The Bahá’í Concept of Unity (2/3): In terms of Humanity

Copyright of the image belongs to the Bahá’í World Centre

Given that the third post in my sequence on Science, Spirituality and Civilisation looked in some detail at the issue of perennialism and the idea of unity it seemed only right to republish this sequence from 2019.

I was asked to give a talk at a South Shropshire Interfaith meeting in the Methodist Church in Ludlow. This sequence is based on the slides I showed and the explanations I gave. It does not attempt to give an account of the experience of the evening: it would be impossible to do justice to that. Suffice it to say, I am grateful to have had the opportunity to explore these issues with such a welcoming group of seekers after truth.

One Family

Humanity is one family. We are interconnected at both the material and the spiritual levels.

Interconnections at the material level are obvious and sometimes overwhelming. From the internet through the dynamics of our economic system to our impact upon the environment we cannot escape the fact of our global interdependence.

In terms of spiritual interconnectedness the evidence is anything but evident to most of us!

David Fontana’s book Is There an Afterlife? marshalls a wealth of data collected under carefully controlled conditions, all pointing to something impossible to explain in purely material terms. He is aware, as is John Hick, that even this amount of evidence for the transcendent is not compelling.

In his book The Fifth Dimension Hick explains why, in his view, it never will be. He contends that experiencing the spiritual world in this material one would compel belief whereas God wants us to be free to choose whether to believe or not (pages 37-38):

In terms of the monotheistic traditions first, why should not the personal divine presence be unmistakably evident to us? The answer is that in order for us to exist as autonomous finite persons in God’s presence, God must not be compulsorily evident to us. To make space for human freedom, God must be deus absconditus, the hidden God – hidden and yet so readily found by those who are willing to exist in the divine presence, . . . . . This is why religious awareness does not share the compulsory character of sense awareness. Our physical environment must force itself upon our attention if we are to survive within it. But our supra-natural environment, the fifth dimension of the universe, must not be forced upon our attention if we are to exist within it as free spiritual beings. . . . To be a person is, amongst many other things, to be a (relatively) free agent in relation to those aspects of reality that place us under a moral or spiritual claim.

As an additional complication, he talks also (page 114) of the materialism of our current ‘consensus reality.’ Naturalism has created the ‘consensus reality’ of our culture. It has become so ingrained that we no longer see it, but see everything else through it.

The near death experience of the initially skeptical Eben Alexander, a neurosurgeon, as recounted in his book Proof of Heaven, is strong anecdotal evidence of mind-brain independence at the very least. In terms of interconnectedness at a spiritual level Thomas Mellen‘s account, in his story of his near death experience, of when he encountered the being of Light, (Ken Ring – Lessons from the Light – page  287) is as cogent as you could get:

And at that time, the Light revealed itself to me on a level that I had never been to before. I can’t say it’s words; it was a telepathic understanding more than anything else, very vivid. I could feel it, I could feel this light. And the Light just reacted and revealed itself on another level, and the message was “Yes, [for] most people, depending on where you are coming from, it could be Jesus, it could be Buddha, it could be Krishna, whatever.”

But I said, “But what it is really?” And the Light then changed into – the only thing I can tell you [is that] it turned into a matrix, a mandala of human souls, and what I saw was that what we call our higher self in each of us is a matrix. It’s also a conduit to the source; each one of us comes directly, as a direct experience [from] the source. And it became very clear to me that all the higher selves are connected as one being, all humans are connected as one being, we are actually the same being, different aspects of the same being. And I saw this mandala of human souls. It was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, just [voice trembles], I just went into it and [voice falters], it was just overwhelming [he chokes], it was like all the love you’ve ever wanted, and it was the kind of love that cures, heals, regenerates.

None the less these intensely felt personal experiences cannot compel, in those who do not wish to believe it, an acceptance of the spiritual dimension, with our consequent interconnectedness at that level.

Even at the material level there is a strong case that all prejudice and gross inequality must be abolished: the spiritual case, which is unfortunately more elusive, is potentially an even more powerful a motivator. And this sense of connectedness, of essential unity, needs to extend beyond our species to the planet as a whole. The earth, our homeland must be nurtured not exploited.

Copyright of the image belongs to the Bahá’í World Centre

Bahá’u’lláh could even be said to have anticipated the way our planet is kicking back against our mindless greed and ruthless exploitation. He wrote: ‘My earth is weary of you, and everything within it shunneth you.’ (Hidden Words Bahá’u’lláh)

So, exactly what does our unity mean in practice?

The Welfare of the Entire Human Family

There is a challenging aspect to this as we discovered as we explored it together in a workshop at a Bahá’í Summer School.

There is no get-out clause in the wording that this message uses: ‘Each human being on earth must learn to accept responsibility for the welfare of the entire human family.’ So that means everyone must take responsibility for the welfare of everyone. I can’t wriggle out of it. This means me: I have to take responsibility for the welfare of everyone – no exceptions allowed.

Some aspects of this are not too challenging. I live near a college for the visually handicapped. Quite often as I walk to town I spot a blind person with a white cane at a difficult crossing, where traffic is hard to judge if you can’t see, struggling to decide whether or not it is safe to cross. It’s easy for me to offer help and let them take my arm as I choose the right moment to cross. It costs me no more than a minute or two and I know exactly what needs doing.

It gets harder with large groups that are equally in need of my help, if not more so, because effective help would require more effort and more knowhow. I might baulk at the idea of helping thousands of refugees even though I wanted to.

That was not the biggest problem though. What about those who undoubtedly are playing a part in creating the refugee problem, Isis for example? I have no problem helping the physically blind. What should be my attitude to the morally blind, those who might harm me if I try to help them and who are impossible for me to like let alone love? Isn’t moral blindness deserving of compassion and effective help?

In the workshop we got as far as realising that society has a responsibility to understand their deficiencies and seek to remedy them compassionately, while keeping those individuals who are doing this work safe from harm at the hands of psychopaths or fanatical ideologues.

If we are going to be able to hold firm to this compass of compassion and steer a consistent course between the many temptations and deterrents that will lie in our way, what do we have to do? For most religious people prayer and meditation are obvious prerequisites, as well as obedience to the laws and observance of the rituals of their Faith.

Next time I’ll be looking at two important ways of increasing our capacity to work more effectively together to change this complex and divided world.

Read Full Post »

Book Review (7/8): Do we need a transcendent focus? (a) – ‘The Empathic Civilisation’

The perfect soul of man—that is to say, the perfect individual—is like a mirror wherein the Sun of Reality is reflected. The perfections, the image and light of that Sun have been revealed in the mirror; its heat and illumination are manifest therein, for that pure soul is a perfect expression of the Sun.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá – Promulgation of Universal Peace – page 173

People will probably not feel an urgency to transform the current disordered world into a spiritually enlightened global civilisation unless they gain an appreciation for the true nature of reality.

(John Fitzgerald Medina Faith, Physics & Psychology – Page 52)

As I have just published a post whose focus was on how to lift our awareness to a higher level that will benefit not just ourselves but all life on earth, it seems a good time to republish this sequence.

We have looked in reasonable detail at Jeremy Rifkin’s important analysis of the relationship in our culture between empathy and entropy, at his model of levels of consciousness where he pins his best hope for our survival on what he terms ‘biosphere consciousness,’ and his outline of where child rearing practices might produce the most responsibly empathic outcome within an essentially materialistic approach to reality.

I found his book valuable, thought-provoking but in one respect deeply flawed. There are no prizes for guessing where I think the flaw is to be found.

Embodied Experience Alone?

He is not just attacking a belief in the transcendent, it is true. Reason is in his rifle sights as well (page 141):

Both fail to plumb the depths of what makes us human and therefore leave us with cosmologies that are incomplete stories – that is, they failed to touch the deepest realities of existence. That’s not to dismiss the critical elements that make the stories of faith and reason so compelling. It’s only that something essential is missing – and that something is “embodied experience.”

