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

Reflecting Evil

These [perfect] mirrors are the Messengers of God Who tell the story of Divinity, just as the material mirror reflects the light and disc of the outer sun in the skies. In this way the image and effulgence of the Sun of Reality appear in the mirrors of the Manifestations of God. This is what Jesus Christ meant when He declared, “the father is in the son,” the purpose being that the reality of that eternal Sun had become reflected in its glory in Christ Himself. It does not signify that the Sun of Reality had descended from its place in heaven or that its essential being had effected an entrance into the mirror . . . .

Promulgation of Universal Peace – page 173

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

We have discovered how far Rifkin’s case against religion seems largely to be based on his dislike of Christian teachings, especially concerning the existence of Satan, the Fall of man,  and the resultant denigration of the body. He is aware that other religious teachings do not fall into what would be for him the same trap.

For example, he feels that the Gnostic gospels were more empowering and benign (page 238) and finds close parallels ‘between Jesus’s teachings as expressed in the Gospel of Saint Thomas and Hindu and Buddhist teachings at the time.’

He develops this theme (page 239):

. . . the Gnostics viewed Jesus as a human being who had achieved enlightenment. There is no talk of him performing miracles or referring to himself as the son of God or any recollection of Jesus dying for the sins of a fallen humanity.

Then he states his case (page 240):

For the Gnostics, ignorance of one’s true self, not sin, is the underlying cause of human suffering. Therefore, the key to unlocking the divine in each person is self-knowledge through introspection.

And he has a view of Jesus to match (page 241):

The critical question is whether enlightenment comes from fully participating in the world around us in all of its vulnerability and corporeality or by withdrawing to an inner world removed from the vulnerability of corporeal existence. The historical Jesus was fully engaged in the world.

He acknowledges the positive impact of Christianity (page 246):

The Christian empathic surge lasted a mere three centuries; but in that time it made an incredible mark on history. By A.D. 250 the number of Christians in Rome alone had grown to fifty thousand people.

Goethe, Kant and Schopenhauer

He, in the same way as many others, dates from the time of the Enlightenment the demise of religion as an effective force in society. He locates a key figure as embodying an inspiring post-Enlightenment empathic spirit – secularised empathy, if you like: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (page 307):

If one were to have to choose a single individual who most embodied a cosmopolitan view of the world and a universal empathic sensibility, Goethe would be an easy pick.

His subsequent commentary explains exactly the nature of Goethe’s appeal for Rifkin. He fuses empathy with biosphere concern (page 308):

Goethe felt that the purpose of living was to enrich life and that man is endowed with a special appreciation of life – a heightened consciousness – so that he might steward all that is alive. . . . Breathing nature in and out was the way one takes in nature and remains connected to the larger whole.

It is here that the roots of Rifkin’s model of empathy and biosphere consciousness becomes most explicit (page 309):

With Goethe, we see the secularisation of the empathic impulse, embedded in the embodied experience and that includes not only human society but all of nature. His empathic view is truly universal in scope.

His critique of Kant remains firm. He condemns his take on the Golden Rule (page 347):

Left behind is any heartfelt connection to another’s plight as if it were one’s own; the desire to comfort them because of a felt understanding of one’s common humanity.

He prefers Arthur Schopenhauer (page 348):

Schopenhauer argues that the moral code that accompanies theological consciousness is purely prescriptive. If human nature is “fallen,” as the Abrahamic religions suggest, then there is no moral basis within an individual’s being that would predispose him to do the morally right thing. God’s commandments, therefore, are a prescriptive device telling human beings that this is the way they “ought” to behave if they are to be rewarded by God’s grace and not punished by his wrath.

He is indeed hanging his condemnation of religion as a positive redemptive influence almost exclusively on the hook of a particular religion’s interpretation of Genesis. I suspect there is a rope around the throat of his argument here. He feels that he can now locate our redemption in that same physical nature he is convinced that religion is revolted by (page 349):

After deconstructing Kant’s categorical imperative, Schopenhauer offers a detailed description of moral behaviour that he argues is embedded in the very sinew of human nature – with the qualification that it needs to be brought out and nurtured by society if it is to be fully realised. He argues that “compassion” is at the core of human nature.

Is Being Embodied Enough?

Robert Wright

However, in my view, and I suspect in the view of many members of many religions throughout the world, there is no need to make his leap of logic and deny a transcendent realm in order to explain why human beings can be compassionate. Even evolutionary theory – for example in the thinking of Robert Wright and Michael McCullough – plainly discerns how the development of empathy is wired into our brains and selected for in successful cultures.

Robert Wright sees this in evolutionary terms. In his book The Evolution of God, he discusses how the expansion of the moral imagination (page 428) can ‘bring us closer to moral truth.’

His line of argument will not appeal to everyone: it’s probably too materialistic for many religious people and too sympathetic to religion for many materialists. He states:

The moral imagination was ‘designed’ by natural selection . . . . . to help us cement fruitfully peaceful relations when they’re available.

He is aware that this sounds like a glorified pursuit of self-interest, similar to one of Rifkin’s reservations about the Golden Rule. He argues, though, that it leads beyond that (pages 428-429):

The expansion of the moral imagination forces us to see the interior of more and more other people for what the interior of other people is – namely remarkably like our own interior.

Michael McCullough in his exploration of our dual potential for revenge and forgiveness, Beyond Revenge, sees them as hard –wired (page 132):

Revenge and forgiveness… are conditioned adaptations – they’re context sensitive. Whether we’re motivated to seek revenge or to forgive depends on who does the harming, as well as on the advantages and disadvantages associated with both of these options.

Empathy, also hard-wired, plays its part in determining what will happen (page 148):

One of the best ways to take all the fun out of revenge, and promote forgiveness instead, is to make people feel empathy for the people who’ve harmed them. In 1997, my colleagues and I showed that when people experience empathy for a transgressor, it’s difficult to maintain a vengeful attitude. Instead, forgiveness often emerges. . . . When you feel empathic toward someone, your willingness to retaliate goes way down.

This material potential may be a necessary condition for empathy to grow further in our increasingly global civilisation. Even if religion is not the enemy, do we need it? The question is whether we agree that the way evolution has shaped the brain is also a sufficient condition to produce the necessary levels of self-mastery and altruism and spread them widely and deeply enough across humanity to preserve us in the longer term.

