Veils, Words & Values (3/5): competing needs

O My servants! Be as resigned and submissive as the earth, that from the soil of your being there may blossom the fragrant, the holy and multicolored hyacinths of My knowledge. Be ablaze as the fire, that ye may burn away the veils of heedlessness and set aglow, through the quickening energies of the love of God, the chilled and wayward heart. Be light and untrammeled as the breeze, that ye may obtain admittance into the precincts of My court, My inviolable Sanctuary.

Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá-u-lláh — CLII

Authenticity

When I was confronting my challenges in the 1992 diary entry I quoted in the first post of this sequence, I asked myself ‘How am I to break this vicious circle? Do I risk losing the social ties and work I value? That’s what scares and deters me, stands between me and myself.’

I went on to explore this more deeply:

.  . . . My background programmed me to believe that the cost of being ‘myself’ in the face of disapproval would be some kind of ‘death’ or absolute loss. But is this true? Is it too late to turn this round and refuse to be self-traitor any longer? Can I not find the means to reflect and write within my various roles? . . . To do so I must dare to introduce my differences into my relationships rather than sinking them beyond recovery in a swamp of self-deception.

That scares me. It will also be extremely hard work. There will be no comfortable easy rides. Confrontations, the idea of which shrivels me up inside, will be frequent. I will have to discover my true response in positions where that will be dangerous. I have so far attributed my survival and ‘success’ to my evasion of all such situations. My roles seem to require a dedication to the kind of facts with which the world typically stones to death the metaphors and myths poetry values and relies on.

It’s perhaps worth clarifying that at this point I really didn’t know about the language of the heart and its importance. All I seemed to know was that ‘My life and sanity seem to depend on my finding a workable and sustainable solution.’

I was gifted my Hearth Dream in 1993, triggered by the quotation at the head of this post, and it seems clear now that it started me on my long road out of this impasse. What I didn’t even begin to realise in 1993 was that this priceless source of innumerable insights almost certainly came from my literal heart, and not just ‘heart’ in some metaphorical sense. That clinching insight, as readers of this blog will know by now, came decades later.

There were various other complicating factors at work during this challenging period, above and beyond the role strain and conflicting values. My introversion had been a long-standing contributor to my stress, as previous posts have explored in more detail. What I was probably not factoring in was something that was only clearly explained in a recent book. Adam Robarts in his moving exploration of how he and his wife coped with the premature death of their son touches on a theme which resonated strongly with me and concerned ‘authenticity,’ something that seemed a core quality deeply embedded in his son, Haydn’s, being.

He quotes research published in Scientific American by Jennifer Beer:[1]

Beer notes, “Authentic people behave in line with their unique values and qualities even if those idiosyncrasies may conflict with social conventions or other external influences. For example, introverted people are being authentic when they are quiet at a dinner party even if social convention dictates that guests should generate conversation.” The distinctive twist, however, is that “a number of studies have shown that people’s feelings of authenticity are often shaped by something other than their loyalty to their unique qualities. Paradoxically, feelings of authenticity seem to be related to a kind of social conformity.” Specifically, she notes that such conformity is usually applied to a particular set of socially approved qualities, such as being extroverted, emotionally stable, conscientious, intellectual, and agreeable.

I have grappled since my teenage years with the issue of reconciling my introverted temperament with the need to operate effectively in the social world. I still remember my decision in my mid-teens to fake sociability in order to get on in the world.

The insights Robarts quotes helped me see how the confusion of extraversion with authenticity had made authenticity difficult for me as an introvert.

A relevant Socratic question might be how do I square the value I attach to connectedness with my deep desire for so much solitude? The acting on the latter leaves me feeling guilty while acting on the former creates frustration and drains energy. I am therefore rarely content.

Competing Needs

Grounded in my values, there are competing needs within me, for connection on the one hand and for solitude on the other. The problem is I feel authentic when alone, which can trigger a need to withdraw from company: when alone, though, I feel guilty for neglecting people who value my company, even though I often feel inauthentic when I’m with them.

There is apparently therefore no escaping my need for solitary time most days and usually I can scrape enough of that together. What I consistently fail to do most of the time with most people is to be true to my real self (not my ego but my heart). Part of the reason for this is my sense that who I really am in certain respects would not fit well with “present company” – I might easily upset or anger someone. I’m not so bothered about angering others because, for example, my views or tastes differ, but I hate upsetting or offending anyone.

I have not so far been able to find any way out of this cage. This contributes to a sense of distance from or loneliness with others that feeds my need for the quietness of solitude.

I wonder whether the distinction made by Eliot in his poem, Burnt Norton, which Lyndall Gordon discusses, is a clue:[2]

. . . the end of March, then, was [Hale’s]’s first opportunity to take in the [Eliot’s] detachment from human love. It was certain to shake her trust that this was ‘our’ poem.

Next to the line ‘darkness to purify the soul’, Eliot gives Hale a clue in ink: ‘The Ascent of Mt Carmel’. And next to the passage beginning ‘Descend lower’, he writes, again in ink, ‘The Dark Night of the Soul’. The 16^th century treatises by the Spanish monk St John of the Cross preached a solitary discipline: to divest oneself of natural human affections so as to arrive at the love of God.