We soon find ourselves in the currently prevalent default mode of reductionism whose limitations I have discussed elsewhere at length (page 163):

Human beings have created religious images of the future in part as a refuge against the ultimate finality of earthly existence. Every religion holds forth the promise of either defeating time, escaping time, overcoming time, reissuing time, or denying time altogether. We use our religions as vehicles to enter the state of nirvana, the heavenly kingdom, the promised land. We come to be believe in reincarnation, rebirth, and resurrection as ways of avoiding the inevitability of biological death.

While I accept that organised religion has not helped its case by its history of intolerance and cruelty in the name of some travesty of godhead. As Greg Hodges puts it in a recent post: ‘It takes a willful ignorance of history to deny . . . . that much of what humanity remembers about its collective past centers around large-scale, religiously-legitimized violence.’

Isn’t it just possible though that we might believe in transcendent realities such as an afterlife because there happens to be some hard evidence to suggest that there is really something in these ideas? Let’s take Pim van Lommel as one possible example of carefully gathered evidence that strongly suggests, at the very least, that consciousness cannot be adequately explained by brain activity alone and is therefore extremely unlikely to be a purely material phenomenon. The crux of his case can be captured in a few quotations from his book Consciousness beyond Life (pages 132-133):

The fact that an NDE [near death experience] is accompanied by accelerated thought and access to greater than ever wisdom remains inexplicable. Current scientific knowledge also fails to explain how all these NDE elements can be experienced at a moment when, in many people, brain function has been seriously impaired. There appears to be an inverse relationship between the clarity of consciousness and the loss of brain function.

Pim van Lommel

What kind of evidence does he adduce in support of this proposition? The most telling kind of evidence comes from prospective rather retrospective studies, ie studies where the decision is taken in advance to include all those people who have undergone resuscitation within the context of several hospitals and question them as soon as possible, ie immediately afterwards, and then again later after a set period of time. This is a more powerful methodology than retrospectively finding people who claim to have had an NDE and interviewing only them.

The data is impressive both for the numbers in total involved (page 140):

Within a four-year period, between 1988 and 1992, 344 consecutive patients who had undergone a total of 509 successful resuscitations were included in the study.

And for the strength of the evidence those numbers provided (page 159):

The four prospective NDE studies discussed in the previous chapter all reached one and the same conclusion: consciousness, with memories and occasional perception, can be experienced during a period of unconsciousness—that is, during a period when the brain shows no measurable activity and all brain functions, such as body reflexes, brain-stem reflexes, and respiration, have ceased.

The conclusion van Lommel felt justified in drawing followed naturally on from that evidence (page 160);

As prior researchers have concluded, a clear sensorium and complex perceptual processes during a period of apparent clinical death challenge the concept that consciousness is localized exclusively in the brain.

What is important to emphasise here is that the precise conditions under which each NDE was experienced were completely, accurately and verifiably recorded, something not possible in a retrospective study: van Lommel is clear (page 164) that ‘in such a brain [state] even so-called hallucinations are impossible.’

Eben Alexander

For those who find vivid individual experiences more compelling, that is just about all of us, one of the best examples is the detailed, and in my view completely trustworthy, account of a near death experience given by Eben Alexander in Proof of Heaven. I need to quote from it at some length to make its relevance completely clear. Describing the early stages of his NDE he finds it frankly bizarre (page 77):

To say that at that point in the proceedings I still had no idea who I was or where I’d come from sounds somewhat perplexing, I know. After all, how could I be learning all these stunningly complex and beautiful things, how could I see the girl next to me, and the blossoming trees and waterfalls and villagers, and still not know that it was I, Eben Alexander, who was the one experiencing them? How could I understand all that I did, yet not realize that on earth I was a doctor, husband, and father?

The girl accompanies him through almost all the stages of his journey. When he makes his improbable recovery from the week-long encephalitis-induced coma, as an adopted child he goes back to exploring his birth family, an exploration interrupted almost before it began by his life-threatening illness. He makes contact and discovers that he had had a birth sister who died. When he finally sees the photograph of her a dramatic realization slowly dawns (pages 166-167):

In that one moment, in the bedroom of our house, on a rainy Tuesday morning, the higher and the lower worlds met. Seeing that photo made me feel a little like the boy in the fairy tale who travels to the other world and then returns, only to find that it was all a dream—until he looks in his pocket and finds a scintillating handful of magical earth from the realms beyond.

As much as I’d tried to deny it, for weeks now a fight had been going on inside me. A fight between the part of my mind that had been out there beyond the body, and the doctor—the healer who had pledged himself to science. I looked into the face of my sister, my angel, and I knew—knew completely—that the two people I had been in the last few months, since coming back, were indeed one. I needed to completely embrace my role as a doctor, as a scientist and healer, and as the subject of a very unlikely, very real, very important journey into the Divine itself. It was important not because of me, but because of the fantastically, deal-breakingly convincing details behind it. My NDE had healed my fragmented soul. It had let me know that I had always been loved, and it also showed me that absolutely everyone else in the universe is loved, too. And it had done so while placing my physical body into a state that, by medical science’s current terms, should have made it impossible for me to have experienced anything.

His whole account absolutely requires careful reading. It is to be trusted in my view first of all because it is written by someone who was, before his NDE, an atheist, secondly because he is an academic as well as a highly regarded neurosurgeon with much to lose from declaring himself as a believer in such things, and lastly because he followed the advice of his son and recorded the whole experience before reading any NDE literature that might have unduly influenced his narrative.

On this issue, Rifkin’s cart may well be in front of his horse (page 168):

It should also be noted that where empathic consciousness flourishes, fear of death withers and the compunction to seek otherworldly salvation or earthly utopias wanes.

NDEs have been shown to increase empathy and reduce the fear of death over and over again, except in the case of the minority of examples of distressing NDEs (see Nancy Evans Bush for a rigorous study of those phenomena.) I’m not sure where his evidence is that empathy is greater where all forms of transcendence are denied.

He is aware of a void in the credibility of his position and has to locate awe elsewhere than in the transcendent he resumes to acknowledge (page 170):

Empathic consciousness starts with awe. When we empathise with another, we are bearing witness to the strange incredible life force that is in us and that connects us with all other living beings. Empathy is, after all, the feeling of deep reverence we have for the nebulous term we call existence.

I find this slightly muddled in any case. The first sentence implies that awe kicks off empathic feelings, whereas it is clear he feels that empathy creates awe. In any case I am not convinced by his empathy/awe connection.

© Bahá’í World Centre

The Golden Rule & the Fall

As a convinced advocate of the Golden Rule and aware of its roots in the Axial Age which saw the dawn or significant development of Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Jainism, Judaism, and Taoism, I am uneasy with his take on this key stone of almost every moral arch. He sees the Golden Rule as self-interested because, by observing it, according to his version of religion, we buy paradise when we die. Kant, in his view, almost rescued it but not quite (page 175):

Immanuel Kant make the rational case for the Golden Rule in the modern age in his famous categorical imperative. . . . . First, “Act only on that maxim that can at the same time be willed to become a universal law.” Second, “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another, always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means.” Although Kant eliminated the self-interested aspect of doing good that was so much a part of most religious experiences, he also eliminated the “felt” experience that makes compassion so powerful and compelling.

Rifkin does acknowledge that Judaism endorses the the universal application of the Golden Rule (page 214):

Lest some infer that the Golden Rule applies literally to only one’s neighbours and blood kin, the Bible makes clear that it is to be regarded as a universal law. In Leviticus it is written: “[T]he stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

He acknowledges that the Axial Age (page 216) was ‘the first budding of empathic consciousness.’

But he does not regard with favour what happened next (page 236-37):

Unfortunately, the universal empathic embrace extended to all human beings became increasingly conditional over the course of the next several centuries with the introduction of the devil into human affairs. The devil played virtually no role in Judaism. Satan came on the scene in the form of a demon, shortly after the crucifixion, among some Jewish groups. But the devil as a key player, pitted against Christ and the Lord, with the vast power to deceive, sow seeds of chaos, and even challenge the power of God, was a Christian invention.

