Language and Thought in Spiritual Science

He Who is both the Beginning and the End, He Who is both Stillness and Motion, is now manifest before your eyes. Behold how, in this Day, the Beginning is reflected in the End, how out of Stillness Motion hath been engendered. This motion hath been generated by the potent energies which the words of the Almighty have released throughout the entire creation.

(Baha'u'llah, Gleanings from the Writings of Baha'u'llah: 168)

Today, the mind’s attention must be continuously bi-focal: it should preserve a complex identity, yet make room for a difference in that identity.  Thus the symbols describing how this "Man of Two Visions" (The Hidden Words #12 Persian) truly thinks in his maturity must have a static structural aspect and a dynamic process aspect.  These twin characteristics beget the laws of transformation.  All moves forward in any unfolding integral development, though each stage is also under the dominion of one aspect, one Name of God.  Knowledge is the cause of progress, so all progress is from a new Revelation of the knowledge of God.

In a resonating universe, any full truth is the union of metaphor and fact, which may be the confluence of metaphors, as things are the nexus of spiritual and material energies.  Now metaphorical truth is more suggestive than precise, evoking not explicating, exact but not exacting, and the historical movement of thought and language is from the former to the latter and back again on a higher turn of the spiral: effects precede causes in knowledge, mirroring that causes precede effects in being.  Such a truth paradigm maintains that all is potentially knowable because knowledge itself is an interconnected, complex and intricate web of analogical correspondences corresponding to the web of actual life.  Thus spiritual truth, which is “both the Beginning and the End” “both Stillness and Motion”, comes forth at the maturity of humankind.  The truths of the age of Him Who is the “Spirit of Truth” Who “will guide you into all truth” (King James Bible, John 16:13) is both infinitely suggestive and everlastingly creative, and singularly precise depending upon the context.  I mean that fact in one context is context itself in another.  The context is composed of a causal spiritual truth at the locus, or center, and the metaphorical truths of the material world that are its field of effects, its vibrating influence.

The finding in abstract space of the intellectual essence of things, the ding an sich,—which was the great work of the self-conscious individual that grew up within the Adamic cycle, especially after the Greek revolution in thinking associated with Plato and Aristotle as put forth in Eric Havelock’s groundbreaking Preface to Plato—makes room for great relational structures in thought that in language are indicated by analogies and other metaphors, the evidence of things unseen.

We are seeking in this age the general and specific laws of transformation, like E=mc².  But His laws and principles are to convert “satanic strength into heavenly power.” (Gleanings from the Writings of Baha'u'llah: 200)  Divine philosophy may include the “discovery of a radical approach to the transmutation of elements” (The Kitab-i-Aqdas: 250), but this greater alchemy of soul, the spiritual and sacred science, this science of the love of God, will renovate all the conditions of existence. 

Baha’u’llah’s spiritual principles and revealed truths are the foundation upon which human beings are constructing a new type of discourse which is neither merely perceptual and poetic nor only scientific and conceptual.  It joins and knits together spirit and matter, energy and form.  It is inspirational and motivating, and non-rational as a higher ratiocination. It is for revealing the divine.  Hence, we can roughly characterize it as revelatory.  It borders upon and sometimes spills over into language which the modern temper would call mystical, which grates harshly upon rationalist’s ears, but that is because it is trying to explicate a “mystic transformation” (The Kitab-i-Iqan: 156), a transformation so complete as to turn the base metal of human life into the golden age of humankind. This kind of language has been the lingua franca of spirit over centuries of expression.  Its piling up of emotionally-charged metaphors indicates that this is the kind of thing the mind comes up with when encountering something of overwhelming importance and power that empowers, when anyone speaks of high spiritual matters.

The symbolic union of the spiritual and the material in a single unifying discourse of Revelation needs a new logic of description to present its new objects of knowledge.  That is, the syntactical relations and contexts of language must illuminate the transmutations of being.  As the self-conscious individual that grew up within the Adamic cycle became aware of abstract objects in thought, so today, the Revelation of Baha’u’llah, awakening the divine within the human reality, reveals to that new Man spiritual objects of knowledge, because it opens vision to the placeless and timeless.  There is, therefore, also need of a new frame of discourse and a new vocabulary.

Such foundational work is involved in the birth of any science, let alone a new kind of science. This is science as Scientia.  It is the inventing of a language and perspective, of force finding form, which makes spiritual science possible.  Yet it is also the rebirth of an ancient divine philosophy in the modern materialist techo-world, the reintroduction of the sense of the sacred, and it is the addition of the sacred dimension to awareness that differentiates spiritual science from intellectual science as a knowledge domain.

As with any science there is need of both a fundamental coordinating principle, like that of evolution in biology, and operational principles of transformational relations that build into a mature body of knowledge as it explicates its realm of experience and perception.  For spiritual science this is the union of divine love and knowledge.  The unity of all things is, at one and the same time, the foundational coordinating principle, the essential relation, and the goal of divine philosophy.  “The most important principle of divine philosophy”, stated the Master, “is the oneness of the world of humanity, the unity of mankind, the bond conjoining East and West, the tie of love which blends human hearts.” (The Promulgation of Universal Peace: 31)  Similarly on the macroscale: “It will be demonstrated and become evident that the origin and outcome of phenomena are identical and that there is an essential oneness in all existing things. This is a subtle principle appertaining to divine philosophy and requiring close analysis and attention.” (Abdu'l-Baha, The Promulgation of Universal Peace:285)

But, equally as important as foundational abstract, structural and relational principles, new kinds of concepts must be presented in new lexical formulations and syntactical arrangements.  Intellections that only attempt to isolate the intellectual essence of something, or cognitions that statically capture, embalm, or fix in the hard amber of thought, the nature of something and then relate it through other abstract concepts to something else are residue of a once towering but now crumbling paradigm of knowing.

