Reflections After a Few Days with the Grandchildren

Whosoever has lost himself has found the universe and the inhabitants thereof. Whosoever is occupied with himself is wandering in the desert of heedlessness and regret. The "master-key" to self-mastery is self-forgetting. The road to the palace of life is through the path of renunciation. (‘Abdu’l-Baha, Star of the West, vol. 17, no. 2, p. 348

My wife and I had a great time spending a few days with the grandchildren, Elani and Aman.  The ones in the picture above.  They worked their usual magic, simultaneously exhilarating and exhausting their grandparents.  But what a circus ride they provide.  After recovering my strength and my normal heart rhythm I began thinking of how they live their day, and what it all means for “education.”

Small children, being not yet socialized and possessing no innate morality, only moral potential, are nothing but curiosity and questions. They are anarchic little bundles of energy with no set purpose, no goals, or final outcomes in their sights.  They move from activity to activity as the spirit or someone else moves them.  They live and learn, learn and live in an eternal present.  Society demands that they be turned into social beings.  But training of this sort seems to mean to prune and squash their great forces of spirit into an effective citizenry.  I know these conditioning actions must go on.  But I will miss them after the conditioning has done its work. 

For, they are powerfully creative.  They learn in great gulps and huge bites.  They ask inappropriate questions, make embarrassing faux pas’s that make their wide-eyed, dumbfounded parents blurt out: “Kids!”—as I did as a parent. (Grandparents seem a lot more tolerant and amused.)   Children are the models of how humans really learn, of how we must upset before we can reset.  And there is no more genuinely subversive activity against a status quo entrenched in its assumptions, against all cramped orthodoxies and tyrannies of mind, than a simple question.  And, yes, in adolescents much of this questioning is incoherent or badly articulated and thus carries the threat of violence, for without voice, with no one to hear their call, then rebellion and aggression, active or passive, is the only course of action left.  But this is also because it is so strongly felt; because conflict and competition, striving against someone or something, whatever its destructive ends, is always the better alternative to fending for oneself alone.  If it is the only choice, punishment is usually preferable to neglect.  To ask questions is the right of everyone.  Children know this in their tissues, not yet their minds.  I mean they know this because they don’t yet know any better, or, maybe I should say, know any worse. 

            Because of bad conditioning that averts eyes and minds from the essential questions, many older students have been deprived of the use of their inherent power of understanding.  They have little faith, poor vision, dammed up creativity, no reflection.  They have no opportunity to really question and find their answers.  There is always another math test to study for, another party to anxiously groom for.   

For people of any age, education is to discover their value as human beings.  It is emotionally driven at first by heightened and intense feelings of insecurity that generate the energies of risk.  In today’s education, however, as Gardner points out: “…neither teachers nor students are willing to undertake ‘risks for understanding’; instead, they content themselves with safer ‘correct-answer compromises.’  Under such compromises, both teachers and students consider the education to be a success if students are able to provide answers that have been sanctioned as correct.  Of course, in the long run, such a compromise is not a happy one, for genuine understandings cannot come about so long as one accepts ritualized, rote, or conventionalized performances.” (Gardner: The Unschooled Mind: 150)               

Piaget believed that “…to understand is to discover, or reconstruct by rediscovery.”  Understanding is a process of continual transformation, and, therefore, it has characteristics similar to the poetic invention.  It both unfolds from within and assimilates from without and transforms both in the process.  But, again, with the sacred we are in a different kind of learning environment. 

            We know that the sacred cannot be taught; only awakened.  It is already there, because kids know who God is.  They know who God is because He is with them, right at the inner surface of their intelligence.  Most adults have layers of conditioned sediment in the way.  There are two stories about children and God that I love.

First: a young couple bring home a new baby and introduce him to their four-year old, hoping that there will not be any great outbursts of jealousy.  Over the next few days, they notice the older child going into the baby’s room.  Finally, one day they stand outside the door and hear her say to her new brother: “Brother, please tell me about God, I’m starting to forget.” 

The other story is about the child leaning intently over the picture he is drawing.  His teacher asks him: “Johnny, what are you drawing?”  Johnny replied, matter-of-factly: “I am drawing a picture of God.”  His teacher, being an adult, said: “But no one knows what God looks like.”  Without turning his head, or stopping even for an instant to consider this pitiable creature’s perplexity, Johnny triumphantly announced: “They will when I get done.”  I bet God laughed and winked His approval.

            Spiritual education is to undertake the risk of building a new culture of learning.  I almost would call it a kid’s culture of learning, because such an environment is engaging the students in the process of their own learning and transformation and children do this automatically.  They explore, openly and with tenacity, the spiritual dimension, either to bring forth their higher spiritual aspect, or the spiritual aspect of the world.  The spirit being everywhere at once, either direction leads to a common center.

            Spiritual education says that the first and essential transmission is the gradual transfer from teacher to student not of knowledge, but of responsibility for learning, and that learning is built around the fundamental questions.  Some call it “learning how to learn”, but I believe there is more fundamental phrase than that.  In my mind, learning how to learn is a great step but only a step toward the real goal: educating how to educate. 

            All this is fine.  But it is also adult-speak.  And all the theory and big words are nothing compared to running into the schoolyard to see them one last time before you depart for home, having them spot you, squeal “Grandpa!” with surprise, bolt disobediently from the line entering school as the bell rings, and jump without any inhibition into your arms.  One of the top five moments of my life, no matter what else happens. 

