‘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: 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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Roads to Reality

Goya’s ‘Truth Has Died’

Just as there is a fundamental difference between divine Revelation itself and the understanding that believers have of it, so also there is a basic distinction between scientific fact and reasoning on the one hand and the conclusions or theories of scientists on the other. There is, and can be, no conflict between true religion and true science: true religion is revealed by God, while it is through true science that the mind of man “discovers the realities of things and becomes cognizant of their peculiarities and effects, and of the qualities and properties of beings” and “comprehendeth the abstract by the aid of the concrete”. However, whenever a statement is made through the lens of human understanding it is thereby limited, for human understanding is limited; and where there is limitation there is the possibility of error; and where there is error, conflicts can arise.

(A Compilation on Scholarship: Baha’i Reference Library)

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

This faculty brings forth from the invisible plane the sciences and arts. Through the meditative faculty inventions are made possible, colossal undertakings are carried out; through it governments can run smoothly. Through this faculty man enters into the very kingdom of God.

(‘Abdu’l-Bahá in Paris Talks, page 175)

A Turning Point in Human History

At a critical period in the prehistory of humanity, traces of three trends can be found in the archaeological record at a level not previously seen: artistic activity, burial and advances in tool making. As the basis of his examination of the link he sees between this flowering of creativity and a vulnerability to problems of the mind, Horrobin summarises this turning point in the following terms (The Madness of Adam & Eve, page 19):

While our knowledge of our ancestors remains very limited, the artefacts that they left behind demonstrate a clear discontinuity in mind, if not in body, which occurred at some point between about 50,000 and 200,000 years ago.

More recently Keith Oatley has unpacked a similar point in his exploration of the importance of fiction, Such Stuff as Dreams (page 28):

Steven Mithen has proposed that the ability to make metaphors is close to the essence of being human, and close to the essence of art. It’s the ability to discover that something can be both itself and something else. . . . It could be that our attainment of it was the crossing of a threshold from the archaic to the modern human mind. Evidence of the archaeological record indicates that this ability arose between (sic) relatively recently. . . .  A musical instrument – a flute – has been found from 43,000 years ago. The first known cave paintings were made 31,000 years ago. At around the same time, people started burying their dead.

Altamira Cave Painting

An increased variation in the tools created also dates from this period.

This is a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms and can only be seen as a dramatic development. The reasons are hard to explain and reducing them to the result of accelerated brain development from some combination of vitamin-rich fish and digestion-aiding fire fails to be completely convincing. That a bigger brain gives us an evolutionary advantage in the ability it confers on us to deal with the complexities of our social life misses part of the mystery for me.

My concern is not so much with this development’s physical causes, its suddenness or the evolutionary advantages it might be said to bestow, but with the fact that it seemed to implicate three diverse forms of human expertise and inquiry: art, religion and science/technology. The roots of all those three are here. Horrobin quoted Picasso (op. cit: page 16) as having viewed the cave paintings at Altamira, painted throughout a period between 10,000 and 40,000 years ago, and commented: ‘We have learned nothing.’

The Dangers of Dogmatic Science

We have become prone to see the realms within which art, religion and science move as quite distinct, even hostile. Is that position justified? Might it be possible that each is a path towards a better understanding of reality, towards a closer approximation of the truth? By divorcing them have we blocked off any hope of achieving a more complete perspective than the current fragmented and contradictory one?

There are increasing numbers of reputable thinkers who believe so. Rupert Sheldrake is a scientist who has risked his credibiliity and his career arguing publicly for science to accept its limitations and allow for the existence of baffling mysteries it cannot (yet?) explain.

He lists unhelpful dogmas that the church of science teaches (pages 7-8):

Here are the ten core beliefs that most scientists take for granted.

1. Everything is essentially mechanical. Dogs, for example, are complex mechanisms, rather than living organisms with goals of their own. Even people are machines, ‘lumbering robots’, in Richard Dawkins’s vivid phrase, with brains that are like genetically programmed computers.

2. All matter is unconscious. It has no inner life or subjectivity or point of view. Even human consciousness is an illusion produced by the material activities of brains.

3. The total amount of matter and energy is always the same (with the exception of the Big Bang, when all the matter and energy of the universe suddenly appeared).

