The Third Power

To harmonize the whole is the task of art.

(Kandinsky: Concerning the Spiritual in Art: 3)

Western consciousness is often 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 a certain kind of hearing.   The Greek consciousness is based on “rational” knowing or "reason" which is a certain kind of seeing.  It is the basis of science. 

Religion and science, faith and reason, are often portrayed as opposing powers battling over the territory of the mind, and individuals usually choose one over the other.  But that is only because usual history leaves out the middle third which is art and imagination.  Now by middle third I mean a connecting link, if a linear sequence in time, or a mediating power if a hierarchy, a translator, if one thing must be translated into another.  Religion, science, and art are the co-ordinated vision of human learning and education.  But learning is of knowledge, whether religious, scientific or artistic, and knowledge is structures of metaphor, and their internal form and workings are correlated with what is outside them to produce the symbol, which comes from the Greek sýmbolon, meaning ‘to throw together.”  It is in that sense of unifying symbol that Kandinsky speaks above about art. 

In human consciousness we usually say that the symbolic modes of thought, the thought of poets, develop between the sensory and the conceptual and mediate them within the mind.  In the evolution of "western" culture a similar mediating relation, or way of organizing knowledge, holds between the Hebraic and Hellenic, between faith and reason.  For me this third powerful influence on western consciousness is Egypt.  Here begins our poetic and philosophical, especially cosmological, tradition.  Egypt was where symbolic thought first flourished.

The ancient Hermetic teachings were laid down by the eponymous figure of the Egyptian Hermes Trismegistus.  He is also called Thoth, Idris, Hermes of Greek mythology, Mercury, and Balinus.  Baha'ullah says Hermes has many names, depending upon which culture we are talking about.  Baha'ullah also writes of Hermes Trismegistus  in the Tablet of Wisdom, calling Him "the Father of Philosophy."   The hermetic teachings remain, despite their antiquity, the best imaginative cosmology out there.  The Hermetic tradition was a powerful stream of thought into the modern age when it was banished to the underground.  Well known “modern” students include Newton and Hegel—scientists and philosophers by day, but alchemists and occultists by night.  The name Trimegistus means “thrice-great” because he purportedly mastered the three kinds of knowledge—spiritual, mental, material.  The essence of His teachings was set out in the Emerald (Chrysolite?) Tablet.  Its most often misquoted principle is: As above, so below.  It is misquoted because it is actually As Below, so Above.  This is the structure of the cosmos. 

The principles of Hermes teachings were the foundation of alchemy and most other occult arts.  In its search for metaphors of connection between the inner and outer, spiritual and material, realms of existence and experience, this philosophy generated a whole bunch of different images.  The great chain of being, planes of correspondence, the dance of life which is the vibrations of life along the hierarchy, are all primary cosmological images organizing “western” thought even down to the Elizabethan Age. 

The planes of correspondence hold, each within its own plane, the counterparts of things in the other planes.  The chain of being connects the planes, with the dance of life going on everywhere at every link of the chain.  The Biblical image of Jacob’s ladder, with the angels going up from earth and down from heaven, is a modulation of the chain, with the added quality of the same figures movement up and down creating circulation and cycles of its own development.  Such images fell into disfavor when "modern" western thought collapsed the three-tiered cosmos into a two-term physical universe, and the plane of divinity was thrown into the unconscious.

But the hermetic principle is still going strong in the Bahá’í Writings: “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)  Or in the Bab’s often repeated summation: “the Kingdoms of Revelation and Creation and whatever lieth between them.”   And Hermetic teachings underpin much of what is called New Age literature, especially The Law of Attraction.

If the above is like that below, and whatever lieth between them, then the whole cosmos is constructed symbolically.   The counterparts accord not only by themselves but also within the human reality as our spiritual and material natures which must be brought into harmony.  They are essential to each other and to the whole, like painter and canvas are both essential to getting painting done.  

The symbolic way of knowing is the basis of all art, and it precedes abstract cognition both in human collective history and individual psychology.  I mean that as the direct expression of the senses and imagination, art is pre-cognitive.  But that is not also to say it is irrational or unintelligent, or, as many school-systems say, an ornament to real learning and thus the first thing cut from the academic curriculum.  If cuts need be made, art should be the last to go for it is the most essential of the academic subjects. 

