Harmonizing the Inner and Outer Powers

Revelation, then, is either the fabulous clothing in which intelligible truth presents itself to people who have a low I.Q.; or it is the religious name for the process which is essentially the growth of reason in history.

(H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture: 111)

For my money, Revelation is the second description, but it is also more than that.  Revelation is the means by which reason grows in history by infusing the human intelligence with the energies of faith and vision and asking reason to examine and clarify their discoveries.  We often don’t see this, because of a crabbed scientistic view, which, until recently and to protect a heavy-handed materialistic bias, dismissed all other modalities of knowing and understanding besides those of the senses and logic as atavistic holdovers from other times and lesser minds.  Thank God, this is changing.  But it is exactly to overcome several centuries of conditioning that we must restore the transcendent and reawaken our spiritual faculties. (I also examine intuition and inspiration as modes of knowing in Terra in Cognita)

The core principle of the rational faculty is ratio, harmony and proportion.  This implies that each created thing and every human means of their apprehension, from the senses up through the spiritual faculties, has its own ratio (i.e. vibration or frequency) When the object and its means of apprehension are in harmony understanding occurs.  Thus, every physical sense is a kind of reason as much as every cognitive power is.  The senses, the mental powers, and the spiritual faculties have their own rationality.  The rational faculty is able to move freely among all realms of rationality and reason, creating harmony and coherence between them, for it is a faculty of discovering, expressing and harmonizing ratios, and not any one ratio.  Therefore all possible ratios are within it.

As we are endowed with the capacities, through our senses, of apprehending the material world (the world and our senses being, in Wordsworth terms “admirably fitted” to each other) and since we, too, are capable of grasping, through our minds, the world of ideas and thought, so we are, through spiritual faculties, able to understand the spiritual world and the Word of God.  Bahá’u’lláh wrote in this regard: “He hath endowed every soul with the capacity to recognize the signs of God. How could He, otherwise, have fulfilled His testimony unto men, if ye be of them that ponder His Cause in their hearts.” (Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh: 105-106)  Again He confirms this view when He writes: “Even as He hath revealed: "We will surely show them Our signs in the world and within themselves." Again He saith: "And also in your own selves: will ye not, then, behold the signs of God?" (Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh: 177)

Thus we know the world and ourselves.  But there is yet a higher receptive use of the rational faculty.  ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, in The Secret of Divine Civilization, discusses the attributes of the spiritually learned.  He wrote of “those famed and accomplished men of learning, possessed of praiseworthy qualities and vast erudition, who lay hold on the strong handle of the fear of God and keep to the ways of salvation. In the mirror of their minds the forms of transcendent realities are reflected, and the lamp of their inner vision derives its light from the sun of universal knowledge.” (The Secret of Divine Civilization: 21)

Thus this rational faculty has a spiritual or transcendent aspect which is its true power and is at the heart of the higher self of the human reality. This embracing, transcendent aspect has its counterpart in the lower self, the animal soul.  That counterpart is traditionally called the sensus communis, the common sense, or what ‘Abdu’l-Bahá described as “the common faculty” intermediating between the inner and outer powers of the human being.  He wrote: “Man has also spiritual powers: imagination, which conceives things; thought, which reflects upon realities; comprehension, which comprehends realities; memory, which retains whatever man imagines, thinks and comprehends. The intermediary between the five outward powers and the inward powers is the sense which they possess in common—that is to say, the sense which acts between the outer and inner powers, conveys to the inward powers whatever the outer powers discern. It is termed the common faculty, because it communicates between the outward and inward powers and thus is common to the outward and inward powers.” (Some Answered Questions: 210)
           But the new dimension to this faculty, the awakening of its divine aspect, is its ability to reflect and discern transcendent, spiritual realities.  The Master made the distinction in a letter: “Thus is it clear that the human spirit is an all-encompassing power that exerteth its dominion over the inner essences of all created things, uncovering the well kept mysteries of the phenomenal world.

The divine spirit, however, doth unveil divine realities and universal mysteries that lie within the spiritual world. It is my hope that thou wilt attain unto this divine spirit, so that thou mayest uncover the secrets of the other world, as well as the mysteries of the world below.” (Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá: 170)

This post and the previous one are a broad outline of the kind of lens the books I am collectively calling Restoring the Transcendent will see through.  They are built on a model of something that I call spiritual perception.   The books will lean heavily on statements from the Bahá’i Writings. This is not to dismiss other perspectives as wrong or stupid, but because these Writings embody, in my opinion, the most penetrating spiritual perception available to us.  If one is trying, as I am, to develop “spiritual perception” it only makes good sense to use the best proponents of that perspective.

This model bears some obvious similarities in its structure to the four-tiered cosmos worldview of the western Middle Ages.  Given that this was the last transcendent vision before the great collapse into materialism, it should not be surprising that there are similarities.  In that vision, heaven, which is the place of the Presence of God, or, as Bahá’is would say, the Manifestation of God, was at the top, revealing the Kingdom of Revelation.  Directly under that is the world God intends humanity to live in, the spiritual Eden with no sin or death in it.  The third level, traditionally the fallen world for man, is the order of Nature which man finds himself born into but is not to stay, for it has both sin and death. This marks the fall of man into materialism if he tries to conform to this world.   He is, rather, to transform Nature into an earthly Eden, the imitation of the second level.  This is the great work of redemption humanity is now engaged in.  The fourth level was the demonic, the place of hell and perdition, which, for us, is the beastly world humans create when they don’t live according to the divine teachings.  Bahá’u’lláh says about this fourth level and those who live in it: “This nether world is the abode of demons: Guard yourselves from approaching them. By demons is meant those wayward souls who, with the burden of their evil deeds, slumber in the chambers of oblivion. Their sleep is preferable to their wakefulness, and their death is better than their life.” (Baha'u'llah, Tabernacle of Unity: 69)

This cosmological scheme, first philosophically articulated in antiquity in the Hermetic texts, carried human thought for centuries, and was still going strong in some quarters in the seventeenth-century, as E.M.W.  Tillyard’s classic study, The Elizabethan World Picture, shows.  From there it went underground as a naturalistic bias that morphed into a materialistic one took hold.  But it remains a potent force and is returning to fertilize modern day physics and psychology.

The cosmological order, so conceived, was mirrored in the human and political order.  In many traditional societies the order of human governance supposedly reflected the cosmic order, (e.g. the King was as the sun) though often enough it was simply a crass and transparent rationalization of the privileges held by the ruling class.  But through images such as the chain of being and the net of correspondences, images which for all their antiquity are not antiquated, people made sense of their world. Such archetypal images are the roots of human thought, the royal metaphors holding thought together. They are, that is, the way that the Prophets have told us to think about the world and ourselves, Jacob ladders upon which angels of thought travel between the spiritual and material worlds.  Indeed, so pervasive are these primal notions that we can read in a recent publication on economics: “The economy exists for respecting and preserving life, not getting rich.  Its frame of reference must be the laws that govern the cosmos as well as the earth—not just, for example, the laws of supply and demand.” Peter Brown and Geoffrey Garver, Right Relationship: Building a Whole Earth Economy: xvii)