by Guy Murchie
Evidence in this direction can be seen in the unusual work of anthropologist Cohn Turnbull, who wrote about the starving (and apparently devolving) Ik tribe in central Africa, pointing out that although love seems (in face of the desperate competition for food) to have virtually disappeared from among them, hatred has also disappeared, leaving them in a state of neutral apathy. Thus we see a rare and pointed illustration of polarity and the complementarity of good and evil, each of which implies the other, while no known tribe, nation or world that possesses one of them is completely lacking the other.
Could it be that love and hate obey laws resembling those of magnetism, where poles of opposite charge attract each other while like ones repel? Certainly psychologists know that the normal human tends to be put off by any other human who closely resembles himself - almost surely because what's called negative comparison is a threat to self-esteem.
And success and failure are another polar pair of major significance in life and their sensitive feedback relation is being increasingly studied by imaginative educators, who have remarked that illness (particularly of psychoneurotic types) seems to have been of creative importance in the lives of Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln (coincidentally born the same day), Florence Nightingale, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sigmund Freud, Marcel Proust and many other very successful people. In fact of a list of thirty-five of the "greatest geniuses in all history" 40 percent were judged to have had "sharp mental disorders," while 90 percent were at least "psychopathic." Could Einstein's failure to learn to talk until he was three and his being discharged from his first three jobs as an adult have been factors in his later achievement? It always used to be assumed that children want and need to be understood, but recent findings suggest that in many cases they not only want and need, but actually depend on, a solid foundation of misunderstanding in order to develop self-reliance and mature as independent-thinking adults. This could well have been true in the cases of young Einstein, who dropped out of school in disgrace, of young Ulysses S. Grant at the bottom of his class, of young Tom Edison, a "hopeless" scholar, and countless others.
The mental and spiritual aspects of success or failure of course have their own polarities, which seem related to what one could call the curiously elusive complementarity of happiness-unhappiness. Indeed attempts to define the poles of spirit are rare. Yet I've heard of an experiment in which monkeys were given mechanical puzzles, which they soon learned to enjoy working "just for the fun of it." But two weeks later a new rule was made and any monkey who solved a puzzle was rewarded with food. Then, after a happy month, the rewards were arbitrarily stopped - and the monkeys, obviously upset, refused to do any more puzzles. Which, I would say, supports the concept of relativity in fun or happiness. For, compared to nothing, the puzzles were fun. But, compared to puzzles for food, the puzzles were the bunk.
I've noticed the same thing in human lives: that happiness is affected more by one's movement toward (or away from) success than by one's position near (or far from) it. Thus a famous king and conqueror, who has always had everything he wanted, but whose fortunes are slipping slightly, is less happy than a blind beggar, who never had anything he wanted, but has just found himself a tasty crust of bread. So the law of happiness says happiness waxes and wanes in direct proportion to a sense of progress toward or away from a goal, a worthy cause, a creation, a companion to be loved. It is geared not to place but to direction and speed. It is not absolute but relative. It is based less on the concrete than on the abstract.
THE PARADOXES OF FREEDOM
As to the polarity of freedom, it seems to be an ancient and double paradox that can be analyzed from two notable aspects: first, freedom as the complement of enslavement; second, freedom of will as the antithesis of predestination.
Of the first, what do you think freedom of liberty really is anyway? Does it mean letting go of all restraints like a train that jumps its track? Does it require abandonment of every normal rule of behavior in the way of a mad dog or a runaway horse? I would venture to say not, for the train that leaps the rails is obviously about to turn into a wreck, and the mad dog can expect nothing so surely as a bullet in the head. Neither does an ideal such as is symbolized by the famous Statue of Liberty in New York harbor justify letting go of control, responsibility, consideration of others or any disregard of law. Most significantly, it does not imply even the slightest violation of the laws of nature.
If a violin string is lying on a table loose and detached from any violin, some might suppose it "free" because it is unconstrained. But what, one should ask oneself, is it "free" to do or be? Certainly it cannot vibrate with beautiful music in such a condition of limpness. Yet if you just fasten one end of it to the tailpiece of the violin and the other to a peg in the scroll, then tighten it to its allotted pitch, you have rendered it free to play. And you might say that spiritually the string has been liberated by being tied tightly at both ends. For this is one of the great paradoxes of the world to be seen and tested on every side: the principle of emancipation by discipline.
The second and related paradox of freedom is the age-old controversy of free will and destiny. How often have you wondered how some mystic source of foreknowledge, whether it be a Gypsy palmist or God Himself, can know with certainty that your planned trip to Bombay will actually take you there next month if it is true that you really are perfectly free to change your mind and remain in Chicago? For it isn't reasonable to suppose that a flexible free choice can possibly produce a foreseeable fixed outcome.
