Irreducible Mind – a review (3/3): the self & the Self

What is the dust which obscures the mirror? It is attachment to the world, avarice, envy, love of luxury and comfort, haughtiness and self-desire; this is the dust which prevents reflection of the rays of the Sun of Reality in the mirror. The natural emotions are blameworthy and are like rust which deprives the heart of the bounties of God.

(‘Abdu’l-Bahá: Promulgation of Universal Peace – page 244)

In the previous two posts I’ve been moaning about how I was robbed when my training in psychology steered me away from the work of thinkers such as FWH Myers as though they had the plague. What I probably need to do to redress the balance is mention how much I was influenced by thinkers who were deeply influenced by Myers. In one case I know that for certain because I still have Roberto Assagioli‘s introductory text on psychosynthesis, which I read in 1976 and which cites Myers in the list of references at the end of Chapter I. Another was a seminal book I borrowed but never bought, so it is impossible to say whether the influence was direct and acknowledged: this was Peter Koestenbaum’s New Images of the Person.

Assagioli explained in his book the importance of what he calls a ‘disidentification exercise’ (page 22):

After having discovered [various elements of our personality], we have to take possession of them and acquire control over them. The most effective method by which we can achieve this is that of disidentification. This is based on a fundamental psychological principle which may be formulated as follows:

We are dominated by everything with which our self becomes identified. We can dominate and control everything from which we disidentify ourselves.

(For the psychosynthesis disidentification exercise see the following link.)

Then, in another exciting moment, I came upon Koestenbaum’s ideas about reflection six years after I had read Assagioli. Reflection is the ‘capacity to separate consciousness from its contents’ (Koestenbaum: 1979). We can step back, inspect and think about our experiences. We become capable of changing our relationship with them and altering their meanings for us. It is like a mirror learning to see that it is not the same as what is reflected in it. So here was a writer in the existentialist tradition speaking in almost the same terms as psychosynthesis. I had practised Assagioli’s exercise for a long period after reading his book. Now I was triggered into resuming the practice again by what Koestenbaum had written.

I came across Koestenbaum’s book just before I discovered the existence of the Bahá’í Faith (for a fuller account see link). It helped me take what I had found in Assagioli and fuse it with what I had found in the Faith and create an experiential exercise to express that understanding in action in a way that helped me immensely to adjust to spiritual concepts which until that point had been completely alien to me for decades – all my adult life in fact. The Baha’i Writings talk about certain key powers of the soul: loving, knowing and willing as well as introducing me to the idea of the heart, the core of our being, as a mirror. I pulled this into my version of the exercise (see below). What I didn’t realise until later was that Assagioli had corresponded with ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and had therefore to some degree been influenced by Bahá’í thought. (See Disidentification exercise for the final version that I used myself rather than this one I revised to share for the use of others).

How amazing then to find Emily Kelly, in the book Irreducible Mind, quoting Myers quoting Thomas Reid, an 18th century philosopher (page 74):

The conviction which every man has of his identity . . . needs no aid of philosophy to strengthen it; and no philosophy can weaken it.… I am not thought, I am not action, I am not feeling; I am something that thinks, and acts, and suffers. My thoughts and actions and feelings change every moment…; But that Self or I, to which they belong, is permanent…

What I regret therefore now is that the usefulness of this exercise did not make me trace it back to its source and find out more of what Myers thought about this and many other things of great importance to me. So, better late than never, that is what I am about to do now.

Myers’s the self and the Self

The disidentification exercise rattled the cage of my previous ideas about who I was in essence. While I didn’t quite buy into Assagioli’s other ideas about consciousness at that time I felt, both intuitively and from the experiences I was having, that his idea was completely right that there is some form of pure consciousness underpinning our identity.

