The Great Reversal

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. As the instruments and science of war have reached the degree of thoroughness and proficiency, it is hoped that the transformation of the human world is at hand and that in the coming centuries all the energies and inventions of man will be utilized in promoting the interests of peace and brotherhood.

(‘Abdu’l-Baha: Bahá’í World Faith: 232)

Looking back on my wish to write about education I see that it was the result of the collision of two powerful forces, one towering up from within me, the other penetrating inwardly from the world and, therefore, into me from the other direction.  As you read, I hope you will discover, as I did, that these two forces are really the same force in two places, or, rather, a force everywhere at once. 

            The internal stimulus was this.  I had long felt that the world presented to me in high school textbooks, college classes, works of history and treatises in philosophy, in the sciences both social and natural, and even the arts, was upside down in some way and needed to be turned right side up somehow.  It was as if my consciousness was being continually asked to look through the wrong end of a mental telescope.  But there was an added twist to the beguilement of these works.  They peered through a looking glass which not only reflected but also reversed true circumstances, something like taking the photographic negative to be the real picture.  In short, I felt that the vision of things was inverted.  I discovered that I was not alone. 

            The poet, William Blake, wrote a marvelous poetic critique of his time entitled The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.  It is full of lines like: “The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.”  He thought that what people normally describe as heaven was actually hell and vice-versa.  He felt most people were enslaved by what he called “single vision and Newton’s sleep”—a purely this world mechanical vision organized by cold arithmetical logic having no spiritual dimension to it.  His poetry from first line to last was a heroic effort to awaken human vision to perceive spirit.  He wrote, also in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is: Infinite.”  We would do well to study his works. 

            St. Paul wrote: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” (1 Corinthians 13:12)  Two thousand years ago he, too, struggled to set human perception free from the gravitational pull of wrongful assumptions that too often govern human thought.

            Both St. Paul and Blake warn against going deeper into the world to try to gain a better perspective of it.  This only results in one being swallowed by the world, what the Bible describes as “they became what they beheld.”  It is a basic principle demonstrated in literature that disappearing into one’s own mirror image is entering a world of reversed and reduced dimensions.  This is always a central symbol of descent—and it brings with it the loss of one’s freedom of action until it ends in paralysis or death.  Alice, to get into Wonderland, had to go through the looking glass, into her mirror image.  It was a confusing, dissolving, brutal world she landed in.  We are trapped in such a world and need to leap back out!   This is the hardest thing to do. 

            To reverse out of this reversed world is the literary theme of ascent.  But to do this the mind must undergo a process of reversing its gaze to understand both the world and the human reality correctly as simultaneously creations mirroring each other, and as a reality that is reflected.  The impetus for this change of consciousness is often said to come from within not from without, but it actually comes from everywhere at once, or, anywhere at all, as we exist within a field of divine thought which both surrounds and permeates this world. 

            The Book of Proverbs says: “Where there is no vision, the people perish.”  Whoever wrote that nugget may have had us in mind.  We are without vision, though we have plenty of dreams, for we are victims of what Bahá’u’lláh calls “lack of a proper education.”   It was my own education.  But I mean the phrase “lack of a proper education” in a much broader sense than what goes on in schools and other formal learning institutions.  I also include the messages in the media, the unspoken values regulating interactions between people, the laws and mores of society, and the decisions of government and civic institutions.  In short, everything that goes on among people in society is part of an all-encompassing educational effort in every culture.  I believe that is what Baha’u’llah meant also. 

Following the essay’s opening quote from ‘Abdu’l-Baha the argument that follows is driven by the metaphor of reversal.  Now, there are several forms of reversal.  One is like the reversal in a math equation: if A=B then B=A.  This reversal which occurs within the static structure of the universe of mathematics is also like the flow of energy from yin to yang and back of Chinese philosophy.  Then there is an attempt, in consciousness, to reverse the order of time.  That is, to go back in time imaginatively to rediscover a lost sacred time and place governed by the laws of a sacred science.  However beneficial this might seem, this is a quixotic quest and is not what the Master means. This is a vision of a lost paradise, meaning whatever state we are in at the moment is a fallen state.   But this movement is one part of a larger and double reversal, which I will talk about.  Both these are examples of  transformations taking place within a state or condition of being.  They drive the dialectic of growth to the end or full development of that state.  But the first only reverses movement back to the opposite metaphysical pole, while the second reverses the stages of development, to go back to the opposite historical pole, called the beginning.  Both these can only lead to ruin.

‘Abdu’l-Baha’s statement means not a transformation or reversal of consciousness within the human world, but a transformation of human consciousness itself.  It is a kind of vast, universal Hegelian negation of the negation.  It is the kind of thing that Christ talked about when he said that the last shall be first, and the first last—i.e. those that are socially first may be spiritually last, while the socially marginalized and dispossessed may be spiritually exalted.  This kind of reversal occurs only at the end of an order, not within it.  The reversal into a whole new order of life and thinking that happens after a complete consummation of a certain line of development has occurred is, on one hand, a catastrophe of such proportions that the former ways are almost totally obliterated.  But, on the other hand, it liberates powerful energies latent within the human reality that when properly ordered can reintegrate humanity in a higher state, the first occurring because the second is taking place.  These are the twin aspects of any birth and death event which takes place on two orders of being simultaneously.  Humanity is at the end of the materialist age, which is itself the last epoch of millennia devoted to building the mature material vessel capable of expressing spiritual impulse.  I believe, therefore, that it is also the beginning of its age of spirit.  Now, like the principles of Newtonian physics in the age of quantum mechanics, except within a narrow range of everyday phenomena the former patterns of perception and thought apply no longer.