What my grandchildren boisterously enabled me to recall is the sheer fun that life should be and that tremendous stores of energy are waiting to be used so that they can be replenished.  Social mistakes are made—taking a flying leap onto grandpa’s back while he is sitting on the floor being one of them—but they are correctable, especially if you laugh through the pain.  But “spiritual mistakes” is something of an oxymoron where children are concerned.  And they are looking for an answering joy, a little anarchy, a soothing stroke of the head as they fall asleep, an approving nod and a “great job!” exclamation, and heaps of love.  My grandchildren are lucky to have two parents who give them more than enough of those essential requirements.  We never lose those requirements.  They are at least as important as enough to eat.

The Birth of the Ego and Morality

Once one has read through the Old Testament from this point of view, the entire succession of works becomes majestically and wonderfully the birth pangs of our subjective consciousness.  No other literature has recorded this absolutely important event at such length and with such fullness.

(Julian Jaynes, The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

p. 312-313)

All spiritual perception begins with the Messengers of God articulating new dimensions and perspectives on the spiritual world.  Spiritual perception gets turned into human learning, which can block the acceptance of deeper spiritual perception.  And it is spiritual perception that opens up vast new horizons for human consciousness.

Western consciousness has been described as the result of two main influences, called the Hebraic and the Hellenic, the Hebrews and the Greeks.  The religious or Hebraic consciousness is based on faith and certain kind of hearing.  It is the foundation of divine knowledge.  The scientific or Greek consciousness is based on “rational” knowing and a certain kind of seeing, which is the basis of human learning.  Jaynes writes, correctly, that: “the more secular developments of the last three millennia are related to their emergence from a different mentality.  I am thinking of the history of logic and conscious reasoning from the Greek development of Logos to modern computers…” (The Origins of Consciousness:319)

Jaynes also asserts: “The coming of consciousness can in a certain vague sense be construed as a shift from an auditory to a visual mind.” (The Origins of Consciousness:269)   But here Jaynes is equating consciousness with the Hellenic mind, and the auditory with the Hebraic.  This perspective is typical of the secular way of thought that dominates our consciousness, but it leaves out the sacred experience which, as our leading quote says, always leads in the birth of human subjective consciousness.

Let us ask: What is the criterion used to decide when and where human mental evolution consciousness began and grew?  We are taught that "rational" consciousness began pretty much with early Greek thinkers, but from the religious Hebraic perspective one could say consciousness began with Adam’s naming things in the garden.  This is a mythical account of the birth of conscious intellection, of seeing the physical universe as separate and objective from oneself.  It is the birth of mind as a thinking agent thinking about the world, and the establishment of an interior intellectual universe through the naming of things.  Thus, saying the name brings the thing to the mind even when it is not physically present.          

Later, with Abraham, a unique consciousness began; that of faith and moral self-consciousness.  I mean that with Abraham there is a two-fold development: first, toward, a deepening of true self -consciousness subjectivity; second, the development of ego-consciousness.  Paradoxically, this is a separation both from God and from Nature, making the human soul in its two conditions of eternal and contingent.  Let me explain.

The Bible says that “faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” (The Book of Romans 10:17)  ‘Abdu’l-Bahá echoes St. Paul when He says that “the voice of God hath made thine ears to hear.” (Tablets of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. V.1:132)  

The opening of both the dimension of faith and ego-consciousness by Abraham (Genesis chapter 22) was based on a new development in consciousness of God, namely, obedience to the inward “hearing” of the Voice of God’ and knowing it to be the Voice of the Divine and not a projection of human subjectivity.  It is what Walter Ong in his book, The Presence of the Word, would call “the interiority of consciousness.” 

This originating “event” of faith by Abraham, the encounter with God through His Voice and Abraham’s absolute obedience to this voice in defiance of all human laws and social and ethical principles brought the light of faithfulness into human experience.  This light, also, however, creates the shadow of faithlessness and this contrast on the human plane makes the human individuality a moral entity.  Now the soul has a new dimension of moral choice.  That is, the moral choice is not just to obey or disobey the outer social law.  Now the soul has an inner existential choice, to obey the Voice of God or the voice of itself, and to choose God, as Abraham did, may oppose the whole order of human laws and customs.  This is individuality. 

The consequence of this new choice was the birth of the individual ego, the analog “I” of the higher selfhood, the dark shadow of the light of the higher nature.  The ego is the subjective consciousness whose “mind” is the shadow of the ideal self, but which is also an objective self to the inner eternal self; for we must objectify ourselves in order to create a new subject with its own subjectivity.  This subjective development was unknown to the early Greeks.  Jaynes remarks: “Iliadic men did not have subjectivity as do we; he had no awareness of his awareness of the world, no internal mind-space to introspect upon.” (Origins of Consciousness: 75)

Thus with Abraham is the beginning in human psychology of introspection, subjectivity and the like, for it is the creation of that interior space inhabited by a “living” person in relation with himself, because in a new relation with God. The ego is an internal mind-space that can hear either God, which is its own higher self, or itself.  The difference is that the eternal self may hear the Word of God directly as a full existential resonant actuality, but we can only overhear ourselves, the inner chatter that we call subjectivity.  But, again, the birth of this subjective, narratizing self makes disobedience to God now possible, as law makes the criminal.  For before there was law, there was only action, neither right or wrong.  The law, by deciding what is right, also defines wrong.

