Elizabeth Jennings (4/4): A Closer Look at some Poems

Given that my current sequence includes references to the spiritual poetry of Táhirih, who wrote her mystical verse in 19th Century Persia, it seemed useful to republish this sequence on another woman poet with a spiritual core.  

Bearing in mind the key sentence from Dana Greene, I plan now to look for how effectively ‘a spiritual dimension is conveyed’ through the vehicle of her poetry. It’s important to emphasise, given how the word ‘spiritual’ has been deracinated and emptied of specific meaning in the West, as Carrette and King describe in their book Selling Spirituality, that Jennings uses the term in a strong and definite sense which is rooted in her Roman Catholic faith.

The First Sequence of Poems

Immediately, as I warned last time, there is a problem if I just take one poem out of its context. The poem at the top of this post is powerful, with its echoes of Tennyson’s anticipation of Darwin (In Memoriam – Canto 56) where humanity:

Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed

Not that Tennyson, whom she read at school, seemed to resonate with her. However, the poem certainly is not a confident affirmation of a ‘spiritual dimension.’ It also suggests a degree of recoil from what can be other positive human experiences. In the world of this poem, moonlight is connected with predation, blood flowing and teeth gripping. The poem describes men as ‘in bed with love and fear,’ and in a context where ‘human creatures’ being ‘lip to lip’ follows directly on from the owl being dragged ‘upon its prey,’ and even kissing seems potentially dangerous. In fact, later in the poem, we are described as feeling ‘the blood throb to death’ after kissing ‘in trust’ and before conceiving a child. At the close of the poem, pain seems inescapable and love inseparable from fear.

A dark world in which light only seems to help the killers.

The thought began to dawn on me, as I read more, that, whatever Elizabeth Jennings might have wanted to achieve, glimpses of a spiritual dimension were going to be hard won, and perhaps only tantalising glimpses out of the corner of her eye, rather than unequivocal affirmations of her consciously chosen faith.

It seems a good idea to look at the poem that followed on from Song for a Birth or a Death, rather than cherry picking another from a different period of time.

Family Affairs, the next poem, remains in a fairly dark place. It appears to affirm that ‘Indifference lays a cold hand on the heart;/We need the violence to keep us warm.’ Not much progress here towards a sense of the transcendent, then.

A Game of Chess follows. The atmosphere is calmer: ‘Now peacefully/We sit above the intellectual game.’ She even begins to wonder if ‘feelings cool/Beneath the order of an abstract school?’ But I turn the page and find the answer: ‘Never entirely, since the whole thing brings/Me back to childhood when I was distressed.’

However, although this may seem disappointing, since the spiritual dimension remains elusive, at least up till now, it becomes clearer why I value her poetry so much. It is completely honest. It respects and conveys her experience simply and directly, but with enough ambiguity at the edges to allow me to feel I am sharing in her quest for meaning, rather than colluding in some didactic attempt to convey her clear conclusions. The last line of A Game of Chess reads: ‘My king is caught now in a world of trust.’ I’m still not quite sure what that means.

From there we move to the gem of a poem I found in my notebook and which triggered me to go back to her poetry and to find out more about her life.

The poem is poignant and honest. There is grief, I feel, though she explicitly denies it, mixed with the sense of guilt, some perhaps her grandmother’s, hinted at in lines like:

The place smelt old, of things too long kept shut,
The smell of absences where shadows come
That can’t be polished.

In this poem, I feel, she is not preaching at us to be compassionate: she is demonstrating her own strong capacity for compassion. She is setting us a moving example.

Then we come to a poem where you would expect to find what she claims she was seeking to convey: In Praise of Creation.

We are closer now to William Blake in her use of animals. We have a sky ‘full of birds,’ and find ‘the tiger trapped in the cage of his skin.’ Even so we have not escaped the link between birth and death of the first poem: ‘the tigress’ shadow casts//A darkness over’ the tiger, causing his blood to beat ‘beyond reason.’ The closest we can get to the spirit is to find at the end ‘Man with his mind ajar.’

