Cosmos

Look at the world and ponder a while upon it. It unveileth the book of its own self before thine eyes and revealeth that which the Pen of thy Lord, the Fashioner, the All-Informed, hath inscribed therein. It will acquaint thee with that which is within it and upon it and will give thee such clear explanations as to make thee independent of every eloquent expounder.

(Baha'u'llah, Tablets of Baha'u'llah: 141-142)

If the metaphor for the universe is things and their organic relations of composition to create physical life, the metaphor for the cosmos is words and their relations of composition to create mental life.  As the universe has atoms, elements, planets, on up to stars and galaxies, all within one universe pulsing with life, so the cosmos, the intellectual dimension of creation, has, figuratively, letters, words, pages on up to books and libraries until they are contained in one Book, even one Word, named Logos, pulsing its meanings and principles of thought.  These intellectual signs are proof of Thought and Reason, which creates the cosmos, which emanates into the universe, all of which is held within the knowledge of God. 

Cosmos is founded upon the spoken or written intellectual Revelation that is the Word (traditionally, the verbum scriptum). The universe is the sensible Revelation that is Nature (verbum factum). These are in complete correspondence and perfect accord. ‘Abdu’l-Baha says, for example, “…the outward is the expression of the inward; the earth is the mirror of the Kingdom; the material world corresponds to the spiritual world.” (Some Answered Questions: 283) 

The Knowledge of God is “deposited” within the creation.  It is infinitely deep, the least of His signs cannot be fathomed.  Consider these statements from Baha’u’llah apropos this theme: “Every created being however revealeth His signs which are but emanations from Him and not His Own Self. All these signs are reflected and can be seen in the book of existence, and the scrolls that depict the shape and pattern of the universe are indeed a most great book.” (Tablets of Baha'u'llah: 60)  And: “How all-encompassing are the wonders of His boundless grace! Behold how they have pervaded the whole of creation. Such is their virtue that not a single atom in the entire universe can be found which doth not declare the evidences of His might, which doth not glorify His holy Name, or is not expressive of the effulgent light of His unity.” (Gleanings from the Writings of Baha'u'llah: 62)

The lower reality is contained in the higher reality.  The human reality—remember, “the reality of man is his thought”—being the crown of creation and essentially a spiritual creation possessing in potential all the qualities of God, is described by ‘Abdu’l-Baha: “Man is said to be the greatest representative of God, and he is the Book of Creation because all the mysteries of beings exist in him.” (Some Answered Questions: 236)  But above the human reality, i.e. the Book of Creation, is the Manifestation of God, the Word made flesh.  Of Them Baha’u’llah writes: “GOD testifieth that there is none other God but Him and that He Who hath appeared is the Hidden Mystery, the Treasured Symbol, the Most Great Book for all peoples, and the Heaven of bounty for the whole world. He is the Most Mighty Sign amongst men and the Dayspring of the most august attributes in the realm of creation.” (Tablets of Baha'u'llah: 47)

The intellectual Reality of the Word and all Its meanings is often named, I believe, the Kingdom of Names.  The Bab wrote to one of His inquirers: "If thou art sailing upon the sea of God’s Names, which are reflected in all things, know thou that He is exalted and sanctified from being known through His creatures, or being described by His servants. Everything thou beholdest hath been called into being through the operation of His Will. How can such a created thing, therefore, be indicative of His essential oneness? God’s existence in itself testifieth to His Own oneness, while every created thing, by its very nature, beareth evidence that it hath been fashioned by God." Selections From the Writings of the Báb:  125

Of the influence on the universe of Revelation, Baha’u’llah asserts: “The breeze of the bounty of the King of creation hath caused even the physical earth to be changed, were ye to ponder in your hearts the mysteries of divine Revelation.” (Kitab-i-Iqan: 47)  It does so, because, as our opening quote from Baha’u’llah states, the world “revealeth that which the Pen of thy Lord, the Fashioner, the All-Informed, hath inscribed therein.”  These are the new configurations of the universe of things as the Master describes in the opening page of The Secret of Divine Civilization. 

