Evans Experientialism  Evans Experientialism
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 A Transformational Technology |
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| Mark A. Foster, Ph. D. http://markfoster.biz/ http://www.markfoster.net/ http://structurization.com/ |
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Mark A. Foster, Ph. D., is a traditional,
not a metrosexual, highly respected
Renaissance
man. He can offer you numerous online
and
face-to-face services. As a sociologist,
he has a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.
D. in
sociology) and a Master of Arts (M.
A. in
sociology).
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A Transformational Technology Mark A. Foster, Ph. D. A Transformational Technology & Bahá'í
Study Circle Proposal Mark A. Foster, Ph.D.
Introduction Structurization Tech™1, from The Structurization Institute™2, is a transformational technology, a Bahá'í deepening process, an original study circle3 proposal, and a nonacademic application of The Structurization Paradigm™4, including Structurization Theory™5 and Structurization Theism™6. It centers on the nominalist proposition of the absolute sovereignty of God. According to divine command theory, God's decree is good only because He wills it. Since there is, in God's measure, no virtue apart from His omnipotent Will or Teleology, good and evil do not function as fixed eternal essences or ideal forms. They are, instead, names for the actions, the Cause of God, resulting from His Will. From the standpoint of Structurization Tech, divine Will or Purpose applies soley to the intentionalities of God. Human spirits, as names for the God-given capacities associated with particular individuals, may permit a person to conform to God's Will or Purpose, but the Purpose is God's Will rather than a universal, or an innate, human essence. That is to say, since the purpose of man is God's Purpose for man, these spirits are powers, not purpose and powers. Just as God has a free Will, so each person has, with whatever limitations God may elect to impose, a free will, as well. The individual's choice is whether to conform to a personal nominalism, the supremacy of the human will posited by Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean Paul Sartre, and Aleister Crowley, or to the divine nominalisms promoted in certain texts of the so-called Abrahamic religions, including Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and the Bahá'í Faith. In the latter case, although one continues to acknowledge one's own will, without attempting to suppress it, one deliberately chooses to surrender to the Will of God. Nonetheless, if it were God's Will, the entire written Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh, or any portions thereof, could be discarded, much as He Himself was reported to have undertaken with certain of His Tablets. It is God and His Will, not His relative structurizations of reality or revelational language games, which should command our loyalty. Revelation, the Logos, is dependent on the Will of God; and His Will, or Covenant, takes precedence over His Word, or His Revelation, and His Cause, or His actions and Command. It is evident that the changes brought about
in every Dispensation constitute the
dark
clouds that intervene between the eye
of
man's understanding and the divine
Luminary
which shineth forth from the dayspring
of
the divine Essence. Consider how men
for
generations have been blindly imitating
their
fathers, and have been trained according
to such ways and manners as have been
laid
down by the dictates of their Faith.
Were
these men, therefore, to discover suddenly
that a Man, Who hath been living in
their
midst, Who, with respect to every human
limitation,
hath been their equal, had risen to
abolish
every established principle imposed
by their
Faith - principles by which for centuries
they have been disciplined, and every
opposer
and denier of which they have come
to regard
as infidel, profligate and wicked,
- they
would of a certainty be veiled and
hindered
