Spiritual Perception

Beware lest human learning debar thee from Him Who is the Supreme Object of all knowledge, or lest the world deter thee from the One who created it and set it upon its course.  Tear asunder the veils of human learning lest they hinder thee from Him Who is My Name, the Self-Subsisting.

(Baha’u’llah: The Summons of the Lord of Hosts: 56)

Divine education is built upon spiritual not sensory or intellectual perception.  The topic of spiritual perception is important.  I believe that there are two forms of spiritual perception, one primary, real and true, the other derived from the first, and though good, is also the various forms of human learning that Baha’u’llah warns us against becoming attached to, for these can obscure the first.            
            The different kinds of human or intellectual learning derived from original spiritual perception are available to anyone.  One kind sees creation as a kind of generalized image of a creator, the varied manifestation of invisible but intellectually perceptible forces which have physical counterparts or embodiments.  Much of great philosophy, especially mystical and Platonic-inspired philosophy, falls into this category. 

All of us know deeply spiritual people of this kind, and they are to be honored and learned from.  They provide a growing body of philosophical and mystical insights and reflections that help us intellectually understand spirituality. But this kind of spiritual perception, which I will call the philosophical, is built upon perceiving the world of thought-forms which are themselves reflections of deeper spiritual realities.  This traditional form of philosophizing is returning, as within certain schools of psychological inquiry—usually associated with or inspired by Jung--spiritual forms are taken to be the archetypes at the biological level of human intelligence. As the views and experiments of quantum mechanics and String Theory gain wider acceptance and appeal, the spiritual is seen as the mental foundation of the physical universe.  In today’s world, the advances of science provide one means for many to search out spiritual realities.     

Within human culture, spirituality maintains a presence as fuel for our higher imaginative expressions.  I mean that spirituality feeds the imagination by providing themes for art, connecting the mind and heart not to faith but to the fabulous, because the connection is not to an objective world of spiritual realities but to the subjective world of dreams, desires and fantasies.  These are sometimes taken to be spiritual, but they stem from the wrong kind of understanding of spiritual realities, one which sees them as spectral will-o-the-wisps which stir up a froth of blurred inspiration.

When spirituality is perceived as only part of culture, rather than its source, humans lose their moral grounding and purpose, because they lose touch with the moral aspects of the Sacred.  For culture in all its forms and varieties, in its life and institutions, is concerned with the temporal and material realization of values.  This does not mean that it is solely concerned with these things, but that it can only ever realize them conceptually, imaginatively, and materially. 

Thus, another form of human learning derived from the spiritual dimension is the moral. Ethics and morals quickly degenerate whenever the moral sense gets subordinated to the imaginative drive of the aesthetic sense.  Subordination often provokes a reaction, or, better, overreaction, as those parts of culture dominated by the legalistically conceptual turn morals into iron principles of behaviour to get the culture back in line, but which itself so often degenerates into governing the herd by an educated priestly class of moralists. 

There is yet another kind of spiritual insight that is really another form of human learning, namely, the religious.  In this case, the mind denies the new spiritual Reality expressed as a new revelation because the heart denies the authority of the new Revelator.  It does so from attachment to an earlier Revelator.  This attachment to earlier religion prevents them from perceiving His new manifest Reality. Bahá’u’lláh states in this regard: “Verily they failed to recognize the Point of the Bayan, for had they recognized Him they would not have rejected His manifestation in this luminous and resplendent Being. And since they fixed their eyes on names, therefore when He replaced His Name 'the Most Exalted' by 'the Most Glorious' their eyes were dimmed.” (The Tablets of Bahá’u’lláh:185)        

Thus philosophical, scientific, artistic, moral, and religious forms of human knowledge can in themselves all be parts of that education that “deprives” people of that which they “inherently possess.”  This is so because, though all learning is to be prized, and the exponents of such learning are to be honored, there are, nevertheless, inherent restrictions limiting what the finite human mind can comprehend by itself of an infinite divine Revelation.  There are also limitations upon what techne can accurately embody of what the mind perceives.  Unless the mind is energized, illumined and even formed by new Revelation there is no way that it can recognize the Word of God Itself and comprehend that a new Divine Word has appeared both in human and verbal Form.  This recognition and comprehension is the foundation of true spiritual perception, and the source of what I am calling sacred science and knowledge which are the content of divine education.  Barring this infusion of divine energy and knowledge, the human mind can only see reflections, semblances, analogies, and traditional images and invented symbols.  It does not have direct perception of spiritual reality.  Every human knowledge may be a path leading to true perception and knowledge, but it is not that true knowledge.

             Spirituality is not just moral rules, imaginative stories, philosophical insights or eschatological beliefs.  It is neither a conceptual nor an imaginative construction.  Rather, it is first and essentially our mystical connection with the Creator, because human consciousness is rooted in a powerful sense of the sacred.  We are humans, finally, because we can recognize supernatural realities, not because we can invent them.  We have spiritual perception not because we are imaginative and rational beings but because we are spiritual ones.

In its essence spiritual knowledge is wisdom, and wisdom is the proper ordering of things, the kind of understanding that lives in human consciousness at a far deeper level than does imaginative and intellectual understanding, for wisdom is the long, slow, pulsations of the perennial mind, the still waters that run deep.  Bahá’u’lláh identifies the source of wisdom as divine Revelation when He writes:” Above all else, the greatest gift and the most wondrous blessing hath ever been and will continue to be Wisdom.  It is man’s unfailing Protector. It aideth him and strengtheneth him.  Wisdom is God’s Emissary and the Revealer of His Name the Omniscient.  Through it the loftiness of man’s station is made manifest and evident.  It is all-knowing and the foremost Teacher in the school of existence.  It is a Guide and is invested with high distinction.  Thanks to its educating influence earthly beings have become imbued with a gem-like spirit which outshineth the heavens.” (The Tablets of Bahá’u’lláh p.66)
            Intellectual knowledge and human learning have brought marvelous advances to human civilization.  But their very success has brought about a spiritual myopia where “the veils of human learning and false imaginings have prevented their eyes from beholding the splendour of the light of His countenance.” (The Tablets of Bahá’u’lláh p. 240-241)
             “How shall we attain the reality of knowledge?” asks ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. He answers: “By the breaths and promptings of the Holy Spirit which is light and knowledge itself.  Through it the human mind is quickened and fortified into true conclusions and perfect knowledge.” (Foundations of World Unity p.47).    Hence Baha’u’llah writes: “We beseech God to strengthen thee with His power, and enable thee to recognize Him Who is the Source of all knowledge that thou mayest detach thyself from all human learning, for, ’what would it profit any man to strive after learning when he hath already found and recognized Him Who is the Object of all knowledge.’  Cleave to the Root of Knowledge, and to Him Who is the Fountain thereof, that thou mayest find thyself independent of all who claim to be well versed in human learning, and whose claim no clear proof, nor the testimony of any enlightening book, can support.” (Gleanings from the Writings of Baha’u’llah:176)

I take this statement not as a call to join a religion, but a call to establish divine education.