Asma Essay

From Kamal to Asma to the Recursive Self

By John Taylor; 2007 August

One bounty of being human is that we can learn to take our cues from the natural world, the seasons of the year. One bounty of being a Baha'i is that we can add to that an appreciation of specially chosen divine attributes, each of which the Badi' calendar fits into a fixed location in each season. Thus, we can prepare for each feast by reflecting upon the virtues for which the Bab named this month and the next, and fitting that in with the cycles of nature. Here is one answer to the prophesy that many are called, but few chosen. Our calendar chooses us, it chooses the combination of virtues, and with it we learn to choose our self through it.

For instance, this present month is Kamal, Perfection, and the upcoming Feast in the calendar will feature the divine attribute of Asma, or Names. Actually Asma is the second of four months named for a verbal virtue. The ordering of late summer months goes: Kalimat, Kamal, Asma, that is, Words, Perfection, and Names. Perfection is, as it were, surrounded by verbal virtues. Asma, month number nine, will be the last month residing entirely in summer. The autumn equinox takes place towards the end of Izzat, Might, the tenth and middle month of the entire nineteen months in the Badi' year.

So, what do these summer virtues, words, perfection, names, all mean? They certainly seem to imply that the path to perfection leads first through perfect words, then to perfection itself, Kamal, and thirdly to the names we use.

But what does perfect mean? Perfect, like everything outside God, is relative. There are an infinite number of perfections, many contradicting one another. A perfect preying mantis is very different from a perfect cow. Among human beings, one with a perfect soul will be very different from one with a perfect body. And souls show forth a thousand different virtues. Which of these perfections should we aspire to? This is another bounty of being a Baha'i, for we have been given an Exemplar. We have a specific insight into what a perfect Baha'i must be like.

However, even the Master offered many different sides to His Perfection.

Fortunately, Abdu'l-Baha Himself offered a hint as to which part of Him we should emulate during His visit to California. As Ramona Brown tells in her memoir, Abdu'l-Baha pointed out which of His virtues to imitate: His complete devotion and service, day and night, in word and deed, to the Cause of God. Thus for Him Kamal does lead straight to Asma; the names of God were the exclusive goal and preoccupation of His life.

This lesson, that names matter, seems central to what we are meant to learn at our next Feast.

Names are not just special. They are far more than, as it were, merely nominal. Asma mark an extremely intimate connection with the Godhead. As the Master put it, the "essential names and attributes of God are identical with the Essence..." [SAQ pp. 148-9] The essence or "essential names" of God will of course never be known directly by the likes of us. God acts and reflects in creation through an intermediary, His Manifestation. But nonetheless His Names do rub their trace into reality.

Consider this thought experiment.

How would you feel if you discovered that someone has tacked a snapshot they had taken of you onto a wall and then spat upon it, thrown darts at it and desecrated it in every way they could? Most would find it difficult not to be chagrined. Is it a comfort to think that the photograph was just a piece of paper covered in chemicals? Or, does it help to consider that the image is not even your property? Everyone has a right to do what they want with their own property. Is it consoling that destroying your image may have given them emotional release? You may not even like how you look in the photograph. But it is still your image. It bears your name, and its destruction stands as an insult.

We all instinctively think just this way about our image, but is it the same with our names? Try another little experiment. Imagine someone writing your name on a piece of paper and then ripping it to pieces before your face. Would you take this as a compliment? Is not your name, even written in ink on a bit of scrap paper, in a strange way part of you?

In a similar way, each of God's creatures in its own way identifies closely with its name. For the lower kingdoms of creation, the name is written in the creature's genetic code. For all living beings a name, in the form of a coded genome, literally builds their bodies from scratch. The new science of epigenetics describes how this spiraled genetic material is sheathed in a protective protein coating. This sheath dynamically responds to the environment, deciding which aspect of the genome to express in a given environment.

Similarly, as Richard Hofstadter describes, the very fact that we are conscious means that we are constantly rewriting and reforming our own identity. This, he says, is a recursive operation, feeding nothing back into something. Like pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. Like Escher's picture of a hand drawing a hand drawing a hand. Or, like Godel's recursive equations proving that the reach of mathematics is inherently bounded, or Turing's recursive equations doing the same for computability.

That is what Asma implies, writing the name of self on an invisible scrap of paper we call soul, an entity that we can never grasp any more than the eye can see itself. This name of self, like our physical genome, constructs and defines our entire conscious world. The spirit of Asma is to take an ephemeral, limited, inadequate image of self and forge out of airy nothing something with the aspect of eternity, a glorious Name of God. To do this, praised be God, we have the help of an Exemplar, One Who models the miracle. And, praised be God, we have the Badi’ calendar to remind us that it is late summer and the time is now to act, before our meridian forces are spent, and that fall and the decline of our life force will soon be upon us.