from acknowledging His truth. There is no direct correspondence between words and realities. Even the divine Word, the Logos, constitutes an epistemically contingent transmission of God's Will to His servants. All descriptions of worlds or kingdoms, and of the content and ordering of spiritual conditions and substances, are discoursive symbol pictures. Numerous approaches to scriptural hermeneutics have been developed. The revealed Word (the knowledge of God) might be compared with a driver, historicism (the Prophetic ecology of the Messenger, the dialectical God-Man, and His Revelation situated in their original cultural, historical, bodily, and linguistic contexts) to the vehicle, and religous ecology (the recontextualizations of the revealed Word into multiple normative structurizations) to the destination. Given, therefore, that narratives are inexact and perspectival (as with the Jain doctrine of anakanta), allowing for diverse, even contradictory, divine and human reality constructions, one may simultaneously recognize, even advocate and celebrate, a radical multidoxy or polydoxy of variegated Bahá'í faiths and a similarly radical orthopraxy of covenantal obedience. Indeed, heresy (Greek, hairesis) is presented throughout the Christian New Testament, not as the benign presence of alternative beliefs, but as the self-willed promotion of malignant division. Since language has only an accidental or intentional relationship with particulars and their categories or connections, a linguistic contradiction is a contradiction. Likewise, the frameworks and taxonomies narrated in divine Revelations are contextual and constructed realities, historically relative treatments of relationships between the attributes of particulars, and language games, not concrete metaphysical systems. Thus, the inevitable contradictions between, often within, certain faith-based scriptures can only be resolved, if ever, in the linguistic texts of religiously authorized interpreters. The Seven Valleys presents one such language game. With it, we will begin at the end, in the condition of faná (self-annihilation), translated by Marzieh Gail as The Valley of True Poverty and Absolute Nothingness. The annihilation of self-will is the culmination of other spiritual attributes, or valleys, mentioned in this Tablet, including search, love, knowledge, and contentment. The Bahá'í wisdom teachers, Marian C. Lippitt7 and Henry A. Weil, have described, to their own understandings, additional language games found in the Bahá'í texts. Since many of their assumptions were grounded in essentialism, Aristotelian realism, or Platonic idealism, Structurization Tech, as a nominalist perspective, has relativized both their models. Indeed, one of its principal engagements is with a radical deconstruction of the Platonic and Aristotelian foundationalisms in Lippitt's and Weil's understandings of Bahá'í wisdom teachings. Decidedly, no attempt is made to be faithful to any previous constructions, including those developed by Weil and Lippitt. All such systems, rather than being regarded as fixed ontologies (reality frameworks) or kosmologies (Ken Wilber's term), are treated here as language games, names, and categories. Likewise, created reality is a name for God's volitionally relative structurizations or lifeworlds, not a perennial ordering of existence or idealized scheme of timeless first principles. Now, formation is of three kinds and of three
kinds only: accidental, necessary and
voluntary.
The coming together of the various
constituent
elements of beings cannot be accidental,
for unto every effect there must be
a cause.
It cannot be compulsory, for then the
formation
must be an inherent property of the
constituent
parts and the inherent property of
a thing
can in no wise be dissociated from
it, such
as light that is the revealer of things,
heat that causeth the expansion of
elements
and the solar rays which are the essential
property of the sun. Thus under such
circumstances
the decomposition of any formation
is impossible,
for the inherent properties of a thing
cannot
be separated from it. The third formation
remaineth and that is the voluntary
one,
that is, an unseen force described
as the
Ancient Power, causeth these elements
to
come together, every formation giving
rise
to a distinct being. Marian Crist Lippitt It has, regrettably, been common for certain of Lippitt's proponents, including my late friend who introduced me to her work in January, 1971, to argue that the indexing system she developed, which she subsequently implemented with her coworkers, was simply the Writings and not the product of individual deepening and personal interpretation: A clear distinction is made in our Faith
between authoritative interpretation
and
the interpretation or understanding
that
each individual arrives at for himself
from
his study of its teachings. While the
former
is confined to the Guardian, the latter,
according to the guidance given to
us by
the Guardian himself, should by no
means
be suppressed. In fact such individual
interpretation
is considered the fruit of man's rational
power and conducive to a better understanding
of the teachings, provided that no
disputes
or arguments arise among the friends
and
the individual himself understands
and makes
it clear that his views are merely
his own.
Individual interpretations continually
change
as one grows in comprehension of the
teachings.