I find that brilliant though, and not frustrating, or at least not more frustrating than real life. It is not frustrating to read because it reflects back a sense of my felt experience, I hear that captured in words in a way that clarifies, pins down, what I sometimes find too hard to catch before it fades away.

The last poem I will consider in this sequence is World I Have Not Made. Here she speaks of themes that resonate through a great deal of her work: ‘trying to love without reciprocity,’ coming ‘to terms with obvious suffering,’ and ‘how even great faith leaves room for abysses.’ In a sense that poem summarises the drift of her work as a whole, missing out only an explicit attempt to define what her poetry is for, though it demonstrates it clearly enough. She fights persistently to deal with love and loss, pain and trauma, faith and doubt, searching for meaning in this kind of ambiguous darkeness.

The Second Sequence of Poems

Which makes my next shift to another sequence written twenty years later intriguing for what it reveals of progress made in probing more deeply into the same ground, as well as extending her range further. Having moved forwards from a first poem in the 1961 sequence, I’ll be moving forwards to the last poem in the 1985 collection.

The end of the poem about her grandmother spoke of ‘the new dust falling through the air.’ The first poem I will look at now, Frail Bone, after pointing out that we are an ‘easily wounded . . . small being,’ refers to us as sand falling ‘through the hour glass of the planet,/Blown through the universe,/And yet that dust delivers/Defiant speech to the last,/Anomalous oratory.’ A paradox of our existence is dramatically flagged up for our attention: we are star-dust that speaks. For someone to find that anomalous is the beginning of a sense that we are not just matter.

The next poem Dust (nothing to do with Lyra by the way) makes this even more explicit: ‘We are people of dust/But dust with a living mind.’ In fact, as the next verse states ‘Dust with a spirit.’ This is directly addressing the spiritual nature of humanity.

For some, this might seem too direct. Poetry should create an experience, some might say, but not tell us what that experience means: this is theology, not poetry. As someone who is also guilty of writing poetry that touches on this issue, though perhaps in a more questioning way (see for example the end of Enlightenment), I am leaning towards feeling that the powerful directness of this phrase belongs in poetry not prose. I am not so sure about what follows, for example ‘grace/Goes to the end of the earth.’ This illustrates what I mentioned earlier, that even in the same short lyric the quality of her poetry fluctuates.

I think she picks herself up again when she writes:

We are dust from our birth
But in that dust is wrought

A place for visions.

The enjambement and stanza break flag up that there is a leap to be made here from dust to vision.  The word ‘wrought’ also makes clear how effortful that is. ‘Visions’ is, of course, a word that cuts both ways – does it refer to imagination or mysticism or both?

The closing lines of that lyric read:

Dust discovers our own
Proud, torn destinies,
Yes, we are dust to the bone.

The insistent and repeated thudding of the letter d adds to the power of the lines, not just with its sound but also with its possibly unwelcome reminder of death.

Which is where she explicitly moves to in the next poem, Water Music.

                                                    Sea music is
What quiets my spirit. I would like my death
To come as rivers turn, as sea commands.
Let my last journey be to sounds of water.

The hissing and buzzing of the repeated s creates a different effect, though, calmer, quieter, more accepting. The word spirit appears for the first time in my selections. Its exact meaning is unclear, which wouldn’t surprise Carrette and King (page 3): ‘There is no essence or definitive meaning to terms like spirituality.’ For Elizabeth Jennings, though, it almost certainly means something close to soul, possibly experienced through the heart. That she sees death as a journey confirms that her vision is essentially transcendent.

And this brings us to the final poem in her 1985 edition of Collected Poems: Precursors.

The mood of the poem is autumnal, echoes of Keats here perhaps, or Shelley, with their odes to autumn. Keats mattered to her (Greene – page 19): ‘She found [his] writing so immediate and fresh that she could not believe he was dead.’ Memories are triggered: ‘I watched as a child the slow/Leaves turning and taking the sun, and the autumn bonfires,/The whips of wind blowing a landscape away.’ Here we encounter a combination of features that tend to characterise her best poetry: longer lines which give more space for exploration and evocation, sensory details that evoke a mood but do not tell us what we should feel, and any relatively abstract words used carry genuine weight, such as landscape here.

