Veils, Words & Values (5/5): Theodicy

Had the life and growth of the child in the womb been confined to that condition, then the existence of the child in the womb would have proved utterly abortive and unintelligible; as would the life of this world, were its deeds, actions and their results not to appear in the world to come.

(‘Abdu’l-Bahá in Bahá’í World Faith: page 393)

We ended the last post with this thought.  Wynn Thomas captures what he feels is Thomas’s achievement as someone ‘writing the modern history of a soul’ in the following words:[1]

. . . This is the Thomas who seems to have fully discovered the natural idiom of his soul only late in his career, in his haunting religious poetry.

That just about summarises my response to R. S. Thomas’s achievement in this respect at least.

Even so, we have the third problem. It was hard for Thomas, in the absence of presence, to reconcile the elusive existence of God with the state of a world supposedly created out of his compassionate omnipotence – the theodicy problem basically.

As Wynn Thomas explains:[2]

Thomas was ever helpless to deny his nagging, underlying recognition of the cruelty of the laws governing the world of God’s creation.

The problem, in Wynn Thomas’s view was a torment to him:[3]

The problem of accounting for the overwhelming evidence of suffering in the world supposedly created by a God of love: it tormented R. S. Thomas his entire life.

Thomas is not the only poet, of course, who has been troubled by this issue.

Dickinson & War

Emily Dickinson’s poetic productivity peaked during the years of the American Civil War. Wolosky in A Historical Guide to Emily Dickinson explains: [4]

[M]ore than half of her poetic production coincides with years of the Civil War, 1861 to 1865. The years immediately preceding the war… were also the years which Thomas Johnson identifies with ‘the rising flood of her talent,’ as well as with the beginning of her reclusive practices.

There was an amazing peak in 1863 alone. Betsy Erkkila describes it as follows, in a later chapter:[5]

[O]f the 1789 poems in Franklin’s variorum edition, over half were written during the years of the Civil War between 1861 and 1865; and of these, almost 300 were written in 1863, a year of crisis and turning point in the war, when even Union victories such as Gettysburg had become scenes of horrific bloodletting and mass death on both sides.

It is not surprising that one of the main concerns of these poems is ‘theodicy’:[6]

The first striking feature of these war poems is the fundamental and commanding place they give to the problem of theodicy. Dickinson’s war poems generally attempt to make out ‘the anguish in this world’ and to decipher whether it has ‘a loving side.’ This would mean its fitting into some wider schema, some purpose that would justify suffering, giving it place and hence significance.

This was a testing struggle as in war death is[7] ‘arbitrary and recalcitrant.’ In fact:[8]

The Civil War reached levels of carnage before unknown, made possible both by new technology and new strategies of total warfare, in combination with a profound ideological challenge to American national claims and self identity, political and religious.

Shira Wolosky lists other writers, including some poets, similarly challenged:[9]

Dickinson’s work brings to awareness the importance of theodicy as a core literary (as well as philosophical and religious) structure, in, for example, Aeschylus, Augustine, and Milton, Herbert and Donne, or, closer to Dickinson, Melville and Hopkins.

In the end:[10]

Religion in many ways is a paradigm that fails Dickinson, and yet, she never completely discards it. If she is not devout, she is also not secular.… Dickinson’s work… engages in endless disputation, which is endlessly inconclusive.

Shades of R. S. Thomas here also, it seems.

Eternity

However, he does perhaps arrive at a solution which was not surprising to me:[11]

His strategy [in the end] was to foreground that very transcendent otherness of God, and to emphasise that when thus coolly viewed sub specie aeternitatis[12] the otherwise vivid world of human experience faded into ephemeral, illusory importance.

He made the additional point that ‘[Also] language could at best be but a darkling glass that inevitably muddled understanding.’

I was driven to address the same problem in a sequence of posts. I came to essentially the same conclusion:

In the end though, as the quote at the beginning of this post suggests, any consideration of suffering that fails to include a reality beyond the material leaves us appalled at what would seem the pointless horror of the pain humanity endures not only from nature but also from its own hands. I may have to come back to this topic yet again.

Within that context I tried to give suffering a more positive meaning and purpose:

If we could only come to see our pain and loss as providing us, as a gift, with the currency we will need when we travel, as we all must at some unknown point in the future, to settle in the undiscovered land from whose borders no traveller returns, it would become possible to accept it gratefully rather than resist it pointlessly. We would not then unwittingly destroy it, much to our disadvantage later. Without this currency, when we die we will be like refugees, ill-equipped at first to deal with the challenges of our new homeland. If we were to realise this, not just with our heads but with our hearts as well, we could then do as Bahá’u’lláh advises us and greet calamity with the same peace of mind as we welcome all good fortune. That would be true wisdom and real wealth.

I’m still not sure how successful I was in that attempt, as there is a catch here though for many of us mortals. Given that in evolutionary terms human beings have been around for a matter of minutes, our tribulations shrink in that perspective. Clearly they would shrink to nothing in the light of eternity. However, as it’s hard for our primate brains to grasp the billions of years it has taken for us to arrive on the scene, to place them in the context of an eternity in which we have no faith, given the prevalent materialistic perspective on the world, is understandably impossible. As we dismiss the afterlife as a delusional consolation what little hope we may have can be all too easily torpedoed.

However, it seems to me that unless we do find a way not only to confront the issue of a hidden God, and the veils it implies, but also the related one of theodicy, it’s hard to hold onto a positive set of values and any sense of meaning in this traumatically troubled world we wander through.