4. The laws of nature are fixed. They are the same today as they were at the beginning, and they will stay the same for ever.

5. Nature is purposeless, and evolution has no goal or direction.

6. All biological inheritance is material, carried in the genetic material, DNA, and in other material structures.

7. Minds are inside heads and are nothing but the activities of brains. When you look at a tree, the image of the tree you are seeing is not ‘out there’, where it seems to be, but inside your brain.

8. Memories are stored as material traces in brains and are wiped out at death.

9. Unexplained phenomena like telepathy are illusory.

10. Mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really works.

Oatley is both a psychologist and novelist who makes what might seem extraordinary claims for fiction as ‘not just a slice of life’ (From the Preface) but as ‘a guided dream, a model that we readers and viewers construct in collaboration with the writer, which can enable us to see others and ourselves more clearly. The dream can offer us glimpses beneath the surface of the everyday world.’

Both of these writers, Baumeister and Oatley, bring the methods of science to bear upon the positions they are arguing for.

Combining our Powers

In the posts of this blog we have already seen Eric Reitan argue that it is just as reasonable to believe in God as not to believe in Him. There is no evidence, scientific or otherwise so completely compelling as to force anyone to believe or not believe. We have seen Ken Wilber and Margaret Donaldson clearly demonstrate that scientism privileges the kind of evidence that supports scientism’s reductionist prejudices and discounts replicable experiences within the meditative traditions that suggest they might be unwise to do so. Baumeister and Tierney as we have recently discussed have trawled the scientific literature and found numerous examples of how religion benefits society and the individual. (I am not blind to the dark side of faith and have discussed it at some length – see my posts on Conviction in the list below.)

In the end, though, how much longer can a beleaguered humanity grope for solutions to its complex and global problems in the semi-darkness, refusing to use every possible source of light?

All too often it seems, as Sheldrake contends, the light of science is dimmed by reductionist and simplistic filters that need to be discarded. Robert Wright has strongly implied that religion in the hands of too many of us is narrowed to the pencil torch of some kind of fundamentalism. At the same time, too much of art at the so-called high end has surrendered to the fragmented perspectives of modernism and merely reflects our bewildered and chaotic perceptions of reality back to us in its broken mirror.

We can’t afford to let this continue for much longer, I would have said. We need to stop bickering and combine our powers if we are to solve our problems in time.

I plan to come back to the works of Sheldrake and Oatley in more detail at a later date but feel that what they write is of such importance and said so eloquently that I needed to highlight their work almost as soon as I had found it.

Related articles

• Review: Such Stuff As Dreams – Keith Oatley
• Rupert Sheldrake: the ‘heretic’ at odds with scientific dogma
• The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry, By Rupert Sheldrake
• Skilfully Willing (2/2) (A summary of Baumeister and Tierney’s points about the value of religion)
• Conviction 1, Conviction 2 & Conviction 3
• ‘Is God a Delusion?’ by Eric Reitan
• The Self & the Soul (5/5) (for Wilber and Donaldson)
• Expanding the Moral Imagination (A review of Robert Wright’s book ‘The Evolution of God’)

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A Different Spin on ‘Bounce’ (2/3): education, creativity & equality

The Old Bridge: Clare College

Daughters and sons must follow the same curriculum of study, thereby promoting unity of the sexes. When all mankind shall receive the same opportunity of education and the equality of men and women be realized, the foundations of war will be utterly destroyed. Without equality this will be impossible because all differences and distinction are conducive to discord and strife. Equality between men and women is conducive to the abolition of warfare for the reason that women will never be willing to sanction it. Mothers will not give their sons as sacrifices upon the battlefield after twenty years of anxiety and loving devotion in rearing them from infancy, no matter what cause they are called upon to defend. There is no doubt that when women obtain equality of rights, war will entirely cease among mankind.

(Compilation on Education)

As I explained in the earlier post, it is not the debate about the exact relationship between effort and excellence that provides me with the main interest of the book Gifted Lives. It is in the other areas I listed, some of which I will attempt to explore further.

The easiest place to start is with education. Education has an uneasy relationship with creativity and can therefore be a challenging situation for anyone who stands out from the crowd as a result of special abilities. We’ve been here before of course with Ken Robinson‘s talk on education and creativity which I include at the end of this post (see an earlier post for a different presentation of much the same material).