Rifkin clearly feels it’s the best hope we’ve got, even though one of his key witnesses wasn’t sure where empathy comes from (page 350):

Although the origins of man’s capacity for empathy was a mystery to Schopenhauer, the teleology was clear. By feeling another’s plight as if it were our own and by extending a hand to comfort and support them in their struggle to persevere and prosper, we recognise the unifying thread that connects each of us to the other and all of life on earth.

He nonetheless builds an ideal of interconnectedness as far as possible in these purely material terms. He sees civilisation as having a key role in realising this potential (page 362):

While we are all born with a predisposition to experience empathic distress, this core aspect of our being only develops into true empathic consciousness by the continuous struggle of differentiation and integration in civilisation. Far from squelching the empathic impulse, it is the dynamics of unfolding civilisation that is the fertile ground for its development and for human transcendence.

He wheels out the atheist’s favourite philosopher to administer what he hopes will be the kiss of death to any hope of the transcendent (page 382):

Nietzsche went after both the theologians and the rationalists, saying that it was time to give up the illusion that there exists something called “absolute spirituality” or “pure reason.”

Nietzsche argued that there is ‘only a perspective “knowing”. . .’ I won’t rehearse here all the thinking that has been done to confirm that, while it is true that all I have is my perspective, it does not mean that we have proved there is no transcendent realm. I’ve explored this, for example, in the sequence of posts on William James, whose point of view is succinctly captured by Paul Jerome Croce in his masterly Science & Religion in the Era of William James (page 222):

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

Absence of evidence therefore would not be evidence of absence, but in any case there is a wealth of evidence Rifkin is choosing to ignore here, as we have briefly touched upon above.

I realise that just as it is impossible for Rifkin conclusively to prove that any hope of empathic rescue from our current predicament must come from our material nature because that is all there is, I cannot conclusively prove to everyone’s satisfaction that

(a) this could never be sufficient, and

(b) that is OK because we can draw upon transcendent powers.

That though is what I believe.

When I was a child my father asked me to imagine what it would be like if a man stood with each of his feet in a bucket, grabbed the handles and tried to lift himself off the ground. In my view, all the evidence so far points to our being in a similar predicament: I find it impossible to believe we can mobilise what would be the necessary level of vision, self-sacrifice and sustained co-ordinated action over centuries to turn round our descent into self-destruction and climb back from the brink of extinction by our own unaided efforts.

Amit Goswami (for source of image see link)

A Ground of Being

In any case, whatever you think about that point, I feel there is even more convincing evidence that we do not have to rely only on ourselves. There is a transcendent dimension or foundation to reality and we can learn to draw upon its powers. In religion-neutral language we can speak of a ground of being, inherently conscious, inherently loving, inherently wise, that we can learn to connect to.

Amit Goswami, the physicist, in an interview about his book, The Self-Aware Universe, confirms the mystic insight and vividly conveys his sense of it:

So then one time — and this is where the breakthrough happened — my wife and I were in Ventura, California and a mystic friend, Joel Morwood, came down from Los Angeles, and we all went to hear Krishnamurti. And Krishnamurti, of course, is extremely impressive, a very great mystic. So we heard him and then we came back home. We had dinner and we were talking, and I was giving Joel a spiel about my latest ideas of the quantum theory of consciousness and Joel just challenged me. He said, “Can consciousness be explained?” And I tried to wriggle my way through that but he wouldn’t listen. He said, “You are putting on scientific blinders. You don’t realize that consciousness is the ground of all being.” He didn’t use that particular word, but he said something like, “There is nothing but God.”

And something flipped inside of me which I cannot quite explain. This is the ultimate cognition, that I had at that very moment. There was a complete about-turn in my psyche and I just realized that consciousness is the ground of all being. I remember staying up that night, looking at the sky and having a real mystical feeling about what the world is, and the complete conviction that this is the way the world is, this is the way that reality is, and one can do science. You see, the prevalent notion — even among people like David Bohm — was, “How can you ever do science without assuming that there is reality and material and all this? How can you do science if you let consciousness do things which are ‘arbitrary’?” But I became completely convinced — there has not been a shred of doubt ever since — that one can do science on this basis.

And he is not the only scientist to have reported such an experience (see link).

There are those who feel that this can be done as an individual through meditation without drawing upon any spiritual tradition or organised religion. I certainly agree that we can move a long way forwards in this way, but for me there is a distinction between the profound insights granted to the Founders of the great world faiths, no matter how far the followers may have strayed from the original path, and those insights a mystic can achieve.

To explain this clearly we need to start from the idea stated in the quotation at the head of this post. The Founders of the great world religions are like stainless Mirrors in which we can see reflected what is the closest approximation to the reality of God that we are capable of apprehending.

However, our hearts, which are, as a friend once expressed it, the experience of our soul in consciousness, are also mirrors which we can polish until they reflect as perfectly as we are able, but not as perfectly as a Messenger of God, the Sun of Reality if we choose to point them in that direction.

We therefore have two responsibilities: the first is to polish or rather burnish the steel of our heart’s mirror (it’s not a modern mirror!) so it can reflect more faithfully and, the second is to turn it towards the Sun of Truth. If we turn it in worship towards lesser gods it will become tarnished again (Bahá’u’lláh – from The Seven Valleys – page 21):

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

That, it seems to me, defines the difference between a mystic and a Messenger of God. Each Messenger of God has given us guidance appropriate to the time in which we live that will enable us to perfect our heart, as far as we are able, and perfect our world – rebuild our civilization if you like.

The Universal House of Justice, the central body of the Bahá’í Faith, has already unpacked very clearly what this must mean to us (see my earlier post on Working for a Divine Arkitect). When the arc of buildings on Mount Carmel were complete, the following words were read at the opening ceremony:

. . . the time has come when each human being on earth must learn to accept responsibility for the welfare of the entire human family. Commitment to this revolutionising principle will increasingly empower individuals and Bahá’í institutions alike in awakening others to . . . the latent spiritual and moral capacities that can change this world into another world.