Certainly the take on the serpent in Judaism seems more subtle than the Christian one

A very enigmatic figure in this story is the snake. What kind of animal is this that speaks and tempts Adam and Eve? Actually, it is hard for us to imagine the primordial snake, since part of the snake’s punishment was a metamorphosis of what and who he is.

Before the sin of Adam and Eve, we find the snake described in detail in the Bible. He is depicted as “cunning,” he speaks to Eve, he walks, and he even seems to have his own volition and will. After the sin, he is punished in that he will now crawl on his stomach, his food will be dirt, and there will eternal enmity between himself and man. What was the snake originally, and what did he do to deserve such a downfall?

Most kabbalistic commentators equate the snake with the Yetzer Hara — the self-destructive tendencies to move away from God.⁴ What is the function of the Yetzer Hara? Why were such tendencies created? And why was a snake chosen to represent this?

The purpose of God’s creating the world was to bestow goodness on mankind. The ultimate good is to not give someone a gift, but to empower him to accomplish on his own. Imagine someone training for the Olympics with his coach serving in the role of the opponent. If the coach does not oppose him with all his strength and wiles, the athlete will be upset with him. And when the student manages to overcome the coach, the coach is happy at his own downfall — since it is his role to finally be vanquished.

The Yetzer Hara is our coach. Any rational person would desire a worthy opponent to overcome. Therefore the original snake was almost human, walking on legs, speaking intelligently, and able to present a world view alternate to God’s. In that sense, the snake is the ultimate servant of God and man. He is the force which gives us the ability to choose between two worldviews — as long as the choice is balanced and the snake is not too difficult to overcome.

When the choice was between intellectual and sensual, the snake needed to be able to tempt man with a sensual experience. However, he needed to clothe it in the guise of the rational and objective truth. Therefore the snake was almost human in his abilities.

When man failed that test, the snake himself needed to undergo a metamorphosis. He needed to become the obstacle and temptation for a different humanity, who now could be easily led astray. Therefore the intelligent rational snake becomes a dirt dwelling mute creature.

Nancy Evans Bush makes it clear in her book that hell is a concept introduced by Christians and promulgated most powerfully in the mistranslations of sheol in the King James version of the Bible.

We will be looking in the next post at how much his aversion to the theological hinges on these Christian variations on that theme as well as where that then leaves us in terms of reversing our descent into the abyss.

Read Full Post »

Book Review – ‘Living in a Mindful Universe’ (7/7): Revisiting Other Themes

Given that the post on 13 November makes reference to Eben Alexander’s near-death-experience I thought it might be helpful to republish this sequence albeit slightly soon. 

I’ve ended up spending more time than I expected going over Living in a Mindful Universe. This is partly to be explained by the strength of the resonance for me of its central idea – that, as Amit Goswami expresses it ‘consciousness is the ground of all being.’ But there is a bit more to it than that. Alexander and Newell also touch on various other themes and ideas that are also of concern to me. So, in this final post of this sequence I’m going to flag them up without going into too much detail.

Stepping Stones

First there is the idea that suffering is far from being a meaningless torment. I’ve recently visited this idea in my review of Nineteen, Adam Robarts’ moving memoir of his family’s experience of his son Haydn’s dying of cancer.

The idea that there is much of value to be derived from painful challenges bookends his pages. Almost at the very beginning he writes:[1]

There is a Chinese proverb that says, “He who tastes the most bitter is the greatest of men.” In other words, only by withstanding the hardest of hardships can you hope to rise to greatness. After years of observation in China, I will generalize and say that this concept is a deeply ingrained aspect of life within Eastern societies. In contrast, Western societies seek to avoid pain and suffering wherever possible. The primary goal is to seek pleasure.

And almost at the end he writes:[2]

Looking back on my life before Haydn’s journey of suffering, it feels to me that I lived in a relatively unconscious or semiconscious state. This journey became a real wake-up call—to notice more, love more, be more conscious of the bounties that are raining down upon every one of us at every moment.

Alexander and Newell are more or less on the same page:[3] ‘Life continues to present challenges that helped me to grow. As I do this, I become more aligned with my higher self and more authentic to my true nature, as can we all.’

They also use the same term as Shoghi Effendi employs:[4] ‘Life lessons are stepping-stones that can be accomplished in an individual life, leading toward the grander lessons.’ And here is Shoghi Effendi’s explanation:[5] ‘We Bahá’ís can always, with the aid of Bahá’u’lláh, Who is ever ready to strengthen and assist us, turn our stumbling blocks into stepping stones.’ And Alexander and Newell use the term more than once:[6] ‘We can all come to see the hardships in life, illness, and injury as the stepping-stones on which our souls can grow and ascend toward that oneness with the Divine.’

‘Abdu’l-Bahá, in Paris Talks endorses this idea, it seems to me, using a different metaphor:[7]

 The mind and spirit of man advance when he is tried by suffering. The more the ground is ploughed the better the seed will grow, the better the harvest will be. Just as the plough furrows the earth deeply, purifying it of weeds and thistles, so suffering and tribulation free man from the petty affairs of this worldly life until he arrives at a state of complete detachment. His attitude in this world will be that of divine happiness.

The close correspondence between Alexander and Newell’s take on this and what we find in Nineteen is unmistakable:[8]

I often encountered parents who are grieving the loss of a child. Most often, no matter how far along they are in the grief process, these parents tell me their child seemed to have immense strength in the face of imminent death – in fact, they often report the child to be the greatest pillar strength holding the family together around such a tragic loss.

And all this matters if humanity is collectively going to arise to the challenges that currently confront us (page 631):

Just as each person’s soul grows through the hurdles and challenges of life, humanity is meant to face these challenges together, all to catalyse our growth to unprecedented levels. . . As more of us come to know that truly we are all eternal spiritual beings, the world will become far more harmonious and peaceful.

Health & Nature

I’ll just mention briefly the book’s emphasis on the importance of the spiritual in both taking care of our health and enhancing our sense of the value of nature, before moving on in slightly more detail to the issue of reincarnation.

Alexander and Newell see spiritual approaches as an essential component of recovery:[9]

When the fundamental problem is one that’s more deeply spiritual, it needs spiritual addressing, not only biochemical. While medication might be necessary in some cases, exploring the benefits of some sort of spiritual practice is a must.

Faith in the process of healing is crucial, in their view:[10]

Belief is cited as the first of six steps to healing – the belief that one can be healed. . .  [T]his is the underlying power of any treatment and . . . suggests that ultimately all healing might be attributable to the mind, whether through conventional western medicine or through alternative approaches.

So, the spiritual, in their view, is not to be discounted:[11] ‘I have come to see that any true vision of health must include not only the physical, mental, and emotional realms, but, most importantly, the spiritual.’

And as for nature, they are on the same page as Karen Armstrong in her book Sacred Nature. Alexander quotes Karen Newell as describing nature as a pathway to the truth:[12]

“We can all learn valuable lessons from nature. Nature is an expression of God, or, if you prefer, of the creative force and intelligence in the universe. Since we are created by the same power as nature, we can use nature as a mirror in which to reflect on truths about ourselves.”

Reincarnation:

I’m not going to make a meal of this as I have blogged about this more than once.

I don’t quite get Alexander and Newell’s take on this when they describe reincarnation as[13] ‘the best way to reconcile the omniscient, omnipresent, and infinitely loving deity’ with ‘the suffering of innocent beings allowed in our world, especially children and animals.’ From my point of view the idea of recompense or redress in the afterlife is at least as good if not better.

I accept that there is experiential evidence that supports the idea of reincarnation including the idea of in-between lives planning:[14]

Among other things, this body of data suggests that we actively plan each of our lifetimes, including choosing our parents and physical bodies, and selecting the challenges (such as illness and injury) and gifts that will most effectively teach us that which we came here to learn.

