Terra in Cognita

When a divine spiritual illumination becomes manifest in the world of humanity, when divine instruction and guidance appear, then enlightenment follows, a new spirit is realized within, a new power descends, and a new life is given.

 (‘Abdu’l-Bahá. The Promulgation of Universal Peace: 305)  

The book explores the implications of the above statement from ‘Abdu’l-Bahá.  Part One investigates how divine Revelation determines human knowledge.  That is, not how divine Revelation is one among many important influences making human knowledge possible and giving it form and substance and verification, but, in fact, that Revelation is the one indispensable influence, as the sun is the one indispensable influence for life on earth, other influences supporting or neutralizing the effects of the sun’s light, but all born from it.  Further, if Revelation is progressive, as the Bahá'í Writings state, then knowledge itself is in a state of emergent evolution.

We must realize that those who understand the world’s imperatives for change will be called upon very soon to be a refuge to whole populations of mental and emotional refugees fleeing the ravages of other states of mind and heart.  In the introduction to the document, One Common Faith, The Universal House of Justice sets the task for Bahá'ís:  “If they are to respond to the need, Bahá'ís must draw on a deep understanding of the process by which humanity’s spiritual life evolves.” (One Common Faith: p. iii)  That process, for me, always begins with the revealing of the Word.  Materialistic thought opposes that in principle.

Materialism is a terrible spiritual pathology which has infected all humanity to some degree.  All living today were born into the most materialistic world that humanity has ever built, and Americans have been raised in the most materialistic society of that world, the very vortex of materialism.  In our ignorance and because those around us think the same way, unconsciously most of us in the “developed” countries accept this inherited belief as a true picture of reality. If left unchallenged or unexamined, and so long as food is on the table and roof is over one’s head, it seems to work adequately enough.  But if comfort is threatened, the most violent reactions from the center of the human psyche are likely to be brought forth.   Many are religious.  But I am not talking about established religion, which is so often but one more pill in our pharmacology of mental slumber aids.  In fact, if we want to know how a pathology like materialism took hold of the mind and heart of humanity, we must look to the decline and perversion of religion itself as the answer and first cause, at least that is where I believe Bahá’u’lláh directs our gaze.

These few essays do not intend any more than a tentative search along a few chosen paths of investigation.  But, to be clear, I am not trying to cut my way through a great, tangled wilderness of dimly lit spiritual intuitions to cultivate the ground and bring it, finally, into bright rational civil order.  Rather, I am trying to accustom my vision to a brilliantly lit order of vast and intricate complexity that is the revealed Word, the City of God.  It is not the “landscape” that needs illumination, but the wanderer in it.

The first three essays composing Part One were originally presentations at the annual Desert Rose Artists and Scholars Symposium.  They have each endured an expansion of their material, as befits a less constrained written presentation, adding what I hope is more depth and clarity to their discussions.  But I have made no attempt to synthesize these essays into a single narrative. While some repetition remains of themes and topics, this is a natural consequence of overlapping contexts where a theme that is briefly alluded to in one essay may be dealt with in more detail in another, because it is more central in that other context.

The long final essay, The Revolt Against Materialism, which is all of Part Two, was written for this book. It is a first extended, but far from completed, examination of a topic that I call “sociology of the spirit”, the replacing of the human order by a divine one

The essays do not couple like railway cars, but, rather, their topics and themes interpenetrate and  interrelate because they start from and are manifestations of the same Origin: the field that surrounds and penetrates all things, so that all things become its different manifestations: a unity manifest in diversity. To grasp processes of manifestation in motion, the questions to answer are: How do spiritual forces manifest in organic forms?  And: How do organic forms grow? 

This is also to identify a different causality, a causality of simultaneity, that I call “spiritual causality”.  In this view, the process of transformation is understood as seeing how entities and patterns in the eternal spiritual dimension, where things exist, get translated into temporal forms, whose equivalent structural principles are processes that persist.  In such a study of transformation, on the divine, spiritual side words such as manifestation, crystallization, and materialization are useful, while on the organic, human side a vocabulary of words such as emergence, development and unfoldment come to prominence.  All guided transformation is traced through a lexicon of operative metaphors and nouns: template, Plan, pattern and nucleus, and powers and attributes “emerging” from Essence that build into progressive manifestation called development. 

An example of what I mean by spiritual causality is a statement made by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá.  Upon laying the cornerstone of the first Bahá’i House of Worship in the West, He remarked: “The Temple is already built”, though not a single brick had been laid.  Of the great transformation of spiritual pattern into organic form, Bahá’u’lláh wrote: “Soon will the present-day order be rolled up, and a new one spread out in its stead. Verily, thy Lord speaketh the truth, and is the Knower of things unseen.” (Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh: 6)