Facing Uncertain Death (35/42): A Light that does not Blind

Given that the recent sequence on veils, words and values focused at some length on R. S. Thomas’s struggles to access God, reposting this poem that touches on a similar idea seemed worthwhile. My new poem to be posted tomorrow was triggered by Thomas’s later poems.

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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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Mapping Consciousness (4/6): Was replicating consciousness Woolf’s conscious intention?

. . . art is something which, though produced by human hands, is not wrought by hands alone, but wells up from a deeper source, from man’s soul, while much of the proficiency and technical expertise associated with art reminds me of what would be called self righteousness in religion.

The Penguin Letters of Vincent van Gogh – to Anthon van Rappard March 1884 – page 272

Even though it’s barely a year since I last republished this sequence, its relevance to my sequence on Science, Spirituality and Civilisation is unmistakable. Art, as well as science and religion, has a role to play in understanding consciousness, so here it comes again!

The next two posts are going to be more challenging to write than the previous ones. The issues are a bit of a stretch. Firstly, it’s going to be quite difficult to convey what Woolf manages to achieve, and secondly it’s going to be almost equally tricky to tease out all the variables that can impact on any objective assessment of the quality of her achievement.

For example, my subjective response is so strong it clouds other issues to some extent, such as the need to examine the probable nature of consciousness from more than just this somewhat poetic perspective. Even if I do that, we come to possibly important distinctions between normal consciousness, in the sense of consciousness as most of us experience it, and other kinds of consciousness, some of which have been labeled ‘abnormal’ in a critical sense, and others which are seen as enhanced, as a result, for instance, of prolonged meditation under expert instruction.

Should an artist’s achievement be judged only in terms of how well she captures normal consciousness? In which case what is normal? Or should we be setting our sights somewhat higher and expecting an artist to tackle other states of consciousness in any work attempting, as the novel does, to represent a reality beyond the average scope? Perhaps we can fairly expect ‘madness’ to be delineated in places, and mystical states.

This is not even beginning to tackle aspects such as literary skill and the zeitgeist, or pervading collective cultural consciousness of the period.

You can see my problem.

I’m going to blast on anyway! Please stick with me if you still wish to do so.

Was replicating consciousness her conscious intention?

A fair question to ask at this point is whether she intended consciously to replicate consciousness in the novels under consideration here, ie To the Lighthouse and The Waves.

As is becoming my habit here, I’m going to start with the picture Julia Briggs paints. She feels that (page 77): ‘Woolf was set on capturing in words “the complex and evasive nature of reality.” She feels that (page 93): ‘Woolf had put behind her the forms of nineteenth century realist fiction which falsified, she thought, by assuming the novelist’s omniscience. Instead, her novel admits to uncertainties at every turn. She set out to write a novel about not knowing…’

To be fair to earlier novelists I feel obliged to subject you all to another detour.

The Cultural Context

Before attempting to convey the impact upon me of Woolf’s mapping of consciousness, it’s perhaps worth saying a few words about the literary context out of which her work sprang.

Thought she mentioned him only rarely in her work, journals and letters, Briggs was in no doubt that Shakespeare was a key influence upon her. Amongst other things he was the master of the soliloquy. This is not the same exactly as Woolf was attempting, but it may have been the soil in which her plan had its roots.

The main difference is that Shakespeare’s words were to be performed on stage and, while soliloquies were designed to give the audience an insight into a character’s mind that could not otherwise be conveyed, they were not attempting to reproduce exactly the contents of the character’s consciousness – not even in Hamlet, where the protagonist is famous for his introspection. Most of his soliloquies serve to open for the audience an illuminating window on his vacillation and his feelings about that. We see the tugging to and fro within his mind. It’s definitely a step towards Woolf’s destination and would almost certainly have influenced her, whether consciously or not. But she planned to divorce her maps of introspection from the switchbacks of a plot.

To leap forward to the 19^th Century, and before we consider Jane Austen’s innovation – free indirect speech – we can give a passing glance to Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues and his complex masterpiece, The Ring and the Book, written after the death of his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Again, even though he is hoping to convey, in the latter work, the differing perspectives of the various characters on the key events of the plot, they are all addressing an audience of some kind as they speak. They are in persona, rather than introspecting alone.

What Jane Austen, followed by, amongst others Ford Madox Ford, attempted to do was to narrate her novel always through the eyes of one of her characters, rather than in her own voice.

