The Seven Mysteries of Life

by Guy Murchie

  Yet a close study of history shows that the great religious teachers, as distinct from their apostles, are spiritually related in ways closely analogous to the relations between the different teachers in a school. The first-grade teacher of six-year-old children, for instance, can appear just as autediluvian to teen-age high school students as the high school teacher is incomprehensible to the six-year-olds. But the teachers of all grades are members of the same school system, hired by the same superintendent, who was appointed by the same school board. They are not opposed to each other and the main difference between them is that they are teaching children of different ages and different degrees of understanding. In other words, they are adapting their language, teaching techniques and discipline to the dissimilar needs of the pupils before them.

  So has it ever been with the Prophets of God who teach mankind. Moses gave his crude followers the law now known as the Mosaic Code, instructing them: "thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth," etc. (Exodus 21:23 - 24). It was of course a brutal and seemingly vengeful principle of justice in the light of present times. Yet, as the first moral code recorded by, history and consigned to that primitive tribe of Jews more than three thousand years ago, it had the virtue of meting out swift, direct; clean-cut justice in an age before jails had been invented. And it gave the tribe a strict discipline for enforcing the highest standard of morality then known. It was both progressive and good in the time and place of Moses.

  When Jesus appeared 1300 years later, however, western civilization was out of the cradle, having lived through the Golden Age of Greece, seen the rise of Rome and perfected writing 'and the pooling of knowledge on a large scale. Clearly man was ready for a more advanced spiritual code. So Christ taught him, instead of returning evil for evil, to turn the other cheek and love his enemy. And religion thereby took a giant step forward.

  Then came Muhammad to the very backward land of Arabia 600 years later, advancing spiritual law another step by establishing reasonable property rights, limiting polygamy to four wives, prohibiting intoxicating drinks, etc.

  And, in the nineteenth century, Baha'u'llah arose out of medieval Persia, offering the modern world the most enlightened teaching it has yet seen, with prime emphasis on unity, brotherhood, universal education, reasonableness, a global language and a world government - all urgent needs of the present day.

  Each of these mystic figures, it is now becoming evident, serves as a vital link in the endless chain of progressive divine revelation, the sublimely integrated succession that goes back into the eons of longforgotten prophets of prehistory and will continue into the unimaginable future ages of prophets still undreamed. It is a sequence remarkably parallel to the afore-mentioned chain of progressive revelation in science, although the major teachers in religion, tend to be farther apart in time than the great scientists and, to a greater degree, they feel and express the mystic relationship between themselves, each not only honoring his predecessors but intuitively prophesying the advent of his still more exalted successors in millenniums to come.

  Thus, for example, is Jesus reported to have 'told his disciples at the Last Supper (John 16:12 - 13): "I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit when he, the Spirit of Truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth..." This prophecy, though variously interpreted, was fulfilled eighteen centuries later by Baha'u'llah, who specifically declared himself none other than the very Spirit of Truth referred to at the Last Supper, his life becoming his great testament to the fact. And the circumstance that he is the most recent of the great prophets, whose message was directed and timed to reach the majority of mankind at the height of Earth's germination period, seems to me reason enough to heed the promise of his still new, but steadily growing, Baha'i Faith.

  SCIENCE AND RELIGION

  Not least of its teachings, I must not fail to mention, and one not only unique among world revelations but germane to our times, is the principle that everyone is entitled to his or her own independent investigation of truth, a human right that leads naturally into the singularly satisfying concept of the essential harmony of science and religion as integral parts of one whole. "Science and religion are as the two wings of a bird," wrote Baha'u'llah in one of his nearly two hundred books and tablets. "And the bird is mankind, which cannot fly on one wing alone. For the wing of science, if it lacks the insight of religion to balance it, leads to materialism. And the wing of religion, unguided by the reasonableness of science, leads to superstition." I am reassured to find Einstein in agreement when he said that "science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be." And "though religion may determine the goal, it nevertheless learns from science, in the broadest sense, what means will contribute to the goal's attainment." In sum, "science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." And I have no reason to doubt that Baha'u'llah was presciently honoring Einstein among others when he emphatically described the pioneers of science and philosophy as the "eyes" of humankind.