Following the metaphor of words, which are articulate sound, the Holy Books of the Judeo-Christian tradition speak of God calling creation into being.  The cosmos is the level of continual transformation, the middle earth, so to speak, existing between Nature and Spirit and is their conjunction.  This is brought out in Genesis which opens with the phrase: “In the beginning God created heaven and earth.”  Man appears later in the week, created, first, spiritually, after the image and likeness of God. (Genesis 1:26), only later in Genesis 2: 7 is he given material being: “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”  The two halves are united when “the breath of life”, i.e. the spirit or power of thought, is breathed into the nostrils of the first man, the form of red clay (Adamah) which is the physical form of the human being.  “It is this spirit to which the verse in the Old Testament refers when it states that man has been created "after the image and likeness of God". (Abdu'l-Baha, Foundations of World Unity: 91)  One might also use the metaphor of light and say that this image was imprinted on the human reality as light upon a mirror.

Given this conjunction, whatever the metaphor employed, it should be no surprise that, as the Master says: “It is evident that human personality appears in two aspects: the image or likeness of God, and the aspect of Satan. The human reality stands between these two: the divine and the satanic.”  On the natural level each of us is given a body. What about the level of Spirit?  ‘Abdu’l-Baha goes on: “It is manifest that beyond this material body, man is endowed with another reality, which is the world of exemplars constituting the heavenly body of man.” (The Promulgation of Universal Peace: 465)

Living squarely in the level of change and transformation, the work of  humanity is to bring forth its own and nature’s potentials through learning and education.  Spirit educes human potential by providing certain mental forms called spiritual principles that resonate with existing inner potentials of the human reality, bringing them forth to expression.

The Universal House of Justice writes: “There are spiritual principles, or what some call human values, by which solutions can be found for every social problem….The essential merit of spiritual principle is that it not only presents a perspective which harmonizes with that which is immanent in human nature, it also induces an attitude, a dynamic, a will, an aspiration, which facilitate the discovery and implementation of practical measures.” (The Universal House of Justice, The Promise of World Peace: 3)

It is no different in principle from school education which, for example, presents certain mathematical or language forms to the existing but not yet expressed potentials for math and language resident within every human being. One does not TEACH math or language, one draws these capacities forth through math and language structures and forms. These are mental forms and shapes in harmony with potentials.  Potential is not an unformed lump, but rather an unexpressed, unmanifest power.  Potential can take on any form or shape that brings it forth into the plane of reality, as a painter translates a three-dimensional object onto the two-dimensional plane of the canvas.

Energy Matters

The essence of existence is a spiritual reality because invisible forces of the spirit are the origin of matter and the foundation thereof.

(Shoghi Effendi, quoted in Keven Brown “A Baha’i Perspective on the Origins of Matter.”: Journal of Baha’i Studies 2.3 (1990) 15-44.

Let me start this next series of posts by reviewing the three levels of the divine creation, as I see them.  First and lowest (i.e. most manifest) level is the universe around us, the infinite physical world, with all its galaxies, numberless stars and planets, cosmic dust and layers upon layers of subatomic energies.

Next and higher is the Cosmos, composed of the archetypal thought forms and intellectual structures of reality that science infers or discovers and whose foundation is the on-going Revelations of God that configure the universe.  It is also the human understanding of this level of creation, (i.e. what is called cosmology) written in the various poetic, philosophical and scientific languages of their times and across time.

Finally, at the highest level is the divine Creation, the foundational, spiritual powers (attributes of God,) each a universal, that are revealed and configured by the knowledge of God—i.e. the knowledge that God has of the creation which manifests His Will: a knowledge that is infused into every atom of creation.  From this level or plane of Reality cosmos and universe unfold.  It is what Shoghi Effendi meant, I believe, by "the essence of existence", in the opening quote above.

For me, The Word is the primary creation. The secondary creation is the physical universe, the crafts of God. Yet it is all three levels taken together--in descending order from the foundation: powers, structures, things--along with their inter-relations, that are the whole creation, and which, within the knowledge of God, are as the signs and symbols written in the Book of Creation, or book of existence.  This post will examine the universe.  Discussions of the cosmos and creation will follow.

Material science, which has been the dominant paradigm of the past few hundred years, recognizes only the sensible, physical universe as real, with human knowledge being the results of rigorous and systematic investigation into the laws and principles governing that universe, though that perspective has been changing and enlarging since the turn of the twentieth-century.

Physics now recognizes different levels of matter and energy just in the physical universe.  There is visible matter, dark matter, energy, and dark energy, which seems to power the expansion of the universe, the latter three composing about 96% of the universe. All these it seems arise out from the zero-point field, or quantum vacuum, which is the ground state of energy of the universe.  Visible matter, what we see with our eyes and telescopes is about 4%. 