(Universal House of Justice: 24 May 2001 in Turning Point page 164)

While Bahá’ís have a model for how this task might be accomplished, it is not a task for Bahá’ís alone. It would be impossible. All people of good will across the planet need to play their part according to their sense of what is required of them.

While I accept that the capacity for a high degree of empathy is wired into our brains, I also strongly believe that a higher level again can be reached, with proportionately more leverage in terms of sustained action, if we also can internalise a sense of what the Quakers term ‘That of God’ which is in all of us. Then we will not only have a strong sense of our links to one another but we will also have the confidence to act against apparently overwhelming odds that comes from the knowledge that we human beings are not alone. Bahá’u’lláh says (Bahá’u’lláh, The Hidden Words, Arabic no. 13):

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Embodied Experience Alone?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pim van Lommel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eben Alexander

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Bahá’í World Centre

The Golden Rule & the Fall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Invisible Influences & Unintended Consequences (5/6): Biosphere Consciousness, Empathy & Altruism

The world’s population currently consumes the equivalent of 1.6 planets a year, according to analysis by the Global Footprint Network. Photograph: NASA (For source see link)

Were one to observe with an eye that discovereth the realities of all things, it would become clear that the greatest relationship that bindeth the world of being together lieth in the range of created things themselves, and that co-operation, mutual aid and reciprocity are essential characteristics in the unified body of the world of being, inasmuch as all created things are closely related together and each is influenced by the other or deriveth benefit therefrom, either directly or indirectly.

(Abdu’l-Bahá, from a previously untranslated Tablet quoted in part in a statement from the Bahá’í International Community Conservation and Sustainable Development in the Baha’i Faith)

Post-truth politics also poses a problem for scepticism. A healthy democracy needs to leave plenty of room for doubt. There are lots of good reasons to be doubtful about what the reality of climate change will entail: though there is scientific agreement about the fact of global warming and its source in human activity, the ultimate risks are very uncertain and so are the long-term consequences. There is plenty of scope for disagreement about the most effective next steps. The existence of a very strong scientific consensus does not mean there should be a consensus about the correct political response. But the fact of the scientific consensus has produced an equal and opposite reaction that squeezes the room for reasonable doubt. The certainty among the scientists has engendered the most intolerant kind of scepticism among the doubters.

(From How climate scepticism turned into something more dangerous by David Runciman – Guardian Friday 7 July 2017)

Given the current sequence focusing on Jill Bolte Taylor’s My Stroke of Insight, her exploration of how she was jolted by a brain bleed into an altogether different experience of reality, made me feel it was worth republishing this long sequence from 2017. 

At the end of the last post I shared the hope that my helicopter survey of a vast field has done enough to convey clearly my sense that as individuals and communities we are locked into unconsciously determined and potentially destructive patterns of thought, feeling and behaviour, until we discover the keys of reflection for individuals and consultation for groups.

What we might do next is the focus of the final two posts.

When people resist therapy the personal price can be high. When cultures resist change the social and environmental costs can be even greater.

At whatever level we consider the matter, counteracting our default patterns requires significant effort, and the more complicated the problem, as in the case of climate change, the greater the effort. Even a simple puzzle can defeat even the best brains if the necessary effort is not taken to solve it. And often no effort is made because no failure in problem-solving is detected. Take this beautiful illustration of the point from Daniel Khaneman’s excellent treatment of what he calls System 1 (rapid fire reaction) and System 2 (careful effortful thinking) in Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow.I have dealt at length elsewhere with my distaste for the use of the word ‘intuitive’ in this context: I prefer ‘instinctive.’ Now though is not the time to delve into that problem: I’m currently republishing some of the posts dealing with that question.

The main point and its relevance is hopefully clear.

Biosphere Consciousness

Taking on the difficult problems is clearly going to be a challenge when we don’t even recognise or admit that our default reponses are so wide of the mark.

We need to reach at least a basic level of interactive understanding on a global scale if we are to successfully address the problems of our age. But we need more than that.

Rifkin, in his excellent book The Empathic Civilisation argues the case eloquently. He recognizes that to motivate us to make the necessary sacrifices to allow our civilization to survive its entropic processes we need something larger than ourselves to hold onto. By entropic he means all the waste and excessive consumption a growing population generates.

He doesn’t think religion will do the trick though.

For example, he sees the Golden Rule, a central tenant of all the great world religions, as self-interested because, by observing it, according to his version of religion, we buy paradise when we die. Kant, in his view, almost rescued it but not quite (page 175):

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

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

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

Satan Watching the Endearments of Adam and Eve (1808), version from the “Butts set” (for source of image see link)

He acknowledges that the Axial Age (page 216) was ‘the first budding of empathic consciousness.’ He feels Christianity has warped this ideal, especially in respect of the existence of Satan, the Fall of man, and the resultant denigration of the body. He is aware that other religious teachings do not fall into what would be for him the same trap. However, he dates from the time of the Enlightenment the demise of religion as an effective force in society.

He feels that he can now locate our redemption in that same physical nature he is convinced that religion is revolted by (page 349):

After deconstructing Kant’s categorical imperative, Schopenhauer offers a detailed description of moral behaviour that he argues is embedded in the very sinew of human nature – with the qualification that it needs to be brought out and nurtured by society if it is to be fully realised. He argues that “compassion” is at the core of human nature.

The question is whether we agree that the way evolution has shaped the brain is also a sufficient condition to produce the necessary levels of self-mastery and altruism and spread them widely and deeply enough across humanity to preserve us in the longer term.

He clearly hopes it does. He describes the exact nature of the challenge our situation creates (page 593):

The challenge before us is how to bring forward all of these historical stages of consciousness that still exist across the human spectrum to a new level of biosphere consciousness in time to break the lock that shackles increasing empathy to increasing entropy. . . .

And he concludes (ibid.):

In a world characterised by increasing individuation and made up of human beings at different stages of consciousness, the biosphere itself maybe the only context encompassing enough to unite the human race as a species.

This position is perhaps an inevitable consequence of his unwillingness to admit the possibility of a theological inspiration. I am astonished even more by a subsequent claim, which is imbued with the same blinkering assumption that Western materialist models of the world have basically got it right. He blurts out, in surprise (page 593-4):

While the new distributed communications technologies – and, soon, distributed renewable energies – are connecting the human race, what is so shocking is that no one has offered much of a reason as to why we ought to be connected. . . .

