Alpha and Omega

       

The Holy, 'Divine Manifestations are unique and peerless, They are the archetypes of celestial and spiritual virtues in their own age and cycle.  'They stand on the summit of the Mount of Vision and they foreshadow the perfections of an evolving humanity.

(‘Abdu’l-Baha: Star of the West vol. V #5)

The special object of study of spiritual history is the process of humanity’s spiritual evolution in the material world.  It is “the one eternal religion” as it progressively manifests Itself in an unfolding collective social form called civilization. The Baha'i belief that all the religions achieve some glorious consummation in a universal religion is an example of the principle that what appears in perfectly developed form at the end of a process of development is the essence or fundamental form of that process itself. Civilization follows the same trajectory. 

            Due to accepted Darwinian reasoning about evolution, however, the full relationship between the beginning and ending of a developmental process is a difficult one to see, but it is this: the essential form of anything is the last to appear in manifest form, though it is first in rank and the progenitor of all those partial and prior manifested forms that appear in time before it.  That is, the spiritual “essence” is the archetypal form out of which all manifest forms appear and which itself becomes manifest in some form at the end—Alpha become Omega.             

            Each particular civilization is both a material and social expression of a spiritual (eternal) universal and a partial embodiment of the universal social form, called a world civilization, that will appear at the end of civilized development. Said another way, the essential spiritual form unfolds in time as a progressive sequence of organic models called civilizations which ultimately will enfold into a universal structure, or world civilization, at the “end of time”.  Civilization, like revelation, progresses from one particular form of the universal to another, each later one a more complete and comprehensive organization of the same totality.  This is the unfolding through developmental stages of “the Primal oneness" (Selections from the Writings of 'Abdu'l-Bahá: 263) deposited at the heart of all things until development reaches a fully manifested universal form that embodies all humanity, at which time a new and different kind of cycle of development will commence.

            Said another way, the spiritually first appears fully garbed in the materially last. At every level of creation the essence of that level is last to be manifested, for the material structures capable of embodying and carrying the energy of the archetype must be built first. For the individual human being ‘Abdu’l-Baha states: “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.” (Selections from the Writings of Abdu'l-Baha:285)

In human history, the appearance of the “essence” of Revelation and Civilization in manifest form also signals the end of the material cycle and the beginning of the spiritual one.  At every stage the more complete form of anything is related to but logically independent of its less complete forms.  That is, they are incomparable.  The kingdoms of created things moving toward man show us this by analogy.  For however much we humans genetically resemble our neighboring primates, man is independent of the monkey, a new kind of creation.  Man and monkey are incomparable, though both are parts of the creational world. We differ from them by less than 1% of our genetic makeup. But the organization of the genetic material of humanity is different.  To connect man and monkey logically is to fruitlessly search for the missing link in a literal rather than a metaphorical great chain of being.        

            Due to great changes in thinking and feeling, the stages of psychological growth of an individual are also incomparable, as any parent trying to make sense of their teenager—or even their own teenage years--will tell you.  Yet all these changes are held together by the fact that they are happening within one individual.  Because of vast changes, the cycles of collective human development are also incomparable.  As ‘Abdu’l-Bahá explained: “Now this change, these alterations and this abrogation are due to 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)  Yet all these Dispensations are connected by the recurring Vision of the Prophets moving toward full manifestation.   

            In short, the process of human development moves simultaneously along two pathways which point metaphorically in opposite directions; one, the outer and material, by a revolving upward, which is outward, of all things toward their mature or fully developed physical form.   But in spiritual development and the expansion of consciousness upward or greater means, metaphorically, inward, that is toward the inner or essential form.

            In the natural world the past is the prior and less developed form of the present, which is an earlier and less complete form of the future.  The former precedes the latter, but finds its completion in the latter, not in itself.  But spiritually the greater precedes the lesser, and the prior and greater infuses its later expressions with the forms and energy to progress. All find their fulfillment in return to the first Form when it is manifest in the last form.  To be progressive, all revolution, which means return to the root, must be resurrection into a more complete form.

            Regarding the sequence of Manifestations and where their Words find fulfillment the Bab wrote: “The Bayan and whosoever is therein revolve round the sayings of 'Him Whom God shall make Manifest,' even as the Alif (Gospel) and whosoever was therein revolved round the saying of Muhammad, the Apostle of God.” (Shoghi Effendi. The World Order of Bahá'u'lláh:100)

            But the spiritual relation of the Most Glorious universal Revelation to all previous revelations reverses that: "There is a priority with regard to glory--that is to say, the most glorious precedes the glorious." (Some Answered Questions:116)                       

            Thus the spiritual relation of the universal Revelation to appear at the end of time to its partial and incomplete and previous forms is one of creator to creation, though in historical time this relation appears to be the opposite—the higher appearing later seems in good Darwinian fashion to come out of the former, as is true of all natural cycles of evolution.  Likewise in collective human social development the final form of human material history is a world civilization.  Yet the spiritual relation of this universal form of civilization to previous civilizations, which are the cultural cycles leading up to it, is also one of creator to creation. That is, it is the formal cause of them, while they are the material cause of the universal one.  The universal civilization, the one pointed to by all the Prophets and sung about by poet and seers, spiritually preceded all previous civilizations.  It is their Source, and moving toward it is their purpose. 

