Reflections After a Few Days with the Grandchildren

Whosoever has lost himself has found the universe and the inhabitants thereof. Whosoever is occupied with himself is wandering in the desert of heedlessness and regret. The "master-key" to self-mastery is self-forgetting. The road to the palace of life is through the path of renunciation. (‘Abdu’l-Baha, Star of the West, vol. 17, no. 2, p. 348

My wife and I had a great time spending a few days with the grandchildren, Elani and Aman.  The ones in the picture above.  They worked their usual magic, simultaneously exhilarating and exhausting their grandparents.  But what a circus ride they provide.  After recovering my strength and my normal heart rhythm I began thinking of how they live their day, and what it all means for “education.”

Small children, being not yet socialized and possessing no innate morality, only moral potential, are nothing but curiosity and questions. They are anarchic little bundles of energy with no set purpose, no goals, or final outcomes in their sights.  They move from activity to activity as the spirit or someone else moves them.  They live and learn, learn and live in an eternal present.  Society demands that they be turned into social beings.  But training of this sort seems to mean to prune and squash their great forces of spirit into an effective citizenry.  I know these conditioning actions must go on.  But I will miss them after the conditioning has done its work. 

For, they are powerfully creative.  They learn in great gulps and huge bites.  They ask inappropriate questions, make embarrassing faux pas’s that make their wide-eyed, dumbfounded parents blurt out: “Kids!”—as I did as a parent. (Grandparents seem a lot more tolerant and amused.)   Children are the models of how humans really learn, of how we must upset before we can reset.  And there is no more genuinely subversive activity against a status quo entrenched in its assumptions, against all cramped orthodoxies and tyrannies of mind, than a simple question.  And, yes, in adolescents much of this questioning is incoherent or badly articulated and thus carries the threat of violence, for without voice, with no one to hear their call, then rebellion and aggression, active or passive, is the only course of action left.  But this is also because it is so strongly felt; because conflict and competition, striving against someone or something, whatever its destructive ends, is always the better alternative to fending for oneself alone.  If it is the only choice, punishment is usually preferable to neglect.  To ask questions is the right of everyone.  Children know this in their tissues, not yet their minds.  I mean they know this because they don’t yet know any better, or, maybe I should say, know any worse. 

            Because of bad conditioning that averts eyes and minds from the essential questions, many older students have been deprived of the use of their inherent power of understanding.  They have little faith, poor vision, dammed up creativity, no reflection.  They have no opportunity to really question and find their answers.  There is always another math test to study for, another party to anxiously groom for.   

For people of any age, education is to discover their value as human beings.  It is emotionally driven at first by heightened and intense feelings of insecurity that generate the energies of risk.  In today’s education, however, as Gardner points out: “…neither teachers nor students are willing to undertake ‘risks for understanding’; instead, they content themselves with safer ‘correct-answer compromises.’  Under such compromises, both teachers and students consider the education to be a success if students are able to provide answers that have been sanctioned as correct.  Of course, in the long run, such a compromise is not a happy one, for genuine understandings cannot come about so long as one accepts ritualized, rote, or conventionalized performances.” (Gardner: The Unschooled Mind: 150)               

Piaget believed that “…to understand is to discover, or reconstruct by rediscovery.”  Understanding is a process of continual transformation, and, therefore, it has characteristics similar to the poetic invention.  It both unfolds from within and assimilates from without and transforms both in the process.  But, again, with the sacred we are in a different kind of learning environment. 

            We know that the sacred cannot be taught; only awakened.  It is already there, because kids know who God is.  They know who God is because He is with them, right at the inner surface of their intelligence.  Most adults have layers of conditioned sediment in the way.  There are two stories about children and God that I love.

First: a young couple bring home a new baby and introduce him to their four-year old, hoping that there will not be any great outbursts of jealousy.  Over the next few days, they notice the older child going into the baby’s room.  Finally, one day they stand outside the door and hear her say to her new brother: “Brother, please tell me about God, I’m starting to forget.” 

The other story is about the child leaning intently over the picture he is drawing.  His teacher asks him: “Johnny, what are you drawing?”  Johnny replied, matter-of-factly: “I am drawing a picture of God.”  His teacher, being an adult, said: “But no one knows what God looks like.”  Without turning his head, or stopping even for an instant to consider this pitiable creature’s perplexity, Johnny triumphantly announced: “They will when I get done.”  I bet God laughed and winked His approval.

            Spiritual education is to undertake the risk of building a new culture of learning.  I almost would call it a kid’s culture of learning, because such an environment is engaging the students in the process of their own learning and transformation and children do this automatically.  They explore, openly and with tenacity, the spiritual dimension, either to bring forth their higher spiritual aspect, or the spiritual aspect of the world.  The spirit being everywhere at once, either direction leads to a common center.

