Dust for winds to scatter (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

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

Read Full Post »

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.

Read Full Post »

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.

Read Full Post »

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.

Read Full Post »

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.

Read Full Post »

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.

Read Full Post »