  The idea that the invisible universe is more real than the visible one indeed has never been so widely accepted by practical scientists as now in this climactic century. But it is far from a new notion to seers and philosophers for, don't forget, Aristotle called life "spirit pervading matter," a concept all the great religions would heartily endorse. Some adherents of this doctrine may have been distracted, I surmise, by the perennial philosophy of solipsism which considers life nothing but a dream - not a world dream but a private dream dreamed all by oneself. If true, this would make both the visible, material universe and the invisible, nonmaterial one unreal and imaginary, something existing only in your mind or mine, yet as a concept, to my knowledge, it has never been successfully disproved. However it seems to be but a quibblous, semantic argument resolvable only arbitrarily according to whether you define this world as something subjective or objective. Whichever you call it, the world of course remains whatever it is, so whether you are a solipsist or not hardly, affects the Universe and has no conclusive bearing on how you should deal with it.

  The real Earth meanwhile spins on unheeding, inexorably tooling up for a maturity no man can fathom. And because its horizon of mystery continues to expand at a velocity much greater than that of knowledge (one proposed equation being vm=vk2 in which the velocity of mystery equals that of knowledge squared) there is no more chance of eliminating it than of escaping one's own shadow under the sun. So the philosophy of mysticism emerges as eminently reasonable, even without considering its accordance with the beliefs of the greatest modern scientists and the profoundest prophets of God. And mysticism therefore would seem the proper approach for a humble and contemplative passenger on this solar vessel - pragmatic enough for daily use yet fully embracing the newly realized reality of the nonmaterial world, of fields that influence, of waves that convey, of minds that pervade.

  SPIRAL GRAIN OF THE UNIVERSE

  If impalpable space thus turns out to be not nothingness but a mystic presence, we may ask of what it is made beyond the already mentioned sparsely strewn molecules of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and dozens of life-harboring compounds. What is its structure? Does it have any definable grain or measurable texture that could be thought of as an integral part of it - as put there, say, when "God created the heaven" in the first verse of Genesis, while the earth was still "without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep" - a "deep," by the way, that must have been incomparably vaster than the unconceived, unborn oceans of the then nebulous, cometlike earth?

  Yes, the firmament as we now know it in our finitude of space-time has a grain. Its grain is spiral with a propensity toward abstract nodes or waists as in an hourglass. A geometer might say it is singularly moniliform and plurally spiroid. The waistlike nodes are abstractions of relationship involving space and time and centering on all entities of life, on molecules, spores. seeds. eggs, germ cells and organisms, every one of which is descended from an ancestry spreading out behind it in a
funnel shape toward the past of all life as well as potentially forward in a similar funnel into the future (page 358).

  Spirality pervades the Universe concretely and abstractly, visibly and invisibly. Not only do the galaxies of stars tend to this rotary form, and possibly the supergalaxies or even the Universe itself, but the spiroid theme dominates the courses and shapes of bodies and substances all the way down into the atom. The elliptical orbit of any moving body or particle inevitably spirals in time through space, uttering the world lines of the sun, moon, stars and planets. And fluids both liquid and gaseous, as we have seen, corkscrew their way ahead - the great currents in the ocean, rivers, whirlpools, hurricanes and jet streams in the sky and all the smaller storms from thunder cells and tornadoes down to dust devils in the desert, snowdrifts around a post and smoke plumes out of chimneys - even the celestial streams of plasma with their dark vortex spots on the sun and stars. The shapes of trees (including family trees), vines and most plants and their roots also tend to the helix, as do the forms of shells, certain crystals such as stalagmites, bones, pine cones, flowers, seeds, muscle fibers, worms, fungus mycelium and the molecules within them, particularly protein, long nerve cells and the twisted double-helix DNA in genes - and so on and on to the abstract lines of all genetic connections in evolution, gyrating magnetic lines, invisibly curved space and, more than likely, the still undefined cores of atomic nuclei all eventually transcending into Urgrund, the space-timeless abstraction of Infinitude.