            Spiritual education says that the first and essential transmission is the gradual transfer from teacher to student not of knowledge, but of responsibility for learning, and that learning is built around the fundamental questions.  Some call it “learning how to learn”, but I believe there is more fundamental phrase than that.  In my mind, learning how to learn is a great step but only a step toward the real goal: educating how to educate. 

            All this is fine.  But it is also adult-speak.  And all the theory and big words are nothing compared to running into the schoolyard to see them one last time before you depart for home, having them spot you, squeal “Grandpa!” with surprise, bolt disobediently from the line entering school as the bell rings, and jump without any inhibition into your arms.  One of the top five moments of my life, no matter what else happens. 

What my grandchildren boisterously enabled me to recall is the sheer fun that life should be and that tremendous stores of energy are waiting to be used so that they can be replenished.  Social mistakes are made—taking a flying leap onto grandpa’s back while he is sitting on the floor being one of them—but they are correctable, especially if you laugh through the pain.  But “spiritual mistakes” is something of an oxymoron where children are concerned.  And they are looking for an answering joy, a little anarchy, a soothing stroke of the head as they fall asleep, an approving nod and a “great job!” exclamation, and heaps of love.  My grandchildren are lucky to have two parents who give them more than enough of those essential requirements.  We never lose those requirements.  They are at least as important as enough to eat.

The Birth of the Ego and Morality

Once one has read through the Old Testament from this point of view, the entire succession of works becomes majestically and wonderfully the birth pangs of our subjective consciousness.  No other literature has recorded this absolutely important event at such length and with such fullness.

(Julian Jaynes, The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

p. 312-313)

All spiritual perception begins with the Messengers of God articulating new dimensions and perspectives on the spiritual world.  Spiritual perception gets turned into human learning, which can block the acceptance of deeper spiritual perception.  And it is spiritual perception that opens up vast new horizons for human consciousness.

Western consciousness has been described as the result of two main influences, called the Hebraic and the Hellenic, the Hebrews and the Greeks.  The religious or Hebraic consciousness is based on faith and certain kind of hearing.  It is the foundation of divine knowledge.  The scientific or Greek consciousness is based on “rational” knowing and a certain kind of seeing, which is the basis of human learning.  Jaynes writes, correctly, that: “the more secular developments of the last three millennia are related to their emergence from a different mentality.  I am thinking of the history of logic and conscious reasoning from the Greek development of Logos to modern computers…” (The Origins of Consciousness:319)

Jaynes also asserts: “The coming of consciousness can in a certain vague sense be construed as a shift from an auditory to a visual mind.” (The Origins of Consciousness:269)   But here Jaynes is equating consciousness with the Hellenic mind, and the auditory with the Hebraic.  This perspective is typical of the secular way of thought that dominates our consciousness, but it leaves out the sacred experience which, as our leading quote says, always leads in the birth of human subjective consciousness.

Let us ask: What is the criterion used to decide when and where human mental evolution consciousness began and grew?  We are taught that "rational" consciousness began pretty much with early Greek thinkers, but from the religious Hebraic perspective one could say consciousness began with Adam’s naming things in the garden.  This is a mythical account of the birth of conscious intellection, of seeing the physical universe as separate and objective from oneself.  It is the birth of mind as a thinking agent thinking about the world, and the establishment of an interior intellectual universe through the naming of things.  Thus, saying the name brings the thing to the mind even when it is not physically present.          

Later, with Abraham, a unique consciousness began; that of faith and moral self-consciousness.  I mean that with Abraham there is a two-fold development: first, toward, a deepening of true self -consciousness subjectivity; second, the development of ego-consciousness.  Paradoxically, this is a separation both from God and from Nature, making the human soul in its two conditions of eternal and contingent.  Let me explain.

The Bible says that “faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” (The Book of Romans 10:17)  ‘Abdu’l-Bahá echoes St. Paul when He says that “the voice of God hath made thine ears to hear.” (Tablets of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. V.1:132)  

The opening of both the dimension of faith and ego-consciousness by Abraham (Genesis chapter 22) was based on a new development in consciousness of God, namely, obedience to the inward “hearing” of the Voice of God’ and knowing it to be the Voice of the Divine and not a projection of human subjectivity.  It is what Walter Ong in his book, The Presence of the Word, would call “the interiority of consciousness.” 

