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Discourse of Abdu’l-Bahá at St. John’s, Westminster
September 17, 1911
The pictures of Divinity that comes to our mind are the product of our fancy; they exist in the realm of our imagination. They are not adequate to the Truth; truth in its essence cannot be put into words.
Divinity can not be comprehended because it is comprehending.
Man, who has also a real existence, is comprehended by God; therefore, the Divinity which man can understand is partial; it is not complete. Divinity is actual Truth and real existence, and not any representation of it. Divinity itself contains All, and is not contained.
Although the mineral, vegetable, animal, and man all have actual being, yet the mineral has no knowledge of the vegetable. It cannot apprehend it. It cannot imagine nor understand it.
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9/11 Freakouts and the Sheltered Mind
My first real exposure to Islam was as a teenager during the War on Terror. I don’t say this with pride but it’s earnest. I knew nothing of other religions aside from Judaism when I was a boy, mainly because I lived in a very white area of Pennsylvania. I had Jewish friends, so I understood Judaism exclusively as a faith rather than an ethnic tradition. I had a few Muslim friends that I played basketball with. That was the white suburban experience of Southeastern Pennsylvania, as far as I could tell.
The inflection point of 9/11 is both real and imaginary in the minds of the collective American psyche. The imaginary scars are plastered all over our politics, as the conservative party grows more reactionary by the day and our impotent form of liberalism does nothing except try to hold the reigns long enough to prevent a stampede. Police funding skyrocketed. Domestic terrorism departments were created and funded. Violent crime had already been declining and continued doing so, but fear continued unabated. The enemy was finally at the gates, and this time the enemy wasn’t an idea or a foreigner whose culture we ignore under the guise of mockery. I hesitate to use the royal “we” in these types of assessments, but I feel emboldened by decades of racist and xenophobic pop culture. Sometimes, the market does tell you stuff.
But the Arab World–and Islam specifically–arrived on our doorstep in 2001, forcing a reckoning upon those who had ignored the fact that we’d been bombing the Arab doorstep for decades. I’d go through the blow by blow, but one of the only good podcasts has already done such a stellar job that there’s no need. Blowback is not limited to the Arab World, though, as Noah Kulwin and Brendan James already show expertly in seasons 2 and 3 about Cuba and Korea respectively. Even that scope is limited, both by geography and time, as the conflict of Korea was itself an extension of cultural conflict and revolution in China, itself an extension of and onward and backward and stretched through lands and cultures, all of which have collapsed and been rebuilt again.
But the imaginary consequences of 9/11 manifest in a different way that can be explained by an old French guy named Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who developed the idea of the Noosphere–and whose book The Phenomenon of Man was a massive deal before being rejected by the New Atheist set as pseudoscience around the turn of the century.
The Earth Is One Giant Organism and We Are Its Synapses
The Noosphere isn’t pseudoscience in the same way that stuff like telekinesis is, and is instead a pretty well grounded and observable phenomenon: existence is completely and totally iterative. We’re a species of observed behavior, transmitting signals to each other constantly through action, but each of those signals builds on previously known and accepted definitions of existence. Culture moves glacially as a result–a tattooed man in an office was invisible in the 1980s, rare in the 90s, and surprising but common by the aughts, despite the fact that there wasn’t any official mandate or rule book about tattoos in the workplace. Instead, each day there was another tattooed person showing up to work until it just was what culture was. At scale, we normalize the behavior through the other contextual signifiers (i.e. observable traits like kindness and respect, or cultural signifiers like parenthood or careerism), and it ends up like tempering an egg into a carbonara without curdling it.