A short quote from Austen’s Emma will illustrate her skill and give an example of her typical tone. Emma’s disastrous plan to link the low-born Harriet to the aspiring clergyman on the rise is being incubated precipitously and with no sense of its limitations in Emma’s mind:

Mr. Elton was the very person fixed on by Emma for driving the young farmer out of Harriet’s head. She thought it would be an excellent match; and only too palpably desirable, natural, and probable, for her to have much merit in planning it. She feared it was what every body else must think of and predict. It was not likely, however, that any body should have equalled her in the date of the plan, as it had entered her brain during the very first evening of Harriet’s coming to Hartfield. The longer she considered it, the greater was her sense of its expediency. Mr. Elton’s situation was most suitable, quite the gentleman himself, and without low connexions; at the same time, not of any family that could fairly object to the doubtful birth of Harriet. He had a comfortable home for her, and Emma imagined a very sufficient income; for though the vicarage of Highbury was not large, he was known to have some independent property; and she thought very highly of him as a good-humoured, well-meaning, respectable young man, without any deficiency of useful understanding or knowledge of the world.

We are not in Emma’s mind in the same way Woolf will enter the minds of her characters, but Austen is definitely not being the omniscient narrator, and we are experiencing Emma’s thought processes with all their limitations. She handles the clash of perspectives between characters mostly through skillful dialogue.

Ford Madox Ford followed faithfully in Austen’s footsteps. One example from the opening of Chapter III of Some Do Not (1924) will illustrate this clearly:

At the slight creaking made by Macmaster in pushing open his door, Tietjens started violently. He was sitting in a smoking-jacket, playing patience engrossedly in a sort of garret room. It had a sloping roof outlined by black beams, which cut into squares the cream-coloured patent distemper of the walls. . . . .Tietjens, who hated these disinterred and waxed relics of the past, sat in the centre of the room at a flimsy card-table beneath a white-shaded electric light of a brilliance that, in the surroundings, appeared unreasonable. . . . To it Macmaster, who was in search of the inspiration of the past, had preferred to come. Tietjens, not desiring to interfere with his friend’s culture, had accepted the quarters, though he would have preferred to go to a comfortable modern hotel as being less affected and cheaper.

He then skillfully develops their contrasting perspectives without dialogue, which brings him even closer to the experiments Woolf then attempted.

By the time Woolf was writing her pioneering pieces another innovator writing in English had also appeared on the scene with his masterpiece (Ulysses in 1922), an author about whom she was somewhat ambivalent: James Joyce. She found him ‘sordid’ but ‘brilliant’ (Briggs – page 133). She felt he got ‘thinking into literature’ but recoiled from what she experienced as his ‘egotism’ and ‘desire to shock’ (Lee – page 403). I’m ignoring Proust, whom she acknowledges in an article of 1926, and had been reading since 1922. His use of memory though is often echoed in her work.

Was replicating consciousness her conscious intention continued?

Back to Briggs again.

In Mrs Dalloway (page 132) Woolf uses the technique of interior monologue. We see inside the minds of her two main characters. A previous work Jacob’s Room (page 133) ‘had alerted her to a problem created by interior monologue – that it risked producing a series of self-absorbed, non-interactive characters.’ Mrs Dalloway, on the other hand, (ibid.) ‘is centrally concerned with the relationship between the individual and the group.’ As she moved forward in To the Lighthouse (page 164) ‘she wanted to re-create the constant changes of feeling that pass through human beings as rapidly as clouds or notes of music, changes ironed out in most conventional fiction.’

Woolf was all too aware of how words can fail to catch the mind’s pearls (page 238): in a letter to Ethel Smyth, she wrote: ‘one’s sentences are only an approximation, a net one flings over some sea pearl which may vanish; and if one brings it up it won’t be anything like what it was when I saw it, under the sea.’

It is at this same point in her text that Briggs possibly overextends her argument in a way that I want to accept but don’t think I can. She writes, ‘despite an energetic and enjoyable social round, she always felt that the life of the mind was the only “real life”…’

In my copy of her widowed husband’s extracts from Woolf’s diaries I have the exact entry Briggs refers to here (Diaries – page 144).

The problem for me is that Woolf doesn’t use the word ‘mind’: she describes her work on the novel that became The Waves. The other diary entry Briggs refers to in her notes implicates a more appropriate word: Woolf writes (Diaries – page 126), ‘the only exciting life is the imaginary one.’ Imagination seems to be what Woolf is extolling. This distinction matters to me. Imagination is a power of the mind, but mind is not reducible to imagination, and therefore the life of the mind is beyond imagination alone. I may come back to that in more detail in a later post.