Does he have no awareness of current trends in holistic thinking, which assert that we are already and have always been interconnected at the deepest possible levels, not simply in terms of these recently emerged material factors? Is he ignoring long-standing spiritual systems such as that of the Native Americans whose foundation stone is this concept of interconnectedness? Does he not know of the empirical evidence being generated by near-death experiences, many of which include reports of just such a sense of nonmaterial interconnectedness? Has he not heard even a whisper of the Bahá’í position, admittedly recently emerged but with a longer history than the roots of holism in physics, that humanity is one and needs to recognise its essential unity if we are to be able to act together to solve the global problems that confront us? The problem is not that no one is offering a reason ‘why we ought to be connected’: the problem is that too few people are accepting the idea, expressed by millions of our fellow human beings in many complementary models of the world, that we are already deeply connected at a spiritual level, not just with each other but with the earth that sustains our material existence.

Naomi Klein makes a powerful case for hoping that the shock of climate change will have just the kind of positive effect that Rifkin looks for in Gaia, though she also is fully aware that shock often narrows our capacity to think, feel and relate and we end up in the tunnel-vision of fight and flight. She is aligned with Rifkin in his hope that identification on our part with the plight of the planet will be a sufficient catalyst to produce the desired shift.

Altruism

Matthieu Ricard takes on these issues from a different angle.

There are major obstacles to addressing our challenges effectively and Ricard is not blind to them (page 580):

. . . . . in a world where politicians aim only to be elected or re-elected, where financial interest groups wield a disproportionate influence on policy makers, where the well-being of future generations is often ignored since their representatives do not have a seat at the negotiating table, where governments pursue national economic policies that are to the detriment of the global interest, decision-makers have barely any inclination to create institutions whose goal would be to encourage citizens to contribute to collective wealth, which would serve to eradicate poverty.

Snower contends, and Ricard agrees with him and so do I, that reason alone will never get us beyond this point (page 581):

. . . . no one has been able to show that reason alone, without the help of some prosocial motivation, is enough to persuade individuals to widen their sphere of responsibility to include all those who are affected by their actions.

Because he is a Buddhist, in his book Ricard chooses to advocate altruism (ibid):

Combined with the voice of reason, the voice of care can fundamentally change our will to contribute to collective goods. Such ideas echo the Buddhist teachings on uniting wisdom and compassion: without wisdom, compassion can be blind without compassion, wisdom becomes sterile.

Ricard (page 611) raises the issue of ‘altruism for the sake of future generations.’ If we accept the reality of climate change, as most of us now do, our behaviour will unarguably affect our descendants for the worse if we do not change it. Given that evolution has produced a human brain that privileges short term costs and benefits over long-term ones, such that a smoker does not even empathise with his future self sufficiently strongly to overcome in many cases the powerful allure of nicotine addiction, what chance has altruism in itself got of producing the desired effect?

Ricard to his credit faces this head on and quotes the research of Kurzban and Houser (page 631-32). They conclude from their research that:

20% of people are altruists who bear the fortunes of future generations in mind and are disposed to altering their ways of consumption to avoid destroying the environment. . . . . .

[However], around 60% of people follow prevailing trends and opinion leaders, something that highlights the power of the herd instinct in humans. These ‘followers’ are also ‘conditional cooperators:’ they are ready to contribute to the public good on the condition that everyone else does likewise.

The final 20% are not at all inclined to cooperate and want more than anything to take advantage of all the opportunities available to them. They are not opposed to other people’s happiness in principle, but it is not their business.

Shades of Pettigrew again! This clearly indicates that reaching the tipping point, where most people have widened out their unempathic tunnel vision to embrace the whole of humanity and future generations in a wide-angled embrace, is some way off still. He goes on to outline the many practical steps that lie within our reach, such as recycling more of our waste metals and moving to hydrogen powered cars. Enough of us have to want to bring those steps into reality before change will occur at a fast enough rate.

According to Ricard, we must move (page 682) from ‘community engagement to global responsibility.’ To do this it is necessary ‘to realise that all things are interdependent, and to assimilate that world view in such a way that it influences our every action.’ He sees altruism as the key to this transition.

The last post will take a closer look at that amongst other possibilities.

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Covid-19 and Connectedness (1/2)

Coronavirus Structure (for source of image, see link)

And while we are on the theme of interconnectedness this short sequence of posts, written during the shock of the pandemic, seemed worth repeating.

At the risk of repeating what I said in an earlier post but spurred on by the strength of my reaction to this testing pandemic, I feel I need to expand on what I said then.

I’ll pick up from where I left off.

I wrote then that the very magnitude of the increasingly imminent threat of climate change and the totality of its potentially destructive power may just be the trigger to our recognising our essential unity and mobilising a more effective and unified response. As David Wallace-Wells puts it in his apocalyptic warning, The Uninhabitable Earth :[1]

If you had to invent a threat grand enough, and global enough, to plausibly conjure into being a system of true international cooperation, climate change would be it.

However, in the light of more recent experience, Covid-19 may be a better candidate for this awakening than climate change, because its impact is more immediate.

More than ever we have to transcend our divisive differences and collaborate more creatively together if we are to rise to these challenges and survive, and we must do this without causing further damage to the earth which is our home.

Ideology

An important factor which can either enhance our ability to do this or thwart all our efforts, is the ideology or belief system with which we passionately identify. As readers of this blog will already know, I am writing from the perspective of a particular religion, but much of what I say can be fruitfully applied to any belief system, even to a nihilism which believes in nothing.

Religion is often vilified as divisive as well as deluded. If you want to hear what I think about the validity of spiritual beliefs you’ll need to explore the links at the bottom of this post. There isn’t time for all that now.

It is not just religion that is divisive when it loses the plot: any ideology can become as dangerously divisive. Terrorism is not unique to distortions of Islam, as recent history illustrates with the painful consequences of bombings and assassinations at the hands of the new IRA or of right-wing extremists.

Once we have taken the fatal step into mistaken devotion we are in the danger zone of idealism. 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:[2]

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.

