What’s Happening?

A person is neither a thing nor a process, but an opening or clearing through which the Absolute can manifest.

Martin Heidegger

            A holistic movement emerged in the twentieth-century to reconnect the secular and sacred realms, the One and its manifold parts, and make knowledge and experience whole again.  With the exhaustion of the assumptions of secular, materialist philosophy, there appeared the desire to again expand the universe of human knowledge into the spiritual dimensions.  The movement remains groping to be sure, but it is there nonetheless.  It is emblematic of the intellectual ferment of our times: a ferment about which, I think, education should be aware, because students are living in this environment of thought and need to know how to find their way around this new land, which is also the land renewed.  Modern science is starting to investigate and acknowledge that something intelligent is, indeed, out there!  And if the spiritual is everywhere at once, then what is “out there” might be the same thing as what is “in here.”  In the words of one of astrophysics’ most eminent practitioners, Sir James Jeans, “The universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine.”  So do human beings!      

            Such movements take many forms, but those that start from within secular thought usually take Nature, human reason, or the “unconscious” to be their God.   

            Much of this spiritual search takes the form of an exploration and celebration of the off-beat, the weird, and the so-called irrational. These range all the way from joining obscure sects, to palmistry, numerology, reading tarot cards and astrology charts, and the more disjointed art movements that were in such favor early last century, such as Dada.  Recently the huge popularity of movies and books like What the Bleep and The Secret, which often hearken back to alchemy and the Corpus Hermeticum, and the books on Intentionality, attest to a burgeoning interest in matters spiritual as they can influence and transform our lives on a psychological and practical level of wealth attraction.  

            Within the more “rationalistic” world of science and philosophy, the exploration is toward a unified conceptual understanding of the natural and human worlds. This goes either back to the beginnings of thought to revive myth, or forward to the ends of the earth in universal concepts and Unified Field Theories.  Thus we hear contemporary philosophers of environment speaking of “deep ecology”–the hypothesis that the planet itself is a living, breathing and self-regulating organism, a conception based upon a return to Gaia of early Greek mythology.  Chardin wrote of the “noosphere”, (The Phenomenon of Man) and Gregory Bateson defined the sacred as “the pattern that connects:” (Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred) that is, an integrated fabric of mental process that envelops all life on earth, like the Systems Theorists.        

            But this promiscuous search has its own perils.  Psychologist, William James, said of omni-directional spiritual search:  “All that the facts require is that the power should be both other and larger than our conscious selves.  Anything larger will do, if only it be large enough to trust for the next step.  It need not be infinite, it need not be solitary.  It might conceivably even be only a larger and more godlike self, of which the present self would then be but the mutilated expression, and the universe might conceivably be a collection of such selves, of different degrees of inclusiveness, with no absolute unity realized in it at all.” (The Varieties of Religious Experience:Postscript)  We can be lead astray by our own best intentions.  We must, rather, be guided.

            But what is common to all these movements is the attempt to expand the knowledge world–to resacralize or re-enchant the world after hundreds of years of trying to demythologize and disenchant it.  It tries to inject a kind of spirituality into the stale feelings and blunt sensibility of our artificial civilization and complex rational mentality.  Such “spirituality” is the kind of thing the mind comes up with when it perceives something larger than or outside itself, but doesn’t want to call it God, or to acknowledge the objective existence of a Higher Power.  It is rooted still in the human and rational, that is what is understandable to the cognitive agent generating human knowledge, or in the irrational and natural.  Its mistake is the opposite to that of past religion. As pre-scientific religion sealed off the objective lower world of Nature from investigation, so, too, secular knowledge seals off the higher world of spirit, the sacred dimension, as an objective dimension standing apart from any human conception of it.  Instead, it sees only spirit’s forms in the mind and takes these not as the reflections that they are, but as realities in themselves.

            But as it was not “real” religion that science attacked, it is not real science, which is the systematic investigation into the regularities of the universe, which is being attacked and undermined now.  Rather what is being driven out is a “science” that took the “the real” to be exclusively that which is exhaustively defined by the contingent, the relative, and the sensible.  Modern, positivistic science blossomed on fundamentally secular, mechanistic assumptions about the world, assumptions for which there has never been any conclusive proof.   This has always been a source of anxiety.  To relieve this anxiety science grew into “scientism”; a crude ideological club for determining “truth” by legislating the assumptions by which it can be investigated.  Scientism has failed to grasp the fact that scientific thought is never a substitute for religious needs and capacities, but a complement to them.  This attitude has hardened into exactly the same kind of “religious” dogma science rebelled against, dogma backed by its own priesthood and rituals of publication designed to keep competing voices silenced or out of the picture altogether.  Such science refuses to let metaphysical questions even be asked.  The human spirit will always seek completion, harmony, reconciliation, balance.  So whether the knowledge is weighted too much on either the religious side or the science side, the spirit will work for adjustment.  

            To understand higher spiritual realities we must surrender secular and scientistic assumptions about what is or can be real, what matters and why, else spiritual assumptions will make no sense, or poor sense. To surrender does not mean to throw them out altogether, but to surrender their stranglehold on understanding. 

            The sacred and secular are already converging, drawn toward each other, one from Above the other from below, and when they achieve harmony human intelligence will no longer be caught in the crossfire between fact and faith.  We have already seen that today true science is exploring the sacred as some kind of unifying mental pattern holding the material world together.  Concurrently, there is an efflorescence of religion because the materialistic scientific paradigm is exhausted.  What started long ago as a structure of religious intuition gradually unfolded into a historical sequences of rational, scientific knowledge which have now enfolded into a structure of science of the universe that mirrors the religious view of the creation.  Science and religion have become symmetrical systems of knowledge.  We can now build the spiritual sciences.  Marilyn Ferguson wrote: “Spiritual or mystical experience is the mirror image of science—a direct perception of nature’s unity, the inside of the mysteries that science tries valiantly to know from the outside.  This way of understanding predates science by thousands of years.”(The Aquarian Conspiracy: 362)    

            Or, to use another metaphor, science and religion can be seen as starting at opposite points of a sphere and working toward a common center.  It is the way of religion to infer material truths from perceived spiritual realities. Its truths are figuratively apprehended. Science infers spiritual truths from known material realities.  Its truths are factually comprehended.  Where religion and science meet is the point where faith meets physics, where is the opening  to the Absolute that Heidegger's quote indicates. 