Now it is with this Abrahamic event, I believe, that an ego-consciousness passed out from its embryo to experience itself as distinct and separate and different from the unconscious selfhood it was before and overcome the psychic drag back into it.  Only now can a conscious inner, individual self be formed that stands entirely on its own.  Once this core idea of self is established, this personality, this stranger within, as Baha’u’llah calls him, then related ideas, beliefs, and images begin to constellate around it which seem to be consistent with each other.  The birth of the individual ego, that self-conscious individual subjective selfhood, now can narratize purely interiorized thoughts, the abstractions which cannot be seen except by the intellect.  Narratize means organize abstractions as intellectual objects of knowledge in themselves.  Adam opened the world to intellectual apprehension, but Abraham opened the inner world to intellectual apprehension so a purely inner self could be built.  How is this done? 

This process occurs because the self-center acts as a magnet on the disparate thoughts, images and feelings swirling around it in the general human space which it captures and brings into its orbit.  In this way a reflecting ego having cognizance of itself emerges at the center of its own consciousness.  This rational self-conscious ego can now set up both itself  and human learning in competition with the Divine Voice for the attention of the individual.  Only there is this difference in their temper.  The ego’s voice is “legion” and is a “loud roaring” while the divine voice is the “still, small voice.”  Whereas the ego’s response to the Voice of God is: “Who are you?”  The eternal self responds with: “Here am I!”  

            But, finally, because there is competition with the Voice of God there is now also guilt for breaking the new internal covenant.  Before there may have been right and wrong actions, but the criteria were ethical and behaviorist only.  But now, with the self as a conceptualized entity, something one can “see” in an imaginary “space”, right and wrong becomes a moral question of divine or human authority right and wrong get tangled up with new ideas of personal intent.  Guilt is now possible, for guilt cannot be before there is the sense that one’s soul is one’s own as a self-consistent being maintained by one’s own effort.  Only with this internal development and sense of personal responsibility to respond in some manner to the voice calling one to faith, can feelings of guilt, unworthiness and remorse occur.  “One has to have an analog “I” surveying a mind-space to so see.” (Origins of Consciousness:296)    

A Heartfelt Look

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;--
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

William Wordsworth: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood 

Children do see the world as Wordsworth describes, and as he himself did as a child.  Great poets keep that freshness of perception well into their adult years.  Extraordinary poets, like Milton and Blake in English literature, never lose it.  It is the kind of perception I mean when I talk about spiritual perception.  It is a form of perception originating in the heart.  Wordsworth himself alludes to this in the closing lines of the same poem:

Thanks to the human heart by which we live,

Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,

To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

Scientist and priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote early last century: “The time has come to realize that an interpretation of the universe—even a positivist one—remains unsatisfying unless it covers the interior as well as the exterior of things; mind as well as matter.” (The Phenomenon of Man:35-36).  But to see as the poet and the poetic scientist saw means to perceive through the proper organs of perception, else the reality is not seen, and not being seen is thought not to exist.  Bahá’u’lláh writes: "O servants! Eyes are needed if one is to see, and ears, if one is to hear. Whoso in this blessed Day hath not heard the divine call hath indeed no ear. By this is not meant that bodily ear that is perceived by the eye. Open your inner eye, that ye may behold the celestial Fire, and listen with the ear of inner understanding, that ye may hear the delightsome words of the Beloved." (The Tabernacle of Unity:80)

This is the level of the rhapsodic intelligence, the ecstatic mind, the enlightened heart.  There is not, except in a dichotomous world, an emotional mind and a rational mind, making the emotional by definition irrational and by implication less intelligent.  Their union is where real wisdom is manifest, where a poetics of knowledge and sacred science begins.  Here inspiration flows freely and certainty is known: the perennial and the novel are present.  Here the human intelligence enters an impersonal dimension of pre-established universal harmony.  Whenever the human intelligence catches some glimpse of this, or feels it in some powerful way, a great energy is released and one feels caught up in something greater than oneself.  This experience does not bring us down to Reality, but uplifts us to It.  We see the world “apparelled in celestial light.”  We “behold the celestial Fire”,  “hear the delightsome words of the Beloved”, experience "thoughts too deep for tears."

To achieve a spiritual perception of all things requires a new state of mind, a blending of mind and heart in a higher relationship.  It means to advance into a unified consciousness; the two become one, where mind and heart are not intellect and emotion, but the spiritual intelligence.  To describe this new power of perception as a new state of mind is serviceable at best, because we have no similar phrase like a new state of heart.  To indicate this sea-change in the human intelligence we use phrases like transformation of soul.  This is because things are held together at the soul-level, for it is there within the untapped potentials of the human soul that unities of a higher order reside waiting to be manifestly connected with the inner realities of creation.  Either by mind or heart, thought or feeling, through science or religion, one can first connect with and engage the spiritual. It is the heart that often leads the way, for while the mind knows and comprehends indirectly via thoughts and ideas, the heart understands through direct perception. But their harmonious interaction is the manifestation of the spiritual intelligence.

The heart is the lover, our sense of belonging with the universe, a feeling of empathy with all things, an identifying with the other, not just viewing it.  Love is the one and fundamental substance of the universe, what makes it into a creation, and the remover of all subjective distance.  Mind is order and form perceived objectively out there or in here, but the perceiver is viewing.  It is our sense of separation and objectivity, and when mixed with awe and dread, even alienation.  The spiritual intelligence is both of these together; their union, yet separation, at the highest levels of meaning, knowing and loving, substance and form.  This is the union of opposites making the "thing" whole or holy.