So, as good a place as any to pick up the thread of Myers’s thinking again is with his ideas of the self and the Self. There are some problems to grapple with before we can move on. Emily Kelly writes (page 83):

These ‘concepts central to his theory’ are undoubtedly difficult, but despite some inconsistency in his usage or spelling Myers was quite clear in his intent to distinguish between a subliminal ‘self’ (a personality alternate or in addition to the normal waking one) and a Subliminal ‘Self’ or ‘Individuality’ (which is his real ‘unifying theoretical principle’). In this book we will try to keep this distinction clear in our readers minds by using the term ‘subliminal consciousness’ to refer to any conscious psychological processes occurring outside ordinary awareness; the term “subliminal self” (lower case) to refer to ‘any chain of memory sufficiently continuous, and embracing sufficient particulars, to acquire what is popularly called a “character” of its own;’ and the term ‘Individuality’ or “’Subliminal Self” (upper case) to refer to the underlying larger Self.

Myers believed that the evidence in favour of supraliminal experiences, used here by me in the sense of things that leak through the membrane from above, is strong enough to warrant serious consideration and he distinguishes between that and subliminal experiences that come, as it were, from underneath (see diagram and footnote at the bottom of the post)[1] (page 87):

Supernormal [ie supraliminal in my sense] processes such as telepathy do seem to occur more frequently while either the recipient or the agent (or both) is asleep, in the states between sleeping and waking, in a state of ill health, or dying; and subliminal [unconscious in my use of terms] functioning in general emerges more readily during altered states of consciousness such as hypnosis, hysteria, or even ordinary distraction.

He felt that we needed to find some way of reliably tapping into these levels of consciousness (page 91)

The primary methodological challenge to psychology, therefore, lies in developing methods, or ‘artifices,’ for extending observations of the contents or capacities of mind beyond the visible portion of the psychological spectrum, just as the physical sciences have developed artificial means of extending sensory perception beyond ordinary limits.

Midsummer Night’s Dream

Thin Partitions

He also has much that is interesting and valuable to say about the implications of a proper understanding of these upper and lower thresholds, especially when they are too porous, for both genius and mental health (page 98):

When there is ‘a lack of liminal stability, an excessive permeability, if I may say so, of the psychical diaphragm that separates the empirical [supraliminal: conscious in my usage] from the latent [subliminal: unconscious in my usage] faculties and man,’ then there may be either an expansion of consciousness (an ‘uprush’ of latent material from the subliminal into the supraliminal) or, conversely, a narrowing of consciousness (a ‘downdraught’ from the supraliminal into the subliminal). The former is genius, the latter is hysteria.

His use of supra- and subliminal is slightly confusing here but the main point is that genius expands what we are aware of, and more comes above the threshold, whereas hysteria narrows our experience so that less comes into consciousness. This is partly clarified by Kelly explaining (page 99):

In short, Myers believed that hysteria, when viewed as a psychological phenomenon, gives ‘striking’ support to ‘my own principal thesis’, namely, that all personality is a filtering or narrowing of the field of consciousness from a larger Self, the rest of which remains latent and capable of emerging only under the appropriate conditions.

Even the expanded consciousness of genius, in this view, is still filtering a lot out – in fact, it still leaves most of potential consciousness untapped.

There is in addition a common quality of excessive porousness which explains why, in Shakespeare’s phrase, the ‘lunatic . . . . . and the poet are of imagination all compact.’ Myers’s view is that (page 100):

Because genius and madness both involve similar psychological mechanisms – namely, a permeability of the psychological boundary – it is to be expected that they might frequently occur in the same person; but any nervous disorders that accompany genius signal, not dissolution, but a ‘perturbation which masks evolution.’

For Myers dreams, though they may indeed be common and frequently discounted, they are nonetheless important sources of data (pages 102-103):

Myers argued [that] dreams provide a readily available means of studying the ‘language’ of the subliminal, a language that may underlie other, less common forms of automatism or subliminal processes. . . . Myers’s model of mind predicts that that if sleep is a state of consciousness in which subliminal processes take over from supraliminal ones, then sleep should facilitate subliminal functioning, not only in the organic or ‘infrared’ region, but also in the “ultraviolet” range of the psychological spectrum, such as the emergence of telepathic impressions in dreams.

This has certainly been my own experience. A post I wrote two years ago will perhaps serve to illustrate that for those who are interested. My dream of the hearth, recounted there, was, incidentally, the only dream I have ever had in which I experienced the presence of God, another reason for my attaching such great importance to it.

