What Am I Doing?

The glorious maturity of this world depends upon the realization of two things: the establishment of Universal Peace, and the discovery, or appearance of that hidden science which shall renovate all the conditions of existence.

(I Heard Him Say: Words of ‘Abdu’l-Baha as recorded by his Secretary Mirza Ahmad Sohrab: 38)

Scientific knowledge is the highest attainment upon the human plane, for science is the discoverer of realities. It is of two kinds: material and spiritual. Material science is the investigation of natural phenomena; divine science is the discovery and realization of spiritual verities. The world of humanity must acquire both. A bird has two wings; it cannot fly with one. Material and spiritual science are the two wings of human uplift and attainment. Both are necessary—one the natural, the other supernatural; one material, the other divine. By the divine we mean the discovery of the mysteries of God, the comprehension of spiritual realities, the wisdom of God, inner significances of the heavenly religions and foundation of the law.

(‘Abdu’l-Bahá, The Promulgation of Universal Peace: 138)

Recently, I was asked by a friend: “Why do you write what you write?”  It is a fair question and I have often found it difficult to answer quickly, because the prime areas of my interest are, well, pretty obscure to most.  So, after answering to the best of my ability the first question, a second equally legitimate question comes: “Why should anybody read that?”; or, “OK.  But how does that help anybody?”  Neither question is asked with any malice or attempt to dismiss what I am doing.  They are genuine efforts to understand me and my work.  I appreciate that.  But it is puzzling to many why anyone would pursue something that does not have the immediate and practical benefits of, say, fixing a broken faucet or motor, especially since there is little hope of making a living remuneration for the hours that I put in.  So why do it?  The short answer is: I feel called to do it. More quizzical looks.  It is not a fashionable reason or motivation.  So I am going to devote this long post to answering the question: What Am I doing?

In a nutshell, I am making an inquiry into some possible conditions for spiritual sciences.  I am following up ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s statement in the second quote above that science is of two kinds, material and spiritual.  Both, He says, are necessary.  The past four hundred years has been primarily devoted to bringing forth marvelous material sciences.  The past few decades have seen some scientists undertake a similar effort to discover spiritual realities and generate sciences of the spirit that explain and explicate them, albeit slowly because of, first, great resistance or crushing indifference from those committed to a materialist paradigm, but also from their looking in the wrong place for a true beginning.

I take a somewhat unorthodox view on sciences of the spirit, to say the least. My view hinges on the difference between “sciences of the spirit” and “spiritual sciences”.  The distinction is, for me, more than mere nuance, and certainly not semantic word-games.  It is the difference that makes all the difference.  While generating spiritual sciences does not require that the mind jettison everything about the structure of material science, it also does not mean that we can simply transfer wholesale the methods and approaches of material science to spirit and believe these will bring us all we can ever know of spirit.  Why?

Because the conditions for understanding spiritual realities and, therefore, for establishing spiritual sciences, are more than simply new theories, better experimental apparatus, and the verification of new facts gained from modifying the established paradigm of understanding.  Rather, a new set of assumptions about Reality and human nature, wider contexts and domains of knowledge that include the spiritual, newly awakened faculties of perception, a new language of communication, new practices of attaining knowledge, such as faith and vision, are needed.  In short, a new paradigm of human knowledge and understanding is required.  To establish spiritual sciences requires a revolution in humanity’s total world view.

Thus, for me, while sciences of the spirit can be conceived as new sciences within the existing paradigm of science, extensions, if you will, into the spiritual of the procedures of material science, spiritual sciences are new kinds of sciences.  (The phrase “spiritual science” was also used by Rudolf Steiner, founder of Anthroposophy and Waldorf Schools. Though there is some commonality between his conception of spiritual science and mine, there is an important difference.  I will not go into that here.  Perhaps a later post.)

If we read closely the quote from ‘Abdu’l-Baha about the two kinds of science He calls one the natural, the other supernatural; one material, the other divine.  That is, spiritual science itself is supernatural and not just what it is investigating.