Also references to the elusiveness of powerful subliminal experiences creep in: ‘Always it was the half-seen, the just-heard which enthralled.’ The long line here allows space for this idea to flow to its conclusion.

Perhaps the most crucial theme in the poem relates to her mortality, the ineffability of subtle experience and her work:

                                                 This is the world
Once ahead of me, now behind me, and yet
I am waiting still to record some of the themes
Of the music I heard before I understood it . . .

The line shift of ‘Once ahead of me’ reinforces its meaning, as does our wait for the ending of the three long lines and beyond. The verse enacts its meaning, one of the key powers of poetry and poetic prose.

And then she shares another sense of what poetry might possibly do: ‘So I have come/To believe that poetry is restoration/Or else an accompaniment to what is lost/But half-remembered.’ I can relate to this through my own poems about my father’s death and its aftermath. A poem, once written, serves as a vivid reminder of an experience that fades, and also, like a piece of music associated with a half-forgotten memory, it brings the past more clearly to mind.

Elizabeth Jennings also gives us an idea of what it’s like to sense a poem about to break through the surface of consciousness, and how enormous the task of transcribing it can feel: ‘a tune begins/To sing in my mind. It has no words as yet/And a life and a half would probably be too short/To set the music down with appropriate words . . .’

And the last word of the poem is death.

Coherence

I need to look albeit briefly at the extent to which each of the two sequences of poems I have examined are in any way coherent, by which I mean, ‘Do the poems in the sequence enrich one another?’

There is definitely progression in the first sequence, moving forwards from the first bleak poem, but it’s a bit disjointed. In Praise of Creation definitely refers back to the tooth and claw world of Song for a Birth or a Death while also opening the door to possible transcendence. However, while Family Affairs follows on, A Game of Chess seems to mark a complete break and when we move into the world of My Grandmother we’ve left the blood-drenched jungle far behind. I think it’s good that the animal darkness of the first poem is balanced by more humane elements, and I like the way the last poem I quote opens out to other themes, but I had no sense that this group of poems as a whole belonged together.

The second sequence is more satisfactory. The connecting link of dust and death pulls the first few poems together. Though the mood shifts with Water Music, the connection with death is not lost. At first sight we might think that Precursors has broken the mould again, but I don’t think so. Her darker poems of dust explicitly deal with our expressive gifts, and in Precursors she explores in plain sight how she, implicitly as dust, struggles to find ways of giving expression to half-understood intimations. So, the sequence has coherence as well as balance, and in my view indicates that she has moved a long way towards mastering, not only the single lyric, but the sequence as well, all of which vindicates for me the high regard some critics held her in, in spite of her prolixity.

Coda:

So, do I love her poems more for what they say rather than for the poetic skill with which they say it? I think that’s best for you to decide. My own opinion is that, in spite of her weaknesses at times, she does find the words to capture the elusive nature of experiences at the edge of consciousness, as well as grappling sensitively with the tests and trials that afflict us all.

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The Terror of Conviction (1/3)

Cruelty has a Human Heart,
And Jealousy a Human Face;
Terror the Human Form Divine,
And Secrecy the Human Dress.

William Blake: Songs of Experience Additional Poem

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. One factor, among many, is discussed with great insight by Jonathan Haidt, from whom I quote in this short sequence on conviction.

Terror and the Human Form

I was born just before the end of World War Two. I grew up with images of Belsen and Dachau. My childhood nightmares were of being pursued by the Gestapo.  I grew up in the shadow of the Cold War. (As a child I wouldn’t stand and watch a carnival go past because I was frightened of the uniforms and drums.) I therefore have good reasons to feel deeply concerned about the roots of prejudice, fanaticism and intolerance.

I also had reasons to suspect they might have something to do with our ideas of the divine given that most of my father’s family disowned him when he married a Roman Catholic.