This is of course not the same as karma:[15]

This was not the kind of instant karma, “eye for an eye,” or punishment from a judgemental God . . . this was a decision made by her soul in order to learn from direct experience in the life she was currently leading.

This body of experiential evidence I also acknowledge includes such data as:[16]

. . . stored emotions or feelings carried over from our previous experience . . . that are triggered by experiences in our current life. . . . . When we experience something, whether it’s from a previous life or this life, we form certain beliefs. These beliefs are often related to problems and thus are typically self sabotaging.

Various considerations, over and above the fact that the Bahá’í Faith very much teaches that we do not reincarnate, counts against its literal reality. My doubts predated my decision to choose the Bahá’í Faith as my spiritual path.

First of all, for now at least, there is my basic scepticism about a literal interpretation of all accounts of spiritual experiences including the reincarnation data. There is something genuinely happening that needs explanation, but I am concerned that settling on any existing interpretation of the facts is fraught with difficulties.

I very much do not want to upset anyone who is a believer in reincarnation. In fact, Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Bahá’í Faith, whose teachings I am attempting to follow, advised that ‘we should try and avoid controversial issues . . . if possible.’ However, this is an issue that keeps bouncing across my consciousness and has done so again in this book.

It seems to me that all that we have to go on when it comes to verbal descriptions of transpersonal experiences is basically metaphor. As an NDE contact of Bruce Greyson’s described, the process of conveying such experiences, it’s like trying ‘to draw an odour using crayons.’

This is partly why one of my most important mantra is John Donne’s advice: ‘Doubt wisely.’

William James brilliantly expressed a crucial truth:[17]

For James, then, there are falsification conditions for any given truth claim, but no absolute verification condition, regardless of how stable the truth claim may be as an experiential function. He writes in The Will to Believe that as an empiricist he believes that we can in fact attain truth, but not that we can know infallibly when we have.

I cannot know for sure that what I believe I know is truth. Almost nothing is what it seems. I am also aware that an aversion to the idea of any kind of return to material life may be rooted in my traumatic early experiences of hospitalisation.

So, nothing that I say on this issue is said dogmatically. It’s just how I see this matter at this moment.

For Donne’s poem see link lines 76-82

I understand the wealth of evidence that exists as Mishlove points out:[18]

 The most solid reincarnation evidence comes from the totality of the 2,500 cases in the database, instead of from the strength of particular cases.

In spite of a wealth of evidence, there are other considerations in addition to the dangers of taking descriptions literally. I have explored a lot of the evidence and am aware that we need to find at adequate explanation for it, rather than dismiss it out of hand.

I really welcomed Mishlove’s model:[19]

Archetypal synchronistic resonance is, to my knowledge, the most sophisticated, published alternative to reincarnation. However, in my foreword to James Matlock’s book, Signs of Reincarnation, I acknowledge that reincarnation is a more fitting explanation than archetypal synchronistic resonance regarding data from children. The patterns in the reincarnation data, which I will discuss next, are too strong to ignore.

. . . Recollection is first person, not as if children were watching someone else in a movie. They feel as if their consciousness is continuous with the earlier lifetime they recall.

I was disappointed at his backtrack and for reasons that I’ve explored on my blog before (see Link) I felt that it was not totally convincing.

As I explained there, Matlock’s perspective did not change my mind, but I respect his careful review of the most convincing evidence and his preference for letting the evidence shape the theory not the theory warp the evidence.

He summarises his basic position near the end of the book by stating:[20]

The workings of reincarnation are often presumed to lie in metaphysical obscurity. In reality, as I have tried to show, the process is probably fairly simple, at least in outline. The stream of consciousness that animates a body during life continues into death, and persists through death, until it becomes associated with (possesses) another body, generally one not yet born. The consciousness stream is composed of both subliminal and supraliminal strata, the former bearing memories and various traits we may subsume under the heading of personality, the latter representing conscious awareness. Once in possession of its new body, the reincarnating mind customises it by adding behavioural and physical effects through psychokinetic operations on its genome, brain, and underlying physiology. At the level of conscious awareness, there is a reset, as the mind begins to interact with its new body and brain. Amnesia sets in, the subconscious blocking conscious memory of the past in what it considers to be its own best interests. The influence of the past is expressed behaviourally, however, and at times the subconscious permits memories to erupt into conscious awareness.

I thanked him also for pointing me in the direction of another model that seems at first sight to map more closely onto my own perspective:[21]

The [Archetypal Synchronistic Resonance – Mishlove & Engender 2007] model emphasises the hidden nexus of meaning underlying seemingly disparate events and may have some utility in explaining unverified past-life memories, past-life regression, and past-life readings that tap into a client’s mind if these relate to deep psychological processes and psychic connections between people rather than to the memory of previous lives.

Matlock feels this model is inadequate to explain ‘solved reincarnation cases.’

The middle paragraphs of the second of two posts on reincarnation show how closely my sense of the matter corresponds to the clause in bold.

Peter and Elizabeth Fenwick, in their excellent book Past Lives, have a whole section on this very issue. They refer to[22]  . . . the ‘Cosmic Memory Bank.’ They describe ‘field theories’ and refer to Rupert Sheldrake’s idea of ‘morphic resonance.’ They add:[23]

If memories (information) are held in this way they would exist independently of the brain and therefore be accessible to another brain which ‘resonated’ with them.’

A model along these lines is still my preference, even though Mishlove is clearly a convert[24] to reincarnation, and even though I’ve ploughed through some of Stevenson’s work and Matlock’s sophisticated theory as well.

For now, suffice it so say that I cannot see quite why the strong sense of affinity between a deceased consciousness and a newly generated one that the Fenwicks describe could not psychically impact upon a developing foetus just as strongly as a migrating soul in itself might do. The only data that needs some explanation are the experiences people report of a soul in transit visiting them to declare where they intend to be reborn. Given that communications from a spiritual realm tend to be experienced in ways that are influenced by culture and explanations of them should seldom be taken literally, that may not blast a hole in my hoped for theory below its waterline.

I think that’s more than enough.

Coda

Despite the reincarnation caveat, I hope this sequence conveys that I have found Eben Alexander and Karen Newell’s book deeply engaging as well as immensely helpful to me in making my sense of the spiritual dimension more coherent. I have no hesitation in a strongly recommending it to anyone who wants or needs to explore this area more fully.

As I think I mentioned earlier, reading their book has been rather like visiting a spiritual optician. It tested my mind’s sight, gave me a prescription for a new and improved lens for my heart, which has greatly enhanced my ability to see many spiritual truths more clearly.

References

[1]. Nineteen – page 25.

[2]. Op. cit. – page 200.

[3]. Living in a Mindful Universe – page 397.

[4]. Op. cit. – page 507.

[5]. Light of Divine Guidance (Vol. 1) – page 149.

[6]. Living in a Mindful Universe – page 625.

[7]. Paris Talks – page 178.

[8]. Living in a Mindful Universe – page 553.

[9]. Op. cit. – pages 543-44.

[10]. Op. cit. – page 587.

[11]. Op. cit. – page 595.

[12]. Op. cit. – page 604.

[13]. Op. cit. – page 479 – my emphasis.

[14]. Op. cit. – page 493.

[15]. Op. cit. – page 497.

[16]. Op. cit. – page 506.

[17]. David C. Lamberth William James and the metaphysics of experience – page 222.

[18]. Beyond the Brain – page 33.

[19]. Op. cit. – page 34.

[20]. Op. cit. – page 258.

[21]. Op. cit. – page 233 (my emphasis).

[22]. Past Lives – page 278.

[23]. Op. cit. – page 279.

[24]. Beyond the Brain – page xiv.

Read Full Post »

Book Review – ‘Living in a Mindful Universe’ (6/7): the delusion of materialism

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers . . .

(William Wordsworth – Sonnet)

Given that the post on 13 November makes reference to Eben Alexander’s near-death-experience I thought it might be helpful to republish this sequence albeit slightly soon. 