At one point Freeman links these considerations with insight in general not just gifts in particular (page 121):

Insight is not only the gift of creative people, though. It is a common everyday experience . . . [T]he more insight is used, the more frequent and better it becomes. Alternatively, when it is squashed, as when schoolchildren are forced to think in straight lines, the less easy it is to think intuitively.

To be an artist calls for tenacity in exploring light and colour and combinations of shapes and styles in the search for aesthetic satisfaction. Western education, though, encourages the more linear, rule-bound, left side of the brain to the detriment of the more creative right side from where insights originate.

This can pose problems for everyone as they grow up. It may be worse for women, even now. The link ‘Abdu’l-Bahá makes between intuition and women has interesting implications for the whole way our educational system works:

In some respects woman is superior to man. She is more tender-hearted, more receptive, her intuition is more intense.

(Paris Talks)

Sidelining their capacities will prove costly for us all. Freeman picks up a profoundly important aspect of this, which relates to the Bahá’í teaching on the equality of men and women, and why it is so important to bring the qualities we most associate with women into the field of governance in our society (page 138):

Looking at moral behaviour over the millenia, the evidence is unquestionable. Women rarely start wars, torture people or behave in other highly destructive ways; they are traditionally carers.

There is now no space to go more deeply into this or into the whole related area of morality that she raises. I may come back to it in a later post.

In terms of Freeman’s picture of a typical education, this was all an unwelcome reminder of my early working life as a teacher of English which was tainted by a stifling sense of prose trumping poetry almost every time.

I had been recruited to Tottenham Grammar School by the then Head of English, who appeared at the door of my pokey bedsit near Bush Hill Park dressed in an RAF uniform (he also ran the cadets’ Air Training Corps) and parading a bushy white moustache that matched it well.

‘D’you need a job?’ he asked crisply, after explaining who he was and what he wanted. As I was working in a cemetery at the time for very little money, it was a no brainer. Uniform or no uniform, this seemed better than working for a pittance among gravestones.

I got a strong sense of what was in store when I used the same classroom immediately after his lesson in the first week I was there. The entire blackboard was covered in clause analysis examples which displayed huge numbers of every kind of subordinate clause in different coloured chalk – red for adverbial, green for adjectival and blue for noun clauses. (How many people reading this post can honestly say they have an intense desire to know more about this? For those few who do, please see link.) I began to realise that death comes in many disguises.

The final straw came three years later when I was marking the mid-year English essay exam (that’s an adverbial clause, by the way!). There were two essays that became the litmus paper that detected the exact extent of my discontent.

One was written by the boy with the neatly parted hair and the smart blazer with his hand in the air to every question, who always came top. It was exactly the right number of words on two sides of paper, the handwriting was beautifully legible and the content completely predictable. I gave it 11 out of 20.

The other essay was written by the classroom rebel, forever slouching in his seat with an unkempt shock of hair, crumpled uniform and a scowl on his face. The essay covered eight sheets in straggling barely legible script and was so utterly original and compelling that by the time I finished reading it I didn’t even notice  the scrawl it was written in. I gave it 19 out of 20: I took one mark off for the poor handwriting.

Steeped as I was in Dylan’s music and only a year or so away from enthusiastically joining in the widespread spirit of protest in 1968, I realise now I was a touch biased, but what followed was not a balanced and correct response, replacing as it did a mild injustice with a greater one.

I think the parents of the first boy must have appealed against my mark. The Head of English insisted on re-marking all the essays but the only marks I remember his changing were for these two essays. He gave the first boy full marks and failed the second one because of his poor handwriting. This was one of the main reasons I left the school at the end of that year and moved to a college of further education (and that was not without its challenges, of course). It is interesting how, after all these years, this incident has stayed with me so vividly.

It’s not only at school that these effects impact upon a life.

In words that echo McGilchrist’s concerns, Jeremy, now a jazz pianist, looked back at his life, having for over a decade studied medicine and trained as a child psychiatrist, a career he subsequently abandoned in spite of the respect and affection with which he was regarded (page 52):

‘I over-used my memory and the left side of my brain, instead of using my imagination.’