Due to the immense problems associated with utilizing translated materials as the basis for a scriptural indexing system, especially without sufficient regard for issues of social and historical contextualization, Lippitt's methodology might be described as linguistic realism. According to the literalist hermeneutic in which she instructed her volunteers, Bahá'í and other writings were to be indexed, word by word, following their verbatim English-language renderings. Lippitt's model incorporates, in part, a three-tiered Reality Map (the three physical dimensions of outward appearances, a fourth dimension of rationality and time, and a fifth dimension of purposeful power or spirit underlying outward appearances), a Neo-Platonic reification of the teachings of the Prophets, and a propositional Science of Reality. These metanarratives detract from her otherwise substantial and pioneering constructions of the worlds of God and her general insights into personal development. Additionally, some of Lippitt's ideas were incorporated by her close friend, the late Professor Daniel C. Jordan of the University of Massachusetts, and his colleagues into the Anisa educational project. Lying squarely within the human potential movement of the 1960s and 1970s and framed, primarily, around Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy and, secondarily, around Carl Rogers' and Abraham H. Maslow's humanistic psychologies and Charles Sanders Peirce's realist pragmatism8, Anisa integrated Lippitt's proposition of purpose or potentiality as a universally manifested ontological essence. The worlds of God, a language game premised on the personal understandings Lippitt incorporated into her indexing system, has, over several decades, been reformulated by this writer. Whereas Lippitt regarded her Science of Reality to be a holistic model, Structurization Tech is a reductionist one -- a construction, not a science, of reality. The fairly significant modifications introduced have hopefully made these structurizations, or worlds, simpler to comprehend. I. Deity (Essence of God, divine Oneness, or hahút/He-ness)
II. Station of Prophetic Unity (Greater World, God manifested,
lahút/divinity, or the Unity in the Prophets' Unity in diversity)
III. Creation (Servitude)
A. Station of Prophetic Distinction (jabarút/omnipotence/sovereignty
or the diversity in the Prophets' Unity in diversity)
1. Will of God (Covenant/Purpose/love)
2. Word of God (Revelation/knowledge communication and the
unity in diversity of the revealed religion of God)
3. Cause of God (Command)
B. Next World (after death or malakút/heaven)
C. This World (before death or reflections of next world)
1. Human Kingdom (lesser world/"should be regarded as" greater
world or nasút/humanity)
a. Human Spirituality ('álam al-mithal/imaginal realm/mundus
imaginalis/symbolic terms/ideal forms (names), virtuousness,
human religions/the acceptance of divine Revelation, and
including The Seven Valleys and The Four Valleys)
b. Human Affairs (social constructions of reality, including the
World Order of Bahá'u'lláh and institutionalized religions)
c. Human Imperfection (absence of virtuousness)
d. Human Rationality (logic, reason, and time)
e. Physicality (materiality, energy, magnetism, and gravity)
i. Animal Kingdom (sensation)
ii. Vegetable Kingdom (growth)
iii. Mineral Kingdom (elemental cohesion)
The worlds of God might best be understood as existential categories, as structurizations, or as names for beings and entities with similar attributes, not as eternal essences or ideal forms. The nominal relativity of these worlds may be implied in the following passage: "Although the divine worlds be never
ending, yet some refer to them as four:
The
world of time (zamán), which is the
one that
hath both a beginning and an end; the
world
of duration (dahr), which hath a beginning,
but whose end is not revealed; the
world
of perpetuity (sarmad), whose beginning
is
not to be seen but which is known to
have
an end; and the world of eternity (azal),
neither a beginning nor an end of which
is
visible. Although there are many differing
statements as to these points, to recount
them in detail would result in weariness.
Thus, some have said that the world
of perpetuity
hath neither beginning nor end, and
have
named the world of eternity as the
invisible,
impregnable Empyrean. Others have called
these the worlds of the Heavenly Court
(Lahút),
of the Empyrean Heaven (Jabarút), of
the
Kingdom of the Angels (Malakút), and
of the
mortal world (Nasút). Henry A. Weil Weil's concept of powers of the soul will here be named the human spirit (a.k.a. the innate character, rational faculty, rational soul, or common faculty). That spirit, however, is merely a nominal designation, a universal, for certain innate spiritual capacities and attributes (and categories of innate spiritual capacities). Reflecting on `Abdu'l-Bahá's example, such capacities enable the development of a soul's acquired characteristics and attributes (or spiritual virtues), inter alia, love, mercy, fairness, and trustworthiness. Every other word of Bahá'u'lláh's and 'Abdu'l-Bahá's
writings is a preachment on moral and
ethical
conduct; all else is the form, the
chalice,
into which the pure spirit must be
poured;
without the spirit and the action which
must
demonstrate it, it is a lifeless form. What now follows is an attempt to descrbe the capacities (powers), and categories of capacities, named the human spirit. I have, over the years, made extensive modifications to Weil's framework. As before, these changes have, in my view, made the concepts easier to understand.
