Like Unto: Conscious Reflections

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: 62)

The goal and driving power of transformations in human consciousness is to be “like unto” Him.   This is achieved by obedience.  That is, to be like unto Him, which is real spiritual transformation, in any conscious sense is not something that we accomplish unaided, but a possibility that we set up to have Him accomplish through our obedience. 

Obedience may seem a strange word in this context.  So, let’s be clear: obedience cannot mean “good little boyism”, nor is it to passively knuckle under to some authority.  Every passivity prevents transformation.  Rather obedience is an active state, an act of will.  It is a deliberate move toward greater consciousness.  It is willingly sacrificing one condition for another one of greater powers and understanding.

The phrase “like unto” is another way to state the analogical condition of consciousness, where two things are the same yet they are different (e.g. the image and the reality it reflects) which are linked both directly and indirectly.

“Like unto” is a traditional way of stating this structure of consciousness.  Jesus was asked: “Then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked him a question, tempting him, and saying, Master, which is the great commandment in the law?  Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.  This is the first and great commandment.  And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.  On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (King James Bible, Matthew 22: 35-40)

The commandment to love thy neighbor as thyself is “like unto” the greater commandment to love God with all one’s heart, soul and mind.  Here, again, the spiritual eternal law is reflected in the human dimension, and one without the other is incomplete and imperfect.  Only together is it perfect and complete.  But the human reflects the divine.

Obedience to the divine command is the great principle helping to define the relation between God, the Manifestation of God, and the human soul.  In Christianity obedience results in becoming an active “a son of God” through receiving the Son of God.  As recorded in the Gospel of John: “But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.” (King James Bible, John 1:12-13)

For the one living in the divine aspect, the spiritual self, whose perception is the unity of all creation, whose chief faculty is the knowing heart, whose knowledge is that the whole universe in enfolded within him, all knowledge is a form of self-knowledge, even self-recognition, a style of thought that poets often employ to connect with Nature—i.e. to see some human quality or trait, reflected in Nature.

But spiritually and in relation to God, the human soul is the lesser reality. It is the reflector, the mirror, of the greater Reality appearing within it.

The Master explains: “The Holy Spirit is the Bounty of God and the luminous rays which emanate from the Manifestations; for the focus of the rays of the Sun of Reality was Christ, and from this glorious focus, which is the Reality of Christ, the Bounty of God reflected upon the other mirrors which were the reality of the Apostles. The descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles signifies that the glorious divine bounties reflected and appeared in their reality.” (Some Answered Questions:108)

Similarly, human knowledge is “like unto” divine knowledge.   Knowledge is not something humans generate by themselves.  Rather, it is something we discover within ourselves, and having discovered it there we can see it in creation, for all knowledge already exists. I mean that if, as we have read before, the creation is complete and perfect from the first, then complete and perfect knowledge of creation is part of creation from the first.  The Báb says of God: “Verily, Thy knowledge embraceth all the things Thou hast created or wilt create.” (Bahá’i Prayers:166)

Knowledge is, therefore, a condition we attain through successive levels or transformations.   Knowledge is already there, intelligence attains to it at every stage of development and insight by moving into higher manifestations of intelligence.  ‘Abdu’l-Bahá states: “knowledge, which is a state attained to by the intelligence, is an intellectual condition; and entering and coming out of the mind are imaginary conditions; but the mind is connected with the acquisition of knowledge, like images reflected in a mirror.” (Some Answered Questions: 108)

Again, while the connections made by poets between Nature and the human reality are, we can say, “natural”, with nature taking on human form through the means of a kind of infusion of human quality into nature, and while science discovers the laws and principles of the phenomenal world and make it into material knowledge, the knowledge of spiritual realities is won by sacrificing the human condition.  Sacrifice is obedience, is to become like unto Him.

Contrasting these two forms of knowing, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá wrote: “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-Baha, p. 170)

But in order to attain perception of divine realities and universal mysteries unveiled by the divine spirit, He says: “Until a being setteth his foot in the plane of sacrifice, he is bereft of every favour and grace; and this plane of sacrifice is the realm of dying to the self, that the radiance of the living God may then shine forth. The martyr's field is the place of detachment from self, that the anthems of eternity may be upraised. Do all ye can to become wholly weary of self, and bind yourselves to that Countenance of Splendours; and once ye have reached such heights of servitude, ye will find, gathered within your shadow, all created things. This is boundless grace; this is the highest sovereignty; this is the life that dieth not. All else save this is at the last but manifest perdition and great loss.” (Selections from the Writings of Abdu'l-Baha, p. 76-77)