            Real education can draw no sharp line forever dividing sacred from secular concerns, for properly speaking, the universe is one creation.  All education, therefore, is one, because all learning is one.  Learning is one because education exists, finally, not to serve the interests of the state and not just to train students for some vocation. It exists to develop the whole person – heart, soul and intelligence, for serving the common good and seeking knowledge and virtues, and expanding consciousness in the exploration of reality in all its facets and levels. To develop the whole person is to nurture the unfoldment of the inexhaustible potentials of the sign of God that is the essential form of every created thing and every human being.  

What Happened?

The great world religions are, as it were, great rivers of sacred tradition which flow down through the ages and through changing historical landscapes which they irrigate and fertilize.

(Christopher Dawson; Religion and the Rise of Western Culture: 12)

            This post is concerned with outlining a process of historical debasement in the thinking of the west, a process mistakenly called Enlightenment.  The origins of historical processes are notoriously hard to identify.  So I will start not historically, but analytically.  This post and the next are an overview of two longer essays to be available soon.

            In Europe, before the advent of the scientific revolution, religious authorities strove to suppress emerging scientific knowledge because it upset their rooted dogmas about the world. They had turned religion from an open highway of holiness into a mechanical treadmill of moral exhortation and abstract law, unfeeling, indifferent, merciless and cruel with no way to evolve. Revolt was the only liberating attitude to take toward this spiritual perversion, and, betrayed into defiance, starting in the sixteenth century with the pioneers of the Scientific Revolution, Western thinkers did just that–in the name of a new religion of science built upon reason and secularism. 

            Over time and through the practical success of science, religious conviction, spirituality and faith were replaced by an abiding rationalism, a religious devotion to the factual and a materialistic interpretation of reality that saw only a mechanistic universe ticking away.  But it was based on an impoverishment of thought, not a liberation of it.

            During the Enlightenment, for example, a reversal of traditional logic allowed Enlightenment thinkers to assert atheism as a respectable, in fact the only respectable, way to think and believe for the truly educated.  Carl Becker notes that: “These thinkers did not conclude that nature must be rational because God is eternal reason. They concluded that God must be an engineer because nature is a machine.” (The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers:56)  But, he goes on, they could not accomplish this logical inversion of cause and effect and thus run God out of their universe: “unless they were prepared to dispense with his revelation to men—the revelation through Holy Writ and Holy Church.  This was the whole point of their high offensive gesture.  Renunciation of the traditional revelation was the very condition of being truly enlightened.” (Heavenly City:50)  Becker sees this movement of thought not as something really new.  Rather he sees such “Enlightenment” thinkers as the secular bearers of traditional religious thought, but in its negative—in the photographic sense--form.  The “Heavenly City thus shifted to earthly foundations, and the business of justification transferred from divine to human hands.” (Heavenly City: 49)

            Later in the Romantic period the process of absorbing a religious body of thought and turning it into a secular one continued.  Professor Meyer Abrams writes in his book Natural Supernaturalism:  “The title Natural Supernaturalism indicates that my recurrent, but far from exclusive, concern will be with the secularization of inherited theological ideas and ways of thinking.” (Natural Supernaturalism:12)  He goes on: “It is a historical commonplace that the course of western thought since the renaissance has been one of progressive secularization, but it is easy to mistake the way in which that process took place.  Secular thinkers have no more been able to work free of the centuries old Judeo-Christian culture than Christian theologians were able to work free of their inheritance of classical and pagan thought.  The process—outside of the exact sciences at any rate—has not been the deletion and replacement of religious ideas but rather the assimilation and reinterpretation of religious ideas, as constitutive elements in a world view founded on secular premises.  Much of what distinguishes writers I call ‘Romantic’ derives from the fact that they undertook, whatever their religious creed or lack of creed, to save traditional concepts, schemes, and values which had been based on the relation of the Creator to his creature and creation, but to reformulate them within a prevailing two-term system of subject and object, ego and non-ego, the human mind or consciousness and its transactions with nature.” (Natural Supernaturalism: 13)

            Henry Steele Commager states that the same process of turning spiritual thought into secular ideas occurred in America: “Although the theological implications of Puritanism wore off in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many of its moral and political implications persisted.  Two centuries of reaction could not dissolve the Puritan inheritance of respect for the individual and for the dignity of man, of recognition of the ultimate authority of reason, of allegiance to principles rather than to persons, to the doctrine of government by compact and consent, and to spiritual and moral democracy.  These things, along with Puritanism deep-seated moral purpose, its ceaseless search for salvation, its passion for righteousness and for justice, and its subordination of material to spiritual ends, entered into the current of secular thought and retained their vitality long after the theological and metaphysical arguments which sustained them had been forgotten….The church itself confessed to a steady secularization.” (The American Mind: 165, 167)

            Over the course of about eight centuries, a general displacement from a supernatural to a natural frame of reference occurred, translating the traditional hierarchy of the theological system of salvation in a spiritual world, with inner movement “up and down” (Jacob’s ladder) between worlds, into a secular program of linear progress in this one, with outer movement from “left to right”, past to future, in this one.  This was a diminishment of human thinking, for, as professor Abrams notes, it took the three worlds of God, Man and Nature and made it into a two-term one of Humanity and Nature.  God, the sacred and transcendent, dropped from the Supreme Consciousness to became identified, first, with the higher Reason of humanity, then, secondly, with Nature, or natural law, and finally, with the unknown aspects of human nature located, paradoxically, at the deepest within of humanity, the “unconscious”.  This is the slide into fully rationalized materialistic ways of thought.    

