EXPANSIVE EMOTIONS

Be the change you want to see in the world.

(Mohandas Gandhi)

           

I want to end the exploration of the role of emotions in education by giving some general remarks about optimism, humility, and spirituality.

            Optimism is the expectation that life will be mostly good, that things will work out.  Ideally, happiness and optimism go hand in hand—but not necessarily. We can feel blue or blah yet recognize it as a passing mood. We can be dissatisfied in our work or relationships but believe that better times lie ahead. We can acknowledge a painful situation without concluding that the universe is permanently against us. That is, we can be momentarily sad, but remain optimistic.  But optimism has many benefits.

            Optimism enhances well-being because it leads to greater engagement with life.  Engagement is a key factor.  Better mental and physical health is tied to efforts expended to realize goals, so long as they are internally motivated.  A large circle of friends, higher education, and greater socioeconomic status play a part in fueling optimism and are, in turn, fueled by it.  These all result from the priorities you set and the actions taken to achieve them.  

            Optimism's real power, however, might lie not so much in what it does for us but in what it compels us to do.  Optimists not only trust that the future will be mostly good, but they also believe their actions shape their destinies. This may be why optimists are more likely to eat right and exercise and are less likely to smoke or engage in other risky habits. When an optimist does get sick, he or she is more apt to research and seek the best medical care and actively participate in treatment—all of which may improve the prognosis.  Medical literature is full of stories of people recovering from some terrible illness simply by believing that healing will occur.  Seeing the glass as half full rather than half-empty is not “factually” more correct, but acting like an optimist can bolster your body, mind, and spirit.  Too, greater religious involvement is positively associated with more positive feelings and emotions.  Optimism can help spiritualize your life.

            Spirituality is brought out with engagement in the meaningful questions of human existence.  Surveys by Gallup, the National Opinion Research Center and the Pew Organization conclude that spiritually committed people are twice as likely to report being "very happy" than the least religiously committed people.  Strong religious commitment has also been linked with a lower risk of depression and drug abuse and fewer suicide attempts, and a greater sense of well-being and self-esteem and lower levels of hypertension and clinical delinquency.  Overall, religion is a positive contributor to mental health; religious people, in general, have less psychological distress, more life satisfaction, and better self-actualization.  

            Faith is one of our most powerful endowments, certainly the one most capable of bringing a new reality into our lives, for imagination gives the future shape and faith shapes an uncertain destiny—again, the link to optimism.  The more an assumption is repeated the more permanent the neural structure becomes, the more we see “reality” that way.  Thoreau said: ‘Go confidently in the direction of your dreams.  Live the life you have imagined.”  Such statements make the darkness shine.  Daily persistent repetition of “affirmations” can also awaken spirituality.  Constructing one’s reality is based on the principle that what is “out there” points to what is “in here”, and what is “in here” points to what could be out there.  If we understand this relationship we will be well. But what is understanding?  It is linked with humility.

            Literally, understanding means to stand under.  It is to put oneself in a lower place, to stand under him or her, so one may understand.  The House of Justice encourages the Baha’is to “adopt a humble posture of learning.”  This is to stand under, not to seek leadership or domination or authority, but opportunities of service and knowledge. 

 ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was often likened to an ocean, not just because He seemed bigger than any situation, but also because His deep humility made Him put Himself lower than everyone else and thus serve them.  All waters flow to the ocean for it is at the lowest point, yet the ocean is also the fount of all life.  Humility is not such total self-effacement that one feels unworthy to do anything.  Humility is an attitude that seeks out service; that always wishes to help.  It should be the chief quality of the leaders of humankind.

Business consultant Steven Covey writes: “You can’t have a oneness, a unity, without humility….The great servant leaders have that humility, the hallmark of inner religion.” (Principle-Centered Leadership:92) 

I choose these emotions mostly because they allow us to empathize and tune in harmoniously to one another.  They are part of creating healthy relationships between people, to achieve a “resonant fit” between teacher and student, of transforming the negativity the world is spewing out in torrents into a healthy inner spiritual environment, sort of like cleaning up a polluted river.  Best of all, the various building blocks of a positive outlook, such as optimism, gratitude, mindfulness, and spirituality, are “infectious” as a good belly-laugh is.  In fact, they are more infectious than are the negative emotions of fear, anxiety, anger, depression.  Thus, we must demonstrate these emotions and encourage students to develop them.

            Young people who strove for authenticity with their parents, teachers and peers developed stronger bonds and were less troubled by depression or self-esteem issues later in life.  Those who chose to hide their true feelings from their parents and teachers -- or were too shy or worried to share them -- risked being depressed by their lack of openness. People who feel insecure in their relationships or avoided getting close to others appear to have a greater risk of developing several chronic diseases.  But extra attention and emotional support from family members seemed to help diminish some of the feelings of depression.

The phrase “avoidant attachment” has been coined to show the association between people who feel unable to get close to others or have others depend on them and chronic pain, such as frequent or severe headaches.  Another term, "anxious attachment" -- a tendency to worry about rejection in relationships, feel overly needy and find that others are reluctant to get close -- was associated with a wide range of health problems, including heart-related diseases, such as stroke, heart attack and high blood pressure. Anxious attachment was also linked to a higher risk of chronic pain and ulcers. 