Yet the simple resolution of this paradox turns out to be nothing but the dimensional difference between the impinging perspectives of free will and fate. Imagine a hungry puppy coming to a corner where he has to choose between turning left toward a plate of dry fish bones abandoned by the cat, and turning right toward a dish of his favorite juicy hamburger. Naturally he feels (and is) quite free to make up his mind which way to go, though it takes only one sniff to decide him. But his master, looking down from a lordly height upon the episode and being familiar with the puppy's keen appetite, can prophesy the animal's choice with Olympian infallibility - for the master's extra dimension above the floor, particularly his superior altitude in intelligence and experience, gives him a lofty and relatively divine overview. Thus the puppy's simple two-dimensional decision is revealed to be in no way at odds with his master's more sophisticated three-dimensional precognition in favor of hamburger. For the puppy is free to do what he wants although not free to want what he wants, and his free will and fate interrelate like a flat 2-D picture and a solid 3-D model of the same thing.
THE TOOL OF POLARITY
There is literally no end to polarity's ubiquity in this, or probably any, world. As man evolves tools, tools in turn evolve man - and his invention of the hammer naturally leads to the birth of responsibility for its use. So do times of peril test the soul. But while it isn't always apparent that darkness is vital to light, the pupil of the eye, the blackest part of most people's bodies, is actually the part that lets in the most light to the interior, being the aperture through which you see the outside world.
The profoundest polarity of all, however, may be the fact that not only did the Creator create all the creatures of the worlds but those same creatures in turn had to come into existence in order to fulfill the Creator. If true, it would be comparable to the way man created the alphabet, the computer and all the rest of technology that fulfills. and thereby helps create, him in return - both subject and object being integral as well as reciprocal aspects of one whole.
Our polarized Earth rolls on meanwhile, a world in which love's door is hinged with pain, evil spawns good and hate cannot exist without love - a world in which easing another's heartache always helps one's own. And, in the way that a part of every wheel or body must move backward to propel its whole forward, life itself advances in waves, never permanently deterred by corruption or evil.
This is the essence of polarity
. Indeed, in Baha'u'llah's words, "Through transgressors... God's loving-kindness is diffused among men." And through the diffusion, nature in her wisdom is bound to keep on trying, patiently, inscrutably - while her multievolutions unfold, groping but not blind, plying her celestial tools of error, monstrosity, war and evil to find her answers, to steer her course - that life in the large may ultimately be more beautiful and more fulfilling.
Chapter 19
Fifth Mystery: Transcendence
* * *
THE WORD "TRANSCENDENCE" means going beyond common experience. And, with usage, it has come to signify something on the order of an extradimensional state exceeding anything you could call familiar on Earth.
So it isn't surprising that we do not notice transcendence by looking upon our planet from space. For although she has sprouted fresh areas of green and yellow in recent millenniums and now is breaking out in sudden lakes and delicate webs of cities and highways, the earth remains materially almost the same old cloud-flecked world she has long long been. Transcendence, in other words, is not material so much as mental. And, to an even greater degree, spiritual. So it could hardly be perceivable except by a sensitive spirit who can look on the invisible ups and downs of feeling on Earth and comprehend them.
A news item says: "A band of criminals has disrupted the government by raiding the treasury. Their gang rule has made money so scarce that many farm hands are out of work and few farmers can afford to hire them." It was published on papyrus in the city of Memphis, Egypt, in the year of recession: 3068 B.C.
Another report quotes a top leader in education as complaining that "children nowadays are tyrants. They not only talk back to their parents, teachers and elders, but expect every luxury, gobble their food, chatter incessantly and sneer at any attempt to control them." This from Socrates in the fifth century B.C.
If it makes you wonder whether the Earth is getting anywhere with all her struggle for peace and prosperity, it may also cast perspective on our continuing difficulty in judging the spirit of mankind in view of the meagerness of knowledge available to us - even now. The ancients evidently thought the world and nature were getting to be pretty well known and that man was all set in his dominance of Earth - so much so in fact that an Egyptian author of the Twelfth Dynasty (c. 1900 B.C.) wrote that his greatest problem was "the difficulty of saying anything new."
Yet every century or two a voice would arise to express some degree of awareness of what might be called transcendence. There were the Prophets of God such as Moses, who avowed "we spend our years as a tale that is told." And occasionally a natural philosopher or scientist like Herakleitos who went so far as to declare Homer misguided when he prayed, "Would that strife might perish from among gods and men!" because the poet hadn't realized he was asking for the destruction of the universe, since, should his prayer be answered, all things must pass away. Herakleitos obviously recognized the Polarity Principle and saw that "the sun is new every day" and "no man can step twice into the same river since the waters that flow upon him are ever fresh."
Such ideas naturally introduce the concept of transcendence, which, although elusive, is so important we can no longer avoid it. Further, it is a multiderivative of abstraction, omnipresence, polarity and other of the abstruse traits of the maturing Earth we have been talking about. Buddha hinted at it when he said that "neither being nor nonbeing, nor both being-and-non-being, nor neither-being-nor-non-being can express the existential purport and content of human reality." Christ spoke of it when he said, "Before Abraham was, I am." And Baha'u'llah, when he said, "No vision taketh in God, but God taketh in all vision."
