# Body, Mind, Soul and Spirit

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> Source: Bahá'í Library Online (bahai-library.com), curated by Jonah Winters. Used by permission of the curator. Original citation: Anjam Khursheed, Body, Mind, Soul and Spirit, bahai-library.com.
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> 
> Body, Mind, Soul and Spirit
> Anjam Khursheed
> 
> Abstract
> 
> This paper presents the Baha'i view of human nature, which involves an
> interaction between spirit, soul and body. It argues that these same
> elements also exist in the Semitic line of religions as well as in the Far
> Eastern ones. The paper sets out to demonstrate that both the so-called
> Western dualist and Eastern monist traditions are in fact tripartite in
> character, where monism provides the underlying rationale and unity for
> dualism. Another theme addressed in this work is the conflict between
> traditional religious beliefs and modern science concerning the
> immortality of the soul. It presents the Baha'i many-world approach to
> human beings and their place in the cosmos, and argues that such a view
> is perfectly consistent with both traditional religion and modern science.
> 
> 1. Introduction
> 
> The belief in an afterlife is universal. In practically every culture since
> recorded history, human beings have looked upon death as a door
> separating us from another world, and people from all cultures offer up
> prayers for their departed. It is difficult to explain exactly how this belief
> arose and why it has persisted. Few things are as certain and yet so
> mysterious as death.
> 
> Most religions believe that the fruits of our actions and thoughts are in
> some way propagated on into another world. In one way or another, each
> of the world's religious traditions describes human nature and our place
> in the cosmos in terms of a spiritual journey. Although the end of each
> journey may be called by a different name, a "Heaven", a "Paradise" or a
> "Nirvana", they all bear remarkable resemblance to one another.
> Although the route to each religious heaven might vary, they are all at
> 110             THE SINGAPORE BAHAT STUDIES REVIEW
> 
> the end of the day concerned about cosmological justice and the
> maintenance of universal moral balance.
> 
> In the Semitic line of religions, the Judaic-Christian-Islamic one, the
> traveller on the spiritual journey is described in terms of a "human spirit"
> or "soul", inherently different to the world of its body. "Wisdom" in
> these traditions frequently involves choosing the world of the "spirit" as
> opposed to the world of "matter", and striving to arrive at a situation
> where the "spirit" prevails.
> 
> In traditional Christian theology, human nature is described in terms of
> the well-known biblical image of a "half-angel" self, struggling to
> overcome a "half-animal" self1. Historically, this Christian self-portrait
> intermingled with the Ancient Greek belief of the soul being immortal
> and fundamentally different to our perishable bodies. Both in terms of
> theology and philosophy, the distinction between an eternal "soul" and a
> transient "body" has dominated Western thought, and is usually referred
> to as "dualism". In theology, the 5th century priest, St. Augustine of
> Hippo is usually cited to be the most famous exponent of dualism, while
> in philosophy, apart from Plato and Socrates, reference is usually made
> to the 17th century pioneer of modern science, the French mathematician,
> René Descartes.
> 
> In Far Eastern religious traditions, the spiritual traveller might appear to
> describe his journey quite differently. In Buddhism and some strands of
> Hinduism, the purpose of the spiritual traveller is to rise above dualism.
> The goal of the journey is described in terms of the traveller reaching a
> selfless state of "Emptiness", or "Nothing". The mystical monism of the
> Eastern Religions involves the traveller becoming simultaneously united
> to the path and the world through which he traverses, and in so doing, he
> 
> Man as a "little lower than angels" is described in Psalms 8: 3-6, "what is
> man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?
> For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him
> with glory and honor. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy
> hands; and hast put all things under his feet". The apostle St Paul describes a
> conflict in human nature, "my inner being delights in the law of God. But I see a
> different law at work in my body - a law that fights against which my mind
> approves o f (Romans 7: 22-23). St Paul, in the same letter, refers to human
> nature being intrinsically bound by "sin" (Romans 7: 18-20).
> Body, Mind, Soul and Spirit                     111
> 
> reaches the goal.
> 
> Another difference between the Western dualist and Eastern monist
> spiritual traditions is apparent in how they describe the "self of a human
> being. The Buddhist description is often taken by many to involve
> rejecting the existence of a personal "self which survives death.
> Important qualities of the "soul" like human consciousness and its
> identity, according to many Buddhists is perishable. This belief not only
> seems to contradict prior Hindu beliefs concerning the existence of an
> individual "atman", but seems at odds with orthodox Christian doctrine.
> Take for instance the view of the medieval scholastic philosopher, St
> Thomas Aquinas, which became official Catholic doctrine for many
> centuries. Aquinas presents reasons why the soul is not only immortal,
> but also why it is personal and unique2.
> 
> There are many such differences between Western and Eastern religious
> traditions, but whether they really represent genuinely conflicting
> descriptions about human nature is an issue to be examined in this paper.
> Often the doctrines that divide religious people from one another are in
> fact not reflected in their own sacred scriptures. The argument advanced
> here is that the Buddhist description of the soul in all its major aspects
> shares much common ground with the concept of an immortal soul of
> other religions.
> 
> On a broader note, Western dualism and Eastern monism are still
> variations upon a common theme. Both Western and Eastern religious
> traditions share the common conviction that our life has meaning, that
> there is an afterlife and that the two are somehow related. They share the
> conviction that we are accountable for our actions, not only in this world
> but in the world beyond. In both cases, the universe maintains a moral
> balance, and human beings are essentially moral beings. This is of
> course, not only true about the world's major religious traditions, but
> also arguably true of all religions.
> 
> There has however, been considerable opposition to traditional religious
> views on the afterlife and human nature in modern western secular
> societies. This opposition is often linked with modern science, and
> 
> St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 76:2, chapter 5, p. 113.
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> 
> whether this is altogether fair to science, is one of the themes that will be
> examined in this paper. Modern science is often invoked to suggest that
> we are mere fragments of matter in a world that is neither about us or for
> us. The influential philosopher of science, Bertrand Russell, writing early
> this century stated that the "world which Science presents for our belief,
> involves the notion that "man is a product of causes which had no
> provision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his
> hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of
> accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire,, no heroism, no intensity of
> thought and feeling, can preserve an individual beyond the grave"3.
> 
> The above citation from Russell, perhaps the most widely read modern
> Western philosopher, is diametrically opposite to his ancient counterpart,
> Socrates,
> 
> "Is not what we call death a freeing and separation of soul from body...
> and the desire to free the soul is found chiefly or rather only, in the true
> philosopher; in fact the philosopher's occupation consists precisely in the
> freeing and separation of soul from body... true philosophers make
> dying their profession." 4
> 
> Death for Socrates is the culmination of wisdom and all true
> philosophers should seek to attain its liberation. Death for Russell, is a
> process of atoms dispersing, and nothing more. Russell is of course, one
> of the most famous spokesmen for the warfare thesis between science
> and religion this century. Because human beings are supposed to be
> nothing more thpn "accidental collocations of atoms", there is no life
> after death, no justice beyond the grave. Now the degree of
> sophistication may have changed since Russell wrote the above words,
> but the fundamental axioms behind it remain the same. In one way or
> another, a scientific description of human beings is associated with
> rejecting the belief in an immortal soul or an afterlife. In these modern
> times, it is more usual to find descriptions of the mind in terms of
> physical causes and physical causes alone, as opposed to say an immortal
> spiritual entity which has moral purposes. In the philosophy of mind,
> 
> Bertrand Russell, A Free Man's Worship, an essay in the book "Mysticism and
> Logic", p. 10.
> Socrates, Pheado, 67a-68b.
> Body, Mind, Soul and Spirit                                113
> 
> Russell's approach is sometimes referred to as "physicalism".5
> 
> Just to what extent the modern western "physicalist" view has eroded
> belief in the afterlife is a complex question, and not one that will be
> pursued here. It certainly seems to have caused much doubt about it, but
> in the author's experience, most modern Western people still attend
> funerals and pray for their departed family members and friends. So
> perhaps the impact of physicalism has disturbed deeper traditional
> beliefs, but not eradicated them - even in the modern West. If this is the
> case, there is undoubtedly a large gap between theory and practice.
> Consider the modern philosophy of mind. Very few professional
> philosophers who work in the philosophy of mind write in defence of
> traditional religious views of mind. Most the literature in the modern
> philosophy of mind describes the mind in terms of physical causes, a
> kind of "physical monism" which is usually incompatible with the
> traditional dualism of the West, or the spiritual monism of the East.
> 
> Most traditional religious accounts of human beings involve the belief
> that they have freewill. Many theories in the modern philosophy of mind
> on the other hand, particularly those that align themselves to science,
> either directly or tacitly amount to rejecting free-will. Ironically, the
> philosophers who arrive at such conclusions would want to deny that
> they were in any way "forced" into them: they would want to maintain
> that they arrived at their innovative and creative theories by themselves -
> by their own free-will.
> 
> It should be noted that this contradiction between the theory and practice
> of modern philosophy is now a global one. Even in South Eastern Asia
> where religious traditions have a much stronger social profile than in the
> West, the university curriculum in the philosophy of mind is dominated
> by secular philosophies of mind, that is, they either directly reject or
> indirectly undermine traditional religious views of human nature. The
> 
> Various different forms of physicalism have appeared since Russell, these include
> behaviourism, central state materialism, the brain-mind identity theory, functionalism,
> connectionism, etc, see the book, Body and Mind by Keith Campbell. The latest forms of
> physicalism often use computers to model the mind. A whole new area of cognitive
> science has sprung up in the last few decades which attempts to describe and explain
> mental phenomena in terms of a set of complex interactive and adaptive software
> instructions, see The Minds I by Hofstadter and Dennet.
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> 
> physicalist human self-portrait is diametrically opposed to the
> fundamental axioms of all religions. Whether it be the Buddhist journey
> to Nirvana, or the Christian journey to Heaven, the attempt to squeeze
> human experience into the narrow confines of physical causes and
> physical causes alone, naturally leads to the death of an afterlife and
> points towards a universe that has no moral balance.
> 
> The attack of physicalism on traditional religion has of course, occurred
> first within Western culture and largely takes the form of criticisms
> against Western dualism. Russell describes a process whereby the word
> "soul" was gradually replaced by "mind", and where the word "mind"
> was in time, replaced by "subject".6 Russell himself contrasted his
> physicalist view with Plato's dualism, Aristotle's "substance", and
> Aquinas's "embodied soul". He also pointed out the contradictions
> associated with Aquinas's thesis of bodily resurrection.
> 
> In all his criticisms of Western spiritual traditions, Russell took his own
> view to be representative of science. He stated for instance, that "Natural
> knowledge only enables us to recognise a thing by its attributes" and he
> takes a "substance" to denote the "sum of its attributes", and goes on to
> state that, "there is no need to suppose an unknowable core, in which his
> attributes inhere like pins in a pin-cushion. What is absolutely and
> essentially unknowable cannot even be known to exist, and there is no
> point in supposing that it does".7 He ascribes this latter view to some
> followers of the 17th century philosopher John Locke, but it is clearly
> also a view with which he agrees. Russell's philosophy is based on what
> he understood to be scientific facts. In connection with soul-body
> dualism, he states for instance, "The primary facts which we can observe
> have no such dualism, and give no reason for regarding either "things" or
> "persons" as anything but collections of phenomena"8. Russell's factual
> representation of science is however, questionable.9
> 
> Russell's detailed criticisms of the soul-body doctrine are many, but
> 
> B. Russell, Religion and Science, chapter Soul and Body.
> Ibid, pp. 115-6.
> Ibid, pp. 121-2.
> see the author's paper in The Singapore Bahá "i Studies Review, vol.1, entitled "The
> Spiritual Foundations of Science" and also in the author's book, The Universe Within.
> Body, Mind, Soul and Spirit                    115
> 
> what is important here is to articulate something of the spirit behind
> them. His concern generally relates to preserving scientific objectivity,
> as he understood it. In particular, he spoke out against people holding
> beliefs that go beyond what the scientific facts show. This concern for
> scientific objectivity is of course commendable, but is it really fair to
> reject belief in an immortal soul on that basis? The Baha'i Faith is an
> instance where a religion upholds the integrity of scientific objectivity,
> while at the same time adhering to the doctrine of an immortal soul. This
> article will attempt to show how these two beliefs need not be in conflict.
> 
> In his celebrated book, 'The Concept of Mind', the philosopher of mind
> Gilbert Ryle writing around the middle of this century disparagingly
> referred to Cartesian Dualism, that is, Descartes' philosophy of mind, as
> "the dogma of the Ghost in a Machine".10 Without going into Ryle's
> detailed criticisms, the "ghost in a machine" metaphor epitomises many
> of the difficulties that religious dualism faces in the modern world.
> 
> Like a ghost, the soul is difficult to measure in empirical terms, and the
> natural question to ask is, where is it located? It is also difficult to
> understand how a ghost might be moved by or move anything physically.
> By implying that the soul is like a ghost, the same difficulties for the soul
> are suggested and the physicalist often asks the question of how exactly
> the soul interacts with the body. This question was not given a clear
> answer by Descartes, and it is often assumed to be an inherent weakness
> of dualism.