  THE RELATIVITY OF GOD

  Just where or how any guiding mystic force or God fits into all this cosmic geometry is hard to say. But if "the world is a becoming," as Martin Buber said, and "we continually create it," all material structure may be considered a kind of script whose interrelations, like all geometric relations, depend on which of various possible viewpoints is used and are therefore, in essence, relative. So let us consider the relativity of God, relativity being a general principle that, in my view, almost surely pervades all things and non-things. When you were a baby, for instance, your mother presumably served as God in relation to you - in an inescapable if impersonal way before birth, and through the expression of an autocratic but very personal love after birth. Virtually everything good that came to you then, such as milk and love and coziness, seemed to be bestowed by her. And no doubt a few things "not so good," including an occasional scolding or a restraining slap, for of course she was sovereign and almighty - at least relatively speaking.

  Comparable to this, more or less, may be the relation between a man and his dog. Or between a dog and his fleas, to whom the dog also represents God to the extent of being an incomprehensible source of sustenance, comfort and occasional discipline. To a flea, getting scratched or bitten by one's native habitat is a discipline akin, I suppose, to that experienced by a stone-age man getting battered by a thunderstorm, an attack he is well known to have attributed, when he first evolved the power to think, to the anger of a god. Moreover, if the dog symbolizes divinity to the flea, and the flea in turn to the microbes dwelling upon it, there may be no realistic limit to the relativity of God in the still unknown hierarchies of parasitism, neither deeper down in the microcosm, higher up in the macrocosm, nor anywhere in the mystic, intangible echelons of mind and spirit.

  You may never have thought of it this way but, if you are accustomed to swatting mosquitoes, flies or other "bugs" that invade your home, and if you help birds, pets, plants or needy creatures of any kind, you are influencing evolution directly, even playing the part of a god in relation to the lives and deaths of some of these beings, to whom your motives may be just as inscrutable as your own deity's motives are inscrutable to you. At the very least this analogy is germane to the relativity of godliness and I think the Apostle Paul must have been acutely aware of such a principle when he wrote to the Corinthians that "the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men." If he was right to suggest God might appear foolish from any viewpoint, even from a divine one, who can say what profundities of wisdom and divinity may soar beyond Elysium? And who can be sure there is any finite number of the "many mansions" of the Lord?

  WHY THE WORLD?

  It is obvious that many if not the majority of people regard the earth as basically a material world. And their number, I suppose, includes most astronauts, despite their rare advantage of an outside view. But at least one of them, Edgar D. Mitchell, saw more - for he wrote: "The first thing that came to mind as I looked at ... planet Earth floating in the vastness of space ... was its incredible beauty ... a blue and white jewel suspended against a velvet black sky ... The presence of divinity became almost palpable and I knew that life in the universe was not just an accident based on random processes. This knowledge came to me directly - noetically ... an experiential cognition."

  It made me think of the time many years earlier when philosopher William Ernest Hocking asked his students at Harvard whether they would like to go to a remote but hospitable planet where they would be free to take advantage of any of innumerable opportunities, including living out their lives in any form of society they preferred with absolutely no interference from outside. When a few allowed it would be exciting, if true, he casually remarked, "Well, it is true. Right now you are on a remote planet, floating free and independent in the universe, and you actually have a chance to make any dream you dream come true - if you really want it badly enough!"

  That indeed is the exciting circumstance in which man finds himself on Earth. Could anyone dream up a truer challenge? A more vital and precarious situation? It's almost as if the angels above were ripping out their feathers in frustration, imploring God, "Where can we find a place dangerous enough for those humans to live on? What do You say, Sir, to a tiny drop of splash balancing between a star too hot to touch and the cold surrounding ink of nothingness?"