            It takes no great leap of imagination to see that avoidant attachment and anxiety attachment are two expressions of a single set of behaviors.  Those who avoid intimacy and authenticity in their relationships may do so from the anxiety that if they do the person they want to be intimate with will leave them.  Better not to get involved and set up the possibility of getting hurt.  These avoidant behaviors are most likely based on traumatic childhood experience. 

            Early experiences with caregivers shape a child's core beliefs about self, others, and life in general. Experiences of the baby and young child are encoded in the brain. Emotional experiences of nurturance and protection are encoded in the brain's limbic area, the emotional center. Over time, repeated encoded experiences become internal working models - core beliefs about self, self in relation to others, and the world in general. These core beliefs become the lens through which children (and later adults) view themselves and others, especially authority and attachment figures. Core beliefs serve to interpret the present and anticipate the future.  Changing core beliefs is quite challenging, because core beliefs are rigid, automatic, and associated with self-protection and survival. Yet without change, negative core beliefs formed early in life remain fixed into adulthood, with severe social, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual consequences.

Peaceful Emotions: Mindfulness and Gratitude

Perhaps the most disturbing single piece of data in this book coms from a massive survey of parents and teachers and shows a worldwide trend for the present generation of children to be more troubled emotionally than the last: more lonely and depressed, more angry and unruly, more nervous and prone to worry, more impulsive and aggressive.

(Daniel Goleman: Emotional Intelligence: xiii)

            Mindfulness, or focused attention, is both the glue that keeps us intimately connected to events and others, and that gives us detachment to see the world and ourselves clearly.  It is how we use our psychic energy.  How we choose to direct that energy is intensely meaningful.  Not all our scars can be seen.  Some are deep within the psyche.  These emotional and spiritual wounds create a distorted self-image which, in turn, makes the world look like one of those distorting funhouse mirrors.  This can create anxiety and a sense of disconnection.  Since our actions depend upon what we think is true, if what we think about ourselves is not true, we cannot perceive either others or the world accurately.  There is a prayer that says: “O God, help me to see the world as it is.”  That is mindfulness.

            Mindfulness does not permit the mind to spin out of control about the negative what if's and could be’s of life.  Mindfulness doesn’t focus on the things one can’t control, rather it focuses on what can be controlled, and this, more often than not, is our own thoughts and feelings, actions and reactions, to life’s events.  You can choose to focus on what can do to make any situation better, or you can focus on how it is overwhelming you.  Within a strong social network of caring friends positive focus is much easier, because, as I wrote in the last post, our friends emotions, especially their positive emotions, influence how we feel.

            Another aspect of mindfulness is: Forget your failures.  If you have had one of those days when nothing went right, lessons bombed, kids acted up and you resembled a screaming banshee or angry thundergod, or a contentious faculty meeting went spiraling out of control, try to let it go.  Also, as we used to say as kids, “If you mess up, ‘fess up.”  Seeing things directly, without a haze of self-justification or through a fog of rationalization, will help to put a bad event behind you and you are then free to concentrate on doing the next thing right.  Reframe!  After a bad day, to prepare for the next day, remember your past successes.  This will encourage your creativity.  Trying to fix weaknesses won't help; rather, incorporating strengths such as humor, originality and generosity into everyday interactions with people is a better way to achieve success.  These are all situations to act out in your imagination in order to act them out in public.  According to the Buddha, "Mind is the forerunner of states of existence. Mind is chief, and (those states) are caused by the mind. If one speaks and acts with a pure mind, surely happiness will follow like one's own shadow!"

            The authors of The Good Society remind us that: “Mindfulness is valued because it is a kind of foretaste of religious enlightenment, which in turn is a full waking up from the darkness of illusion and a full recognition of reality as it is.” (Good Society: 255)  No doubt, this is the reason that many philosophical and religious traditions teach that happiness is to be found by living in the moment, and practitioners are trained to resist mind wandering and to be here now.

            In an important study, two Harvard researchers, Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert, conducted a study based on an iPhone web application that allowed gathering 250,000 data points on 2,250 subjects' thoughts, feelings, and actions as they went about their lives.  The volunteers were contacted at random intervals and asked how happy they were, what they were currently doing, and whether they were thinking about their current activity or about something else that was pleasant, neutral, or unpleasant.
            The subjects reported spending 46.9% of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they were doing, and this mind-wandering actually made them unhappy. Killingsworth and Gilbert said that “a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost.”
            Lives pervaded by the non-present are not often happy lives, but are filled with anxiety, boredom, and dissatisfaction.  Mind-wandering, not mind-engagement, seems to be a better predictor of people's happiness, though in a reverse correlation.  I mean that the more often the mind wanders the less happy people seem to be.  On one level, mind wandering was not a consequence of being unhappy, but the cause of it. 

To increase mindfulness be grateful.  Gratitude is an emotion connected with joy and happiness, both feeding them and being fed by them.  The grateful person always feels he has enough, he is thankful for what he has, he expects little, so he feels able to handle pain and is not bitter about it.  What he gets is always a reward.  That his neighbor has more is not a cause for envy and covetousness, but rejoicing.  Gratitude, being mindful of blessings, develops that sense of inner security that is essential to prevent the mind from wandering into unhappiness.