Do we have any other leads in her diary entries – the ones available to me at least?

A key quote for me comes on page 85:

I am now writing as fast and freely as I have written in the whole of my life; … I think this is the proof that I was on the right path; and that what fruit hangs in my soul is to be reached there.

At the end of this sequence I may try to tackle more deeply the possible implication in this context of such words as mind, imagination, soul etc. For now all I will say is that the word soul could be taken to be subsuming into one concept thought, feeling, reason, imagination, mind etc. She is not engaged in refined philosophical discriminations here: she is using words that she knows are mere approximations to what she is trying to say. In which case is I’d better stop my nit-picking for now.

She does describe her experience of the mind as (page 123) ‘the most capricious of insects, fluttering.’ She is well aware it is elusive (page 131): ‘But what a little I can get down into my pen of what is so vivid to my eyes.’ At times she feels she is getting the hang of it (page 81): ‘My summer’s wanderings with the pen have I think shown me one or two new dodges for catching my flies.’ But even such slight confidence clearly comes and goes. We have already heard her say (page 212), ‘I had so much of the most profound interest to write here – a dialogue of the soul with the soul – and I have let it all slip. . .’

Once she begins to really connect it gets easier but she has to proceed with due caution (Pages 218-20:

I make this note by way of warning. What is important now is to go very slowly; to stop in the middle of the flood; never to press on; to lie back and let the soft subconscious world become populous; not to be urging foam from my lips. There’s no hurry.

… the well is full, ideas are rising and if I can keep at it widely, freely, powerfully, I shall have two months of complete immersion. Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order. I can see the day whole, proportioned – even after a long flutter of the brain such as I’ve had this morning it must be a physical, moral, mental necessity, like setting the engine off.

She is also very conscious of the many different levels of experience that she needs to attend to. She describes them jokingly at one point (page 75):

But my present reflection is that people have any number of states of consciousness: and I should like to investigate the party consciousness, the frock consciousness etc.

On a more serious note, but well after To the Lighthouse and The Waves were written, she hesitantly acknowledges (page 259:

I see there are four? dimensions: all to be produced, in human life: and that leads to a far richer grouping and proportion. I mean: I; and the not I; and the outer and the inner – no I’m too tired to say: but I see it: and this will affect my book… (18.11.35)

I will close with what I find to be a very revealing thought (page 97):

Have no screens, the screens are made out of our own integument; and get at the thing itself, which has nothing whatsoever in common with the screen. The screen-making habit, though, is so universal that probably it preserves our sanity. If we had not this device for shutting people off from our sympathies we might probably dissolve utterly; separateness would be impossible. But the screens are in the excess; not the sympathy.

It is this permeability which so strongly characterises her writing. Here she speaks of a permeability to others, but she also displays the same porous quality to her own unconscious. What she then experiences is hard to capture. Perhaps this is why she is drawn to poetry so much (page 326), ‘is the best poetry that which is most suggestive – is it made of the fusion of many different ideas, so that it says more than is explicable?’

I think I may be ready now to tackle the texts themselves.

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Science, Spirituality and Civilisation (2/4): Oneness of Religion and Science (b)

Religion and science are the two wings upon which man’s intelligence can soar into the heights, with which the human soul can progress. It is not possible to fly with one wing alone! Should a man try to fly with the wing of religion alone he would quickly fall into the quagmire of superstition, whilst on the other hand, with the wing of science alone he would also make no progress, but fall into the despairing slough of materialism.

(‘Abdu’l-Bahá – Paris Talks – page 143)

In many ways, in Consciousness Unbound, the treatment of this theme is obviously in tune with my thinking and the fundamental Bahá’í belief in the harmony of religion and science.

The authors absolutely accept the evidence that torpedoes materialism. For example, Presti states:[1]

… if one is open and honest about the empirical data, it is clear that what has been and continues to be experienced by a great many individuals over vast expanses of time goes beyond the personal as conceived within our current biophysical model of reality.

There is a catch though, he feels, in terms of a wider acceptance of this position:[2]

. . . for most scientists interested in consciousness, work will continue to be accomplished solely via investigation of neural correlates, and in that lies what I view as a key obstruction in conceptualising the signs of consciousness more expansively.

