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Thanks Peter. I think of this very thing often. How is the belief in order any less probable than believing in accident and disorder?
Hi, Ernest. What’s so unsettling though is that we have been left free to choose what we believe. Most of the time, for me, nihilism is less plausible than theism, but the world puts that position to the test far too frequently for my liking!
Baha’u'llah offers certitude. Certitude is not accessible to the mind; we can know logically, we can see that a view is confirmed by all that is around it; but this is subject to change based on experience. Certitude is knowing with a deeper feature of the human soul. It bypasses the mind and goes straight to the soul. It is more real than knowing what we ate for breakfast, or where we are standing, or that we exist. It is spoken of in the Book of Certitude. Though I haven’t written on this topic, I have a number of websites, in various stages of writing, you might take a look.
http://certitude-study.blogspot.com
http://tablets-divine-plan.blogspot.com
http://bahai-insights.blogspot.com
http://bahai-covenant.blogspot.com
http://bahai-storytelling.blogspot.com
Warmest greetings and thanks
Brent Poirier, Maine, USA brent at cybermesa dot com or
poirier dot brent at gmail dot com
Dear Brent,
Many thanks for sharing these resources. I will be exploring them when I have time later. For now, I feel I need to explain exactly what I meant by my joking response to Ernest.
I completely agree with your comment as an explanation of the situation in principle. I have, though, reflected over a number of years about what that principle feels like in practice.
First, I need to explain the distinction I draw between Certitude as a spiritual concept and certainty as a purely human experience. Certitude, to cut to the core as this is meant to be a brief response, relates to the Word of God, as Bahá’u’lláh explains:
“[The city of Cerititude] is none other than the Word of God revealed in every age and dispensation.” (The Kitáb-i-Íqán: page 199)
Certainty is more about the degree of conviction we hold in terms of our own understanding, and, as Bahá’u’lláh explains, our understanding is limited:
O SON OF BEAUTY! By My spirit and by My favor! By My mercy and by My beauty! All that I have revealed unto thee with the tongue of power, and have written for thee with the pen of might, hath been in accordance with thy capacity and understanding, not with My state and the melody of My voice. (AHW: no. 67)
One of the issues I’ve thought about a lot is conviction and I have written a number of posts on the issue. I have reflected on how much conviction we can afford to have. You plainly need enough to motivate you to act with courage and persistency in the face of obstacles and attacks over long periods of time. But how much of this kind of conviction becomes too much?
I believe uncertainty and conviction need to be held simultaneously in mind. Enough conviction to be motivated but not enough to be fanatical and enough uncertainty to be tolerant of differences and sceptical of your own rectitude but not so much as to paralyse. The idea then – how about ‘tentative or provisional conviction’?
The understanding we arrive at as we progress spiritually will be tested by experience, of course. As I will be exploring in later posts, these tests will hopefully spur us onto ever higher levels of consciousness. For faith at our current level to grow it has to allow itself to doubt.
It is only very rare individuals who will, in their lifetimes, lift themselves to the highest levels that provide a consistent experience of the Certitude that you refer to.
Jenny Wade, in Changes of Mind, her excellent analysis of levels of consciousness, feels that such a state comes only with what she terms Transcendent or Unity levels of consciousness. The highest level the most determined of the rest of us tend to achieve in a lifetime is the Authentic level.
As Shoghi Effendi says, “the complete and entire elimination of the ego would imply perfection — which man can never completely attain — but the ego can and should be ever-increasingly subordinated to the enlightened soul of man. This is what spiritual progress implies.”