His poem’s swing from human love does not deny the validity of the rose-garden moment [they had shared together]. The rationale is that the ‘way up’ in the rose-garden and the ‘way down’ of the saint coexist, as in the epigraph from the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus: ‘The way up and the way down are the same’. These are alternative routes across the frontier of the timeless, and the poem does not lose sight of the route via natural love.

. . . So, for him to shun human love would have been more than expected; how could it not come as a shock and change her willing surrender to shame and disappointment? The first hint that he will turn away from pleasure comes in an otherwise intimate letter on 6 January when he writes that joy does not lie in the things of this world.

Basically, the theory goes that you can pierce the veils and access the timeless either upwards through connection with others or downwards through solitary introspection. Eliot ended up opting for the latter. I am torn between the two: the first seems an inescapable obligation, the latter an inexcusable indulgence. Pursuing either causes conflict and/or a sense of guilt.

My diary entries persistently track other aspects of this, for example, in an entry from Friday 17 June 2022:

Today I have experienced a crucially important epiphany. On the back of a fleeting comment I made recently that Iain McGilchrist, in his recent book ‘The Matter with Things’, was stating that art can serve as bridge between our consciousness and the ineffable aspects of reality, I came to see all too clearly a truth that I have been blind to all these years: art is not just a subordinate domain to science and religion – it is their equal. We need all three if we are to mobilise all parts of our brain to enable our minds to grasp almost any important and complex truth more completely in all its aspects. One of these domains is in itself not enough for most of us, at least.

This realisation almost immediately created the acronym S.T.A.R. in my mind — a peak experience, in its way; certainly a lightbulb moment. If I am to provide true C.A.R.E [my acronym for consultation, action, reflection and experience] I must resolutely follow my S.T.A.R. It’s only taken me 79 years to realise this. In fact, only to by taking CARE and following my STAR will I really be able to achieve anything remotely close to my life’s purpose.

Star and Care

This moved me onto to a critical question:

Have I really at last reached a proper understanding of what I should be doing with the rest of my life — a question that’s been bugging me for ages?

After years of sometimes invisible struggle, I clearly thought I was coming close to ripping off a few of the veils obscuring my inner vision.

This is such a revelation. I can’t quite capture all its many meanings. This not only explains my mysterious and compelling sense of quest, a desperate search for elusive meaning — something that has driven me ever since my wakeup call in the mid-70s. It also gives me a far better sense of where and how I should be focusing my energy and attention. . . .

I think a lot more energy than I was aware of was struggling to bring this crucial insight to the surface of my mind through miles of labyrinthine potholes and passageways. CARE is largely ‘How?’ and STAR is largely ‘Why?’ and ‘What?’

Of course, I had to bring my bête noire of reductionism into the mix:

Any form of reductionism or potentially toxic over-simplification is to be avoided at all costs in all three domains. A destructive ‘science’, ‘art’ or ‘religion’ is neither art, science nor religion. I think with this model, if I am immersing myself in any kind of genuine manifestation of any one of those three domains, there is no need to feel guilty, or slag myself off for betraying the other two and wasting my time.

I must keep all three in balance though.  Different people will privilege different domains at different times and in different places: what is critical is that destructive dogmatism and fanaticism be avoided at all costs and ideally everyone should be open to information and experiences from all three domains, or risk descending into illusion at best or dangerous delusion at worst. If I hear anyone disparaging any of these domains as pointless I’ll know not to trust a word they say.

For me a more difficult task than avoiding reductionism, is keeping the three domains in balance.

I know I am not a polymath, but I really do need to keep all three in balance. Choosing psychology swung me away from the arts but the fire-in-the-car-engine dream helped me redress that imbalance. My conversion to the Bahá’í Faith derailed the arts again in favour of religion. The Writings talk so much about the harmony of religion and science as paths towards the truth, that even though they praise the role of the arts in expressing spirituality I failed to see that there is more to the arts than that.

I think these insights might help me shed the burden of guilt that has dispirited me so long and prevented my enjoying and learning from literature, painting and song in the way I used to. Maybe I again got too close to the position Iain McGilchrist reminds us that Darwin found himself in:

He draws from Charles Darwin’s Autobiography which speaks of the great pleasure he derived as a young man from poetry, music and art, something now almost completely lost to him:[3]

My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts . . . And if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once a week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through the use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

I am determined to do everything I can not to make that same mistake again.

. . . Basically, I think I have come to a firm realisation that my path entails using an exploration of the arts, social sciences and spirituality to help me enhance my understanding of reality and ease my own existential pain as well as lift the understanding and ease the pain of others.

Recent reading, which I will touch on in the next post, suggests I need to keep my focus on arts and sciences that explore spirituality in some way, however indirectly. My recent heart insights showed me that, as all three in their highest form are valuable paths towards what is ultimately the same truth, my sense of their being in conflict was a completely misplaced veil blocking my ability to jettison my disabling guilt about following any of them at the imagined expense of the others.

Also, I wrote that I had been ruminating so long on what I was interested in — science, art, consciousness, spirituality etc. — without really looking at how to enact that (except in my blog). That was not enough. I need to use every interaction, every solitary action, to authentically express my deepest self in as constructive a way as possible, regardless of the criticism, and possible contempt it might trigger.