Skating on Thin Ice

I am not qualified to explain the political and social roots of the human face of terror. I have of course noticed that having been oppressed is no guarantee that I will not be an oppressor in my turn if I get the chance. That was clear right from the French Revolution (See Michael Burleigh‘s ‘Earthly Powers‘) and nothing that has happened since causes me to think that anything is different now. I have also seen how injustice and inequity breed enmity, as can extremes of wealth and poverty in close proximity (See Amy Chua‘s ‘World on Fire‘ for example). Michael McCullough looks surprisingly hopefully on the problem from an evolutionary perspective in his book ‘Beyond Revenge‘. Marc Hauser‘s examination of morality, ‘Moral Minds,’ comes at the issue primarily from a developmental angle.

I do not feel competent to add anything to their positions.

They all make it very clear that tolerance in any society is a very thin ice and is all the more precious for that. Blunden’s poem, ‘The Midnight Skaters’ captures that precarious feeling as the skaters dance across the deep and frozen pond:

. . . .  not the tallest there, ’tis said,
Could fathom to this pond’s black bed.

Then is not death at watch
Within those secret waters?
. . . .  With but a crystal parapet
Between, he has his engines set.

. . . . Court him, elude him, reel and pass,
And let him hate you through the glass.

(Edmund Blunden: ‘The Midnight Skaters‘ – for an interesting critique see Poetry Scene News)

The Horns of a Dilemma

I do though feel that the spiritual perspective informed by psychology and psychotherapy complements those views and fills an important gap they leave.

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 (page 75).

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

Richard Holloway sees it much the same way:

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

(‘Between the Monster and the Saint‘: page 136)

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

What Haidt regards as central is this:

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

He is aware though that idealism enhances life in some ways also (page 211):

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

How are we not to throw out the precious and in fact indestructible baby of idealism with the bathwater of zealotry, fanaticism and intolerance? This feels like an issue well worth exploring further. It will lead us to considering, in the next post, how three ids interact: idealism, ideology and identity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Heart

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On a huge hill,

Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will

Reach her, about must and about must go,

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

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

As women do in divers countries go

In divers habits, yet are still one kind,

So doth, so is Religion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

World Transforming Consciousness

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

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

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

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

. . . all souls [must] become as one soul, and all hearts as one heart. Let all be set free from the multiple identities that were born of passion and desire, and in the oneness of their love for God find a new way of life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References:

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

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The Understanding Heart (4/6): redressing the balance

Even though it is less than a year since I last republished this sequence it seemed important to nest within it one of the closing posts of my sequence on understanding the heart, which is coming out next Monday. 

I know you will say I brought this on myself. Nobody asked me to tackle this issue in public. I have only myself to blame. I wanted to know more clearly what is meant by Bahá’u’lláh’s expression ‘ the understanding heart.’  I decided to go public with my struggles to do so. Now I’m not so sure that was such a great idea after all. I’m not at all convinced I can deliver in a way that advances anyone’s understanding more than a few millimetres at best. Some people may even feel I’m taking them back a step or two.

Anyway I said I would have a go, so let’s get on with it.

I have so far been tackling the easy bit. I’ve clarified that the heart in the sense Bahá’u’lláh meant could not be reduced to our gut feelings, or possibly even to our feelings of any surface kind.

Downloadable at this link

Interestingly, Tai Sheridan touches on this distinction in his pamphlet Buddha in Blue Jeans (page 7): ‘Your feelings are your heart and gut response to the world.’

The heart obviously does not mean our thoughts, though the thoughts we have, which relate to our beliefs about the world and what it means, can trigger a whole host of diverse feelings. Given that our view of the world is probably a kind of cultural trance, it’s not likely to be the pathway to our understanding heart.

What we discover about the nature of the understanding heart should not be too grandiose, that’s for sure. Though wiser than our other faculties, it will be a fallible and limited organ nonetheless. Bahá’u’lláh makes that abundantly clear. We can’t even use it to understand a key aspect of our own mind let alone more abstruse mysteries:

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.

(Gleanings: page 164-166: LXXXIII)

He leaves us with the paradox that we would we wiser to recognise our limitations in this respect. This may be a good place to start in our investigation of what an understanding heart would be like if we were aware of it. We’d know what we couldn’t know. We’d have a realistic sense of humility in the face of the unknowable. We would probably not be saying that it could not exist because I can’t measure or physically detect it. 