Art as ornamentation or just representation, a mere artifice, a copy of something real, is another casualty of secular, Greek rationality—often said to have begun with Plato’s blistering dismissal of the poets in The Republic--which can’t perceive art as power to invoke presence.  In what we laughingly call pre-historic times, painted images on cave walls or stones were images of power, talisman bringing the animals to the hunt, or capturing the feelings of it, uniting the essential form with its manifest form, the active force with that which is its recipient.  Over time, pictures and verbal images establish a symbol system, forming what art critics call a grammar of the imagination that both measures individual subjective depth and acts as the collective psychological ground of culture. Jung was the first to demonstrate that these interconnect in the “unconscious.”  Later, with developments in prose and a more thoroughly instrumental, denotative use of language, the metaphors, similes, analogies and other modes of figurative expression become simply literary forms.  But language itself is the great collective organ of human perception.  Its figurations are the secure units of our knowing, and its best practitioners are traditionally the poets.  Symbols make human knowledge; no surprise when we remember that the word poet means maker.  "Treasures lie hidden beneath the throne of God; the key to those treasures is the tongue of poets”, states an Islamic tradition. (The Dawn-Breakers:258-259)  We need to better understand the influence of this great tradition of thought begun in Egypt upon our own, the third power driving our development.    

The next few posts will further this exploration.

         

The Indigenous Source of Knowledge

When philosophy paints its gray in gray, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's gray in gray it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.

Georg W.F. Hegel. Philosophy of Right.  (From the Preface.)

Recently books bearing titles like Neil Postman’s The End of Education and Anthony Kronman’s Education’s End are appearing, because we are at the end of an established philosophy of education.  As Hegel describes above, as philosophies these books do not rejuvenate current education, only enable us to understand the shape of its life grown old.

If education is to take the lead in rebuilding civilization it must show leadership. To do this it must, paradoxically to the superficial mind, return to first principles and peoples. These are the essential principles, the simplest notions, the foundation, the Source.  For  individual psychology, this means to lead with the heart’s connection with the sacred, not because the heart is at the bottom, the first rung on the ladder of consciousness, but because it is at the center, the mid-most point of creation, the first principle and context from which all others unfold.  The return to first principles is not to advocate a return to the historically primitive, but to consciously incorporate the psychologically primitive, to be childlike--for we cannot enter the kingdom of heaven unless we become as little children. 

The rejuvenation of human culture begins with the renewed spirit of religion, which is the eternal, the archaic.  The spirit of religion always reappears during periods of intense social and psychological upheaval, like now, when reason fails because things must be renewed and not just reorganized.  Hence this term, the spirit of religion—as opposed to any of its historical forms-- refers to the fundamental structure of human thought and feeling, the vision indigenous to our souls.  It is not the antiquity of indigenous culture which makes it a structural principle of civilization but the permanence of it, the fact that centuries of exploitation and murder and other forms of castration have failed to eradicate it. The failure has occurred because the indigenous is the permanent part of the human condition.

The mighty powers of prophecy and myth, of poetry and magic, the indigenous modes of perception, apprehension and expression, were the foundation of ancient civilization and are to be again not because the cycle of fortune turns in mindless fashion and by accident we have found ourselves born at the origin again. It is because whenever civilization needs to be renewed these are the powers that do it.  Hence when we tap into these powers we initiate the remaking of the world.  But to these ancient powers we must add the modern powers of science and rational thought, so that education for civilization today must combine the oracular with the scribal, the circular logic of the imagination with the linear logic of intellect, the looser, fluid rhythms of feelings with the tighter, solid rhythms of concepts.

Education will not rebuild civilization by doing better what the materially advanced are already doing, for this shows more regard for our own preconceptions and learned experience than for the complexity and reality of the truth.  I mean that at this time the need is not for a coherent doctrine of education.  These are plentiful enough. Rather we should know and adopt the proper attitude toward education, which is humility.  A humble posture of learning is needed, because the greatest barrier to new knowledge is not ignorance, but the illusion of knowing. That is, to understand is to stand under.  We believe that we know about education.  But do we?   We can not know enough about it until we learn to again listen to the regular and ancient song and heartbeat of the indigenous and become primitives again.