            The archetypal form of civilization was metaphorically imprinted on the historical civilizations in some way, as the artist imprints his mental vision on the material canvas, slowing building it into a complete picture.  It is their perfection, originating with the foundation of creation and appearing at the end of it, and they are its partial and periodic realization.  Exactly the same spiritual/material, structure/sequence relationship holds for the whole universe.  The Master tells us: “All beings, whether large or small, were created perfect and complete from the first, but their perfections appear in them by degrees...The organization of God is one; the evolution of existence is one; the divine system is one...” (Some Answered Questions:199)

            More on this in the next post.

The Holy Books as an Expanding Vision of Human Consciousness

Every universal cause is divine and every particular one is temporal.   The principles of the divine Manifestations of God were, therefore, all-universal and all-inclusive.

(Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá:68)

            Each Holy Book shows humanity traveling the same road and covering the same ground, namely, from the beginning to the end of time, called the apocalypse, after which a whole new kind of history will begin.  Each Book is a reconstruction of the real shape of historical time and meaning of temporal existence.  

            As a book the Bible is an unfolding recreation of an archetypal vision of human possibility; a vision which informs, that is puts form into, the human intelligence so that its innate potential may be expressed.  It is a vision which informed human intelligence prior to the writing of the Bible and will continue to inform this intelligence should the Bible, or at least the Christian religion, become entirely forgotten.  It's the vision of a God-man teaching lesser men how to climb out of the raging sea of material passion into which they have metaphorically fallen and in which they are drowning, scale a forbidding mountain arising in the midst of that sea, maneuver past horrible dragons and monsters which threaten to consume him, and get free of alluring but treacherous sirens and nymphs which tempt him to stop his climb, until he reaches the top where he enters the God-man's golden City of Light and discovers that his entire journey was a scaling of the inner mountain of self, that the journey was his own spiritual development, the goal of which was the recovery of his true self.

            The real drama of the epic is entirely psychological, not historical.  The validating of the quest of consciousness toward the perfect or mature form of itself is entirely experiential, not experimental.  To say the fall is human pride, the sea is human passion, the darkness human ignorance of its real nature, the monsters and sirens the various kind of fears and temptations threatening its advance, the Golden City the human essence—all this is decent enough interpretation. But it is also only a persistent fairy tale and raw material for myth, poetry and even philosophy, the man-made stories of humankind.  

            The Bible is both a single vision of human possibility and is two testaments of that vision.  These are called old and new not just because one came before the other in time, but also because the second is a more developed recreation of the first.  But their essence is the same and timeless.  Christ and Moses, the two most prominent Visionaries in the Bible, though by no means the only Ones, were energized by the same expanding Vision.  The Koran is a later, more complete and unified testament of the same Vision that appeared in the Bible.   For the Vision in the Koran begins and ends exactly where the Bible does, namely, the beginning and end of time.  Hence it is really a recreation by the single mind of Muhammad of the same vision informing the Bible.  This is not to say that He lifted it from the Bible. God revealed the Vision through Him.   He was the Vision: the vision of God looking through Muhammad.

            The Koran is a more expanded and complete Vision because the generic human mind was, at the time of Muhammad, more developmentally advanced than it was during the time of either Moses or Christ, in large part thanks to Their Revelations.  The Vision remains the same, but more of it is revealed to the human consciousness and the human mind grows into it.  And this larger and more unified testament called the Koran reveals a more developed view of human power than was and remains possible to the mind remaining within the confines of the traditional Jewish or Christian statements of the Vision.

            The Holy Books are not reliable empirical history, though they comprehend it.  They do this not by reducing history to the telling of the Sinaic meanderings of some obscure tribes of nomadic ex-slaves, or to the toppling of the Roman edifice from the Christian mole burrowing within, nor by chronicling the rise of some barbarous clans of Arabs to the pinnacle of civilization, and dismissing the rest of humanity as unworthy of attention, except as they interact with these chosen peoples. 