            By the early twentieth century, a materialistic interpretation of reality had consolidated itself so completely as to become the dominant world faith insofar as the direction of society was concerned.  It penetrated and captured all significant centers of power and information at the global level, including education.  But a consciousness that is fully rationalized is also fully realized and, therefore, at the end of its development. This itself is a sign of the need for a new encounter with the sacred in order to transcend the whole condition itself.  At this juncture of our cultural evolution, individuals seek such encounters in regions outside the rational in the occult, in mystery of all kinds, seeking answers beyond not just what is comprehendible but also what is conceivable.   

            It was precisely at the moment of its greatest success and spread that the materialistic, secular paradigm was psychologically undermined by the discovery of the unconscious by Freud, and scientifically torpedoed by relativity and quantum mechanics.  As the document, Who is Writing the Future?, puts it: “A new door had suddenly opened into the study of both the minute constituents of the universe and its large cosmological systems, a change whose effects went far beyond physics, shaking the very foundations of a world view that had dominated scientific thinking for centuries. Gone forever were the images of a mechanical universe run like a clock and a presumed separation between observer and observed, between mind and matter. Against the background of the far-reaching studies thus made possible, theoretical science now begins to address the possibility that purpose and intelligence are indeed intrinsic to the nature and operation of the universe.” (Who is Writing the Future:1) 

            Secular knowledge, basically scientific in method and humanistic in belief, still dominates our thinking today, and dominates our education.  In a world whose centers of thought and power remain under the sway of the secular mind and its attitudes toward knowledge, wisdom and reality, spiritual knowledge is considered no knowledge, for real knowledge is concerned with material things and with man’s physical and psychological needs.  In such a world it is hard to believe in and understand spiritual realities. But there is, too, a real hunger for them, a need to again expand the knowledge-base that humans may profitably use. 

             

The Sacred Dimension

The eternality of religion is rooted in the eternality of the sacred in human consciousness.

(Robert Nisbet: The Social Bond: 241)

            Last post discussed the sacred essence of the human reality.  But this inner dimension must connect with an outer dimension of sacredness in the world for sacred energy to flow.  But we must also be careful with terminology and what “spacial” metaphors imply.  Inner and outer are not different and separate regions. The designations are meant, rather, to indicate one power manifest in two places: the “general” place of the spiritual creation and the “specific” place of the individual human soul.  But this relationship is like that between the ocean and the wave.  The cosmos is neither just within us nor entirely outside us, but everywhere at once—and with children the relationship between inner and outer is very close. 

            What is the sacred?  The sacred is not simply an object, a belief, or just some special feeling one has about something or someone.  The sacred is, first of all, a power, a dynamic life-force.  Like gravity, it acts upon human beings whether they are aware of it or not.  But it is a dimension that can manifest itself.  Human beings to be complete require the sacred and a connection with it for the world and themselves to have purpose and to make sense.  Engaging and connecting with the sacred is the experience of transcendence and the infusion of energy to power positive transformation.  While we can aspire to it, we can not reach it unaided.  It must reach down and “grasp” us. 

            Sociologist Peter Berger wrote: “By sacred is meant a quality of mysterious and awesome power, other than man and yet related to him, which is believed to reside in certain objects of experience.” (The Sacred Canopy: 25)   This power is a felt presence both within something, or within ourselves, that human beings encounter and can connect to.   On the archaic level of culture, the real -- that is, the powerful, the meaningful, the living -- is equivalent to the sacred.  The great scholar Mircea Eliade writes: “For primitives as for man of all pre-modern societies, the sacred is equivalent to a power, and, in the last analysis, to reality.  The sacred is saturated with being.  Sacred power means reality and at the same time enduringness and efficacity.” (The Sacred and the Profane:12)  

            Thus the sacred is not a projection of human desire.  Neither is it simply something of great concern, or seriousness.  It is not that such and such is “sacred to me”, though such an attitude obviously exists.  The sacred is an objective dimension of existence.  It does not originate from within human subjectivity, but exists beyond humanity as the source and ground of that subjectivity.  If we don’t “get it” it is because it hasn’t gripped us.  Perhaps it hasn’t gripped us because a too narrow view of reality precludes the possibility of its existence, or calls it something else. 

            The sacred is something with infinite and mysterious depths, whether God, our own soul, human relationships, or the universe.  Experiencing the sacred is of a qualitatively different order of experience than that of the ordinary.  It is the experience of a power that empowers. Sacredness is not bestowed by human beings, but is perceived and received by them, and aroused within them.  The sacred makes up the transcendent content of our lives and only our transcendent self recognizes it for what it is. 

            There is no doubt that, traditionally, religion has been the chief vehicle for this kind of experience.  Religion has always said that there is something “in here”, the deep, metaphysical within of the human reality, the immanent divinity usually called “soul” or spirit that responds to a transcendent Power, called God, the Divine, “out there.”  But by religion I don’t mean the hoary dogmas and churchy ideas that have crept into what is the most powerful experience humans are capable of having.  The religious instinct is a resident power of the human spirit.  It spontaneously manifests itself in children when they make inquiries like: “Mommy, who made God?”  