If I pause to think for a moment, I can easily imagine a massive groan exuding from any audience of mine as soon as the word ‘materialism’ passes from my lips or through my pen.

‘Will he never stop banging on about this?’ I hear them roar.

Well, I hate to say this, but probably never.

Those who have had the patience to read through my sequence about my Parliament of Selves will know that a battle has raged within me between the sub-personalities who favour poetry, meditation and the exploration of consciousness, and the sub-personalities who are committed to what they would regard as real action against our toxic challenges, such as the climate crisis.

As the controlling consciousness, I have a similar passion about how evil materialism is – in fact it maybe the underlying disease of which global heating is just the worst and most terrifying symptom.  Maybe my fight against materialism is a valid kind of activism after all, even though waged almost entirely in words on this blog. Not sure if that idea would satisfy the activists in my Parliament of Selves though.

What I hope to explore here is why a reductionist belief that matter is all there is and spirit or soul is just a distracting myth is profoundly mistaken. I’ll be drawing on Alexander and Newell’s book but also straying into all sorts of other territory.

A Vision of Something Higher

Viv Bartlett, a Bahá’í colleague, in his recent book, Navigating Materialistic Minefields, which was published shortly before his death, asks a profoundly important question:[1] ‘How, we may ask, can humanity progress without a vision of something higher, more enthralling than that which presently exists?’

I’ve asked a similar question, triggered by Jeremy Rifkin’s The Empathic Civilisation: do we need a transcendent focus? At the end of a long sequence about his book I concluded that, while I accept that the capacity for a high degree of empathy is wired into our brains, I also strongly believe that a higher level again can be reached, with proportionately more leverage in terms of sustained action, if we also can internalise a sense of what the Quakers term ‘That of God’ which is in all of us. Then we will not only have a strong sense of our links to one another but we will also have the confidence to act against apparently overwhelming odds that comes from the knowledge that we human beings are not alone. Bahá’u’lláh says:[2]

Turn thy sight unto thyself, that thou mayest find Me standing within thee, mighty, powerful and self-subsisting.

Only when we have such a sense of powerful support and shared humanity does it seem to me that we can reach that tipping point, when most of the world of humanity will be prepared and able to put their weight effectively against the wheel of redemptive change for as long as is needed, and only then will disaster be averted. Pray God that moment will not come too late for us.

I felt that Rifkin had done his best in his impressive book to suggest one possible path towards a secure future – an identification with Gaia, our planet. Those who follow his line of thinking and put it into practice will surely do some good. They could do so much more if they had faith in an effectively benign power higher than the planet we are seeking to save and which needs our urgent help.

Viv’s conclusion, encapsulated in a quotation from ‘Abdu’l-Bahá,[3] nails it:[4] ‘Man must attach himself to an infinite reality, so that his glory, his joy, and his progress maybe infinite.’

What’s Stopping Us?

This is a fairly simple question to answer at its most basic level. Too many of us are buying into the default dogmatic delusion of materialism that is subliminally conveyed by almost every mainstream aspect of our culture, until we are induced into what Charles Tart calls a ‘consensus trance.’

In his book Waking Up,[5] which featured in an earlier sequence, Charles Tart uses the term ‘consensus consciousness’ to describe how our culture and life experiences shape our perceptions of the world. This effect is so strong that he goes onto describe it as a state of mind that is definitely not an enviable one:

. . . . consensus trance is expected to be permanent rather than merely an interesting experience that is strictly time-limited. The mental, emotional, and physical habits of a lifetime are laid down while we are especially vulnerable and suggestible as children. Many of these habits are not just learned but conditioned; that is, they have that compulsive quality that conditioning has.

Bernard Haisch unpacks one of the fundamental tenets of materialism, which is randomness. Haisch contends that:[6]

[R]andomness is the conviction that natural processes follow the laws of chance within their allowed range of behaviour. Given those beliefs there is one and only one way to explain the fine-tuning of the universe. An infinite number of universes must exist, each with unique properties, each randomly different from the other, with ours only seemingly special because in a universe with different properties we would never have originated. Our existence is only possible in this particular universe, hence the tuning is an illusion.

It leads to the multiverse hypothesis, the supposedly only viable way of explaining how life can exist at all when it depends upon such a finely tuned and impossibly improbable set of preconditions.

Most of us in the West have been successfully indoctrinated into accepting whatever our successful and apparently trustworthy doctrine of scientism pronounces as the truth. Haisch doesn’t buy into this myth for one minute:[7]

The evidence for the existence of an infinite conscious intelligence is abundant in the accounts of mystics and the meditative, prayerful, and sometimes spontaneous exceptional experiences of human beings throughout history. The evidence for random universes is precisely zero. Most scientists will reject the former type of evidence as merely subjective, but that simply reduces the contest of views to a draw: zero on both sides.

The odds are so daunting Paul Davies, in The Goldilock’s Enigma, almost threw up his hands in despair:[8]

So, how come existence? . . . all the approaches seem . . . hopelessly inadequate: a unique universe which just happens to permit life by a fluke; a stupendous number of alternative . . . universes . . .; a pre-existing God . . .; or a self-creating . . . universe with observers. . . Perhaps we have reached a fundamental impasse dictated by the limitations of the human intellect.

Others are more dogmatic, so dogmatic in fact they refuse to accept the possibility of evidence to the contrary because they are so convinced that no evidence can possibly exist to support what they believe is impossible.

Viv Bartlett quotes Haisch:[9]

A conversation between philosopher Neal Grossman and an academic colleague underlines this point. Bernard Haisch, in his book The God Theory, writes about this conversation:

‘. . . The academic cavalierly dismisses accurately reported details of near death experiences that could only have been perceived from vantage points outside the body as coincidences and lucky guesses. An exasperated Grossman finally asks: ‘what will it take, short of having a near death experience yourself, to convince you that they are real?’ Rising to the occasion… the academic response: ‘if I had a near death experience myself, I would conclude that I was hallucinating, rather than believe my mind can exist independent my brain.’ Then, to dispose of the annoying evidence once and for all, the champion of enquiry confidently states that the concept of mind existing independent of matter has been shown to be a false theory, and there can be no evidence for something that is false. Grossman observes: ‘This was a momentous experience for me, because here was an educated, intelligent man telling me that he will not give up materialism, no matter what.’

The result is that information is buried that might shake our belief in materialism. Mishlove brings in a professor to explain it:[10]

Jeffrey Krippal, professor of philosophy and religious thought at Rice University, suggests that near-death experiences and after-death communications are much more common than we typically realise. Social pressure is still suppressing the data. Public discussion of post-mortem survival is relatively rare. The reason is that we are afraid of our own supernature . . .

Scientism has even invented what seems to be a plausible copout. Alexander explains the premise they use as the foundation stone upon which to build their castle in the air:[11]

One such metaphysical assumption (referred to as metaphysical because it is at the foundation of our thinking) is that only the physical world exists, a position known in science as materialism (also called physicalism).

And quotes a so-called scientist to flag up the supposedly unassailable defence:[12]

Novella seemed satisfied merely to declare that one day actual evidence would be found to support their assumptions (known as “promissory materialism”).

(And incidentally too many scientists are too afraid to jeopardise their careers to stand up and be counted.)

What effectively proves that this position is fundamentally at odds with true science is its failure to operate on the core requirement of scientific investigation, as Alexander and Newell explain:[13]

I have come to see that true open-minded scepticism is one of the most powerful commodities in this enterprise. However, most of those in our culture who proudly claim to be sceptics are actually just the opposite — . . . Their mindset is the antithesis of what many hold to be the ideal of scientific thinking – approaching such deep questions with the most open mind possible, untainted by premature conclusions.

Experience around the world is littered with evidence that calls the reductionist position into question, what Alexander and Newell call ‘black swans’:[14]

NDE reports by the tens of thousands – and similarly numerous reports of deathbed visions, after-death communications, shared-death experiences, and past-life memories of children indicative of reincarnation – represent data that demand explanation if one has any interest in understanding the world as it is, and not just as they think it should be.