> 
> Another difficult question relates to identifying the exact moment when
> an immortal soul comes into being. On the individual level, this
> translates into asking when an immortal soul is co-joined to its body. Or
> on a collective level, the question translates into determining the point in
> human evolution at which souls appeared. Yet another question is what
> makes a human being unique, that is, how does one soul differ from
> another? These are only some of the objections that have been made
> against dualism. Many books which collect together important works in
> the philosophy mind, often start off with undermining dualism as a valid
> theory of mind based upon some of these criticisms11.
> 
> G. Ryle, The Concept of Mind, p. 17.
> '   see Body and Mind, by K. Campbell.
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> 
> There is an additional element in the modern approach to human nature
> which goes beyond philosophy. This is the question of the difference
> between human beings and animals. Ever since the theory of evolution,
> the scientific approach has always been associated with the view that
> human beings are not in principle different to animals, and that both are
> best understood in terms of natural causes.
> 
> This paper will outline some Baha'i responses to the above questions.
> The discussion will present the Baha'i tripartite model of human nature
> which is founded on an interaction between body, soul and spirit,
> correlating it both to Western dualism and Eastern spiritual monism.
> This model of human nature will be related to the religious traditions of
> Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. In addition, the
> Baha'i approach will be used to identify tripartite elements in the
> philosophies of Plato and Descartes, which are usually described to be
> dualist. Finally, the weaknesses and strengths of modern approaches to
> human nature will be discussed in the light of the Baha'i principle that
> science should be in harmony with religion.
> 
> The first point to make about the Baha'i belief in the existence of an
> immortal soul is that it is foundational, a cornerstone belief upon which
> many others depend. Understanding the soul is an integral part of the
> Baha'i approach to topics as diverse as God, science, and world peace. In
> 1912, 'Abdu'1-Bahá, the eldest son of Baha'u'llah, the founder of the
> Baha'i Faith, began a talk in Boston, America, in the following way:
> 
> "In the world of existence there is nothing so important as spirit, nothing
> so essential as the spirit of man. The spirit of man is the most noble of
> phenomena. The spirit of man is the meeting between man and God. The
> spirit of man is the animus of human life and the collective center of all
> human virtues. The spirit of man is the cause of the illumination of this
> world. The world may be likened to the body: man is the spirit of the
> body, because the light of the world is the human spirit. Man is the life
> of the world, and the life of man is the spirit. The happiness of the world
> depends upon man, and the happiness of man is dependent on the
> spirit"12.
> 
> * Abdu'1-Bahá, Promulgation   of Universal Peace, pp. 239-240.
> Body, Mind, Soul and Spirit                        117
> 
> 'Abdu'1-Bahá goes on to present arguments in favour of the existence of
> a human soul and its immortality, and finishes the discourse by the
> following closing remarks: "As we have shown that there is a spirit and
> that this spirit is permanent and everlasting, we must strive to learn of it.
> May you become informed of its power, hasten to render it divine, to
> have it become sanctified and holy and make it the very light of the
> world illuminating the East and the West".
> 
> As the above quotations imply, the Baha'i belief in an immortal soul is
> inextricably related to the spiritual nature of human beings. Its
> importance in Baha'i eschatology cannot be over-emphasised.
> 
> Another point that needs to be made from the outset is that the human
> soul according to the Baha'i Faith is a profound hidden mystery whose
> true nature lies beyond our grasp. Baha'u'llah declares that:
> 
> "Verily I say, the human soul is, in its essence, one of the signs of God, a
> mystery among His mysteries. It is one of the mighty signs of the
> Almighty, the harbinger that proclaimeth the reality of all the worlds of
> God. Within it lieth concealed that which the world is now utterly
> incapable of apprehending."13
> 
> Elsewhere, Baha'u'llah states,
> 
> "Thou hast asked Me concerning the nature of the soul. Know, verily,
> that the soul is a sign of God, a heavenly gem whose reality the most
> learned of men hath failed to grasp, and whose mystery no mind,
> however acute, can ever hope to unravel. It is the first among all created
> things to declare the excellence of its Creator, the first to recognize His
> glory, to cleave to His truth, and to bow down in adoration before Him.
> If it be faithful to God, it will reflect His light, and will, eventually,
> return unto Him. If it fail, however, in its allegiance to its Creator, it will
> become a victim to self and passion, and will, in the end, sink in their
> depths".14
> 
> The above passage has important implications for the present discussion.
> 
> Baha'u'llah, Gleanings, p. 160.
> Baha'u'llah, Gleanings, p. 158.
> 118               THE SINGAPORE BAHAT STUDIES REVIEW
> 
> From the Baha'i perspective, we cannot obtain objective knowledge of
> the soul, only personal glimpses of it. This means that discussion about
> the soul is inherently imprecise, and resembles more the language of
> poetry than the logic of a mathematical proof, or the empirical
> demonstrations of the applied sciences. Descriptions of the soul in the
> Baha'i writings are often made in terms of analogies, and each analogy
> illustrates a different aspect of the soul. No single analogy however,
> describes the soul in objectively precise terms. Since notions about the
> soul are inherently subjective, we will inevitably have our own preferred
> analogies where the same words have different meanings to different
> people. What some call "soul", others have referred to as "mind" or
> "intellect", or "spirit". This is particularly true when comparing beliefs
> about the soul between various cultures. For instance, to the ancient
> Greeks, it was the "mind" or "intellect" (Nous) which formed the
> immortal part of man, while on the other hand, the soul was a generic
> term which applied to all forms of life. This is apparent in Aristotle's
> writings, who when using the soul in relation to human beings, always
> qualified it and used the term, "rational soul". On the other hand, in the
> Christian tradition, the soul is distinguished from the "spirit", and it is
> the "spirit" which is qualified in different instances, such as the "human
> spirit" in one context, or the "Holy Spirit" in another. In Buddhism, it is
> the mind which is eternal, as opposed to a perishable "self.
> 
> Often, ambiguities of terminology are created by different translations of
> the same text. Even in the Baha'i writings there is the multiple use of the
> words "soul", "mind" and "spirit". Shoghi Effendi, the grandson of
> ' Abdu'1-Bahá, noted this problem:
> 
> "When studying at present15, in English, the available Baha'i writings on
> the subject of body, soul and spirit, one is handicapped by a certain lack
> of clarity because not all were translated by the same person, and also
> there are, as you know, still many Baha'i writings untranslated. But there
> is no doubt that spirit and soul seem to have been interchanged in
> meaning sometimes; soul and mind have, likewise, been interchanged in
> meaning, no doubt due to difficulties arising from different
> translations."16
> 
> 1946
> Unto Him Shall We Return, p. 60.
> Body, Mind, Soul and Spirit                         119
> 
> Since there are many sources of potential confusion, not only from
> cultural differences but also from personal preferences, the Baha'i
> approach to the soul requires flexibility in the use of words and
> metaphors and discourages disputes about it. In the final analysis, we can
> have at best only partial glimpses of its inherent hidden mystery, and
> even then, this tiny glimmer of understanding will be irreducibly
> personal. For this reason, it should be stated from the outset that this
> paper does not attempt to give a rigorously complete account of the
> Baha'i concept of the soul. It only presents some analogies which have
> been helpful to the author in correlating Baha'i beliefs to a few issues of
> human nature that involve modern philosophy and various religious
> traditions. The following discussion reflects the author's background as a
> professional scientist, and might appear at times a little technical to the
> general reader, but in the light of the foregoing discussion, such bias is
> inevitable.
> 
> 2. A multi-dimensional universe
> 
> When comparing the Baha'i description of the soul to other approaches,
> particularly modern ones, it is important to emphasise that the Baha'i
> Faith is intrinsically committed to the existence of many worlds. Like
> most other religious traditions, the Baha'i Faith believes that the physical
> world we live in is somehow bounded and relative, and that it is
> embedded in other worlds. One powerful way of thinking of many
> worlds is to liken them to other dimensions, different to the familiar
> space-time ones we live in. The following simple geometric analogy,
> creatively portrayed by the writer Edwin Abbot in 1884, highlights the
> difference between a physicalist approach and a religious view of human
> nature. Abbot named his novel "Flatland", and it is unique in the way it
> combines religious imagery with mathematics. It consists of parables in
> the language of geometry. Much of the imagery evokes the timeless
> drama relating to the birth of a religion: the messenger coming from
> another realm, the conversion of the first disciple, the disbelief of the
> populace and persecution by the prevailing clergy, and so on. Here a
> variation of Abbot's Flatland is formulated to act as a metaphor for the
> soul.
> 
> Imagine geometric shapes are confined to move on a two-dimensional
> 120            THE SINGAPORE BAHAT STUDIES REVIEW
> 
> plane, as illustrated in the figure below. Imagine further, that these
> shapes, a triangle, square, circle etc, are animated with life. They
> obviously see the world quite differently to us. As they move along the
> flat plane, they do not see shapes, but can only discern lines. The
> inhabitants of Flatland use touch to overcome the difficulty of shape
> recognition. Also, through the existence of a fog, the more sophisticated
> shapes deduce geometric information by sight: distances further away
> appear dim while those close to the observer appear bright, so depth
> information about objects can be extracted. Abbot describes a
> community of geometric shapes which are obsessively class conscious:
> the position of a shape in the social hierarchy rises in direct proportion to
> the number of sides it has. The square has more moral and intellectual
> standing than a triangle, but is inferior to pentagons, and so on. The
> highest class, the priestly class, are polygons which have hundreds of
> sides.
> 
> Two Dimensional Plane
> 
> One night, on the eve of a new millennium, a square has a strange vision.
> He encounters a stranger who mysteriously appears in his sitting room
> without having entered the doors of his house. The stranger is somehow
> simultaneously able to be a point and a perfect circle, changing its size at
> will. In response to the square's questions demanding to know its
> identity, the stranger declares that "I am the circle of all circles" and says
> Body, Mind, Soul and Spirit                        121
> 
> that he is the bearer of an important message to the inhabitants of
> Flatland. He explains that he has chosen the square to be his first
> disciple, and the message he brings is the "Gospel of the 3rd dimension".
> The stranger of course, turns out to be a sphere crossing the surface of
> Flatland.
> 
> The act of religious conversion is paralleled by flat geometric figures
> coming to believe in the 3 rd dimension. The spiritual perfections of a
> religious founder is creatively portrayed in terms of him being able to
> move in a higher dimension. The three dimensional stranger can look
> upon the two dimensional inhabitants of Flatland from a much more
> comprehensive perspective than they can ever see themselves. None of
> the inhabitants of Flatland can, for instance, see their "insides", but the
> fact that each shape must have an "inside" can be inferred from the rules
> of geometry. A point extended in a direction perpendicular to itself
> produces a line of say 3 inches. A line extended out perpendicularly to
> itself by 3 inches produces a square having an area of 32 inches. The
> more mathematically minded inhabitants of Flatland understood this. But
> earlier in the same evening, when one of the square's grandsons reasoned
> by analogy that there must also be geometrical meaning to the quantity
> 3 3 produced by a square somehow moving in a direction perpendicular to
> itself, the square dismissed his speculations as nonsense, stating
> categorically that "Geometry has only two dimensions". But later that
> night, the stranger confirmed that the square's grandson had reasoned
> correctly. In order to overcome the square's scepticism about the
> existence of the 3rd dimension, he lifted the square out of Flatland's
> surface, enabling him to see for the first time, the "insides" of the houses
> and inhabitants of Flatland. In what he interpreted to be a mystical
> vision, the square saw Flatland from above, and viewed the objects of
> Flatland in a much more complete way than he had ever seen them
> before.
> 
> Abbot's simple but imaginative Flatland analogy can also be used to
> depict the relationship of the human soul to its body. The soul may be
> represented by a luminous object placed above Flatland, like the sun
> shinning on a flat landscape. In this analogy, the sun represents an
> individual soul, and its brain/body is denoted by the landscape. The
> analogy of the sun representing the soul whose light is in some way
> 122              THE SINGAPORE BAHAT STUDIES REVIEW
> 
> reflected in the body is given in the Baha'i writings.17 The rays of the sun
> reaching Flatland models the way thoughts are communicated from the
> soul to the brain. If the question be asked, where is the soul located?
> Then according to this analogy, it is obvious that the soul cannot be
> located in the brain or body - no more than the sun can be located on the
> surface of the landscape. Just as the flat geometric figures of Flatland can
> never look out into the 3rd dimension directly, so we too, can never
> observe the soul directly. But just as the existence of the 3rd dimension
> can be reasoned by analogy from one and two dimensions, so too is the
> existence of a 4th dimension understandable to us by analogy. If we live
> in a multi-dimensional universe, the physicalist insistence that the soul
> be explained only in terms of physical causes in the brain is obviously
> similar to insisting that all objects in the universe lie on a Flatland-like
> surface, which is of course, unnecessarily restrictive.
> 
> In the Flatland novel, Abbot even hints that a 4th dimension does exist
> and refers to it as "Thoughtland". The square, destined to be the first
> disciple of the gospel of the 3 rd dimension, reasons that there must be a
> dimension perpendicular to three dimensional space, and that someone
> out in the 4th dimension can somehow look upon the inhabitants of three
> dimensions and see their place in the universe in much greater
> perspective than they themselves could ever imagine.