And what is going on within us during these “moments.”  The authors of Heartmath state: ‘According to our studies, at those elusive moments when we transcend our ordinary performance and feel in harmony with something else—whether it’s a glorious sunset, inspiring music, or another human being—what we’re really coming into sync with is ourselves….we’re at our optimal functioning capacity.” (Heartmath:39)

A brilliant philosopher calls this consciousness the “numinous state of mind’ and describes how to achieve it: “This mental state is perfectly sui generic and irreducible to any other; and therefore, like every absolutely primary and elementary datum, while it admits of being discussed, it cannot be strictly defined.  There is one way to help another to an understanding of it.  He must be guided and led on by consideration and discussion of that matter through the ways of his own mind, until he reach a point at which ‘the numinous’ in him perforce begins to stir, to start into life and into consciousness.  We can cooperate in this process by bringing before his notice all that can be found in other regions of the mind, already known and familiar, to resemble, or again to afford some special contrast to, the particular experience we wish to elucidate.  Then we must add: ‘This X of ours is not precisely this experience, but akin to this one and the opposite of that other.  Cannot you realize for yourself what it is?’  In other words our X cannot, strictly speaking, be taught, it can only be evoked, awakened in the mind; as everything that comes ‘of the spirit’ must be awakened.” (Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy:46) 

 Sociologist Andrew Greeley wrote: “An experience of the sacred orders the world because it not only provides a channel for man to come into contact with the really real, the numinous; it also enables him to share in the work of ordering reality.” (Unsecular Man: 167) 

Numinous consciousness, ecstatic reason, the spiritual intelligence—all names for the same state--is, I believe, our first consciousness, which is a consciousness of God and the sacred.  In children and primitives the sacred provokes an inchoate stirring of powerful feelings.  It is urgent, active, compelling to action, alive.  But with the development of the “rational” powers of the mind numen becomes nomen, power becomes a named power.  With naming comes power to channel to some extent this transcendent power, to let it flow through one’s being to become the gradual unfolding of the constituent elements of one body of experience.  These higher reaches of thought are essentially mystical, though the child inhabits them naturally, or, better, they inhabit him until overlaid with sediments of human learning.  The Sacred enters our tissues, rearranging atoms and molecules and magnetically charging our cells with love and knowledge.  Children have the sacred intelligence in abundance.  Perhaps Jesus had this in mind when He said in words I’ve quoted before: "Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” (The Book of Matthew, 18:3)  We need joy to approach the sacred, or the vibrations of its visitation will break us apart.

Spiritual Perception

Beware lest human learning debar thee from Him Who is the Supreme Object of all knowledge, or lest the world deter thee from the One who created it and set it upon its course.  Tear asunder the veils of human learning lest they hinder thee from Him Who is My Name, the Self-Subsisting.

(Baha’u’llah: The Summons of the Lord of Hosts: 56)

Divine education is built upon spiritual not sensory or intellectual perception.  The topic of spiritual perception is important.  I believe that there are two forms of spiritual perception, one primary, real and true, the other derived from the first, and though good, is also the various forms of human learning that Baha’u’llah warns us against becoming attached to, for these can obscure the first.            
            The different kinds of human or intellectual learning derived from original spiritual perception are available to anyone.  One kind sees creation as a kind of generalized image of a creator, the varied manifestation of invisible but intellectually perceptible forces which have physical counterparts or embodiments.  Much of great philosophy, especially mystical and Platonic-inspired philosophy, falls into this category. 

All of us know deeply spiritual people of this kind, and they are to be honored and learned from.  They provide a growing body of philosophical and mystical insights and reflections that help us intellectually understand spirituality. But this kind of spiritual perception, which I will call the philosophical, is built upon perceiving the world of thought-forms which are themselves reflections of deeper spiritual realities.  This traditional form of philosophizing is returning, as within certain schools of psychological inquiry—usually associated with or inspired by Jung--spiritual forms are taken to be the archetypes at the biological level of human intelligence. As the views and experiments of quantum mechanics and String Theory gain wider acceptance and appeal, the spiritual is seen as the mental foundation of the physical universe.  In today’s world, the advances of science provide one means for many to search out spiritual realities.     

Within human culture, spirituality maintains a presence as fuel for our higher imaginative expressions.  I mean that spirituality feeds the imagination by providing themes for art, connecting the mind and heart not to faith but to the fabulous, because the connection is not to an objective world of spiritual realities but to the subjective world of dreams, desires and fantasies.  These are sometimes taken to be spiritual, but they stem from the wrong kind of understanding of spiritual realities, one which sees them as spectral will-o-the-wisps which stir up a froth of blurred inspiration.

When spirituality is perceived as only part of culture, rather than its source, humans lose their moral grounding and purpose, because they lose touch with the moral aspects of the Sacred.  For culture in all its forms and varieties, in its life and institutions, is concerned with the temporal and material realization of values.  This does not mean that it is solely concerned with these things, but that it can only ever realize them conceptually, imaginatively, and materially. 

Thus, another form of human learning derived from the spiritual dimension is the moral. Ethics and morals quickly degenerate whenever the moral sense gets subordinated to the imaginative drive of the aesthetic sense.  Subordination often provokes a reaction, or, better, overreaction, as those parts of culture dominated by the legalistically conceptual turn morals into iron principles of behaviour to get the culture back in line, but which itself so often degenerates into governing the herd by an educated priestly class of moralists. 