Over time, these become embedded as cultural knowledge, pieces of information wired into our DNA such that we return to them through generations. If that’s true for our behaviors, why wouldn’t it be true for our ideas? With an objective eye towards the history of non-homogenous cultures, it feels indisputable that there are multiple inflection points–some violent like 9/11 or The Crusades, some peaceful like traveling monks–for global consciousness throughout history; a sort of turning point where cultures observably begin to act differently after even relatively minor interactions with one another. Separate of spiritual reasons, one can marvel at the uncannily similar timeline between Buddhism and Christianity, for example, as similar disruptive approaches to consciousness that spread Eastward and Westward concurrently. Universal symbols of motherhood, violence, war, peace, sex that transcend cultures and religions are scattered in the wake of these new interpretations. An inherited and increasingly complex language is pushed forth from a massive lifeform at the same time in variant dialects, slowly coalescing. That’s the Noosphere, and it’s considered pseudoscience for the same reason all this stuff is: even it feels correct and one can observe it happening, one can’t observe any of this in a methodologically sound way, thereby negating the ability to conclusively determine cause and effect.
But what if the Noosphere isn’t a naturally progressive phenomenon but one that was manmade–or, at the very least, one whose progress could be restrained by mankind? That’s where history and reality meet for the reckoning of our shared pasts, all of which were impossible to see until North America finally had its first attack on home soil. The pieces were all there, it just didn’t make a lick of sense based on the company line. We needed to see the material world from someone else’s perspective, something that Americans had never, ever been forced to do.
The planes that crashed through the towers in New York City had to pass through an invisible sheen, undetectable to the naked eye, that enveloped the United States of America since the end of World War 2. After dropping a nuclear bomb on Japan and committing the most horrifying atrocity in history (both qualitatively and quantitatively, when considering the rate of bodies atomized per second), the United States took the place of the vengeful Old Testament God on the global stage. It was our job to meter out punishment, and to balance the scales of inequity around the world. That’s the narrative from the history books from public school when I was a kid, and it still mostly is, evidenced by the high proportion of people in the United States who are still under the mistaken impression that we were Nazi hunters instead of Nazi enablers. This mistaken impression, repeated over generations and reinforced by the official institutions of our culture, becomes more than mere factual inaccuracy over time. It becomes an identity. It becomes an ethos, and an ethos is a lifeform; an essential ingredient in the biosphere as advanced by groundbreaking scientist Vladimir Vernadsky in the early 20th century. We may not be able to observe it in a materially satisfactory way for modern science, but that doesn’t mean modern science dismisses the concept of the Noosphere. In fact, its pretty well-incorporated into how we think about the biosphere–i.e. the massive interdependence of all life and ecosystems on Earth.
We may not have seen it, but that ethos smothered the North American continent in a sort of comforting malaise; an overarching foundational belief that preceded all other observations of the material world. It’s not that Americans didn’t see the violence perpetuated by its foreign policy apparatus on other countries, on non-white people, on different religions and cultures, etc. It’s that this violence was always reinforcing the primary ethos that had suffocated our civilization. The violence was good when we couldn’t see it, because when we couldn’t see it, we could more easily believe the comforting narrative about what that violence was enabling around the world. The freedom, the end of dictatorships and authoritarian governments, all the things that were clearly not universal views such that one gets taught when young in America. There’s little to no mention of our forefathers spraying napalm all over Laos, thus negating any likelihood that they would love the United States and all of its cultural touchstones by proxy.
Our personal Noosphere had to be popped on 9/11 for a new understanding to wash over us in the way that it has the past decade or more. It’s not correct to say that we’re only now learning all of this stuff about what the United States has been doing in other countries. The knowledge has been there. The newspaper articles are archived and exist. The academic papers were written. The religious texts had been discovered, published, distributed. There’s plenty of pop culture that exists celebrating our imperial exploits rather than admonishing, curating a sense of justified understanding of American violence. Each of these things contains a lot of the essential information, but it’s the framing that makes the whole thing a trick:
Yes, we kill. But, we kill the bad guys, and we are loved by the good guys of all colors. We are liberators.