William James. (For source of Image see link.)

A key thinker of the past is clear this won’t ever work. Presti brings William James’ perspective into the mix:[3]

To expand a science of mind, one must take seriously the occurrence of relevant empirically verifiable phenomena that do not fit within the standard accepted explanatory paradigm – the anomalies.

I love the phrase James created to capture the nature of the evidence scientism ignores:[4]

He referred to the unclassified, perhaps mystical, residuum as “wild facts”.

. . . more study of what James categorised as the wild facts is essential. . . . they are. . . paranormal only by virtue of their being beyond our capacity to explain within our current framework of biophysical science.

It will, however, be tricky to subject such phenomena to systematic examination:[5]

Here we must take what is given by nature, for [the essential ] emotionally evocative circumstances simply cannot be created in the laboratories or other well-controlled settings.

But if science does not find a way to incorporate the study of such phenomena into its methodology it will continue to fall far short of what should be its mission – the investigation of truth rather than the confirmation of delusion. Here’s James again:[6]

 “. . . our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, while all about it, parted from it by the filmiest screens, there are potential forms of consciousness entirely different… No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded” (James, 1902, page 388).

We will be looking at the screen or veil effect in more detail when I pick up on the dissociation metaphor in a later post.

It is certainly true that the evidence already gathered by research into the paranormal has, according to Presti, been consistently and unfairly dismissed:[7]

Parapsychological researchers may well be among the best experimentalists in human behavioural science “because they know that they must design more sophisticated, bias-proofed studies than scientists in other fields in order to be believed” (Leary, 2011, page 276). . . . Here is Jessica Utts (2016) in her presidential address to the American statistical association several years ago:

“The data in support of precognition and possibly other related phenomena are quite strong statistically, and would be widely accepted if they pertained to something more mundane. Yet, most scientists reject the possible reality of these abilities without ever looking at the data! . . . I have asked the debunkers if there is any amount of data that could convince them, and they generally have responded by saying, “probably not.” I ask them what original research they have read, and they mostly admit that they haven’t read any! Now there is a definition of pseudoscience – basing conclusions on belief, rather than data!”

None the less the nature of the evidence will probably remain inevitably and perhaps indefinitely problematic to a convinced materialist.

For example, with research on NDEs, 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:[8]

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:[9]

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:[10]

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.

No matter how important it is that we change our perspective, Presti provides reasons why this may remain a Bechers Brook for science for some time to come:[11]

If the material universe is enfolded with mind, this idea comes very close to home – as close as it possibly could: our consciousness. This is not a distant abstraction, like dark matter, dark energy, and Higgs bosons. The wild facts really matter on a very personal level. They threaten our worldview.…

In a current physicalist worldview, there is no place for a mind that really matters.

Also we need to remember James’s pragmatic sense that, while we may sometimes end up knowing the truth, we will never be able to absolutely prove it. As David Lamberth puts it:[12]

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.’

According to Marshall the consequences of this denial may be more far-reaching than most of us realise:[13]

Unfortunately, the exclusion of qualitative properties and the more advanced felt characteristics of mind – what it is like, for example, to know, understand, feel, imagine, desire, hope, and will – set up a causal and explanatory gap between conscious mind and the world.

Wishful thinking of this kind may seem to pay off:[14]

The hardest of the physicalisms is a kind of eliminativism that wishes away the mind-body problem by dismissing the awkward qualitative properties as nonexistent. No qualitative properties, no mind-body problem.

But the quantitative methods of physicalism make it qualia-blind:[15]

Felt colours, sounds, tastes do not come out of the equations used to model physical processes and so resist satisfactory integration into the program of quantitative science.

This neglect has serious consequences. Rather in the same way as Kripal describes the situation as the ‘materialist metaphysics of modernity’ being ‘our intellectual heart attack’,[16] Presti chooses a different metaphor with similar implications:[17]

There is something to be said for the idea that humanity is at present in the midst of a collective psychosis – a massive and disabling confusion over what is “real.”

But Presti, looking on the bright side, feels that[18] ‘A scientific revolution is nigh.’

This will inevitably rattle a more than a few cages:[19]

[I]nvestigation of who we are and how we relate to the rest of the universe can bring one into what is generally considered the territory of religion and, some maintain, outside the domain of science. This can be unsettling – to individuals in either camp.

