I maintain that the human mystery is
incredibly demeaned by scientific reductionism, with its claim in promissory
materialism to account eventually for all the spiritual world in terms of
patterns of neuronal activity. This belief must be classed as a superstition. …
We have to recognize that we are spiritual beings with souls existing in a
spiritual world as well as material beings with bodies and brains existing in a
material world.
(John Eccles, Evolution of the
Brain: Creation of the Self: 241)
Baha’u’llah states that His revelation holds the
keys to the sciences, arts and knowledge.
He means by this claim that His Revelation holds the keys to new
sciences, arts and knowledge, for the established sciences and arts of His and
prior days had already been unlocked. So hidden away in His metaphors, analogies
and statements are the principles of a whole new kind of epistemology. But our minds must be reconfigured to grasp
them. So complete may be that change as
to make current science seem as superstition, as science calls the more
imaginative statements of truth in myth and fable.
I
am not alone in thinking this. The lead
quote from noted neuroscientist and Nobel Prize winner John Eccles also states
this. Another Nobel winner, physicist Erwin
Schrodinger, wrote, “I am very astonished that the scientific picture of the
real world around me is very deficient. It gives a lot of factual information,
puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly
silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really
matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet,
physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly,
good or bad, God and eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions
in these domains, but the answers are very often so silly that we are not
inclined to take them seriously.” (Nature and the Greeks:
93)
Spiritual knowing is a new and different kind
of epistemology, one that overthrows the current scientific model, by
incorporating it within a more complexly integrated one. So we need a new epistemological attitude, a
wider set of beliefs concerning what is acceptable to know and who is
acceptable to speak it. It remains fundamental
to the advance of knowledge that every view and insight must be empirically verified. We do not throw out the intellectual today any
more than when we advanced into the intellectual we threw out the senses. But this new knowledge is also different.
It is knowledge gained from the keys provided
by Revelation, and not any of the forms of it that constitute human learning,
such as art, science, poetry and philosophy, which are the human responses to
it. ‘Abdu’l-Baha says: “You
must endeavor to understand the mysteries of God, attain the ideal knowledge
and arrive at the station of vision, acquiring directly from the Sun of Reality
and receiving a destined portion from the ancient bestowal of God.” (The Promulgation of Universal Peace: 263)
Spiritual epistemology’s principles include “keenness
of understanding is due to keenness of vision” (Tablets of
Baha'u'llah: 35)
and faith plays a “central role in consciousness.” (One Common Faith:
5) There are other criteria. Baha’u’llah wrote: “The understanding of His
words and the comprehension of the utterances of the Birds of Heaven are in no
wise dependent upon human learning. They depend solely upon purity of
heart, chastity of soul and freedom of spirit.” (The Kitab-i-Iqan (The Book of Certitude): 211) Hence every human being that possesses “purity
of heart, chastity of soul and freedom of spirit”, who envisions new truth and
believes faith is not blind acceptance of authority but a perceiving of new
Reality, is automatically a member of the great circle of acceptable speakers
of truth. There are no more religious or
scientific priests to interpret the Word for us.
Hence spiritual knowing is not just some happy
combination of science and myth, but something more than both. Let us call it direct perception of spirit
encoded in symbols. It is going to be
some time before we enter fully into the regime of spiritual knowledge. We are now in the first stages of this vast,
unparalleled transition. As I said before, the emerging sciences are sciences of
process and not of state—bridges to reality in ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s phrase. Perhaps that is because humanity is transitioning
out of one state of mind into another, and the sciences and arts, poets and
philosophers, mystics and materialists, are all simply registering the stages
of this universal process that moves from cosmos through chaos into a new
cosmological understanding, accelerating by several orders of magnitude and
complexity every decade, as the energy waves of a new revelation pass through and
reconfigure the human intelligence.
In similar fashion, myths
were the “sciences of process” of antiquity, that long ago period when humanity
moved from an animal signal-awareness to a larger symbol-manipulating mind, and
education changed from the natural to the human. Today a universal birth of humanity into the
spiritual state is occurring and new being always births new ways of
thinking. We are in the time of divine
education. Once we get better grounding
in our new state sciences of that state will appear on the threshold of
consciousness.
But, for a while anyway, it
is the old way in new form—the strange juxtaposition of twilight with the
dawn’s early light without any intervening night. A new ratio of understanding is everywhere
emerging. Past myths, arts, and sciences
in their respective though smaller transitions provide useful analogies and
examples to what Shoghi Effendi called an “organic change in the structure of
present-day society, a change such as the world has not yet experienced.” (The World Order of Baha’u’llah: 43) We are again very close to the sacred, so
close that the current of truth can leap the narrow gap, like Michelangelo’s
great painting of God and Adam on the Sistine ceiling. We are, in fact, with Baha’u’llah’s
Revelation at the very center and essence of spirit, the mid-most heart of
creation itself. This is the Age of
God. Thus all those times in history
when we were close to the spiritual can return today as fertilizing analogies
to our thought.
This
is the time when we shall construct sacred sciences and pioneers abound in this
endeavor. Material science sought to establish a strictly physical
sequence of causation for all phenomena, which being in time and organic flow
this causation can only be linear and efficient causality, and to encase
humanness itself in conceptual abstractions of human nature that yielded a
system of positive sciences generating empirical facts and knowledge. Sacred science starts from the assumption
that an energetic, causal spiritual world precedes, not sequentially but
formally, the material, quantitative world of effects. Spirit is the plane of causation. It
is the first principles and laws of spiritual genesis flowing into laws of material generation of
the new which is also renewal.
Causation, then, is not just linear and sequential but also formal and simultaneous,
and is the coordination of these causes. Next post will make a little detour to examine
the nature of formal causality. It is central to understanding spiritual knowledge.
A direct link to my book, Renewing the Sacred
is http://tinyurl.com/cndew5a It is now also in Kindle
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