The concepts themselves must be dynamic; they must move, like pulsations of energy or “the water of life”, because they take on the characteristics of Spirit.  It is their divine origin and reality, their connection with the Names of God, that gives them life and motion as conduits for the Will and Mind of God, which is the true Origin of all creation. These are first known in the subtle intimations of the sacred heart.  Only the revealed Word can open our spiritual intelligence to this world, to “see” this Reality.

These living conceptions of spiritual energies flow and integrate, and in their range of integration show the limits of a domain.  They are concepts that unify and resonate to show how structure gets transformed into sequence by process and back again through the exchange not just of force and physical energies, but also what scientists call information, and at times by information alone: the kind of thing in homeopathy where healing takes place through an antidote that has nothing left of the original substance but the memory of it, the information of its past presence. These concepts are themselves complexes of movement issuing into larger complexes and combinations, which, if you will, leap and dance to an inner music and harmony.  Concepts that are not yet really concepts, but symbols, unities of life and experience, body and soul joined and knit together, not ghostly after-life things drained of all their earthy substance.  It is symbols of divine philosophy that in their most complex figuration demonstrate and show forth the reciprocal relations, the mutual-mirroring, between the three levels of creation, and between ontology, ethics, and epistemology, between human being, human doing, and human knowing.  These figurations will gradually unfold into coherent theory that shines forth the divine Spirit in all creative actions.  Let us look at a few examples of what I mean to understand something of their nature.

“We cannot segregate the human heart from the environment outside us and say that once one of these is reformed everything will be improved. Man is organic with the world. His inner life moulds the environment and is itself also deeply affected by it. The one acts upon the other and every abiding change in the life of man is the result of these mutual reactions.

No movement in the world directs its attention upon both these aspects of human life and has full measures for their improvement, save the teachings of Bahá'u'lláh.  And this is its distinctive feature.” (The Compilation of Compilations vol. I, p. 84-85)

“Such simultaneous processes of rise and of fall, of integration and of disintegration, of order and chaos, with their continuous and reciprocal reactions on each other, are but aspects of a greater Plan, one and indivisible, whose Source is God, whose author is Bahá'u'lláh, the theater of whose operations is the entire planet, and whose ultimate objectives are the unity of the human race and the peace of all mankind.” (Shoghi Effendi, The Advent of Divine Justice: 72-73)

“Thou hast asked regarding the subject of the return. Know thou that the end is like unto the beginning. Even as thou dost consider the beginning, similarly shouldst thou consider the end, and be of them that truly perceive. Nay, rather consider the beginning as the end itself, and so conversely, that thou mayest acquire a clear perception. Know thou moreover that every created thing is continually brought forth and returned at the bidding of thy Lord, the God of power and might.

“As to the Return, as God hath purposed in His sacred and exalted Tablets wherein He hath made this theme known unto His servants; by this is meant the return of all created things in the Day of Resurrection, and this is indeed the essence of the Return as thou hast witnessed in God's own days and thou art of them that testify to this truth.

“Verily God is fully capable of causing all names to appear in one name, and all souls in one soul. Surely powerful and mighty is He. And this Return is realized at His behest in whatever form He willeth.” (Baha'u'llah, Tablets of Baha'u'llah: 183)

"Should they attempt to conceal His light on the continent, He will assuredly rear His head in the midmost heart of the ocean and, raising His voice, proclaim: 'I am the lifegiver of the world!'... And if they cast Him into a darksome pit, they will find Him seated on earth's loftiest heights calling aloud to all mankind: 'Lo, the Desire of the world is come in His majesty, His sovereignty, His transcendent dominion!' And if He be buried beneath the depths of the earth, His Spirit soaring to the apex of heaven shall peal the summons: 'Behold ye the coming of the Glory; witness ye the Kingdom of God, the most Holy, the Gracious, the All-Powerful!'" (Baha’u’llah quoted by Shoghi Effendi, The World Order of Baha'u'llah: 108)

“When, however, thou dost contemplate the innermost essence of all things, and the individuality of each, thou wilt behold the signs of thy Lord's mercy in every created thing, and see the spreading rays of His Names and Attributes throughout all the realm of being, with evidences which none will deny save the froward and the unaware. Then wilt thou observe that the universe is a scroll that discloseth His hidden secrets, which are preserved in the well-guarded Tablet. And not an atom of all the atoms in existence, not a creature from amongst the creatures but speaketh His praise and telleth of His attributes and names, revealeth the glory of His might and guideth to His oneness and His mercy: and none will gainsay this who hath ears to hear, eyes to see, and a mind that is sound. (Abdu'l-Baha, Selections from the Writings of Abdu'l-Baha: 41)

“For it must be clearly understood, nor can it be sufficiently emphasized, that the conjunction of the resting-place of the Greatest Holy Leaf with those of her brother and mother incalculably reinforces the spiritual potencies of that consecrated Spot which, under the wings of the Báb's overshadowing Sepulchre, and in the vicinity of the future Mashriqu'l-Adhkar, which will be reared on its flank, is destined to evolve into the focal center of those world-shaking, world-embracing, world-directing administrative institutions, ordained by Bahá'u'lláh and anticipated by 'Abdu'l-Bahá, and which are to function in consonance with the principles that govern the twin institutions of the Guardianship and the Universal House of Justice.” (Shoghi Effendi, Messages to America,: 32)