            A Bahá’í is encouraged to “bring yourself to account each day.”  This is no mere bookkeeping exercise.  I think that to develop a good sense of gratitude, every night remember the good things that happened to you that day—as the early Baha’is did with each other while in the prison of Akka.  Gratitude visits — looking up someone who has taught or mentored you and thanking him or her — are important in positive psychology.  Such visits, studies show, bring the largest increase in happiness to everyone.  Find things in your life to be grateful for.  Count your blessings.  Gratitude boosts happiness and social well-being and health.  In his book, The Hidden Messages in Water, Masaru Emoto ranks gratitude higher than even love.  

Another aspect of spiritual accounting can be seen when we recall that “grace” is the root of “gratitude”, so that we should be grateful for the grace given to us in the form of innate talents and abilities.  Gratitude is an active power drawing to us the good pleasure of God, the first attracting the second.  Gratitude works for prosperity by establishing relations of trust.

            Finally, ‘Abdul-Baha wrote: “There is a cordial thanksgiving, too, which expresses itself in the deeds and actions of man when his heart is filled with gratitude. For example, God has conferred upon man the gift of guidance, and in thankfulness for this great gift certain deeds must emanate from him. To express his gratitude for the favors of God man must show forth praiseworthy actions. In response to these bestowals he must render good deeds, be self-sacrificing, loving the servants of God, forfeiting even life for them, showing kindness to all the creatures.” (The Promulgation of Universal Peace: 236.)

            When we perform these actions as services for others, we not only show our gratitude to God, but also this increases everyone’s feelings of love, happiness, and feeling secure and positive, embraced by love, increases mindfulness.

             Both of these emotions or practices, along with love and happiness discussed in the last post, will go a long way toward reversing the situation described by Daniel Goleman in the opening quote.           

Positive Emotions in Education

Positive emotion is, I believe, so abundant in young children because this is such a fundamental period for broadening and building cognitive, social and physical resources.  Positive emotion accomplishes this in several ways.  First, it directly generates exploration, which in turn allows mastery.  Mastery itself produces more positive emotion, creating an upward spiral of good feeling, more mastery, and more good feeling.  Your little daughter then becomes a veritable broadening and building machine, her initially small bank account of resources growing mightily.  When experiencing negative emotion, in contrast, she is building a fortress that falls back on what she knows is safe and impregnable, at the cost of locking our expansiveness.
(Martin E.P. Seligman: Authentic Happiness: 210)

           

There is a growing body of evidence documenting the power of positive emotions to influence biological and social connections.  Science has demonstrated what every group of friends and every close-knit family knows: that one person's emotions can influence another's; laughter can trigger guffaws in others; seeing someone smile can momentarily lift one's spirits; that feeling and knowing that one is loved will empower a person to overcome almost any obstacle; that misery doesn’t really love even its own company.

Through both biological and social "nerve" pathways, we humans seem capable of almost automatically tuning in to what is going on with those close to us.  Long married couples often experience a retuning into one composite nerve system, even taking on similar facial features.  Parents, perhaps especially mothers, and their children can have a sixth sense of mutual awareness.   Even pets and their owners experience a melding.  Knowing the power of positive emotions can vastly improve an education situation.  In the next few posts I want to make some general remarks about the power of positive emotions in education, especially their role in creating a nurturing classroom community.  This post will discuss love and happiness.

            Love is a dynamic state of consciousness and action not simply a romantic attraction resembling a flaming meteor.  I have called love the fundamental substance of the universe.  This universal energy affects the attractions and repulsions of things, from atoms to galaxies, and these currents are mirrored in the human soul.  In human growth love is essential in many ways, of course.  Maslow points to one of them when he writes: “Not only does love perceive potentialities but it also actualizes them.  The absence of love certainly stifles potentialities and even kills them.” (Toward a Psychology of Being:98)

            Love is the feeling environment within which exploration takes place, discoveries shared, and collective identities formed by a network of people who rely on each other to be fully present in each others lives.  Love orchestrates the harmonics of our emotional life, for it is the master emotion.  Emotions form a complementary field of heart awareness to the information networks of the mental field, as Candace Pert has shown in her book, Molecules of Emotion.  The chemical signatures of emotion link the individual mind and heart through the sympathetic, parasympathetic and autonomic nervous systems as the peoples of the earth are connected through the global electronic nervous system we call the Internet.  Human DNA has been called a biological internet that is superior in many respects to the artificial one.  But loving communion can have a powerful neurological effect on any two people engaged in meaningful communication.

            During extended and meaningful conversation, the brain activity of both people come to look remarkably similar, especially when the two are really understanding each other, a process scientific researchers call "neural coupling", and what folk wisdom calls “heart-to-heart communication.”

            Neural coupling occurs so well because it seems that there is a great deal of commonality between the process of producing speech and comprehending speech.  The more coupling there is, the more the speaker and the listener are using similar mechanisms.  Brain scans further show that in some areas of the brain, coupling occurs at the same time the speaker is talking, while in other areas, the coupling lags. Sometimes, brain activity in the listener's brain comes before the activity in the speaker's brain, suggesting the listener may be anticipating what the speaker is going to say.   Such mirror imaging may aid in comprehension—yet another support for the idea that we are literally hardwired to connect. 