I am trying to hold on to these words of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, translated from the Arabic:

Let the loved ones of God, whether young or old, whether male or female, each according to his capabilities, bestir themselves and spare no efforts to acquire the various current branches of knowledge, both spiritual and secular, and of the arts.

More on all this next time.

Explained at this link

References

[1]. Nineteen – page 36.
[2]. The Hyacinth Girl – pages 227-229.
[3]. The Matter with Things – page 619.

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Our Sand of Simulations

As the current sequence, in part at least, touches on how hard we find it to see further than the surface of our simulations, it seemed worth re-publishing this second of three poems.

The portrait is Ginny, 1984 (scanned from Alice Neel: Painter of Modern Life – page 219)

This poem is a kind of afterglow of the earlier sequence on Alice Neel

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Scattered Longings (after Machado)

Machado’s poetry connects with my heart more strongly than almost any other poet, so it seems appropriate to re-publish, in the midst of a sequence about connecting with the heart, the three whose spirit I have attempted to capture in English

For source of image see link: for the original Spanish click here.

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Science, Spirituality and Civilisation (1/4): Oneness of Religion and Science (a)

All Saints Church, Hereford

In the wake of my sequence on understanding the heart, I got steered onto a somewhat different track. Every month I meet up with a former psychology colleague and close friend for a coffee and deep conversation on topics close to both of our hearts.

The café we repair to is in All Saints church. We grab our drinks and nibbles and go up the curving stairs to a quieter, specially built part of the café, walk past a wooden risqué carving on the ceiling, which would be barely detectable at ground level, to sit, if possible, at the quiet far end on comfortable armchairs at a low table.

On a recent occasion, after I’d risked boring him to bits with my prolonged exploration of the heart theme, he shared with me a printed copy of the epilogue to Consciousness Unbound by Edward Kelly titled The Emerging Vision and Why It Matters, as downloaded from the Paradigm Explorer website, Kelly co-edited the book with Paul Marshall. A key quote, indicating the general direction of travel of this sequence reads:[1]

Our individual and collective human fates in these dangerous and difficult times – indeed, the fate of our precious planet and all of its passengers – may ultimately hinge on a wider recognition and more effective utilisation of the expanded states of being that are potentially available to us but largely ignored or even actively suppressed by our struggling post-modern civilisation with its warring tendencies toward self-aggrandising individualism and fundamentalist tribalism

As I had found the earlier book in what I came to realise is a sequence of three – Irreducible Mind – a compelling and illuminating read (see links for my blog sequence), there was no way I could resist getting hold of a copy as soon as humanly possible.

It took a few days for Waterstones to get hold of a copy for me, but, as soon as they did, I plunged right in. The reading experience, spread over several weeks, was a combination of pleasurable hope and unexpected disappointment, for reasons I am about to explore.

I’ll be going in some depth into three main themes: harmony of religion of science, the perennialism, and dissociation with a slight diversion into precognition. Before I do so, I just need to flag up two important ways in which I resonated to issues that are not the book’s main focus but were welcome side-alleys.

Heart

There is at least one faint echo of the heart theme in Faggin’s article. He describes a crucial wake up experience he had in these terms:[2]

I felt a powerful rush of energy-love emerge from my chest . . .

This feeling was clearly love, but a love so intense and so incredibly fulfilling that it surpassed any possible idea I had about what love is. Even more unbelievable was the fact that I was the source of this love. I perceived it as a broad beam of shimmering white light, alive and beatific, gushing for my heart with incredible strength.

Then suddenly that light exploded and filled the room and then expanded to embrace the entire universe with the same white brilliance. I knew then, without a shadow of a doubt, that this was the “substance” of which all that exists is made.

Inscape

In words which open with ones almost the same as those used by one of my favourite poets, R. S. Thomas, he adds:[3]

A little of the time, I began to realise that the truly important journey is the inner one…

I realised that I had almost always repressed my true feelings… I had convinced myself that I was strong, when all I did was estrange myself from my own heart by pretending that everything was fine.

. . . the inner world of meaning must also be an irreducible property of all that exists from the very beginning. Meaning and matter must be like the two faces of the same coin.

R. S. Thomas

Thomas has it this way:[4]

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.

Mental Health

Mental Health is another topic which the book occasionally addresses with strong resonance for me. Presti is quite scathing about our culture’s standard approach when he discusses the use of medications in mental health:[5]

. . there are compelling reductionist narratives underlying the understanding of these conditions and their associated clinical interventions.

. . . Something shared among all… non-Western medical traditions is that health and illness are viewed in a strong psychophysical manner. Mind is understood to very much influence bodily processes – there is no schism between body and mind.

. . . In the case of psychiatric medications, reliance on neurobiological research to reveal mechanisms of and interventions for mental distress has led to little progress in understanding mechanisms and designing better treatments. Furthermore, it has contributed to a pharmaceutical industry of design and marketing of medications to address mental distress based on poorly supported mechanistic narratives, with little to show for all this beyond billions of dollars in research expenditures (funded largely by taxpayers) and billions of dollars of corporate profits from the sale of pharmaceuticals to treat mental distress.

My hymn-sheet exactly.