What then do we need to do to get closer to a state of mind that might allow us to get in touch with our understanding heart, which Gurdjieff in his way, and Bahá’u’lláh in His, assure us that we potentially can do?

This is where we leave the easy bit behind. Bahá’u’lláh writes:

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.

(Bahá’u’lláh: Kitáb-i-Íqán page 162)

We are in difficult territory here. First of all, we have the need to dispense with every trace of love as well as hate. At the same time we have to take account of what Bahá’u’lláh says in other places. For example: ‘In the garden of thy heart plant naught but the rose of love, and from the nightingale of affection and desire loosen not thy hold.’ This is from the Persian Hidden Words (PHW: 3).

I am clearly unable to give an authoritative explanation of how these two sets of statements can be reconciled. They clearly indicate that we must not be too simplistic here. They probably suggest that doing verbal pyrotechnics would not be as good an idea as meditating upon these two quotations for a long period of time until they sink into the depths of our consciousness as a result of which we may come to benefit from the whisperings of our understanding heart if we are patient and attentive enough.

For now, all I can say is that it reactivated the same puzzlement in me as when I read how Buddhism suggests we have to relinquish even the desire for enlightenment as we meditate if we are ever to achieve it and the compassion and wisdom that are its fruits. How was I supposed to persist for years in meditation without any desire for what was supposed to result?

Bahá’u’lláh’s phrase ‘the rose of love’ suggests that He might be pointing us towards the possibility that there are many kinds of love but only one that would be compatible with realising the truth. It feels to me that the many feelings of ‘love’ that I have experienced, even when I have thought it was the love for God, might well be the nettles and thistles of love which the Kitáb-i-Íqán seems to be telling me I have to weed out of my heart. The same pattern may be true also of the ‘nightingale of affection and desire:’ I’m stuck with the crows and ravens perhaps, not even the robins.

I could of course be hopelessly off the mark, though my inference here is given some credibility by the fact that the comparison between the nightingale and the Messenger of God is often made in the Bahá’í Writings, for example: ‘ the Nightingale of Paradise singeth upon the twigs of the Tree of Eternity, with holy and sweet melodies, proclaiming to the sincere ones the glad tidings of the nearness of God,’ and one rose in particular is described in exceptional terms:

In the Rose Garden of changeless splendour a Flower hath begun to bloom, compared to which every other flower is but a thorn, and before the brightness of Whose glory the very essence of beauty must pale and wither.

What is unarguable is that the path I have to tread to get in touch with my understanding heart will be long and arduous, though infinitely rewarding.

I am reminded of Margaret Donaldson‘s book Human Minds. Part of her contention in this deeply rewarding book is to argue that our modern so-called developed society has chosen to value and promote the arduously won insights of mathematics and the scientific method  over the equally arduously won insights of the meditative traditions. In both cases most of us do not test or investigate in depth for ourselves the insights won: we simply trust the experts.  

We also fail to appreciate that the arduously won insights of the meditative traditions are equally testable and replicable as those of hard science for those prepared to devote enough hours to the acquisition of the requisite skills.  Because our society encourages the latter, we have scientific adepts in abundance: because it is suspicious of the former, accomplished mystics are hard to come by. We are out of balance and will eventually pay the ultimate price if we are not already beginning to do so.

Bahá’u’lláh has no doubt about the benefits of the path of search he advocates:

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.

(Bahá’u’lláh: Kitáb-i-Íqán page 196)

William Blake (for source of image see link)

We are in the world of 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.

And Wordsworth’s ‘sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused.’ When mystics and so many poets agree we would have to be arrogant indeed to dismiss out of hand the possible truth of what they describe.

Donaldson also refers interestingly to the views of Iris Murdoch on the value of art and imagery to this process of deepening understanding (op.cit.: page 230):

Murdoch . . . . . defends art as giving us ‘intermediate images’ and argues, correctly I think, that most of us cannot do without the ‘high substitute for the spiritual and the speculative life,’ that it provides. But she also recognises that images can lead to a full stop if they are taken as being ‘for real.’