In the end I do think there is any other way to get past the theodicy problem except through the perspective of an eternal after life. John Hatcher, one of the translators of Táhirih whose work we started from earlier in this sequence, explains it in this way in a post on the Bahá’í Teachings website:

Everyone, sooner or later, asks the age-old question: does an omnipotent, all-knowing God cause—or at least fail to stop—the suffering of the innocent?

Several major principles in the Baha’i writings urge us toward a solution to this substantial dilemma. For example, God is not restricted to this physical life in rectifying injustices we have suffered in our individual lives, nor is God limited to a certain span of time for working out justice in history, as we have noted earlier in this series of essays.

This observation may seem obvious, but it is the single most critical factor in coming to terms with theodicy—the important question of why a good Creator permits evil to exist. It means that we cannot possibly evaluate or judge what befalls us or anyone else in terms of what they endure in their earthly experience. Whether suffering ultimately results in justice or injustice, something beneficial or harmful, would be similar to our attempting to assess how someone will fare in their occupation while they are still in a formative stage within the mother’s womb.

Since our fruition is destined for another plane of existence, we can hardly assess what does and does not benefit that process, any more than a fruit tree could evaluate the beneficial results of its own pruning.

And that is probably about as far as we can take it in this sequence.

References and Footnotes

[1]. R. S. Thomas: Serial Obsessive – page 10.
[2]. R. S. Thomas to Rowan Williams: The Spiritual Imagination in Modern Welsh Poetry – page 208.
[3]. Op. cit. – page 210.
[4]. A Historical Guide to Emily Dickinson – page 107.
[5]. Op. cit. – page 158.
[6]. Op. cit. – page 111.
[7]. Op. cit. – page 112.
[8]. Op. cit. – page 125.
[9]. Op. cit. – pages 113-114.
[10]. Op. cit. – page 116.
[11] Op. cit. – page 210.
[12]. From Wikipedia: ‘Sub specie aeternitatis (Latin for “under the aspect of eternity”)[1] is, from Baruch Spinoza onwards, an honorific expression denoting what is considered to be universally and eternally true, without any reference to or dependence upon temporal facets of reality. The Latin phrase can be rendered in English as “from the perspective of the eternal”. More loosely, it is commonly used to refer to an objective (or theoretically possible alternative) point of view.’

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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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Conviction without Hatred (3/3)

My mind . . . . .
Yet knows that to be choked with hate
May well be of all evil chances chief.
If there’s no hatred in a mind
Assault and battery of the wind
Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.

(W. B. Yeats: ‘Prayer for My Daughter‘)

My recent focus on the role of religion, and my rejection of the idea that all the main religions do not have any really common ground, suggest it is worth republishing this attempt to define some of the main causes of ideological conflict. 

A World-Embracing Vision

A central concept in Bahá’í discourse, as could be inferred from previous posts, is the heart. This is used to refer to the core of our being. It is not purely emotional, though emotion is an important factor.

In the garden of thy heart plant naught but the rose of love.

(Persian Hidden Words: No. 3)

It also involves insight. Bahá’u’lláh uses the phrase ‘understanding heart’ on a number of occasions.

There is more to it even than that. In previous posts about the self and the soul I have explored the implications of the way that Bahá’u’lláh describes the heart either as a ‘mirror’ or a ‘garden.’ I won’t be revisiting those considerations here but they are relevant to this theme.

I want to look at another angle on the heart which Bahá’u’lláh repeatedly refers to.

In the Hidden Words (Persian: No.27) He writes:

All that is in heaven and earth I have ordained for thee except the human heart, which I have made the habitation of My beauty and glory; yet thou didst give My home and dwelling to another than Me and whenever the manifestation of My holiness sought His own abode, a stranger found He there, and, homeless, hastened to the sanctuary of the Beloved.

The meaning is clear. Like an addict we fill our hearts with junk as an addict blocks his receptors with heroin so that the appropriate ‘occupant’ is denied access and we do not function properly. We are in a real sense poisoned.

Bahá’u’lláh is equally clear about the advice He gives:

Return, then, and cleave wholly unto God, and cleanse thine heart from the world and all its vanities, and suffer not the love of any stranger to enter and dwell therein. Not until thou dost purify thine heart from every trace of such love can the brightness of the light of God shed its radiance upon it, for to none hath God given more than one heart. . . . . . And as the human heart, as fashioned by God, is one and undivided, it behoveth thee to take heed that its affections be, also, one and undivided. Cleave thou, therefore, with the whole affection of thine heart, unto His love, and withdraw it from the love of any one besides Him, that He may aid thee to immerse thyself in the ocean of His unity, and enable thee to become a true upholder of His oneness. God is My witness.

(Gleanings: CXIV)

Though it is easier said than done, of course, this has several important implications.

We are often divided within ourselves, worshipping more than one false god. We are divided from other people when we perceive them to be worshipping other gods than ours. This warps the proper functioning of the heart. It prevents us from becoming ‘a true upholder of His oneness,’ people who see all of humanity as our business and behave accordingly.

Bahá’u’lláh observed:

No two men can be found who may be said to be outwardly and inwardly united. The evidences of discord and malice are apparent everywhere, though all were made for harmony and union.

(Tablets of Bahá’u’lláh: pages 164-165)

‘Abdu’l-Bahá developed the same theme:

Let all be set free from the multiple identities that were born of passion and desire, and in the oneness of their love for God find a new way of life.

(Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá: page 76)

Note that transcending such divisions within and between people is linked with a unifying devotion to an inclusive and loving God: if we worship an exclusive and narrow god our divisions and conflicts will be exacerbated.