My very battered copy of this classic.

Eric Fromm provides a plausible explanation for why we are drawn to seek such destructive certainty. In his attempt to understand the horrors of Nazism, he writes in his masterpiece, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, a dog-eared disintegrating paperback copy of which I bought in 1976 and still cling onto, something which deserves our attention here:[3]

The intensity of the need for a frame of orientation explains a fact that has puzzled many students of man, namely the ease with which people fall under the spell of irrational doctrines, either political or religious or of any other nature, when to the one who is not under their influence it seems obvious that they are worthless constructs. . . . . Man would probably not be so suggestive were it not that his need for a cohesive frame of orientation is so vital. The more an ideology pretends to give answers to all questions, the more attractive it is; here may lie the reason why irrational or even plainly insane thought systems can so easily attract the minds of men.

His idea in this respect is also to be found at various key points in the Bahá’í Writings. For example, in this quotation from Bahá’u’lláh:[4]

Arise, O people, and, by the power of God’s might, resolve to gain the victory over your own selves, that haply the whole earth may be freed and sanctified from its servitude to the gods of its idle fancies—gods that have inflicted such loss upon, and are responsible for the misery of their wretched worshippers. These idols form the obstacle that impedeth man in his efforts to advance in the path of perfection.’

I will be focusing mainly on how to reduce the hold of this poisonous temptation in the realm of religion, but I hope I’ve said enough to clarify that this extends beyond that to all forms of belief in one way or another.

Oneness and Interconnectedness

One of the traps that religion can fall into is explained by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in a useful analogy:[5]

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. . . . 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.

At any point in history, revelations can appear expressed in terms that the people of that place and time can understand, with practical remedies suited to their circumstances. For example, dietary laws can vary between faiths, but the spiritual core of their message, such as in the Golden Rule ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself,’ is almost identical, differing only in the terminology, not the essential meaning. To divisively reduce the religion to its local variations and to the literal interpretation of the metaphors it uses to convey the inexpressible, as fundamentalists of all faiths tend to do, is an error with huge destructive potential. It’s important to emphasise here that fundamentalists and zealots are not unique to religion, as the world I was born into in 1943 proves beyond any shadow of doubt. The atrocities committed by states in thrall to Stalin, Mao and Hitler were made possible largely by our tendency to espouse ‘insane thought systems.’ I accept that other factors such as craven conformity were also at work, but I don’t think they were the main driver.

From the Bahá’í point of view on religion, it is imperative that we recognise that all religions are in essence one:[6]

. . the time has come when religious leadership must face honestly and without further evasion the implications of the truth that God is one and that, beyond all diversity of cultural expression and human interpretation, religion is likewise one. It was intimations of this truth that originally inspired the interfaith movement and that have sustained it through the vicissitudes of the past one hundred years. Far from challenging the validity of any of the great revealed faiths, the principle has the capacity to ensure their continuing relevance. In order to exert its influence, however, recognition of this reality must operate at the heart of religious discourse . . .

If we do not, then we will fail to operate effectively at this time of crisis, and in consequence our divided world will career towards its eventual destruction.

Beyond that we have to recognise that humanity is in essence one. As Bahá’u’lláh writes:

It is not for him to pride himself who loveth his own country, but rather for him who loveth the whole world. The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens.[7]

It is important to emphasise here that a recognition of the unity of humankind is not restricted to those who follow a religious path. We all need to accept our inescapable interconnectedness. Tom Oliver is not a believer in God. His evidence base lies in science. But he is unequivocal in his book The Self Delusion that we share the dangerous delusion that we are independent selves:[8]

. . . We have one . . . big myth dispel: that we exist as independent selves at the centre of a subjective universe.

He explains:[9]

We are seamlessly connected to one another and the world around us. Independence is simply an illusion that was once adaptive but now threatens our success as species.

If we can bring ourselves to accept that consciousness-raising truth, something which the impact of Covid-19 should help us do, then certain potentially life-changing implications follow.

The Universal House of Justice addressed the following words to all those gathered on Mount Carmel to mark the completion of the project there on 24^th May 2001 (my emphasis):

Humanity’s crying need will not be met by a struggle among competing ambitions or by protest against one or another of the countless wrongs afflicting a desperate age. It calls, rather, for a fundamental change of consciousness, for a wholehearted embrace of Bahá’u’lláh’s teaching that the time has come when each human being on earth must learn to accept responsibility for the welfare of the entire human family. Commitment to this revolutionizing principle will increasingly empower individual believers and Bahá’í institutions alike in awakening others to the Day of God and to the latent spiritual and moral capacities that can change this world into another world.

There is no get out clause here. We cannot draw arbitrary convenient distinctions between people of the kind that help us ignore their obvious needs. It doesn’t matter if they are of a different colour, nation, faith or gender: they are human beings like us and deserve the same compassion and support as we would wish for ourselves. The Universal House of Justice made this explicitly clear in an earlier message:[10]

The primary question to be resolved is how the present world, with its entrenched pattern of conflict, can change to a world in which harmony and co-operation will prevail.

World order can be founded only on an unshakeable consciousness of the oneness of mankind, a spiritual truth which all the human sciences confirm. Anthropology, physiology, psychology, recognize only one human species, albeit infinitely varied in the secondary aspects of life. Recognition of this truth requires abandonment of prejudice—prejudice of every kind—race, class, colour, creed, nation, sex, degree of material civilization, everything which enables people to consider themselves superior to others.

So what’s the problem then? If it’s so obvious, why don’t we do it? That will have to wait till next time.