And David, an architect who emerged from his education relatively unscathed, gives a vivid insight into the experience of intuition (page 122):

I have an intuitive intelligence which I can rely on to take me towards a solution for a problem. After working in the usual way, I stop and then ideas suddenly come to me. Starting a new project, I collect all the information and just put it to one side, so it’s kind of around. Then after a few days, my mind has passively chewed over it for a bit and I’m ready to start. If I start designing straight away, I might miss exciting possibilities.

In my limited experience, this works for writing too. Meditation, such as I have described earlier, can lead to floods of ideas coming into my mind unbidden once my thinking on a topic has been primed in some way. It begins to seem as if I am taking dictation from within.

So, Gifted Lives is a rich and rewarding read. As I’ve written far more than I intended on this theme, I’ll have to leave the other aspects that intrigued me to a later date.

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Bringing Down the Barricades: the Art of Consultation

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending time we find them there.

(‘Mending Wall‘, Robert Frost, Selected Poems, page 43)

In the closing decades of the last century the Berlin wall tumbled. Nor was it only in the landscape that we found this happening. Such collapses were and still are transforming our inscape as well.

The Bahá’í Revelation, Bahá’ís believe, has a crucial part to play in helping the dismantling of the barricades within and between people. We are a kind of catalyst in that it is by our transformation as Bahá’ís that this process will be accelerated and, even better, by borrowing our ideas and practices everyone, whether a Bahá’í or not, can join in the work of bringing down the barricades.

In the concluding post of the sequence on Conviction I threatened to return to some aspects of the Bahá’í prescription for living in a way that could, if given the chance by a sufficient number of people, change the direction of civilization for the better.

I’m now delivering on that threat and going to attempt to demonstrate that one exportable aspect unique to the Bahá’í life has an especially strong bearing on this problem of walls: consultation. There are others that I don’t mention here that would have the same effect. Another, meditation, which I will deal with very briefly, is not unique to the Faith.

Meditation, for an individual, seems to be equivalent to consultation for the group. It serves the same purposes and requires and creates the same personal qualities. They both grow from and result in unity and in detachment, which may in any case be one and the same process and end-state.

I apologise for this post’s being so long but it didn’t seem possible to split it without  making the theme hard to follow.

Consultation

The purpose is to emphasize the statement that consultation must have for its object the investigation of truth. He who expresses an opinion should not voice it as correct and right but set it forth as a contribution to the consensus of opinion . . .

(‘Abdu’l-Bahá: Promulgation of Universal Peace: page 72)

We have to remain mindful, though we often forget, that investigating the truth is a goal whose pursuit does not guarantee that we will always find it. What we can do though is be resolute in developing increasing levels of humility about the value of our opinions, so that the consensus becomes richer and an ever closer approximation to the particular truth under investigation. Developing that kind of humility in such an opinionated world is easier said than done.

Some questions might still come to mind. Why is it so difficult to treat our own opinions as simply contributions to a consensus? How can we learn to do that? Is the investigation of the truth the only purpose of consultation or are there others?

Turning to the literature of the Bahá’í Faith should assist us. For example Bahá’u'lláh writes :

Take ye counsel together in all matters, inasmuch as consultation is the lamp of guidance which leadeth the way, and is the bestower of understanding.’

(Tablets of Bahá’u'lláh, pages 168-9)

If we are in the dark, some light, however little, will help – even a match will be better than nothing. Even though the light we create will never rival the sun’s, it will often be quite good enough to help us find our way forwards. But it will work best when we combine our lights together rather than shielding them to ourselves. That is what consultation can do: polishing our own mirror in meditation helps us, as we will briefly see later, bring a brighter light to the process of consultation.

Why is letting go and sharing our light so hard? How can we learn to do it?

Peter Senge, a systems theorist, in The Fifth Discipline (pages 8-9), argues that we all operate upon ‘mental models’ or ‘mental maps’ (page 239) which are

deeply ingrained assumptions, generalisations, or even pictures or images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action. Very often, we are not consciously aware of our mental models or the effects they have on our behaviour.

And on page 185:

all we ever have are assumptions, never truths, that we always see the world through our mental models and that the mental models are always incomplete.

He asserts (page 182) that:

. . . decision-making processes could be transformed if people became more able to surface and discuss more productively their different ways of looking at the world.