There is a key passage in the Arabic Hidden Words (No. 68) which assists in helping us understand the spiritual dynamics here:

Since We have created you all from one same substance it is incumbent on you to be even as one soul, to walk with the same feet, eat with the same mouth and dwell in the same land, that from your inmost being, by your deeds and actions, the signs of oneness and the essence of detachment may be made manifest.

Oneness and detachment are inextricably linked. Only when we detach ourselves from false gods can we integrate all aspects of ourselves, bring our divided loyalties together under one banner, and see ourselves at one with all humankind. When we dismantle the barriers within us we can also dismantle those between us. Only then can the expression of unity come from the depths of our being and manifest itself in actions and words that are a seamless fabric of complete integrity harmonised with all humanity. The process of striving to achieve this state in this physical world is a slow and painful one but cannot be evaded if we are to live a full and fulfilling life, as against an empty, sterile and potentially destructive one. Above all it involves expressing a sense of common humanity in action regardless of how we feel sometimes: positive values are a better guide to consistently positive action than feelings that can shift swiftly from light to dark and back again.

Without such a radical integration we will not be able to achieve the world embracing vision required of us if the problems confronting our civilisation are to have any hope of resolution. Anything less runs a very strong risk of perpetuating prejudice, conflict, discrimination and all the evils such as pogroms that have their roots in such heart-felt and deep-seated divisions.

We must be careful not to substitute some limited idea of God of our own devising for the limitless experience of love that is the one true God beyond all description. That way hatred lies. It is the ‘rose’ of love that we must plant in the garden of our hearts, not its daisy or its dandelion, though either of those would certainly be better than the stinging nettle of animosity, but probably not up to meeting the challenges that this shrinking and diverse world is currently throwing at us.

Planting the most inclusive and embracing flower of love in our hearts that we are capable of is the indispensable precursor to the positive personal transformation of a radical kind that is demanded of us now.

The Method

Without some plan of action, what I have described may well of course turn out to be empty rhetoric. Every great world religion has described in detail the steps we need to take to perfect ourselves once we have placed its message in our heart of hearts.

Buddhism is perhaps the clearest in its ways of doing this, with its four noble truths and eightfold path. Also its system of psychological understanding is second to none, which is perhaps why current psychological approaches to distress are borrowing so heavily from it, for example in the concept of mindfulness.

The Baha’i Faith is a much younger tradition but is unique in combining recommendations for individual spiritual development, such as prayer and reflection (in the sense I have discussed in detail in previous posts) with prescriptions for expressing spiritual understanding collectively in the special conditions of the modern world. There are two key components of this.

First, consultation, which is a spiritual and disciplined form of non-adversarial decision-making. Second is a way of organising a global network of like-minded people, which combines democratic elections with authority held collectively by an assembly. There is neither priesthood nor presidency. The system allows for a flexible process of responding to what we learn from experience: there is nothing fossilised about it.

I believe there is much to learn from the Baha’i model that can be successfully applied in our lives whether we decide to join the Baha’i community or not. The learning is readily transferable to almost any benign context.

Seat of the Universal House of Justice © Bahá’í World Centre

An Appeal to our Better Selves

After such a long post as this, now is not the time to go into this in detail but the many links from this blog will introduce these ideas in accessible form. I intend to return to this aspect of the issue in due course.

I would like instead to close with the words of a powerful message sent by the Universal House of Justice, our governing body at the Baha’i World Centre, to the world’s religious leaders in 2002. It stated in its introduction:

Tragically, organized religion, whose very reason for being entails service to the cause of brotherhood and peace, behaves all too frequently as one of the most formidable obstacles in the path; to cite a particular painful fact, it has long lent its credibility to fanaticism.

They continued:

The consequences, in terms of human well-being, have been ruinous. It is surely unnecessary to cite in detail the horrors being visited upon hapless populations today by outbursts of fanaticism that shame the name of religion.

All is not lost, they argue:

Each of the great faiths can adduce impressive and credible testimony to its efficacy in nurturing moral character. Similarly, no one could convincingly argue that doctrines attached to one particular belief system have been either more or less prolific in generating bigotry and superstition than those attached to any other.

They assert their conviction:

. . . that interfaith discourse, if it is to contribute meaningfully to healing the ills that afflict a desperate humanity, must now address honestly and without further evasion the implications of the over-arching truth that called the movement into being: that God is one and that, beyond all diversity of cultural expression and human interpretation, religion is likewise one.

And they close with the following appeal:

The crisis calls on religious leadership for a break with the past as decisive as those that opened the way for society to address equally corrosive prejudices of race, gender and nation. Whatever justification exists for exercising influence in matters of conscience lies in serving the well-being of humankind.

This is work that we can all support, wherever we are and in whatever God we do or do not believe. We should not just leave it to our leaders.

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Conviction: the Double-Edged Sword (2/3)

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

(W. B. Yeats: ‘The Second Coming‘)

My recent focus on the role of religion, and my rejection of the idea that all the main religions do not have any really common ground, suggest it is worth republishing this attempt to define some of the main causes of ideological conflict. 

Ruling passion

We obviously need to take care what we believe in. It tends to determine the person we will become. Sadly, most of us devote more conscious effort to choosing a car than creating a character. We simply accept what we have been given, rarely assessing its value, rarely considering whether or not it could be changed for the better, and if we do feel dissatisfaction with what we have become we tend to test it against inappropriate measures such as the wealth it has brought us, the worldly success we have achieved, the number rather than the quality of our friendships, the power we derive from it and so on. We seldom carefully reflect upon our beliefs and how they have shaped and are still shaping who we are.