            The great psychologist Jung said of religion: “Religion, as the careful observation and taking account of certain invisible and uncontrollable factors, is an instinctive attitude peculiar to man, and its manifestations can be followed all through human history.” (The Undiscovered Self:26) Sociologist Daniel Bell believes: “The power of religion derives from the fact that, before ideologies or other modes of secular belief, it was the means of gathering together, in one overpowering vessel, the sense of the sacred—that which set us apart as the collective conscience of a people.” (The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism:154).  Historian, Arnold Toynbee, believed that religion is one of the most powerful drives behind the development of a new civilization. Religion, he felt, is the cultural glue which holds civilization together.  He said, “religion, after all, is the serious business of the human race."  Another historian, Christopher Dawson, believed that “it is of the essence of religion to bring man into relation with transcendental and eternal realities.” (Religion and the Rise of Western Culture: 25)     

            “Religion,” explains Peter Berger, “is the human enterprise by which a sacred cosmos is established.” (The Sacred Canopy: 25)   It is “the audacious attempt to conceive of the entire universe as being humanly significant.” (The Sacred Canopy: 28)  “Religion,” states Neil Postman, “may be defined as our attempt to give a total, integrated response to questions about the meaning of existence.” (The End of Education:152)   Sociologist Andrew Greeley writes: “Religion is man’s view of ultimate reality, a view learned in community and generating community, a view which demands the involvement of the whole man and thus embodies itself in myth and produces, in some form or other, a sense of the numinous or the transcendent.” (Unsecular Man: 173)  

            Regarding religion’s connection with human intelligence, anthropologist Gregory Bateson says “religion is a rich, internally structured model that stands in metaphorical relationship to the whole of life, and therefore can be used to think with.” (Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred:195)   Daniel Bell writes: “Religion…is a constitutive part of man’s consciousness: the cognitive search for the pattern of the ‘general order’ of existence; the affective need to establish rituals and to make such conceptions sacred; the primordial need for relatedness to some others, or to a set of meanings which will establish a transcendent response to the self; and the existential need to confront the finalities of suffering and death.” (The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism:169)  In short: “Religion is the consciousness of society,” (The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism:155) 

            Dr. Alfred Meier writes: “...the religious belongs to the wholeness of the human personality….The subjective experience connected with a religious phenomenon and with healing is actually one of transcendence and this transcendence is a new element which was not in the system from the beginning.” (Jung’s Analytic Psychology and Religion: 73)

            The Bahá’í Writings speak of “…religion as the principal force impelling the development of human consciousness.” (One Common Faith: 23)  Religion is “a source of knowledge that totally embraces consciousness.” (One Common Faith: 13-14)  These same Writings warn that: "Should the lamp of religion be obscured, chaos and confusion will ensue, and the lights of fairness and justice, of tranquillity and peace cease to shine. Unto this will bear witness every man of true understanding." (Tablets of Baha’u’llah: 269)

Religion, not as personal experience but, rather, as a system of knowledge is the result of a collective, objective relationship with what is sacred, supernatural, divine, and mystical.  It is not an invention of the imagination or some needy wish-fulfillment of weak minds or socially marginalized groups.  Neither is it an opiate of the lazy and spiritually indolent.  The religious instinct is a perennial power.  As a perennial power it always performs the same function, namely, the bringing forth of human consciousness and human society by connecting with the sacred, the divine, the powers greater than human driving the universe.  It is not something that can be “outgrown” or discarded without losing something inherent within us, without denying some faculty necessary to fully engage the universe as a creation, without shattering both the wholeness of the human personality and society. 

            No education worth its salt could ever deny developing such a potent power without suffering grave distortions in its ability to present and interpret Reality. Being without full use of the religious power is like being deprived of the use of the faculty of sight.  Being deprived of sight would severely restrict the ability of the person to engage with visible Nature and revel in its glories.  Yet deliberately denying the existence of the faculty of religion is what western society has done.  I will trace some of that spiritual undevelopment of the west next.  

The Sacred Essence

An experience of the sacred orders the world because it not only provides a channel for man to come into contact with the really real, the numinous; it also enables him to share in the work of ordering reality. 

(Unsecular Man: 167) 

            Learning starts with perceiving difference, with making distinctions. What is identical to you cannot be known by you.  All knowledge is of distinction and difference.  But the most important distinction is the distinction between the sacred and the ordinary worlds, the holy and unholy worlds.  But I am not using holy and unholy in a strictly religious sense.  A holy world is a whole one, for holiness comes from wholeness.  An unholy world is one that is disconnected and fragmented.  We see in our fragmenting world not only the eclipse of spiritual thought within human consciousness, but also, as a consequence, the fracturing of a unified culture.  Likewise, when it loses connection with the spiritual dimension the inner world of human consciousness is fractured.

            A complete world does not exist where “nothing is sacred.”  Both the spiritual and the material are available to our perception, material and spiritual being two strategic levels at which reality is accessible by human inquiry.  To see both at once is what the poet William Blake indicated when he wrote: “When the doors of perception are cleansed, man will see things as they truly are, infinite.”  He put this double-perspective into almost every poem he wrote.  For example, when gazing upon a thistle by the lane:

Double the vision my Eyes do see,

And a double vision is always with me.

With my inward Eye ‘tis an Old man grey;

With my outward, a Thistle across my way.

Or, in this poem titled Auguries of Innocence:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an Hour.

            The spiritual surrounds and shines through shimmering matter, illuminating it from within.  We may see the sacred in and through the everyday object and event as children do, if, in Blake’s phrase, “the doors of perception” are cleansed.  This spiritual perception is to see directly “face to face” not materially “as through a glass darkly.”  In a material consciousness we “know in part” but, in a spiritual consciousness we shall “know even as also I am known.”(1 Corinthians 13:12)

            Knowledge of the spiritual is to see spiritual energy animating matter, to see each form of matter in its “essential form” not just its elemental forms, and to experience the divinity of the Source of that energy.  Matter becomes more spiritual when we see it that way, for matter is realized spirit.  In the same vein, we must strive to see each human being through the same spiritual prism.  When we do, as Maslow asserts” “the eternal becomes visible in and through the particular, the symbolic and platonic can be experienced in and through the concrete instance, the sacred can fuse with the profane, and one can transcend the universe of time and space while being in it.” (Religion, Values, and Peak Experiences:116.)