And it’s easy to maintain that fantasy until someone else’s God comes and flies a plane into the international symbol of Western capitalism. And for a while after the initial shock, the fantasy was maintained not by prosperity but brutality: the Muslims had drawn first blood (to those who didn’t consider Muslims human and therefore didn’t count all the bodies we piled up first), and it was time to satisfy the Old Testament God of the West. It makes me physically ill when I remember what was done in my name in Abu Ghraib, and it makes me mentally spiral to remember that those are just the stories that managed to escape, with incalculable atrocities undoubtedly committed when the witnesses were only the victim, perpetrator, and God. To this day, I have never heard a credible or convincing argument for why what the United States did and continues to do to the Arab world isn’t the same as Nazi tactics. Nobody’s been punished, and George W. Bush gets to go on TV to talk about his facile little paintings. C’est la vie.
But to say that nothing changed after the revelations of our actions in Afghanistan would be little more than nihilistic posturing, and something that is observably inaccurate. This is where the shift in the Noosphere feels most tangible: the material circumstances still look remarkably similar (millions starving in Afghanistan; a proxy war in Ukraine with plurality / near consensus support among elected officials) but there’s a palpable qualitative difference to this moment. The “left,” such that one exists in America, has more popular support than ever among voters, albeit with little to show for it thus far at the national level. Antiwar and anti-American political discourse is relatively mainstreamed now (albeit not on the major cable networks or corporate news outlets), compared to the level of censorship in the wake of 9/11 that saw prominent activists like Ward Churchill turned into pariahs for wondering in writing whether we provoked the attack with our own human rights atrocities.
From Horseshoe to Loop: Baháʼu'lláh and Unavoidable Comprehension
The mind can’t unlearn something. The world may be transient in terms of how it materializes in front of us, but existence is not transient. It continues onward at all times, gathering momentum with each new thought expressed by a human being as though it were a pebble gathering snow as it rolls down a mountainside. The brilliant and holy Persian prophet Baháʼu'lláh observed this in Iran and was persecuted immensely for his beliefs. Baháʼu'lláh noticed that all religions weren’t just closely related in parable and meaning, but that the parables and meanings evolved alongside humanity and merely became expressed in increasingly advanced ways. Baháʼu'lláh’s teachings are the basis for the Bahai faith, the most recent of the major world religions (not counting the money cults in the West).
The great Prophet saw the thruline of history as more than just some juvenile reflection of the modes of production. Material circumstances may dictate our reactive impulses and instincts, but it does very little to account for the divine spark; the persistent instinct throughout history to do more than survive but thrive. We gain that power and strength through unity, but that desire occurs at the individual level, actualized through shared experience. This is the divine spark. This is the piece of creation that broke off into every human being, a concept that has been present in human life since the earliest parts of religious thought and confirmed later by science when it was proven that we’re all made up of the same materials from the Big Bang. There’s God knows how much of it inside you, fractured and compartmentalized, but there’s also no element here on Earth that wasn’t in the cosmos 100 million years ago, so it’s in there.
This is the foundational teaching of the Baháʼí faith, founded by followers of Baháʼu'lláh. The school of thought takes a step further than Western Unitarian Universalism by being far more prescriptive about how observable this spiritual development of consciousness has been. That’s natural. The Great Prophet was looking at the world with an eye on history that the Englishman Theophilus Lindsay, the founder of Unitarianism, would never have been capable of seeing from his perspective and the Western perspectives that had been fed to him up to that point, all descended of the same Orientalist demonization of anything non-white.
Baháʼu'lláh made observations that beg the question: is the whole of existence actually transient? If our universe is a closed loop system, as science dictates, then it would follow that while manifestations of what we consider physical existence are transient, the matter that creates consciousness is not. We can’t observe the machinations that create it, and it’s possible that it all falls apart when one experiences physical death, but that’s about as far as one can go with any conclusions about “the end.” If human beings act in accordance with the observable natural world as scientific frameworks say, then that would imply that physical death isn’t the end of anything, because thus far there is no observable end to our world. There are models that predict a heat death of the universe, but those are just numbers a person came up with for a future that’s so far off it might as well be imaginary.