Kripal describes a telling example to counteract this reductionist narrative:[6]

Further scholarship eventually challenged the Katzian position… on pure consciousness.

… [Rachel Peterson’s experience ] she tells the story of how her clinical depression was effectively addressed through an encounter with ultimate reality on psilocybin… The psilocybin did not just ease her of her clinical depression; it also cured her of her atheism. After all, she could not deny her own experience, and she had known, directly and immediately, “an abiding force that permeated all existence – something that felt conscious, vast, benevolent, eternal, peaceful, and furiously important.”

Materialistic Heart Attack

Kripal also expresses a related take on humanism:[7]

. . . this . . . materialism has been so destructive of the humanities, mostly by rendering the human literally non-existent, and certainly irrelevant in the technological world of objects and things.

… Most humanists, like most scientists, assume the same metaphysics. They assume some kind of physicalism or materialism.

. . . In the materialist or physicalist metaphysics, the humanities are the practices of something that is not real, studying other things that are not really real. The humanities are nothing studying nothing.

… The materialist metaphysics of modernity is our intellectual heart attack.

This brings me onto my first detailed focus: the need for us to recognise, as the Bahá’í Faith does explicitly, that there is a fundamental harmony between religion.

Even so, after finishing the book I was left feeling that I needed to do Consciousness Unbound justice but that it was also important, given my caveats, not to exaggerate its value, perhaps also because all the contributors are men.

This first section covers one of its most encouraging lines of argument.

Oneness of religion and Science

Hopefully their case compellingly suggests how the current conflict between science and spirituality can be transcended: they avoid the word ‘religion’ for reasons Kelly makes clear:[8]

We believe that the single most important task confronting all of modernity is that of meaningful reconciliation of science and spirituality.

. . . we believe that emerging developments within science itself are leading inexorably toward an enlarged conception of nature, one that can accommodate realities of a spiritual sort while rejecting rationally untenable “overbeliefs” of the sorts routinely targeted by critics of the world’s institutional religions.

This, in his view, requires that[9] ‘[b]oth science and religion . . . must evolve.’ For him this is a tricky path to tread in the book because ‘most of us are scientifically minded adults… sceptical of the currently dominant physicalist worldview but equally wary of uncritical embrace of any of the world’s major faiths with their often conflicting beliefs and decidedly mixed historical records.’ I’ll be dealing with these caveats about religion in more detail in a later post in this sequence

The rewards of succeeding are potentially immense:[10]

This synoptic vision seems to us to harbour tremendous practical implications… in terms of providing humanity, individually and collectively, with an ethos that is fundamentally life affirming and optimistic, profoundly ecumenical in character, and potentially capable of addressing the multitude of societal ills and threats to a planet that can be seen as flowing directly or indirectly from the currently dominant physicalism.

Basically, the properly recognised harmony between these two approaches to reality could lift our civilisation to a far higher level.

So, what does such an approach mean in practice?

There is so much to say on that, it will have to wait until next time.

References

[1]. Consciousness Unbound. – pages 286-87.
[2]. Op. cit. – pages 284-85
[3]. Op. cit. – page 286.
[4]. Groping from Collected Poems – page 328.
[5]. Consciousness Unbound – page 345-47.
[6]. Op. cit. – page 388.
[7]. Op. cit.— pages 374-76.
[8]. Op. cit.— page 2.
[9]. Op. cit.— page 3.
[10]. Op. cit. – page 8.

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Understanding the Heart (6/6): Lifting our Game with our Hearts

‘Guernica’ – Partial scan from Scala Publishers Edition. Simon Schama’s exploration on television is probably no longer available.

The wars in the Middle East and in Ukraine are just two more tragic and traumatic symptoms of the underlying sickness of our so-called civilisation. To fall into the trap of furiously taking sides, blinded with anger, simply serves to widen the divides. Only heartfelt unity will cure this plague.

That of course is easier said than done, and even the most enlightened forms of humanism might find such a perspective hard, or even impossible, to maintain.

Incidentally, I’ve just discovered that Kripal expresses a possibly relevant take on humanism:[1]

. . . this . . . materialism has been so destructive of the humanities, mostly by rendering the human literally non-existent, and certainly irrelevant in the technological world of objects and things.

… Most humanists, like most scientists, assume the same metaphysics. They assume some kind of physicalism or materialism.

. . . In the materialist or physicalist metaphysics, the humanities are the practices of something that is not real, studying other things that are not really real. The humanities are nothing studying nothing.

… The materialist metaphysics of modernity is our intellectual heart attack.

It is therefore hard to see something that is part of the disease being strongly enough motivated to attempt to cure it.

Readers of this blog will be well aware of my spiritual bias. I am also aware, on my side, that religions do not have an unblemished record in terms of divisive bloodshed. So why should I be so keen to suggest that some form transcendent perspective is essential if we are to acquire the hope, the compassion, the patience, the wisdom and sustained endurance to move humanity towards a concerted recognition of our essential oneness, towards an unshakable awareness that we are one family, and that only by expressing that understanding in collective and compassionate action can we cure ourselves?

Basically, the answer to that is simple. I do not see any other way. All other motivators in my view fall short of the intense and overwhelming role our circumstances demand that they fulfil. I have dealt with this elsewhere in various posts (see the sequence reviewing Rifkin’s The Empathic Civilisation as an example).