Culture has struggled to get a handle on this problem for generations. In the 18th Century they talked of people having a ‘ruling passion.’ This was the organising principle around which all activities and aspirations were supposed to revolve. Alexander Pope wrote:

The ruling passion, be it what it will,
The ruling passion conquers reason still.

(Moral Essay iii: lines 153-154)

(Samuel Johnson, though, questioned the usefulness and validity of this concept in his usual robust fashion.) That they called it a ‘passion’ gives us a clue about what is going on here.

Samuel Johnson (for source of image see link)

Erich Fromm’s book, ‘The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness‘ (1973: page 260) develops this idea very clearly.  He argues that, in human beings, character has replaced instinct as a driver of what we do. And character creates a special need in us.

Man needs an object of total devotion to be the focal point of all his strivings. In being devoted to a goal beyond his isolated ego, he transcends himself and leaves the prison of absolute egocentricity. He can be devoted to the most diverse goals and idols but the need for devotion is itself a primary, essential need demanding fulfilment.

This has created a god-shaped hole in the middle of our being. We cannot help but fill it with something. Our sense of identity is at stake. In 2001 the Bahá’í World Centre published a review of the Twentieth Century which contained these words (page 59-60):

The yearning for belief is inextinguishable, an inherent part of what makes one human. When it is blocked or betrayed, the rational soul is driven to seek some new compass point, however inadequate or unworthy, around which it can organize experience and dare again to assume the risks that are an inescapable aspect of life.

Is conviction, like atomic power, a double-edged sword? Can we truly say that no great enterprise was ever accomplished and no huge and large scale evil ever completed without it? If this is so, and I think it is because both great good and massive evil require great energy and great persistence, what determines whether it will be destructive or constructive?

Idealising something (or someone) seriously flawed corrupts us: I  think the opposite is also true and that worshiping something both better and greater than ourselves improves us. I would like to entertain the possibility that it is the object of our devotion as we understand it rather than simply the intensity of the conviction that makes the greatest difference, though if the object of devotion is less than good then the intensity of our devotion will strongly influence how destructive espousing that belief will make us.

Is there any object of devotion that does not induce in its followers intolerance and hatred towards others especially those who have a different god?

Tolerant Devotion

The issue of what determines the strength and nature of our convictions is not a straightforward one. When I was studying psychology for the first time in the 1970s I came across the work of Thomas Pettigrew, which is still referred to even now. It illustrates nicely the exact nature of the difficulty.

To put one set of his findings very simply, whether you were a miner  in segregated West Virginia or apartheid South Africa, the culture around you differed depending on whether you were above ground or below it. Below ground discrimination was potentially dangerous so the culture there frowned on it: above ground the culture was discriminatory. What was particularly interesting to me was that 20% of people discriminated all the time regardless of the culture and 20% refused to do so at all: 60% of people shifted from desegregation below ground to segregation above it (the percentages are approximate: the pattern is accurate).

The implications are fascinating.

First, as Richard Holloway stresses, most of us are ‘infirm of purpose’ and lack the courage of our convictions or even any convictions at all. We follow the herd, a potentially dangerous tendency.

Secondly, the proneness to develop strong convictions does not lead us to develop only the best ones. In the example of the mining communities, segregation and desegegration are antitheses and cannot both be right and desirable, but clearly both attract approximately equal numbers of adherents with equivalent degrees of courage in their convictions, in stark contrast to the moral cowardice or lack of conviction of the rest of us. It is questionable whether it is the ‘best’ that  ‘lack all conviction.’

Thirdly, while most of us are drifting with the tide rather than choosing a firm rock to cling to, the strong-minded do choose but on grounds that have little if anything reliably to do with their strong-mindedness. Authoritarianism  has been wheeled out as a favourite explanation for why people end up fascist or fanatical. It would though be hard to make it work as an explanation of the moral courage and firm conviction of a Martin Luther King or a Ghandi. The vision of these two men was not one of replacing their oppressors in power and becoming oppressors in their turn but of transcending oppression altogether.

So where on earth or in heaven does that leave us? Are these two men so exceptional that their example does not count? Or is a humane and constructive kind of strong conviction possible for most if not all of us?

A Possible Way Forward

When it comes to determining what might provide a positive vision of sufficient power to heal the divisions of the world of humanity, a consideration of religion is inevitable. Although I was brought up a Christian, became an atheist for nearly two decades and was strongly attracted to Buddhism for a period of years, the religion I know best is the Bahá’í Faith.

Much of what I will be describing in the next post about the vision I have derived from its teachings, is also to be found in other faiths. For instance, anyone who wants to know about the healing heart of the Christian message and the positively empowering concept of God it enshrines, there is no better place to go than Eric Reitan’s book, and I would also see God in much the same way as he does. His view also opens the way towards discerning the same spirit in other faiths.

One of his premises is that our concept of God, who is in essence entirely unknowable, needs to show Him as deserving of worship: any concept of God that does not fulfil that criterion should be regarded with suspicion.  Our idealism, our ideology, will then, in my view, build an identity on the crumbling and treacherous sand of some kind of idolatry.

I will though confine my discussion now to what the faith I know best, with its inclusive vision of the divine, has taught me about a way out of this divided and intolerant state by which we are bedevilled. Even those who do not believe in the divine can relate to much of what I will be saying by reframing the ‘divine’ as their highest most inclusive sense of the ultimate good around which to organise our lives.