            Brain scans of those who seemed to have the most nuanced understanding of each other showed the most complete neural coupling.   But even between those meeting for the first time, good neural coupling can almost instantly occur, possibly hinting at why some people click during conversation and some don't.  This neural coupling showed up as a strong correlation between how much of the listener's brain matched the speaker's brain and how well the listener understood the other.    

            Neural coupling is yet another term for the resonant harmony that is created between those engaged in distinctive and meaningful conversations, a harmony manifest in a synchronicity of hearts that matches the synchronicity of the mirror neurons in an observer's brain firing in the same sequence as those of the person he  is observing.  Perhaps this synchrony between one's own heart and brain and between the hearts and brains of those experiencing neural coupling occurs because more than half of the heart is actually composed of neurons of the same nature as those that make up the cerebral system. 

           If love and communication between family and friends are important not only at the meaning and feeling level, but even down to the level of neurons, in regards to building community, it becomes very important what is being communicated and how far that influence extends.  Perhaps the most important emotion to communicate is happiness. 

            A widely-publicized study from 2008 in the British Medical Journal reported that happiness in social networks may spread from person to person along cultural nerve pathways that mimic those within the body.  Researchers followed nearly 5000 individuals for 20 years in the long-standing Framingham Heart Study and found clusters of happiness and unhappiness tended to spread through close relationships like friends, siblings, spouses, and next-door neighbors, but that happiness spread more consistently than unhappiness through the network. Moreover, the structure of the social network appeared to have an impact on happiness, as people who were very central (with many friends and friends of friends) were significantly more likely to be happy than those on the periphery of the network. When one person in the network became happy, the chances that a friend, sibling, spouse or next-door neighbor would become happy increased between 8 percent and 34 percent, the researchers found. The effect continued through three degrees of separation, although it dropped progressively from about 15 percent to 10 percent to about 6 percent before disappearing.  Overall, the results suggest that happiness might spread through a population like a virus.

            Happiness, then, sends a kind of ripple effect through social networks.  If someone changes from unhappy to happy in a network of friends others in the social network will become happy too, without necessarily knowing why.  A well-liked next-door neighbor’s joy will probably increase your own sense of happiness. 

            Even further, happiness is so contagious that it can ripple through clusters of people who might not even know each other.  While one’s emotional state would depend primarily on your own choices and actions and experience, it also depends on the choices and actions and experiences of other people, including people with whom you are not directly connected, lending support to calls to “commit random acts of kindness.”  One person's happiness can affect another's for up to a year, researchers found, and while unhappiness can also spread from person to person, the "infectiousness" of that emotion appears to be far weaker.

            There is, then, little doubt, scientific or otherwise, that good human relationships are the most important ingredient in human happiness, especially if you can see or contact your friends and family often. Yet the competitive, me-first materialistic culture we live in tells people to sacrifice social relationships to get other things that likely won’t make them as happy, such as money.  Relationships are far more important to happiness than anything else.  Educators can build on this.    

Connecting Cosmos and Consciousness

Instead of narrative method, we may now use mythical method.  It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for art…”

(T. S. Eliot: Ulysses, Order and Myth)

Myth is more than an early and discarded stage in the odyssey of the human mind.  Neither is myth today just strange stories set long ago or in an imaginative world of Avatars populated with beings that think and act remarkably like ourselves, whatever their physical appearance.  Myths are the founding and perennial stories.  No doubt, myth is humanity’s earliest consciousness, one bearing the closest likeness to the world, so close to it as to be separated from it by only a thin and porous membrane of objectivity.  It is pre-rational rather than irrational, for one must first be rational before irrationality is a possibility.  But what myth most definitely is NOT is a fiction.  Why?  As Cassirer writes: “Myth is not a fiction, for that is the work of individuals who abandon themselves to the free activities of fancy.  On the contrary, everything in it is a necessity imposed on us not from without, by the existence of ‘things’, but from within, through the nature of consciousness.  This consciousness is the real ‘active subject’ of mythology.” (The Problem of Knowledge v. 4: 298) 

But today myth is also an artful method of telling stories that is different from narrative. It is a way of coordinating our levels of understanding.  That is its importance for the adult world.  In a seminal 1923 essay, “Ulysses, Order and Myth”, which examined James Joyce’s “novel” Ulysses, T. S Eliot wrote: “In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. [....] It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.”  This new method of coordinating the panorama of human experience, of ordering and giving shape to a perspective, had, as Eliot remarks, “the importance of a scientific discovery.”  Joyce did for literature what Freud and Jung did for psychology, and at about the same time, namely, open up and illuminate the labyrinth of past human thought for retrieval and renewal by modern thought. 

Myth as a literary form overrules narrative in favor of symbolic structures, making past and present, particular and cultural, part and whole aspects of a single vision.  Joyce’s book, with its continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, between Bloom’s daily wanderings in early twentieth-century Dublin and Ulysses travels and trials through the ancient Mediterranean, drew together past and present narratives as manifestations of a single, trans-historical consciousness that demonstrated how “myth” is a perennial part of the human situation. The mythic method refuses to resolve into a single focused point of view, or even a single narrative line. Rather it moves continuously between conscious and unconscious points of view.  That is, it is symbolic.