> 
> There is in principal no conflict with a religious multi-dimensional view
> of human nature and modern science. It is true that if the soul lies in a
> realm outside space and time and is not located in the brain, a complete
> scientific description of it may not be possible. But this need not be
> cause for alarm, after all, if we do live in a multi-dimensional world, then
> one would expect science to have some inherent limitations, particularly
> with respect to those special human characteristics that make science
> possible in the first place. The main point here is that scepticism about
> the religious view of human nature should not be founded on modern
> science.
> 
> Abbot's intuition that we live in four-dimensional space was confirmed
> 
> Baha'u'llah's sun/cloud/landscape analogy, Gleanings, LXXX, and 'Abdu'1-Bahá's
> sun/mirror analogy, Some Answered Questions, pp. 239-40, will also be quoted later in
> the text.
> Body, Mind, Soul and Spirit                                  123
> 
> by Einstein's special relativity theory which appeared only 21 years after
> Flatland was first published.18 In special relativity, time plays the role of
> a 4 dimension, and the space-time continuum forms the landscape upon
> which all events in our world are located. This theory showed that space
> and time are relative quantities which depend on our own frame of
> reference: if we use an object's motion to measure time intervals or
> measure its spatial dimensions, what we observe will depend upon our
> relative motion to that object. The more our relative speeds differ, the
> greater the space-time distortion. In the extreme case, if our relative
> speeds approach the speed of light, events that would ordinarily take one
> second in our frame of reference, seem to take eternity if viewed from
> the other frame of reference.
> 
> Einstein's theory of General Relativity, published around a decade after
> his special relativity appeared, also brought about a profound revolution
> in our notions of space and time. If the four-dimensional space-time
> continuum of special relativity is represented by Flatland, then the
> landscape implied by General Relativity is a realm of space-time warps
> and curves. Einstein related the contours of this landscape to
> gravitational mass, where the distortions of space-time are created by the
> action of the gravitational force. The motions of planets around stars are
> now explained in terms of space-time geometry instead of Newtonian
> forces acting at a distance. For instance, if we observe events close to a
> large star, the motion of objects around it reveal to us a space-time
> terrain where time is slowed down. In the extreme case, a second
> between events on earth becomes eternity at the centre of a space-time
> singularity such as a black hole. As is well known, the existence of black
> holes have been empirically verified in modern astronomy. In fact, the
> theory of General Relativity has received a considerable amount of
> experimental evidence in its favour, and is now well accepted amongst
> physicists.
> 
> The surface-land of General Relativity implies that events in our
> universe are trapped in a space-time fabric which folds and undulates. It
> 
> see the author's books, Science and Religion, and The Universe Within which
> discuss at length Einstein's theories and their harmony with philosophy and religion. A
> clear and concise description of special and general relativity for the non-scientist, is
> given by Einstein himself in his essays which are available in the book Relativity, the
> Special and the General Theory.
> 124              THE SINGAPORE BAHAT STUDIES REVIEW
> 
> indicates we are creatures that dwell on a landscape that is in some sense
> bounded, relative, and in this respect, it is similar to Abbot's Flatland.
> Moreover, physicists since Einstein have been postulating the existence
> of many more than four dimensions. As is well known, in some of the
> Grand Unified Field theories (GUTs) of modern physics, seven extra
> dimensions to our ordinary three spatial ones are conjectured to exist. It
> turns out that these extra dimensions help create the framework in which
> the various forces of nature can be united - at least in theory19. Just as
> Abbot and many mathematicians have long recognised, there is nothing
> to exclude the existence of higher dimensions. In fact their existence is a
> logical extension of our mathematical experience. The argument by
> analogy is still quite plausible: instead of our universe being confined to
> a kind of Flatland where it is limited to what science can discover, it is
> more likely that we live in a multi-dimensional terrain. We cannot
> directly look into the other dimensions, no more than the creatures of
> Flatland can look into the 3rd dimension. But that does not mean that
> there are no indicators that the other dimensions exist.
> 
> The results of modern physics present us with many indirect signs that
> we live in a multi-dimensional world. Imagine the movements of an ant
> on the surface of an apple. There are various reasons for it to suspect that
> there are dimensions beyond its two dimensional surface-world. When it
> completes an entire revolution of the apple and returns to its initial
> position, or when it adds up the angles of a triangle and finds them to be
> greater than 180 degrees, it might suspect that higher dimensions
> actually exist, although it will not be able to look up into the 3rd
> dimension directly. The results of General Relativity give us similar
> results: we deduce that light bends in space-time, and a beam of light
> which we transmit might even return to us - if we could wait that long. If
> we send out beams of light between three distant points and measure the
> angles between them, they too would not add up to 180 degrees. Our
> world no more obeys the laws of a Euclidean like Flatland than does the
> surface of an apple. So just as there are reasons for the ant to believe that
> there is more to its world than the surface of the apple, so too for us,
> there are many indicators to think that our world is not limited to our
> space-time world. There is however, an important difference: to the best
> 
> see for instance, Superforce by Paul Davies, written on a level the general reader
> can understand.
> Body, Mind, Soul and Spirit                           125
> 
> of our knowledge, the ant is no mathematician.
> 
> It should be noted that General and Special Relativity are only two
> theories of modern physics which imply that we live in a multi-
> dimensional universe, there are of course, more such theories. For
> instance, Quantum Mechanics, also developed in the early part of this
> century, revises our notions of matter. The apparent incompatibility of a
> ghost and a machine in Ryle's metaphor derives much from our
> "classical" view of matter. In classical physics, matter consists of objects
> which move like billiard balls, bouncing and colliding off one another.
> But quantum mechanics reveals that what we see as matter actually
> consists of scattering and reflecting waves of energy. Atoms are clouds
> of energy, vibrating and constantly transforming into different forms.
> Modern physics replaces the classical notion of matter moving in
> absolute space and time with the more fundamental concept of waves of
> energy vibrating in space-time. The seeming permanence of matter, on
> the subatomic scale, turns out to be an illusion. At this level, copper can
> be turned into gold and vice-versa. Matter appears to be pockets of
> energy trapped in a crinkled space-time fabric. Even what we conceive
> of as a vacuum is actually filled with the continual generation and
> annihilation of ghostly "virtual" particles and their anti-particles. All of
> this is now quite well known and widely accepted.20
> 
> In the Baha'i writings, the belief in many worlds is often illustrated in
> terms of parallels drawn between the mineral, vegetable, animal and
> human realms. 'Abdu'1-Bahá gives the following description of the
> afterlife, explaining that although it is very close to our world, we are
> nevertheless, unaware of it,
> 
> "the souls of the children of the Kingdom, after their separation from the
> body, ascend unto the realm of everlasting life. But if ye ask as to the
> place, know ye that the world of existence is a single world, although its
> stations are various and distinct. For example, the mineral life occupieth
> its own plane, but a mineral entity is without any awareness at all of the
> vegetable kingdom, and indeed, with its inner tongue denieth that there is
> any such kingdom. In the same way, a vegetable entity knoweth nothing
> 
> for more on the philosophical implications of Quantum Mechanics see Quantum
> Reality, Beyond the New Physics, by Nick Herbert.
> 126             THE SINGAPORE BAHAT STUDIES REVIEW
> 
> of the animal world, remaining completely heedless and ignorant thereof,
> for the stage of the animal is higher than that of the vegetable, and the
> vegetable is veiled from the animal world and inwardly denieth the
> existence of that world - all this while animal, vegetable and mineral
> dwell together in the one world. In the same way the animal remaineth
> totally unaware of that power of the human mind which graspeth
> universal ideas and layeth bare the secrets of creation - so that a man
> who liveth in the east can make plans and arrangements for the west; can
> unravel mysteries; although located on the continent of Europe can
> discover America; although sited on the earth can lay hold of the inner
> realities of the stars of heaven. Of this power of discovery which
> belongeth to the human mind, this power which can grasp abstract and
> universal ideas, the animal remaineth totally ignorant, and indeed denieth
> its existence. In the same way, the denizens of this earth are completely
> unaware of the world of the Kingdom and deny the existence thereof.
> They ask, for example: * Where is the Kingdom? Where is the Lord of the
> Kingdom?' These people are even as the mineral and the vegetable, who
> know nothing whatever of the animal and the human realm; they see it
> not; they find it not. Yet the mineral and vegetable, the animal and man,
> are all living here together in this world of existence".21
> 
> According to the Baha'i Faith, there is no real separation between this
> world and the next, they are both part of a "single world". Just as the
> mineral and vegetable live in the same world as the animal or human
> being, they are not aware of them in any meaningful way. This lack of
> awareness is obviously related to a difference in consciousness. In the
> same way, is it not possible, indeed, is it not perfectly logical, that
> beyond what we see of the world, there should exist higher states of
> consciousness?
> 
> If we take ourselves in analogy to other forms of life, everything in our
> experience points to there being worlds beyond ours. Take for instance, a
> caterpillar. It might seem that the world of the caterpillar is limited to an
> existence of twigs and branches, a leafy surface world. What would a
> caterpillar's awareness of the 3rd dimension be like? In what way could
> the caterpillar be aware of the sky, or the birds that fly through the air?
> Yet, after it undergoes chrysalis and emerges in the form of a butterfly,
> 
> 'Abdu'1-Bahá, Selections of the Writings of yAbdu 'l-Bahá, pp. 193-194.
> Body, Mind, Soul and Spirit                     127
> 
> the same creature is able to flutter through the atmosphere, which when
> compared to its former life, might be described as a celestial realm, a
> world which it had formerly been unaware of. Could the afterlife not in
> the same way lie beyond our grasp? This argument does not prove that
> the afterlife exists, but it does make it more plausible than the opposite
> alternative, which is to believe that there are no more worlds other than
> the ones we can understand or perceive. We cannot and should not use
> science to exclude the possibility of there being an immortal soul.
> Science and religion are not combatants in a true contest, both can be
> united in their search for universal truths.
> 
> Imagine a world without relative motion, where all objects appear
> stationary and even movement inside your body ceases. If somehow you
> could retain consciousness, would you be aware of time? From moment
> to moment, if there is no observable change in your world, would time
> exist? Would you not be in eternity? Or imagine that after sleeping,
> everything appears exactly the same to you as it was before you fell
> asleep, would you have any way of knowing how long you had been
> sleeping? Obviously time is applicable to the decay and growth of
> bodies, to the change and relative motion of objects. When however we
> are in a state of sleep, that is, when the senses are dormant, our minds
> seem to operate independently from time. Our conception of days and
> nights come from the earth's spinning motion with respect to the sun, but
> if we were able to live on the surface of the sun, days or nights would
> have no meaning. From the Baha'i perspective, the world of the afterlife
> lies outside time and yet exists alongside it. It is comparable to the way
> our dreams coexist alongside our bodies when we sleep,
> 
> "Those who have passed on through death have a sphere of their own. It
> is not removed from ours; their work, the work of the Kingdom, is ours;
> but it is sanctified from what we call 'time and place.' Time with us is
> measured by the sun. When there is no more sunrise, and no more sunset,
> that kind of time does not exist for man. Those who have ascended have
> different attributes from those who are still on earth, yet there is no real
> separation".
> 
> That our world is embedded in higher worlds is poetically conveyed in
> 
> 'Abdu 'l-Bahá in London, p. 96.
> 128             THE SINGAPORE BAHAT STUDIES REVIEW
> 
> the following passage by ' Abdu'1-Bahá,
> 
> "And as we reflect, we observe that man is like unto a tiny organism
> contained within a fruit; this fruit hath developed out of the blossom, the
> blossom hath grown out of the tree, the tree is sustained by the sap, and
> the sap formed out of earth and water. How then can this tiny organism
> comprehend the nature of the garden, conceive of the gardener and
> comprehend his being?"23
> 
> To picture ourselves in terms of a tiny organism, with many worlds lying
> beyond our comprehension or perception is surely a humble, open-
> minded position to take of our position in the cosmos. To claim that there
> can be nothing more evolved than what science can discover, or to state,
> as Bertrand Russell stated, that "Whatever can be known, can be known
> by means of science"24, is clearly closed-minded - a "Flatland" position
> to take. The irony is that most people today generally associate
> modernity with being open-minded, and usually think of traditional
> religion as being closed-minded.
> 
> The confusion here is created by dogmas in the name of both science and
> religion. Although a religion may be open-minded with respect to the
> existence of many worlds, its followers may be closed-minded about it.
> Mediocre scientists and dogmatic religious believers share a lot in
> common. Both reductionist science and puritanical religion de-emphasise
> the role of the individual in their pursuit to acquire objective truths. Both
> are based not so much on what they believe, but what they reject.
> "Positivist science" became infamous for relegating "non-science" to an
> inferior truth-status, while dogmatic religion is well known for denying
> salvation to believers who do not share exactly its own creed of
> confession. Positivist science often attempts to reduce intangible
> experiences to a series of empirical facts, while religious dogma
> translates faith into a set of rituals, rites and specific codes of practice. A
> parallel between closed-minded science and dogmatic religion is
> presented in detail elsewhere by the author.25 On the other hand, there
> are many parallels one can draw between genuine scientists and truly
> 
> 'Abdu'1-Bahá, Auguste Forel and the Baha'i Faith , p. 19.
> B. Russell, History of Western Philosophy, p. 788.
> see the author's book, The Universe Within, chap. 12, The Puritanical Mind.
