Forward to Prophesy

Back to the Future with the Impeller and the Witness

By John Taylor; 2007 August 20

Now that Momka is working evenings, sometimes as late as eleven, the kids were staying up later and later to meet her and get a mother's touch for bedtime. Last week it was getting ridiculous, up past midnight, sleeping until almost noon. To help get them back to normal I gave them a propaganda campaign, Ben Franklin's saying, "Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise." At the same time I lured our toughest egg, just turned eight-year-old Tomaso, out of bed with a film each morning. The most effective of all was a boxed set of Spielberg’s "Back to the Future" trilogy that I had picked up for a song. After seeing the first movie it was murder keeping him away from the next film in the series all day. I had to keep saying, "I had to wait years to see the next one when they were made back in the Eighties so you can certainly tough it out for one day." As expected, it was very easy to get him up early in the morning to see the next installment. Now he is constantly making time machines out of Lego pieces, and each new contraption comes with its own time-traveling "flux capacitor," just like in the films.

This morning I read an article, intriguingly but rather deceptively named "Memories of the Future, How your mind can slip through time," on the cover of the March 24, 2007 edition of New Scientist magazine. The gist of it is that new brain imaging techniques have found that the brain uses the same neural circuitry to reconstruct past events as it does to imagine future events. Not just similar, but the exact same hardware lights up when we remember as when we plan and anticipate.

We get this new understanding from the unintentional sacrifice of those poor blighters who suffered brain trauma and amnesia. Memory is no longer divided into just short and long term, there are now known to be several kinds of long term memory, broadly divided into semantic (knowledge of facts), episodic (memories of events in our lives) and procedural (knowing how to do something, like play the piano). Each of these has its corollary in our imagination of future events. Endel Tulving of the University of Toronto teased some of this understanding from a patient known as KC., whose loss of episodic memory meant that, hooked up to the new imaging contraptions, Tulving could see that his memory loss wiped out also his ability to see himself in past or future. (Future Recall, Jessica Marshall, New Scientist, 26 March, 2007, p. 37)

Of course Alice in Wonderland learned this when she was told that the only time you can ask for directions is when you know where you want to go, and to distinguish your goal you must remember where you have been. Nonetheless, the author says that this is an important finding because it is known that we spend on average twelve percent of our waking time musing about future events. Our reveries are not wasted time -- as the New Agers and meditation gurus would have us believe -- but are necessary for planning, essential to the examined planning of civilized life. We all, in effect need to spend at least one moment in ten in that place the Spielberg movies call "back to the future."

After reading this article I could not help but think of Baha'u'llah's masterpiece, the Kitab-i-Iqan. The greatness of the Iqan rests in just what this research uncovers. Prophesy is literature concerned with our collective episodic memory, and our future sense. The Iqan therefore addresses our religious memory and, at the same time, our anticipation center, our religious sensibility, the thing that drives us to see ourselves, and put ourselves into, a bright future.

Now I see why the Bab and Baha'u'llah portray the Iqan as the "key" that opens up past prophesy, and why that is significant -- as a former atheist I used to think, who cares about prophesy? It confirms what was written thousands of years ago, so what? Now I see that the same "key" that opens up the past also works on our future, our faculty for planning.

Before this Revelation, religious teaching was all it could be, a vector pointing towards a distant future when, it was vaguely anticipated, an individual would be free to plan. I plainly see: if, as Jesus said, `the truth will set you free,' the fact that freedom has always been so rare and exclusive meant that truth was incomplete, as yet not wholly grasped. There must be a civilization, an order of peace, equality, justice and freedom in order for past and future episodic memory to reflect the whole, un-obscured by prejudice.

The pre-Iqan world was a time of prophesy because the episodic memory of the Adamic cycle was incomplete. Religion ended in prophesy, vague prediction of something big happening sometime way off in an unimaginable future, a future not memorable, since humanity had not written what Kant predicted would one day be called a "cosmopolitan history." There were regional, ethnic and sectarian histories, but nothing universal. A cosmopolitan history would be a unified history of the entire human race, not a part, not apart.

The Iqan is God's gift, a spiritual cosmopolitan history. Without it there would be no way to imagine or plan out future acts of will. It portrays our collective place in the past and at the same time enables us to see and plan our own future within the Plan of God. Thanks to this book, souls from around the world got a vision of the past, the concept we now term "progressive revelation," and that led at the same time to a beatific vision of a better, united future. This double stimulus prompted them -- without indoctrination, on their own initiative -- to give up home and homeland to go wherever the Plan of God beckoned. Thanks to this book, even today believers, even children, are suffering mockery and martyrdom in order to follow what Baha'u'llah in the Epistle to the Son of the Wolf calls the "ban" of God.

The significance of "back to the future" is not just that we use the same mental muscle for reveries about past and future experience. This way of working things out is not just a quirk of brain anatomy; it is a reflection of twin attributes of God, twin attributes that it took Twin Manifestations to pound into our consciousness. The following passage from the Iqan points out that this memory and future faculty in our skulls reflects two attributes, God as Witness (memory) and God as Impeller (anticipation). This I just now uncovered when these musings prompted me to look once more into the Iqan,

 

"As the commentators of the Qur'an and they that follow the letter thereof misapprehended the inner meaning of the words of God and failed to grasp their essential purpose, they sought to demonstrate that, according to the rules of grammar, whenever the term "idha" (meaning "if" or "when") precedeth the past tense, it invariably hath reference to the future. Later, they were sore perplexed in attempting to explain those verses of the Book wherein that term did not actually occur. Even as He hath revealed:
"And there was a blast on the trumpet, -- lo! it is the threatened Day! And every soul is summoned to a reckoning, -- with him an impeller and a witness." (Qur'an 50:20)
"In explaining this and similar verses, they have in some cases argued that the term "idha" is implied. In other instances, they have idly contended that whereas the Day of Judgment is inevitable, it hath therefore been referred to as an event not of the future but of the past. How vain their sophistry! How grievous their blindness! They refuse to recognize the trumpet-blast which so explicitly in this text was sounded through the revelation of Muhammad.
"They deprive themselves of the regenerating Spirit of God that breathed into it, and foolishly expect to hear the trumpet-sound of the Seraph of God who is but one of His servants! Hath not the Seraph himself, the angel of the Judgment Day, and his like been ordained by Muhammad's own utterance? `Say: What! Will ye give that which is for your good in exchange for that which is evil? Wretched is that which ye have falsely exchanged! Surely ye are a people, evil, in grievous loss.'" (Kitab-i-Iqan, pp. 115-116)