Advocates of scientism, Presti hopes, may soon have to accept that their position is based on a problematic act of faith:[20]

Eccles stated that “we regard promissory materialism as a superstition without a rational foundation. The more we discover about the brain, the more clearly do we distinguish between the brain events and the mental phenomena, and the more wonderful do both the brain events and the mental phenomena become. Promissory materialism is simply a religious belief held by dogmatic materialists… It has all the features of a messianic prophecy – the promise of a future freed of all problems . . .

If we were able to shake off this delusion the world might be a better place. Marshall asks some key questions about how we might decide on the value of a new paradigm:[21]

Does the theory offer explanatory insights into processes behind, say, psi and post-mortem survival? Are new lines of enquiry opened up by the theory, and what real-world usefulness might it have? Can it, for example, inspire us to live better lives and build better societies and formulate our long-term aspirations? . . . The importance of including mystical experience in the range of phenomena to be explained cannot be overstated, for there are clear connections between psi and mystical phenomena, and so an adequate theory should address both.

Kripal even makes a brief reference to a possible role for the heart, one of the rare mentions of this organ in this 500 page tome:[22]

Many of the Tantric traditions even locate the cardiac region of the human body as the esoteric door or portal through which this Consciousness beams in, more or less exactly as Federico Faggin describes his own awakening in chapter 8 in this volume.

A fitting place to bring to a pause this exploration of the as yet unaccepted harmony of religion and science is with Kripal’s record of his own experience:[23]

Gradually, over the course of the decades of meetings and interactions, I came to realise, with a growing sense of shock and liberating confusion, that many of the psi phenomena that I had been trying to ignore or dismiss as legends or pious exaggerations – as “miracle,” “folklore,” or, worse, “magic” – and separate from true or genuine religious experience should not in fact be separated and are quite real. They are real in the simple sense that they happen.

. . . I came to see that the data on the rogue phenomena are remarkably robust and more convincing, even if they, too, “do not behave” – that is, even if these phenomena in their most extreme and convincing forms cannot be replicated in a laboratory for some very good reasons… Rogue phenomena tend to manifest spontaneously in life-cycle moments of crisis, illness, trauma, danger, and death, none of which can be ethically reproduced or predicted in a controlled environment.

He even speculates that such experiences are intentionally thrusting themselves on our attention to force a change of perspective:[24]

On the most philosophical and speculative level, I came to see both these mystical experiences and these rogue paranormal phenomena as intentional signs of the fundamental inadequacy of the present Western worldview. I do not use the word ‘intentional’ lightly here.… They want us to look.… They want us to change reality.

I realise that even these compelling approaches may not be enough to convince a sceptic, but what I would at least hope is that sometime soon we’d reach a tipping point where enough thinkers would begin to explore what they don’t want to know, rather than keep dismissing evidence supporting it on the grounds that it could not possibly be true. That is not science.

Next time I’ll be taking a look at perennialism.

References:

[1]. Consciousness Unbound – page 326.
[2]. Op. Cit. – page 330.
[3]. Op. Cit. – page 335.
[4]. Op. Cit. – page 326)
[5]. Op. Cit. – -page 337.
[6]. Op. Cit. – -page 338.
[7]. Op cit. – page 339.
[8]. After – page 74.
[9]. Surviving Death – page 172.
[10]. Living in a Mindful Universe — page 262.
[11]. Consciousness Unbound – page 340.
[12]. William James and the Metaphysics of Experience – page 222.
[13]. Consciousness Unbound – page 410.
[14]. Op. cit.— pages 411-12.
[15]. Op. cit.— page 412.
[16]. Consciousness Unbound  — page 376.
[17]. Op. cit.— page 341.
[18]. Op. cit.— pages 351.
[19]. Op. cit.— page 351.
[20]. Op. cit.— pages 352-53.
[21]. Op. cit.— page 421.
[22]. Op. cit.— page 366.
[23]. Op. cit.— page 370.
[24]. Op. cit.— page 372.

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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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Understanding the Heart (5/6): The Right Method of Approach to the Truth

Was Jill Bolte Taylor in contact with her heart rather than her right hemisphere given the fact she had no words at all, an alleged characteristic of the heart in a physical sense? This is a difficult enough issue to decide on.

There is a far more complicated one coming up right now.

Even given the alleged evidence to support the notion that the heart has at least a limited capacity for precognition and long-distance emotional communication, is it a leap too far to even begin to suggest that the pump in our chest is able to rise to the challenges I am about to address concerning our ‘understanding heart’ in the Bahá’í sense of that phrase?