There is yet another kind of spiritual insight that is really another form of human learning, namely, the religious.  In this case, the mind denies the new spiritual Reality expressed as a new revelation because the heart denies the authority of the new Revelator.  It does so from attachment to an earlier Revelator.  This attachment to earlier religion prevents them from perceiving His new manifest Reality. Bahá’u’lláh states in this regard: “Verily they failed to recognize the Point of the Bayan, for had they recognized Him they would not have rejected His manifestation in this luminous and resplendent Being. And since they fixed their eyes on names, therefore when He replaced His Name 'the Most Exalted' by 'the Most Glorious' their eyes were dimmed.” (The Tablets of Bahá’u’lláh:185)        

Thus philosophical, scientific, artistic, moral, and religious forms of human knowledge can in themselves all be parts of that education that “deprives” people of that which they “inherently possess.”  This is so because, though all learning is to be prized, and the exponents of such learning are to be honored, there are, nevertheless, inherent restrictions limiting what the finite human mind can comprehend by itself of an infinite divine Revelation.  There are also limitations upon what techne can accurately embody of what the mind perceives.  Unless the mind is energized, illumined and even formed by new Revelation there is no way that it can recognize the Word of God Itself and comprehend that a new Divine Word has appeared both in human and verbal Form.  This recognition and comprehension is the foundation of true spiritual perception, and the source of what I am calling sacred science and knowledge which are the content of divine education.  Barring this infusion of divine energy and knowledge, the human mind can only see reflections, semblances, analogies, and traditional images and invented symbols.  It does not have direct perception of spiritual reality.  Every human knowledge may be a path leading to true perception and knowledge, but it is not that true knowledge.

             Spirituality is not just moral rules, imaginative stories, philosophical insights or eschatological beliefs.  It is neither a conceptual nor an imaginative construction.  Rather, it is first and essentially our mystical connection with the Creator, because human consciousness is rooted in a powerful sense of the sacred.  We are humans, finally, because we can recognize supernatural realities, not because we can invent them.  We have spiritual perception not because we are imaginative and rational beings but because we are spiritual ones.

In its essence spiritual knowledge is wisdom, and wisdom is the proper ordering of things, the kind of understanding that lives in human consciousness at a far deeper level than does imaginative and intellectual understanding, for wisdom is the long, slow, pulsations of the perennial mind, the still waters that run deep.  Bahá’u’lláh identifies the source of wisdom as divine Revelation when He writes:” Above all else, the greatest gift and the most wondrous blessing hath ever been and will continue to be Wisdom.  It is man’s unfailing Protector. It aideth him and strengtheneth him.  Wisdom is God’s Emissary and the Revealer of His Name the Omniscient.  Through it the loftiness of man’s station is made manifest and evident.  It is all-knowing and the foremost Teacher in the school of existence.  It is a Guide and is invested with high distinction.  Thanks to its educating influence earthly beings have become imbued with a gem-like spirit which outshineth the heavens.” (The Tablets of Bahá’u’lláh p.66)
            Intellectual knowledge and human learning have brought marvelous advances to human civilization.  But their very success has brought about a spiritual myopia where “the veils of human learning and false imaginings have prevented their eyes from beholding the splendour of the light of His countenance.” (The Tablets of Bahá’u’lláh p. 240-241)
             “How shall we attain the reality of knowledge?” asks ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. He answers: “By the breaths and promptings of the Holy Spirit which is light and knowledge itself.  Through it the human mind is quickened and fortified into true conclusions and perfect knowledge.” (Foundations of World Unity p.47).    Hence Baha’u’llah writes: “We beseech God to strengthen thee with His power, and enable thee to recognize Him Who is the Source of all knowledge that thou mayest detach thyself from all human learning, for, ’what would it profit any man to strive after learning when he hath already found and recognized Him Who is the Object of all knowledge.’  Cleave to the Root of Knowledge, and to Him Who is the Fountain thereof, that thou mayest find thyself independent of all who claim to be well versed in human learning, and whose claim no clear proof, nor the testimony of any enlightening book, can support.” (Gleanings from the Writings of Baha’u’llah:176)

I take this statement not as a call to join a religion, but a call to establish divine education.

             

Reading Our Creation

Even as He hath revealed: ‘We will surely show them Our signs in the world and within themselves.’ Again He saith: ‘And also in your own selves: will ye not, then, behold the signs of God?’  In this connection, He Who is the eternal King hath spoken: ‘He hath known God who hath known himself.’

(Gleanings from the Writings of Baha'u'llah, p. 177)

            The whole cosmos is constructed symbolically.  Symbols are the language of spiritual understanding, the primary tool for the communication of divine mysteries, a bridging device linking the concrete and material with the intangible and spiritual, a tool to facilitate spiritual transformation by evoking a transcendental experience.  Symbols enable the mind and heart to discern the hidden reality in the manifest one, for the manifest is the outer form of the hidden.  A symbol exists when the use of a term for one thing to describe another because of a similarity between them or between their relations to other things can be established.  For example, “He is a lion” indicates the same quality of courage in man and beast.

            The signs of God are manifest in three “places”: within the written Revelation, which is the archetypal Source of these signs; within the human reality as our powers, qualities and characteristics; within Nature as the visible created world of things.  Symbolic thinking perceives a correspondence of the signs of God simultaneously in Revelation, in humanity and in Nature.  A symbol is the connection within the human intelligence of a sign of God in its different levels of manifestation.  Abdu’l-Baha, following traditional theology in seeing the relation between Revelation and Creation through the metaphor of two Books, the verbum scriptum and the verbum factum, writes: “There are two Books: one is the Book of creation and the other is the written Book.  The written Book consisteth of the heavenly Books which are revealed to the Prophets of God and have issued forth from the lips of His Manifestations.  The Book of creation is the preserved Tablet and the outspread Roll of existence.  The Book of creation is in accord with the written Book.” (Quoted in Nakhjavani: Response:13)

            These books are in accordance because: “The spiritual world is like unto the phenomenal world. They are the exact counterpart of each other. Whatever objects appear in this world of existence are the outer pictures of the world of heaven.” (Promulgation of Universal Peace:10)  Baha’u’llah further elaborates on this thought when He writes: “All these signs (of God) 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)  In another place Baha’u’llah asserts: "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."(Tablets of Baha'u'llah, p. 141-142)  Would I love to be able to do that!

