of Divine Civilization: 21)

Thus this rational faculty has a spiritual or transcendent aspect which is its true power and is at the heart of the higher self of the human reality. This embracing, transcendent aspect has its counterpart in the lower self, the animal soul.  That counterpart is traditionally called the sensus communis, the common sense, or what ‘Abdu’l-Bahá described as “the common faculty” intermediating between the inner and outer powers of the human being.  He wrote: “Man has also spiritual powers: imagination, which conceives things; thought, which reflects upon realities; comprehension, which comprehends realities; memory, which retains whatever man imagines, thinks and comprehends. The intermediary between the five outward powers and the inward powers is the sense which they possess in common—that is to say, the sense which acts between the outer and inner powers, conveys to the inward powers whatever the outer powers discern. It is termed the common faculty, because it communicates between the outward and inward powers and thus is common to the outward and inward powers.” (Some Answered Questions: 210)
           But the new dimension to this faculty, the awakening of its divine aspect, is its ability to reflect and discern transcendent, spiritual realities.  The Master made the distinction in a letter: “Thus is it clear that the human spirit is an all-encompassing power that exerteth its dominion over the inner essences of all created things, uncovering the well kept mysteries of the phenomenal world.

The divine spirit, however, doth unveil divine realities and universal mysteries that lie within the spiritual world. It is my hope that thou wilt attain unto this divine spirit, so that thou mayest uncover the secrets of the other world, as well as the mysteries of the world below.” (Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá: 170)

This post and the previous one are a broad outline of the kind of lens the books I am collectively calling Restoring the Transcendent will see through.  They are built on a model of something that I call spiritual perception.   The books will lean heavily on statements from the Bahá’i Writings. This is not to dismiss other perspectives as wrong or stupid, but because these Writings embody, in my opinion, the most penetrating spiritual perception available to us.  If one is trying, as I am, to develop “spiritual perception” it only makes good sense to use the best proponents of that perspective.

This model bears some obvious similarities in its structure to the four-tiered cosmos worldview of the western Middle Ages.  Given that this was the last transcendent vision before the great collapse into materialism, it should not be surprising that there are similarities.  In that vision, heaven, which is the place of the Presence of God, or, as Bahá’is would say, the Manifestation of God, was at the top, revealing the Kingdom of Revelation.  Directly under that is the world God intends humanity to live in, the spiritual Eden with no sin or death in it.  The third level, traditionally the fallen world for man, is the order of Nature which man finds himself born into but is not to stay, for it has both sin and death. This marks the fall of man into materialism if he tries to conform to this world.   He is, rather, to transform Nature into an earthly Eden, the imitation of the second level.  This is the great work of redemption humanity is now engaged in.  The fourth level was the demonic, the place of hell and perdition, which, for us, is the beastly world humans create when they don’t live according to the divine teachings.  Bahá’u’lláh says about this fourth level and those who live in it: “This nether world is the abode of demons: Guard yourselves from approaching them. By demons is meant those wayward souls who, with the burden of their evil deeds, slumber in the chambers of oblivion. Their sleep is preferable to their wakefulness, and their death is better than their life.” (Baha'u'llah, Tabernacle of Unity: 69)

This cosmological scheme, first philosophically articulated in antiquity in the Hermetic texts, carried human thought for centuries, and was still going strong in some quarters in the seventeenth-century, as E.M.W.  Tillyard’s classic study, The Elizabethan World Picture, shows.  From there it went underground as a naturalistic bias that morphed into a materialistic one took hold.  But it remains a potent force and is returning to fertilize modern day physics and psychology.

The cosmological order, so conceived, was mirrored in the human and political order.  In many traditional societies the order of human governance supposedly reflected the cosmic order, (e.g. the King was as the sun) though often enough it was simply a crass and transparent rationalization of the privileges held by the ruling class.  But through images such as the chain of being and the net of correspondences, images which for all their antiquity are not antiquated, people made sense of their world. Such archetypal images are the roots of human thought, the royal metaphors holding thought together. They are, that is, the way that the Prophets have told us to think about the world and ourselves, Jacob ladders upon which angels of thought travel between the spiritual and material worlds.  Indeed, so pervasive are these primal notions that we can read in a recent publication on economics: “The economy exists for respecting and preserving life, not getting rich.  Its frame of reference must be the laws that govern the cosmos as well as the earth—not just, for example, the laws of supply and demand.” Peter Brown and Geoffrey Garver, Right Relationship: Building a Whole Earth Economy: xvii)