Spirit and One God, Part I

Spirit and One God, Part I

By John Taylor; 21 March, 2006

Today, for Naw Ruz, let us talk about spirit and how it relates to the
principle of One God.

In a recent talk Peter Khan, a member of the House of Justice,
mentioned one of our great challenges as Baha'is. We firmly believe
that the spirit made a great jump in power in Persia in the year 1844,
and that this infused a great creative impulse in thought and in every
walk of life. This idea most who hear it today regard as preposterous
and incomprehensible. Khan points out that this is to be expected
since in a similar way much of what we regard now as a mainline
scientific understanding of the universe would have been regarded in
the 19th Century by scientifically minded persons as similarly
ridiculous and incomprehensible. Khan points out that science freely
accepts today that our bodies are constantly being bombarded by
invisible rays, radio waves, magnetic fields, gravitons, neutrinos,
gamma radiation, cosmic rays, and more. That would not have seemed
rationally credible to the scientific mind until the 20th Century. We
should be confident in view of this progress, Khan points out, that
our Baha'i belief in the pervasiveness of spirit may not seem so
absurd to the scientific understanding not so far in the future.

Baha'u'llah Himself seems to have briefly alluded to this vexing
question of a pervasive, invisible spirit in His Tablet of Hikmat
where He writes,

"The essence and the fundamentals of philosophy have emanated from the
Prophets. That the people differ concerning the inner meanings and
mysteries thereof is to be attributed to the divergence of their views
and minds." (Tablets, 145)

This idea "emanating" from a Manifestation of God is that spirit is
the means by which an image of reality enters into the mind. As a
Psalm puts it, "For with thee is the fountain of life: in thy light
shall we see light." (Ps 36:9, KJV) Spirit thinks us, we do not think
it; no authority is derived from how we articulate what it gives us,
and anything born of that leads to distortion and corruption. Paul
seems to have understood this well, saying something very similar in
the following,

"But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have
entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for
them that love him. But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit:
for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God. For
what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is
in him? even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of
God." (1 Corinthians, 2:9-11, KJV)

An invisible, pure, knowing, pervading spirit is a major preoccupation
in Eastern religion. Take this passage from the Bhagavad-Gita.

"But beyond My visible nature is My invisible Spirit. This is the
fountain of life whereby this universe has its being. All things have
their life in this Life, and I am their beginning and end. In this
whole vast universe there is nothing higher than I. I am the taste of
living waters and the light of the sun and the moon. I am OM; the
sacred Word of the Vedas,.... And I am from everlasting the seed of
eternal life." (Gita 7:5-10)

Baha'u'llah in this same passage of the Hikmat continues, referring to
a prophet who as far as I can determine is the pre-Socratic
philosopher Heraclitus, or perhaps his Israelite teacher, since
"Prophet" is capitalized here:

"We would fain recount to thee the following: One of the Prophets once
was communicating to his people that with which the Omnipotent Lord
had inspired Him. Truly, thy Lord is the Inspirer, the Gracious, the
Exalted. When the fountain of wisdom and eloquence gushed forth from
the wellspring of His utterance and the wine of divine knowledge
inebriated those who had sought His threshold, He exclaimed:
"'Lo! All are filled with the Spirit.'"
"From among the people there was he who held fast unto this statement
and, actuated by his own fancies, conceived the idea that the spirit
literally penetrateth or entereth into the body, and through lengthy
expositions he advanced proofs to vindicate this concept; and groups
of people followed in his footsteps." (Baha'u'llah, Tablets, 145-146)

This could refer to any or all of several schools of thought that
ended in literalistic parodies of the idea of spirit. It could be
talking about Manichaeism, or the origin in Hinduism of reincarnation,
or indeed Paul's own doctrine of the Incarnation of Christ. It may
allude to the tendency of any group to lose the love and flexibility
of spirit and consequently to value one's understanding above truth.
This divisive process is often described in the Qu'ran, "Of those who
divided their religion and became seas every sect rejoicing in what
they had with them." (Qur'an 30:32, Shakir Ali, tr.) The vision born
of spirit, on the other hand, is inherently unifying, as the Bab
points out:

"Reduce not the ordinances of God to fanciful imaginations of your
own; rather observe all the things which God hath created at His
behest with the eye of the spirit, even as ye see things with the eyes
of your bodies." (Bab, Selections, Kitab-i-Asma, XVII, 15, p. 146)

Still, there may be no need to go further since Heraclitus is well
known to have held that spirit in the form of fire is the basic
substrate of all matter. Baha'u'llah's brief saying, 'Lo! All are
filled with the Spirit,' distills what little is known of Heraclitus's
philosophy. A Dictionary of Philosophy sums up the wide ranging
teaching of this early Greek philosopher.

"Heraclitus of Ephesus, died after 480 BCE. Greek philosopher known as
"the obscure," "the riddler," and "the weeping philosopher." The most
famous doctrine attributed to him was that all things are in a state
of flux; even the unchanging hills change, but more slowly than most
other things. This doctrine was, however, certainly balanced by a
notion of logos, the word or reason, which keeps everything in order,
and there was also some doctrine, hailed by Hegel, of the unity of
opposites. Heraclitus postulated fire as the basic matter of the
universe; for him, the fire of the human soul was related to the
cosmic fire, which virtuous souls eventually join." (p. 145)

Having this introduction to Heraclitus, let us delve further tomorrow
into the place in history reserved for his idea that "all things are
filled with spirit."

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com