> Body, Mind, Soul and Spirit                     129
> 
> religious people. Both the scientific genius and genuine religious
> believer are people of great faith, humble before the great cosmological
> mysteries of our existence, and commitment to the many-worlds
> hypothesis is a natural part of their world-view.
> 
> 3. Apparent Dualism
> 
> 'Abdu'1-Bahá's description of the soul or the "human spirit" often starts
> out by contrasting the intellectual qualities of the mind with the animal
> instincts of the body. From the Baha'i point of view, the distinguishing
> feature of being human lies in the power of thought. 'Abdu'1-Bahá
> declares, "The reality of man is his thought, not his material body. The
> thought force and the animal force are partners. Although man is part of
> the animal creation, he possesses a power of thought superior to all other
> created beings".26 This passage strongly echoes the Rationalist tradition
> in Western Philosophy. It is for instance, close to Descartes', "I think
> therefore I am" dictum.
> 
> The seventeenth century Rationalists, as with those in ancient and
> medieval times, took consciousness, the power of abstraction and ability
> to reason to be the primary qualities of being human. Descartes had
> come to this conclusion by a process of systematic doubt. He found that
> he could doubt the validity of things such as our perception of objects,
> the existence of the external world and the truth of mathematical
> theorems. He could doubt whether he had a body, but could not doubt
> the process of thinking, since this in itself involved thinking. He
> concluded that,
> 
> " From this I recognised that I was a substance whose whole essence or
> nature is to be conscious and whose being requires no place and depends
> on no material thing. Thus this self, that is to say the soul, by which I am
> what I am, is entirely distinct from the body, and is even more easily
> known; and even if the body were not there at all, the soul would be just
> what it is."27
> 
> 'Abdu'1-Bahá, Paris Talks, p. 17.
> Descartes: Philosophical Writings,?. 32.
> 130               THE SINGAPORE BAHAT STUDIES REVIEW
> 
> Similar arguments exist in the Islamic philosophical tradition.28 'Abdu'l-
> Bahá also follows these kinds of arguments to demonstrate the
> superiority of mind over body. He notes that even though parts of the
> body may be dismembered, the mind is not affected, the "whole body
> may be paralyzed; and yet the mind, spirit, remains ever the same".29
> 
> 'Abdu'1-Bahá often refers to an animal as, " a captive of nature", that is,
> its behaviour is dominated by the demands of its senses and regulated
> directly by the laws of nature. He contrasts this with the minds of human
> beings, which, by discovering the laws of nature, put them to whatever
> use they wish. Animals are bound by biological constraints, whereas
> human minds are not. For instance, the fact that human beings can travel
> through the air or in the deep ocean comes from the mind's power of
> intellectual discovery, and not from any developments in biological
> evolution. We have in this sense broken the laws of nature. From the
> Baha'i point of view, by being discoverers of the laws of nature and not
> passive subjects to it, human beings show that they have an active inner
> force which is not present in animals. In comparison to this human
> conscious active force, the body of man or the animal is unconscious and
> passive. This belief is of course, similar to Aristotle's Active Intellect,
> which communicates and animates a "passive sensory" brain, or Plato's
> self-moved soul30. Plato made the distinction that human souls are active
> and cannot be understood in terms of a chain of prior physical causes,
> unlike the "souls" of other objects. Similarly, the ability of human
> beings to discover the laws of nature, from the Baha'i perspective, shows
> that their minds are in some way independent from them. 'Abdu'1-Bahá
> also often used an argument that was presented by Plato and attributed to
> Socrates. This is the view that the human soul is a "simple" element, that
> is, it is not a combination of elements. 'Abdu'1-Bahá, like Plato, uses this
> concept of the soul to argue for its immortality.31
> 
> Avicenna's "floating man", see pp. 201-2, The Singapore Baha'i Studies Review,
> Vol.2.
> 'Abdu'1-Bahá, Promulgation of Universal Peace, pp. 243.
> see Aristotle's Active Intellect described in De Anima, III.5, and Plato's self-moved
> soul described in Phaedrus.
> Plato, Pheado 77c-78d, known as the 'Affinity argument'. 'Abdu'1-Bahá on the
> incomposite nature of the Soul, Promulgation of Universal Peace, p. 306.
> Body, Mind, Soul and Spirit                                        131
> 
> The commonly used distinction in the Baha'i Writings to classify all
> objects and living beings into various "Kingdoms": the mineral,
> vegetable, animal and human kingdoms, is similar to Aristotle's three
> grades of life. Aristotle categorises all living beings into the "souls" of
> vegetables, animals and human beings. Also, similar to Aristotle's
> schema, the Baha'i writings state that the prime characteristic of the
> vegetable is growth, for the animal it is sense perception, and for human
> beings it is the power of thought.
> 
> Aristotle's designation of the human soul as the "rational soul" is used in
> the Baha'i writings on several occasions, and is acknowledged by
> 'Abdu'1-Bahá to be the "terminology of the philosophers".32 Like
> Aristotle, 'Abdu'1-Bahá emphasises that the rational soul is the only
> grade of life which is immortal.33 In many instances, the word "spirit" is
> substituted for "soul", and Aristotle's grades of life are widened to
> include elements of belief that clearly come from the Semitic religious
> tradition. 'Abdu'1-Bahá states for instance that "spirit" is universally
> divided into five categories: the vegetable spirit, the animal spirit, the
> human spirit, the spirit of faith, and the Holy Spirit".34 The first three
> "spirits" are described in a manner similar to the way Aristotle describes
> "souls" in his three grades of life.
> 
> The above discussion demonstrates that the Baha'i Faith's conception of
> the soul has many points in common with Western philosophical
> dualism. Broadly speaking, the same is true for Western theological
> dualism. The following passage by ' Abdu'1-Bahá echoes the well known
> spirit-matter distinction of Christianity,
> 
> "Man is the highest degree of materiality, and at the beginning of
> spirituality - that is to say he is the end of imperfection and the beginning
> of perfection. He is at the last degree of darkness, and at the beginning of
> light; that is why it has been said that the condition of man is the end of
> the night and the beginning of day. He has an animal side as well as an
> 
> 'Abdu'1-Bahá, Some Answered Questions, p. 208, pp. 217-18, pp. 239-40.
> "It is, further, in its separate state that the Intellect is just that which it is, and it is
> this alone that is immortal and eternal", Aristotle, De Anima, Book III, Chap. 5, Intellect
> II, Active and Passive, and 'Abdu'1-Bahá in Some Answered Questions, chap.55, p. 208.
> ' Abdu'1-Bahá, Some Answered Questions, chap. 36, "Five Aspects of Spirit".
> 132               THE SINGAPORE BAHAT STUDIES REVIEW
> 
> angelic side... Not in any other of the species in the world of existence is
> there such a difference, contrast, contradiction and opposition as in the
> species of man."35
> 
> Here, the uniqueness of human beings is described in terms of them
> standing on the boundary between the material and spiritual worlds.
> There are many such passages which refer to the essential dual nature of
> human beings.36
> 
> In Christianity, the dual nature of human beings is often described in
> terms of a sinful nature being in opposition to an angelic one. In Islam,
> the dual nature of human beings is usually expressed in terms of a
> conflict between the wicked against the righteous. In the Baha'i Faith,
> human dualism is usually portrayed as a tension between animal like
> qualities and spiritual ones. The animal qualities are those related to
> survival, such as aggression, while the spiritual qualities typically
> include our ability to reason, to be selfless, and our capacity to be of
> service to others.
> 
> There are various analogies given in the Baha'i writings in support of
> mind/body dualism. Human nature is likened to a rider on a horse, a bird
> in a cage, or the sun shining on a mirror. They are all used to express the
> soul's inherent independence from the body. The rider for instance will
> leave the horse when the horse cannot travel any further; the bird will fly
> free when the cage is broken; and the sun continues to shine even if the
> mirror is shattered.37 The bird in the cage analogy is of course
> reminiscent of similar beliefs in other spiritual traditions. Plato for
> instance, likened the soul to be a chariot with broken winged horses
> which is trapped on earth.38
> 
> ' Abdu'1-Bahá, Some Answered Questions, pp. 235-6.
> see Paris Talks, chapter on 'The Two Natures in Man', pp. 60-62, also
> Promulgation of Universal Peace, p. 60, p. 295, p. 464.
> 'Abdu'1-Bahá, rider/horse analogy, Promulgation of Universal Peace, p. 416, bird in
> a cage, Some Answered Questions, p. 228, sun/mirror, Some Answered Questions,p. 242.
> "Let us adopt this method, and compare the soul to a winged charioteer and his team
> acting together. Now all the horses and charioteers of the gods are good and come of
> good stock, but in other beings there is a mixture of good and bad ... Now we must try to
> tell how it is that we speak of both mortal and immortal living beings. Soul taken as a
> whole is in charge of all that is inanimate, and traverses the entire universe, appearing at
> Body, Mind, Soul and Spirit                                   13 3
> 
> 4. The Baha'i Tripartite approach and its underlying monism
> 
> Soul/body dualism is not the only way that human nature is described in
> the Baha'i writings. Often a tripartite distinction is made, involving an
> interaction between body, soul and spirit. 'Abdu'1-Bahá on several
> occasions refers to this tripartite view of human nature explicitly, as in
> the following passage,
> 
> "There are in the world of humanity three degrees; those of the body, the
> soul, and spirit. The body is the physical or animal degree of man. From
> the bodily point of view man is a sharer of the animal kingdom. The
> bodies alike of men and animals are composed of elements held together
> by the law of attraction. Like the animal, man possesses the faculties of
> the senses, is subject to heat, cold, hunger, thirst, etc.; unlike the animal,
> man has a rational soul, the human intelligence. This intelligence of man
> is the intermediary between his body and his spirit. When man allows
> the spirit, through his soul, to enlighten his understanding, then does he
> contain all Creation; because man, being the culmination of all that went
> before and thus superior to all previous evolutions, contains all the lower
> world within himself. Illumined by the spirit through the instrumentality
> of the soul, man's radiant intelligence makes him the crowning-point of
> Creation."39
> 
> Another explicit reference is given in the following passage,
> 
> "When we ponder over the reality of the microcosm, we discover that in
> the microcosm there are three realities. Man is endowed with an outer or
> physical reality. It belongs to the material realm, the animal
> kingdom...The human body is like animals subject to nature's laws. But
> man is endowed with a second reality, the rational or intellectual reality;
> and the intellectual reality of man predominates over nature... Yet there is
> a third reality, the spiritual reality. Through its medium one discovers
> spiritual revelations, a celestial faculty which is infinite as regards the
> 
> different times in different forms. When it is perfect and winged it moves on high and
> governs all creation, but the soul that has shed its wings falls until it encounters solid
> matters. There it settles and puts on an earthly body, which appears to be self-moving
> because of the power of soul that is in it, and this combination of soul and body is given
> the name of a living being and is termed mortal." Plato, Phaedrus, p. 246.
> 'Abdu'1-Bahá, Paris Talks, pp. 96-97.
> 134               THE SINGAPORE BAHAT STUDIES REVIEW
> 
> intellectual as well as physical realms. That power is conferred upon man
> through the breath of the Holy Spirit. It is an eternal reality, an
> indestructible reality, a reality belonging to the divine, a supernatural
> kingdom; a reality whereby the world is illumined... It is the ray of the
> Sun of Reality."40
> 
> The world of the spirit is described in a manner that resembles the
> Christian Holy Spirit, or Hindu Atman. The soul is not able to function
> unless it is filled with the Holy Spirit. Both intellectually and spiritually,
> human souls depend on the spirit. 'Abdu'1-Bahá states, "By the power of
> the Holy Spirit, working through his soul, man is able to perceive the
> divine reality of things. All great works of art and science are witnesses
> to this power of the Spirit. The same Spirit gives eternal life"41. The Holy
> Spirit is the animating spiritual force which gives life to both the world
> of the soul and body. It is the force which links God to His creation. In
> the Baha'i writings, God and his Manifestations are often likened to the
> Sun, the Holy Spirit is represented by its rays, and all living beings are
> symbolised by the earth. ' Abdu'1-Bahá puts it in the following way,
> 
> "The Divine Reality may be likened to the sun and the Holy Spirit to the
> rays of the sun. As the rays of the sun bring light and warmth of the sun
> to the earth, giving life to all created things, so do the 'Manifestations'
> bring the power of the Holy Spirit from the Divine Sun of Reality to give
> light and life to the souls of men42 ...The Holy Spirit is the Light from
> the Sun of Truth bringing, by its infinite power, life and illumination to
> all mankind, flooding all souls with Divine Radiance, conveying the
> blessings of God's Mercy to the whole world. The earth, without the
> medium of the warmth and light of the rays of the sun, could not receive
> benefits from the sun. Likewise the Holy Spirit is the very cause of the
> life of man; without the Holy Spirit he would have no intellect, he would
> be unable to acquire his scientific knowledge by which his great
> influence over the rest of creation is gained. The illumination of the Holy
> Spirit gives to man the power of thought, and enables him to make
> discoveries by which he bends the laws of nature to his will. The Holy
> 
> 'Abdu'1-Bahá, Foundations of World Unity, p. 51.
> 'Abdu'1-Bahá, Paris Talks, p. 85.
> In the Baha'i writings, the term 'Manifestations of God' refers to the founders of the
> world's major religions. The 'Divine Sun of Reality' refers to God.