An important related topic he also addresses is that of ‘hallucinations.’ People tend to be quite closed minded on this topic, seeing visions and voices as the sign of a mind gone wrong. This is quite unhelpful. There is a mass of evidence that I may come back to some time to indicate that ‘hallucinations’ range from the darkly destructive to the life enhancing and it important to pay close attention to the details of them and the circumstances under which they occur before coming to any conclusion about them. Our society’s default position, the result of exactly the backward step under discussion here that both psychology and psychiatry took in the name of pseudo-science, is harmful rather than helpful quite often (I have explored a more positive approach on this blog – see the six links to An Approach to Psychosis). Pim van Lommel’s research into NDEs replicates the same kind of pattern in that patients whose families and friends were unsympathetic took much longer to integrate their experiences and found it a more painful process than those who were met with support and understanding. He summarises this (page 51):

When someone first tries to disclose the NDE, the other person’s reaction is absolutely crucial. If this initial reaction is negative or skeptical, the process of accepting and integrating the NDE typically presents far greater problems than if this initial reaction is positive, sympathetic, or neutral. Evidence has shown that positive responses facilitate and accelerate the integration process. In fact, without the possibility of communication, the process of coming to terms with the NDE often fails to get under way at all.

We tend to underestimate the frequency of ‘hallucinations’ in the ‘normal’ population, something the Myers was already aware of (page 108):

One of the most important accomplishments of Myers, Guerney, and their colleagues in psychical research was in demonstrating the previously suspected, but as it turns out not infrequent, occurrence of hallucinations in normal, healthy individuals.

Not all them should be dismissed as fantasy (page 109):

These studies and surveys also demonstrated that such hallucinations are not always purely subjective in origin. Some, in fact, are veridical – that is, they involve seeing, hearing, or otherwise sensing some event happening at a physically remote location. . . . . Using their own figures for the frequency with which people recall having hallucinations in a waking, healthy state, together with statistics regarding the incidence of death in the United Kingdom, they concluded that hallucinations coinciding with a death happened too frequently to be attributable to chance.

All in all, Myers’s mould-breaking approach to the mind and to the problems of consciousness is refreshing to say the least, and maps onto my own long-standing interests in spirituality, creativity and ‘psychosis.’ It was icing on the cake to find what he said about science and religion, a point to savour and a good note to end this post on (page 113) :

On the one hand, . . . he believed that science could ‘prove the preamble of all religions’ – namely, that the universe extends far beyond the perceptible material world. On the other hand., religion could contribute to ‘the expansion of Science herself until she can satisfy those questions which the human heart will rightly ask, but to which Religion alone has thus far attempted an answer.’

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[1] Unfortunately, Myers uses supraliminal to mean anything that crosses any threshold into consciousness, whether from above or below. This is a perfectly legitimate usage but it then leaves us no straightforward word to describe what lies above us and beyond our upper threshold. I have preferred to use subliminal to mean what lies beneath the lower threshold and supraliminal for what lies beyond our upper threshold, and conscious to describe what crosses either of the thresholds into our awareness. Quotes from or about Myers tend to follow his usage.

The Threshold Issue

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Irreducible Mind – a review (1/3): how psychology lost the plot

. . . . the mind is the power of the human spirit. Spirit is the lamp; mind is the light which shines from the lamp. Spirit is the tree, and the mind is the fruit. Mind is the perfection of the spirit, and is its essential quality, as the sun’s rays are the essential necessity of the sun.

(Selected Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá: page 316-317)

I began studying psychology in 1976, long before I became a Bahá’í, and completed my clinical training in July 1982, at least four months before I met even a mention of the Faith in the following November.

Never once in my entire experience of being taught psychology did I ever hear of Frederick William Henry Myers. The closest encounter I ever had of this kind was with William James. He was mentioned in asides with a dismissive and grudging kind of respect. The implication was that he was an amazing thinker for his time but nowadays very much old hat. I gave him a quick glance and moved on.

Looking back now I realise I was robbed.

FWH Myers (1843-1901)

When I decided to become a Bahá’í at the beginning of December that same year, after a lightening conversion, my friends thought I was nuts, and when I met the quote from ‘Abdu’l-Bahá which you’ll find at the top of this post, I was thunderstruck. It ran completely counter to all I had been taught and all I had found in any psychology I had ever read. I really struggled to integrate that insight into my world-view.