It is for that reason that I am hoping that readers will have the patience to plough through the following explanation, which may seem counterintuitive to most members of our planetary community in these competitive and materialistic days. I am convinced that the reality I am going to attempt to describe is deeply intuitive, and our understanding of it is rooted in our wisest organ, our hearts, whose whispers are all too often drowned out by the clamour of our limited brains.

The Heart

I am going to be drawing mostly on Nader Saiedi’s powerful and challenging book Gate of the Heart: Understanding the Writings of the Báb.

He makes it clear right from the start[2] that ‘the concept of “heart”… is one of the most important principles in the Writings of the Báb.’ The reason for this is:

The station of the heart is the highest stage of created being’s existential reality. It is the reflection of divine reality itself within the inmost reality of things.

Our materialistic prioritisation of the brain does not square easily with this, but I hope the earlier posts in this sequence have helped make this idea more plausible than it would otherwise have been.

The consequences of an effective acceptance of this insight are massive in their implications:[3]

To engage in the act of interpreting the [Writings of the Báb] at the level of the heart, in terms of its supreme Origin, seeing the reflection of the divine mirrored in every atom of creation, is to transform the phenomenal realm into its ultimate spiritual reality.

This concept immediately reminded me of the beautiful lines from William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour

It is important to hold in mind, as we will explore later when we consider the inaccessibility of the Essence of God, and the Will of God as the creative force, that this idea is perhaps not quite as simple as it seems at first sight.

There are also challenging concomitants to our achieving such a level of understanding:[4]

To know truth, one must attain the station of servitude, which means to travel the path of humility, self-effacement, and negation of all but God. As long as the obscuring layers of selfish desires, arrogance, and reliance on anything but God still exist, one cannot become worthy of beholding the Divine Beauty. When the station of servitude is realised, then the divine light will shine upon the pure mirror of the heart.

Servitude seems an unlikely source of powerfully transformative action. However, one of the readings used recently at a Bahá’í meeting I attended might help shed light on why such a reaction is too facile and simplistic:[5]

[The beloved of God] should conduct themselves in such manner that the earth upon which they tread may never be allowed to address to them such words as these: “I am to be preferred above you. For witness, how patient I am in bearing the burden which the husbandman layeth upon me. I am the instrument that continually imparteth unto all beings the blessings with which He Who is the Source of all grace hath entrusted me. Notwithstanding the honour conferred upon me, and the unnumbered evidences of my wealth—a wealth that supplieth the needs of all creation—behold the measure of my humility, witness with what absolute submissiveness I allow myself to be trodden beneath the feet of men…”

We cannot understand this with our heads, though, as the end of the reading hinted at:

This is the luminous Tablet, whose verses have streamed from the moving Pen of Him Who is the Lord of all worlds. Ponder it in your heart, and be ye of them that observe its precepts.

Interestingly, the starting point of this sequence – the hearth dream about the central important of the heart (see link) – lends support to exactly this line of argument. I might never have understood the quote I refer to there – ‘be as resigned as submissive as the earth’ – so fully without the dream.

The English poet-priest John Donne was well aware that truth was not easy to access as he forcefully expressed it in Satire III:

On a huge hill,

Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will

Reach her, about must and about must go,

And what the hill’s suddenness resists, win so.

And he was aware, in a time of atrocious religious divisions, of another important aspect of reality:

As women do in divers countries go

In divers habits, yet are still one kind,

So doth, so is Religion

This corresponds so closely to a translation of the Writings of Bahá-u-lláh I can’t resist quoting it:[6]

It is clear and evident to thee that all the Prophets are the Temples of the Cause of God, Who have appeared clothed in divers attire. If thou wilt observe with discriminating eyes, thou wilt behold Them all abiding in the same tabernacle, soaring in the same heaven, seated upon the same throne, uttering the same speech, and proclaiming the same Faith. Such is the unity of those Essences of Being, those Luminaries of infinite and immeasurable splendor!

Saiedi makes a parallel point, linking this understanding to the need for humility:[7]

Because the diverse perceptions of truth entertained by different minds are due to the varying reflections of the divine creative Word in the hearts, an approach of humility and tolerance is called for, as well as avoidance of conflict and contention… The attitude of those who occupy higher stations must be one of compassion and understanding towards those of lower stations.

I hope this is also conveying how close poetry and scripture are in terms of conveying crucially important insights from one heart to another.

It’s perhaps important to emphasise that the resignation, humility and submissiveness under discussion here does not mean that we should all be striving to become some kind of doormat.

Such a degrading concept does not square with the courage and determination of all those faithful Bahá’ís such as Badi who have, throughout the history of the Faith, refused to recant their faith in the face of torture and execution.

Saiedi explains this clearly with quotes from Bahá-u-lláh:[8]

To realise one’s destiny is not a mere acceptance of whatever ‘is’; on the contrary, it is an active movement toward realising spiritual values in one’s own life and developing the potentialities and perfections, hidden, like ‘gems,’ in the ‘mine’ of one’s own being.

