Reading Our Creation

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?’  In this connection, He Who is the eternal King hath spoken: ‘He hath known God who hath known himself.’

(Gleanings from the Writings of Baha'u'llah, p. 177)

            The whole cosmos is constructed symbolically.  Symbols are the language of spiritual understanding, the primary tool for the communication of divine mysteries, a bridging device linking the concrete and material with the intangible and spiritual, a tool to facilitate spiritual transformation by evoking a transcendental experience.  Symbols enable the mind and heart to discern the hidden reality in the manifest one, for the manifest is the outer form of the hidden.  A symbol exists when the use of a term for one thing to describe another because of a similarity between them or between their relations to other things can be established.  For example, “He is a lion” indicates the same quality of courage in man and beast.

            The signs of God are manifest in three “places”: within the written Revelation, which is the archetypal Source of these signs; within the human reality as our powers, qualities and characteristics; within Nature as the visible created world of things.  Symbolic thinking perceives a correspondence of the signs of God simultaneously in Revelation, in humanity and in Nature.  A symbol is the connection within the human intelligence of a sign of God in its different levels of manifestation.  Abdu’l-Baha, following traditional theology in seeing the relation between Revelation and Creation through the metaphor of two Books, the verbum scriptum and the verbum factum, writes: “There are two Books: one is the Book of creation and the other is the written Book.  The written Book consisteth of the heavenly Books which are revealed to the Prophets of God and have issued forth from the lips of His Manifestations.  The Book of creation is the preserved Tablet and the outspread Roll of existence.  The Book of creation is in accord with the written Book.” (Quoted in Nakhjavani: Response:13)

            These books are in accordance because: “The spiritual world is like unto the phenomenal world. They are the exact counterpart of each other. Whatever objects appear in this world of existence are the outer pictures of the world of heaven.” (Promulgation of Universal Peace:10)  Baha’u’llah further elaborates on this thought when He writes: “All these signs (of God) are reflected and can be seen in the book of existence, and the scrolls that depict the shape and pattern of the universe are indeed a most great book.” (Tablets of Baha’u’llah:60)  In another place Baha’u’llah asserts: "Look at the world and ponder a while upon it. It unveileth the book of its own self before thine eyes and revealeth that which the Pen of thy Lord, the Fashioner, the All-Informed, hath inscribed therein. It will acquaint thee with that which is within it and upon it and will give thee such clear explanations as to make thee independent of every eloquent expounder."(Tablets of Baha'u'llah, p. 141-142)  Would I love to be able to do that!

           The point is that we are endowed with what Baha’u’llah called Two Visions, or as Northrop Frye suggests a “Double vision.”  By these phrases is not meant that we see a double image of a thing, as someone who has been struck in the eye and his retina cannot properly focus.  What is meant, rather, is that we can see the inner, spiritual and the outer material forms of a thing, so that we may create the symbol which is the basis of human knowledge.  The counterparts accord not only by themselves but also within the human intelligence, because all the same signs of God written in Revelation and appearing in creation also exist within the human soul.  All true symbols are built upon the "triple" correspondence of the signs of God in Revelation, humanity, and Nature, and reading the divine signs correctly generates genuine human knowledge.

           Thus, without the spiritual dimension of Revelation human “knowledge” is limited to the senses, to logical or provable ideas, and to what the human imagination can invent.  The triple correspondence is reduced to a double one of man and nature.  This can lead us into a wild thicket of confusing analogies when we attempt to perceive the spiritual world.  For to see the spiritual requires seeing with our spiritual faculties and the revealed Word when interpreted by the Revealer can alone tell us what we are looking at.  Otherwise we tend to think the spiritual world is some vast phantasmagoria of images, or the projection of subconscious longings.  Once we do recognize Revelation, which is the guide to our seeing the true meaning of all outer signs and symbols, then the invisible becomes visible, faith turns into vision and knowledge of spiritual reality is possible by direct perception.

           The cosmos is both a spiritual and a material universe in the simple accordance of invisible spiritual reality to its visible material picture.  Bahá’u’lláh, for example, when discussing the two kinds of stars that appear with the birth of every Manifestation of God (e.g. the celestial star followed by the Zoroastrian Magi with the birth of Christ) and which herald His coming says, too, that there is also a heavenly spiritual star (e.g. a forerunner of a greater manifestation, as John the Baptist was of Christ) that simultaneously appears.  He says: “These twofold signs, in the visible and the invisible heaven, have announced the Revelation of each of the Prophets of God, as is commonly believed.” (The Kitab-i-Iqan:62)

           Within the universe of human self-knowledge a symbol is created when the intelligence connects in thought and image the different realms of human experience, the transcendent and the temporal, the sacred and the profane.  It makes the transcendent less than transcendent, but, too, makes the sensible more than sensible by turning both into thought.  Symbol brings the human reality into relation not with the higher Presence directly, but with the reflection, the image, of the Presence.  In this way the heart feels something of the sacred power of the Presence and responds with longing for the transcendent, turning it into religion.  Such thought is attempting to do what Coleridge described as trying to find “a symbolical language for something within that forever and always existed.”  But, too, the symbol stands for Nature because we cannot directly connect with the natural, either.  Rather we find the corresponding quality of a natural thing within us and recreate it within our mind and heart by our thinking and imagining powers as a thought and image, turning it into science and art.

           The cosmological spiritual and material correspond in the human reality to our spiritual and material natures.  Here things get a bit more complicated for we must introduce the idea of free will and choice, and their unhappy associates, contradiction and opposition.  This point is crucial for divine education.  It gets sticky because what appears in one nature is not directly manifest in the other as an “outer picture”, as it is with Revelation and creation.  Rather, within the human reality the sign of God in one nature has its “opposing” counterpart in the other, and the wise person is the one who has learned to read the one by the other by inversion.

           I mean that within the moral world of choice, symbols have a light and a dark aspect, benefic and malefic function, because we are both angels and animals, light and shadow.  Thus knowledge is contrasted with ignorance, good with evil, justice with tyranny, and both these “qualities” are possible for us to manifest.  Thus the scriptures of the “western” religions will speak metaphorically, meaning in symbols, of the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden opposed by the Tree of Zaqqum, or the infernal Tree mentioned in the Quran, Surih 37, and about which ‘Abdu’l-Baha says in regards to child education: “to train the character of humankind is one of the weightiest commandments of God, and the influence of such training is the same as that which the sun exerteth over tree and fruit. Children must be most carefully watched over, protected and trained; in such consisteth true parenthood and parental mercy.

           "Otherwise, the children will turn into weeds growing wild, and become the cursed, Infernal Tree, knowing not right from wrong, distinguishing not the highest of human qualities from all that is mean and vile; they will be brought up in vainglory….” (The Compilation of Compilations vol. I, p. 263)

           However if the angelic aspect is trained to rule the animal aspect the child comes to know that: “He hath known God who hath known himself.”