> Body, Mind, Soul and Spirit                      13 5
> 
> Spirit it is which, through the mediation of the Prophets of God, teaches
> spiritual virtues to man and enables him to attain Eternal Life."43
> 
> In the Baha'i Faith, the world of the spirit is the uniting principle for the
> soul and body. The relationship between the immortal realm of the soul
> and the perishable world of the body is best understood with reference to
> the world of the spirit, since it is at this higher level that they have a
> common origin. Just as the physical life of all living beings on earth
> depend on the rays of the sun, the intellectual and spiritual life of human
> beings depend on an invisible sun, the "Sun of Reality", the "Divine
> Reality", the "Sun of Truth", names which in the Baha'i writings
> translate to mean God and His Manifestations. The main point is that
> both souls and bodies have a common point of reference: both, to their
> own degree are ultimately signs of God. Their unity and relationship to
> each other can only be understood in relation to the world of God and
> His Manifestations. 'Abdu'1-Bahá states,
> 
> "The worlds of God are in perfect harmony and correspondence one and
> another. Each world in this limitless universe is, as it were, a mirror
> reflecting the history and nature of all the rest. The physical universe is,
> likewise, in perfect correspondence with the spiritual or divine realm.
> The world of matter is an outer expression or facsimile of the inner
> kingdom of the spirit. The world of minds corresponds with the world of
> hearts." 44
> 
> The human material, intellectual and spiritual realms are interconnected,
> and are but different projections of the same world of spirit. Our physical
> universe, although a "facsimile" of a more real world, is nevertheless, a
> natural part of it.
> 
> Dualism, as it. appears in the Baha'i writings, does so upon the
> background world of the spirit, or world of God. If taken out of this all-
> important context, it will inevitably be misrepresented. It is precisely the
> filtering out of this element from our various spiritual traditions that
> characterise many modern descriptions of traditional dualism. Since they
> have a secular bias, they tend to tacitly miss out the uniting link between
> 
> 'Abdu'1-Bahá, Paris Talks, pp. 58-59.
> 'Abdu'1-Bahá, Promulgation of Universal Peace, p. 270.
> 136               THE SINGAPORE BAHAT STUDIES REVIEW
> 
> soul and body which was always there in a more religious framework.
> The world of the spirit provides the transpersonal element to human
> nature. It makes up the selfless part which inspires and nurtures the
> progress of the soul.
> 
> The world of the spirit provides rationale to the very idea of the soul.
> Dualism, viewed from this perspective is only the starting point. The
> soul is not only different to the body, but it is a powerful sign of the
> existence of a world beyond it. It is not a suspended immortal substance
> to be defined only in terms of what the body is not, but it is an "image of
> God". From this perspective, the concepts of God and the soul are
> inextricably linked. The faculties and qualities of the soul are bound
> together with the attributes of God. In fact in many religious traditions,
> knowledge of the soul is equated with knowledge of God, not in an
> objective sense, but in spiritual terms, that is, in an inner sense.45
> 
> The soul as it appears in this world is a mere shadow of how it will
> appear in the next world: "Know thou that the Kingdom is the real world,
> and this nether place is only its shadow stretching out. A shadow hath no
> life of its own; its existence is only a fantasy, and nothing more; it is but
> images reflected in water, and seeming as pictures to the eye".46 The
> Baha'i tripartite approach has its focus primarily on the world of the
> spirit. This is the monist side of the Baha'i Faith, and the nature of both
> soul and body can only be understood in terms of this third element.
> While both dualism and monism co-exist in Baha'i teachings, monism is
> the uniting principle that underlies its dualism.
> 
> Many Baha'i analogies which describe the soul and the afterlife can be
> readily interpreted in a tripartite way and serve to illustrate the
> aforementioned points. Take the often-used analogy of the foetus in the
> womb. In Baha'u'llah's words, "The world beyond is as different from
> this world as this world is different from that of the child while still in
> the womb of the mother".47 The foetus represents our soul and the
> uterine world symbolises this world: We can have no more conception of
> 
> see article "The Hindu Concept of God: Unity in Diversity", by the author, The
> Singapore Bahá 7 Studies Review, vol.2, section 3.2, pp. 17-31.
> 'Abdu'1-Bahá, Selections from the Writings of 'Abdu 'l-Bahá, p. 178.
> Baha'u'llah, Gleanings, p. 157.
> Body, Mind, Soul and Spirit                          13 7
> 
> what the afterlife is like than a foetus can imagine the world into which it
> will be born. Death in this life is not an end, but a birth into a wider
> world. Just as the womb is a dark restricted place in comparison to the
> world in which the foetus is to be born, so too, is our life in this world
> limited when compared to the world to come. The world of the afterlife
> according to the Baha'i writings, is not limited by space and time. Just as
> a baby develops its organs, eyes, ears, etc for use in this world, the
> purpose of our lives is to develop spiritual qualities which will be used in
> the next life. In ' Abdu'1-Bahá's words,
> 
> "Consider how a being, in the world of the womb, was deaf of ear and
> blind of eye, and mute of tongue; how he was bereft of any perceptions
> at all. But once, out of that world of darkness, he passed into this world
> of light, then his eye saw, his ear heard, his tongue spoke. In the same
> way, once he hath hastened away from this mortal place into the
> Kingdom of God, then he will be born in the spirit; then the eye of his
> perception will open, the ear of his soul will hearken, and all the truths of
> which he was ignorant before will be made plain and clear".48
> 
> An important message of the foetus/womb analogy is that the fruits of
> our actions in this life cannot be seen while we are still within it. The
> meaning and purpose of our lives here is defined only in relation to the
> afterlife. Also, just as it would be implausible for the foetus to think that
> its life were limited to the uterine world, so too, is it unlikely that our
> lives are restricted to this physical world,
> 
> "... just as the effects and the fruitage of the uterine life are not to be
> found in that dark and narrow place, and only when the child is
> transferred to this wide earth do the benefits and uses of growth and
> development in that previous world become revealed - so likewise
> reward and punishment, heaven and hell, requital and retribution for
> actions done in this present life, will stand revealed in that other world
> beyond. And just as, if human life in the womb were limited to that
> uterine world, existence there would be nonsensical, irrelevant - so too if
> the life of this world, the deeds here done and their fruitage, did not
> come forth in the world beyond, the whole process would be irrational
> 
> 'Abdu'1-Bahá, Selections from the Writings of 'Abdu 'l-Bahá, p. 177.
> 138               THE SINGAPORE BAHAT STUDIES REVIEW
> 
> and foolish."49
> 
> The world of the spirit is represented by the mother in this analogy. Just
> as the mother surrounds and sustains both the foetus and the womb, so
> too does the world of the spirit nourish our souls and bodies. Imagine
> you are the foetus, conscious in the same way as you are now. It is
> perfectly natural for you to make a distinction between the uterine world
> and yourself. After all, are you not growing in some sense, in a way that
> the world around you is not? Your first inclination might tend towards
> dualism. You and the uterine world, although interdependent, are yet
> quite different. You seem to possess a freedom in movement, an
> autonomy that the rest of the objects in the uterine world do not have. As
> time goes on, you begin to suspect that there is more to the uterine world
> than can be directly observed. Although you share much with your
> uterine world, you do not conclude that you are nothing but the product
> of forces acting within it. It would be more natural to be open to the
> possibility of worlds existing beyond your immediate world. You are a
> fish in the topsy-turvy world of an amniotic liquid, but a thin layer of
> skin is all that separates you from a world of air, space and light. If
> somehow you heard of the existence of the world of the mother, a world
> that nourishes and sustains both you and the uterine world, would you
> not believe in it? Would it not explain many aspects of your nature and
> your relationship to the uterine world? You may come to believe that the
> existence of this invisible third element is actually very important, and
> that it is the only reasonable way of accounting for the differences
> between you and the uterine world. Finally, when your nine-month
> incubation period comes to an end, when you depart from the womb
> world, you are in fact born into another world. There you are free from
> being a fish immersed in the amniotic liquid world, and for the first time,
> you breath the air of another world.
> 
> Another analogy frequently used in the Baha'i writings is the image of
> the soul being like a plant and the body being like the earth or soil in
> which it grows. ' Abdu'1-Bahá describes it in the following manner,
> 
> ".the soul is the intermediary between the body and the spirit. In like
> manner is this tree the intermediary between the seed and the fruit. When
> 
> 'Abdu'1-Bahá, Selections from the Writings of 'Abdu 'l-Bahá, p. 185.
> Body, Mind, Soul and Spirit                      139
> 
> the fruit of the tree appears and becomes ripe, then we know the tree is
> perfect... when the soul has in it the life of the spirit, then does it bring
> forth good fruit and become a divine tree."50
> 
> In this analogy the soul is nurtured by the world of the spirit, variously
> symbolised by the rays of the sun, the rain from clouds, and
> "springtime",
> 
> "When the phenomenal sun appears from the vernal point of dawning in
> the zodiac, a wondrous and vibrant commotion is set up in the body of
> the earthly world. The withered trees are quickened with animation, the
> black soil becomes verdant with new growth, fresh and fragrant flowers
> bloom, the world of dust is refreshed, renewed life forces surge through
> the veins of every animate being, and a new springtime carpets the
> meadows, plains, mountains and valleys with wondrous forms of life.
> That which was dead and desolate is revived and resuscitated; that which
> was withered, faded and stricken is transformed by the spirit of a new
> creation. In the same way the Sun of Reality, when it illumines the
> horizon of the inner world, animates, vivifies and quickens with a divine
> and wonderful power. The trees of human minds clothe themselves in
> new and verdant robes, putting on leaves and blossoms and bearing
> spiritual fruits of the heavenly glad tidings. Then fragrant flowers of
> inner significances appear from the soil of human souls, and the whole
> being of man awakens to a new and divine activity. This is the growth
> and development of the inner world through the effulgent light of divine
> guidance and the heat of the fire of the love of God."51
> 
> Although a seed is planted in the ground, the cause for its growth comes
> from beyond the world of the soil; that is, it comes from the influence of
> the sun and clouds. Gradually, green shoots emerge from the soil. Both
> the top part of the plant and the world above it is invisible to those who
> are confined to live underground. As the plant grows further, it may, or
> may not develop fruits. Likewise, the world of the spirit, although lying
> beyond this physical world, invisible from an empirical standpoint, is
> responsible for our soul's development. The tree's fruits represent
> spiritual qualities of the soul and symbolise our life's purpose. We in this
> 
> 'Abdu'1-Bahá, Paris Talks, p. 98.
> 5x
> ' Abdu' 1-Bahá, Promulgation of Universal Peace, p. 271.
> 140               THE SINGAPORE BAHAT STUDIES REVIEW
> 
> life have roots which stretch down into the physical world, yet at the
> same time, a part of us reaches out into another realm, a world which is
> under the direct influence of the spirit.
> 
> Whether our souls develop spiritual qualities is dependent on us and the
> moral choices we make. Just as it is impossible to observe a tree and its
> fruits from a point below the ground, so too, is it impossible for us to
> observe the development of the soul and make judgements about it while
> we are in this physical world. In terms of this analogy, mind/body
> dualism recognises that there is a difference between the world of the
> soil and the growing plant, but this is only the starting point. It naturally
> leads us to conclude that there is another world, a world which both
> surrounds the plant and the soil in which it grows, but at the same time,
> extends beyond them. Just as it is difficult to imagine how and why the
> plant and soil interact unless the influence of the world above them be
> recognised, so too is it difficult to relate our bodies to our souls unless
> the influence of the world of the spirit is taken into account. The world
> of the spirit is the unifying world, the one reference point for both soul
> and body.
> 
> In the tree/soil analogy, the founders of the world's major religions are
> likened to "Gardeners" who nurture the plant's growth: their teachings
> and their lives are responsible for the spiritual growth of souls,
> 
> "It is evident, therefore, that man is in need of divine education and
> inspiration, that the spirit and bounties of God are essential to his
> development. That is to say, the teachings of Christ and the Prophets are
> necessary for his education and guidance. They are the divine Gardeners
> Who till the earth of human hearts and minds. They educate man, uproot
> the weeds, burn the thorns and remodel the waste places into gardens and
> orchards where fruitful trees grow".52
> 
> Death has been likened to a kind gardener uprooting the plant and
> transferring it to a "wide open area". 'Abdu'1-Bahá, when writing about
> the death of a youth, stated the following,
> 
> "The     inscrutable     divine    wisdom      underlieth      such   heart-rending
> 
> 'Abdu'1-Bahá, Promulgation of Universal Peace, p. 295.