            The Holy Books comprehend history by revealing the essential meaning of historical events and the real spiritual significance for all people of these events.   From a spiritual perspective, the essential events of history are the appearance of the Prophets, the Word of God which periodically becomes flesh and dwells among us, for these bring into human culture's mental activity both a new knowledge and real knowledge renewed.  Many are the cultures more advanced in the arts of civilization than is the culture within which the Prophet first appears.  But it is His appearance and the renewal of civilization His teachings achieve that promises humanity’s social evolution.  His appearance always provokes a crisis of culture and history for that people and their traditions of experience and learning, and the spread of the Message to other cultures provokes the same crisis in those cultures.

            These obscure Hebrews, captive Jews, oppressed Christians and pagan Arabs were chosen vehicles of a single, unfolding transcendental message.  For the Prophets stand at the center of human history and each One is the center not just for His people, but for His time.  His appearance among them makes His people the center of humanity, the materio-cultural source of the spread of the divine Word that influences the entire world.  ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says, for example, that “…the New and Old Testaments propounded throughout all regions the Cause of Christ and were the pulsating power in the body of the human world.” (Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá: 223)  

            The struggle of these different “chosen people” to come to grips with their special status is their hold upon us and not some special virtue of the people themselves.  Except for this privilege of having their every mundane act refracted through the prism of their relation with a divinity that walked among them, their daily history is no more or less interesting than that of other people, and studying it gets the mind not a fraction of an inch closer to understanding the spiritual odyssey of humanity through time.

            Using the Holy Books as a source book of historical data is also a very tricky affair. One has only to read the Bible’s different sequences of “begats”, or the Gospels varying accounts of the events surrounding the crucifixion of Jesus to understand this point.  The Bible as history is often just another slippery myth; the Old Testament God, often a big, bad wolf which the Hebrews and Jews have to propitiate or outfox before He gobbles them up in a fit of rage, metamorphoses into the kindly, loving Father of the New Testament Who benevolently watches over and protects even His sparrows. But as the imaginative rendering of the spiritual odyssey of some remarkable peoples, who represent humankind and its evolving consciousness of divinity, the Holy Books make perfect sense. To perceive the Holy Books as the chronicling of the stages of humankind's evolution from a consciousness swaddled in sensuality to one standing upright in spirituality, a consciousness which at one time can only shiver in dread before a huge, scowling Deity, yet later can shelter under the loving kindness of the Father, is profound historiography.

            The Holy Books, then, are not empirical history, or are very bad empirical history.  But whatever such history they contain is entirely irrelevant to their purpose.  They are really an informing and unfolding Vision, something that creates not just history but the awareness of history because they are the essential collective verbal form of the evolving human mind.  History begins with an infusion of divine energy from eternity, and is renewed, or begun again and further developed, with another infusion, setting up cycles and stages of a developmental process—toward what?

The Holy Books articulate the inner structure of history unfolding through time as a progressively developmental sequence of religions and their civilizations toward a teleological finale, which can only be the emergence of that structure itself in full material form within both history and the mind of man, uniting the cultural and the spiritual cycles into one symbol and image.  When this unification in consciousness occurs, the latent identity of history and mind will become manifest and man will see history as the Prophets have always done. 

           

Spiritual History

History, however long, complex and tumultuous in appearance, is at its core one and single and at its heart is sacred.

(George Townshend. The Promise of All Ages p. 43)

            Historical understanding in a philosophical sense is the capacity to grasp essential forms of meaning and human development.  In any philosophy of history, whether social, economic, intellectual, Marxist, or any other kind, to discover and elucidate meaning historical events do not dictate perceptions and concepts, though they influence them, rather perceptions and concepts are used to reconstruct events. That is, a philosophy of history does not want representations but re-presentations, for simply recapitulating the events and viewpoints of past ages will not give us the complete meaning of those times.  This requires another kind of view, an overall philosophical one.  

For example, when I was in high school and university, more years ago than I care to admit, the history textbooks often presented the progress of  “western” civilization as some sort of cultural baton-pass from the “Greeks” through the Empire of Rome, whose “fall” sent “Europe” stumbling blindly into the tunnel of the Dark Ages, which came out into the bright light of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, then vast expansion around the world, but especially into the western hemisphere where everything came to some grand finale in America.  This philosophy of history—arranged on the scheme of ancient-medieval-modern history--was put forth to show the superiority of the west even when it was clearly inferior, or its “peoples” did not yet know they were superior.  The grand march of the west had all the feel of an ineluctable destiny.  It is a completely discredited view.  So the search is on for a new and universal one.     

In his groundbreaking study The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn argued that a new paradigm in science is never cobbled together from bits and pieces of other viewpoints, nor is it laboriously figured out piece by piece before it appears.  Its essential features emerge into view whole though not wholly developed, and while it may again recede into unconsciousness and come back, recede and return again to view until it can be held by the conscious mind, from the beginning it was another and complete way of looking at the world. 