He later goes on to give more detail:[9]

The pure heart is detached and purified from all limiting, particularistic, attachments and presuppositions while at the same time it is supremely attached to love of God and consequently it is completely committed to moral values as well as imbued with a universal love for all beings. The reader of the Kitáb-i-Íqán may be surprised that Bahá-u-lláh kindness to animals, one of the conditions of the spiritual journey! But this is precisely an integral expression of this holistic moral orientation that is the principle of the heart.

World Transforming Consciousness

Now, perhaps, we can begin to move on to where all this relates to achieving a world transforming level of consciousness. Such a massive level of resolute commitment is clearly necessary. Is there something else as well?

Saiedi captures another essential quality of this perspective:[10]

One can most directly approach noumenal reality through the sanctuary of the heart, which affords the only perspective from which an all-encompassing gaze of unity is possible.

Divided minds create divided societies. Most of the categories we generate inside are projected divisively onto the outside world. Bahá-u-lláh laments that ‘No two men can be found who may be said to be outwardly and inwardly united’.[11] ‘Abdu’l-Bahá explains a crucial implication and the remedy:[12]

. . . 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.

This then enables us to reach higher levels of understanding:[13]

 . . . by attaining the higher perspective of the heart, one can transcend the oppositions of the limited station of intellect and arrive at a more comprehensive, holistic perspective.

Saiedi explains the potential implications of this for humanity as a whole:[14]

Humanity has now arrived at the beginning of a new age: human spiritual culture has evolved from the stage of the “body” through that of the “soul,” to that of “intellect,” and has arrived at the stage of the “heart.”

It may seem a body blow to hear that intellect lies below the heart in this spiritual hierarchy of capacities, but unless we accept that truth and achieve a better understanding of what that means we’ll remain locked in a cage of catastrophic tests indefinitely, though we should not arrogantly mistake this for a direct connection with the highest reality of God:[15]

Although the perspective of the heart transcends the limited and potentially divisive categories of intellect, this perspective is never suggested as a means of understanding the Essence of God, but, rather, the revelation of God at the level of the phenomenal world.

Saiedi explains in more detail the distinction between the unknowable Essence of God and the divine Will which emanates throughout creation and which the more spiritually advanced can sense to some degree.

Misidentifying the supposed signs of God has had dire consequences throughout history. Saiedi gives a key example:[16]

Taking the perspective of the heart, therefore, is the proper method of embarking on the search for religious truth, the spiritual journey that leads to [its] recognition….… As the Báb frequently emphasises, the tragic irony is that although the believers of the former religion were longing for their Beloved One to appear, when He did appear they universally condemned Him.

Only from ‘the perspective of the heart’ can true unity be achieved:[17]

The attainment of the station of the heart permits one to transcend the realm of limitations and oppositions and to behold all things in their station of unity.

This sense of oneness, as we have seen, needs to go beyond humanity alone, of course:[18]

… one should take into account not only the interests of human beings, but the interests of all creative things because the realm of nature is endowed with moral rights as well as spiritual significance.

Just so it does not appear that I am relying only on one source for this perspective, I’ll quote another author here as well – Julio Savi.

He writes that in Bahá-u-lláh’s list related to mysticism:[19]

. . . the most important symbol… is the heart as an organ of spiritual knowledge, a seat of divine revelation and an object of attraction. The heart can be enveloped by veils which abate its splendour; or it can be enlightened by the sun and its radiance, refreshed by springtime, cleansed by fire and water, perfume to by the wind and its scents. However, it always remains ‘dust’.

. . . It is usually intended as an organ of knowledge, as the seat of divine presence, and the object of attraction towards the ‘other’. In any case, the symbol implies that the heart will be able to function effectively only after it has been properly prepared through a cleansing process.

He quotes Schimmel who echoes one of Bahá-u-lláh’s constant reminders that we should purify our hearts:[20]

‘The heart is the dwelling place of God; or it is, in other terminology, the mirror in which God reflects Himself. But this mirror has to be polished by constant asceticism, and by permanent acts of loving obedience until all dust and rust have disappeared and it can reflect the primordial divine light.’

This absolutely cannot be divorced from essential action, as Saidi also makes clear:[21]

In emphasizing the primacy of recognition, Bahá-u-lláh affirms the ‘heart’ – inner recognition of faith – but He immediately makes this inseparable from the work of ‘hands and feet’ – action in accordance with the laws. At the same time, He stresses the significance of assisting the Cause of God through utterance and the pen, in the form of the promotion and teaching of the Cause of God. Together, these imply witnessing through one’s entire being.

So it can’t be a half-hearted response to the situation we are facing in the world as it stands. To be effective we must cleanse and unite our hearts so that we can draw as fully as possible upon powers that transcend the purely material forces that we are so attached to and limited by right now.

Nothing else will serve to ward off more atrocities such as those recorded in Picasso’s Guernica and Goya’s El Tres de Mayo. Standing before each of those powerful works of art when we visited Madrid some years ago reduced me to silent tears. To be watching daily the lived reality of comparable atrocities on my television screen brings back what triggered the nightmares of even my late childhood, where I woke in terror from dreaming I was vainly trying to escape the Gestapo, only to find I was trapped in the school gymnasium, clambering up the wall bars with nowhere else to go, as they burst through the door at the far end. ‘When will we ever learn?‘

It’s not just the wake-up call of climate catastrophe and Covid to which we must respond, but also the norm-shattering clarion of the morally contagious divisiveness that is spreading war and prejudice more widely along with a cruel indifference to the suffering it causes across the planet.