> Body, Mind, Soul and Spirit                                141
> 
> occurrences. It is as if a kind gardener transferred a fresh and tender
> shrub from a confined place to a wide open area. This transfer is not the
> cause of the withering, the lessening or the destruction of that shrub; nay,
> on the contrary, it maketh it to grow and thrive, acquire freshness and
> delicacy, become green and bear fruit. This hidden secret is well known
> to the gardener, but those souls who are unaware of this bounty suppose
> that the gardener, in his anger and wrath, hath uprooted the shrub. Yet to
> those who are aware, this concealed fact is manifest, and this predestined
> decree is considered a bounty."53
> 
> Like the foetus/womb analogy, the tree/soil analogy is based upon
> supposing that our physical world is but a finite world embedded in
> many worlds that extend beyond it, and that our souls are evolving
> through the influence of the invisible rays of the spirit. The journey
> analogy also conveys similar themes. The soul is likened to a traveller
> who passes through this physical world acquiring spiritual qualities. Here
> an individual human body is likened to be a vehicle for the soul, which,
> while moving about physically, enables the soul to make a parallel
> journey in another universe, a universe within. 'Abdu'1-Bahá describes
> our inner journey and the need for it in the following way,
> 
> "The wisdom of the appearance of the spirit in the body is this: the
> human spirit is a Divine Trust, and it must traverse all conditions, for its
> passage and movement through the conditions of existence will be the
> means of its acquiring perfections. So when a man travels and passes
> through different regions and numerous countries with system and
> method, it is certainly a means of his acquiring perfection, for he will see
> places, scenes and countries, from which he will discover the conditions
> and states of other nations. He will thus become acquainted with the
> geography of countries and their wonders and arts; he will familiarize
> himself with the habits, customs and usages of peoples; he will see the
> civilization and progress of the epoch; he will become aware of the
> policy of governments and the power and capacity of each country. It is
> the same when the human spirit passes through the conditions of
> existence: it will become the possessor of each degree and station."54
> 
> ' Abdu'1-Bahá, Selections from the Writings of 'Abdu 'l-Bahá, pp. 199-200.
> 'Abdu'1-Bahá, Some Answered Questions, p. 198.
> 142               THE SINGAPORE BAHAT STUDIES REVIEW
> 
> Elsewhere, 'Abdu'1-Bahá states, "The pathway of life is the road which
> leads to divine knowledge and attainment. Without training and guidance
> the soul could never progress beyond the conditions of its lower
> nature"55. From the Baha'i perspective, the soul's purpose is to acquire
> spiritual wisdom. There is much more than soul/body dualism here. The
> soul is a "Divine Trust" in search of God. The appearance of the soul in
> the body is not the outcome of an accidental or random occurrence. Like
> all good travellers, the spiritually wise recognise the need for skilful
> guides. According to the Baha'i writings, God, His Manifestations and
> His spirit provide the compass by which our souls navigate the inner
> landscape.
> 
> Baha'u'llah in his "Seven Valleys" describes some of the spiritual
> landmarks that must characterise our inner journey. The traveller
> journeys successively through the valleys of "search", "love",
> "knowledge", "unity", "contentment", "wonderment", and reaches the
> valley of "true poverty and absolute nothingness"56. In the valley of
> search, Baha'u'llah describes some of the sacrifices the "true seeker"
> must be prepared to make if he or she is reach the final goal, referred to
> as "the realm of the spirit, which is the City of God". The object of the
> traveller's goal is also personified in terms of a journey to find a "trace
> of the traceless Friend",
> 
> "The true seeker hunteth naught but the object of his quest, and the lover
> hath no desire save union with his beloved. Nor shall the seeker reach his
> goal unless he sacrifices all things. That is, whatever he hath seen, and
> heard, and understood, all must he set at naught, that he may enter the
> realm of the spirit, which is the City of God...On this journey the
> traveller abideth in every land and dwelleth in every region. In every
> face, he seeketh the beauty of the Friend; in every country he looketh for
> the Beloved. He joineth every company, and seeketh fellowship with
> every soul, that haply in some mind he may uncover the secret of the
> Friend, or in some face he may behold the beauty of the Loved One."57
> 
> 'Abdu'1-Bahá', Promulgation of Universal Peace, p. 296.
> The Seven Valleys is a commentary on the famous mystical Sufi work: Faridu'l-Din
> 'Attar's Conference of the Birds.
> Baha'u'llah, The Seven Valleys, p. 7.
> Body, Mind, Soul and Spirit                       143
> 
> At each stage of the journey, the traveller is dependent on God's
> guidance. In the valley of "true poverty and absolute nothingness",
> Baha'u'llah states,
> 
> "These journeys have no visible ending in the world of time, but the
> severed wayfarer - if invisible confirmation descend upon him and the
> Guardian of the Cause assist him - may cross these seven stages in seven
> steps, nay rather in seven breaths, nay rather in a single breath, if God
> will and desire it.. .They who soar in the heaven of singleness and reach
> to the sea of the Absolute, reckon this city - which is the station of life in
> God - as the furthermost state of mystic knowers.. ."58
> 
> This last valley is the "dying from self and the living in God"59, and is
> obviously similar to the end goal described in many of the world's other
> mystical traditions. The "absolute nothingness" for instance of this last
> valley, is similar to the "blow out" or "annihilation" of Nirvana in
> Buddhism. This journey involves the traveller becoming more and more
> selfless. The end goal of the journey is to arrive at a condition where no
> trace of ourselves exist, and where we become a perfect channel for the
> world of the spirit, "Yea, all he hath, from heart to skin, will be set
> aflame, so that nothing will remain save the Friend"60. This spiritual state
> is both a consequence and precondition of the soul being in complete
> harmony with the world of God. It does not mean of course that we
> become identical to God, but that God's light becomes perfectly
> reflected in us. From the Baha'i perspective, our souls cannot be
> understood without reference to this ultimate goal. Perfect spiritual unity
> with the world of God is the highest aspiration of all souls. Once again,
> the starting point is mind/body dualism. The goal of our inner journey is
> however, unity, and it is this all-important third element, an underlying
> monism within us that is able to unify an immortal soul to its perishable
> body.
> 
> Baha'u'llah, The Seven Valleys, pp. 40-41.
> Baha'u'llah, The Seven Valleys, p. 36.
> Baha'u'llah, The Seven Valleys, p. 36.
> 144              THE SINGAPORE BAHAT STUDIES REVIEW
> 
> 5. The rays of the mind and its reflections
> 
> On some occasions the sun/landscape analogy is used to illustrate the
> link between the soul and the body and clarify ideas about the faculties
> of the mind. The sun is used to symbolise the human soul and the
> landscape is likened to the human body. Baha'u'llah gives this analogy
> in the context of describing how injuries which seem to change the mind,
> do not in fact affect the soul. He likens these injuries to be like clouds
> which obscure the sun's light,
> 
> "Know thou that the soul of man is exalted above, and is independent of
> all infirmities of body or mind. That a sick person showeth signs of
> weakness is due to the hindrances that interpose themselves between his
> soul and his body, for the soul itself remaineth unaffected by any bodily
> ailments...When it leaveth the body, however, it will evince such
> ascendancy, and reveal such influence as no force on earth can equal.
> Every pure, every refined and sanctified soul will be endowed with
> tremendous power, and shall rejoice with exceeding gladness. Consider
> the lamp which is hidden under a bushel. Though its light be shining, yet
> its radiance is concealed from men. Likewise, consider the sun which
> hath been obscured by the clouds. Observe how its splendor appeareth to
> have diminished, when in reality the source of that light hath remained
> unchanged. The soul of man should be likened unto this sun, and all
> things on earth should be regarded as his body. So long as no external
> impediment interveneth between them, the body will, in its entirety,
> continue to reflect the light of the soul, and to be sustained by its power.
> As soon as, however, a veil interposeth itself between them, the
> brightness of that light seemeth to lessen. Consider again the sun when it
> is completely hidden behind the clouds. Though the earth is still
> illumined with its light, yet the measure of light which it receiveth is
> considerably reduced. Not until the clouds have dispersed, can the sun
> shine again in the plenitude of its glory. Neither the presence of the
> cloud nor its absence can, in any way, affect the inherent splendor of the
> sun. The soul of man is the sun by which his body is illumined, and from
> which it draweth its sustenance, and should be so regarded."61.
> 
> In this analogy, it is the body that reflects the light of the soul, and the
> 
> Baha'u'llah, Gleanings, LXXX.
> Body, Mind, Soul and Spirit                       145
> 
> "impediments" which may reduce its apparent brightness come from
> injury of the brain. Here Baha'u'llah makes an important point about the
> mind: the faculties of the mind, as we observe them, depend on the state
> of the body. 'Abdu'1-Bahá also uses the same analogy to clarify the
> relationship of the mind to the soul,
> 
> "Now regarding the question whether the faculties of the mind and the
> human sou] are one and the same. These faculties are but the inherent
> properties of the soul, such as the power of imagination, of thought, of
> understanding; powers that are the essential requisites of the reality of
> man, even as the solar ray is the inherent property of the sun. The temple
> of man is like unto a mirror, his soul is as the sun, and his mental
> faculties even as the rays that emanate from that source of light. The ray
> may cease to fall upon the mirror, but it can in no wise be dissociated
> from the sun".62
> 
> The faculties of the mind are likened to the "rays" of the soul. This
> passage appears to suggest that the mind continues to exist, even when
> the soul is dissociated from the body. But this is only partially true, since
> what we observe of the mind will be signs of the soul's power in this
> world, and unlike the sun, the intensity of its rays appear to change with
> time. Elsewhere ' Abdu'1-Bahá elaborates this point,
> 
> "Now concerning mental faculties, they are in truth of the inherent
> properties of the soul, even as the radiation of light is the essential
> property of the sun. The rays of the sun are being renewed, but the sun
> itself is ever the same and unchanged. Consider how the human intellect
> develops and weakens, and may at times come to naught, whereas the
> soul changeth not. For the mind to manifest itself, the human body must
> be whole; and a sound mind cannot be but in a sound body, whereas the
> soul dependeth not upon the body".63
> 
> Here a distinction is made between the sun and its rays: the sun is
> "unchanged", while its rays are being "renewed". It is perhaps more
> accurate to think of the Baha'i view of the mind in terms of it emerging
> from an interaction between the soul and its body. In this way, the power
> 
> ' Abdu'1-Bahá, August Forel and the Baha'i Faith, pp. 24-25.
> 'Abdu'1-Bahá, August Forel and the Baha'i Faith, p. 8.
> 146               THE SINGAPORE BAHAT STUDIES REVIEW
> 
> behind the mind is the eternal part, emanating from the soul, while the
> faculties of the mind that we observe are temporal in character. This
> conclusion seems to be confirmed by the Baha'i writings. ' Abdu'1-Bahá
> states for instance, that the "intelligence of man is the intermediary
> between his body and his spirit"64, and Shoghi Effendi states that, "What
> the Baha'is do believe... is that we have three aspects of our humanness,
> so to speak, body, a mind and an immortal identity - soul or spirit. We
> believe the mind forms a link between the soul and the body, and the two
> interact together"65. Note that this picture is still essentially dualist, in
> that it makes the distinction between the temporal world of the body and
> the eternal realm of the soul. The mind however, being the interface
> between these two worlds, contains within it elements of both.
> As to the question of when a soul comes into being, a question often
> posed in the philosophy of mind, 'Abdu'1-Bahá states the following:
> 
> "... these members, these elements, this composition, which are found in
> the organism of man, are an attraction and magnet for the spirit; it is
> certain that the spirit will appear in it. So a mirror which is clear will
> certainly attract the rays of the sun. It will become luminous, and
> wonderful images will appear in it - that is to say, when these existing
> elements are gathered together according to the natural order, and with
> perfect strength, they become a magnet for the spirit, and the spirit will
> become manifest in them with all its perfections. Under these conditions
> it cannot be said, "What is the necessity for the rays of the sun to
> descend upon the mirror?" - for the connection which exists between the
> reality of things, whether they be spiritual or material, requires that when
> the mirror is clear and faces the sun, the light of the sun must become
> apparent in it. In the same way, when the elements are arranged and
> combined in the most glorious system, organization and manner, the
> human spirit will appear and be manifest in them."66
> 
> The belief in a soul does not mean that at conception an immortal
> substance is somehow created ex-nihilo. It means rather that when the
> special combination of elements that make up a human being come
> together, they are able to reflect the rays of the spirit. The soul being
> 
> 'Abdu'1-Bahá, Paris Talks, p. 96.
> Unto Him Shall We Return, p. 60.
> 'Abdu'1-Bahá, Some Answered Questions, p. 201.
> Body, Mind, Soul and Spirit                              147
> 
> outside time is always there, but by being reflected in a body/brain, its
> personality is strengthened and it has the opportunity to grow spiritually.
> The Baha'i seed/soil analogy helps to clarify this point. The soil, as
> already explained, represents our space-time world and the seed
> symbolises the soul. Before the seed is planted, it exists, but lies outside
> the world of the soil. Likewise, before conception, a soul exists outside
> our space-time world. Imagine that placing the seed into the ground
> corresponds to the events that accompany the conception of a human
> embryo. The seed once placed in the ground, begins to grow, sprouting
> above the soil. Likewise, the soul grows spiritually, reaching out beyond
> our space-time world. Just as the form and colour of a plant is latent
> within the seed from the outset, so too, is there an intrinsic part to each
> human being, which under the right conditions, develops and grows
> 
> "The personality of the rational soul is from its beginning; it is not due to
> the instrumentality of the body, but the state and the personality of the
> rational soul may be strengthened in this world.. ."67
> 
> 6. Engineering Analogies of the Soul
> 
> According to 'Abdu'1-Bahá, the human body "develops through the
> animal spirit"68. Note that this point is in agreement with Darwin's
> theory of evolution. Man's body is animal in nature and has a common
> origin with animals. On the other hand, the theory of evolution says
> nothing about human minds. That has of course not stopped many people
> from making a connection, but this kind of reductionism is completely
> unwarranted69. The Baha'i Faith affirms the phenomenon of human
> evolution, but maintains that the human species was always distinct from
> animal species. A common origin may exist for the bodies of human
> beings and animals, but that does not mean that they are identical. In
> fact, their obvious mental differences suggest that there are fundamental
> differences.