The context included ideas such as Manifestations of God (symbolised by the stars in the picture at the head of the post), a spiritual realm (represented by the left hand line), and a link between that spiritual realm and our material one (the line that joins the left hand to the right hand line). If accepting the idea of God was a huge challenge for a former atheist, taking on board the concept of a soul was an even bigger one. At least the Bahá’í concept of God was definitely not the one I most certainly did not and could never believe in: it still seems such an unwarranted gift for beings like us to have an immortal soul though, considering how badly we behave most of the time. It took me four years at least of hard study and deep reflection to even begin to get my head around this stuff. (The poem I posted on 21 March, after this post was written, gives a sense of where I was starting from.)

It is plain to me now though how this situation came about. Kelly and Kelly capture it neatly and clearly in the introduction to their brave, thorough and well-researched book, Irreducible Mind (pages xvii-xviii):

[William] James’s person-centered and synoptic approach was soon largely abandoned . . . in favour of a much narrower conception of scientific psychology. Deeply rooted in earlier 19th-century thought, this approach advocated deliberate emulation of the presuppositions and methods – and thus, it was hoped, the stunning success – of the “hard” sciences especially physics. . . . Psychology was no longer to be the science of mental life, as James had defined it. Rather it was to be the science of behaviour, “a purely objective experimental branch of natural science”. It should “never use the terms consciousness, mental states, mind, content, introspectively verifiable, imagery, and the like.”

And, sadly, in some senses nothing much has changed. Psychology is still, for the most part, pursuing the Holy Grail of a complete materialistic explanation for every aspect of consciousness and the working of the mind. It’s obviously all in the brain, isn’t it (page xx)?

The empirical connection between mind and brain seems to most observers to be growing ever tighter and more detailed as our scientific understanding of the brain advances. In light of the successes already in hand, it may not seem unreasonable to assume as a working hypothesis that this process can continue indefinitely without encountering any insuperable obstacles, and that properties of minds will ultimately be fully explained by those brains. For most contemporary scientists, however, this useful working hypothesis has become something more like an established fact, or even an unquestionable axiom.

This is a dogma and as such can only be protected by ignoring or discounting as invalid all evidence that points in a different direction. Edward Kelly argues for a different approach in his introduction, believing as the co-authors demonstrate in this massive tome that there is a wealth of evidence to undermine this a priori belief (page xxii):

First and perhaps foremost is an attitude of humility in relation to the present state of scientific knowledge. . . . Second, we emphasise that science consists at bottom of certain attitudes and procedures, rather than any fixed set of beliefs. The most basic attitude is that facts have primacy over theories and that belief should therefore always remain modifiable in response to the empirical data.

Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

He quotes Francis Bacon (ibid.):

“The world is not to be narrowed till it will go into the understanding . . . but the understanding is to be expanded and opened till it can take in the image of the world as it is in fact.”

The Kellys try and practice what they preach, as their book demonstrates (page xxv):

Our own empiricism is thus thorough-going and radical, in the sense that we are willing to look at all relevant facts and not just those that seem compatible, actually or potentially, with current mainstream theory. Indeed, if anything it is precisely those observations that seem to conflict with current theory that should command the most urgent attention.

Their first chapter, to which I may return in a later post, takes a critical look at the current mainstream position. I want to start instead with their second chapter that looks in detail at the work of Myers. I want to do justice to a deep and creative thinker whom I was induced to neglect during my formal training, much to the detriment of my practice for a significant number of years.

I am plucking a quote from the middle of Emily Kelly’s chapter on Myers’s approach (page 76) because the last sentence cuts to the core of the challenge constituted by his position and the evidence that mainstream ‘scientists’ ignore:

This notion of something within us being conscious, even though it is not accessible to our ordinary awareness, is an exceedingly difficult one for most of us to accept, since it is so at variance with our usual assumption that the self of which we are aware comprises the totality of what we are as conscious mental beings. Nevertheless, it is essential to keep in mind Myers’s new and enlarged conception of consciousness if one is to understand his theory of human personality as something far more extensive than our waking self.