This sounds like the mistake we all might be making, which is to take what we sense for what truly is.  Basic science scuppers that in any case. Colour is not in the object, nor is it even in the eye, but in the mind of the beholder. We translate a particular wavelength of light into red, blue, green and so on. Red could just as easily have been experienced as blue. The colour allocation is arbitrary and not inherent in the object.

Science even carries us as far as understanding that solid objects have more empty space than matter in them. It is the force that particles exert that creates the illusion of solidity. It is not then quite such a huge leap of imagination to suppose that atoms could be doorways to a deeper reality if only we could detach ourselves sufficiently from the delusions and attachments of consensus reality.

Where then do we turn from here in order to progress further in this task?

As the heart, in the sense we are using the word, is a metaphor it is perhaps not surprising that the best way of enhancing our understanding of the term might be through other metaphors. We’re at the cusp where mysticism and poetry intersect, it seems.

We’ve been here before on this blog, with my encounter with R S Thomas. I found his anthology of religious verse published in the 60s, and read in his introduction (page 9):

The mystic fails to mediate God adequately insofar as he is not a poet. The poet, with possibly less immediacy of apprehension, shows his spiritual concern and his spiritual nature through the medium of language, the supreme symbol. The presentation of religious experience is the most inspired language in poetry. This is not a definition of poetry, but a description of how the communication of religious experience best operates.

That is where we look next time, and given that Bahá’u’lláh was both a mystic and an accomplished poet it should be a fruitful but perhaps demanding experience.

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Discovering Traherne

Part of one of the four Traherne Windows in Audley Chapel, Hereford Cathedral, created by stained-glass artist Tom Denny. (For source of image see link)

. . . . reflect upon the perfection of man’s creation, and that all these planes and states are folded up and hidden away within him.

“Dost thou reckon thyself only a puny form
When within thee the universe is folded?”

(Bahá’u’lláh Seven Valleys & Four Valleys 1978 US Edition – page 34)

I would normally publish a new post on a Monday but given how this fits so neatly into the Facing Uncertain Death poems I’m re-posting at the moment, and follows on from last Monday’s re-blog I couldn’t resist re-blogging it now.

When I was replacing the books of Chinese and Japanese poetry back on my shelves, after my earlier post, I found a pamphlet, The Eye of Innocence, dating back to 2003. I had no memory at all of the Traherne Festival it refers to.

I’ve always had a place in my heart for the poems of Herbert and Marvell, who were writing during the same period as Traherne. In fact, I took the liberty of imitating, but not copying, Herbert’s style and verse form in a poem that attempted to capture my feelings on discovering the Bahá’í Faith after about 20 years of atheism/agnosticism.

The Herbert Poem was Love (III).Mine was Thief in the Night, written in the early 80s but not published in any form until after 2006.

Though mine sounds strained in comparison to Herbert’s, the intensity reflects the strength of my feeling about the unexpected conversion experience at the time. An earlier blog post explores other influences operating unconsciously at the time to shape its imagery. Often, it seems, even the writer does not fully understand their own poem.

I thought Traherne’s only interesting poem was the one beginning ‘I saw Eternity the other night,’ only to discover fairly soon, in my recent investigations, that Traherne hadn’t written it at all: it was Henry Vaughan’s.

Not a good place to start from really.

Anyway I read my way through the pamphlet, fascinated by the poems quoted, but equally intrigued by the passages of prose. Even more startling was the story of how the poems were discovered after his death.

How long do you think it took to find them? Ten years? Twenty? Fifty maybe? Well, he was born in Hereford about 1637 and died in Middlesex in 1674: the main body of his poetry and prose did not begin to surface till 1896-97, a mere 222 years afterwards:[1]

It is the winter of 1896-7. Mr William Brooke is rooting around on the street bookstalls of London looking for interesting literature. In Whitechapel, and Farringdon Road, for a few pence he buys two handwritten manuscripts, one poetry and one prose, in the same hand, but with no author.

After some research Brooke concludes that they are the work of Thomas Traherne and publishes the poems in 1903. Though an agnostic himself, he saw their value which he described in his introduction:[2]

Men of all faiths, even of no faith, may study them with profit, and derive from them a new impulse towards that ‘plain living and high thinking’ by which alone happiness can be reached and peace of mind assured.