> 
> ' Abdu'1-Bahá, Some Answered Questions, p. 240.
> Ibid.
> a detailed discussion about this subject can be found in chapter 6, The Survival
> Machine, in the author's book, The Universe Within.
> 148               THE SINGAPORE BAHAT STUDIES REVIEW
> 
> If one subscribes to the Baha'i view of there being varying degrees of the
> spirit, it is natural to ask what it is about human beings that allows for an
> immortal soul? But to speak of the soul in "object" or physical terms is
> to misunderstand it, and the Baha'i writings are very clear about
> avoiding such an approach. The soul, according to the Baha'i Faith is
> best understood in its own spiritual terms, "the comprehension of that
> other life depends on our spiritual birth!".70 Yet, the Baha'i writings do
> give many analogies of how to think of the soul and some of them have
> already been mentioned in this paper. Since in our modern society, a
> scientific approach is almost always invariably associated with one
> which rejects the existence of the soul, the following analogies, inspired
> by the Baha'i writings have been specially devised by the author to help
> clarify the spiritual difference between man and animal. These analogies
> are tentative in nature and were found helpful to the author. They are
> given here in that spirit. They are by no means definitive, and to the
> general reader, might appear technical in places.
> 
> The first analogy is based upon the capture of rain by a container or cup.
> The rain symbolises the world of the spirit, while the container denotes a
> human being in this physical world. The rain is essentially different from
> the container in that it does not have a specific shape or form. After it
> falls into the container, it is given apparent form. Likewise, the world of
> the spirit comes from outside space-time. Containers have different
> shapes and sizes and some collect more rain than others. In this analogy,
> imagine that we can only see the outside surface of containers and cannot
> observe their contents. The soul is like the collected rain, essentially
> formless, but given form by the container. Since we can only observe the
> surface of containers from their outside, we cannot see each other's
> souls. The soul is a form of energy which lies outside our space-time
> world, but rests alongside it. The spirit flows through everything, but in
> our space-time world, it is given form. A spiritual person is someone
> who is filled with the spirit. The goal of life is to capture the spirit. Each
> of us has a different spiritual capacity, just as containers come in
> different sizes. We all contaminate the water to some extent, that is, we
> all in some way leave our imprint on it - some leave less, others leave
> more. At death the container is broken and the collected water pours out
> into another dimension. Its task is eventually to flow back to the infinite
> 
> 'Abdu'1-Bahá, Paris Talks, p. 94.
> Body, Mind, Soul and Spirit                         149
> 
> Ocean (God). Through each successive world, it makes its way closer
> and closer to the Ocean (God).
> 
> The difference between man and animal in this analogy may be thought
> of in terms of the varying degrees to which they are able to capture the
> spirit. Animals may for instance be modelled in terms of objects in
> which the spirit is not collected: the rain essentially flows through them.
> At death, when their elements disperse, no "spirit" is transferred into
> another dimension. They nevertheless, whilst alive, have the spirit in
> them.
> 
> The second analogy is that of a torch. Let the battery, the source of
> electrical energy, represent the spirit, and let the electrical wires in the
> circuit, as well as the thin wire filament in the bulb denote the human
> body. Furthermore, let the projected light of the torch symbolise the
> human soul. Initially, just after the torch is switched on, electrical energy
> from the battery supplies current in the circuit. As the current increases
> in magnitude, heat is dissipated in the thin-wire bulb filament and is
> given off in the form of light. This light is then projected forward by the
> mirror behind the bulb. Likewise, from the moment of conception, the
> spirit is empowering the spiritual life of human beings and the light of
> the soul is reflected in this world and the world beyond. Now the thin-
> wire bulb filament is in principle no different to any other wire. The only
> difference is that it is much thinner and can withstand a higher
> temperature than other wires. If the bulb filament is now replaced by a
> normal wire in the circuit, one that is much thicker, then no light is
> produced. This might model the difference between an animal and
> human being. The "circuit" for the animal in this analogy is similar to the
> torch, but it is one where the bulb filament is replaced by an ordinary
> piece of wire. The animal "circuit" is empowered by the source, and a
> current is produced, but no light is propagated. Strictly speaking an
> ordinary electrical circuit will emit a small amount of radiation, but it is
> very much smaller in magnitude to the light of the torch and it is not in
> the visible frequency range.
> 
> Man and animal in the torch analogy are similar. They are both modelled
> to be circuits which conduct spiritual energy. There is a small but crucial
> difference represented by the thin-wire bulb filament. This difference is
> enough to account for a kind of soul-light in the human case. Although
> 150            THE SINGAPORE BAHAT STUDIES REVIEW
> 
> the animal does not emit this kind of light, it does have however, a
> "radiation" of its own.
> 
> There are many variations of the torch analogy which are possible. The
> analogy is based upon likening human beings and animals to electrical
> circuits which are powered by the spirit. The circuit model for human
> beings may employ a capacitor instead of a bulb. For those familiar with
> electrical circuits, they will know that the capacitor will charge up after
> the switch is closed (on position) and will subsequently store electrical
> energy. So when the switch is put in the off position, breaking the
> electric circuit, a voltage remains across the capacitor, representing the
> stored energy of the circuit. This might model how souls of human
> beings store and collect spiritual energy and how after death, spiritual
> qualities of the soul remain. In the case of the animal where the
> corresponding circuit has no capacitance but only resistance, the voltage
> across the resistor falls to zero almost immediately after the source is
> disconnected from the circuit. The animal equivalent circuit is obviously
> very similar to the human one, the only difference is that it does not have
> the capacity to store up spiritual qualities in the same way that human
> beings do.
> 
> The electric circuit model of human nature can even incorporate free
> will. Imagine that in the equivalent circuit there is a variable resistance.
> In the case of the torch, a variable resistor is used to control the intensity
> of light that is emitted, while in the case of the capacitor circuit, it
> controls the rate at which the capacitor charges up. In both cases,
> imagine that the ability to change the variable resistor value is something
> that lies within the control of human beings. The ideal value of the
> variable resistor is zero. In the case of the torch model, zero resistance
> will maximise the intensity of the soul-light propagated, while for the
> capacitor circuit, zero resistance will result in a greater store of spiritual
> energy in a given amount of time. Minimising the value of the variable
> resistor is obviously analogous to human beings becoming selfless, and
> providing less "resistance" to the spirit.
> 
> It should also be mentioned at this point that a technological analogy for
> the Baha'i approach to the soul has already been provided by John
> Body, Mind, Soul and Spirit                      151
> 
> Hatcher . Hatcher compares the connection between the soul and the
> brain to the way information is broadcast from a television transmitter
> and detected by a television receiver. The waves of electromagnetic
> energy traversing the earth's atmosphere are independent of the receiver.
> It is only by tuning our television set to the correct frequency, that is, by
> decoding the information in a certain way, that we can form images on
> our TV screen. Likewise, "thought waves" of the soul might traverse an
> "inner space", and be detected by the brain. Although Hatcher did not
> use this analogy to highlight the spiritual difference between man and
> animal, it can be used to do so. The animal equivalent electric circuit
> here would be one that can neither transmit or receive "soul waves".
> There is a similarity of the transmitter part of this analogy to the torch
> analogy. As in that case, the main difference between animal and man
> lies in the degree of sophistication of their respective equivalent circuits.
> To transmit and receive electromagnetic waves requires the use of
> special types of circuits called "tuned circuits". The animal equivalent
> circuit would not be of this type. The main point which emerges from
> these technological analogies is that from a bodily point of view, man
> and animal can be quite alike. Their important differences can only be
> explained when viewed from higher dimensions or other worlds.
> 
> The last analogy to be considered here models more than the difference
> between man and animal, and conveys also something of man's purpose
> in life. Consider a small dark room where the shutters at its only window
> are closed. Imagine that the room is occupied by a man who has a torch
> or lamp strapped to his forehead. The head torch is initially switched off
> and is fixed on so that it illuminates the direction in which the man
> looks. Being on his forehead, the man cannot observe the torch directly.
> Let there be enough food provisions in the room that the man can survive
> for a long period of time. Imagine that the only door in the room is
> locked and that there is no other exit to the outside world. Now consider
> the situation where the head torch is switched on. The man may look
> around and explore the room. He may notice the paintings on the wall
> which depict landscapes. The man may discover hidden mirrors which
> enable him to catch a glimpse of himself. He may wander over to the
> window and find a way of releasing the shutters and thereby catch a
> glimpse of the world outside the room. Imagine also that there is a large
> 
> W. Hatcher, The Purpose of Physical Reality, p. 151.
> 152            THE SINGAPORE BAHAT STUDIES REVIEW
> 
> stainless mirror by the window. By the aid of this mirror the man is able
> to observe something of the outside world and obtain a clear reflection of
> himself. At some time later, the door opens, and the man is taken out of
> the room into the sunlight.
> 
> The room in this analogy symbolises this physical world. The head torch
> represents the soul, and its rays denote the light of human consciousness.
> The world outside the room represents the afterlife, and the opening of
> the door symbolises death. The mirrors in the room, the shutters, and
> paintings all represent the founders of religions and their teachings. By
> their aid, the man is able to catch glimpses of his true self, and
> understand how his limited dark world relates to the bright spacious
> world that lies beyond it. This analogy obviously combines elements of
> the Baha'i foetus/womb and sun/mirror analogies together.
> 
> Now if the man were to ask himself where exactly the outside world is
> located, it would be a question that would be very difficult to answer in
> terms of what can be observed within the room. This is analogous to
> inquiring into the location of the afterlife. If the man were to ask exactly
> where the head-torch is located, he would not be able to locate it. In the
> same way, we cannot locate souls or fathom the intellectual light that
> comes from them.
> 
> The difference between man and animal can be depicted by switching off
> the head torch and providing the man with a box of matches. The man's
> perception of the room suddenly becomes much more fragmentary. The
> man effectively moves around the room by touching objects. He will not
> see the room as a whole, but can only see partial glimpses of it. His field
> of view will be limited to the small area illuminated by a match while it
> is lit. This fragmentary view of life might represent how an animal
> perceives our world. Animals in comparison to us, seem to perceive
> events in space and time in a much more separate and disjointed way. In
> time, they seem to live more from moment to moment. In space, their
> images are less correlated compared to ours, and they are easily misled
> by optical illusions. In the dark room analogy, all this is represented by
> the difference of seeing the room by the aid of a bright head-torch
> instead of by striking a series of matches.
> Body, Mind, Soul and Spirit                        15 3
> 
> 7. The Semitic Religions
> 
> In the Semitic line of religions, the unifying element to human nature is
> either directly identified with God, or with those who come in God's
> name, or with God's spirit. In these religions, human beings are of
> course, "made in God's image". The unity of human nature naturally
> follows on from the unity of God. God's voice is heard both in the call of
> the "prophet" and in human conscience.
> 
> In Judaism, human nature and the physical world are directly dependent
> on God. It is the "breath of God" which gives man life, and it is the
> return of this breath to God which causes death,
> 
> "The Lord God took some soil from the ground and formed a man out of
> it; he breathed life-giving breath into his nostrils and the man began to
> live." (Genesis 2: 7).
> 
> "Lord, you have made so many things! How wisely you made them all!
> The earth is filled with your creatures. There is ocean, large and wide,
> where countless creatures live, large and small alike... All of them
> depend on you to give them food when they need it. You give it to them,
> and they eat it; you provide food, and they are satisfied. When you turn
> away, they are afraid; when you take away your breath, they die and go
> back to the dust from which they came. But when you give them breath,
> they are created; you give new life to the earth." (Psalms 1042: 24-30).
> 
> From the above Old Testament passages, it is clear that the breath of God
> overcomes the dualism between man and nature. The immortal soul in
> Judaism is virtually indistinguishable from God's breath, and the
> tripartite character of human nature is implicit. In terms of God's breath,
> the difference between man and the rest of creation is only a matter of
> degree. But so different is the spiritual station of man with respect to the
> world of nature, that he is Lord and master of it, "When I consider thy
> heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast
> ordained; what is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man,
> that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the
> angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honor. Thou madest him to
> have dominion over the works of thy hands; and hast put all things under
> his feet" (Psalms 8: 3-6).
> 154            THE SINGAPORE BAHAT STUDIES REVIEW
> 
> In Christianity, and subsequently Islam, a tripartite approach to human
> nature is articulated with greater clarity, and the belief that the soul is on
> a never-ending journey towards God gradually arose. Although
> historically, life after death in these religions has been interpreted in
> quite literal terms, there are many references within their source
> scriptures which suggest a different approach. In fact, a significant
> number of passages support the Baha'i view of the soul advancing in
> different forms, where its state after death is so different to its existence
> in this world that it cannot be adequately understood in physical terms.
> 
> In Christianity, the afterlife is symbolised by the growth of an individual
> seed,
> 
> "Someone will ask. "How can the dead be raised to life? What kind of
> body will they have?" You fool! When you sow a seed in the ground, it
> does not sprout to life unless it dies. And what you sow is a bare seed,
> perhaps a grain, not the full-bodied plant that will later grow up. God
> provides that seed with the body he wishes; he gives each seed its own
> proper body... This is how it will be when the dead are raised to life.