Imagine that physical death is the only death. That everything that led to it will remain, including whatever forward strides one’s consciousness may have made during its time on Earth. That the ideas and the hurt and the happiness and the suffering continue onward not just with those who descend of one’s flesh but in the Noosphere, the global collective consciousness that Teilhard tackled from the faith-based perspective and Verdansky tackled from the scientific perspective. Ideas and understanding are not transient but iterative, and the great Prophet Baháʼu'lláh noticed the thruline of the development of human consciousness from the oldest known Vedic texts from prehistory through Islam and onward. There is nothing in our consciousness that is not present and accounted for in the ancient Vedic schools of thought, these things have just elaborated and reworked based on the experiences of trillions upon quadrillions of minuscule bursts of synaptic lightning dispersed randomly through minds that may or may not have had the ability to communicate them to others.
The Cowardice of Catholicism
It’s patently false to say that Islam arrived in the West after 9/11, obviously, but 2001 was a reckoning that the West couldn’t avert its eyes from. Since then, there’s been countless texts analyzing it from every angle, the cultural impact on the United States, the debates about Islam as an ideology and whether it’s more or less oppressive than other systems of government around the world. These are all very silly things to think about outside of the United States, where Islam has more history than we’ll every hope to achieve here. These are very silly things to think about that are only enabled in the world’s most self-obsessed and historically ignorant culture.
What isn’t often discussed–and has only been made possible by the penetration of our own self-contained Noosphere such that the United States was forced to join the rest of the world’s consciousness–is whether or not the roots of 9/11 are all the way back in the 11th century. When Air America liberals from the aughts would talk about Islam’s relationship to Christ as a sort of “gotcha” to the evangelicals, they weren’t correct, as is typically the case with the smug liberalism of the Northeastern aesthete. Islam historically has engaged with Christianity quite a bit, but not ours. Imams in Iran have credited Ethiopia and the Aksumites, for example, with saving the true Islam by taking in the relatives of Muhammad, peace be upon his name, after his physical death. Despite its favorable and peaceful coexistence with the Coptic Christians and Ethiopian Tewahedo, Islam has pretty justified issues with the Catholic Church, though, especially after the sacking of Jerusalem in the Crusades. It turns out when a bunch of white Europeans ride in on horses cutting heads off and raping everything in sight before proceeding to never leave, it causes some tension that compounds over time. It’s easy to look at the “Middle East” broadly and focus in on the tribal factions and disputes and assess them as though one is a casual observer. With that kind of magnified view, the United States temporarily looks sane. But it wasn’t that sane just a very short time ago. And the Western way of life appears to be back in the same drain circling pattern it was a century ago.
What happened in September of 2001 created permanent damage to the United States in all the observable forms that have been examined and re-examined. The security state and increased policing at home. Espionage, operatives, and censorship in the media that’s never been resolved since the 1970s, considering the revolving door relationship between high profile media entities and White House administrations. These are all reflections of a broader change that I’ve been struck by recently, though, as shows like Blowback grow in popularity and create indisputable counter narratives to the garbage one gets fed in high school. Perspective that would have never been possible before the protective ozone sheen of post-War American foreign policy was forever destroyed by a counternarrative.
At the root of all persistent religions and ideologies is an essential truth, and when one traces each of these truths far enough, the complications are stripped away. Right and wrong becomes far more tangible. Karma becomes more than something as silly as the human conception of “if I’m nice, I’ll get a reward.” Imbalance is scientific, and the Noosphere is rather simple to prove, in my humble opinion, counter to the New Atheists like Richard Dawkins and the evolutionary biology types. It feels unavoidable to acknowledge that the post-war sprint from religion during the War on Terror on the Left was born of an instinct of self-defense, because to truly reckon with religion would be to acknowledge the unavoidable traps of Western philosophy. It seems equally unavoidable to conclude that this newfound “reengagement” with Catholicism by political and artist types of all (predominantly white) stripes is to hide from a reckoning. But what if the essential texts also tell us that reckoning is avoidable. What if one is meant to pursue atonement, rather than reckoning?
One can’t observe consciousness in a scientific sense, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to perceive a karmic moral bend to the universe that helps dictate right and wrong, otherwise known as a Noosphere. After all, the only observably permanent state of existence is one of ignorance.
Have a Good Sunday. All the Best.
Casey