Experience requires dispassionate exploration if we are ever to understand what it really means. That the spiritual dimension is invisible does not warrant our contemptuous dismissal of its possible existence, but here we find scientism’s double standard hiding in plain sight:[15]

[Black swan data are dismissed but . . .] the existence of [invisible] neutrinos is not in doubt to most physicists, neutrinos being a very subtle form of matter, yet their existence is crucial to evolving models of subatomic physics. The fact that they are not as obvious as Canada does not mean they do not exist.

Applying such a double standard makes it next to impossible for [NDE] research studies ever to demonstrate significance.

Limitations of Methodology

Another key obstacle to gaining wider acceptance of anomalous experiences in scientific circles is the challenges of replicating them in laboratory conditions.

I have already touched on this in my review of Bruce Greyson’s book After.

Attempts to provide an even more rigorous methodology may have failed, not because the NDEs were inauthentic but because the methods adopted were inappropriate to the task. A good example is the idea of placing targets close to the ceiling in the hope that experiencers would spot them. Consultations with a group of NDE experiencers flagged up the problem with this approach very clearly and, in my view, convincingly. Greyson described what happened:[16]

When I discussed [my] research findings at a conference attended by a large number of people who had had NDES, they were astounded at what they considered my naivete in carrying out this study. Why, they argued, would patients whose hearts had just stopped and who were being resuscitated – patients who were stunned by their unexpected separation from their bodies – go looking around the hospital room for a hidden image that has no relevance to them, but that some researcher had designated as the “target”?

This also resonates with what Julie Beischel writes in Leslie Kean’s Surviving Death about mediumship studies:[17]

The analogy I like to use is that a mediumship study in which the environment is not optimised for mediumship to happen is akin to placing a seed on a tabletop and then claiming the seed is a fraud when it doesn’t sprout.

Alexander and Newell are on essentially the same page:[18] ‘The elaborate process of setting up a scientific assessment of prayer in a controlled setting often strips much of the spiritual energy out of the endeavour.’

‘Doubt Wisely’

What all too often makes materialism, and its sibling, scientism, delusional is the toxic degree of certainty some of us invest in it, something which leads us to dismiss a priori any evidence that contradicts what we have decided to conclude is absolutely true, regardless of the possible strength of that evidence.

Perhaps it is also important to clarify that making this argument does not necessarily mean that I am trying to meet reductionist dogmatism with spiritual fundamentalism. The arguments and evidence I have marshalled here and elsewhere do not prove there are ghosts or gods. It simply convincingly demonstrates that there is something more than matter that needs to be included in our paradigm.

I have, of course, chosen to go further than that, but am happy to admit that this is a personal act of faith, something which dogmatic materialists seems extremely reluctant to admit in their turn: they too have made a leap of faith. To me the choice I’ve made seems both more fulfilling and more realistic than placing my faith in matter.

Significantly, though I have decided to believe in a God, a spiritual dimension and an after life, and also to trust what Bahá’u’lláh tells me, I know that I cannot trust my understanding of any of these things. I know the first three of these exist but even with Bahá’u’lláh’s help I have no certainty about the nature of God, only a vague idea of what the spiritual dimension might be, and harbour slightly stronger impressions of what the afterlife might be like, derived largely from survivors’ descriptions of near-death-experiences (NDEs), which one experiencer described as being like ‘trying to paint a smell.’ I try to follow John Donne’s advice in Satire III and ‘doubt wisely’ – I only wish the followers of dogmatically materialistic scientism would do the same.

The cost of materialism

The delusional state I have attempted to subvert is not just a harmless choice of perspective.

It paves the way for and even fosters destructive cultural consequences such as our blind faith in neoliberal capitalism, the glorification of individualism, and Ayn Rand’s vilification of altruism, to name but a few.

I think I’ll leave the final words of this post to more eloquent sources. In Century of Light, in which the Universal House of Justice encapsulates its perspective on the world during the previous century, we find:[19]

Tragically, what Bahá’ís see in present-day society is unbridled exploitation of the masses of humanity by greed that excuses itself as the operation of  “impersonal market forces”. What meets their eyes everywhere is the destruction of moral foundations vital to humanity’s future, through gross self-indulgence masquerading as “freedom of speech”. What they find themselves struggling against daily is the pressure of a dogmatic materialism, claiming to be the voice of “science”, that seeks systematically to exclude from intellectual life all impulses arising from the spiritual level of human consciousness.

Materialism is a kind of religion, in their view:[20]

Fathered by nineteenth century European thought, acquiring enormous influence through the achievements of American capitalist culture, and endowed by Marxism with the counterfeit credibility peculiar to that system, materialism emerged full-blown in the second half of the twentieth century as a kind of universal religion claiming absolute authority in both the personal and social life of humankind. Its creed was simplicity itself. Reality—including human reality and the process by which it evolves—is essentially material in nature. The goal of human life is, or ought to be, the satisfaction of material needs and wants. Society exists to facilitate this quest, and the collective concern of humankind should be an ongoing refinement of the system, aimed at rendering it ever more efficient in carrying out its assigned task.

Time to stop now.

Living in a Mindful Universe also deals with many other important topics including the meaning of suffering, health, the importance of nature and reincarnation. More on some of that next time.

References

[1]. Navigating Materialistic Minefields – page 160.

[2]. The Hidden Words – Arabic no. 13.

[3]. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá on Divine Philosophy – pages 136-37.

[4]. Navigating Materialistic Minefields — page 147.

[5]. Waking Up – page 95.

[6]. The God Theory – iBooks page 16.

[7]. Op cit. – pages 18-19.

[8]. The Goldilocks Enigma – pages 292-93.

[9]. Navigating Materialistic Minefields – pages 114-15.

[10]. Beyond the Brain – page 95.

[11]. Living in a Mindful Universe – page 121.

[12]. Op. cit – page 121.

[13]. Op. cit. – pages 132 -33.

[14]. Op. cit. – page 136.

[15]. Op. cit. – page 139.

[16]. After – page 74.

[17]. Surviving Death – page 172.

[18]. Living in a Mindful Universe – page 262.

[19]. Century of Light – page 136.

[20]. Century of Light – pages 89-90.

Read Full Post »

Book Review – ‘Living in a Mindful Universe’ (5/7): the brain as filter

Given that the post on 13 November makes reference to Eben Alexander’s near-death-experience I thought it might be helpful to republish this sequence albeit slightly soon. 

Our Dividing Line

Anjam Khursheed, in his book The Universe Within,[1] summarises our situation: ‘Humanity stands on the dividing line between two universes: the conscious universe within us and the external universe that surrounds us.’

The previous two posts have focused mainly on the importance of the impact we need to try and make on the ‘landscape’, whereas it is now time to return again to a focus on what we might call the ‘inscape.’

I recently rediscovered a poem to which, judging by the note scribbled in the margin, I had strongly resonated when I first read it nearly 30 years ago. It’s called The New Mariner.[2]

The joking reference is obvious. R S Thomas may not have been through a traumatic experience at sea after shooting an albatross, but he clearly identifies with the idea of pestering unreceptive strangers, including wedding guests, with his weird experiences in the manner of Coleridge’s ancient mariner.

He speaks of sending out his ‘probes’ into ‘the God-space, being an ‘astronaut/on impossible journeys/to the far side of the self’ and returning ‘with messages/I cannot decipher.’ In the end he can’t help ‘worrying the ear/of the passer-by, hot on his way/to the marriage of plain fact with plain fact.’

His poetry is full of similar references, for example in Groping:[3]

The best journey to make

is inward. It is the interior

that calls. Eliot heard it.

Wordsworth turned from the great hills

of the north to the precipice

of his own mind, and let himself

down for the poetry stranded

on the bare ledges.

He is of course not alone among the poets in this respect. Gerard Manley Hopkins sings from a similar though darker hymn sheet:

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall 

Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap 

May who ne’er hung there. 