For humanity’s mental odyssey, the basic principle of mythical structure and coordination is ontogeny sort of recapitulates phylogeny; that is, the individual human being repeats in his or her own mental forms of experience what the whole race has already passed through, much as the growing fetus in the womb is supposed to pass through the forms and stages of the lower kingdoms before being born in human form.  But there is this difference.  The mind returns to those forms that best fit its situation, for all past forms remain accessible, both subjectively in the mind and objectively in culture and often spontaneously manifest in both “places.”  This process of accumulation as one passes through stages of growth is, for me, the various stages of the unfolding rational faculty, the sedimenting of the layers of subjectivity which, said another way, is the expanding world of human subjectivity and increasing self-knowledge as it accumulates knowledge of the world and itself. 

Myths represent human consciousness in continual change and transformation, undergoing strange and dramatic metamorphoses and instant happenings.  As such they are an essential part of education because: “Perhaps the oldest of educational ideas is that of the dramatic transformation of the mind, the sudden entry into a new plane of reality.” (Northrop Frye: On Education: 151)  But transformation can occur because any new manifest plane of reality was already within the essential human reality. 

Myth makes things happen via  imaginative causality, which is very close, both psychologically and physically, to the kind of non-local causality science is now exploring in Chaos Theory and Complexity science, and popularized in productions like The Secret and What the Bleep.  This should not surprise us.  As Oswald Spengler wrote:  "Every physics is a psychology."  These new sciences are sciences of process not of state, of becoming not being, as is myth an imaginative statement of process and metamorphosis.  Sciences like Systems Theory are also sciences of the global nature of things, the universal behavior of complexity, the fractal patterns that appear and reappear on different scales at the same time because of the inescapable consequence of the way that small scales intertwine with large ones, where change often occurs from a sensitive dependence on initial conditions which can end in catastrophic consequences, as the butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon ends as the typhoon ravaging Japan.  These are sciences where nonlinear equations rule, where seemingly divergent movements actually circle around vibrating patterns called strange attractors, those bizarre, infinitely tangled abstractions, those goblins of the mind, that nevertheless yield simple, structural patterns at their core.  The appearance of an attractor signals on one level pure disorder because no point ever recurs, but this disorder is the entry to a new kind of order, like breaking the sound barrier in a plane.  These are sciences where infinite instability ends in stability and randomness morphs into order through a sort of self-organization.  Non-periodicity is unpredictability, but the whole is still there, because both chaos and order spontaneously arise in systems.   

But, perhaps, these are sciences of process and not state, because we are in the process of moving out of one state of humanity into another, and the sciences and arts, poets and philosophers, are all simply registering in their respective domains the stages of this universal process that moves from cosmos through chaos into a new creation, a new cosmos generating a new cosmology: a process accelerating by several orders of magnitude and complexity every decade, as the effects of a new revelation pass through them.  It is the universal birth of humanity into the spiritual state, and new forms of being always birth new ways of thinking.  Once we get better grounding in our new state, then sciences of that state will start to appear.  But it is, too, the old way in new form—the strange juxtaposition of twilight with the dawn’s early light without any intervening night.  A new ratio is everywhere emerging.  But the past myths, arts, and sciences in their respective though smaller transitions provide useful analogies and examples to this “organic change in the structure of present-day society, a change such as the world has not yet experienced.” (World Order of Baha’u’llah:43)  .  

Antiquity is Modernity

One view of the evolutionary trend is that physics is returning to the holistic assumptions of the magical era.  But there is an important difference.  The post-modern view no longer lacks the explanatory power of the first era.

(Dean Radin: Entangled Minds: 244)

Despite the scientific conceit expressed by Dean Radin above, “the holistic assumptions of the magical era” were just as explanatory as are the unholistic (unholy?) assumptions of modern science.  But the two traditions use different mental powers to explain.  Lets return to the teachings of Hermes to explore this.

The principles of Hermes teachings were the foundation of alchemy and most other occult arts around the world.  I don’t mean that everybody learned directly from Hermes, but that, given the similarity in the thought and vision of the seemingly different alchemical traditions, European, Indian, Chinese, it seems that this is a level of human consciousness activated and released into the world by Him, as the spirit of faith was activated and released by Abraham’s test of faith. 

Ancient cosmologists of both east and west believed there were two universal realities in relationship, the One Mind, which was the Universal Mind, and the One Thing, or primal, elemental matter, the basic substance of the universe.  Mind and Matter were, to use the latest term, entangled, making a same but different structure and interaction.  Mind in-forms, or puts form into, matter which at its most fundamental level of the prima materia is the repository of all past and future physical configurations. That is, active Mind energized its recipient Matter, giving it life and form and purpose.  The two universal realities were both in the visible world and in the unseen world which was nevertheless intelligible. The difference between the two worlds was determined by which universal Reality predominated, Mind or Matter.  These realities were considered to be interlocked, interconnected and interrelated.  Whatever appeared in one had its counterpart in the other, whatever happened in one effected the other. 