The concept or notion of ether has been round a very long while, but fell into disfavor in the nineteenth century when, at the height of the materialist era when all things had not only to have physical being but physical, measureable causes, some sensible substance called ether could not be detected.  However it is making a comeback as science again begins to open the door to the possibility of the existence of non-material phenomena.

Still, mainstream science does not as yet recognize non measureable phenomena as real.  ‘Abdu’l-Baha disputes that claim and provides reasoning to infer the existence of realities that are not sensible.  “If we wish to deny everything that is not sensible, then we must deny the realities which unquestionably exist. For example, ethereal matter is not sensible, though it has an undoubted existence. The power of attraction is not sensible, though it certainly exists. From what do we affirm these existences? From their signs. Thus this light is the vibration of that ethereal matter, and from this vibration we infer the existence of ether.”  (Abdu'l-Baha, Some Answered Questions: 190)

To me, this is also a logical proof of the mental foundation (i.e. cosmos) to physical existence.  Apropos this point, He also stated: “In the same way, nature, also, in its essence is an intellectual reality and is not sensible; the human spirit is an intellectual, not sensible reality.” (Some Answered Questions: 83)  Trying to prove the existence of the ether or any purely intellectual reality through the measurement of a physical apparatus will prove fruitless.  Yet such failure should not lead to the fallacy of believing that absence of proof is proof of absence.  It is like trying to prove the existence of a thought by measuring it with some sort of Geiger counter-like apparatus.  At best one does not capture the thought, which is a purely intellectual reality, but the effects or vibrations of that thought on the world.  Effects are signs of existence, as the painting is of the painter, not that existence in itself. Hence anything which creates effects must exist.  ‘Abdu’l-Baha explains: “For instance, the nature of ether is unknown, but that it existeth is certain by the effects it produceth, heat, light and electricity being the waves thereof. By these waves the existence of ether is thus proven.” (Baha'i World Faith: 341)

But all these levels of matter, this infinite depth of the universe, rests on one thing which never changes in nature.  The Master states: “The existence of living things signifies composition, and their death, decomposition. But universal matter and the elements do not become absolutely annihilated and destroyed.  No, their nonexistence is simply transformation.” (Some Answered Questions: 203-204)  We can ask: Is what the Master calls “ethereal matter,” “universal matter,” “the nature of ether”, the same thing as what physicists call zero-point energy?  I don’t know.  That will be a question which, I presume, spiritual science will answer.

’Abdu’l-Baha goes to present the idea that this one, universal matter specialized in its different aspects into the basic elements, and the infinite unities of form and substance, the B and the E joining and knitting together, gradually produced innumerable created things.  “It is necessary, therefore, that we should know what each of the important existences was in the beginning—for there is no doubt that in the beginning the origin was one: the origin of all numbers is one and not two. Then it is evident that in the beginning matter was one, and that one matter appeared in different aspects in each element. Thus various forms were produced, and these various aspects as they were produced became permanent, and each element was specialized. But this permanence was not definite, and did not attain realization and perfect existence until after a very long time. Then these elements became composed, and organized and combined in infinite forms; or rather from the composition and combination of these elements innumerable beings appeared.”

“This composition and arrangement, through the wisdom of God and His preexistent might, were produced from one natural organization, which was composed and combined with the greatest strength, conformable to wisdom, and according to a universal law.”  (Abdu'l-Baha, Some Answered Questions: 181)

Let’s return to the idea of an ether.  ‘Abdu’l-Baha says that ether is not a physical reality, but an intellectual one, so it cannot be detected by physical instruments.  Ether, then, is not in or a part of or even the physical foundation of physical space.   Perhaps it is something like a mental medium through which pass waves of thought. It is a non-localized, conceptual or thought-medium, an abstract space characterized not by physical relations but logical, rational ones.  To physical reality it would appear or be conceived as a void, but that is a product of reasoning from certain assumptions and beliefs that make thought itself somewhat unreal, a result only of chemical and neurological interactions.

‘Abdu’l-Baha calls the world of thought a “boundless sea.”  He goes on to state the relation between this “sea” of thought and the world of existence, saying “the effects and varying conditions of existence are as the separate forms and individual limits of the waves; not until the sea boils up will the waves rise and scatter their pearls of knowledge on the shore of life.” (The Secret of Divine Civilization: 109)

Ether, then, may, like concepts of space and time and other concepts of physics and science, indeed the whole domain of thought, be part not of the universe but of the cosmos.