The Understanding Heart

I have explored this phrase at some length in a previous sequence, but will share a few key quotations at this point in order to give a sense of its importance in the Bahá’í Revelation and clarify the context in which Bahá-u-lláh uses it.

Even at best, the heart has clear limitations as Bahá-u-lláh explains:[1]

Consider the rational faculty with which God hath endowed the essence of man. . . . . Wert thou to ponder in thine heart, from now until the end that hath no end, and with all the concentrated intelligence and understanding which the greatest minds have attained in the past or will attain in the future, this divinely ordained and subtle Reality, . . .  thou wilt fail to comprehend its mystery or to appraise its virtue. Having recognized thy powerlessness to attain to an adequate understanding of that Reality which abideth within thee, thou wilt readily admit the futility of such efforts as may be attempted by thee, or by any of the created things, to fathom the mystery of the Living God . . . . . . This confession of helplessness which mature contemplation must eventually impel every mind to make is in itself the acme of human understanding, and marketh the culmination of man’s development.

If we want to get the best out of it, we have to purify it:[2]

When a true seeker determineth to take the step of search in the path leading unto the knowledge of the Ancient of Days, he must, before all else, cleanse his heart, which is the seat of the revelation of the inner mysteries of God, from the obscuring dust of all acquired knowledge, and the allusions of the embodiments of satanic fancy. . . . . . He must so cleanse his heart that no remnant of either love or hate may linger therein, lest that love blindly incline him to error, or that hate repel him away from the truth.

This helps get us closer to possessing an understanding heart:[3]

Then will the manifold favors and outpouring grace of the holy and everlasting Spirit confer such new life upon the seeker that he will find himself endowed with a new eye, a new ear, a new heart, and a new mind. . . . . . Gazing with the eye of God, he will perceive within every atom a door that leadeth him to the stations of absolute certitude.

So, despite its inescapable limitations the understanding heart has significant powers, including another key capacity:[4]

Were these people, wholly for the sake of God and with no desire but His good-pleasure, to ponder the verses of the Book in their heart, they would of a certainty find whatsoever they seek. In its verses would they find revealed and manifest all the things, be they great or small, that have come to pass in this Dispensation. They would even recognize in them references unto the departure of the Manifestations of the names and attributes of God from out their native land; to the opposition and disdainful arrogance of government and people; and to the dwelling and establishment of the Universal Manifestation in an appointed and specially designated land. No man, however, can comprehend this except he who is possessed of an understanding heart.

The Central Importance of the Heart

Klebel addresses these issues in Chapters 3 and 4 and is convinced, on the basis of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s clarification, that the system of nerves connected with heart are both spiritual and physical:[5]

‘The powers of the sympathetic nerve are neither entirely physical nor spiritual, but are between the two (systems). The nerve is connected with both. Its phenomena shall be perfect when its spiritual and physical relations are normal.’

He tries to unpack some of the possible implications of this duality:

Bahá’u’lláh, for example, speaks of the ‘eye of thine heart’[6] or He mentions a person who has ‘unstopped the ear of his inmost heart’[7] implying the heart has an ability that can somehow be compared to the senses of hearing and seeing. He states that hearts can be affected by touch, telling us ‘hearts have been sorely shaken’.[8]Bahá’u’lláh speaks of a ‘wise and understanding heart’[9] and places the function of memory into the heart as well when He lets us pray ‘to make my heart to be a receptacle of Thy love and of remembrance of Thee.’[10] He further instructs us to think, meditate, or ponder in our heart, saying in many places, ‘Ponder this in thine heart’.[11]

He quotes the Báb, the forerunner of Bahá-u-lláh, who is a Manifestation of God in His own right and not just some kind of John the Baptist figure simply prophesying the appearance of Bahá-u-lláh:

For the Báb, the heart is the central place where the belief in God is centred, and the heart encompasses the ‘expanse of heaven and earth’.[12]

With the help of Nader Saiedi and his book Gate of the Heart, I have attempted to take a closer look at the Báb’s Writings on the heart. There is a huge amount to ponder there but for now I will just flag up a key consideration.