There was yet a greater life energy common to both realities that acted as their means of communication and brought the two realities into relation.  The life energy, or spirit, of the individual was the same as the life energy of the planet; the macrocosm of the universe was reflected in all its grandeur in the microcosm of the human being.  Things were known and related by “spiritual” means. 

Modern science is likely to use terms such as information and energy for the alchemical Mind and Thing, or Matter.  But the process of creation science presents is essentially the same as myth presents—the union of energy and form, whatever we wish to call these.  Baha’u’llah, in the Tablet of Wisdom, calls this creative relation “the glorious structure” and it is built on the Hermetic principle: “these two are the same, yet they are different.” (Tablets of Baha’u’llah:140)   

Thus all cosmologists explore the same thing, the universe.  But whereas alchemy and other ancient investigations took primarily an imaginative/experiential look at it, science takes a conceptual/experimental look at it.  The ancients tend to see aspects of the same thing while we moderns tend to see the aspects as separate things.  But new science is using a more imaginative approach, so it is more holistic and conceives the various levels of known energy as manifestations of one Energy.

 The resurgence of the imaginative and mythical is manifest in a whole shelf of books bearing titles such as The Tao of Physics, Science and the Akashic Record, The God Theory, and Why God Won’t Go Away, and sub-atomic experimental physics pursues the God particle.  From the other side of modernity, books like Sacred Science, describing the “science” of ancient Egypt, and Symbols of Sacred Science by the modern day philosopher Rene Guenon, stress the symbology of the ancient teachings and their hermeneutical usefulness for today’s thinking.

While differences of approach remain, these may only reflect differences of terminology which are converging.  The ancient names of ether and the akashic, for example, from the classical Greek and ancient Hindu traditions, seem to name the same fundamental power and intelligence underpinning the physical universe.  Quantum physicists use terms like the Zero Point Field and the Quantum Vacuum to describe the same entity, with “ether” making a sort of comeback after being banished by the famous Michelson/Morley experiment that seemed to rule out its existence.  There is also the M theory of the string theorists, a theory that will contain, they hope, everything.  The Grand Field Theory of physics will be the scientific story of all things, following all the poetic stories of all things, those epical, encyclopedic poems such as Milton’s Paradise Lost.  Other fields include the Morphogenetic field of Rupert Sheldrake to account for the continuity of life forms in a species, a field through time not just in space, and the Intentional Field of Wayne Dyer, to designate the purposeful thought of the Universal Mind. 

Old Alchemy and New Science converge and are reuniting, a great B and E experience is occurring, so that knowledge is becoming one: antiquity is modernity.  Another eminent scientist, Dr. Robert Becker, nominated twice for the Nobel Prize, wrote: “Medicine has come full circle, from the mysterious energies of the shaman-healer to the scientific understanding of the life energies of the body and their relationship to the energies of the environment.  This scientific revolution has simultaneously enriched the concepts of technological medicine and supported the ideas of energy medicine. What is emerging is a new paradigm of life, energy and medicine.” (Cross Currents:81)

Today in the same collective mental “space” where mythical demons and goblins snarled, and fairies and sprites played and danced, holographic models and implicate and explicate orders are seen, and quantum events take place.  There are many other names and parts to this great universe we are trying to find our way around in conceptually and know the nature of experimentally. 

Perhaps the mythical is making a strong comeback because of the chaotic times we live in.  In such situations the mythic always returns.  Why?  Eliade explains: “Every myth shows how a reality came into existence, whether it be the total reality, the cosmos, or only a fragment—an island, a species of plant, a human institution.  To tell how things come into existence is to explain them and at the same time indirectly to answer another question: Why did they come into existence?  The why is always implied in the how—for the simple reason that to tell how a thing was born is to reveal an irruption of the sacred into the world, and the sacred is the ultimate cause of all real existence.

Moreover, since every creation is a divine work and hence an irruption of the sacred, it is at the same time represents an irruption of creative energy into the world.  Every creation springs from an abundance.  The gods create out of an excess of power, an overflow of energy.  Creation is accomplished by a surplus of ontological substance.  This is why the myth, which narrates this sacred ontophany, this victorious manifestation of a plentitude of being, becomes a paradigmatic model for all human activities.” (The Sacred and the Profane: 97-98) 

It is not that the mythical cosmology is truer than the scientific, or vice-versa, (which is the fallacy of literalism in any shape or form) except as a matter of preference, imaginative or conceptual.  It is that this process of symbolizing coming out of ancient Egypt with Hermes/Idris is how creative thought gets up and going at all.  That is, it has something to do with how human thought works creatively at any level. 

 

The Third Power

To harmonize the whole is the task of art.

(Kandinsky: Concerning the Spiritual in Art: 3)

Western consciousness is often 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 a certain kind of hearing.   The Greek consciousness is based on “rational” knowing or "reason" which is a certain kind of seeing.  It is the basis of science. 

Religion and science, faith and reason, are often portrayed as opposing powers battling over the territory of the mind, and individuals usually choose one over the other.  But that is only because usual history leaves out the middle third which is art and imagination.  Now by middle third I mean a connecting link, if a linear sequence in time, or a mediating power if a hierarchy, a translator, if one thing must be translated into another.  Religion, science, and art are the co-ordinated vision of human learning and education.  But learning is of knowledge, whether religious, scientific or artistic, and knowledge is structures of metaphor, and their internal form and workings are correlated with what is outside them to produce the symbol, which comes from the Greek sýmbolon, meaning ‘to throw together.”  It is in that sense of unifying symbol that Kandinsky speaks above about art. 

