Levels of Being/Templates of Consciousness/Patterns of Society

Now the new age is here and creation is reborn. Humanity hath taken on new life. The autumn hath gone by, and the reviving spring is here. All things are now made new. Arts and industries have been reborn, there are new discoveries in science, and there are new inventions; even the details of human affairs, such as dress and personal effects—even weapons—all these have likewise been renewed. The laws and procedures of every government have been revised. Renewal is the order of the day.

And all this newness hath its source in the fresh outpourings of wondrous grace and favour from the Lord of the Kingdom, which have renewed the world. The people, therefore, must be set completely free from their old patterns of thought, that all their attention may be focused upon these new principles, for these are the light of this time and the very spirit of this age.
 (Abdu'l-Baha, Selections from the Writings of Abdu'l-Baha: 252)

I am continuing to elaborate the introduction to the four volume study I am writing tentatively titled, Restoring the Transcendent: Spiritual Principles in Cosmology, History, Civilization and Knowledge.

We live in an increasingly globalizing world, though, politically at least, the world remains more international than global.  Religion, too, like politics, remains in a divided state of affairs, carving the inner world into sovereign states of faith. Uniting the religions is a work of universal faith.  Bringing the political order and the religious order into a coherent state, the first global, the second universal, is the crux of most of the world’s endemic problems, for religion and government, the rulers of the inner and outer worlds of humanity, are the two most potent forces on the planet.  Their transition into a new and greater unity is tumultuous, to say the least.  But that is what is happening.  It is an Axial Age.  Humanity is in the throes of what Shoghi Effendi calls, “an organic change in the structure of present-day society, a change such as the world has not yet experienced.”(The World Order of Bahá’u’lláh: 43)

This declaration of Shoghi Effendi means to me that it is not that western civilization is in crisis—though that is obviously true.  Neither is it that civilization itself is everywhere in trouble: also true. I mean that civilization can’t be fixed, but it can be transformed.  It is that a certain order of the civilizing process, a certain kind of civilized life, has been fulfilled and, having reached utter exhaustion collapses into sickness and sterility, so that a new order can appear.  The types of civilization characteristic of the past few millennia can no longer promote human development.  A new order, a new kind of civilization, never before seen, but latent within the reality of social existence, has to emerge and be established.

Society is rooted in the fundamental experience of humanity which is the soul’s connection with the transcendent and sacred.  As dimensions of cosmological experience the interplay between spirit and matter is between the eternal and the temporal, as mediated through Persons, called by Bahá’is   Manifestations of God, Who are transcendentally gifted in spiritual perception and knowledge.  Thus, beside unifying the religious and political realms, the cosmological order must be coordinated and unified: the divine, the human and natural orders must achieve a kind of coherence in human understanding.  The recurring, which also means unfolding and progressing, eternal principles of Divine Revelation They propound provide a framework for human experience,  coordinate interactions between the spiritual and the temporal realms, give new direction and  ideals to human thought, and renew the organic powers of human social life to build civilization. 

Historically, as the primal experience of the sacred blossomed from pure inchoate overpowering experience into increasingly more complex conscious knowledge of the transcendent through templates of consciousness, another historical pattern emerged, namely, that the infinite Spirit given specific form in every Revelation provided patterns of growth, archetypes of social and intellectual progress that humanity grew into and then out of to grow into others.  These transcendent archetypes exist not only as creative forces outside of time in a region traditionally called eternity, but they also exist and are mirrored as higher potentials within the human reality and civilized society which the eternal forms connect to, infusing them with spiritual energy and power.   They become active forces which the human powers are receptive to.

These inner potentials are in need of awakening, of being educed or brought forth and trained.  That is the periodic work of Revelation and spiritual principles.  Unfolding from eternity, Revelation enfolds into the human experience to awaken latent moral patterns and energies which then unfold from human souls into new intellectual and social structures.  These templates of consciousness and patterns of society are the progressive divine message brought to humanity through a succession of Spiritual Luminaries. 

Spiritual archetypes as causative forces interact with human, social, and natural causes to organize human history into cycles or periods of consciousness and social development.  This is the basis of all thinking on universal history.    Different metaphors for the social and material unfolding of human potential include Spengler’s organic cycles for civilization and Toynbee’s challenge and response of civilizations and religions.  The Hegelian Absolute Spirit unfolding in periodizations of history which are moments of consciousness, or Marx’s triad of feudal, capitalist and socialist relations of economic production, are, too, examples of what I mean, though on different levels of social analysis.  Vico’s age of gods/age of heroes/age of men, Sorokin’s societies cycling through Idealistic/Ideational/Sensate stages or Voegelin’s schema of the search for order in history in the history of order, can also be brought forward.

But universal history is understood fully only in that on-going stimulus/response relation of a progressive revelation giving spiritual impetus and shape to a responding humanity to build, from the foundations to the final structures of time, an ever-advancing civilization.  To be ever-advancing means that civilization is built upon increasingly complex templates of consciousness into increasing complex social structures that embrace ever more disparate members of the human family within one organic system. This building passes historically through distinct stages of growth until it achieves a sort of permanence which Christians call the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, a stable universal/global form that will go from perfection to perfection without going through the valley of abrogation and annihilation.

Revelation, then, is never just spiritual energy and plan for personal salvation, but also, and increasingly, as humanity approaches the present day, as complex social pattern, coded information for human social, intellectual and moral evolution.  Muhammad’s revelation was the most complex union of sacred and secular life up until the modern age, but with the revelation of Baha’u’llah in the mid-nineteenth century a full, though not yet fully developed, social Order is delivered that humanity can see as a model for its own further development.  It is the divine Order, the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, the crowning Golden Age of human evolution.

Every Revelation brings forth from the human reality new powers and capacities to advance civilization. The greatest Revelations also bring forth new levels of being.  These are not new social and intellectual qualities, but ontological revelations about the human reality—i.e. our unfolding essential being into complete manifestation, which corresponds in some of its aspects with the spiritual cosmology or fundamental structure of the cosmos.   All societies are held together by inner spiritual powers and moral capacities that are the foundation of its social virtue.  These capacities and powers are expressions of our fundamental being.  Bahá’u’lláh’s spiritual templates of consciousness are the qualities that must emerge from human nature into today’s world in order to guide the ship of state and to build a world civilization that fully manifests the oneness of humanity.  These qualities and their corresponding leading social virtues are justice, unity and peace, all states of being wrapped up within the human reality awaiting the proper social conditions for their emergence into structures of governance.  We shape our institutions and thereafter they shape us, same with thoughts, same with the natural environment.  The building of those outer social structures and mental relations are both the receiver of spiritual impulse and bring them forth and channel them into the world of social appearances where they are shaped into social structures.

Reminder to all interested Kindle owners who are also signed up for Amazon Prime to borrow one or more of my books (seen on the right) online through the Kindle Owners Lending Library. It is free for you, and every page that you read provides me a small royalty. Thanks so much.