O My Servant!
Obey Me and I shall make thee like unto Myself. I say 'Be,' and it is, and thou
shalt say 'Be,' and it shall be.
(Baha'u'llah,
The Four Valleys: 63)
We continue making our way toward a possible
understanding of the Baha’u’llah’s statement above. I have been examining the relations between
the physical and intellectual realms, in an attempt to elucidate how much human
intention can create within this context.
Last post talked about seeing the universe as either primarily a
physical mechanism or an intellectual idea.
Neither view needs God or what I called the Supreme Thinker as a Creator. But to connect human intentionality with the
prophetic utterance is to hearken back to the medieval understanding of
intentionality as discovering structure to the universe: that visible structure
being a reflection of deeper hidden structure.
Thus
the third way to view creation is as the product of divine thought, or mind force,
that surrounds and pervades everything.
In this context we understand 'Abdu’l-Baha’s statement on healing: “All
that we see around us is the work of mind.
It is mind in the herb and the mineral that acts on the human body and
changes its condition.” (Abdu'l-Baha in
London: 95) It is also from this
perspective that statements like the following make sense: “Human belief that a
plant might grow faster was apparently acting as a nutrient to actually
produced faster growth. Thought was a
food!” (Peter Thompkins and Christopher Bird, The Secret Life of Plants 359)
The three views
come from the three components that is the structure of two things in
relation. The third view grasps the
whole situation from the point of view of the relation itself. ‘Abdu’l-Baha says the relation between the
physical and intellectual forms of things is like that between the sun and its
image in the mirror. The medium between
sun and mirror is the real connection between these discrete levels of
reality. A similar kind of relation
binds the material place of manifestation with its immaterial power. He says: …if you examine the human body, you
will not find a special spot or locality for the spirit, for it has never had a
place; it is immaterial. It has a connection with the body like that of the sun
with this mirror. The sun is not within the mirror, but it has a connection
with the mirror.” He goes further: “The
mind which is in man, the existence of which is recognized—where is it in him?
If you examine the body with the eye, the ear or the other senses, you will not
find it; nevertheless, it exists. Therefore, the mind has no place, but it is
connected with the brain. The Kingdom is also like this. In the same way love
has no place, but it is connected with the heart; so the Kingdom has no place,
but is connected with man.” (Some
Answered Questions: 242)
Objects become more transparent as their
relations become more apparent. Bringing relations to awareness and percept reveals
the previously hidden causes which are the environment of creation. Environment is the hidden unity, the secret
synthesis. For the environment as
process is an active agent, not a passive container within which activity takes
place.
This relation between the mental
form and the physical form of something, between mind and matter, gives a
double-formed nature to every created thing.
This mirror-imaging is what physicists call symmetry. F. David Peat, in his book Synchronicity, says: “Matter, in this
sense, would be a reflection or the representation of these fundamental
patterns; or rather, symmetry and material structure form two sides of a deeper
order.” Peat goes on to suggest that: “…these processes are themselves based on
even deeper orders whose origin is a particularly subtle movement that is
neither matter nor mind. The fundamental
symmetries and their structures have their origin in something that is close to
a pure intelligence which springs from an unknown creative source.” (Synchronicity:196) This more subtle order of pure intelligence
postulated by Peat would be, from my point of view, divine Revelation, that creative
Source we call the Word of God. (It is
worth noting that Peat’s book is subtitled The
Bridge between Mind and Matter which is what others have called Intentionality. Synchronicity is a term he borrowed from
Jung: synchronicity being the name Jung gave to what he saw as an acausal
connecting principle manifesting meaningful coincidences. But for Jung all causality was efficient
causality, not the formal causality we have discussed. Hence the only way for him to explain those events for which we do not understand the cause, but which cluster together in
meaningful ways, was designate them acausal. They were caused, of course, not efficiently but
formally. However, there is meaning and volition (i.e. intention) involved if
we postulate a higher will.
From a Baha’i point of view, the
Manifestations and other holy souls have complete command of both the physical
and the intellectual dimensions of reality. Every
Manifestation recreates this subtle intellectual level of creation with His Words,
making new thought forms which become new sciences and arts and other rational
forms. Other holy souls understand this new
creation and the fertilizing effect of the Word gradually brings other minds into
an understanding of it.
Every Revelation recreates both the physical
universe and the intellectual one, the relation of these two being one of
symmetry or direct connection as the sun in the mirror. This evolving twofold aspect of mental and
physical existence of the creation manifests in increasingly complex form and
relations the pre-existent formal “glorious structure” of “these two are the
same yet they are different” (Tablets of Baha’u’llah:140) i.e. the relation that is an
intellectual reality reflected in a physical mirror, making a unity or symmetry
of forms but not an identity of essence.
This last is an important point, for
it means that the universe is not an undivided continuum of degrees of
consciousness, but a series of discrete levels in connection—i.e. kingdoms. One of the most significant of these
divisions is that between Nature and Humanity.
In the Tablet of Wisdom Baha’u’llah praises Socrates for the:
“penetrating vision into philosophy this eminent man had! He it is who perceived a unique, a tempered,
and a pervasive nature in things, bearing the closest likeness to the human
spirit, and he discovered this nature to be distinct from the substance of
things in their refined form.” (Tablets
of Baha’u’llah: 152)
The
concept of "likeness" is one we are familiar with, though we discussed it under
the word symmetry before. Likeness is
the theological equivalent to the scientific symmetry, but it highlights the
essential aspect of discreteness yet connection. Likeness is how the kingdoms are connected. The Bible states “And God said, Let us make
man in our image, after our likeness.” An image is the outer form of something;
that is, a form that “embodies” a greater reality in a smaller number of
“dimensions.” For example, a photograph
is a likeness of a person, but it is two-dimensional, not three.
The outer form of God is His
attributes and the Manifestation is a perfect likeness to God, being the perfect
embodiment of God’s attributes, but not His Essence. Human beings are made not after God, but
after the likeness of God, which is the Manifestation of God, since all the
qualities of God are within every human reality, but not perfectly. The animal world, in turn, is made in the
likeness of the human spirit. ‘Abdu’l-Baha states all three relations in the
following quote: “God has created man after His own image and likeness. He has
endowed him with a mighty power which is capable of discovering the mysteries
of phenomena...This is the foundation of the world of humanity; this is the
image and likeness of God; this is the reality of man; otherwise, he is an
animal. Verily, God has created the animal in the image and likeness of man,
for though man outwardly is human, yet in nature he possesses animal
tendencies.” (The Promulgation of
Universal Peace: 262)
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