Such attempts to capture what I have come to call the inscape, a term borrowed from Hopkins, have always fascinated me, not least because of the quotation from Ali, the successor of Muhammad in Bahá’u’lláh’s The Seven Valleys. In the earliest version I came across it reads:[4] ‘Dost thou reckon thyself only a puny form/When within thee the universe is folded?’ Anjam Khursheed in his book The Universe Within uses[5] almost identical wording from The Writings of Bahá’u’lláh[6], along with quotations from other religious traditions, to give warrant to the title of his book.

A later edition of The Seven Valleys uses another wording:[7] ‘Dost thou deem thyself a small and puny form,/When thou foldest within thyself the greater world?’

Viv Bartlett, in his recent and last book, Navigating Materialistic Minefields, uses this later quote to come to a more limited conclusion:[8] ‘the physical body of every human being comes from the materials of the universe.’ Given Bahá’u’lláh’s wake up call in the Arabic Hidden Words[9] – ‘Know ye not why We created you all from the same dust?’ – that may be one possible legitimate implication of those lines. However, I don’t think it is the only one, or even the main meaning of the words. Viv’s book contains many deep insights of great value, which caused me to pause before deciding to use those poetic lines to support my perspective on the infinity within as Khursheed also did in his book.

In the end, I came to feel that the quote more than justifies this sense of a numinous infinity hidden within us, and Alexander and Newell’s book, Living in a Mindful Universe, comes as close as almost any trending text I have read to exploring what the ‘God-space’ might be, how it might be connected with ‘the far side of the self,’ and in the process confronting ‘plain fact’-addicted materialists with unpalatable transcendent truths.

Most of the territory they cover was already familiar to me, but the way they synthesised it provided one of the most coherent validations so far of my own developing understanding of this ineffable reality.

Why Is It So Important?

Why might this be so important, even in the light of the compelling imperatives of action I explored last time. Khursheed raises an important point here:[10]

Our spirit of exploration and discovery in the external universe is not matched by a corresponding spirit for the inner universe. We are more comfortable conquering far away moons then exploring inner space.

The climate of the mind, it seems, is at least as important as the climate of our planet, but we are out of balance, something which renders the maintenance of progress in the right direction highly problematic. In Khursheed’s view[11] ‘We must endeavour to uncover our eyes and ears, open our hearts and minds, so that we can recognise our role, play our part, and discover just who we really are.’ Blind to our inner reality we will fail to be fully effective.

So, what do Alexander and Newell, along with their advocate, Mishlove, actually say?

The Brain as a Filter

They have an interesting take on why we are so blind to what is potentially so important.

Mishlove, as a starting point, highlights the evolutionary bias:[12] ‘. . . The brain places into the spotlight of awareness a reduced level most useful for biological survival.

Unlike the transceiver model to be found in John Hatcher[13] and Pim van Lommel,[14] Eben Alexander prefers to use a filter model:[15]

The brain is a reducing valve, or filter, that reduces primordial consciousness down to a trickle – our very limited human awareness of the apparent ‘here and now.’

Why should this be so? Mishlove[16] calls on Grosso to explain:

We must ask why embodied human beings have psychic abilities. . . . Philosopher Michael Grosso states these are unnecessary, rarely used abilities for most living persons – as we meet our survival needs through conventional sensorimotor and rational faculties. However, ESP and PK are latent potentials that become stronger, ‘after we drop our bodies in death and our minds are all we possess.’ Then they become essential.

Once brain activity reduces, access to the transcendental paradoxically increases.

Alexander points towards the evidence for this surprising state of affairs in that experiments with psychedelic drug experiences suggest[17] ‘the greatest mental experiences involved a significant decrease in regional brain activity . . .’ In addition,[18] ‘Mindfulness training is correlated with a decreased volume in the amygdala, a brain structure associated with fear responses,’ so that[19] ‘[a]s the brain becomes less active, internal mental experience actually becomes more active.’

Only then, it seems:[20]

 By reducing the visual, auditory, and tactile stimuli that bombard us every waking minute, we are able to connect more with the Collective Mind. . . . When we eliminate the “noise” (that is, the sensory flood processed through our body’s nervous system to perpetuate the Supreme Illusion), we isolate a core aspect of conscious awareness itself.

Alexander describes it graphically by saying:[21]

Ultimately, by getting the brain out of the way, whether through meditation, achieving a flow state, or sensory deprivation, we are able to rise above the Supreme Illusion of earthly space-time.

All of which goes some way towards explaining ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s emphasis on silence:[22]

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 at one 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 and the spirit answers: the light breaks forth and the reality is revealed.

Such is the power of silence that:[23]

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

Even so we need to be careful. Alexander flags up the same kind of trap as Mason Remey fell into when he started his completely unwarranted claim, after Shoghi Effendi’s death, that he was the new Guardian:[24]

“Got to be careful not to go through the door of enlightenment too fast; that would be going through the door with your ego on. Good way to get delusions of grandeur, a messianic complex, to wind up in a mental institution. You got to be really pure. You can’t just make believe you’re pure.”

We can end up mistaking the light we see shining from the mirror of our hearts as being ours, rather than having the humility to see it for what it really is – a reflection of light emanating from a far more noble source.

He advises us to review the day’s events for their meaning:[25]

What if we could enact a daily or weekly review, where notable events are assessed as potential lessons?

This echoes Bahá’u’lláh’s advice:[26] ‘Bring thyself to account each day.’

In this process we need to bring into awareness of the unconscious processes involved in our decision making if we are to connect more securely to our higher selves:[27]

. . . Each choice of intention creates a consequence and [we need] to pay close attention to the ramifications of our choices. Becoming more conscious of our unconscious decision-making process allows the greater awareness of how our unfolding reality comes into being.

In the end, this may render us capable of recognising a deeper truth about our reality:[28]

Our self-focused world is a major part of the problems we currently face. Our little individual theatre of consciousness appears at first glance to be ours alone, but the evidence emerging from quantum physics and from the deepest study of the nature of consciousness and the mind-body problem indicates that we are all truly part of one collective mind. We are all in this together, and are slowly awakening to a common goal – the evolution of conscious awareness.

Time to pause again before taking another look next time at the delusion of materialism.

References:

[1]. The Universe Within – page 7.

[2]. Collected Poems – page 388.

[3]. Op. cit. – page 328.

[4]. The Seven Valleys (1945 edition) – page 34.

[5]. The Universe Within – page 23.

[6] The Writings of Bahá’u’lláh – page 40.

[7]. The Seven Valleys (2018 edition) – page 44.

[8]. Navigating Materialistic Minefields – page 127.

[9]. Arabic Hidden Words – Number 68.

[10]. The Universe Within – page 157.

[11]. Op. cit. – page 169.

[12]. Beyond the Brain:
the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death – page 16.

[13]. The Purpose of Physical Reality – page 151.

[14]. Consciousness Beyond Life – Kindle Reference 261.

[15]. Living in a Mindful Universe – page 85.

[16]. Beyond the Brain – page 90.

[17]. Living in a Mindful Universe – page 145.

[18]. Op. cit. – page 294.

[19]. Op. cit. – page 304.

[20]. Op. cit. – page 306.

[21]. Op. cit. – page 314.

[22]. Paris Talks – page 174.

[23]. Op. cit. – page 175.

[24]. Living in a Mindful Universe – page 626.

[25]. Op. cit. – page 514.

[26]. Arabic Hidden Words – Number 31.

[27]. Living in a Mindful Universe – pages 519-520.

[28]. Op. cit. – page 629.

Read Full Post »

Book Review – ‘Living in a Mindful Universe’ (3/7): the need for co-ordinated action (a)

Given that the post on 13 November makes reference to Eben Alexander’s near-death-experience I thought it might be helpful to republish this sequence albeit slightly soon. 