And perhaps it needs to be said in advance, in order to soften the shock for some readers, that he is not just talking about the kind of unconscious processes we all accept as definite, such as those which keep our hearts beating, or as probable, such as the projection of past experiences onto the present. He takes seriously not just what lies underneath our minds so to speak, the stuff that many dreams are made of, but also what soars above them, such as mystical states.

Emily Kelly’s preamble:

Before we look in more detail at what his exact position was in the next post, it might be useful to quote from Emily Kelly’s preamble. She puts her finger on the most significant loss incurred when psychology went pseudo-scientific (page 50):

All elements of the universe are not only inextricably related, but they all function according to the same basic, deterministic principles of cause-and-effect and are all, in the final analysis, of the same basic essence or nature. . . . The attempt to transform psychology into a science, however, raised some unique problems. The phenomena of psychology are unlike those of any of the physical sciences in that they are, above all else, mental. (Ibid.)

The pioneers of this approach were far too sure of themselves (page 54):

. . . . For many in the first generation of scientific psychology, the thoroughgoing unilateral dependence of mind on brain was “a practical certainty.”

The basic issue had been resolved (page 58):

. . . . For [T.H.]Huxley as for many other 19^th-century scientists, the exact nature of the dependence of psychical processes on physical ones with an open – though unresolvable – question; the general dependence of mind on matter was a resolved – and thus closed – question. (page 58)

I almost winced when I read her pointed explanation of how psychology had traded in the mind to buy itself a place among the sciences (page 59):

Scientists instrumental in the development of 19^th-century psychology thus in general had chosen to conceptualise science primarily not as a method with which to confront basic questions posed by contradictory aspects of human experience, but as a doctrine to which psychology, if it is to be a science, must conform. (page 59)

Lotus/I-Ching (From this Website)

She paves the way for a key component of Myers’s approach in her quote from Mill (page 62):

John Stuart Mill had been the leader and exemplar of mid 19^th- century liberal thinkers who believed that the cause of knowledge is best served, not by partisans, but by “those who take something from both sides of the great controversies, and make out that neither extreme is right, nor wholly wrong.” (page 62)

In the next post we’ll be taking a closer look at Myers’s approach.

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Why Religion is Natural, Science is Not – a review

Muller-Lyer Illusion: the lines are of equal length

We may think of science as one wing and religion as the other; a bird needs two wings for flight, one alone would be useless. Any religion that contradicts science or that is opposed to it, is only ignorance—for ignorance is the opposite of knowledge.

Religion which consists only of rites and ceremonies of prejudice is not the truth. Let us earnestly endeavour to be the means of uniting religion and science.

(‘Abdu’l-Bahá: Paris Talks – pages 130-131)

I have just finished reading Robert McCauley‘s book on the issue of religion and science. It is a valiant attempt to deal with this issue as dispassionately as possible. It is, however, in my view, only partially successful. I think this is largely because he holds back by far his most effective explanation of the key considerations until the very end. The result is that much of the book appears not to be comparing like with like.

Let’s look at his basic case first, as explained in the opening half of the book, before looking in more detail at how his treatment of his topic has to some degree undermined his argument.

The Basic Points

He lays a foundation for his argument by explaining at length what he regards as two forms of natural cognition: there are learned skills/cognitions as against what he describes as maturational ones. Chewing and walking are maturational skills: they come inevitably as we grow. As he explains (page 22) they occur very early, we don’t remember learning them and they don’t require the guidance of adults to acquire. Writing and riding a bike are different. They come naturally up to a point but entail coaching, we remember learning them as a rule and yet we exercise the skill automatically and unconsciously once acquired and they feel completely natural.

He concludes his introductory overview by stating (page 30):

This suggests (i) that most of humans’ maturationally natural forms of knowledge arrive comparatively early, (ii) that they will address some of the most basic problems humans face (like those that are solved by chewing and walking), and (iii) that they will prove to be so ubiquitous that their emergence counts as normal development. In contrast to capacities that possess a practiced naturalness and are second nature to us, perception, cognition, and action that possess maturational naturalness are first nature to us.

