Sciences of the Spirit

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.

(Stanwood Cobb. Thoughts on Education and Life: 55)  

Sacred science stretches the idea of knowledge to include again, besides the human relations with Nature and with each other in society, the relations of the soul with that which is Divine and transcendent, the invisible powers that govern and drive the universe.  The great enemy of symbolic thought is literalism, whether religious or scientific, for relationally all is metaphor.  The symbolist method of thought is essential for the creation of sacred sciences.  Symbolism says that the material manifest form is real and worthy of study, but that it is also linked with a higher, essential form of itself, a spiritual Reality, which working together in reciprocal interaction with the material create a sacred science.  Sacred science would connect these dimensions of creation within one symbiotic relation, so that the path to truth can be complementary, a reading the spiritual from the material, or, reading the material from the spiritual.  In this spiritual or sacred science the harmony of science and religion would be apparent and investigated by the one mind, for human consciousness in all its varied cultural forms and individual appearances is still one.  I am currently undertaking this kind of reconceptualizing of history, sociology and economics, the three disciplines that Shoghi Effendi encouraged youth to study.

He, for example, “advised young people to study deeply such subjects as History, Economics and Sociology as they are all related to the teachings and aid in understanding the Faith.” (Lights of Guidance: 629)  He also advised them to study “History, Economics or Sociology, as these are not only fields in which Bahá'ís take a great interest but also cover subjects which our teachings cast an entirely new light upon.” (Compilation on Scholarship:12)  These two statements indicate the reciprocal relation between the knowledge in these disciplines and the Bahá’í Teachings.  But these reciprocal relations must be brought out.  Hence: “Shoghi Effendi has for years urged the Bahá'ís (who asked his advice, and in general also) to study history, economics, sociology, etc., in order to be au courant with all the progressive movements and thoughts being put forth today, and so that they could correlate these to the Bahá'í teachings.” (Compilations on Scholarship:18)

To show something of that epistemological interplay between reason and Revelation—i.e. to study these subjects because they help to understand the Faith, to study them because the “teachings cast an entirely new light upon” these same subjects, and to correlate the two—is the goal of many scholars and writers.  To get a foothold in this new terrain however a spiritual perspective is needed.

The suggested interplay between the Faith and human knowledge hinges on the complex interplay between Divinity and humanity. That interplay operates through several relations, with different forms and is comprehended through various metaphors. One relation is between the eternal and temporal as dimensions of existence.  There is the creative interplay of Mind and matter as dimensions of creation.  There is the spiritual/organic interplay as rhythms of growth, and the sacred and profane as moral dimensions of spiritual principle and virtuous action.  The interplay between humanity’s two greatest means of generating knowledge, reason and faith, and their two large containing forms, science and religion, is the interplay of consciousness and being.  The sequential unfolding of an inner structure simultaneously enfolding into an outer structure that mirrors it and reflects back to it is the interplay. 

This unity in diversity, this movement of a diverse spiritual whole that is reconstructed into a differentiated organic whole in another and smaller plane, can be summed up in Aristotle’s four causes: the formal cause finding its mirror-form in the final cause through the interaction of the efficient cause upon the material cause.  But then there is a reply of the final cause back to the formal, so that interaction and interrelation occur, so that not just a one-way relation is shown but a relationship is formed.  One implication of that last statement is that there is a delicate and extensive connection between divinity and humanity that not only shapes perception, but also acts as a timing mechanism bring forth further stimuli and response from both: the interplay is an interaction.

One way to see this comes from reflecting on the phenomenon and nature of “emergence.”  I mean that in discussing novelty or when seeing something new or for the first time, or noticing, perhaps with surprise, a sudden added complexity of a phenomenon, we use phrases like “an emerging reality” or “an emerging pattern of life or society”, even calling the universe itself an emergent thing.  The word “emerging” is often coupled with another word “shaping.”  Hence we get complete phrases such as shaping the new emerging reality.  If asked the meaning of these kinds of phrases we generally focus upon the noun, “reality”, its shape and history, its now visible pattern, and so on.  But focus upon the adjective “emerging” leads me to ask: From where does the reality or pattern emerge?  From a spiritual perspective here are two answers to this.  First, something is emerging into the world or human consciousness and, second, something is emerging from the world and human consciousness, the second emergence dependent upon the first.  The too often one-sided discussion of emergence only focuses upon the second emergence from the world without seeing it as caused by a prior emergence into the world.

I mean that, if a pattern or power is emerging, it already exists somewhere, just not here in this world, or in our consciousness which alone can “see” it as a pattern.  The first power existed in a spiritual dimension and it emerged into our world.  It startled into activity or stimulated into action some latent power or capacity within the human reality, our idea of emergence conceptually registering this switch from quiet potential to active ability.  It emerges, that is, into awareness.  Powers, therefore, exist in both places and we know them to be there only when they move.  The causal sequence being, that is, “emerging into” so that something may be “emerging from.” 

A profound reconfiguration of the human intelligence is going on.  Faculties that I named in my book Renewing the Sacred as the sacred heart and spiritual mind are awakening.  Reconfiguration is necessary, for humanity is not merely at the end of an era, or a style of thought, nor is it just that nations have become entangled in political gridlock or government entered into final form of society called liberal democracy.  Neither have we arrived just at some temporary cultural impasse.  We are, in fact, at the end of days of humanity as we know that term.  If this is the end of history then nothing from the past or anywhere else in creation will navigate us through this new voyage, for all but the soul is trapped within the morphic field of intellect, and it is the soul that is voyaging, using the mind and body as its ship and oars.  The end of days is the edge of eternity.  We stand on the brink staring out over a shoreless ocean of divine thought which flows out from that center which is the beginning of all things.  We must not just be renewed but also made new.  The old forms have been retrieved, but enfolded within a new more comprehensive state called the Revelation of “spirit of truth”, the Most Glorious Manifestation of God, Baha’u’llah.