I am not claiming that others have not grappled with these issues: nor am I saying that what they have discovered as possible antidotes to fanatical intolerance is to be ignored or discounted. McCullough, for example, has much of great value to say from which we can all learn a great deal.

I do believe though that religion and spirituality have recently been so demonised in certain quarters that we are in danger of neglecting the powerful antidotes to evil that they also can provide. It is to these that I wish to draw our attention in the next post.

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Becoming a True Upholder of His Oneness (2/4): burnishing the mirror of our heart

To download the complete materials click this link Upholders of His Oneness v2.

It seemed worth republishing this sequence at a point when I will soon be launching into an exploration of how as individuals we can prepare ourselves for working more effectively to create a unified but still diversely creative world. 

Each day we drove into Strathallan from Dundee. This was because my health issues meant that I needed to make sure I had enough rest each day. Being a resident at summer school means that you have the benefit of more activities but with that goes a greater expenditure of energy that I couldn’t afford this time round.

So, after the long ribbon of the bridge over the shining waters of the Firth of Tay and the 17 miles of dual carriageway under alternating showers and sunshine, we arrived back at the school in time for prayers and Khazeh Fananapazir’s engaging exploration of the significance of this year. Two hundred years ago Bahá’u’lláh, the Founder of the Bahá’í Faith, was born in Tehran. This year therefore Bahá’ís are taking every opportunity to remember His life and connect with Him spiritually, as well as to deepen our understanding of the spiritual connection between Bahá’u’lláh as the Manifestation of God for this day and the Báb as His Herald .

After that, and a cup of coffee and a cake, we headed for our workshop.

Consensus Consciousness

It might help if we begin more or less where we left off. Charles Tart in his book Waking Up.’ begins his analysis of social reality and its impact on the individual by contending (page 9) that ‘Consciousness, particularly its perceptual aspects, creates an internal representation of the outside world, such that we have a good quality “map” of the world and our place in it.’ He doesn’t mince words when he describes what he feels is an important correlative of this (page 11): ‘Our ordinary consciousness is not “natural,” but an acquired product. This has given us both many useful skills and many insane sources of useless suffering.’

He chooses to introduce a phrase that captures this (ibid):

. . . [For the phrase ordinary consciousness] I shall substitute a technical term I introduced some years ago, consensus consciousness, as a reminder of how much everyday consciousness has been shaped by the consensus of belief in our particular culture.

He continues (page 59):

. . . . one of our greatest human abilities, and greatest curses, is our ability to create simulations of the world . . . . These simulations, whether or not they accurately reflect the world, can then trigger emotions. Emotions are a kind of energy, a source of power.

In the workshop at Strathallan School we delved deeply into this down side and its costs from a spiritual point of view. In a mystical work of poetic power and great beauty Bahá’u’lláh writes (Seven Valleys – pages 19-20):

Thus it is that certain invalid souls have confined the lands of knowledge within the wall of self and passion, and clouded them with ignorance and blindness, and have been veiled from the light of the mystic sun and the mysteries of the Eternal Beloved; they have strayed afar from the jewelled wisdom of the lucid Faith of the Lord of Messengers, have been shut out of the sanctuary of the All-Beauteous One, and banished from the Ka’bih of splendour. Such is the worth of the people of this age! . . . . .

Clearly, this kind of tunnel vision is more than enough to account for why Bahá’u’lláh can dismiss much of what we think as superstition, illusion, delusion and ‘vain imaginings.’ There was some discussion in the workshop as to whether invalid should be taken to mean ‘sick’ or ‘unconfirmed/inauthentic.’ Fortunately we had the chance to check out with Khazeh, the presenter of the plenary sessions and a reader of both Arabic and Persian, what the word in the original text meant: he said without the slightest hesitation, ‘sick’.

Also, what we see is still very much in the eye of the beholder. In an exploration which compares reality at the spiritual level to the sun, whose pure light is white, Bahá’u’lláh illustrates how different what we observe is from the light itself (pages 19-20):

In sum, the differences in objects have now been made plain. Thus when the wayfarer gazeth only upon the place of appearance–that is, when he seeth only the many-colored globes –he beholdeth yellow and red and white; hence it is that conflict hath prevailed among the creatures, and a darksome dust from limited souls hath hid the world. And some do gaze upon the effulgence of the light; and some have drunk of the wine of oneness and these see nothing but the sun itself.

It cannot be emphasised too strongly that these subjective differences, which result from the imperfections of our vision, can give rise to utterly toxic conflicts, conflicts whose origins are in essence delusional.

Cleansing the Mirror

As individuals, brainwashed by flawed worldviews, what can we do to transcend the resulting limitations?

In exploring this angle on the issue I am not discounting that steps also need to be taken to address the limitations of our culture, but, in seeking to capture the flow of consultation around the quotations we were considering, it’s easiest to start from here and deal with the wider issues later.

Bahá’u’lláh writes (Gleanings – XXVII):

. . . These energies with which the Day Star of Divine bounty and Source of heavenly guidance hath endowed the reality of man lie, however, latent within him, even as the flame is hidden within the candle and the rays of light are potentially present in the lamp. The radiance of these energies may be obscured by worldly desires even as the light of the sun can be concealed beneath the dust and dross which cover the mirror. Neither the candle nor the lamp can be lighted through their own unaided efforts, nor can it ever be possible for the mirror to free itself from its dross. It is clear and evident that until a fire is kindled the lamp will never be ignited, and unless the dross is blotted out from the face of the mirror it can never represent the image of the sun nor reflect its light and glory.