These assumptions are deeply ingrained because we have often formed them in childhood or adolescence, they have seen us through difficulties or even kept us alive, and they seem to make sense of our sometimes overwhelming experiences. We are not inclined to leave go of them too easily nor do we look charitably upon those who threaten them by argument or action. So, we protect our little candle and don’t readily let it pool its light with everyone else’s.

Blocks

Peter Koestenbaum in his book ‘New Image of the Person: theTheory and Practice of Clinical Philosophy’ states that:

‘[a]nxiety and physical pain are often our experience of the resistances against the act of reflection.’

By reflection, amongst other things, he means unhooking ourselves from our ideas.

An example he gives from the clinical context illustrates what he means:

. . . to resist in psychotherapy means to deny the possibility of dissociating consciousness from its object at one particular point . . . To overcome the resistance means success in expanding the field of consciousness and therewith to accrue increased flexibility . . .’

But overcoming this resistance is difficult. It hurts and frightens us. How are we to do it? In therapy it is the feeling of trust and safety we develop towards the therapist that helps us begin to let go of maladaptive world views, self-concepts and opinions.

Amongst the prerequisites listed by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá for those who take counsel together is ‘detachment from all save God.’ In the Tablets written after the Kitáb-i-Aqdas Bahá’u'lláh explains what it takes to be detached:

The essence of detachment is for man to turn his face towards the courts of the Lord, to enter His Presence, behold His Countenance, and stand witness before Him.

It’s fairly clear that such an awareness will entail a great deal of work on practising the presence of God. If we can maintain such a sense of His Presence then it is extremely unlikely that we would be inclined pig-headedly to bludgeon our friends, family, colleagues and neighbours into submission with our opinions.  It feels like a lifetime’s work to get to this point though.

Detachment as a Process

Is this becoming one of those counsels of despair which can seem so characteristic of the spiritual life? Can we only consult if we are completely detached? If not shouldn’t we bother?

Perhaps though detachment is more of a process than an end-state at least in this life.

Koestenbaum supports this view (page 73):

The history of philosophy, religion and ethics appears to show that the process of reflection can continue indefinitely . . . .  there is no attachment . . . which cannot be withdrawn, no identification which cannot be dislodged.’

By reflection he means something closely related to meditation.

We need to consider the possibility that consultation is also a process that can help us become more detached. If so, it’s goal is clearly more than simply the investigation of truth. It is a spiritual discipline in itself and leads to personal as well as group transformation. It perhaps could rightly be called a Bahá’í yoga.

Maybe now would be a good time to shift our attention from consultation to a brief consideration of meditation before looking at how the two processes work together. They may be mutually reinforcing: they may even effectively be the same thing!

Meditation

The wine of renunciation must needs be quaffed, the lofty heights of detachment must needs be attained, and the meditation referred to in the words “One hour’s reflection is preferable to seventy years of pious must needs be observed, . . .’

(Bahá’u'lláh: The Kitáb-i-Íqán, page 238)

At first sight an equivalence between meditation and consultation, of the kind I am speculating about, seems unlikely. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá explains in Paris Talks (page 174):

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 a man to do two things it one time – he cannot both speak and meditate.

Consultation, at least in Western Europe and the United States, is not conspicuous for its silences. Have we drawn a blank?

‘It is an axiomatic fact,’ He continues,

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

Perhaps not. We are, in a sense, consulting, though with our higher Selves rather than with other people. Such inner speech seems to require an absence of outer speech, but it may nonetheless be a form of consultation. We are suspending our usual assumptions and opening ourselves up to other possibilities. He goes onto say:

The spirit of man is itself informed and strengthened during meditation; through it affairs of which man knew nothing are unfolded before his view. Through it he receives Divine inspiration, through it he receives heavenly food.

Do Consultation and Meditation Reinforce Each Other?

When we suspend our assumptions in this way, we receive intimations of a higher and more accurate kind. This sounds remarkably similar to the understanding achieved in consultation. It seems possible , at least in principle, to use meditation to improve our consultation skills and consultation perhaps to practise and refine our meditation. It also raises the question whether consultation, at least in the West, would benefit from more silence.

We know it requires detachment. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá continues:

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

One possible way of conceptualising detachment, orr at least a result of it, is freedom from our animal nature as described here.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá wrote:

Regarding the statement in ‘The Hidden Words’, that man must renounce his own self, the meaning, is that he must renounce his inordinate desires, his selfish purposes and the promptings of his human self, and seek out the holy breathings of the spirit . . . . ..

