The Disorder of Knowledge and the Reconfiguring of Human Intelligence

Unveiled and unconcealed, this Wronged One hath, at all times, proclaimed before the face of all the peoples of the world that which will serve as the key for unlocking the doors of sciences, of arts, of knowledge, of well-being, of prosperity and wealth.

   (Baha'u'llah, Tablets of Baha'u'llah: 96)

These next few posts will be the transcript of a talk I just gave at the Desert Rose Artists and Scholars Symposium.  Actually, what I will post in this series is the longer essay from which I drew the material for the talk.  I hope that you enjoy these posts, and look forward to any responses you might have.

First we need to locate ourselves in what is called the context of history.  To do that we must look at where we were, where we are, and where we are going.    

The disorder of knowledge is occurring because, through the power and authority of Baha’u’llah’s Revelation, humanity is being born collectively into the spiritual reality from the current mental one.  The world’s equilibrium hath been upset, and this includes the equilibrium of the world of knowledge.  We are in-between worlds, a confusing condition where the old knowledges still hold sway in our minds, at least our pat assumptions, unchallenged notions, unexamined conclusions, received opinions and inherited beliefs about Reality do, but at the same time, the new spiritual knowledge to be built on principles of the nature of Reality found in Baha’u’llah’s Revelation are silently and gradually inserting themselves into our consciousness in their stead. 

Humankind has been here before, at least by analogy and metaphor.   I mean that six thousand years ago when our ancestors stepped out of the nomadic wilderness into the settled garden they also stepped out of a sensory knowledge made of the earthy exteriority of material signs into a reflexive intellectual knowledge built out of the airy interiority of symbols.  It was a change from cognition to re-cognition, from consciousness to self-consciousness. 

This evolutionary leap is told in the great culture myths of every people, specifically in the Judeo-Christian tradition in what is known as the Genesis story where a Manifestation of God inaugurated a new cycle of human power by naming things: “In the beginning was the Word”—though before the action of the creative Word was the creatable substance to receive the Word, i.e. the One matter to be acted upon.  Naming commences the Adamic Cycle of human intellectual evolution.  Now, we must avoid the creationist fallacy of the Bishop Ussher’s who believe that Genesis is the actual historical beginning 6,000 years ago of this leap.  No, Genesis is the mythical account of this leap, a leap that actually took many centuries, a leap from one universal cycle to another, and only myth can tell that sort of story. 

This new cycle initiated by the Figure we call Adam was characterized by the flowering of symbol systems such as language, art and number to encode our thought, the building of a mental universe as rich and complex as the natural one, a universe of knowing that found its conclusion where it started, in sensory knowledge.  But sensory knowledge was in this latter time not directly apprehended, rather it was rerouted and re-rooted in a Descartian mathematico-mechanistic philosophy of extension, the classification knowledge into a proliferating number of disciplines, a determinedly, reductionist, empirical science whose language is digital, all spewing forth libraries of facts communicated via the apparatus of knowledge dispersion, but lacking any coordinating principle. 

The mental abilities opened by Adam and the succession of Manifestations after him, emerged, unfolded, and evolved within the open field of intellectual life through a kind of morphic resonance, the formative mental causation of that species of cultural life and learning called human, as the biological forms evolve in the biosphere.  The term “formative causation” comes from Rupert Sheldrake, a biologist from Britain, whose theory is named morphic resonance.  He believes that morphogenetic fields are self-organizing systems arranged and fashioned by "Morphic fields" which are responsible for the characteristic form and organization of systems in biology, chemistry, and physics.

At higher levels these fields provide the templates for the ways in which organisms develop and are also responsible for the behavior and social and cultural development of organisms and social groups. These are not static fields, they are able to learn and unfold and establish new patterns and habits across time and space, a process which is termed "Morphic resonance."  Mental forms or templates for social forms of consciousness are first-order likenesses of spiritual forms, or archetypes: material forms are the second-order likeness, the material imitation or embodiment of the intellectual models of spiritual Reality, if you will.

For Sheldrake, morphic fields are traditions of accumulated species-experience encoded in memory that organically develop by the innovations that come from meeting novel situations that reconfigure past ideas to express new potentials.  A similar idea in cultural history and development was articulated by T.S. Eliot in a famous essay titled, Tradition and the Individual Talent. He wrote: “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of æsthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.”