. . . . .the people are wandering in the paths of delusion, bereft of discernment to see God with their own eyes, or hear His Melody with their own ears. Thus have We found them, as thou also dost witness.
Thus have their superstitions become veils between them and their own hearts and kept them from the path of God, the Exalted, the Great.
(Bahá’u’lláh: Tablet of Ahmad)
. . . . consciousness will be referred to as consensus trance; the hypnotist will be personified as the culture. The “subject,” the person subjected to this process, is you.
(Charles Tart: Waking Up – page 85)
Even though it is less than a year since I last republished this sequence it seemed important to nest within it one of the closing posts of my sequence on understanding the heart, which is coming out next Monday.
When I set my foot on the Bahá’í path in 1982 there were many things that puzzled and tested me. I have already dealt with one of the main ones – ‘mind is an emanation of the spirit‘ at considerable length. That most certainly was not the only one.
Another was the phrase ‘understanding heart.’ This occurs at least 30 times in currently translated Bahá’í texts. It made no sense to me at all at the time, but it challenged me by its regular occurrence to grapple with what for me was its irreconcilable paradox. The head, in my view at the time, did the understanding: the heart did the feeling. In so far as there was a relationship between them it was better to keep the heart in a subordinate position and let your head rule, OK. Understanding in an emotional sense bordering on thought was found in such expressions as ‘She’s very understanding,’ and had nothing to do with penetrating into the meaning of profound statements about spiritual reality.
I needed to know in what sense my heart could understand what Bahá’u’lláh was talking about better than my head.
I was familiar with apparent profundities such as Pascal’s ‘The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of.’ I made sense of them within my frame of reference by dismissing them as nonsense.
It was clear I had an Everest to climb. The muddle in the picture at the head of this post doesn’t convey the half of it. Let’s just say that what my sceptical gaze fell upon was a confused mix of psychological and layman’s points of reference poking through the layered screens of memory and perception that constituted my experience, and here I was, being required to completely revise them in the light of the new perspective I had catapulted myself into accepting.
My first step was to read all the Bahá’í Writings at my disposal – I had no computer, not even a Concordance, at this time. I noted down on index cards every reference to the heart that I could find. There were hundreds of them. I arranged them into various groups. I think this work was probably what brought me to the point where I had the dream I described and explained in a recent post. Sadly, I have long ago shredded them thinking that they had served their purpose, not realising then that I would have need of them now.
Into the mix of my muddled understanding at the time went ideas about reflection. After all Bahá’u’lláh had quoted the hadith ‘One hour’s reflection is preferable to seventy years of pious worship.’ These I have also explored at length elsewhere. Reflection was something I saw as very closely related to meditation and heavily dependant upon, if not overlapping with, aspects of detachment.
That was pretty good going really for a recently derailed died-in-the-wool atheist. But, as life went out of its way to prove, it was by no means enough. So I’m back here once more feeling I need to pull together stuff I’ve learned over the years in an attempt to dig even deeper into this paradox. Sometimes it feels as though the rest of my life might depend upon it in some way I don’t quite understand yet, probably because of the heart problem I’m talking about.
Let me illustrate one place where problems still clearly lurk for me behind the bushes of ignorance with which the garden of my mind is overgrown. Over many months, years even, off and on, I used the following quotation in my morning meditations:
Return, then, and cleave wholly unto God, and cleanse thine heart from the world and all its vanities, and suffer not the love of any stranger to enter and dwell therein. Not until thou dost purify thine heart from every trace of such love can the brightness of the light of God shed its radiance upon it, for to none hath God given more than one heart. . . . . And as the human heart, as fashioned by God, is one and undivided, it behoveth thee to take heed that its affections be, also, one and undivided. Cleave thou, therefore, with the whole affection of thine heart, unto His love, and withdraw it from the love of any one besides Him, that He may aid thee to immerse thyself in the ocean of His unity, and enable thee to become a true upholder of His oneness., the Exalted, the Great.
(Proclamation of Bahá’u’lláh: page 52)
Anyone who reads that carefully will almost certainly recognise one of the key challenges it presents. Do you know anyone personally who answers to the description of possessing an ‘undivided’ heart? I don’t. And I definitely know mine has a variety of allegiances. Books for a start, food, lyric poetry, coffee, songs, murder mysteries, Shakespeare, chocolate – need I go on? I find it hard enough to forego sitting in a chair watching Poirot, as I dunk ginger biscuits in my coffee, even for the sake of the physical heart within me that I know for sure exists and whose earnestly desired ability to beat for a bit longer depends upon exercise and diet. How do I learn to sacrifice all that and much more for the sake of my invisible inaudible insensible but apparently understanding heart in some other sense?
I hope I can make my desperate explorations of this topic clear enough to be of use to others. Even if I can’t, I need to do it any way, and doing it this way, in public, makes me try harder than I would if I did it in private. And after all, you don’t have to read it if you don’t want to.