What is a supernatural science?  It could be merely mental, for the mind is, strictly speaking, a supernatural phenomenon.  But I believe it is more than mental, for He further defines supernatural science as divine.  What is a divine science?  He goes on: divine science is the discovery and realization of spiritual verities…By the divine we mean the discovery of the mysteries of God, the comprehension of spiritual realities, the wisdom of God, inner significances of the heavenly religions and foundation of the law.

Are any spiritual sciences mentioned in the Bahá’i Writings?  I believe so.  In the second Valley of His Four Valleys, a valley devoted to “primal reason”, Baha’u’llah quotes these lines from a celebrated Persian poet: 

Wouldst thou that the mind should not entrap thee?

Teach it the science of the love of God!”

(Baha'u'llah, The Four Valleys: 52)

It seems this science is the means to mental health and progress, else the mind stops growing and gets entrapped in its own imaginings.  It is like alchemy, perhaps the first proto-science, which started out fine but got lost in its imaginings, as will any science which does not lead to God.  A bit more on alchemy below.

But the science of the love of God is more than a good psychology.  The science of the love of God may be the foundational science for all spiritual sciences.  I say this because of a phrase in the first opening quote—I know it is a pilgrim’s note and is not scripture so it must be taken as not necessarily His actual words.  That phrase is the discovery, or appearance of that hidden science which shall renovate all the conditions of existence.  Look at it again: a single science “will renovate all the conditions of existence.” That’s the kind of foundational DNA-like code of knowledge out from which can emerge different sciences, as the oak tree emerges, from trunk to twig to leaf, from the acorn because the entire code sequence to make an oak is in it.

A statement from the Master that qualifies as more scriptural than pilgrim’s notes gives support to this idea.  He is reported to have said: “In this century of the latter times Bahá'u'lláh has appeared and so resuscitated spirits that they have manifested powers more than human….Therefore, the question arises: How is this resuscitation to be accomplished?

“There are certain means for its accomplishment by which mankind is regenerated and quickened with a new birth. This is the second birth mentioned in the heavenly Books. Its accomplishment is through the baptism of the Holy Spirit. The resuscitation or rebirth of the spirit of man is through the science of the love of God. It is through the efficacy of the water of life. This life and quickening is the regeneration of the phenomenal world.” (Promulgation of Universal Peace: 277)  The bold-faced emphasis is, of course, mine.

I believe that some keys to the science of the love of God may be concealed within Baha’u’llah’s Tablet of Wisdom—Tablets of Baha’u’llah: 137-152—awaiting discovery.  It is in this tablet that He refers to the teachings of Hermes, or Idris, as that Manifestation of God is known in the Qur’an.  There He also praises Balinus (Apollonius of Tyana) as a “man of wisdom who became informed of the mysteries of creation and discerned the subtleties which lie enshrined in the Hermetic writings.” (Tablets of Baha'u'llah:148)  The scope of Hermes teachings is brought out in the footnote to that statement: “In one of His Tablets Bahá'u'lláh wrote: 'The first person who devoted himself to philosophy was Idris. Thus was he named. Some called him also Hermes. In every tongue he hath a special name. He it is who hath set forth in every branch of philosophy thorough and convincing statements. After him Balinus derived his knowledge and sciences from the Hermetic Tablets and most of the philosophers who followed him made their philosophical and scientific discoveries from his words and statements...' In the Qur'án, Sura 19, verses 57 and 58, is written: 'And commemorate Idris in the Book; for he was a man of truth, a Prophet; And we uplifted him to a place on high.' (Tablets of Baha’u’llah: 148)

Earlier in that same tablet Baha’u’llah wrote: “I will also mention for thee the invocation voiced by Balinus who was familiar with the theories put forward by the Father of Philosophy (Hermes) regarding the mysteries of creation as given in his chrysolite tablets, that everyone may be fully assured of the things We have elucidated for thee in this manifest Tablet, which, if pressed with the hand of fairness and knowledge, will yield the spirit of life for the quickening of all created things.” (Tablets of Baha'u'llah:147)  All this sounds to me very much like the kind of language revolving around the great science of the love of God.  The science of the love of God may be that fundamental scientific knowledge that “will yield the spirit of life for the quickening of all created things.”