           The point is that we are endowed with what Baha’u’llah called Two Visions, or as Northrop Frye suggests a “Double vision.”  By these phrases is not meant that we see a double image of a thing, as someone who has been struck in the eye and his retina cannot properly focus.  What is meant, rather, is that we can see the inner, spiritual and the outer material forms of a thing, so that we may create the symbol which is the basis of human knowledge.  The counterparts accord not only by themselves but also within the human intelligence, because all the same signs of God written in Revelation and appearing in creation also exist within the human soul.  All true symbols are built upon the "triple" correspondence of the signs of God in Revelation, humanity, and Nature, and reading the divine signs correctly generates genuine human knowledge.

           Thus, without the spiritual dimension of Revelation human “knowledge” is limited to the senses, to logical or provable ideas, and to what the human imagination can invent.  The triple correspondence is reduced to a double one of man and nature.  This can lead us into a wild thicket of confusing analogies when we attempt to perceive the spiritual world.  For to see the spiritual requires seeing with our spiritual faculties and the revealed Word when interpreted by the Revealer can alone tell us what we are looking at.  Otherwise we tend to think the spiritual world is some vast phantasmagoria of images, or the projection of subconscious longings.  Once we do recognize Revelation, which is the guide to our seeing the true meaning of all outer signs and symbols, then the invisible becomes visible, faith turns into vision and knowledge of spiritual reality is possible by direct perception.

           The cosmos is both a spiritual and a material universe in the simple accordance of invisible spiritual reality to its visible material picture.  Bahá’u’lláh, for example, when discussing the two kinds of stars that appear with the birth of every Manifestation of God (e.g. the celestial star followed by the Zoroastrian Magi with the birth of Christ) and which herald His coming says, too, that there is also a heavenly spiritual star (e.g. a forerunner of a greater manifestation, as John the Baptist was of Christ) that simultaneously appears.  He says: “These twofold signs, in the visible and the invisible heaven, have announced the Revelation of each of the Prophets of God, as is commonly believed.” (The Kitab-i-Iqan:62)

           Within the universe of human self-knowledge a symbol is created when the intelligence connects in thought and image the different realms of human experience, the transcendent and the temporal, the sacred and the profane.  It makes the transcendent less than transcendent, but, too, makes the sensible more than sensible by turning both into thought.  Symbol brings the human reality into relation not with the higher Presence directly, but with the reflection, the image, of the Presence.  In this way the heart feels something of the sacred power of the Presence and responds with longing for the transcendent, turning it into religion.  Such thought is attempting to do what Coleridge described as trying to find “a symbolical language for something within that forever and always existed.”  But, too, the symbol stands for Nature because we cannot directly connect with the natural, either.  Rather we find the corresponding quality of a natural thing within us and recreate it within our mind and heart by our thinking and imagining powers as a thought and image, turning it into science and art.

           The cosmological spiritual and material correspond in the human reality to our spiritual and material natures.  Here things get a bit more complicated for we must introduce the idea of free will and choice, and their unhappy associates, contradiction and opposition.  This point is crucial for divine education.  It gets sticky because what appears in one nature is not directly manifest in the other as an “outer picture”, as it is with Revelation and creation.  Rather, within the human reality the sign of God in one nature has its “opposing” counterpart in the other, and the wise person is the one who has learned to read the one by the other by inversion.

           I mean that within the moral world of choice, symbols have a light and a dark aspect, benefic and malefic function, because we are both angels and animals, light and shadow.  Thus knowledge is contrasted with ignorance, good with evil, justice with tyranny, and both these “qualities” are possible for us to manifest.  Thus the scriptures of the “western” religions will speak metaphorically, meaning in symbols, of the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden opposed by the Tree of Zaqqum, or the infernal Tree mentioned in the Quran, Surih 37, and about which ‘Abdu’l-Baha says in regards to child education: “to train the character of humankind is one of the weightiest commandments of God, and the influence of such training is the same as that which the sun exerteth over tree and fruit. Children must be most carefully watched over, protected and trained; in such consisteth true parenthood and parental mercy.

           "Otherwise, the children will turn into weeds growing wild, and become the cursed, Infernal Tree, knowing not right from wrong, distinguishing not the highest of human qualities from all that is mean and vile; they will be brought up in vainglory….” (The Compilation of Compilations vol. I, p. 263)

           However if the angelic aspect is trained to rule the animal aspect the child comes to know that: “He hath known God who hath known himself.”

           

           

           

The Power of Example

Spirit is reality, and when the spirit in each of us seeks to join itself with the Great Reality, it must in turn give life.

(‘Abdu’l-Bahá in London:107)

We all know of the power of example, of the influence of any life lived by principle, conviction, and faith.  These are powerful in part because they demonstrate to our children those “wonders with which God hath willed to entrust your souls.”  Only real, living examples make moral principles real.  To grow spiritually, our children are in need of such models of spiritual excellence, as much as they need models of great statesmen, great athletes, scientists and artists if they are to excel in those fields.  Where are they to find them?