Even though his poetry clearly anticipates three of my other much-read poets – Blake of the Songs of Innocence & Experience,Wordsworth of Ode on the Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, and Gerard Manley Hopkins – I had not bothered to read the small selection of his poems at the end of my Norton Critical Edition of the Seventeenth Century Religious Poets. What a mistake!

Infinity and Eternity

Blake touches powerfully on themes of relevance to Traherne.

For example his Auguries of Innocence famously begins:

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

Traherne is similarly preoccupied with infinity:[3]

The Heaven of Infancy

It’s Wordsworth’s powerful, and to modern materialistic ears counterintuitive, portrayal of childhood that Traherne seems to anticipate so uncannily. A key stanza from Wordsworth’s Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, published in 1807 reads:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

Traherne got there before him, and threw eternity in for good measure:[4]And many of his other poems, The Salutation for example, dealt with the same theme [ibid]:If we take this second quote literally it sounds quite narcissistic. However, in the context of what we know of his life and what we read in his poems and prose as a whole, I am more inclined to see him as writing about the human predicament as a whole. What he writes is therefore meant to apply to everyone. Sadly the vast majority of us, especially now in the West where capitalist materialism holds sway, are never likely to remember such experiences even if we ever had them, as studies of what are termed reincarnation experiences confirm. Too many children who report such experiences in the so-called ‘developed’ world, are talked out of them so that they fade away until they become irretrievable for most of those who experienced them.[5]

Traherne’s experience was in some ways not dissimilar to this, as he describes in the compilation of his prose:[6]

The first Light which shined in my infancy in its Primitive and Innocent Clarity was totally ecclypsed; insomuch that I was fain to learn all again. If you ask me how it was ecclypsed? Truly by the Customs and maners of Men, which like Contrary Winds blew it out: by an innumerable company of other Objects, rude vulgar and Worthless Things that like so many loads of Earth and Dung did over whelm and Bury it: by the Impetuous Torrent of Wrong Desires in all others whom I saw or knew that carried me away and alienated me from it… And at last all the Celestial Great and Stable Treasures to which I was born, as wholy forgotten, as if they had never been.

He was fortunate, though, to rediscover what could so easily have been permanently lost, a recovery that his poetry is focused on celebrating.

Nature

Last of all we come to nature. In this respect Traherne does not so much anticipate John Clare, a highly regarded self-taught poet of nature, writing at the time of the Enclosures – his connection with Gerard Manley Hopkins is much closer, given the shared spirituality of their priesthood.

Here’s Hopkins, in God’s Grandeur written in 1877, positive about nature but as disenchanted with worldly contaminants as Traherne, even though he could never have read him:Or again in Pied Beauty:Traherne is less concretely specific in his imagery but nonetheless his ardent love of nature displays the same intensity:[7]Apparently, according to Wikipedia, Elizabeth Jennings, a poet I’ve also explored on this blog, was also a fan.

It should be no surprise, then, to hear that I plan to acquaint myself more deeply with Traherne’s prose as well as his poetry – better late than never. It may be somewhat delayed as a trip to Hay-on-Wye to scour its rich mines of second-hand books could be indefinitely postponed by Covid-19 containment measures. Still, ‘such light griefs are not a thing to die on.’[8]

Is God laughing now, I wonder? I’ve lost count of the plans I’ve made that got lost somewhere on the road.

Footnotes:
[1]. The Eye of Innocence – page 4.
[2]. The Eye of Innocence – page 7.
[3]. My Spirit from George Herbert & the Seventeenth Century Religious Poets – page 191.
[4].  Wonder from George Herbert & the Seventeenth Century Religious Poets – page 182.
[5]. For more detail see James G. Matlock’s book, Signs of Reincarnation
[6]. Centuries 3.7 quoted in The Eye of Innocence pamphlet – page 27.
[7]. Wonder from George Herbert & the Seventeenth Century Religious Poets – page 182.
[8] Byron’s Don Juan: Canto II – stanza xvi.

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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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