Alexander and Newell are using words to describe the ineffable, so not everyone would sign up to every detail, but their basic sense of the transcendent is essential as a motivating perspective to give us the necessary level of sustained conviction to put aside our differences and undertake the challenging task of building a better world. It’s true that they have used their website to share valuable ways to help us raise our level of consciousness. Is that enough though?

This a truly important issue, and I feel it is one we may need to explore together at some length. I sense that this first attempt may already be too long!

As an introvert, part of me would like to believe I can just step back from the world and pursue my spiritual journey quietly, interacting with just a few like-minded souls. As I noted on my blog somewhere, when I was working with a Jungian therapist he jokingly shared his perception that on my grave would be carved the words, ‘He died with his options open,’ so reluctant was I at that point to commit to any cause or to join any movement.

I still do not vote, except in Bahá’í elections. The political and economic system is, in my view, broken. I’ve explored this at some length at various times on my blog (for example see link).

Culture of Contest

Our habitual acceptance of competition and profit as natural blinds us to the problematic nature of our culture. Our ‘culture of contest,’ to borrow Michael Karlberg’s evocative phrase, is a broken model that: (a) prevents the truth being discovered and justice reliably being achieved in court rooms where the whole point in most Western countries is for two opposing teams to wrangle until one wins, (b) thwarts equity as well as increasing inequality in the economic sphere, where the prize of increasing wealth goes to the most effective competitor rather than the most worthy one, and (c) obstructs wise decision-making in the political sphere because the main point is to defeat one’s opponents in elections and remain in power for as long as possible.

To use present day party politics and the economic model as the two most relevant examples, we can see first of all that a competitive model doesn’t do a lot to widen the moral imaginations of its participants in the political sphere. Karlberg presents the weaknesses of this system clearly:[1]

As Held points out:

“Parties may aim to realise a programme of ‘ideal’ political principles, but unless their activities are based on systematic strategies for achieving electoral success they will be doomed to insignificance. Accordingly, parties become transformed, above all else, into means for fighting and winning elections.”

. . . . Once political leadership and control is determined through these adversarial contests, processes of public decision-making are also structured in an adversarial manner.

. . . .Western-liberal apologists defend this competitive system of electioneering, debate, lobbying and so forth as the rational alternative to political violence and war. Based on this commonsense premise, we structure our political systems as nonviolent contests, even though most people recognise that these contests tend to favour more powerful social groups. . . . . [T]his premise embodies a false choice that arises when the concept of democracy is conflated with the concept of partisanship. . . . . [W]e lose sight of a third alternative – non-partisan democracy – that might be more desirable.

Recent events illustrate how competitive divides corrode relationships even within the same political party.

In terms of economics, Karlberg argues the same deficiencies appear in a different guise, and in fact we ignore the fundamental principle of moral restraint on markets cited by one of the founding father’s of economic thinking, Adam Smith:[2]

Since western-liberal societies have largely neglected Smith’s call for moral self regulation, yet accepted Smith’s warnings about state regulation, they have been left with a culture of virtually unrestrained market competition. Indeed, competition has become the pre-eminent value of a deeply materialistic age. And in the absence of external and internal market regulation, its culture of competition – or culture of contest – has led to widespread social conflict and ecologically degradation.

He goes on to describe these as the causes of (1) extremes of economic inequality, driven by the capitalist’s ‘attempt to extract the maximum surplus value from the labour force that is the primary source of their wealth,’ (2) rivalries between nations, and (3) a ‘relative absence of both external state regulation and internal moral regulation’ resulting in ‘unprecedented conflict between our own species and most other species on the planet.’

Interestingly, a more recent read was singing from a similar hymn sheet. Daniel Pick, in his book Brainwashed: a new history of thought control, picks up on an idea of Hannah Arendt’s:[3]

By politics she meant a process whereby a people, in their plurality, come together to engage with each peaceably, to look at real problems, debating trying to determine collectively what is needed; to consider matters in a properly inclusive and deliberative fashion.

He goes on to say, ‘[a] society, she suggested, needs to be engaged in a common conversation across all the differences.’

He summarises her position by saying, ‘In short, we need to struggle for the creation, or in some instances the restoration, of conditions that enable us better to engage with each other as people, with requisite information, and to think in company with others about our futures, to compare notes on harms and on remedies, with less role for money and the banishment of corrupt corporate lobbyists in that process . . .’

Sadly, opting out does not provide an effective response, but something else is needed as well if we are to effectively engage in this sort of demanding process.

Drawing on Spiritual Powers

The Bahá’í position declares that it is necessary to draw upon both material and spiritual powers (Social Action):

An exploration of the nature of social action, undertaken from a Bahá’í perspective, must necessarily place it in the broad context of the advancement of civilization. That a global civilization which is both materially and spiritually prosperous represents the next stage of a millennia-long process of social evolution provides a conception of history that endows every instance of social action with a particular purpose: to foster true prosperity, with its spiritual and material dimensions, among the diverse inhabitants of the planet. A concept of vital relevance, then, is the imperative to achieve a dynamic coherence between the practical and spiritual requirements of life.

This same document unpacks the exact implications of that very clearly indeed:

When the material and spiritual dimensions of the life of a community are kept in mind and due attention is given to both scientific and spiritual knowledge, the tendency to reduce development to the mere consumption of goods and services and the naive use of technological packages is avoided. Scientific knowledge, to take but one simple example, helps the members of a community to analyse the physical and social implications of a given technological proposal—say, its environmental impact—and spiritual insight gives rise to moral imperatives that uphold social harmony and that ensure technology serves the common good. Together, these two sources of knowledge tap roots of motivation in individuals and communities, so essential in breaking free from the shelter of passivity, and enable them to uncover the traps of consumerism.

From a Bahá’í point of view, it is from the fusion of both material and spiritual powers that the necessary understanding and motivation derive.

The Bahá’í perspective shares Matthieu Ricard’s awareness, expressed in his book Altruism, of the need to link the local through the national to the global (Social Action):

No matter how essential, a process of learning at the local level will remain limited in its effectiveness if it is not connected to a global process concerned with the material and spiritual prosperity of humanity as a whole. Structures are required, then, at all levels, from the local to the international, to facilitate learning about development.

Cultural Creatives

My sequence on what Ray and Andersen in their book The Cultural Creatives try to convey goes some way to explaining why. They discuss their sense of the exact nature of the cultural change we are all experiencing but from the point of view of the Cultural Creatives:[4]  

This group, who constitute 25% of the population of America (i.e. about 50 million people), feel we are in a period of transition. The authors call it the Between.

The Between is the time between worldviews, values and ways of life; a time between stories. The transition period, [John] Naisbitt concluded, “is a great and yeasty time, filled with opportunity.” But it is so, he added, only on two critical conditions: if we can “make uncertainty our friend,” and “if we can only get a clear sense, a clear conception, a clear vision of the road ahead.”

Ray and Anderson[5] are cautious and see this period as a ‘dangerous tipping point.’ They describe the position of Cultural Creatives[6] as seeing ‘an antique system that is noisily, chaotically shaking itself to pieces.’

This is not all negative:[7]

. . . this era is at least as much about cultural innovation as it is about decline and decay of established forms.

Ray and Anderson, in terms of interdependence, quote Mary Ford:[8]

You have to have a definition of self that’s bigger than [society’s] definitions, that’s grounded in how connected we all are to each other.

And this needs to lead to coordinated action, something which I feel plugs a hole in Alexander and Newell’s nonetheless impressive boat. The skilled marketing they do on their Sacred Acoustics site does not go far enough.

The how of mobilizing effective coordinated action is, of course, easier said than done, and we’ll be looking at that in more detail in the next post.

References:

[1]. Beyond the Culture of Contest – pages 44-46.

[2]. Op. cit. – page 38-42.

[3]. Brainwashed — pages 270-73.

[4]. Cultural Creatives – page 235.

[5]. Op. cit. – page 236.

[6]. Op. cit – page 40.

[7]. Op. cit. – page 33.

[8]. Op. cit. – page 21.

Read Full Post »