            I believe that Reality has three levels or dimensions, spiritual, mental and material, but for the secular-minded Reality has only two dimensions, nature (material) and human (intellectual), leaving nowhere “real” to locate anything else.  I suggest that this belief persists because our dominant secularist thought is based upon materialist assumptions about Reality.  Materialism does not know how to perceive sacredness and divinity, except as the highest that human beings feel, think and do. 

            Secular understanding is human knowledge that has been stripped of the sacred dimension.  There is no transcendence to it, and as sociologist Daniel Bell remarks: “To understand the transcendent, man requires a sense of the sacred.” (The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism:171)  Where for the spiritually-minded the sacred exists “within” the organic, living creation, the secular-minded only observes a mechanically revolving universe.  The secular mind does not acknowledge powers higher than human, only higher human powers and so, compensates, by deifying the objective powers of Nature.  But such minds fail to recognize that only powers higher than human can activate the higher human powers.  A desacralized creation is a smaller, colder, more indifferent universe, one almost impenetrable by human thought and feeling, except mathematically.  Only humans have real consciousness in it.  It is one where every living thing appears without its aura of sacredness.

            But despite centuries of effort to completely desacralize the universe, something of it must have remained within human consciousness and is being rediscovered.   For example, psychologist and self-styled “Jewish atheist” Jonathan Haidt, writes: “My claim is that the human mind perceives a third dimension, a specifically moral dimension that I will call ‘divinity’….  In choosing the label ‘divinity’, I am not assuming that God exists and is there to be perceived.  Rather my research on the moral emotions has lead me to conclude that the human mind simply does perceive divinity and sacredness, whether or not God exists.” (The Happiness Hypothesis: 183-184)

            Now, one cannot perceive something that is not there, unless one is hallucinating.  To perceive “a third dimension, a specifically moral dimension” means there is an objective dimension there to perceive. How did it get there?  Where did it come from, since it pre-existed our perception of it?  Even if we say that it is only a dimension of the human reality, who put that moral dimension there within us to be experienced?  God, or some ordering power that is not itself perceptible, must have put it there.  We can assert this because, like a photograph of someone who is not present, the photo proves that the one in the photo exists, or existed.  The image is proof of the Reality, as the swaying tree proves the presence of the invisible wind. 

            Perhaps the human mind perceives divinity outside it because there is divinity within it, as Blake believed.  Divinity is the name given to that extra-ordinary consciousness within the human reality that perceives and encounters the sacred, and knows it to be Sacred.  It is the divine within perceiving and responding to the divinity without, that divine spark within every human being that is enkindled by the sacred Fire of the Word, as Buddha presents in his Fire Sermon.  Both the divine spark within the human essence and the Fire within all creation are necessary for connection and to prevent, on the one hand, the sacred from being Itself so “totally other” that it has no relation to human beings, and, on the other hand, from psychologizing the sacred into just a projection of humanity’s own subjectivity.  

            In the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas (saying #70) Jesus is recorded as stating: "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.  If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you."  Whether he said this or not, this is a valid psychological and educational principle.  We are destroying ourselves because for centuries we have not brought out the sacred within us, but have, rather, denied it.  Should we “educe” our sacred essence, we will understand something of what Bahá’u’lláh meant when He wrote: “Turn thy sight unto thyself, that thou mayest find Me standing within thee, mighty, powerful and self-subsisting.”(Arabic Hidden Words #13)  Experiencing the Sacred Essence within us—that same Power that animates and orders the cosmos outside--enables us, as sociologist Andrew Greeley states in the opening quote, “to share in the work of ordering reality.”   The next post will present some thoughts on that experience.

             

             

Knowledge is a State of Mind

  

Moreover, entrance and exit, descent and ascent, are characteristics of bodies and not of spirits -- that is to say, sensible realities enter and come forth, but intellectual subtleties and mental realities, such as intelligence, love, knowledge, imagination and thought, do not enter, nor come forth, nor descend, but rather they have direct connection.  For example, knowledge, which is a state attained to by the intelligence, is an intellectual condition; and entering and coming out of the mind are imaginary conditions; but the mind is connected with the acquisition of knowledge, like images reflected in a mirror.

(Some Answered Questions, p. 106)

            It is generally assumed that knowledge is something that human beings generate by and within themselves.  Obviously every individual does develop his or her own intelligence through their own efforts. But knowledge, like light, is a manifestation of reality and an already existing quality through which every individual may illumine his or her consciousness.  In this view, knowledge itself is something with which both our intellect and heart, humanity’s two main organs of intelligence, may attain.

            We often speak of “acquiring” knowledge like it was some sort of material commodity, a position reflecting a now common commercial way of looking at all things where human beings start out poor and empty and are in need of filling.  There is a good deal of truth to this view, of course, but ‘Abdu’l-Baha speaks above of the human intelligence "attaining" a state of knowledge via direct connection.  Thus real knowledge is not to imbibe and consume learning, but to move through various states of knowing by direct connection with different levels of reality.  Baha’u’llah, quoting an Islamic tradition, wrote: "Knowledge is all that is knowable.” (The Kitab-i-Iqan:185)  Thus within each state of knowing the knowledge manifested is of that state.  One “acquires” that knowledge because one is in that state.  The knowledge is a manifestation of that state; is the state itself.  Higher states are unknowable to one in a lower state and thus its knowledge is not knowable to him.