  That, for better or worse, is your Earth, dear reader. She is not exactly a picnic grove. Materially she is not even your home - but rather, in the long run, your tomb. Yet, if she ever proves unsuitable, might you not go elsewhere? In which case, I wonder if you would still be you. Or, regarding your body, is it you? Or yours? Or is it the world's?

  EVOLUTION OF THE IMPOSSIBLE

  Speaking of the world, now it comes to me that a real and critical portion of it is factually impossible. I mean its history literally is centered on an endless sequence of miracles that one by one come true. In 1,000,000 B.C. it was a miracle to kindle a fire. In 10,000 B.C. it was a miracle to grow one's own food. In 5000 B.C. a wheel was a miracle. So was metal. And riding a horse. And sailing the ocean. As recently as A.D. 1400 printing a book (on movable type) was a miracle. In 1700 an engine was a miracle. In 1780 human flight was a miracle. In 1835 instantaneous long-distance communication was a miracle. In 1950 space travel was a miracle. And these miracles go on - and on - without end.

  The biggest miracle of all, excitingly enough, may be that the world can exist under such an unbelievable system, that it actually operates without central senses amidst so much destruction, waste and woe - riding its inexplicable paradoxes.

  "What have we done," cries mankind, "to deserve such treatment? Why does God try us so?"

  The key philosophical question then boils down to: why the world? What are we here for? Specifically, why were you and I conceived such sorry worms upon a troublous mote named Earth?

  It is a tough one. Scientists and philosophers have wrestled with it for millenniums to meager avail, while the world waxes not only much more complex, drastic and mysterious than we imagine but (as biologist J. B. S. Haldane once allowed) even much more so than we can imagine. Pondering why the Almighty - assuming there is One - would permit such imperfection in His realm, they have not come up with any completely convincing theories. But one of the better among recent ones is "process theology," which postulates that God, along with His universe, is in a perpetual process of development. This is based in large part on the natural science philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead,
a mathematician who added the time dimension to static medieval concepts of absolutism so they would be more compatible with the findings of modern physics, biology, evolution and even psychology. Although it limits God, from a human viewpoint, by associating Him with a finite time field, process theology compensates, as I understand it, by permitting His all-knowingness to be explained by making all life an actual part of His experience. Thus what you and I do and think, God feels and knows eternally through our senses, our lives, our aspirations, our sacrifices, our creations, along with all such everywhere. In fact, if being the Creator means He has to create creatures, we creatures inevitably must be a vital part of Him, so that even our own small creations in turn become subreflections of His creatorship. And, to the extent that God's experience (essentially complete and therefore past in respect to Him) is also our experience, it is just as surely incomplete and therefore present in respect to us. In this way, even without overstepping the explored confines of our mortal space-time continuum, God's ancient suffering can be our present living, and our temporary pains and doubts and struggles and slow evolutions an indispensable jot of His eternal almightiness.

  THE SOUL SCHOOL

  Although the promotion of earthly woe to an aspect of divine experience noticeably helps us in facing life's adversities, we need even more the principles of polarity and transcendence if we are really to explain why adversity is important and (as I believe) actually vital to our progress as spiritual beings. Thus at last we arrive at the only hypothesis for the nature of this troubled world that fits all the known facts - the hypothesis that planet Earth is, in essence, a Soul School.

  Such is not what I'd call a solemn conclusion, even though fraught with meaning. For the soul is the part of us that is incorporeal, immortal and made of spirit, and it should be joyous news to mankind that a Soul School has been found, in which we are duly enrolled, in which raising souls is the prime goal. Indeed I feel like shouting: "Praise God, O humans, for your problems - the worse the better and look for more - because problems are what you are made of." For they are woven into the very texture of the world and every pain and trouble is food for the spirit without which it cannot grow.