Scanned from Simon Schama’s ‘Power of Art’ His exploration on television is probably no longer available.

References:

[1]. Consciousness Unbound. Pages 374-76.
[2]. Gate of the Heart – page 50.
[3]. Op. cit. – page 51.
[4]. Op. cit. – page 163.
[5]. Bahá-u-lláh Gleanings V.
[6]. Gleanings – XXII.
[7]. Gate of the Heart – page 176.
[8]. Logos and Civilisation – page 86.
[9] Op. cit. – page 142.
[10]. Gate of the Heart – page 177.
[11]. Tablets of Bahá-u-lláh – pages 163-64.
[12]. Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá — page 78.
[13]. Gate of the Heart – page 180.
[14]. Op. cit. – page 227.
[15]. Op. cit. – page 247.
[16]. Gate of the Heart – page 288.
[17]. Op. cit. – page 311.
[18]. Op. cit. – page 315.
[19]. Towards the summit of Reality – page 137.
[20]. Op. cit. – page 236.
[21]. Logos and Civilisation – page 260.

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The Understanding Heart (6/6): of mirrors and reflection

Mirroring the Light

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 came out last Monday. 

In an attempt to shed light on what is meant by the phrase ‘understanding heart’ in the Bahá’í Writings, it seemed a good idea to use metaphors to explain a metaphor, given that logical language would probably not be up to the task.

I have reflected so far upon two images, used in the same scriptures, which shed some light on the matter: a lamp/candle/fire and the garden. These two images are not all we have to go on though. The mirror image is equally fruitful to contemplate.

O My Brother! A pure heart is as a mirror; cleanse it with the burnish of love and severance from all save God, that the true sun may shine within it and the eternal morning dawn. Then wilt thou clearly see the meaning of “Neither doth My earth nor My heaven contain Me, but the heart of My faithful servant containeth Me.”

(Seven Valleys and the Four Valleys: pp 21-22)

In previous posts I have discussed the value of reflection, though not in the sense of the way that mirrors reflect, yet the link is interesting. I have drawn on writers such as Koestenbaum who describes how reflection is a process of separating consciousness from its contents. I have used the analogy of the mirror to illustrate what this might mean. What is reflected in the mirror is not the mirror. In the same way what we are thinking, feeling and planning may not be the essence of our consciousness, simply the ‘objects’ that are reflected in it.

This discussion tended to presuppose that the mirror of our consciousness was clean enough to reflect what it was turned towards. This pins down the two essential aspects of the mirror of the heart that concern us here. Let us side-step for now whether the deepest and usually inaccessible levels of consciousness are what Bahá’u’lláh means by the heart: I will return to that topic again shortly.  Let’s consider instead the issues of dust on the mirror and the direction of its orientation.

In Bahá’í terms, as I understand them, turning the mirror of your heart towards debased objects defiles or dirties it.  It therefore has to be cleansed before it can reflect higher spiritual realities even if it is turned towards them.

The mirror referred to in the quote above is one of the ancient kind made of metal. It would need to be burnished with chains not with a soft cloth and polish – altogether more effortful, even painful. And the burnish is defined as love and detachment from all save God. This suggests that we are back with the idea that all the many different attachments we harbour in our hearts, all the different kinds of meaning systems we have devised as lenses through which to experience reality, are just dirt on the mirror of our heart.

It is fairly obvious then that metaphors such as weeding or purifying by fire, as one can do with metals when they’re mined, all add to our idea of what to do and how to do it in order to further this process that is described in terms of a mirror as ‘burnishing.’ We can set aside time to be mindful and locate in our own being the weeds of hatred and envy, for example, and see refusing to act them out and replacing them with kindness and admiration as a kind of weeding or burnishing depending upon what most vividly makes sense to and motivates us. Our minds all work in different ways and there is no one method that suits all.

Whatever method we use to step back from identifying with what impedes us (see link for one example: Disidentification exercise), I feel it could therefore be argued that if we were able to peel back all this dross that veils our hearts from discerning reality for what it truly is we would in effect be unhooking our consciousness from all the curtains that hide reality from us.

Wert thou to cleanse the mirror of thy heart from the dust of malice, thou wouldst apprehend the meaning of the symbolic terms revealed by the all-embracing Word of God made manifest in every Dispensation, and wouldst discover the mysteries of divine knowledge. Not, however, until thou consumest with the flame of utter detachment those veils of idle learning, that are current amongst men, canst thou behold the resplendent morn of true knowledge.

(Kitáb-i-Íqán: pages 68-69)

It’s intriguing that Bahá’u’lláh seems to be saying there that detachment will enhance our understanding of symbolic terms such as the metaphors we are examining here. If I was more detached I would not need to struggle so hard to understand what the metaphor ‘heart’ means in the first place!