            I have said that for human beings Reality presents itself to us as three levels, spirit, mind and matter.  These correspond to the three modalities of knowing, heart, intellect and senses, each of which has a direct connection with Reality on its own level.  Heart, intellect and senses, in turn, correspond to the three aspects of a complete education today, divine, human and material.  All these powers are within the human reality, as Baha’u’llah writes: “Likewise, reflect upon the perfection of man's creation, and that all these planes and states are folded up and hidden away within him. Dost thou reckon thyself only a puny form, when within thee the universe is folded?” (The Seven Valleys:34) 

            Historically, the three aspects of education have been three stages of education, material, human, divine, which today are being rolled up into one education.  As all evolution is of "spiritual man", no matter how embedded in Nature humanity may have been early in its history, and as all education, according to ‘Abdu’l-Baha, is toward divine education, “which is the goal of education”, so, too, the evolution of knowledge is toward that of the sacred and the heart, which is not just the intuitive but also the unitive level of knowledge, both the ground and the goal of all developments in knowledge.  The heart’s knowledge—that is, the higher aspect of heart discussed in The Wonderful Heart (January 12)--is knowledge of the divine or sacred by “direct connection” through a special faculty of knowing resident within it.  Knowledge of the divine means perceiving the creation as composed of “signs of God” (i.e. the essential forms).  Every created thing has a unique sign of God within it which animates its life and generates and guides its development.

            In its higher aspect, the heart is the organ of a knowledge that completely transcends all other powers and knowledges of the soul.  The light of the heart illumines all other faculties, for it is the seat of the spirit.  To escape the polarity, duality, dichotomy, and antinomy that is characteristic of intellectual consciousness we must not only return to this sun of knowing as it is manifest in the child, “except ye be converted and become as little children,” but also combine the heart with the intellect to achieve “light upon light.”  Thus intellectual polarities become structural poles of consciousness, essential parts of something larger, complementary aspects of an epistemological unity rather than contradictory views, as they are for the analytical intellect. 

            There is a difference, too, between the intellect’s and the heart’s primary means of knowing.  While most knowledge obtained by the intellect enters from outside through dialogue, reading, instruction and learning, knowledge of the heart enters and wells-up from within.  Thus it is from a higher dimension. Sacred knowledge enters the human world through a religious faculty, whose seat is the heart.  This faculty puts humanity in touch with a sacred dimension of the creation.  As Baha’u’llah writes, quoting another Islamic Tradition: “Knowledge is a light which God casteth into the heart of whomsoever He willeth.” (The Kitab-i-Iqan: 46)  This knowledge is cast upon the heart and the mind then sees this reflection, as in a mirror; as one leading philosopher put it “the numinous informs the rational from above”—“above” meaning “from within.”  In relation to intellect only this reflected knowledge from the heart enters the mind from within.  Thus, the human reality is described by ‘Abdu’l-Baha as a “luminous light-seeking essence.” (Baha’i World Faith: 371)

            Education is what is brought out of students, or, from the other side, what students pour forth of themselves in their interaction with the world, with others, and with knowledge.  What one brings forth of oneself is one’s education.  The new frontier of education is the spiritual or divine.  This is the bringing forth, the educing, of spirit, meaning each human essence in its essential form as a special sign of God.  Divine or spiritual education is the manifest unfolding of higher human nature itself.  We must transcend ourselves to attain this new state, which is awaiting our arrival. 

            In a previous post, I discussed three terms: progress, transformation and transcendence.  Just as any knowledge that is discovered was already “there”—“there” meaning in the world or in ourselves; which is really the same place--to be discovered, so transcendence is there to be experienced.  I mean that one cannot transcend into nothing.  The state that transcendence lands one in must be "there" as a potential to be experienced.  The fetus progresses through innumerable changes and transformations in the womb.  At birth, the fetus transcends the womb, but transcending the womb (i.e. birth) lands him in the world, not in nothingness.  A transcendent state is the telos, the purpose and the meaning, of the whole prior condition.        

            Yet, though the human spirit, as the Universal House of Justice reminds us, aspires toward transcendence, and that state of transcendence is already within waiting to be unveiled, that spirit cannot, by its own power, achieve transcendence.  Rather, that aspiration must be directly connected to a higher power that lifts the spirit out of the first condition into another.  The human spirit's everlasting quest for transcendence can only be realized by connecting with a transcendent message originating from a transcendent dimension, namely, the Word.  Thus divine education must be built upon the Word.
           I have said that the heart puts us in connection with the sacred realm.  We must explore this state of mind and its knowledge next.
 

Third principle: Humanity is undergoing transcendence

Universal beings resemble and can be compared to particular beings, for both are subjected to one natural system, one universal law and divine organization. So you will find the smallest atoms in the universal system are similar to the greatest beings of the universe.

(Some Answered Questions:182)

            I have been discussing some of the first or root principles of a new education, a new bringing forth of powers and capabilities from the human reality.  The first principle concerned the nature of Reality; the second principle was a discussion of human progress through stages of transformation and into transcendence.  The third principle is the relation between the individual’s spiritual transformation and humanity’s transformation, and that we are at a critical juncture in our collective evolution, called maturity, when all humanity must make a great leap forward, transcend all previous conditions, be lifted into a new condition.  Baha’u’llah wrote: “The end of all beginnings is to be found in this Day.” (The Tabernacle of Unity: 66-67)  But so, too, is the beginning of all ends to be found in today's world.

            The document Who is Writing the Future starts out with this ringing declaration: “The mainspring of Bahá'u'lláh's message is an exposition of reality as fundamentally spiritual in nature, and of the laws that govern that reality's operation. It not only sees the individual as a spiritual being, a "rational soul", but also insists that the entire enterprise that we call civilization is itself a spiritual process, one in which the human mind and heart have created progressively more complex and efficient means to express their inherent moral and intellectual capacities.”(Who is Writing the Future:1)