            Following Kuhn, a universal perspective of history is not the sum total of the different viewpoints—social, political, economic, intellectual, religious etc.--about historical events.  Rather universality is its own way of viewing humanity's history.  A truly universal vision of history must from its inception be a distinct way of viewing the past and interpreting human experience, not an integration of different views but their integrator.  Universality means to unite within a single vision purposeful processes both within and over time; it must unite past, present and future.  Universality is not just to unite within one such conceptual framework the whole world now, a mental exercise more properly called a global view. 

             Where can one look for such a universal conception?  A key can be found in the words of George Townshend found above.  Sacredness puts religion at the center of humanity’s meaningful development.  But this is religion in a special sense.  By religion I don’t mean religious doctrines or theologies, but as ‘Abdu’l-Baha defined religion: "the essential connection that emanates from the realities of things", (Some Answered Questions:158) connections that are known by the "universal divine mind" which is the "special attribute of the Holy Manifestations." (Some Answered Questions:218)

            The Bahá’í view states that what gives both structure and development, unity and sequence, to human history is the succession of the Manifestations of God and Their progressively unifying Message. From this perspective the different religions are "different stages in the eternal history and constant evolution of one religion." (Shoghi Effendi, The World Order of Bahá'u'lláh: 114.)  The "divine and creative purpose” of this periodic renewal of the human condition by the powerful impulse of Revelation “was the evolution of spiritual man. . . The cycle of existence is the same circle; it returns. The tree of life has ever borne the same heavenly fruit." (`Abdu'l-Bahá, Promulgation of Universal Peace: 220.)

            From the perspective of the evolution of spiritual man, history is spiritual history.  But spiritual history is not another branch of historical study, even as a special kind of expanded heilgeschichte, or “salvation history” to describe God's redemptive work in the events of history.  Neither is it the mere chronicle of the succession of religions.  Scripture is not secular history, but divine history, and divine history is in no way divorced from the economic, political, social or intellectual history of humankind: these being in fact parts and expressions of divine history.  Spiritual history is not just God's redemptive work, but also humanity's developmental work through God.   

            Spiritual history is the study of the play of transformations, formed in time, by the changing configuration of eternal forms, the revelations from God which founded the great religions.  The meaning of collective human development, then, is to be found in humanity’s relation to this great overarching theme, this transcendent premise, this unfolding Divine purpose of the Revelations that are each an expression of what philosophers traditionally called Logos. 

Mr. Townshend summed up his philosophy of history gleaned from study of the writings of Baha’u’llah this way: “History, he (Baha’u’llah) taught, in its length and breadth is one and single.  It is one in its structure.   It is one in its movement.   From the beginning of time the whole human race has been subject to one law of development; and it has advanced age after age in accordance with one and the same principle and by the application of one and the same method.   Its whole movement has one source and one cause, and is directed towards one goal.  The unification of the world, instead of being an afterthought, or of needing an improvised miracle for its completion, is the normal conclusion of a process that has been going on since the race began.” (The Promise of All Ages:28)

A history of all humanity that is “one in its structure…one in its movement” is directed and animated by Revelation through two processes, each operating both within every Dispensation of a Great Prophet and as the final purpose of all Revelation.  These interacting processes I call “reorganization” and “development.”  The purpose of these processes is the actualization of human potential to advance civilization. But these are really two aspects of one process; that is to say, reorganization is development.  Why?  From a universal standpoint (i.e one that simultaneously unites humanity’s past, present and future in developmental time and the world now as a single space) there can only be transformation within a universal system.  A universal system cannot transcend itself, only forms of itself as more of its potentials are brought into actuality by a greater power than the system itself.  This is what Baha’is name progressive revelation.  Growth is the progressive actualization of latent potentials.  Hence, human development by Revelation does not simply present history as a sequence of events, but as a sequence of spiritual contexts in which the whole of human character is periodically transformed to develop humanity's spiritual, mental, and physical capacities.  As Baha’u’llah wrote: “Is not the object of every Revelation to effect a transformation in the whole character of mankind, a transformation that shall manifest itself both outwardly and inwardly, that shall affect both its inner life and external conditions (The Kitab-i-Iqan:240) 

            The complete spiritual history of mankind has yet to be written. But since the coming of Bahá’u’lláh the basic guidelines for such a writing are known because we know where historians should look for the real pivots of human history: to the Manifestations and Their Message.  ‘Abdu’l-Bahá further defines that purpose for us: “For a single purpose were the Prophets, one and all, sent down to earth...that the world of man should become the world of God, this nether realm the Kingdom…that the organic unity should reappear and the bases of discord be destroyed and life everlasting and grace everlasting become the harvest of mankind.” (Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá:31)

            More on this topic in the next post.