(Selected Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá: page 207)

Meditation, then, might help us achieve the detachment necessary for consultation. Consultation will almost certainly strengthen our ability to be detached and thereby facilitate our meditation. They are clearly not unrelated disciplines sharing as they do this same outcome.

We also have to be open to the views of other people when we consult and to the Bahá’í Scriptures when we meditate upon them or to the promptings of our higher self when we commune with it in meditation. So these two skills are not all that different either: they both enhance our understanding of reality.

In the end, it’s hard to resist the conclusion that meditation will help us consult and consulting will help us meditate. It certainly seems to me that meditation and consultation used in conjunction as the Bahá’í Faith recommends would constitute a wrecking ball of sufficient power to bring even the most obdurate of our dividing walls crashing to the ground and pave the way for greater unity within and between us. Such a degree of unity is imperative if we are to become capable of solving the problems that currently confront us.

Consultation has links with justice, too complex to go into now, which add further strength to this position:

To the extent that justice becomes a guiding concern of human interaction, a consultative climate is encouraged that permits options to be examined dispassionately and appropriate courses of action selected. In such a climate the perennial tendencies toward manipulation and partisanship are far less likely to deflect the decision-making process.

(From Section II: The Prosperity of Humankind)

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The Self and the Soul: Implications of Mirrorwork (4/5)

Mirroring the Light

These energies with which the Day Star of Divine bounty and Source of heavenly guidance hath endowed the reality of man lie, however, latent within him, even as the flame is hidden within the candle and the rays of light are potentially present in the lamp. The radiance of these energies may be obscured by worldly desires even as the light of the sun can be concealed beneath the dust and dross which cover the mirror. Neither the candle nor the lamp can be lighted through their own unaided efforts, nor can it ever be possible for the mirror to free itself from its dross. It is clear and evident that until a fire is kindled the lamp will never be ignited, and unless the dross is blotted out from the face of the mirror it can never represent the image of the sun nor reflect its light and glory.

(Bahá’u'lláh: Gleanings: XXVII)

A Case of Mistaken Identity

Hopefully we have most of us made an attempt at the exercise at the end of the previous post.

A question left hanging in the air was concerning what we could learn about our mind from the comparison with a mirror. The easiest way to explain one of the most important implications is to say that consciousness is like the glass of the mirror and our thoughts, plans and feelings like the reflections in the glass. All too often we mistake what is reflected in the glass of our consciousness for who we are in essence.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy uses the image of the chess board to make the same point:

We mistakenly identify with the pieces, not realising we are also, perhaps more truly the board. The point is that thoughts, feelings, sensations, emotions, memories and so on are pieces: they are not you.

(A.C.T.: Page 192)

As I do also, they place great store by this aspect of the self, the one that remains the same as changing experiences flow past: they call it the observing self and believe, rather implausibly, that it derives from language. They believe that operating from the observing self enables us to unhook ourselves from disabling scripts and discover, choose to live by and enact our deepest values in spite of all the discomfort that inevitably attends upon such a commitment. Our lives become value- rather than self- or language-centred. If we do not achieve this level of understanding, in their view, we are condemned to betray our highest values because we have confused ourselves with what we are telling or have been told about ourselves.

It’s perhaps worth clarifying at this point that I am not saying that Bahá’ís believe that this ability to reflect is our soul. I do believe though that it is a pointer to or attribute of our soul. To summarise a complex argument rather simply we can say the essence of the soul is unknowable (Gleanings: LXXXII). However, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá illustrates that there is in fact something we can know with the analogy of a flower:

Its external appearance and manifest attributes are knowable; but the inner being, the underlying reality or intrinsic identity, is still beyond the ken and perception of our human powers.

(Promulgation of Universal Peace: page 421)

This suggests that while we cannot know the essence of our soul we can experience its attributes. I am personally of the view that the capacity to reflect is one of the attributes of the soul.