When it comes to interpreting our environment, maturational cognition kicks in swiftly. It had to in the past. Our survival depended upon it. It lies behind our susceptibility to visual illusions such as the Müller-Lyer illusion which cannot be over-ridden in spite of knowing the reality, happens completely automatically and unconsciously, and for example can cause us to almost instantly interpret unexpected noises as a potentially malign presence or, in his terms, agent. It operates on minimal information and involves no higher processes of reflection. Kahneman has examined many of its manifestations in his book Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow, and McCauley refers to his and Tversky‘s work often in this book.

Kahneman uses the expression ‘System 1′ to describe this mode of thinking (page 21):

System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control. System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration.

This same system of thinking causes us all sorts of problems when we have to interpret information for which it is ill-suited but to which it nonetheless confidently and immediately responds with a completely erroneous answer. An example would be useful here as it helps clarify why much of scientific thinking is not natural – much more of a System 2 operation in fact. A favourite area and rich source of examples of erroneous thinking typically involves probability, something we humans are very blinkered about.

McCauley draws an example from the work of Tversky and Kahneman (page 124). They gave character outlines to many people including the scientifically sophisticated, who can find it almost as difficult as the rest of us to counteract these biases despite all their practice to the contrary. One of these outlines includes the information that Linda was a bright, outspoken philosophy major in college and was active in a variety of causes concerned with questions of justice. They were asked to decide what her job is likely to be now. The list included two items: ‘bank teller’ and ‘feminist bank teller.’

The overwhelming majority of subjects assumed that she would have become a feminist bank teller. This is a beautiful example of where our maturational cognitive system leads us astray. As they explain (page 125):

The probability of two claims both being true can never exceed the probability of the truth of the least probable of the two claims.

It would therefore always be more probable that she would be a bank teller rather than a feminist bank teller. Even when we know that intellectually, it is almost impossible to see it as more probable that Linda would end up a bank teller rather than a feminist bank teller. It goes so much against the grain of our first nature to reach that conclusion. We automatically feel that ‘like goes with like’ (Gilovich: ibid).

Implications for Religion and Science

He then moves onto explaining why science, that, by and large, cuts against the grain of these maturational ways of thinking is so much harder for us to learn than religion that cuts far more with grain. The whole of the first part of the book is concerned with expanding upon this point.

It was really not until page 211 that I felt he fessed up clearly to what he had really been doing in the book as a whole, and which had caused me considerable irritation. He says:

Up to this point the target of my analysis has been the cognitive status of popular understandings about religious belief and action, as the corresponding representations are entertained and as religions’ rituals are carried out by ordinary participants. It has been a discussion of religion at the retail level.

So basically he has been contending that hard real science is difficult for us to learn whereas popular religion comes naturally. He concedes that theology is just as difficult as science and draws upon many of the same higher order cognitions that produce counter-intuitive conclusions, though it does not dispense with the idea of an agency working behind the scenes. He also recognises that our intuitive ideas about the reality that science deals with are just as blinkered, automatic and ineradicable as the simplistic ideas of supernatural agency that he attributes to retail religion. But the annoying implication up to this point has been that real science is inherently superior to any form of religion altogether.

That he concedes there is tough thinking inherent in theology, though welcome, doesn’t go far enough for my taste in any case, even when he creates a clearer basis for his comparisons in the final chapter of his book. He completely fails to recognise the existence, let alone the possible validity, of replicable experienced-based forms of religious practice that are not symbolic rituals and also are clearly not abstract and quasi philosophical.

There is no mention of meditation and the resultant mystical experiences that a consistent practitioner can replicate. Margaret Donaldson and Ken Wilber, amongst others, argue cogently, in books such as Human Minds and The Marriage of Sense and Soul, for the need to respect that tradition at least as much as science’s. The conclusions arrived at through meditation were also frequently higher order and counter-intuitive.

These are religious traditions in some cases without any ‘theology’ but which have a deeply sophisticated understanding of psychology and of physical reality derived from centuries of meditative practice – for example, in Nāgārjuna (ca. 150 C.E.). In my view, though physics is catching up, psychology is still lagging woefully behind. A recent major consideration of this is to be found in Irreducible Mind, a work to which I shall be returning in this blog. There is at least one religion, the Bahá’í Faith, with no rituals and no theology. It is also at its core pragmatic and empirical as well as transcendent in its approach, measuring spiritual progress to some extent by positive measurable results in the social world – very much ’treading the spiritual path with practical feet.’ He seems to regard these examples as too esoteric to be relevant to his case.