            In the history books, of course: in the dramatic lives of those great saints gone before.  Yes, but we need not go so far afield.  Bahá’u’lláh Himself states: “It is the bounden duty of parents to rear their children to be staunch in faith, the reason being that a child who removeth himself from the religion of God will not act in such a way as to win the good pleasure of his parents and his Lord.  For every praiseworthy deed is born out of the light of religion, and lacking this supreme bestowal the child will not turn away from any evil, nor will he draw nigh unto any good.” (Baha’i Education p. 3#12)    

            But not only parents are charged with this supreme task.  ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says to: “Establish schools that are well organized, and promote the fundamentals of instruction in the various branches of knowledge, through teachers who are pure and sanctified, distinguished for their high standards of conduct and general excellence, and strong in faith; educators with a thorough knowledge of sciences and arts.” (Baha’i Education p.25#65) 

            Our materialistic culture does not encourage nobility, because it does not often celebrate spiritual models for youth to follow.  It does not do this because it cannot perceive spirit.  The transcendence the human soul intrinsically longs for is conveyed by messages that are heavily freighted with sexual imagery or “losing one’s mind” by, for example, getting wasted, meaning drunk.  Youth seek the “oceanic feeling” of being carried away, or “out of oneself”, from stimulating or numbing the bodily senses, the outermost level of human consciousness, by experimenting with drugs, sex, and a host of other material pursuits, such as shopping and gambling.  But are they not just imitating their parents world?; where all that is left of those important ceremonies of growth traditionally called “passages of rites to adulthood” are empty forms denoting nothing.  It indicates the exhaustion of culture when there is no other reason to be 21 except that it is the legal age to poison one‘s body with alcohol.  Thus to be grown-up is not full adulthood but extended childhood, not a matter of maturity but mere chronology, for, truly, the so-called adult world is often one of irresponsible spiritual delinquency.  But all these destructive “adult” pursuits only block the appearance and expression of spirit.  Blocking the spiritual energies, just as they are primed to enter the individual life in full splendor, leaves the youth feeling, quite naturally, empty and confused, with no ideals, no energy, no noble ambitions; bitter, angry, and vengeful--and he doesn‘t know why.  Our education, from nursery to university, from mom to pop music, is wholly to blame.  For these do not acknowledge the sacred, spiritual energies.  Or, if they do, they trivialize them.

            All this has profound import for our children and youth, not only within schools but, perhaps more importantly, outside of it.  The effectiveness of divine education will not be demonstrated in times of ease and comfort, but in times like now of widespread dread and despair.  That real oceanic feeling just talked about comes not from escape into a private utopia, but from a feeling of belongingness to the universal.  These are or should be the goals of divine education.

            But, we say, children must deal with intense peer pressure.  True, but let us be careful with this term.  Too great an emphasis upon it gives undo power to the negative.  I mean that we speak of peer pressure as something bad that happens to good children, and rarely as something that good children can apply to positively influence their friends.  We put it in the negative because we know that the larger society is corrupt and decadent, and that a small number of good people must stand against this foul tide with light, knowledge and morality. 

            Peers always give pressure, positively or negatively.  That is the nature of group dynamics.  Adults face it, too.  But no individual child can long resist intense negative pressure by him or herself.  Nor, conversely, can they resist positive pressure.  Thus, the purpose of divine education is not to train each individual child to be a good person because he or she must stand alone against the negative.  We will lose that battle nearly every time, or at best, the child will be “good” when with good people, but another person when with others, as many adults are.  Youth is a time for experimentation.  Let them experiment with nobility.

            Divine education can create a powerful moral and spiritual identity both for individuals and for the collective culture, a way of life for children that adults’ model for them, and that will radiate its influence as a benevolent pressure spiritually trained children can in general exert to push humanity to nobler heights of conduct.  In so doing this spiritualized culture, based on faith, vision, spiritual hearing and for the purpose of personal and social transformation, will counteract, neutralize and transform the negative and create in turn a positive pressure that other youth will be attracted to.  It will arouse them to spiritual action, to be active builders of an ever-advancing civilization, and not greedy, passive consumers of a dying one; to be, in other words, a powerful catalyst for transformation.

            This cannot be accomplished simply by teaching children the names of saints.  It will not be done by giving them the dates of important events in the history of religion.  Nor will it be achieved by instructing them in the do’s and don’ts of moral life. It can only be done through faith in the energizing power of the Creative Word; faith in the example we set; faith in the revelatory power of truth to arouse true seekers whose one aim and purpose in life is to find God in themselves.  Should we ever doubt the power of spiritual action let us listen to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá: “If a small number of people gather lovingly together, with absolute purity and sanctity, with their hearts free of the world, experiencing the emotions of the Kingdom, and the powerful magnetic forces of the Divine education, and being at one in their happy fellowship, that gathering will exert its influence over all the earth.  The nature of that band of people, the words they speak, the deeds they do, will unleash bestowals of Heaven, and provide a foretaste of eternal bliss.  The hosts of the Company on high will defend them, and the angels of the ‘Abha Paradise, in continuous succession, will come to their aid.” (Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá:81)

            We need to get such perceptions and actions into the souls of our children, so that they may awaken and demonstrate their power to transform lives.  Then we shall see a new race of men come alive before our eyes.  Divine education is education that we can’t leave to chance, that we can’t just hope will happen, that we can’t give to others to do, that we can’t make a second priority, that we can’t do half-heartedly, that we can’t merely check and monitor periodically, that we can’t do two or three times a week for an hour or so, or any other statement that makes it not the single most important education--not aspect of education--every day of the week, every week of the year, every year of our lives.

The Great Reversal

According to an intrinsic law, all phenomena of being attain to a summit and degree of consummation, after which a new order and condition is established. As the instruments and science of war have reached the degree of thoroughness and proficiency, it is hoped that the transformation of the human world is at hand and that in the coming centuries all the energies and inventions of man will be utilized in promoting the interests of peace and brotherhood.

