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)
Revisiting ‘The Marriage of Self and Soul‘ triggered me into thinking there would be some value in republishing this sequence from 2009.
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:
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.
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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