I know I’m not the only one to be divided against myself. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá makes it completely clear:
. . . all souls [must] become as one soul, and all hearts as one heart. Let all be set free from the multiple identities that were born of passion and desire, and in the oneness of their love for God find a new way of life.
(Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá: page 78)
That he needs to state this at all implies that most of us don’t experience things that way.
The list he also makes, at another point, of things we crave for can apply not just to different people but to the same person who can at different times long for different things, particularly those, like me, of a butterfly-minded tendency, flitting from the marigold of one temptation to the dandelion of another:
Every soul seeketh an object and cherisheth a desire, and day and night striveth to attain his aim. One craveth riches, another thirsteth for glory and still another yearneth for fame, for art, for prosperity and the like. Yet finally all are doomed to loss and disappointment. One and all they leave behind them all that is theirs and empty-handed hasten to the realm beyond, and all their labours shall be in vain. To dust they shall all return, denuded, depressed, disheartened and in utter despair.
(Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá : page 204)
Charles Tart has a very interesting explanation, the first one he gives in a list of several, for why prayer can so often seem completely ineffective (Waking Up: pages 229-30):
. . . . most petitionary prayer, formal or unwitting, has almost no effect. First, because the ordinary person is plagued by shifting identities that have disparate and often conflicting desires, the unwitting prayers of various identities tend to contradict and largely cancel one another.
This view is indirectly supported by statements in the Baha’i Writings where we are assured of the efficacy of our prayers if we say them ‘with absolute sincerity’ or with ‘pure-hearted devotion.’ Not an easy state of mind and heart to achieve.
It does not take much thought to realise that this mishmash of conflicted attachments probably stems from some deeper cause. Most spiritual traditions would agree that it stems at least in part from what ‘Abdu’l-Bahá spells out: we think that matter is more real and more important than spirit, and our culture is probably further down that road than most.
It does take a bit more unpacking though to grasp why we are so prone to the mistake of investing emotionally in empty vessels, and even why that vulnerability and its context make it so difficult even to see that we are vulnerable at all.
For the beginnings of an explanation of our vulnerability to this trap it’s useful to turn to someone who does not feel we need a faith in anything beyond ourselves. Even the most sceptical might then be prepared to accept this as a valid premise upon which to proceed further, though with caution. Erich Fromm writes in his masterpiece, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, a dog-eared disintegrating paperback copy of which I bought in 1976 and still cling onto, something which deserves quoting at length (pages 260-61):
The intensity of the need for a frame of orientation explains a fact that has puzzled many students of man, namely the ease with which people fall under the spell of irrational doctrines, either political or religious or of any other nature, when to the one who is not under their influence it seems obvious that they are worthless constructs. . . . . Man would probably not be so suggestive were it not that his need for a cohesive frame of orientation is so vital. The more an ideology pretends to give answers to all questions, the more attractive it is; here may lie the reason why irrational or even plainly insane thought systems can so easily attract the minds of men.
But a map is not enough as a guide for action; man also needs a goal that tells him where to go. . . . man, lacking instinctive determination and having a brain that permits him to think of many directions in which he could go, needs an object of total devotion; he needs an object of devotion to be the focal point of all his strivings and the basis for all his effective – and not only proclaimed – values. . . . In being devoted to a goal beyond his isolated ego, he transcends himself and leaves the prison of absolute egocentricity.
The objects man’s devotion vary. He can be devoted to an idol which requires him to kill his children or to an ideal the makes him protect children; he can be devoted to the growth of life or to its destruction. He can be devoted to the goal of amassing a fortune, of acquiring power, of destruction, or to that of loving and being productive and courageous. He can be devoted to the most diverse goals and idols; yet while the difference in the objects of devotion are of immense importance, the need for devotion itself is a primary, existential need demanding fulfilment regardless of how this need is fulfilled.
For me though his explanation does not go far enough, in one respect in the same way as Kahneman’s does not.
First of all though, it implies that we would all search for a single dominating focus until we found it, but this is so often not the case for so many people. Many are lost in a mist of competing and chaotic distractions with no real focus whatsoever.
The similarity to the deficiency of Kahneman’s two-brain model is that Fromm’s thesis also misses out too much. Even before I accepted the reality of a spiritual realm, something not easily reducible the mechanics of matter and its formulae was thrusting itself upon my attention with an insistence that would not be dismissed. My dreamwork was the main example of this.
Fromm does not deal with some of the basic questions, it seems to me. For example, do we fall so easily into the quicksand, not just of debased frames of reference but also of divided attachments, not least because we are mistaken in thinking that matter is all that matters? If this idea is an illusion it would be as much use to us as individuals and communities as a mirage of water to a man dying of thirst. If it is an illusion, why do so many of us believe it? More of that next time.
Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights – for source of image see link
Everybody Means Something 