(‘Abdu’l-Baha: Bahá’í World Faith: 232)

Looking back on my wish to write about education I see that it was the result of the collision of two powerful forces, one towering up from within me, the other penetrating inwardly from the world and, therefore, into me from the other direction.  As you read, I hope you will discover, as I did, that these two forces are really the same force in two places, or, rather, a force everywhere at once. 

            The internal stimulus was this.  I had long felt that the world presented to me in high school textbooks, college classes, works of history and treatises in philosophy, in the sciences both social and natural, and even the arts, was upside down in some way and needed to be turned right side up somehow.  It was as if my consciousness was being continually asked to look through the wrong end of a mental telescope.  But there was an added twist to the beguilement of these works.  They peered through a looking glass which not only reflected but also reversed true circumstances, something like taking the photographic negative to be the real picture.  In short, I felt that the vision of things was inverted.  I discovered that I was not alone. 

            The poet, William Blake, wrote a marvelous poetic critique of his time entitled The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.  It is full of lines like: “The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.”  He thought that what people normally describe as heaven was actually hell and vice-versa.  He felt most people were enslaved by what he called “single vision and Newton’s sleep”—a purely this world mechanical vision organized by cold arithmetical logic having no spiritual dimension to it.  His poetry from first line to last was a heroic effort to awaken human vision to perceive spirit.  He wrote, also in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is: Infinite.”  We would do well to study his works. 

            St. Paul wrote: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” (1 Corinthians 13:12)  Two thousand years ago he, too, struggled to set human perception free from the gravitational pull of wrongful assumptions that too often govern human thought.

            Both St. Paul and Blake warn against going deeper into the world to try to gain a better perspective of it.  This only results in one being swallowed by the world, what the Bible describes as “they became what they beheld.”  It is a basic principle demonstrated in literature that disappearing into one’s own mirror image is entering a world of reversed and reduced dimensions.  This is always a central symbol of descent—and it brings with it the loss of one’s freedom of action until it ends in paralysis or death.  Alice, to get into Wonderland, had to go through the looking glass, into her mirror image.  It was a confusing, dissolving, brutal world she landed in.  We are trapped in such a world and need to leap back out!   This is the hardest thing to do. 

            To reverse out of this reversed world is the literary theme of ascent.  But to do this the mind must undergo a process of reversing its gaze to understand both the world and the human reality correctly as simultaneously creations mirroring each other, and as a reality that is reflected.  The impetus for this change of consciousness is often said to come from within not from without, but it actually comes from everywhere at once, or, anywhere at all, as we exist within a field of divine thought which both surrounds and permeates this world. 

            The Book of Proverbs says: “Where there is no vision, the people perish.”  Whoever wrote that nugget may have had us in mind.  We are without vision, though we have plenty of dreams, for we are victims of what Bahá’u’lláh calls “lack of a proper education.”   It was my own education.  But I mean the phrase “lack of a proper education” in a much broader sense than what goes on in schools and other formal learning institutions.  I also include the messages in the media, the unspoken values regulating interactions between people, the laws and mores of society, and the decisions of government and civic institutions.  In short, everything that goes on among people in society is part of an all-encompassing educational effort in every culture.  I believe that is what Baha’u’llah meant also. 

Following the essay’s opening quote from ‘Abdu’l-Baha the argument that follows is driven by the metaphor of reversal.  Now, there are several forms of reversal.  One is like the reversal in a math equation: if A=B then B=A.  This reversal which occurs within the static structure of the universe of mathematics is also like the flow of energy from yin to yang and back of Chinese philosophy.  Then there is an attempt, in consciousness, to reverse the order of time.  That is, to go back in time imaginatively to rediscover a lost sacred time and place governed by the laws of a sacred science.  However beneficial this might seem, this is a quixotic quest and is not what the Master means. This is a vision of a lost paradise, meaning whatever state we are in at the moment is a fallen state.   But this movement is one part of a larger and double reversal, which I will talk about.  Both these are examples of  transformations taking place within a state or condition of being.  They drive the dialectic of growth to the end or full development of that state.  But the first only reverses movement back to the opposite metaphysical pole, while the second reverses the stages of development, to go back to the opposite historical pole, called the beginning.  Both these can only lead to ruin.

‘Abdu’l-Baha’s statement means not a transformation or reversal of consciousness within the human world, but a transformation of human consciousness itself.  It is a kind of vast, universal Hegelian negation of the negation.  It is the kind of thing that Christ talked about when he said that the last shall be first, and the first last—i.e. those that are socially first may be spiritually last, while the socially marginalized and dispossessed may be spiritually exalted.  This kind of reversal occurs only at the end of an order, not within it.  The reversal into a whole new order of life and thinking that happens after a complete consummation of a certain line of development has occurred is, on one hand, a catastrophe of such proportions that the former ways are almost totally obliterated.  But, on the other hand, it liberates powerful energies latent within the human reality that when properly ordered can reintegrate humanity in a higher state, the first occurring because the second is taking place.  These are the twin aspects of any birth and death event which takes place on two orders of being simultaneously.  Humanity is at the end of the materialist age, which is itself the last epoch of millennia devoted to building the mature material vessel capable of expressing spiritual impulse.  I believe, therefore, that it is also the beginning of its age of spirit.  Now, like the principles of Newtonian physics in the age of quantum mechanics, except within a narrow range of everyday phenomena the former patterns of perception and thought apply no longer.