This originating “event” of faith by Abraham, the encounter with God through His Voice and Abraham’s absolute obedience to this voice in defiance of all human laws and social and ethical principles brought the light of faithfulness into human experience.  This light, also, however, creates the shadow of faithlessness and this contrast on the human plane makes the human individuality a moral entity.  Now the soul has a new dimension of moral choice.  That is, the moral choice is not just to obey or disobey the outer social law.  Now the soul has an inner existential choice, to obey the Voice of God or the voice of itself, and to choose God, as Abraham did, may oppose the whole order of human laws and customs.  This is individuality. 

The consequence of this new choice was the birth of the individual ego, the analog “I” of the higher selfhood, the dark shadow of the light of the higher nature.  The ego is the subjective consciousness whose “mind” is the shadow of the ideal self, but which is also an objective self to the inner eternal self; for we must objectify ourselves in order to create a new subject with its own subjectivity.  This subjective development was unknown to the early Greeks.  Jaynes remarks: “Iliadic men did not have subjectivity as do we; he had no awareness of his awareness of the world, no internal mind-space to introspect upon.” (Origins of Consciousness: 75)

Thus with Abraham is the beginning in human psychology of introspection, subjectivity and the like, for it is the creation of that interior space inhabited by a “living” person in relation with himself, because in a new relation with God. The ego is an internal mind-space that can hear either God, which is its own higher self, or itself.  The difference is that the eternal self may hear the Word of God directly as a full existential resonant actuality, but we can only overhear ourselves, the inner chatter that we call subjectivity.  But, again, the birth of this subjective, narratizing self makes disobedience to God now possible, as law makes the criminal.  For before there was law, there was only action, neither right or wrong.  The law, by deciding what is right, also defines wrong.

Now it is with this Abrahamic event, I believe, that an ego-consciousness passed out from its embryo to experience itself as distinct and separate and different from the unconscious selfhood it was before and overcome the psychic drag back into it.  Only now can a conscious inner, individual self be formed that stands entirely on its own.  Once this core idea of self is established, this personality, this stranger within, as Baha’u’llah calls him, then related ideas, beliefs, and images begin to constellate around it which seem to be consistent with each other.  The birth of the individual ego, that self-conscious individual subjective selfhood, now can narratize purely interiorized thoughts, the abstractions which cannot be seen except by the intellect.  Narratize means organize abstractions as intellectual objects of knowledge in themselves.  Adam opened the world to intellectual apprehension, but Abraham opened the inner world to intellectual apprehension so a purely inner self could be built.  How is this done? 

This process occurs because the self-center acts as a magnet on the disparate thoughts, images and feelings swirling around it in the general human space which it captures and brings into its orbit.  In this way a reflecting ego having cognizance of itself emerges at the center of its own consciousness.  This rational self-conscious ego can now set up both itself  and human learning in competition with the Divine Voice for the attention of the individual.  Only there is this difference in their temper.  The ego’s voice is “legion” and is a “loud roaring” while the divine voice is the “still, small voice.”  Whereas the ego’s response to the Voice of God is: “Who are you?”  The eternal self responds with: “Here am I!”  

            But, finally, because there is competition with the Voice of God there is now also guilt for breaking the new internal covenant.  Before there may have been right and wrong actions, but the criteria were ethical and behaviorist only.  But now, with the self as a conceptualized entity, something one can “see” in an imaginary “space”, right and wrong becomes a moral question of divine or human authority right and wrong get tangled up with new ideas of personal intent.  Guilt is now possible, for guilt cannot be before there is the sense that one’s soul is one’s own as a self-consistent being maintained by one’s own effort.  Only with this internal development and sense of personal responsibility to respond in some manner to the voice calling one to faith, can feelings of guilt, unworthiness and remorse occur.  “One has to have an analog “I” surveying a mind-space to so see.” (Origins of Consciousness:296)    

A Heartfelt Look

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;--
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

William Wordsworth: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood 

Children do see the world as Wordsworth describes, and as he himself did as a child.  Great poets keep that freshness of perception well into their adult years.  Extraordinary poets, like Milton and Blake in English literature, never lose it.  It is the kind of perception I mean when I talk about spiritual perception.  It is a form of perception originating in the heart.  Wordsworth himself alludes to this in the closing lines of the same poem:

Thanks to the human heart by which we live,

Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,

To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

Scientist and priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote early last century: “The time has come to realize that an interpretation of the universe—even a positivist one—remains unsatisfying unless it covers the interior as well as the exterior of things; mind as well as matter.” (The Phenomenon of Man:35-36).  But to see as the poet and the poetic scientist saw means to perceive through the proper organs of perception, else the reality is not seen, and not being seen is thought not to exist.  Bahá’u’lláh writes: "O servants! Eyes are needed if one is to see, and ears, if one is to hear. Whoso in this blessed Day hath not heard the divine call hath indeed no ear. By this is not meant that bodily ear that is perceived by the eye. Open your inner eye, that ye may behold the celestial Fire, and listen with the ear of inner understanding, that ye may hear the delightsome words of the Beloved." (The Tabernacle of Unity:80)