Weil also believed that individuality, with what he saw as its twin potentials for accomplishment and inner change, and immortality were "powers of the soul." My own suggestion, however, is that individuality is merely a name for the particularity or uniqueness of each soul, while its potentials are the powers or capacities of the mind's mental faculties, of free will, of inner vision, and of the spirit of faith; and that immortality is an affirmation of each soul's simplicity and indestructibility. Both individuality and immortality are nominal descriptions of souls, not the instrumentalities of human spirits. Conclusion Spiritual transformation, the higher alchemy (al-kímiyá), might be contextualized within the divine philosophy (hikmat-i-iláhí), theosophia, or wisdom teachings of the Bahá'í Revelation. That which is hakím, or wise, is relative to the divine Will (mashiyyat) revealed by a particular Prophet. Aside from God and His Manifestations, or Prophets, there is no eternal essence or ideal form of wisdom. This higher alchemy is constructed, in mystical relationship with God through His Prophet, as a process beginning with the exercise of free will -- prayer, meditation, deepening, and service (order varies in the Bahá'í primary sources) -- attracting the assistance of the spirit of faith (the magnet of faith and service), which, in turn, enhances one's inner vision (insight) and illumines one's mental faculties, thereby allowing one's body to be coordinated in service to God's Will. The end result is the development of virtues (spiritual attributes). The object is, over one's lifecourse, to painstakingly replace one's human imperfections, the absence of virtuousness, with an attainment of spiritual qualities. Gradually, as the spirit of faith and faculty of inner vision, both capacities of the human spirit, are developed, one's conscience, or will, is uplifted, virtue by virtue, from the world of human imperfection to the world of human spirituality. Then, through an increased comprehension of the language games, or divine structurizations (constructions), included in the Bahá'í Revelation, and an application of one's understandings, one may progressively submit to the Will of God. The methodology involves the radical deconstruction of the old mind, including its socially scripted patterns of reactions. Given that many individuals habitually react to situations through their human imperfections, if a person desires to escape these socialized, reactive structurizations of the mind, she must, each time, fall into the habit of pausing, reflecting, and making a spiritually informed decision. Through this means, and by associating with a community of like-minded souls, her reactive structurizations can, reaction by reaction, be progressivelly conquered and replaced with the spiritually proactive structurizations of a new mind. Clearly, not all scripts can, or must, be avoided. The continuity, and effective functioning, of communities, societies, and organizations demands a degree of conformity to certain socialized roles. Nonetheless, scripted behaviors must be countenanced and deliberate, and the individual, not the script, needs to exercise the final veto. It is she who is required not to forfeit her prerogative to edit, where indicated by her wisdom, any socially constructed scripts, whereas the scripts themselves should never be privileged to dominate her decision-making processes. Finally, a section of Structurization Tech will provide a rudimentary introduction to Arabic and Persian and to the history and culture of the lifeworlds of Bahá'u'lláh, the Báb, and `Abdu'l-Bahá. The objective will be to prepare the participant for later contextualized studies of the linguistic and historical structurizations of the Bahá'í texts. Branch courses can address these subjects in greater depth. Structurization Tech (and its praxis of S?Tech Coaching™), the transformational technology briefly surveyed in this paper, will explore how each of us can participate in spiritual and social structurization (construction). Over time, various content delivery systems, including seminars and workshops, and service projects will be developed for this purpose, and persons will be qualified as S?Tech Coaches™. 1 S?Tech™ Copyright © 2005 Mark A. Foster, Ph.D., M.A.,
A.B.J., A.A. All rights reserved.
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