Be that as it may, one of the effects of the appearance or discovery of this “hidden science” that “renovates all the conditions of existence”, that regenerates the phenomenal world because it resuscitates a human spirit entrapped in materialism, will be to cause the kind of rupture in human existence that occurred millennia ago when humanity burst out of its chrysalis of sensory knowledge into the world of intellectual knowledge.  This rupture was the conception—in the biological sense of conception—of science.  The story is told in the Judeo-Christian tradition through the Genesis story surrounding the figure of Adam, though secular thinkers like to ascribe the leap to the pre-Socratic Greeks, or the Egyptians, and so forth.  But such great ruptures can, for me, only occur through the creative Word of God, not intuitive leaps of human beings.

The first rational intellectual form that emerged from the “Adamic” mental revolution was philosophy to replace mythology.  It is from logical inquiry into the regularities of nature and humanity that all sciences have come.  We are passing through an even greater revolution today with the birth of spiritual man.  As intellectual philosophy was the birth of all rational inquiry—an endeavor extending over vast millennia that has culminated in the mansions of thought we now call modern experimental science—so the science of the love of God, a spiritual philosophy, will be the womb out from which will be born, in the coming centuries, powerful spiritually-driven inquiries into creation.

Now when the “mind” was born in that eponymous Garden with the naming of things it was not just a new knowledge, but also a new kind of knowledge, a kind of knowledge that could only be understood by “a new race of men” using newly awakened faculties.  The new knowledge was not just objective, but also subjective, even, we can make the argument, subjective for the first time in the sense of an individual “I” narrating its experiences to itself in an inner “space”.  It was not just conscious, but self-conscious.  Nothing like it had ever appeared before, but everything came from it.

Similarly today a new philosophy leads. In His Kitab-i-Aqdas, Baha’u’llah appointed two signs that indicate the maturity of humanity.  The note elucidating this statement says: “The first sign of the coming of age of humanity referred to in the Writings of Bahá'u'lláh is the emergence of a science which is described as that ‘divine philosophy’ which will include the discovery of a radical approach to the transmutation of elements.  This is an indication of the splendours of the future stupendous expansion of knowledge.” (The Kitab-i-Aqdas: 250)  This can be  alchemy.  But first is the divine alchemy of soul making I discussed last post.

We live in an entirely new day.  What does it require from us to live in the new reality?  ‘Abdu’l-Baha says that people “must be set completely free from their old patterns of thought…until the old ways, the old concepts, are gone and forgotten, this world of being will find no peace, nor will it reflect the perfections of the Heavenly Kingdom.” (Selections from the Writings of Abdu'l-Baha: 252)

Spiritual sciences will be built upon that foundation laid down by the new Revelation, and no other foundation.  Does not Baha’u’llah state: “Unveiled and unconcealed, this Wronged One hath, at all times, proclaimed before the face of all the peoples of the world that which will serve as the key for unlocking the doors of sciences, of arts, of knowledge, of well-being, of prosperity and wealth.” (Tablets of Baha'u'llah: 96)

As I see it, part of the revolution in humanity’s world-view, and an essential aspect of any inquiry into the science of the love of God, will be a new, deeper and broader perspective on causality, for all science must explain the coming into being of things.  While material science has got along quite nicely relying almost exclusively upon efficient causality—the linear, sequential, logico-empirical, left-brained thought so characteristic of the post-Renaissance—spiritual science emphasizes, I believe, the two causes that material science leaves out, formal cause and final cause, structure and purpose, ontos and telos.