            What are some of the historical stages of the spiritual process called civilization building?  If we are to see this as a process and not simply as different, unconnected civilizations that have been built and run through cycles of growth and decline, then we need some framework.  One framework is provided by comparison to the individual’s growth.  ‘Abdu’l-Baha writes: “Praise be to God, throughout succeeding centuries and ages the call of civilization hath been raised, the world of humanity hath been advancing and progressing day by day, various countries have been developing by leaps and bounds, and material improvements have increased, until the world of existence obtained universal capacity to receive the spiritual teachings and to hearken to the Divine Call. The suckling babe passeth through various physical stages, growing and developing at every stage, until its body reacheth the age of maturity. Having arrived at this stage it acquireth the capacity to manifest spiritual and intellectual perfections. The lights of comprehension, intelligence and knowledge become perceptible in it and the powers of its soul unfold. Similarly, in the contingent world, the human species hath undergone progressive physical changes and, by a slow process, hath scaled the ladder of civilization, realizing in itself the wonders, excellencies and gifts of humanity in their most glorious form, until it gained the capacity to express the splendours of spiritual perfections and divine ideals and became capable of hearkening to the call of God. Then at last the call of the Kingdom was raised, the spiritual virtues and perfections were revealed, the Sun of Reality dawned, and the teachings of the Most Great Peace, of the oneness of the world of humanity and of the universality of men, were promoted.” (Selections from the Writings of Abdu'l-Baha:285)

            But another example of such a universal progression is religion.  But, like the human being, the laws of religion operate on two planes, the material, whose law of development is growth and decline, and the spiritual, which “is in itself progressive.” 

            Collectively there are several progressions and transformations of spirit on this plane.  First there is evolution through a cultural or religious cycle until the potentials of the entire condition are fulfilled.  We call such progression in religion a dispensation (Jewish, Christian, etc.) of one of the great Prophets.  This is easy to see and accept.

            A second progression of spirit is to transcend a cultural or religious context once its internal transformations are ended by entering into a larger cycle.  Thus, for many there is Judaism and Christianity as separate religions, but there is also a Judeo-Christian tradition, which can be traced back to Adam; or a Semitic peoples religious tradition which would link Judaism, Christianity and Islam; or, even wider, the tradition of Abrahamic religions which would include, along with Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Zoroastrianism, and the Babi and Bahá’í faiths.  We can also speak of an “Indian” tradition composed of Hindu-Buddhist linkages.  In each case, each religion can be seen, from a wider perspective, as a stage in a larger tradition of shared religious experience.  Each dispensation is its own cycle of development.  One religious dispensation ends with a new revelation. But this change of consciousness is not a smooth incremental step into a new reality.  Indeed, while this transformation in religion is spiritually expansive, culturally it is cataclysmic for the people who have that new Revelation erupt upon them.  Their social reality is pretty well wiped away.  Spiritually, Jesus said to the Jews: “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill.” (Matthew 5:17)  But, socially, fulfillment of the Law of God felt a good deal like the abrogation of their law, for while fulfilling the law does not destroy the spiritual law, it does destroy life run according to it up until that time.

            Thus, the cultural cycles are not comparable, so new social laws and principles are established by a new prophet while old ones are abrogated.   ‘Abdu’l-Baha speaks, for example, of “the impossibility of comparing the time of Christ with that of Moses. The conditions and requirements in the later period were entirely changed and altered.  The former laws were therefore abrogated.” (Some Answered Questions:94)  

            But all these cycles and traditions brought together and having reached maturity of possible consciousness, compose a universal cycle, and to get free of it is real transcendence.  Transcendence is the third progression of spirit and religion, one seen by the prophet Ezekiel in his vision of wheels within wheels. 

            Again, while the expansion of consciousness is unprecedented at the end of one universal cycle and the beginning of another, the destruction that accompanies this third progression is tremendous.  The Master says: “Briefly, there were many universal cycles preceding this one in which we are living. They were consummated, completed and their traces obliterated.”(Promulgation of Universal Peace:220) 

            A universal perception sees that: "The religion of God is one religion, but it must ever be renewed.” (Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá: 52)  It is both "the changeless Faith of God, eternal in the past, eternal in the future,"(Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá'u'lláh:136) and expresses the transformational principle: “That which hath been in existence had existed before but not in the form thou seest today.” (Tablets of Baha’u’llah: 140) Spirit, then, is both the energy and intelligence to evolve within and to transcend any cycle, including at its ultimate stage all previous cycles together. 

            The new universal spiritual law links all past cycles together—absorbs them really--as it gets a new universal cycle up and running.  A new universal cycle has commenced for the entire planet.  That is what makes the convulsions so omnipresent and destructive, that wholly destroy the conditions of the former, including its mental conditions of understanding, yet which also provides the principles that connect all history, peoples and their religions together.  Today these cataclysmic forces of change are propelling humanity through what Shoghi Effendi described as “an organic change in the structure of present-day society, a change such as the world has not yet experienced.” (The World Order of Baha’u’llah: 43) 

            Now, if education does not take account of these new conditions of human possibility and consciousness, it is not an adequate bringing forth of the human spirit, but an inadequate bringing forth, much like forcing an adolescent to subsist on a diet of milk.  It will never suffice for his energy needs.

            I have constructed this post as a short exercise in a kind of history called Heilgeschiste or sacred history, as an example of how the study of any subject can be unifying and relevant to today’s demands of consciousness.  What do you think?

Progress, Transformation, Transcendence

The endowments which distinguish the human race from all other forms of life are summed up in what is known as the human spirit; the mind is its essential quality. These endowments have enabled humanity to build civilizations and to prosper materially. But such accomplishments alone have never satisfied the human spirit, whose mysterious nature inclines it towards transcendence, a reaching towards an invisible realm, towards the ultimate reality, that unknowable essence of essences called God.

            (The Universal House of Justice, 1985 Oct, The Promise of World Peace, p. 1)

            My first principle was a discussion of Reality, which is unknowable in its essence.  But Reality in movement, which I called Reality-as-transformation, is knowable to some extent.  The second principle is a discussion of transformation as it relates to human advancement, and for which education can provide the driving force.  The discussion will take place within the context of the House of Justice statement above that the “mysterious nature” of the human spirit, whose essential quality is mind, “inclines it towards transcendence”, and Maslow’s prediction, quoted in the last post, that teachers will be “forced to teach spirituality and transcendence.”