Some posts that suggest matter is not all there is

Psychology and Spirit

1. Irreducible Mind – a review (1/3): how psychology lost the plot
2. Irreducible Mind – a review (2/3): Myers & the mind-body problem
3. Irreducible Mind – a review (3/3): the self & the Self

Self and Soul

1. The Self and the Soul – The Ghost in the Machine (1/5)
2. The Self and the Soul: Approaching the Heart of the Matter (2/5)
3. The Self and the Soul: Mirrorwork Practice (3/5)
4. The Self and the Soul: Implications of Mirrorwork (4/5)
5. The Self and the Soul: the Promise of a Rose Garden? (5/5)

Concerning Religion and Science

1. Where the Conflict Really Lies (1/4): preparing the ground
2. Where the Conflict Really Lies (2/4): a superficial conflict
3. Where the Conflict Really Lies (3/4): a deep compatibility
4. Where the Conflict Really Lies (4/4): the deep conflict

References

[1]. The Uninhabitable Earth – page 25.
[2]. The Happiness Hypothesis – page 75.
[3] The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness – pages 260-61.
[4]. Tablets of Bahá’u’lláh – page 87.
[5] Selected Writings of Bahá’u’lláh and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá (‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Section Only) – page 255 – The Sun of Reality.
[6]. From the introduction by the Universal House of Justice to One Common Faith 21 March 2005.
[7]. Tablets of Bahá’u’lláh, from Lawh-i-Maqsúd.
[8]. The Self Delusion – page 3.
[9]. The Self Delusion – page 4.
[10]. Universal House of Justice The Promise of World Peace Section III – 1985)

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Book Review: ‘Sacred Nature’ (2/2): What are we to do now?

I ended the previous post asking where all the previous discussion left us in terms of what we need to do?

Kenosis, the Golden Rule and Ahimsa

In seeking to address this question Armstrong brings another powerful spiritual concept into the mix, though well aware of its lack of traction in the Western world. She invokes kenosis – an ‘emptying of self’:[1] ‘we cannot save our planet unless we undergo a radical change of mind and heart, which will inevitably be demanding. . . . However, abandoning our ego is not a popular virtue in the modern world.’

She also makes another shrewd observation[2]: ‘[I]t is true, though, that we value kenosis when we see it in certain popular figures such as Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela.’

She adds, ‘Kenosis, properly understood, liberates us from the destructive strictures and blindness of egotism.’

It would certainly help us step outside the ‘reality bubble’ Ziya Tong depicts and the ‘self-delusion’ Tom Oliver explores. Kenosis, if we could only rise somewhere close to it, would be an important stepping-stone towards enabling ourselves to respond more wisely and less selfishly to the challenges of the climate crisis, though our outrage at the damage we have inflicted need not be diluted:[3]

[H]aving no ego does not mean that the sage has no emotions; he experiences anger and sorrow like everybody else, but there is something imperturbable at his core that gives him mysterious power.

Combining this with a powerfully motivating sense of the sacredness of nature would lift our potential even higher:[4] ‘as Job discovered and the Qur’an insists, we cannot know the reality we call ‘God’ without a reverent attention to the ‘signs’ of nature,’ and[5] ‘even if we don’t regard these natural occurrences as the work of gods, maybe we should learn to marvel anew at the intricate rhythms of nature on which our daily lives depend.’

Beyond that the Golden Rule helps us realise that:[6]

Before uttering a single word or performing a seemingly insignificant action, we must consider how it might affect others, including the ‘myriad things’ which . . .  are not lifeless objects but our companions.

This realisation is felt more strongly in Eastern cultures than in ours:[7]

Unlike Buddhism, Jainism has never become a world religion, but its insistence on kindness and nonviolence has spread throughout the subcontinent and is now also embedded in Buddhism, Hinduism and Indian Islam. In the West, we seem sometimes to have forgotten that ‘To do harm to others is to do harm to oneself . . .’

Perhaps, as she suggests, we should take ahimsa – the idea of doing no harm – far more seriously as well as applying it far more widely:[8]

Ahimsa assumes that the other is like oneself, and is an important step towards perceiving the sacredness of all life; and as we are beginning to realise belatedly, humanity’s welfare is dependent upon all other life forms on this planet.

In a later post, I’ll be going into our dependence upon all other life forms  in more detail when I come to look at Oliver Milman’s radical re-examination, in his book The Insect Crisis, of our relation with the world of insects, which we disparage so much,.

I feel that the Bahá’í Writings also strongly steer us to fundamentally changing our attitude towards and relationship with nature. Bahá’u’lláh wrote that:[9]

[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…’”

He also made clear the moral bankruptcy of any other possibility:[10]

Every man of discernment, while walking upon the earth, feeleth indeed abashed, inasmuch as he is fully aware that the thing which is the source of his prosperity, his wealth, his might, his exaltation, his advancement and power is, as ordained by God, the very earth which is trodden beneath the feet of all men. There can be no doubt that whoever is cognizant of this truth, is cleansed and sanctified from all pride, arrogance, and vainglory….

The Importance of Action

I was particularly intrigued by Armstrong’s sense that[11] ‘Unlike the Buddhists, who believed that one must achieve enlightenment before undertaking political action, the neo-Confucians insisted that political engagement was essential to our spiritual development.’

In my account of my move from Buddhism to the Bahá’í Faith I wrote:

On the other hand, Buddhism, which still seems to me a religion of great beauty, depth and power, though I never threw in my lot with it, disappointed for a different reason.

I was impressed painfully by its combination of deep spirituality and practical inefficacy in the modern world. . . . Without knowing it at the time I longed, from the deepest levels of my being, for a pattern of belief, a meaning system, that could combine effective social action with moral restraints strong enough to prevent that social action becoming a source of oppression.

© Bahá’í World Centre

It is therefore in my view of crucial importance to develop a clear sense of what kind of action plan we need to create and implement. Her book falls somewhat short in that respect, I feel, though her lucid exploration of both our dismal failure and the attitudes we need to develop to help overcome it is both powerful and moving. Some aspects of the Bahá’í community’s approach to how such a process of community building and social action would work are explored in an earlier sequence on this blog: it was, though, written before the climate crisis had risen so clearly above my radar.

A particularly sharp description of the trap we have locked ourselves into comes when Armstrong explains that[12] ‘despite the fact that we live more closely entwined than ever before, we remain dangerously estranged.’ It will take huge massively motivated efforts over a long period of time to overcome this degree of estrangement.

The Value of Empathy and a Sense of Interconnectedness

She tackles the problem I dealt with at some length in my review of Jeremy Rifkin’s The Empathic Civilisation. I summarized my sense of his position as follows:

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

I questioned whether that would be enough.