A Climate of Mutual Respect

I don’t usually post reviews of books when I am so ambivalent about them and have such strong reservations. The reason why I have gone public in this case is because the book is a laudable attempt to deal with a very difficult issue from an unusual and fruitful angle. I just wish he had placed the last chapter first and gone just a step further in acknowledging that religion can potentially, at its highest and best, shed light on the nature of our reality even if, at its most routine, it is no better than lay or retail science.

In the end though, by flagging up the recency and vulnerability of the great achievement which science constitutes as currently practised, he is issuing a useful warning (page 286):

Science’s radical counterintuitiveness makes it cognitively unnatural in the extreme. Humans have produced science so infrequently in their history because not only does it not come to them naturally but because it is incredibly difficult to do and the doing of it is incredibly difficult to sustain. . . . . Historians and philosophers of science, who point to two critical episodes in history of Western thought, namely, the science of the ancient Greeks and modern science born at the turn of the 17th century, hold, in effect, that science was once lost and had to be reinvented. One consequence of the position that I have been defending is that nothing about human nature would ever prevent the loss of science again.

As I believe that both religion and science are essential to our survival as a species and the creation of a better civilisation, I welcome this wake up call. Evangelical atheists, in his view, have been fruitlessly attacking what is so central to human understanding that it will never die, while at the same time, in my opinion, doing a disservice to science, which is already vulnerable, by giving ammunition to its enemies with their arrogant and ill-informed attacks. And I’m not the only one to have profound reservations about their approach. Alvin Platinga, in his excellent book Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism, writes (page 54):

. . . . declarations by Dawkins, Dennett, and others have at least two unhappy results. First, their (mistaken) claim that religion and evolution are incompatible damages religious belief, making it look less appealing to people who respect reason and science. But second, it also damages science. That is because it forces many to choose between science and belief in God. Most believers, given the depth and significance of their belief in God, are not going to opt for science; their attitude towards science is likely to be or become one of suspicion and mistrust.

It is undoubtedly time we created a climate of mutual respect.

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‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Second Visit: the value of silence

This period is an important Centenary Celebration for the Bahá’í community of these islands. Having spent four weeks in England in 1911, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá had returned to Egypt, where He had established His residence, before embarking on an eight-month journey through North America. Greatly to the joy of the Bahá’ís in the British Isles His return journey in 1912 brought Him back to these shores on 13 December to renew and reinforce the relationship He had built with them during His first visit. He left here on 21 January 1913. 

Address by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá at the Friends’ Meeting House, St Martin’s Lane, 12 January 2012 

Bahá’u’lláh says there is a sign from God in every phenomenon. The sign of the intellect is contemplation, and the sign of contemplation is silence; because it is impossible for man to do two things at the same time – he cannot both speak and meditate.

It is an axiomatic fact that while you meditate you are speaking with your own spirit. In that state of mind you put certain questions to your spirit, the spirit answers, the light breaks forth, and reality is revealed…

Meditation is the key for opening the doors of mysteries. In that state man abstracts himself: in that state man withdraws himself from all outside objects; in that subjective mood he is immersed in the ocean of spiritual life and can unfold the secrets of things-in-themselves. To illustrate this, think of man as endowed with two kinds of sight; when the power of insight is being used the outward power of vision does not see.

This faculty of meditation frees man from the animal nature, discerns the reality of things, puts man in touch with God. . .

(‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Paris Talks, pp. 192–5)

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‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Second Visit: drawing on spiritual powers

This period is an important Centenary Celebration for the Bahá’í community of these islands. Having spent four weeks in England in 1911, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá had returned to Egypt, where He had established His residence, before embarking on an eight-month journey through North America. Greatly to the joy of the Bahá’ís in the British Isles His return journey in 1912 brought Him back to these shores on 13 December to renew and reinforce the relationship He had built with them during His first visit. He left the here on 21 January 1913. 

