First, it is incumbent upon all mankind to investigate truth. If such investigation be made, all should agree and be united, for truth or reality is not multiple; it is not divisible.
(Abdu'l-Baha, The Promulgation of Universal Peace, p. 105)
The next few posts will present some of the fundamental or first principles of a spiritual education, as I perceive them. These principles are really concepts of process and interaction, and thus hard to confine within a static definition. I apologize for their abstractness, which is a product of their being presented in isolation. But any theory must present its fundamental assumptions up front, must get the structural blueprint out to guide the building and allow others to see what it might look like. So here goes.
Reality is what “really” is and what we all want to know. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending upon one's ambition I suppose, we can’t know Reality, at least not totally. Reality, capital “R,” is like the physical universe, which is infinitely large and has been around for an inconceivably long time with no evidence of either one, space or time, becoming less difficult to really comprehend. Humans are in sort of a: “The more we know the more we know we don’t know” relation with it. Thus even as we “get” more of it, the horizon of complete understanding recedes from us: one level of complexity opens into another level, and so on, ad infinitum.
When we investigate the mental and spiritual dimensions we say the same kind of things: Reality is unknowable in its essence, but is manifest in the permanence of an eternally unfolding process. This "level" of Reality is ‘Reality-in-transformation.” I mean that anything of Reality that we can know is like a river, because it is in constant movement, flow, change, transformation, and unfoldment. Like air, we perceive it because it moves; otherwise it is too big and still to notice. But it is an eternal river so it is also permanent, for what exists in eternity persists in temporality, "though not in the form thou seest today." (Tablets of Baha'u'llah:140) As an example of this idea, ‘Abdu’l-Baha states: “Each of the divine religions embodies two kinds of ordinances. The first is those which concern spiritual susceptibilities, the development of moral principles and the quickening of the conscience of man. These are essential or fundamental, one and the same in all religions, changeless and eternal -- reality not subject to transformation.” (The Promulgation of Universal Peace:106) The essence of Reality is not subject to transformation, but its qualities are.
Now I believe that what is subject to transformation, the progressive unfolding of aspects or qualities of Reality, has, metaphorically, three levels or, better, three expanding contexts: material, intellectual, and spiritual. This highest level of spiritual is also named the divine or sacred, and for me spiritual, divine and sacred are interchangeable terms. The spiritual is also called holy, because it is whole. Thus the spiritual holds the material and mental contexts or levels “within” it. We can never know the whole of Reality, only Reality as a whole. A complete education must address these three contexts of “Reality-in-transformation” because each is essential to human knowledge and experience. Within knowledge, too, the same relation holds between contexts. That is, great spiritual principles will unite many smaller principles which are unrelated at their own levels, and will, too, unite many seemingly unrelated branches of knowledge, for spiritual principles are the archetype and essence of knowledge. A unified understanding of the universe will unify knowledge about it, for truth does not admit of a multiplicity of beliefs, but reveals the complementarity of them.
But, in a practical and educational rather than philosophical sense, reality is not what is given, what is “out there” in everlasting transformation Neither is it solely what is “in here”, our inner world also in continual transformation. Reality is what is meaningfully constructed by people in the process of engagement with “another” (oneself, others, knowledge, the universe) in order to understand, reconstruct, change and transform their understanding of reality in some way, and to "educe" more Reality. Each one of us takes, chooses or attracts certain aspects of Reality which we fashion into our reality. Reality, small “r”, is the resonant harmony achieved when the outer constructed reality of perception and knowledge is an “objective correlative” of an inner perceived reality in the world, so they achieve communication and “dialogue” and mutual influence and enable transformation. Our human Reality, our divinity or sacredness, is our true and highest consciousness, but all consciousness is by the working of dialogue one holds with oneself, with others, and with the universe, and the steps and stages of any advance in consciousness are captured in words like unveiling, revealing, educing. The whole purpose of schooling is to manifest the human reality through meaningful experience, i.e. transformative learning and action, the “educing” or bringing forth of self so one may pour forth that self into the world and, in turn, bring forth the world. Clear as mud?
Education is what is brought forth from the human reality into manifestation in the world. This changes the world and allows the world to act upon the human reality. To educe (i.e. to bring forth oneself and the world) is to manifest what is inside, to transform an inner reality into an objective reality, a potentiality into an actuality, innate knowledge into constructed knowledge, the inmost self into the outer selfhood. Education is what we manifest of ourselves. “You are the reality and expression of your deeds and actions.” (The Promulgation of Universal Peace: 9)
The next “first” principle concerns the human reality and its transformations.
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