I have dealt at length elsewhere on this blog with the idea of the human heart as a mirror that needs to be burnished if it is to reflect the light of spiritual reality and that we also need to be sure that we do not mistake what is reflected there for the mirror itself. It is enough at this point simply to quote a writer whose insights, along with my experience of Buddhist meditation, helped prepare me to understand Bahá’u’lláh’s Revelation sufficiently to choose the path He reveals to us. What this writer says covers what our consultation on the day disclosed to us about the power and challenges of separating consciousness from its contents, a process he calls reflection.

In his brilliant book on existentialism The New Image of the Person: The Theory and Practice of Clinical Philosophy, Peter Koestenbaum states that (page 69):

[a]nxiety and physical pain are often our experience of the resistances against the act of reflection.

By reflection, amongst other things, he means unhooking ourselves from our ideas.

An example he gives from the clinical context illustrates what he means:

. . . to resist in psychotherapy means to deny the possibility of dissociating consciousness from its object at one particular point . . . To overcome the resistance means success in expanding the field of consciousness and therewith to accrue increased flexibility . . .’

But overcoming this resistance is difficult. It hurts and frightens us. How are we to do it? In therapy it is the feeling of trust and safety we develop towards the therapist that helps us begin to let go of maladaptive world views, self-concepts and opinions.

This process of reflection, and the detachment it creates and upon which the growth of a deeper capacity to reflect depends, are more a process than an end-state at least in this life.

Koestenbaum explains this (page 73):

The history of philosophy, religion and ethics appears to show that the process of reflection can continue indefinitely . . . . there is no attachment . . . which cannot be withdrawn, no identification which cannot be dislodged.’

By reflection he means something closely related to meditation.

Reflection, he says (page 99):

. . . releases consciousness from its objects and gives us the opportunity to experience our conscious inwardness in all its purity.

What he says at another point is even more intriguing (page 49):

The name Western Civilisation has given to . . . the extreme inward region of consciousness is God.

I feel this brings us in psychotherapeutic terms close to the exact place ‘Abdu’l-Bahá is describing in Paris Talks. These are the quotes we wrestled with at the Summer School, striving to understand the role of silence more fully (page 174-176):

Bahá’u’lláh says there is a sign (from God) in every phenomenon: the sign of the intellect is contemplation and the sign of contemplation is silence, because it is impossible for a man to do two things at one time — he cannot both speak and meditate.

It is an axiomatic fact that while you meditate you are speaking with your own spirit. In that state of mind you put certain questions to your spirit and the spirit answers: the light breaks forth and the reality is revealed. . . .

Through the faculty of meditation man attains to eternal life; through it he receives the breath of the Holy Spirit — the bestowal of the Spirit is given in reflection and meditation. . .

Meditation is the key for opening the doors of mysteries. In that state man abstracts himself: in that state man withdraws himself from all outside objects; in that subjective mood he is immersed in the ocean of spiritual life and can unfold the secrets of things-in-themselves. To illustrate this, think of man as endowed with two kinds of sight; when the power of insight is being used the outward power of vision does not see.

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

. . . Through this faculty man enters into the very Kingdom of God. . . .

The meditative faculty is akin to the mirror; if you put it before earthly objects it will reflect them. Therefore if the spirit of man is contemplating earthly subjects he will be informed of these. . . .

Therefore let us keep this faculty rightly directed — turning it to the heavenly Sun and not to earthly objects — so that we may discover the secrets of the Kingdom, and comprehend the allegories of the Bible and the mysteries of the spirit.

May we indeed become mirrors reflecting the heavenly realities, and may we become so pure as to reflect the stars of heaven.

Bronze mirror, New Kingdom of Egypt, Eighteenth Dynasty, 1540–1296 BC. For source of image see link.

This paved the way for our attempt to understand the relationship between achieving oneness and cleansing the mirror of the heart, which Bahá’u’lláh describes as burnishing, a process of intense friction involving metal against metal, not just picking up a duster and some polish to bring the shine back to a modern glass mirror. Once again a quick confab with Khazeh confirmed that the original word implied effort and friction. This suggests that Bahá’u’lláh may have had the early metal mirrors in mind when He wished to convey how difficult, even painful, the polishing process would be for the heart’s mirror. A Wikipedia article states:

. . . . stone and metal mirrors could be made in very large sizes, but were difficult to polish and get perfectly flat; a process that became more difficult with increased size; so they often produced warped or blurred images. Stone mirrors often had poor reflectivity compared to metals, yet metals scratch or tarnish easily, so they frequently needed polishing. Depending upon the color, both often yielded reflections with poor color rendering.^[6] The poor image quality of ancient mirrors explains 1 Corinthians 13‘s reference to seeing “as in a mirror, darkly.”

The art of making glass mirrors was not perfected until the 16^th Century.

If we become capable of polishing the mirror of our hearts, then we can potentially become capable of reflecting the pure undivided light of spiritual reality, thus transcending both our inner conflicts and our conflicts with others.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá describes this possibility in the following words (Selected Writing of ‘Abdul-Baha 1978 – page 76):

For now have the rays of reality from the Sun of the world of existence, united in adoration all the worshippers of this light; and these rays have, through infinite grace, gathered all peoples together within this wide-spreading shelter; therefore must all souls 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 will remedy our current conflicted state, wherein we are at war with ourselves as well as with others. This is Bahá’u’lláh’s description of the challenge we face compared with the reality most of us are blind to (Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh = CXII):

No two men can be found who may be said to be outwardly and inwardly united. The evidences of discord and malice are apparent everywhere, though all were made for harmony and union. The Great Being saith: O well-beloved ones! The tabernacle of unity hath been raised; regard ye not one another as strangers. Ye are the fruits of one tree, and the leaves of one branch.