Culture or civilization is a colossal creative work in-formed by a gigantic vision. This vision is fundamentally a religious one because it fuses (re-ligia) disparate elements into a new order even as it separates the new order from the old.  The ancient and modern, scientific and artistic, advanced and perennial, are parts of a single totality which vision is supposed to encompass, so that within the vision each thing becomes a metaphor for everything, so that every student “may become a symbol denoting the sublimity of the true Educator of humankind, and that each, even as a crystalline mirror may tell of the grace and splendour of the Sun of Truth." (Compilation: Bahá’í Education p.8#30)  Thus the new vision is actually both a renewal of an ancient perennial vision, and that vision in new form.

It is also a religious vision because it is essentially eternal and always with us, like the air surrounding our bodies.  The progress of civilization is said to be, in religious terms, toward a Golden Age of peace, which is also where it came from, as the ancient myths tell us. Hence the Golden Age is placed, metaphorically, either at the beginning or end of time. But really is in both places because it is from eternity and is, therefore, outside time.  It is the vision, the divine looking through us. When we build and then live in such a civilization we have recovered our collective identity.

Spiritual education, or bringing forth the spirit within, is supposed to enable the individual and collectivity to recover that lost identity by identifying the human being metaphorically with the nonhuman worlds around and within us, namely, the natural and the divine.  The formula of metaphor is, “let A be B.”  Of course if this is true, then B is A, and finally we are also left with A is A, and B is B; the same yet different, the glorious structure manifested by “He Who hath been manifested is the Hidden Mystery, the Treasured Symbol, through Whom the letters B and E have been joined and knit together.” (Baha’i Long Obligatory Prayer).   The “same yet different” structure of the symbol is human self-identity and also its identification with what it is not.  The symbol is necessary because human nature does not appear directly.  Rather it appears in spiritual, social, intellectual and natural contexts.  The world, too, does not present itself to us directly, but appears within a mental context called knowledge--i.e. science, art, history, etc. which are conventions of organized awareness. Finally, the divine does not appear directly but, rather, in the form of the Word, which is both a Figure and His Message which is traditionally called Logos, or a revelation.  All these are also aesthetic experiences when communicated for they are not communicated in anything like the way they were experienced.  They must be transformed to be communicated and shared.  This is the work of metaphor.

Thus symbols are more than figures and parts of speech. They create us as intellectual and social beings, especially does the sacred symbol do this.  But even on the human level the verb copula of language unites both subject and object in thought and Subject and Subject in Being, because the grammar points to and expresses an inner experience of regeneration in new but renewed identity.  What is new in real education is really the renewed in different form, for the universe is enfolded within each human being.  Symbol and metaphor are an imaginative identity of separate things. It is union, separation and reunion. It is human knowledge. 

OMEGA AND ALPHA

The highest essence and most perfect expression of whatsoever the peoples of old have either said or written hath, through this most potent Revelation, been sent down from the heaven of the Will of the All-Possessing, the Ever-Abiding God

(Tablets of Bahá'u'lláh Revealed After the Kitab-i-Aqdas:87)

            I have discussed the principle that though the essential or archetypal form appears last in time it is also the source of all previous and partial expressions of itself.  These forms or expressions of the essence unfold from the essential form and then enfold back into it.  An example from the natural world of this unfolding/enfolding sequence is the life of a tree.  The tree begins in seed form, grows through stages of the shoot, branches, leaves, buds, flower, and, finally, manifests as the fruit which holds another seed, another tree, within it.  Spiritually the same principle holds. 

For example, Bahá’u’lláh said of the relation of His own Revelation to those that came before it: “This is the Ocean out of which all seas have proceeded, and with which every one of them will ultimately be united.   From Him all the Sun have been generated, and unto Him they will all return.  Through His potency the Trees of Divine Revelation have yielded their fruits, every one of which hath been sent down in the form of a Prophet, bearing a Message to God's creatures.” (Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá'u'lláh:104)

            In another place He said that His Revelation "attracteth and embraceth all the divinely appointed Dispensations....So vast is its range that it hath encompassed all men ere their recognition of it." (Tablets of Bahá'u'lláh:200)  In the brief introduction to His first book, The Hidden Words, Baha’u’llah writes: “This is that which hath descended from the realm of glory, uttered by the tongue of power and might, and revealed unto the Prophets of old. We have taken the inner essence thereof and clothed it in the garment of brevity…”  And, since the essence is spiritually first and temporally last: “Whoso acknowledgeth belief in Him and in His signs and testimonies hath in truth acknowledged that which the Tongue of Grandeur uttered ere the creation of earth and heaven and the revelation of the Kingdom of Names.” (Tablets of Bahá'u'lláh:47.)