In human consciousness we usually say that the symbolic modes of thought, the thought of poets, develop between the sensory and the conceptual and mediate them within the mind.  In the evolution of "western" culture a similar mediating relation, or way of organizing knowledge, holds between the Hebraic and Hellenic, between faith and reason.  For me this third powerful influence on western consciousness is Egypt.  Here begins our poetic and philosophical, especially cosmological, tradition.  Egypt was where symbolic thought first flourished.

The ancient Hermetic teachings were laid down by the eponymous figure of the Egyptian Hermes Trismegistus.  He is also called Thoth, Idris, Hermes of Greek mythology, Mercury, and Balinus.  Baha'ullah says Hermes has many names, depending upon which culture we are talking about.  Baha'ullah also writes of Hermes Trismegistus  in the Tablet of Wisdom, calling Him "the Father of Philosophy."   The hermetic teachings remain, despite their antiquity, the best imaginative cosmology out there.  The Hermetic tradition was a powerful stream of thought into the modern age when it was banished to the underground.  Well known “modern” students include Newton and Hegel—scientists and philosophers by day, but alchemists and occultists by night.  The name Trimegistus means “thrice-great” because he purportedly mastered the three kinds of knowledge—spiritual, mental, material.  The essence of His teachings was set out in the Emerald (Chrysolite?) Tablet.  Its most often misquoted principle is: As above, so below.  It is misquoted because it is actually As Below, so Above.  This is the structure of the cosmos. 

The principles of Hermes teachings were the foundation of alchemy and most other occult arts.  In its search for metaphors of connection between the inner and outer, spiritual and material, realms of existence and experience, this philosophy generated a whole bunch of different images.  The great chain of being, planes of correspondence, the dance of life which is the vibrations of life along the hierarchy, are all primary cosmological images organizing “western” thought even down to the Elizabethan Age. 

The planes of correspondence hold, each within its own plane, the counterparts of things in the other planes.  The chain of being connects the planes, with the dance of life going on everywhere at every link of the chain.  The Biblical image of Jacob’s ladder, with the angels going up from earth and down from heaven, is a modulation of the chain, with the added quality of the same figures movement up and down creating circulation and cycles of its own development.  Such images fell into disfavor when "modern" western thought collapsed the three-tiered cosmos into a two-term physical universe, and the plane of divinity was thrown into the unconscious.

But the hermetic principle is still going strong in the Bahá’í Writings: “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)  Or in the Bab’s often repeated summation: “the Kingdoms of Revelation and Creation and whatever lieth between them.”   And Hermetic teachings underpin much of what is called New Age literature, especially The Law of Attraction.

If the above is like that below, and whatever lieth between them, then the whole cosmos is constructed symbolically.   The counterparts accord not only by themselves but also within the human reality as our spiritual and material natures which must be brought into harmony.  They are essential to each other and to the whole, like painter and canvas are both essential to getting painting done.  

The symbolic way of knowing is the basis of all art, and it precedes abstract cognition both in human collective history and individual psychology.  I mean that as the direct expression of the senses and imagination, art is pre-cognitive.  But that is not also to say it is irrational or unintelligent, or, as many school-systems say, an ornament to real learning and thus the first thing cut from the academic curriculum.  If cuts need be made, art should be the last to go for it is the most essential of the academic subjects. 

Art as ornamentation or just representation, a mere artifice, a copy of something real, is another casualty of secular, Greek rationality—often said to have begun with Plato’s blistering dismissal of the poets in The Republic--which can’t perceive art as power to invoke presence.  In what we laughingly call pre-historic times, painted images on cave walls or stones were images of power, talisman bringing the animals to the hunt, or capturing the feelings of it, uniting the essential form with its manifest form, the active force with that which is its recipient.  Over time, pictures and verbal images establish a symbol system, forming what art critics call a grammar of the imagination that both measures individual subjective depth and acts as the collective psychological ground of culture. Jung was the first to demonstrate that these interconnect in the “unconscious.”  Later, with developments in prose and a more thoroughly instrumental, denotative use of language, the metaphors, similes, analogies and other modes of figurative expression become simply literary forms.  But language itself is the great collective organ of human perception.  Its figurations are the secure units of our knowing, and its best practitioners are traditionally the poets.  Symbols make human knowledge; no surprise when we remember that the word poet means maker.  "Treasures lie hidden beneath the throne of God; the key to those treasures is the tongue of poets”, states an Islamic tradition. (The Dawn-Breakers:258-259)  We need to better understand the influence of this great tradition of thought begun in Egypt upon our own, the third power driving our development.    

The next few posts will further this exploration.

         

The Indigenous Source of Knowledge

When philosophy paints its gray in gray, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's gray in gray it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.

Georg W.F. Hegel. Philosophy of Right.  (From the Preface.)

Recently books bearing titles like Neil Postman’s The End of Education and Anthony Kronman’s Education’s End are appearing, because we are at the end of an established philosophy of education.  As Hegel describes above, as philosophies these books do not rejuvenate current education, only enable us to understand the shape of its life grown old.