He is unequivocal about the role of religion in this healing process (ibid. – CXXVIII):

The religion of God is for love and unity; make it not the cause of enmity and dissension. . . . Conflict and contention are categorically forbidden in His Book. This is a decree of God in this Most Great Revelation.

And now we come to a cusp where we move from looking mainly at the individual to where we look at the community. And here it is that we will see where words can change from misleading labels or names, corrupted by misguided worldviews, to lamps of guidance.

That needs to wait for the next post.

When we got back to Dundee that evening, from the window of the flat where we were staying we could see the lights of a cruiser docked at the harbour side. Though purely material, it had a beauty of its own.

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Science, Spirituality and Civilisation (3/4): Oneness of Religion

The Sun of Reality is one Sun but it has different dawning-places, just as the phenomenal sun is one although it appears at various points of the horizon. During the time of spring the luminary of the physical world rises far to the north of the equinoctial; in summer it dawns midway and in winter it appears in the most southerly point of its zodiacal journey. These day springs or dawning-points differ widely but the sun is ever the same sun whether it be the phenomenal or spiritual luminary. Souls who focus their vision upon the Sun of Reality will be the recipients of light no matter from what point it rises, but those who are fettered by adoration of the dawning-point are deprived when it appears in a different station upon the spiritual horizon.

(‘Abdu’l-Bahá in Bahá’í World Faith page 255)

Some Background

It was disappointing to find that an exploration of perennialism (definition to follow in a minute) concluded that the organised religions have very little in common, and are not in fact in essence one. For me this ended up being another example of how science can miss the point about the value of religion, but there was none the less much of interest to be found in the line of argument.

I’ll start by briefly touching on some basic points, one of which came at the end of the previous post.

Kelly makes an important distinction:[1]

[P]anentheisms in general attempt to split the difference between classic theisms and pantheism, conceiving of an ultimate consciousness or God pervading or even constituting the manifest world, as in pantheism, but without something held in reserve, as in theism.

This maps fairly closely onto the distinction Nader Saiedi describes the Báb, the Forerunner of the Founder of the Bahá’í Faith, as making between God as Essence versus God as Emanation:[2]

The writings of the Báb, like those of Bahá-u-lláh, confirm that God is the divine Object of mystic devotion, while asserting that the realm of the unknowable Essence is above traditional conceptions of God.

Main explains it as follows:[3]

 . . . panentheism sees the relationship between God and the world as one not of strict separation and transcendence (as in classical theism), or of strict identity and immanence (as in classical pantheism), but of mutual coinherence and harmony between transcendence and immanence.

The Bahá’í Faith does not accept the idea of immanence but instead defines our sense of God in the world as the result of emanation, rather in the same way as the light of the sun that pervades our solar system is not the sun itself but what emanates from it.

As we have seen in the previous post:[4]

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.

Consciousness, according to this model, may be[5] ‘a metaphysical “primitive,” as fundamental to the universe as space, time, energy, and gravity.’

Perennialism

This brings us on to perennialism, mostly in terms of Kripal’s perspective. Mystical experiences are to be found in most religions, and may be a result of connecting with some kind of ground of consciousness.

Kripal sets[6] this ball rolling in detail:

. . . perennialism (the position that the world religions share a common mystical core of metaphysical teachings) was a popular position among major intellectuals.

He approaches this with some caution:[7]

There is no such thing as the mystical experience. There are only mystical experiences. Difference was definitive again. Sameness was out again. In Marshall’s (2014) eloquently simple terms, mystical experience was [according to Katz] no longer seen as a ‘window’ into reality; it was now seen as a ‘mirror’ that mostly just reflected by the psyche, culture, and tradition of the experience.

… The perennialists were after the universal cosmic truth of everything. The contextualists were after, well, contexts.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá

The quotation from ‘Abdu’l-Bahá at the head of this post suggests we need to be careful not to use humanity’s confusion of context with core as a reason to dismiss the basic commonality of faiths across the world.

At this point Kripal is closer to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá than to Katz:[8] ‘Further scholarship eventually challenged the Katzian position… on pure consciousness.’

I began to feel that he might really believe, as I do, in the fundamental oneness of all the great world religions:[9]

. . . I am often accused by colleagues, particularly senior ones, of advancing some form of perennialism; that is, I am accused of belonging to the Dark Side, against which such colleagues apparently believe they have to fight (remember, it is all “difference” now).

… The Dark Side that they perceive in my words comes down to my positing of some form of transcendent consciousness . . . that is potentially available in any human culture at any historical recoverable time; that there is, to put it simply, a nonhistorical presence being filtered by the historical filters; and, to speak in theological language for a moment, that our shared humanity often displays itself as a shared divinity.

Even more so as he writes:[10]

 . . . Perennialism is most commonly framed as the thesis that particular sets of teachings about some specific metaphysical absolute are the true “mystical core” and final goal of all world religions.

Then, to my shock and horror he attempts to torpedo the whole idea:[11]

Sacred scriptures, taken as wholes now, do not agree about much of anything. Religions are not the same. Not even close. Perennialism in this substantive or doctrinal sense (“what they teach”) is just wrong. It is false. It is bad comparison. We are not all journeying the same mountain by different paths. We are all journeying up different mountains.… That is why they (sic) are different communities and people and why there is so much religiously motivated violence in the world.

This is the point at which I step back from his perspective. ‘How dare he abuse the mountain idea in this way?’ I thought. I am far too attached to what John Donne, an Elizabethan poet-priest in Tudor England, wrote:

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.