During His stay in Edinburgh, on the afternoon of January 9th, a number of well-known suffragettes and a number of prominent men opposed to them gathered at the manse to hear ‘Abdu’l-Bahá… The evening of the same day, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá spoke before the Theosophical Society of at 28 Great King Street. Theosophists of neighbouring districts had come as well, and there was not room in that spacious hall for all who attended the meeting. David Graham Pole, the secretary of the Society, said in his opening remarks: ‘‘Abdu’l- Bahá has tremendous spiritual powers. In my opinion, He is the focal point of the spiritual, intellectual, and theological forces of the present and future centuries.’ At that very meeting the spiritual powers of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá were particularly witnessed, even before He spoke, for He arrived very tired. Seated on the platform He looked exhausted. Lady Blomfield writes; ‘Then, seeming to gather strength, He arose, and with voice and manner of joyous animation, and eyes aglow, He paced the platform with a vigorous tread, and spoke with words of great power.’ He spoke of the renewal of religion from age to age. That night, He was the guest of the Theosophical Society for dinner, autographing a number of His own photographs which some of the members had, prayed for a young couple about to be married who, kneeling before Him, asked for His blessing, and wrote this prayer in the Society’s book; ‘He is God. O Lord! Cast a ray from the Sun of Truth upon this Society that it may be illumined’.

(H.M Balyuzi, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, The Centre of the Covenant of Bahá’u’lláh, pp. 367–8) 

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‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Second Visit: the four kinds of love

This period is an important Centenary Celebration for the Bahá’í community of these islands. Having spent four weeks in England in 1911, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá had returned to Egypt, where He had established His residence, before embarking on an eight-month journey through North America. Greatly to the joy of the Bahá’ís in the British Isles His return journey in 1912 brought Him back to these shores on 13 December to renew and reinforce the relationship He had built with them during His first visit. He left the here on 21 January 1913. 

A talk given at 97 Cadogan Gardens, on Saturday, January 4th, 1913

What a power is love! It is the most wonderful, the greatest of all living powers.

Love gives life to the lifeless. Love lights a flame in the heart that is cold. Love brings hope to the hopeless and gladdens the hearts of the sorrowful. In the world of existence there is indeed no greater power than the power of love. When the heart of man is aglow with the flame of love, he is ready to sacrifice all – even his life. In the Gospel it is said God is love. There are four kinds of love. The first is the love that flows from God to man; it consists of the inexhaustible graces, the Divine effulgence and heavenly illumination. Through this love the world of being receives life. Through this love man is endowed with physical existence, until, through the breath of the Holy Spirit – this same love – he receives eternal life and becomes the image of the Living God. This love is the origin of all the love in the world of creation.

The second is the love that flows from man to God. This is faith, attraction to the Divine, enkindlement, progress, entrance into the Kingdom of God, receiving the Bounties of God, illumination with the lights of the Kingdom. This love is the origin of all philanthropy; this love causes the hearts of men to reflect the rays of the Sun of Reality.

The third is the love of God towards the Self or Identity of God. This is the transfiguration of His Beauty, the reflection of Himself in the mirror of His Creation. This is the reality of love, the Ancient Love, the Eternal Love. Through one ray of this Love all other love exists.

The fourth is the love of man for man. The love which exists between the hearts of believers is prompted by the ideal of the unity of spirits. This love is attained through the knowledge of God, so that men see the Divine Love reflected in the heart. Each sees in the other the Beauty of God reflected in the soul, and finding this point of similarity, they are attracted to one another in love. This love will make all men the waves of one sea, this love will make them all the stars of one heaven and the fruits of one tree. This love will bring the realization of true accord, the foundation of real unity.

But the love which sometimes exists between friends is not (true) love, because it is subject to transmutation; this is merely fascination. As the breeze blows, the slender trees yield. If the wind is in the East the tree leans to the West, and if the wind turns to the West the tree leans to the East. This kind of love is originated by the accidental conditions of life. This is not love, it is merely acquaintanceship; it is subject to change.

Today you will see two souls apparently in close friendship; tomorrow all this may be changed. Yesterday they were ready to die for one another, today they shun one another’s society! This is not love; it is the yielding of the hearts to the accidents of life. When that which has caused this ‘love’ to exist passes, the love passes also; this is not in reality love…

(‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Paris Talks, pp. 192–5) 

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