Klebel raises an important point:

. . . the Báb proposes how . . . conflicting yet complementary attributes of the same thing or idea are unified only in the heart:

‘Such conclusive truth hath been revealed through the gaze of the heart, and not that of intellect. For intellect conceives not save limited things . . . No one can recognize the truth of the Middle Way between the two extreme poles except after attaining unto the gate of the heart and beholding the realities of the worlds, visible and unseen.’[13]

This same quote can be found on page 177 of Nader Saiedi’s book Gate of the Heart. Later, Saiedi complements that insight by stating:[14]

The essence of this discussion is that 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.” Humanity is now ready to receive a revelation based on the sanctuary of unity.

Picking up the threads of the previous post, where Klebel explains the heart’s relationship with poetry and dream and revelation, we find him quoting Bahá-u-lláh:

‘Do thou ponder these momentous happenings in thy heart, so that thou mayest apprehend the greatness of this Revelation, and perceive its stupendous glory.[15]

Poetry and Revelation are closely related in Klebel’s view:

The affinity revelatory writings have with poetry, and the fact that some of them even take the form of poetry, can be explained by the fact that poetry speaks primarily to the heart, and only secondarily can be understood by the brain. This is true also for Revelation, as this is understood primarily by the heart and only afterward scrutinized and evaluated by the logical mind. It could be said that the language of the heart is not only the language of dreams but also the language of poetry; this is how spiritual values and understandings are expressed. Ultimately, it must be stated that the language of the heart is the language of divine Revelation.

It is definitely a no brainer to realise why all this appeals to me so strongly given my lifetime of effort invested in decoding poems and dreams.

We can only access the language of the heart indirectly:

. . .  we always have a translation from the heart to the brain and have no awareness in the heart itself directly; we can only use the logical mind to become aware of what happens in the heart. The feelings we experience in the body must be understood by the brain.

Perhaps, in our case, because ‘[m]ost Westerners are well trained in using the brain and have little access to their understanding heart.’

As Nader Saiedi explains it in Gate of the Heart, the Báb’s position is clear (page 65): ‘,. . . it is “the gaze of the heart, and not of the intellect,” which is the right method of approach to the truth.’

The Báb places the heart at the highest level of four in terms of representing human reality. Saiedi states it in this way:[16]

The Báb employs a symbolic schema to represent human reality in terms of four levels: heart, spirit, soul, and body.…

The highest of these levels is the heart. “Heart” here should not be interpreted in the Western sense in which the heart is associated with emotion or sentiment. It is rather the supreme seat of spiritual truth, the abode of divine revelation. After the heart are the three lower stages of spirit, soul and body.

This was a radical change of perspective for me. Saiedi’s explanation is complex and will have to wait until next time. Even then I am not sure I will be able to do it justice.

References:

[1]. Bahá-u-lláh: Gleanings – pages 164-166: LXXXIII
[2]. Bahá’u’lláh: Kitáb-i-Íqán – page 162.
[3]. Op. cit. – page 196.
[4]. Op. cit. – page 174.
[5]. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Tablets of Abdul-Baha Abbas, p. 308. As to the authenticity of this Tablet, the following information was provided Roger Dahl, Archivist of the US National Bahá’í Archives: ‘That Tablet . . . was to a Dr E. H. Pratt of Chicago. The Archives does not have the original Tablet but we do have the translation that Dr Pratt sent to Albert Windust which was used in publishing the book. From a note by Albert Windust apparently ‘Abdu’l-Bahá gave permission for the Tablet’s publication, which Dr Pratt had requested. There is always the possibility that the World Centre Archives has the original Tablet. The translation was done by Ameen Farid on October 4, 1905 in Chicago.’
[6]. Bahá’u’lláh, Kitáb-i-Íqán, p. 91.
[7]. Bahá’u’lláh, The Summons of the Lord of Hosts, p. 86.
[8]. Bahá’u’lláh, Prayers and Meditations, no. 9, p. 8. On this point touched by emotion seems more likely than touched in any direct physical sense.
[9]. Bahá’u’lláh, Epistle to the Son of the Wolf, p. 65.
[10]. Bahá’u’lláh, Prayers and Meditations, no. 40, p. 42.
[11]. Bahá’u’lláh, Epistle to the Son of the Wolf, p. 74.
[12]. Selections from the Writings of the Báb page 145.
[13]. The Báb – Tablet to Mirzá Hasan, Iran National Bahá’í Archives, 53:199
[14]. Gate of the Heart – page 227.
[15]. Kitáb-i-Íqán – page 236.
[16]. Gate of the Heart – page 102.

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