He wrote those words, part of the third of his five satires, during what must have been an agonising period of his life, when he was deciding to abandon the Roman Catholic faith, for which members of his family had died, and become an ‘apostate’. By taking this step, he avoided torture and execution and gained a career at the possible cost, in his mind, of eternal damnation.

While the secular Western world feels it has moved on from such ferocious divisions, the same does not seem to be true everywhere, even within the West, as current conflicts make absolutely clear. Also, we should not perhaps feel we are completely free from milder variations of religious intolerance here either.

This means that Donne’s message is still relevant.

The most obvious implication of what he says here is that we have to work hard to find Truth.

However, there are other equally important implications, and one of them makes a core aspect of the Bahá’í path particularly relevant for us in our relations both between ourselves and with the wider community.

We are all, in a sense, approaching Truth from different sides of this same mountain. Just because your path looks somewhat different from mine in some respects, it does not mean that, as long as you are moving upwards, yours is any less viable than mine as a way to arrive at the truth. Only when someone’s idea of God takes them downhill, perhaps killing others in His name, or at least hating them as misguided deviants, should we realize their God is not ‘worthy of worship,’ to use Eric Reitan’s phrase, and is not God at all. Theirs is not a true religion. All the great world religions are in essence one. It is only when we mistake the cultural trappings and rituals for the core that we think this is not true.

Donne clearly felt so at the time he wrote Satire III:

As women do in divers countries go
In divers habits, yet are still one kind,
So doth, so is Religion.’

It is true that idealisms of any kind, religious or secular, can be a breeding ground for intense prejudice and large scale atrocities, obliterating any sense of common humanity.

Jonathan Haidt in his humane and compassionate book ‘The Happiness Hypothesis‘ indicates that, in his view, idealism has caused more violence in human history than almost any other single thing:[12]

The two biggest causes of evil are two that we think are good, and that we try to encourage in our children: high self-esteem and moral idealism. . . . Threatened self-esteem accounts for a large portion of violence at the individual level, but to really get a mass atrocity going you need idealism — the belief that your violence is a means to a moral end.

Richard Holloway sees it much the same way:[13]

More misery and disillusionment has been visited on humanity by its search for the perfect society and the perfect faith than by any other cause.

Both Haidt and Holloway emphasise that not all such ideals are by any means religious. Haidt, for instance, also quotes the attempt to create utopias as well as the defence of the homeland or tribe as frequently implicated.  Also, when Hitler’s probably narcissistic self-esteem successfully cloaked itself in the rhetoric of idealistic nationalism, mixed with scapegoating anti-Semitism, we all know what happened next: narcissism and idealism make a highly toxic and devastatingly deadly combination.

What Haidt regards as central is this:

Idealism easily becomes dangerous because it brings with it . . . the belief that the ends justify the means.

That humanity perverts religion does not justify dumping God and organised religion along with Him. Haidt is aware that idealism, even with God, enhances life in some ways also:[14]

Liberalism and the ethic of autonomy are great protectors against . . . injustices. I believe it is dangerous for an ethic of divinity to supercede the ethic of autonomy in the governance of a diverse modern democracy. However, I also believe that life in a society that entirely ignored the ethic of divinity would be ugly and unsatisfying.

We just have to be careful about what we choose to worship.

Kripal defines himself as an ‘intellectual gnostic’,[15] someone who ‘recognises the reality of direct immediate mystical knowledge (gnosis) of the soul, or what I would now call consciousness as such, [and] signals an erudite appreciation of how this immediate knowing has been preserved and passed on in the rich particularities and baroque mythology of the history of religions. It also in codes and accents how such a gnosis has been persecuted and for the most part rejected and actively suppressed by the religions, particularly by the Western monotheisms and now materialisms.’

He seems perhaps not quite so far off piste as I was beginning to think.

Challenges

Marshal summarises the challenges that face as we try to grasp the exact nature of this ultimate Reality:[16]

If it is supposed that consciousness does have a cosmic dimension, as an aspect of the universe or its basic nature, then the question arises as to whether this consciousness is fundamental or derivative of something ontologically prior to it, a ‘hypercosmic’ reality of some kind, perhaps a supreme consciousness, such as the source reality that pluralistic systems tend to posit in order to ground and link their multiple units of consciousness.

. . . Has God entered the picture as one or both of these transpersonal types of consciousnesses, and, if so, what kind of God – an evolving pantheistic God identified with the universe, an evolving panentheistic God that includes and yet exceeds the universe, or the immutable God of classical theism, involved in the creation but more distinct from it than the God of panentheism?

Why this is such a hard issue to resolve will have to wait for the final post in this sequence.

I was going to deal with the side issue of precognition at this point but have now decided to leave that till next time: it’ll probably fit better there in any case.

For Donne’s poem see link lines 76-82

References

[1]. Consciousness Unbound – pages 7-8.
[2]. Gate of the Heart – page 199.
[3]. Consciousness Unbound – 160.
[4]. Op. cit. – page 372.
[5]. Op. cit. – page 377.
[6]. (Op. cit. – -page 386.
[7]. Op. cit. – page 387.
[8]. Op. cit. – page 388.
[9]. Op. cit. – page 393.
[10]. Op. cit. – pages 393-94.
[11]. Op. cit. – page 397.
[12]. The Happiness Hypothesis – page 75
[13]. Between the Monster and the Saint – page 136.
[14]. The Happiness Hypothesis – page 211.
[15]. Op. cit. – page 400.
[16]. Op. cit. – page 418.

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