If education is to take the lead in rebuilding civilization it must show leadership. To do this it must, paradoxically to the superficial mind, return to first principles and peoples. These are the essential principles, the simplest notions, the foundation, the Source.  For  individual psychology, this means to lead with the heart’s connection with the sacred, not because the heart is at the bottom, the first rung on the ladder of consciousness, but because it is at the center, the mid-most point of creation, the first principle and context from which all others unfold.  The return to first principles is not to advocate a return to the historically primitive, but to consciously incorporate the psychologically primitive, to be childlike--for we cannot enter the kingdom of heaven unless we become as little children. 

The rejuvenation of human culture begins with the renewed spirit of religion, which is the eternal, the archaic.  The spirit of religion always reappears during periods of intense social and psychological upheaval, like now, when reason fails because things must be renewed and not just reorganized.  Hence this term, the spirit of religion—as opposed to any of its historical forms-- refers to the fundamental structure of human thought and feeling, the vision indigenous to our souls.  It is not the antiquity of indigenous culture which makes it a structural principle of civilization but the permanence of it, the fact that centuries of exploitation and murder and other forms of castration have failed to eradicate it. The failure has occurred because the indigenous is the permanent part of the human condition.

The mighty powers of prophecy and myth, of poetry and magic, the indigenous modes of perception, apprehension and expression, were the foundation of ancient civilization and are to be again not because the cycle of fortune turns in mindless fashion and by accident we have found ourselves born at the origin again. It is because whenever civilization needs to be renewed these are the powers that do it.  Hence when we tap into these powers we initiate the remaking of the world.  But to these ancient powers we must add the modern powers of science and rational thought, so that education for civilization today must combine the oracular with the scribal, the circular logic of the imagination with the linear logic of intellect, the looser, fluid rhythms of feelings with the tighter, solid rhythms of concepts.

Education will not rebuild civilization by doing better what the materially advanced are already doing, for this shows more regard for our own preconceptions and learned experience than for the complexity and reality of the truth.  I mean that at this time the need is not for a coherent doctrine of education.  These are plentiful enough. Rather we should know and adopt the proper attitude toward education, which is humility.  A humble posture of learning is needed, because the greatest barrier to new knowledge is not ignorance, but the illusion of knowing. That is, to understand is to stand under.  We believe that we know about education.  But do we?   We can not know enough about it until we learn to again listen to the regular and ancient song and heartbeat of the indigenous and become primitives again.

Culture or civilization is a colossal creative work in-formed by a gigantic vision. This vision is fundamentally a religious one because it fuses (re-ligia) disparate elements into a new order even as it separates the new order from the old.  The ancient and modern, scientific and artistic, advanced and perennial, are parts of a single totality which vision is supposed to encompass, so that within the vision each thing becomes a metaphor for everything, so that every student “may become a symbol denoting the sublimity of the true Educator of humankind, and that each, even as a crystalline mirror may tell of the grace and splendour of the Sun of Truth." (Compilation: Bahá’í Education p.8#30)  Thus the new vision is actually both a renewal of an ancient perennial vision, and that vision in new form.

It is also a religious vision because it is essentially eternal and always with us, like the air surrounding our bodies.  The progress of civilization is said to be, in religious terms, toward a Golden Age of peace, which is also where it came from, as the ancient myths tell us. Hence the Golden Age is placed, metaphorically, either at the beginning or end of time. But really is in both places because it is from eternity and is, therefore, outside time.  It is the vision, the divine looking through us. When we build and then live in such a civilization we have recovered our collective identity.

Spiritual education, or bringing forth the spirit within, is supposed to enable the individual and collectivity to recover that lost identity by identifying the human being metaphorically with the nonhuman worlds around and within us, namely, the natural and the divine.  The formula of metaphor is, “let A be B.”  Of course if this is true, then B is A, and finally we are also left with A is A, and B is B; the same yet different, the glorious structure manifested by “He Who hath been manifested is the Hidden Mystery, the Treasured Symbol, through Whom the letters B and E have been joined and knit together.” (Baha’i Long Obligatory Prayer).   The “same yet different” structure of the symbol is human self-identity and also its identification with what it is not.  The symbol is necessary because human nature does not appear directly.  Rather it appears in spiritual, social, intellectual and natural contexts.  The world, too, does not present itself to us directly, but appears within a mental context called knowledge--i.e. science, art, history, etc. which are conventions of organized awareness. Finally, the divine does not appear directly but, rather, in the form of the Word, which is both a Figure and His Message which is traditionally called Logos, or a revelation.  All these are also aesthetic experiences when communicated for they are not communicated in anything like the way they were experienced.  They must be transformed to be communicated and shared.  This is the work of metaphor.

Thus symbols are more than figures and parts of speech. They create us as intellectual and social beings, especially does the sacred symbol do this.  But even on the human level the verb copula of language unites both subject and object in thought and Subject and Subject in Being, because the grammar points to and expresses an inner experience of regeneration in new but renewed identity.  What is new in real education is really the renewed in different form, for the universe is enfolded within each human being.  Symbol and metaphor are an imaginative identity of separate things. It is union, separation and reunion. It is human knowledge.