This is the level of the rhapsodic intelligence, the ecstatic mind, the enlightened heart.  There is not, except in a dichotomous world, an emotional mind and a rational mind, making the emotional by definition irrational and by implication less intelligent.  Their union is where real wisdom is manifest, where a poetics of knowledge and sacred science begins.  Here inspiration flows freely and certainty is known: the perennial and the novel are present.  Here the human intelligence enters an impersonal dimension of pre-established universal harmony.  Whenever the human intelligence catches some glimpse of this, or feels it in some powerful way, a great energy is released and one feels caught up in something greater than oneself.  This experience does not bring us down to Reality, but uplifts us to It.  We see the world “apparelled in celestial light.”  We “behold the celestial Fire”,  “hear the delightsome words of the Beloved”, experience "thoughts too deep for tears."

To achieve a spiritual perception of all things requires a new state of mind, a blending of mind and heart in a higher relationship.  It means to advance into a unified consciousness; the two become one, where mind and heart are not intellect and emotion, but the spiritual intelligence.  To describe this new power of perception as a new state of mind is serviceable at best, because we have no similar phrase like a new state of heart.  To indicate this sea-change in the human intelligence we use phrases like transformation of soul.  This is because things are held together at the soul-level, for it is there within the untapped potentials of the human soul that unities of a higher order reside waiting to be manifestly connected with the inner realities of creation.  Either by mind or heart, thought or feeling, through science or religion, one can first connect with and engage the spiritual. It is the heart that often leads the way, for while the mind knows and comprehends indirectly via thoughts and ideas, the heart understands through direct perception. But their harmonious interaction is the manifestation of the spiritual intelligence.

The heart is the lover, our sense of belonging with the universe, a feeling of empathy with all things, an identifying with the other, not just viewing it.  Love is the one and fundamental substance of the universe, what makes it into a creation, and the remover of all subjective distance.  Mind is order and form perceived objectively out there or in here, but the perceiver is viewing.  It is our sense of separation and objectivity, and when mixed with awe and dread, even alienation.  The spiritual intelligence is both of these together; their union, yet separation, at the highest levels of meaning, knowing and loving, substance and form.  This is the union of opposites making the "thing" whole or holy.

And what is going on within us during these “moments.”  The authors of Heartmath state: ‘According to our studies, at those elusive moments when we transcend our ordinary performance and feel in harmony with something else—whether it’s a glorious sunset, inspiring music, or another human being—what we’re really coming into sync with is ourselves….we’re at our optimal functioning capacity.” (Heartmath:39)

A brilliant philosopher calls this consciousness the “numinous state of mind’ and describes how to achieve it: “This mental state is perfectly sui generic and irreducible to any other; and therefore, like every absolutely primary and elementary datum, while it admits of being discussed, it cannot be strictly defined.  There is one way to help another to an understanding of it.  He must be guided and led on by consideration and discussion of that matter through the ways of his own mind, until he reach a point at which ‘the numinous’ in him perforce begins to stir, to start into life and into consciousness.  We can cooperate in this process by bringing before his notice all that can be found in other regions of the mind, already known and familiar, to resemble, or again to afford some special contrast to, the particular experience we wish to elucidate.  Then we must add: ‘This X of ours is not precisely this experience, but akin to this one and the opposite of that other.  Cannot you realize for yourself what it is?’  In other words our X cannot, strictly speaking, be taught, it can only be evoked, awakened in the mind; as everything that comes ‘of the spirit’ must be awakened.” (Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy:46) 

 Sociologist Andrew Greeley wrote: “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) 

Numinous consciousness, ecstatic reason, the spiritual intelligence—all names for the same state--is, I believe, our first consciousness, which is a consciousness of God and the sacred.  In children and primitives the sacred provokes an inchoate stirring of powerful feelings.  It is urgent, active, compelling to action, alive.  But with the development of the “rational” powers of the mind numen becomes nomen, power becomes a named power.  With naming comes power to channel to some extent this transcendent power, to let it flow through one’s being to become the gradual unfolding of the constituent elements of one body of experience.  These higher reaches of thought are essentially mystical, though the child inhabits them naturally, or, better, they inhabit him until overlaid with sediments of human learning.  The Sacred enters our tissues, rearranging atoms and molecules and magnetically charging our cells with love and knowledge.  Children have the sacred intelligence in abundance.  Perhaps Jesus had this in mind when He said in words I’ve quoted before: "Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” (The Book of Matthew, 18:3)  We need joy to approach the sacred, or the vibrations of its visitation will break us apart.