Old Foundations Renewed

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

(Gleanings from the Writings of Baha’u’llah: 95) 

Post Four of the talk: The Disorder of Knowledge and the Reconfiguration of Human Intelligence.

The implications for this are great.  As the document, Who is Writing the Future?, puts it, with the revolutions in physics early in the twentieth century: “A new door had suddenly opened into the study of both the minute constituents of the universe and its large cosmological systems, a change whose effects went far beyond physics, shaking the very foundations of a world view that had dominated scientific thinking for centuries. Gone forever were the images of a mechanical universe run like a clock and a presumed separation between observer and observed, between mind and matter.  Against the background of the far-reaching studies thus made possible, theoretical science now begins to address the possibility that purpose and intelligence are indeed intrinsic to the nature and operation of the universe.” (Bahá’í International Community: Who is Writing the Future?)  Another scientist, Sir James Jeans wrote back in the 1930’s: “The stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter... we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter.” (Sir James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe. p. 137)

Following these investigations of the early twentieth century psychology and physics, a whole shelf of books is appearing with titles such as The Tao of Physics and Science and the Akashic Field, The God Theory, Why God Won’t Go Away.  But spirit remains for many a kind of second order material investigation, because spirit is conceived as an epiphenomenon of material processes.  Thus, sub-atomic physics pursues the God particle, biologists search for the God gene in our DNA, and psychology looks for a God spot in the brain.  Concurrent with the investigations of the physicists into the basement floor of the universe, scientific investigation in biology believes it finds empirical evidence for faith, belief and higher spirituality in the genes, nervous systems, brain chemistry, neurons of the cell, and so on, investigating this thing called consciousness in meditation studies, in theories of transcendence, alternative states of awareness induces by psychedelic drugs or in everyday experience.  It is a bustling enterprise. 

Most scientists are looking in these places for god because most scientists are materialists, not necessarily in their moral values but in their epistemological ones, and this is the only place that science could find god.  But all that this burrowing into Nature will discover is the face of man looking back at himself.  It is the actions of a crippled and myopic supreme talisman exploring but the ground surface of the mine rich in gems of inestimable value: the “puny form” of a gigantic being in which the universe is enfolded, but who is lamentably defective in self-understanding.   Still many are now and have been aware for sometime that something is afoot.  For example, Yeats wrote his poem, The Second Coming, just after World War  I:  

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

    

Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

    

The darkness drops again but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

As Yeats poem indicates another place where the modern mind is looking to find renewed inspiration is in the ancient myths and philosophies, to all past expressions of human intelligence, such as alchemy and symbolic thought, to try and uncover how chaos got turned into cosmos. 

The retrieving of all past knowledge is the effort to bring back the entire six-thousand year regime of knowing, re-presenting the thought forms and epistemological patterns characteristic of the stages of mental growth of the past sixty centuries—the knowledge of all that hath been. (Baha'u'llah, Epistle to the Son of the Wolf: 11)   Hence this retrieving is not really adding another level of knowledge, but rather building a framework to understand ourselves, a comprehending within a single representational form of what is now seen as a whole tradition whose lineaments stretch from the misty dawn of human intellection to the majestic conceptual mansions of today.  This is necessary to do in order to sum up in some kind of judgment the contributions of those centuries and ages to the advance of human civilization and development.  It is a rolling up of one order so that a new one may be spread out in its stead. 

In this spirit of synoptic overview of centuries to perceive progression we can see, in the early part of this long epoch, how a religious historical vision such as that of twelfth-century mystic Joachim of Flora gives way to the more secular sixteenth-century vision of Giambattista Vico’s New Science. In our own time, the great synthetic histories produced by minds like Marx, Spengler, Toynbee, Sorokin and Voegelin, and developmental philosophies like Hegel’s Absolute Spirit moving through moments or forms of consciousness appear.   These thinkers employ a whole battalion of terms like ages, periods, stages, eras, epochs, and cycles, and organize human history into some overarching, tri-part division, such as ancient, medieval and modern, to indicate human development, as I am doing in this paper with sensori-motor, intellectual and spiritual knowing.  These frames and schemes are put forth now because humanity is jostling against the edge, the end, some final limit, of one kind of history, and it is time to judge and make some narrative sense of it, to turn this sequence into a structure and context: to remove the anxiety of the abyss and see that all this past activity was somehow meaningful because it was leading to something.  Reflection is required at the end of any life.  But anarchy and destruction is also present.  

Hence, from the nineteenth century onwards, with Nietzsche’s Ubermench, through works like T.S Eliot’s Waste Land  and Fukuyama’s End of History,  the other story, that of the anarchy and frenetic and confused desperation that fills the minds of political and social revolutionaries, the worship of destruction and moral nihilism, the collapse of long-standing social institutions everywhere, remark on the other half of this dual process of the disintegration of one order and the integration of another, the first happening because of the second.  Hence the House of Justice could write in 1979: “The decline of religious and moral restraints has unleashed a fury of chaos and confusion that already bears the signs of universal anarchy.” (The Universal House of Justice, Ridvan 136, 1979, p. 1)