Scott Peck, in spite of his well documented failings as a human being, was one of the first writers I came across who made it clear that love is not just a feeling if it’s a feeling at all in our usual sense of that word. He stated strongly that love is not a feeling: it is a kind of work (The Road Less Travelled pages 116-119):

. . . love is an action, an activity. . . . Love is not a feeling. . . . Genuine love . .  implies commitment and the exercise of wisdom. . . . . In a constructive marriage . . . The partners must regularly, routinely and predictably, attend to each other and their relationship no matter how they feel. . .  Genuine love is volitional rather than emotional.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy takes much the same line (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy – pages 218-19):

Marrying because of love is considered quite reasonable in our culture, and love is dominantly thought to be a feeling, not a kind of choice. The feelings of love are extremely unpredictable. We speak of love as if it were an accident; we say that we fall into and fall out of this emotional state, for example. It should not then be a surprise when we fall into and fall out of marriages in much the same way. . . . Consider how much easier it is to keep a marriage vow if marriage is based on a choice to marry and love is considered to be a choice to value the other and hold the other as special.

They go on to speak of the importance of commitment.

It’s taken a long time to get to this point. Better late than never though.

Obviously now one of the things that bedevils our ability to understand what the heart is in a spiritual sense, apart that is from taking it too literally and piling on too much baggage from our culture, is that we base our idea of the heart on feelings that come from the gut. We discount the possibility that the feelings that originate in the heart as the doorway to moral and spiritual progress may not feel like feelings at all in the same way. The feelings from the gut promise much and are so easy to give expression to, lie so close to what we see as our comfort zone, but they all too frequently fail to deliver on their promises and bring profound discomfort in their wake.

The feelings from the heart, on the other hand, compel us upwards, involve effort and even hardship often, but the rewards are beyond my ability to describe – of course, that applies only as long as it’s not for the rewards that we follow them. They seem more to do with enacted values than emotions in the usual sense of that word. We tend to forget that emotions and motives have the same root in the idea of movement. We all too often feel moved without moving, or else set off in the wrong direction!

We need to remember, not just sometimes but always, the words of Al-Ghazali: ‘You possess only whatever will not be lost in a shipwreck.’ Near Death Experiences have a similar message. In Lessons from the Light one woman reports that the being of light sent her back and, when she asked what she should do, she was told that she could bring with her to the next world only what she had learned of love and wisdom. This seems a general lesson from such experiences:

One task that NDErs seem to agree on is to learn about love. We do that in a world limited by time and space where we have to make our choices. Many NDErs will agree we have a free will and we are free to choose our way through our world. But since we are part of a Unity Universe our interconnectedness makes that everything we do has an effect somewhere else. All our actions, even the seemingly insignificant ones, ripple through the universe. They have an effect.

So, in the end, it seems that I will only be able to get a better hold of what it means to have an understanding heart by increasing my level of detachment by way of a strenuous and continuous attempt to live in as wise and loving a fashion as I am capable of.

The evidence from research in neuropsychology is clear now that focused and deliberate effort changes the brain, and some research is said to suggest that years of meditation can lead to a synchronisation of the two halves of the brain that creates a very significant change of consciousness. Given that the left-brain is connected with logic and the right-brain with deep intuition, perhaps this gives some idea of the possible physiological substrate of an understanding heart as well as of the prolonged effort that would be necessary to connect with it consistently in consciousness.

Easier said than done, then, but I suspect I have no choice.

So, it has become clear that the heart cannot be the seat of understanding if we coast comfortably along assuming that it is the natural home of feelings in a conventional sense. If it were, how could the understanding heart, for example, protect the flame of love we are encouraged to kindle there from the gusts of negative feeling that blow from the emotional centres of the brain? If we are treating these feelings as though they are what the heart is evolved to house all the time, we’re in trouble. The heart, in the sense we are concerned with here, can’t both harbour the gales of emotion and at the same time shield us from them. The light of love will end up inevitably and rapidly extinguished.

This is where the mirror image is so helpful. It assists us in separating out what is part of the heart in its true sense and what is not. An account of a dream I had many years ago might help here.

There is a lake in the mountains. By its shore a rabbit squats munching leaves or grass. Overhead a hawk flies. A slight breeze wrinkles the surface of the lake so the image of the sky and clouds is crumpled too. Only my eye is there to see this scene: I am not aware of my body at all.

To simplify somewhat, as the dream has other implications as well, after some work on its content I came to see it as an image of my mind. The hawk is my anger, the rabbit my fear, the surface of the lake my superficial consciousness. Not only the sky but the hawk and rabbit are reflected in it.

If I see the surface of the lake as who I truly am I will live my whole life a prey to fear, anger and all the other changes in the mental weather – the clouds, winds, rain and so on of my inscape – that disturb and distress me. But in essence I am not these things. They are only the contents of my consciousness just as they are not the lake itself in the dream, only reflections in or perturbations of its surface.

My mind is the lake itself and the more deeply I allow myself to experience its full reality the closer I get to the ground of my being, where the essence of who I truly am is most closely in touch with the foundation of my existence. If I live my life from this level of awareness I will be authentic, I will be who I really am in essence rather than the person I seem to be in appearance: I will be in touch with my understanding heart. Heaven knows, if I persevere sincerely enough for long enough, one day I might even become capable, before I die, of being my understanding heart, at least for fleeting moments here and there. 

Thanks to all those who have stuck with me this far and I’m sorry if the final conclusion seems disappointingly modest after all the high-flown expectations!

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