Directing the Mirror

‘Abdu’l-Bahá  in ‘Paris Talks‘ goes further in pointing out in what ways this power is involved in our spiritual development. He uses the image of the mirror to do so:

Reflecting Evil

The meditative faculty is akin to the mirror; if you put it before earthly objects it will reflect them. Therefore if the spirit of man is contemplating earthly subjects he will be informed of these. . . . Therefore let us keep this faculty rightly directed — turning it to the heavenly Sun and not to earthly objects — so that we may discover the secrets of the Kingdom, and comprehend the allegories of the Bible and the mysteries of the spirit. May we indeed become mirrors reflecting the heavenly realities . .

(page 176)

From a spiritual point of view, every experience we have is only a reflection in the mirror of our souls and not reducible simply to activity of the brain which is more like a radio receiver than a computer in this process. The purpose of this mirror is to reflect divine light. We must not mistake ourselves for the earthly things we reflect: that drags us down. Neither must we mistake ourselves for God when divine light is reflected from our hearts: that way lies one of the most spiritually corrosive emotions – pride. If we are a mirror it explains why we might experience the whole universe within us — we can reflect it! It is folded within us but it is not us any more than the mirror that I look into is me.

Identity and the Core Self

Another important implication of this model is that we are in essence all mirrors. What our cultures, upbringing, current situation and ‘tribal’ loyalties, such as Everton, England or Unitarianism, have brought to the shaping of our identities is superficial and divisive: it is not who we really are no matter how desperately we hold onto it. Underneath we are all the same. Our differences, when they are creative, are to be celebrated: when they are destructive, they can and should be discarded. Our essence will not be destroyed by this: rather it will be revealed in all its glory.

It is generally agreed that it is hard, if not impossible to undertake such a process of shedding destructive identities unaided. Even those who do not embrace the idea that the soul might be involved, accept that we need a special kind of support which our culture calls psychotherapy. When the shedding of an identity is very radical, when we are proposing to strip our sense of self back to the core, most spiritual traditions recommend a guru: because Bahá’ís are encouraged not to place other human beings on that kind of pedestal, we feel we need to rely on God through prayer and other spiritual processes, all of which are designed to weaken the hold of our attachment to our lesser selves.

However we go about it in our various traditions, stripping our identifications back to this core self is perhaps the only way of achieving a true deep recognition of our common humanity which is sufficiently strong to overcome many of our long-held and much cherished prejudices. Once we have experienced this core self, however faintly, I believe also that the idea of the soul becomes a more reasonable possibility to entertain, though this experience falls short of the kind of compelling evidence that would make dogmatic scepticism seem completely ridiculous.  Reflection, in this sense, and detachment as used in many spiritual traditions, seem to be very closely related.

Ponder at all times in your hearts how ye were created. Since We have created you all from one same substance it is incumbent on you to be even as one soul, to walk with the same feet, eat with the same mouth and dwell in the same land, that from your inmost being, by your deeds and actions, the signs of oneness and the essence of detachment may be made manifest.

(Arabic Hidden Words: No. 68)

Limits of Free Will

This concept of consciousness as a mirror, whose direction of aim we can choose, also helps clarify one of the earlier issues we looked at: is our will free? We always need to specify: free to do what?

The mirror analogy helps here with one aspect of the problem. If a mirror is facing a dung heap and is in reasonably good condition, it will reflect it. That’s what mirrors do: they have no choice but to reflect what’s put before them. To a degree that’s also true of consciousness. However, we can choose which way to turn the mirror, and, if we do turn it, it will reflect something different. Of course if we have really neglected or other people have abused our mirror, it may have become so filthy it can’t reflect anything at all, rather as though it had not just been pointed at a dung heap but dropped into one. So, a double effort would be required here: we’d need to clean it and turn it the right way. Habit could, of course, have made the arm that pulls the mirror towards the world much stronger than the arm that pulls it towards the good, as we conceive it. This means that much exercise of the weaker arm will be needed before we can hold the mirror steadily towards the good. This is a choice that is still within our power though, no matter how weak the better arm may be. Spiritual disciplines help in this process.

Reflecting Higher Things

Where the garden metaphor gains is in helping us understand a different but related aspect of the mind. Unlike a mirror, which is not changed by what is reflected in it, by and large, a garden is very much affected by how it is cultivated and what is sown or allowed to take root in it. This enriches the idea of the kind of choices before us and the exact way free will needs to be exercised.

This we will need to look at in more detail in the next post. In the meanwhile, we can all keep polishing.

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