Armstrong happily accepts the importance of empathy, and also does not baulk at the idea of God, whatever positives that word connotes for us:[13]

We urgently need to cultivate an empathy with our fellow human beings that transcends national, political, racial and other ideological boundaries, as well as a sense of responsibility – and love –towards the ‘myriad things’ of nature. . . . The Covid pandemic has demonstrated the power of nature and our own vulnerability; it has also shown how interconnected we are.

Can we rise to the challenge without a sense of the transcendent? I doubt it and so does she, as her whole exploration demonstrates.

One of the most important dreams I have ever had – one in which I sensed Bahá’u’lláh’s presence – showed me how important our links with nature are. I have discussed it at some length elsewhere on this blog more than once, but for present purposes there is one simple point to make.

The core of the dream is about the hearth in my childhood home. I concluded that I would probably never get to the bottom of the dream’s meanings in this life but that I have to keep referring back to it to see what else it can teach me. What is crystal clear here is that the word ‘hearth’ fuses two words into one: ‘heart’ and ‘earth’ each of which is an anagram of the other. The implications are obvious. The issue under discussion here, concerning the sacredness of nature and our deep interconnectedness with it, could hardly be more important

In conclusion, one of Armstrong’s important final comments resonates strongly with one of my often-quoted passages from the Universal House of Justice. She is convinced that[14] ‘[w]e must extend our compassion, our ability to feel with, even to those who we do not know or understand.’

The Terraces above and below the Shrine of the Báb

The Universal House of Justice addressed all those gathered on Mount Carmel to mark the completion of a project there on 24^th May 2001 with these words (my emphasis):

Humanity’s crying need will not be met by a struggle among competing ambitions or by protest against one or another of the countless wrongs afflicting a desperate age. It calls, rather, for a fundamental change of consciousness, for a wholehearted embrace of Bahá’u’lláh’s teaching that the time has come when each human being on earth must learn to accept responsibility for the welfare of the entire human family. Commitment to this revolutionizing principle will increasingly empower individual believers and Bahá’í institutions alike in awakening others to the Day of God and to the latent spiritual and moral capacities that can change this world into another world.

In case it is not clear so far, I heartily recommend this book to every human being on earth, whether or not they currently recognise that their welfare depends upon a wholehearted acceptance of the basic truths it conveys.

References:

[1]. Sacred Nature – pages 99-101.
[2]. Op. cit. – pages 101-02.
[3]. Op. cit. – page 105.
[4]. Op. cit. – page 132.
[5]. Op. cit. – page 136.
[6]. Op. cit. – page 150.
[7]. Op. cit. – page 162.
[8]. Op. cit. – page 163)
[9]. Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh – V.
[10]. Bahá’u’lláh, Epistle to the Son of the Wolf (Wilmette, Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1988) – page  44.
[11]. Sacred Nature – page 172.
[12]. Op. cit. – page 176.
[13]. Op. cit. – pages 180-81.
[14]. Op. cit. – page 185.

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Book Review: ‘Sacred Nature’ (1/2): What is Sacred about Nature?

Shoghi Effendi, Guardian of the Bahá’í Faith, in a letter written on his behalf, states:[1]

We cannot segregate the human heart from the environment outside us and say that once one of these is reformed everything will be improved. Man is organic with the world. His inner life moulds the environment and is itself also deeply affected by it. The one acts upon the other and every abiding change in the life of man is the result of these mutual reactions.

This is an idea close to the one that Mary Midgley develops in her exploration of Science and Poetry:[2]

. . . we are ourselves an organic part of this world, . . . we are not detached observers but living creatures continuous with all other such creatures and acting upon them.

Thankfully as times passes we seem to be very gradually becoming more aware of how close our connections are with the natural world.

I’ve recently drawn on the insights of Tom Oliver who is intensely concerned to counteract our dangerous delusion that we are independent selves:[3]

. . . We have one . . . big myth to dispel: that we exist as independent selves at the centre of a subjective universe.

He explains:[4]

We are seamlessly connected to one another and the world around us. Independence is simply an illusion that was once adaptive but now threatens our success as a species.

Ziya Tong is acutely aware of how this is so dangerously invisible to us:[5]

Our food comes to us from places we do not see; our energy is produced in ways we don’t understand; and our waste disappears without us having to give it a thought. … humans are no longer in touch with the basics of their own system survival.

My Latest Read

Karen Armstrong is a writer whose work I have greatly enjoyed over the years, so it was no surprise that I could not resist, as a follower of tsundoku[6], buying her latest offering on this theme – Sacred Nature.

I was not disappointed. Almost straightaway she’s talking about one of my favourite poets:[7]

Once I went to school to be inducted into the rational worldview that governs modern life, I, like Wordsworth, experienced the ‘light and glory die away,/And fade into the light of common day.’

From there she moves to an issue I have wrestled with over the years — immanence:[8]

Where we see a range of separate beings and phenomena, tribal people see a continuum of time and space, where animals, plants and humans are all permeated by an immanent sacred force that draws them into a synthesised whole.

Explaining further she states:[9]

We will see that people in early civilisations did not experience the power that governed the cosmos as a supernatural, distant distinct ‘God’. It was rather an intrinsic presence . . . – a force imbuing all things, a transcendent mystery that could never be defined.

While the Bahá’í Faith does not accept that the Supreme Being can be wholly encased in material things, emanation can explain our sense of the transcendent within material reality. As ‘Abdu’l-Bahá explains:[10]

The first emanation from God is the bounty of the Kingdom, which emanates and is reflected in the reality of the creatures, like the light which emanates from the sun and is resplendent in creatures; and this bounty, which is the light, is reflected in infinite forms in the reality of all things, and specifies and individualizes itself according to the capacity, the worthiness and the intrinsic value of things.

Armstrong tracks how we came to lose that sense of the sacred in nature:[11]

But in early modern Europe, the link between nature and the divine was severed , and the Christians began to see ‘God’ as separate from the world. Unlike earlier when an ‘ubiquitous force’ in the words of Thomas Aquinas was ‘present everywhere in everything’. God was not a being but rather ‘Being Itself.

As a result[12] ‘[t]hey must control and subdue the earth as God had commanded.’

Eastern Angles

I found her exploration of Chinese and Indian concepts particularly rewarding. For example her discussion of Qi:[13]

Qi is not a god or a being of any kind; it is the energy that pervades all life, harmoniously linking the plant, animal, human and divine worlds and enabling them to fulfil their potential.

