New Directions for Knowledge

This is a new cycle of human power.

(Abdu’l-Baha in London:19)

Another great but narrowing rift between myth and science is their notions of causality.  Traditional science works on the premise of A before B, where A is both necessary and possibly sufficient to cause B.  It is sequentially efficient causality, like the mechanized assembly-line that builds your car.  The imaginative causality of myth is the “let this be” of the poetic faculty, (the “And God said of the Bible”) which is very close to the kind of non-local everything is in everything causality science is now exploring in Quantum Mechanics (sometimes called “the science of possibility”), Chaos Theory, Complexity science.  It is structured and formal causality, the instant metamorphosis of one thing into another, as in a dream, or the everywhere–at-once power of a field to bring forth novelty.

These new sciences are sciences of process not of state, of becoming not being, as myth is an imaginative statement of process and metamorphosis.  Some of these new sciences, like Systems Theory, also are sciences of the global nature of things, of the universal behavior of complexity, or the iterative fractal patterns that appear and reappear on different scales at the same time, where change often occurs from a sensitive dependence on initial conditions which can end in catastrophic consequences, as the butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon ends as the typhoon ravaging Japan.  This causality works because of the inescapable consequence of the way that small scales intertwine with large ones. 

These are sciences where nonlinear equations rule, of  “deterministic chaos where simply-formulated systems with only a few variables display highly complicated behavior that is unpredictable,” of fixing the laws of motion to explain the patterns of unfixed “particles”, of movements circling around computer patterns called strange attractors, those bizarre, infinitely tangled abstractions, those goblins of the mind, that nevertheless yield simple, structural patterns at their core, for an attractor signals on one level pure disorder because no point ever recurs, but this disorder is the entry to a new kind of order, like breaking the sound barrier in a plane.  These are sciences where infinite instability ends in stability and randomness morphs into order through a sort of self-organization.  Non-periodicity is unpredictability, but the whole is still there, because both chaos and order spontaneously arise in systems.  In short, while myth and language use primarily a formal causality, science uses primarily an efficient causality to explain phenomena.  But, again, when pattern-recognition and the perception of things like gestalts take precedence, then formal causality regains some prestige.

While differences of approach and content exist, these may increasingly only reflect differences of terminology.  Quantum physicists use terms like the Zero Point Field and the Quantum Vacuum to describe the same fundamental entity as do the names ether and the akashic of Greek and Hindu alchemical traditions, with ether making a sort of comeback. Now there is the M theory of the string theorists.  This theory, being the latest attempt at the Grand Field Theory of physics, will, when created, be the scientific story of all things.  It is the scientific attempt, I believe, to give conceptual form to Baha’u’llah statement that the “world’s equilibrium hath been upset through the vibrating influence” of His New World Order. 

The sacred and secular, the greater spiritual Reality and its smaller dimensional “outer picture” in matter, are reconnecting making not only a holy world again but also a whole, or holy, intelligence.  But knowledge is also being reordered, as a material, empirical conceptual causality recouples with the imaginative causality preceding it.  In popular works like the movies and books What the Bleep and The Secret, both of which harken back to a mythic structure of parallel consciousness moving in opposite directions, the above and below as mirrors, we see the inroads being made by imagination and visualization into the land of concepts that marks out the final stage of secular, rational thought.  The original statements of “As Below, so Above”, the Law of Attraction, and so forth, are those of Hermes Trismegistus, author of the Emerald Tablet, messenger of Thoth of ancient Egypt, Idris of The Qur’an, and a Manifestation Whom Baha’u’llah named “the Father of Philosophy.” (Tablets of Baha'u'llah:148)  But all this remembering is the rational faculty re-membering its previous manifestations and rolling them up into a single system as a prelude to a new reconfiguration of human intelligence.  We are being brought to a new kind of knowing, the spiritual, crossing on the Sirat of a new understanding.  The Master wrote: ‎”The sciences of today are bridges to reality; if then they lead not to reality, naught remains but fruitless illusion.” (Selections from the Writings of Abdu’l-Baha: 110)

Because we are entering a new manifest state of humanity, the spiritual state, I believe that an entire epistemic order has come to an end and that a new one is being spread out in its stead. But that is characteristic of perceiving in the Valley of Unity where the end and the beginning are one, because the end is the beginning transformed.

Nearly forty years ago, progressive educator Stanwood Cobb wrote: “What is now needed is a scientific study of spiritual laws and values, so supported by evidence as to be beyond denial.” (Thoughts on Education and Life: 15)   And: “In addition to the material sciences, we shall need to teach the Sciences of Spirit.  What is this Science of Spirit?  That is for future man to ascertain and fervently apply to all life upon this planet.” (Ibid. p.55)   Before him Rudolf Steiner, founder of Anthroposophy and the Waldorf schools called for the birth of spiritual sciences. The mathematician Nikola Tesla remarked: “The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.”  We have arrived at that day, according to the famous neuro-scientist Karl Pribram, who stated: “For the first time in three hundred years science is admitting spiritual values into its exploration.” All these statements point to a new regime of knowledge, the spiritual, without saying what it is.  I don’t know either, but I believe that I know where to start mining them.  Baha’u’llah wrote: “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.” (Tablets of Baha'u'llah: 96)

Notice that He says that he has proclaimed that “which will serve as the key for unlocking the doors of sciences, of arts, of knowledge, of well-being, of prosperity and wealth.”  That’s a staggering claim, yet we should not lightly dismiss it because we don’t see how it can be true, according to scientific epistemology.  I mean that there’s no place in the scientific way of knowing for quantifying the possibility of future knowledge, so scientists often can’t see how anyone else can know that, either. It’s simply impossible to the scientific epistemology. To them it smacks of arrogance because, again, their ways of knowing are incapable of producing that kind of specificity.  It has to be an overstatement.  Yet those who feel this way are themselves locked into that union of ignorance and arrogance that so often overtakes the practitioners of science.  Only a humble posture of learning can open one to the possibility of new knowledge.  So let’s look a little more closely at Baha’u’llah’s statement.

A direct link to my book, Renewing the Sacred is http://tinyurl.com/cndew5a It is now also in Kindle