Science of course is only one path toward truth and it admits its own limitations in everything from the Uncertainty Principle in the atom to the controversial curvature of the universe. There may be a consciousness amid molecules originating in quantized flashes of very short duration. And human consciousness may emerge through the integration of many flashes of trillions of molecules by a kind of weave of memory, a sattva, a recording of innumerable events into a coordinated stream of new dimension. Even electrons may choose their own paths - consciously. And the universe may be integrating all its component consciousnesses.
So we may as well also hearken to our dreams and drift with the world, which, after all, is not just a material structure but, as time conveys it, an abstract celestial flow where our thoughts are cells in a cosmic mind. Indeed out of one cell here comes the notion that it is in the nature of wisdom to have a beginning sometime some place and, from there, to sprout and grow. And, for all I know, this may be true even of God's wisdom - though of course the process of growth involves time, which presumably is no longer finite with God and therefore not restrictive as with us in our mortal phase. Also space fields seem to be provided for wisdom to experiment and grow in. Thus emerges a basic reason for time and space, which together make possible form and motion, without which meaning could hardly be understood. For form is an alphabet of sorts which makes possible language, including mathematics, and particularly the numbers needed to measure and define geometric form. This, I have a hunch, just may be the why of the whole material world, which appears to be a principal finite aspect of the greater mental-spiritual world - an aspect enclosed in mortal space-time fields especially designed for the evolution of spirit, which may show first through the faint feelings of plants, next the stronger senses of animals, then, with expanding consciousness, transcending toward thinking, while feeling and thinking gradually coordinate and blossom into a spiritually mature whole - which, from there, can further evolve and exuberate onward toward attributes and powers and joys and heavens we cannot yet imagine!
Transcendence naturally has a wide variety of aspects, as does evolution, with which it is associated - and all sorts of abstract factors and qualities. The miracles of one millennium (say firearms, the compass, flying, radio ...) tend to become the basic technology of the next, just as luxuries for the few often turn into necessities for the many. Then too, obscure arts like alchemy and astrology grow up to be vital sciences like chemistry and astronomy. But the major transcendences have to do with big abstractions like dimensions and virtues, the lower numbers in dimensions steadily unfolding into higher numbers, and what were once regarded as good skills (like killing a dangerous rival) being progressively demoted to bad acts, sins and eventually capital crimes. Meanwhile other transcendences specialize in dispersing, say, a particular advantage for one person outward into a general advantage for all. Or as individuals transcend into societies, societies transcend into world civilizations. And finitudes transcend into Infinitudes, mortals into Immortals, matter into mind into Spirit and, just possibly, creatures into their Creator.
EMERGENT TRANSCENDENCE
To grasp what all this may mean, let us step backward through time for a spell - I mean a goodly spell, like a dozen billion years or more, to what astrophysicists call the age of radiation, when the universe is thought to have been so young that matter had not yet formed and nothing was visible or perhaps even imaginable except in the cosmic mind of the Creator, assuming there was one. All we now have or know of was then only the potential of a far future still completely hidden in the vibrations of photons or whatever other subatomic particles there were. If mind or spirit existed, besides God's, it was presumably unmanifest and unknowable - for transcendence, if it could be called that, had barely begun to transcend. But gradually radiation evolved matter and matter evolved worlds and worlds turned out to be alive, self-sufficient and full of mystic potentiality. By self-sufficient I mean that life (including human life) eats, drinks and breathes the earth - and also the sun and the Milky Way and the universe. For are not bread and meat and rain part of the earth? And is not the earth part of the sun? And the sun part of the Milky Way and all of them part of the universe?
As for the individual self, we all recognize it is the prime focus of consciousness and, as such, one of the keys to transcendence, along with the dimensions of space and time t
hat define the spatial relations between things and other things on one hand and the temporal relations between things and themselves on the other. Space, time and self, in other words, are the three principal measures relating us to this finite world. They are the dimensional frame through which each of us individually impinges on what is commonly called reality. And the changes that gradually shift our relation to this frame, as by a slow inexorable law of nature, are what constitutes transcendence.
TIME TRANSCENDING
Let us begin with time, because that is the dimension that reveals transcendence to most of us first. Have you ever noticed that the years of your life are passing by faster nowadays than they used to? If you are fully grown, you can hardly have missed this common experience, which becomes more and more evident the older you get. But what is the cause of it? I have heard various theories, such as that metabolism in the brain somehow quickens with age, but the only explanation that withstands critical examination, so far as I know, is that each additional unit of time we live through is a smaller portion of our total experience.
To a newborn baby, time is naturally static and very little less so during his first few months, because he hasn't lived long enough to notice changes in things. To him Mother is just Mother. She is always the same: never was different, never will be different. And the hands of clocks don't move at all.