            What is transcendence?  To understand something of transcendence two other words need to be brought into the discussion, one of which is transformation.  The other is progress.  My perspective is that transformation is a special dynamic of progress and transcendence is a special kind of transformation.  First, what is progress?

            Progress of any kind is advance toward some goal, whether traveling from New York to Chicago, or the growing human body.  But growth is really a spiritual process. Since, as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá wrote: "Spirit in itself is progressive," (Promulgation of Universal Peace:101) then all forms of organic growth are spiritual, at least spiritually driven.   But being in itself progressive, spirit is never fully and finally complete, though stages of completion are possible.  Achieving stages of physical completeness is the general process of material evolution.  But even material evolution is the manifestation of a spiritual drive toward completeness, ‘Abdu’l-Baha writing:  “Progress is the expression of spirit in the world of matter.”(Paris Talks: 90)

            In human development progress is the fuller unfolding of innate qualities into new, more evolved forms and complex patterns until a final stage is reached.  Individually, this is the process of  maturation.  But the same principle of spirit expressing itself in material form in the world of matter holds in the building of the  human world: "True civilization is where the spiritual is expressed and carried out in the material." (Paris Talks: 22)  Again, because spirit is never fully and finally realized, but is ever-advancing, then “all men have been called into being to carry forward an ever-advancing civilization.”  With human development, though, progress is not just unconscious and automatic, as it is with Nature, but has a quality of self conscious purposefulness to it.  It is mind at work.  That means that humans can to some extent guide natural and human progress through their essential quality of mind:  "If a man reflects he will understand the spiritual significance of the law of progress; how all moves from an inferior to a superior degree." (Paris Talks: 94)  The opposite of progress is regress and this brings us to transformation.

            Put simply transformation is the progressive or regressive changing of the form of a thing through the dynamic interplay between forces of integration and disintegration, both within its internal environment and in relation to an external environment.  If integrative forces are uppermost, then transformation is progressive.  If disintegrative forces are more powerful, then transformation is regressive. 

            Progressive transformational processes are the evolutionary unfolding of a being’s potentiality into actuality by dynamically entering into more complex interactions with an “environment”.  These complex interactions generate novel situations which draw forth its latent properties.  When qualities are drawn forth they are called emergent properties.  But they emerge from somewhere, drawn forth from some deep innate well of potential in response to challenge.  Because they are now part of the "environment", emergent properties in turn react back upon what they came out from to change the internal ordering of qualities, putting them in new combinations and form, but do not change the essence itself.             

            In a progressive transformation, each discrete change emerges from a preceding change and moves into another.  One change engenders another by virtue of some potentiality it has for “birthing” another change.  “Emerge” and “drawn forth” are the two sides of progressive transformation, emphasizing one or the other depends upon one’s viewpoint.  Education is the bringing forth or drawing forth of human powers.  All education, material, human and divine, is transformation at work.

            All possible transformations composing a condition exist as potential to be expressed, but each transformation comes to life only when its conditions for appearance are met.  Progressive transformation ends when all potentials for developmental change are actualized.  This is maturity, and it begins the opposite movement, regressive transformation, which was always there in some form and potential, as when the human body over many years slowly transforms back into dust.  Maturity is the consummation of the potential for development of a condition, because the process of growth reaches its end.  Death for an organic form begins at maturity, but maturity is not the end of spiritual growth, for “spirit in itself is progressive” and spirit is everlasting.  As progress is an intrinsic law of the universe, so is transformation to maturity.  “According to an intrinsic law all phenomena of being attain to a summit and degree of consummation, after which a new order and condition is established.” (The Promulgation of Universal Peace:123)  That is, after transformations are consummated transcendence, the last kind of spiritual progress, may occur.   

            Transcendence happens when one enters into another order; when all is made new and not just renewed.  Transcendence happens when one process has reached full maturity, but growth in spirit must still go on.  It is not the progressive reorganization of internal qualities and powers, but a new kind of configuration of them altogether to release capabilities that can not be expressed in any other way.  It is like what Shoghi Effendi described as that “mystic, all-pervasive but indefinable” change from adolescence to adulthood; same person progressing, but not really the same person because not progressing in the same way. 

            ‘Abdu’l-Baha describes it thus: “The suckling babe passeth through various physical stages, growing and developing at every stage, until its body reacheth the age of maturity. Having arrived at this stage it acquireth the capacity to manifest spiritual and intellectual perfections. The lights of comprehension, intelligence and knowledge become perceptible in it and the powers of its soul unfold.” (Selections from the Writings of Abdu'l-Baha: 285)

            Maturity, then, is a double-state.  It is simultaneously the end of one kind of condition and the beginning of another kind of condition.  At maturity physical development is over, but that same “moment” signalizes “the capacity to manifest spiritual and intellectual perfections.”  Transcendence, that universal, mystic, all-pervasive, indefinable spiritual transformation into a new state, was described by Baha’u’llah as similar to turning copper into gold through the power of an ‘elixir”, which, spiritually, is the Word of God.  He wrote: “(T)he real elixir will, in one instant, cause the substance of copper to attain the state of gold, and will traverse the seventy-year stages in a single moment. Could this gold be called copper? Could it be claimed that it hath not attained the state of gold, whilst the touch-stone is at hand to assay it and distinguish it from copper?...Likewise, these souls, through the potency of the Divine Elixir, traverse, in the twinkling of an eye, the world of dust and advance into the realm of holiness; and with one step cover the earth of limitations and reach the domain of the Placeless….Now, could this gold be thought to be copper, these people could likewise be thought to be the same as before they were endowed with faith.” (The Kitab-i-Iqan:156)

            While all education is transformation, only divine education can teach spirituality and transcendence.  More on this in the next post.