She explains the link with the Golden Rule:[14]

Consequently, the Chinese philosopher Mencius . . . insisted that the Golden Rule first promulgated by Confucius in the sixth century BCE – ‘Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire’ — applies not only to our fellow humans but to the wanwu [the ‘myriad’ or ‘ten thousand things’ of nature],  to which we are inextricably connected.

Later she moves on to Daoism and its more tribal origins (Taoism more familiarly perhaps)[15] stating ‘Unlike Confucianism, which originated within the aristocratic gentry, Daoism was rooted in the indigenous, tribal culture of southern China.’

We then find the term ‘emanating’ in this context:[16]

The Dao, Laozi explains, reaches outwards, endlessly emanating from the sublime unknown until, stage by stage, it brings our world into existence.

She observes wryly[17] ‘ironically, the human being . . . is the only creature with the mental ability to obstruct or distort their sacred identity with egotism.’

Her conclusion from this is that[18] ‘The Dao and qi are both very different from our Western God; they are closer to what Thomas Aquinas called Being itself, and this seems to have been how most humans once perceive the divine.’

Hinduism, in her view, has a similar take on this:[19]

Like qi and the Dao, Rta [in the Vedas of Hinduism] was not a god but a sacred, impersonal, animating force.

I was surprised to read that[20] Rta, a terms previously unknown to me, ‘can be translated as “the artfulness of being” and is the Indic root of the English words harmony and art.’

Buddhism, it seems, is very close to the same page:[21]

Buddha-Nature is the essence of the entire cosmos, an ‘eternal, permanent, immutable, pure, and self sufficient force that unites all beings, draws them into a coherent whole, and universally illumines the mind of man and enables him to cultivate his capacity for goodness (ren).’

Her focus returns to the people of the book:[22]

. . . it seems that the mediaeval Jewish mystics who pioneered the tradition of the Kabbalah were, in part, responding to a popular demand for a more immanent notion of the sacred.

Perhaps, she argues[23] ‘[i]nstead of seeing Him confined to the distant heavens, we need to look to this older – and still widespread – understanding of the divine as an inexpressible but dynamic inner presence that flows through all things.’

The Romantics Again

We’re very much back to Wordsworth again here.

                                                  I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

I was also recently alerted to something that was previously well below my radar.

I was reading Molly Lefebure’s book about Coleridge – Samuel Taylor Coleridge: a bondage of opium, which has more to do with the relationship between personality (his addiction and consequent aberrations) and his beautiful poetry and brilliant prose, something that followed on from my recent sequence on Sylvia Plath. However, I realised at one point that what I was reading at the time related strongly to this sacredness of nature post. (Also STC connects nature, spirituality, poetry and personality – and opium — in a way that deserves later exploration in its own right.)

I was surprised to learn that Wordsworth and Coleridge were not on exactly the same page:[24]

The dissimilarity of data dividing S. T. C. and Wordsworth was, in fact, the central philosophical controversy of the Romantic era, the argument over pantheism . . .

As mentioned earlier, Pantheism was too close to immanence from the Bahá’í point of view, as Lefebure’s explanation makes clear (my emphases):[25]

Individual things, said Spinoza, are nothing but modifications of the attributes of God. The more we know of particular things, therefore, the more we know God. Hence, all things are God and God is all things – not the cause of All, but the All itself.

The individual is engulfed in a universal oneness . . . At death, man merely becomes reabsorbed into the All . . . obviously, Spinozism is the antithesis of the individual ‘I am’ and, further, of Christian belief in the survival of the individual soul

This left Coleridge struggling to reconcile two parts of himself:[26]

 . . . as [Coleridge] expressed it, for many years although his heart was with John and Paul, his head was with Spinoza.

He never succeeded:[27] ‘[his] unrealised dream was to achieve a systematic reconciliation of the ‘I am’ with the ‘It is’. . . . .[They] refused to be systematically reconciled.’

Whether his heart would have been eased by the following words of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá we will never know:[28]

The dependence through the creatures upon God is a dependence of emanation: that is to say, creatures emanate from God, they do not manifest Him. The relation is that of emanation and not that of manifestation. The light of the sun emanates from the sun, it does not manifest it. . . . the globe of the sun does not become divided and does not descend to the earth: no, the rays of the sun, which are its bounty, emanate from it, and illumine the dark bodies.

Personally, I find myself convinced. As someone who finds it hard to understand why God should have been so generous as to bestow upon something so imperfect an immortal soul, immanence would be a massive step too far.

Armstrong seems to agree with the Byzantines:[29] ‘that what we call God is not this or that but something immeasurably other . .’ and ‘lies beyond the reach of reason.’

Where does all this leave us in terms of what we need to do?

References:

[1]. Secretary to Shoghi Effendi, from a letter dated 17 February 1933 to an individual believer.
[2]. Science and Poetry – page 238.
[3]. The Self Delusion – page 3.
[4]. Op. cit. – page 4.
[5]. The Reality Bubble – page 172.
[6]. Tsundoku means acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in one’s home without reading them. For more see Wikipedia page. I was alerted to this concept by a friend on FB. I seems less undermining than my previous description of myself as a bookaholic.
[7]. Sacred Nature – page 4.
[8]. Op. cit. – page 9.
[9]. Op. cit. – pages 10-11.
[10]. Some Answered Questions – No: 82.
[11]. Sacred Nature – page 12.
[12]. Op. cit. – page 14.
[13]. Op. cit. – page 32.
[14]. Op. cit. – page 34.
[15]. Op. cit. – page 35.
[16]. Op. cit. – page 38.
[17]. Op. cit. – page 41.
[18]. Op. cit. – page 43.
[19]. Op. cit. – page 45.
[20]. Op. cit. – page 46.
[21]. Op. cit. – page 50.
[22]. Op. cit. – page 53.
[23]. Op. cit. – page 56.
[24]. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: a bondage of opium – page 121.
[25]. Op. cit. – page 123.
[26]. Op. cit. – page 126.
[27]. Op. cit. – page 129.
[28]. Some Answered Questions No: 53.
[29]. Sacred Nature – page 76.

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