The book I am currently piecing together is actually the first volume of a two volume study of the science of the love of God to provide a new cosmology.  Volume two is tentatively titled The Causes of Things.  It examines the Word of God as spiritual cause, the causer of causes—a phrase of Baha’u’llah’s which I have used in my previous books but will hope to define more precisely and use more comprehensively in that coming volume.

At this juncture I will only say that for me spiritual cause is beyond, before, and behind the four traditional causes—formal, final, efficient and material—that Aristotle laid out to explain the creation of phenomena.  Many others, including ‘Abdu’l-Baha, have employed Aristotle’s terminology to explain the creation of phenomena.  If one looks deeply into Aristotle’s discussion of the four causes, however, one can see implied a “causer of causes”.

Spiritual cause is the hidden field out from which the four causes of phenomena come forth, with which they remain connected, and through which they work.  Baha’u’llah says “the Word of God is the cause which hath preceded the contingent world.” (Tablets of Baha’u’llah:141)  Spiritual cause generates, supports, and makes the four causes work, much as the zero-point field does for all subatomic interactions of the physical world.  But spiritual cause, this field of interpenetrating spiritual energies, is prior in importance, though not in time, even to the zero-point field.  Quantum mechanics is turning the thought of physics toward the reality of a mental foundation to the physical universe, but even more refined than the domain of thought, which ‘Abdu’l-Baha called a “boundless sea”, is the kingdom of spirit.  It is to the spiritual level that we will try to penetrate, to become conscious of that which supports and gives life to everything.

These two volumes are the first of an envisioned five volumes titled collectively, Restoring the Transcendent.  Each volume is, even now, at some level of completion.  Besides the current book and the volume on causality, a third volume on history, titled Revelation and History: Axial Ages of Humanity’s Spiritual Evolution, is being written.  The last two volumes are The Loom of Civilization, a study of the construction of divine civilization, and The Coordinated Vision—a treatise of educational philosophy centered on religion, science and art as the three most powerful ways that humans acquire knowledge.  That final volume will complete the circle back to education that started with my first book, Renewing the Sacred: A New Vision of Education.  The purpose of all these works is the same as that stated by Francis Bacon in the preface of his Novum Organon, (New  Science): “I propose to establish progressive stages of certainty.”

‘Abdu’l-Baha said: “The sciences of today are bridges to reality; if then they lead not to reality, naught remains but fruitless illusion. By the one true God! If learning be not a means of access to Him, the Most Manifest, it is nothing but evident loss.

He went on to the same inquirer: “It is incumbent upon thee to acquire the various branches of knowledge, and to turn thy face toward the beauty of the Manifest Beauty, that thou mayest be a sign of saving guidance amongst the peoples of the world, and a focal centre of understanding in this sphere from which the wise and their wisdom are shut out, except for those who set foot in the Kingdom of lights and become informed of the veiled and hidden mystery, the well-guarded secret.” (Selections from the Writings of Abdu'l-Baha: 108)

When we discover that hidden science that will renovate all the conditions of existence, if we can penetrate to that “sphere from which the wise and their wisdom are shut out”, then we will have crossed what Nietzsche called “the rainbow bridge of concepts” that compose “the sciences of today”, that bridge leading from the land of shadows to the domain of light which is Reality.  There we will “become informed of the veiled and hidden mystery, the well-guarded secret.”

The continued evolution of humanity calls for a new state of heart and mind and a new way of looking at things.  I am attempting to show only some of the features of what that may look like.  By definition, whatever I may discover in this work must, I freely admit, be only partial and incomplete, often imprecise in thought and clumsy in expression. That is in the nature of first attempts, and there are few precedents. I take no credit for results, only the effort.  Only a fool would believe he has done anything in this arena by his own making.  If one wishes to help discover that hidden science which shall renovate all the conditions of existence, it is necessary to be led by greater Intelligence, by light up ahead not behind, by illumination from above and beyond.

That is what I am doing now, and, God willing, shall be doing till the inner lights fade and finally go out.  I ask for your prayers and support.