            ‘Abdu’l-Bahá wrote in regarding the relation between the Revelation of Bahá’u’lláh and all previous Revelations: “(T)he rising of the Greatest Luminary was the condition of the perfection of the essence and of the qualities.” (Some Answered Questions:124)  And: (T)he words of Bahá’u’lláh are the essences of the words of the Prophets of the past.” (Promulgation of Universal Peace:314)

            Finally, He said of the relation between Bahá’u’lláh’s Revelation and an evolving humanity: “But the Manifestation of the Most Great Name...was an expression of the coming of age, the maturing of man's inmost reality in this world of being.” (Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá:56)  That is to say that: “Man from the beginning was in this perfect form and composition, and possessed capacity and aptitude for acquiring material and spiritual perfections, and was the manifestation of these words, 'Let us make man in our image and likeness.” (Some Answered Questions:194)

            The same idea is mirrored in humanity’s social advance when civilization is conjoined with Revelation.  Shoghi Effendi said the "supreme mission" of the Revelation of Bahá’u’lláh was "the achievement of this organic and spiritual unity of the whole body of nations.” (The World Order of Bahá'u'lláh:163)  Through the ages of history an ever-advancing civilization means that through the influence of the Great Educators civilization expands until the whole earth itself is truly civilized.  Thus over time more people are brought within the pale of civilization, the powers residing within society continuously evolve until they reach mature perfection, or fully integrated expression, and the greatest abundance of life is realized.  Reaching the condition of organic perfection, named maturity, marks the end of history as a developmental process, for the “organic unity” will have reappeared in full form and, from that point like the individual, humanity will have attained the capacity to manifest its latent intellectual and spiritual powers.  From then on humanity will advance as a single yet infinitely diversified organic and spiritual unity. 

            Further, the decline into death which has overtaken every cultural cycle to date will disappear and an undying, ever-progressive, globally-united cultural life for humanity that is continuously fueled by spiritual springs will commence. This is the real apocalypse, or revelation of hidden form, the unfolding shape of time enfolded into the fully realized shape of our collective being.  When the organic archetype generating all material development itself appears within time, then civilization will follow spiritual cycles.  That means that the "the highest essence and most perfect expression" of all previous civilizations will be operating, because Bahá’u’lláh's revelation holds the same relation to previous revelations.  The civilization now emerging into history is the eternal form of civilization, the Kingdom of God within you is now also the Kingdom of God among you, the mirror-image in the world of time of the eternal society existing in the timeless realm, for "when imperfections reach the station of perfection, they become eternal.” (Some Answered Questions:151)      

            It is the eternal form also because throughout history visionaries have always imaginatively placed this civilization, this condition of universal peace and prosperity, either at the dawn or at the end of time, and this is usually a result of the visionary himself living either closer to the beginning or the end of the developmental process. But it really "exists" at both places because as the Alpha and Omega of human life it is both the origin and the end, the undifferentiated unity and the completely developed and unified one, seed and fruit, ground and pinnacle, of human concern.  Such logically bewildering geographies are the best that the earthbound imagination can come up with when it attempts to grasp the non-earthly regions of eternity.  Such ideal states, no matter where they occur, are a time when all religion, all civilization, all humankind, all nature, all knowledge and all time are drawn into a single eternal and universal form of infinite self-directed possibility and opportunity, Omega become the new Alpha.  Of such stuff is vision made, and working toward it realization is the stuff of history. 

            The Prophetic Revelators of the Adamic Cycle Themselves declared, each in His own imagery, that the Christ-promised Kingdom of God was both in the future and in eternity, and in the future because in eternity.   Hence whenever the prophecy is fulfilled history comes to an end, the future is now and the eternal and the temporal become perfect reflections of each other.   If this is true then the cycles of recorded history, from Adam until the Bab, the six-thousand year incubation period in the womb of time, has climaxed, and the final redemption has taken place.  Now the whole of history is resurrected, placed within one imaginative universe of vision as a single form, and elevated to a new station of understanding.  It is the universal Sabbath which we are to remember and keep holy.  Now civilization no longer moves away from the Founder into corruption and decay to be rescued and set right again by a new revelation, but, rather, evolves toward Him in greater perfection of its own powers. The primary rhythm is not now the organic progression from birth to death, but the spiritual evolution from lesser life to greater life.  An alternating cycle of light and dark has come to an end, and a new kind of cycle where day shall not be followed by night is put in its stead.