> When the body is buried, it is mortal; when raised, it will be immortal...
> When buried, it is a physical body; when raised, it will be a spiritual
> body"(l Corinthians 15:35-44).
> 
> This analogy is obviously very similar to the one presented in the Baha'i
> writings. It suggests that just as a seed must "die" so that a plant can
> grow, so too, must the physical body die, enabling the soul to take a new
> form. The seed remains in the soil, whereas the plant rises above the
> ground and grows into another realm. The meaning of the metaphor is
> obviously that although the atoms of the physical body disperse after it
> dies, the "spiritual body" which emerges from it continues to develop in
> another world. Also implied in this analogy is that the form of the soul in
> the afterlife will be superior to its former life in the physical world. This
> is made more explicit in another passage by St Paul,
> 
> "For we know that when this tent we live in - our body here on earth - is
> torn down, God will have a house in heaven for us to live in, a home he
> himself has made, which will last forever. And now we sigh, so great is
> our desire that our home which comes from heaven should be put on
> over us; by being clothed with it we shall not be without a body. While
> Body, Mind, Soul and Spirit                      155
> 
> we live in this earthly tent, we groan with a feeling of oppression; it is
> not that we want to get rid of our earthly body, but that we want to have
> the heavenly one put on over us, so that what is mortal will be
> transformed by life. God is the one who has prepared us for this change,
> and he gave us his Spirit as the guarantee of all that he has in store for
> us" (2 Corinthians 5:1-5)
> 
> Our physical bodies, being like tents, are only meant to be temporary,
> while the soul's future home, the "houses in heaven", are destined to
> "last forever". This is of course, only poetic language, but it does suggest
> that human souls in the afterlife will take a more complete and
> permanent form than.the one they take in this life. That the "Spirit"
> provides an indication of what the afterlife will be like is also important.
> Just as in Judaism and Islam, the Spirit of God in Christianity bestows
> immortality on human beings, and all the conscious faculties of human
> nature are founded upon it,
> 
> "The Spirit gives one person a message full of wisdom, while to another
> person the same Spirit gives a message full of knowledge. One and the
> same Spirit gives faith to one person, while to another person he gives
> the power to heal... But it is one and the same Spirit who does all this; as
> he wishes. He gives a different gift to each person" (1 Corinthians 12:8-
> 11).
> 
> A common misconception about the Christian view of resurrection and
> afterlife is that it involves the physical resurrection of the body. For
> instance, Leslie Stevenson in his "Seven Theories of Human Nature",
> states that the Christian view of human nature does not entail belief in an
> immaterial soul surviving death. The scriptural reference which he takes
> to support this comes from St Paul's statement, "When buried, it is a
> physical body; when raised, it will be a spiritual body" (1 Corinthians
> 15:35).72 This idea is often coupled with other statements by St Paul
> about the resurrection of believers the "trumpet blast", on the "Last Day"
> (1 Corinthians 15: 51-55). Resurrection, according to this interpretation
> of biblical text has come to mean the re-assembling of the actual physical
> constituents of human bodies as they were before death.
> 
> Leslie Stevenson, Seven Theories of Human Nature, pp. 45-6.
> 156              THE SINGAPORE BAHAT STUDIES REVIEW
> 
> The belief in the physical resurrection of bodies was co-joined with
> Aristotle's notion of the soul being the form of the body by St Thomas
> Aquinas in the late medieval period. It subsequently made its way into
> official catholic doctrine and has remained there. According to Aquinas,
> the physical body after resurrection will be in harmony with the soul:
> "After resurrection of our bodies we will again have bodily organs with
> non-rational powers, and because they will be perfectly amenable to
> reason, there will be courage strengthening our capacity for aggressive
> emotion and moderation our capacity for affection. But before
> resurrection these capacities and virtues will not exist as such; only the
> root or seeds of them in the soul, together with justice in the will"73.
> Aquinas conceives of the soul as an "embodied soul", that is, an
> immortal entity which is in some way bound to the body while on earth,
> but then survives death74. After resurrection, this same soul will be
> reunited with its former body.
> 
> This belief involves an overly literal interpretation of biblical text. The
> seed analogy suggests that physically we perish, but what emerges is
> something different, a timeless entity which does not depend on the
> physical world. In the text already quoted, St Paul explicitly states that
> the "spiritual body" is fundamentally different to the physical body and
> cannot be compared to it (1 Corinthians 15:35-44). The image of "houses
> in heaven" in contrast to the "tent" of the body on earth also implies that
> the state of the soul in the afterlife is going to be quite different to its
> former existence in this world.
> 
> The literal interpretation of resurrection fails to take into account the
> metaphorical use of the terms "life" and "death" in the Bible. The early
> Christians had understood themselves to have "died", and believed that
> they had been spiritually resurrected by their faith in Christ,
> 
> "And we know that our old being has been put to death with Christ on
> his cross, in order that the power of the sinful self might be destroyed, so
> that we should no longer be the slaves of sin. For when a person dies, he
> is set free from the power of sin. Since we have died with Christ, we
> believe that we will also live with him. For we know that Christ has been
> 
> St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, p. 246.
> St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, p. 111.
> Body, Mind, Soul and Spirit                         157
> 
> raised from death and will never die again - death will no longer rule
> over him... In the same way you are to think of yourselves as dead, so
> far as sin is concerned, but living in fellowship with God through Christ
> Jesus." (Romans 6: 11)
> 
> "To be controlled by human nature results in death; to be controlled by
> the Spirit results in life and peace... But you do not live as your human
> nature tells you to; instead, you live as the Spirit tells you - if, in fact,
> God's Spirit lives in you... If the Spirit of God, who raised Jesus from
> death, lives in you, then he who raised Christ from death will also give
> life to your mortal bodies by the presence of his Spirit in you... God's
> Spirit joins himself to our spirits to declare that we are God's children..."
> (Romans 8:16).
> 
> The Christian spiritual resurrection and its immortality is thus
> inextricably linked to the Spirit of God, which "joins itself to human
> spirits. This clearly demonstrates a tripartite conception of human nature
> in Christianity, where the world of the spirit is the world which unites
> body and soul. Moreover, the Christian belief in this spiritual side to
> human nature is founded on faith, faith in the invisible world of the
> Spirit,
> 
> "Even though our physical being is gradually decaying, yet our spiritual
> being is renewed day after day...For we fix our attention, not on things
> that are seen, but on things that are unseen. What can be seen lasts only
> for a time, but what cannot be seen lasts for ever" (2 Corinthians 4:16-
> 18).
> 
> In the Quran, the soul of man is also described in terms of God's breath,
> "Behold! Thy Lord said to the angels: I am about to create man, from
> sounding clay, from mud moulded into shape. When I have fashioned
> him in due proportion and breathed into him of my Spirit, fall ye down in
> obeisance unto him..." (S 15:28-29), or "He has written Faith in their
> hearts, and strengthened them with a spirit from Himself (S 58:22). God
> is ever present in human beings, "We are nearer to him than his jugular
> vein" (S 50:16). This presence of God extends to signs which are also
> apparent in the physical world, "We will surely show them Our signs in
> the world and within themselves" (S 41:53). It is God who is the bridge
> between the physical world and human nature. Since the soul of man is
> 158           THE SINGAPORE BAHAT STUDIES REVIEW
> 
> filled with the spirit and breath of God, the nature of the soul in Islam
> cannot be separated from God.
> 
> Resurrection and life after death in Islam are often described in very
> literal terms. But there are some passages in the Quran which explicitly
> clarify its symbolic meaning. Life after death is described in terms of a
> "new Creation" (S 50:15), or "Resurrection" (S 50:11). In response to
> the scepticism of "unbelievers" about this resurrection from the "dust" of
> human corpses, the Quran likens this rebirth to the growth of vegetation
> from the apparently dry and "dead" earth, "And We send down from the
> sky Rain charged with blessing, and We produce therewith gardens and
> grain for harvests; and tall and stately palm trees, with shoots of fruit
> stalks, piled one over another; - as sustenance for Allah's servants; - and
> We give new life therewith to land that is dead: thus will be the
> Resurrection" (S 50:9-11). This organic analogy of a new life, is
> obviously similar to the Baha'i seed/landscape analogy, where spiritual
> growth emerges from the "soil" of human bodies. In both cases, the
> immortality of human beings is directly dependent on the "blessings" of
> God, "Do ye not see that Allah has subjected to your use all things in the
> heavens and on earth, and has made His bounties flow to you in
> exceeding measure both seen and unseen" (S 31: 28).
> 
> The "resurrection" of life after death is an individual specific occurrence
> for each soul, "And your creation or your resurrection is in no wise but
> an individual soul: For Allah is He who hears and sees all things" (S
> 31:28). This is an important point, since elsewhere in the Quran, the term
> "Resurrection" is used in the collective sense to symbolise the spiritual
> rebirth of mankind (see for instance, S 50:41-44). The afterlife and the
> resurrection of the soul in a new form is directly dependent on God, "We
> have decreed Death to be your common lot... from changing your forms
> and creating you again in forms that ye know not. And ye certainly know
> already the first form of creation: why then do you not celebrate His
> praises? See ye the seed that ye sow in the ground? Is it ye that cause it
> to grow, or are We the cause?" (S 56:60-64). The nature of the human
> soul in Islam, its spiritual growth, immortality and unity are all directly
> dependent on the "bounties" of God and cannot be understood in terms
> of soul-body dualism. God is the all important transpersonal element in
> Islam. Quite contrary to many popular beliefs about an Islamic
> "Paradise", the soul's future journey is explicitly described to be in
> Body, Mind, Soul and Spirit                                   \ 59
> 
> "forms that ye know not".
> 
> 8. Far Eastern Spiritual Monism
> 
> In Buddhism, the tripartite character of human nature is presented in
> terms of a self, mind, and Truth. The self in Buddhism is approximately
> equivalent to the "sinful self of Christianity75, or the Baha'i "animal
> self. The mind in Buddhism is roughly equivalent to the soul in the
> Semitic religious tradition or the "rational soul" of Aristotle77. The
> immortal part of the mind, according to Buddhist writings, is the part that
> has the potential to be the receptacle of Truth. Truth is something akin to
> the Spirit of God in the Semitic religions or the world of spirit mentioned
> in the Baha'i writings.
> 
> Just as everything in the universe, according to the Baha'i Faith, is to its
> own degree a sign or reflection of God78, Truth in Buddhism also reveals
> itself in a variety of different forms. The following summary of the Truth
> appearing in various ways is described as "Truth as Saviour" in Buddhist
> writings79, and obviously bears many similarities to the various
> "Kingdoms" found in the Baha'i writings or the grades of life described
> in the philosophy of Aristotle. It starts off by stating that since "Truth
> desires to appear; truth longs to become conscious; truth strives to know
> itself, it manifests itself first in mineral form: "There is truth in the
> stone... but the stone has no consciousness". Next it expresses itself in
> the form of a plant, which can grow and blossom, but states that "its
> beauty is marvellous, but it has no consciousness". The next highest
> level of Truth, is the realm of the animal, and although this level of
> 
> Romans 6: 6, also see the "natural self mentioned in Romans 6: 12.
> "If man were to care for himself only he would be nothing but an animal for only
> the animals are thus egoistic", Foundations of World Unity, p. 42.
> Aristotle refers to the Intellect as "immortal and eternal" (Aristotle: De Anima,
> III.5).
> "Whatever is in the heavens and whatever is on the earth is a direct evidence of the
> revelation within it of the attributes and names of Gods, inasmuch as within every atom
> are enshrined the signs that bear eloquent testimony to the revelation of that Most Great
> Light", Gleanings, p. 176
> The Gospel of Buddha, p. 5.
> 160               THE SINGAPORE BAHAT STUDIES REVIEW
> 
> existence has consciousness, it is a consciousness of "self only: "There
> is Truth in the animal; it moves about and perceives its surroundings; it
> distinguishes and learns to choose. There is consciousness, but it is not
> yet the consciousness of Truth. It is a consciousness of self only". This
> last sentence concisely presents the difference between man and animal
> in Buddhism. The animal is conscious of "self only, while human
> beings are capable of possessing "consciousness of Truth".
> 
> Liberation of "self comes from immersing it in Truth: "If we liberate
> our souls from our petty selves, wish no ill to others, and become clear as
> a crystal diamond reflecting the light of truth, what a radiant picture will
> appear in us mirroring things as they are, without the admixture of
> burning desires, without the distortion of erroneous illusion, without the
> agitation of clinging and unrest...ye should learn to distinguish between
> the false self and the true self. The ego with all its egotism is the false
> self. It is an unreal illusion and a perishable combination. He only who
> identifies his self with the truth will attain Nirvana; and he who has
> entered Nirvana has attained Buddhahood; he has acquired the highest
> good; he has become eternal and immortal".80 In much the same way as
> in the Semitic religions, the animal side to human nature is considered to
> be the "false self, in contrast to the "true self which is the part of the
> self which can reflect Truth.
> 
> There is a common misconception that Buddhism rejects the existence of
> an individual human immortal soul, but this is not so. Buddhism states
> that the self, that is the animal self as defined above, is perishable. The
> self (animal self) is made up from a combination of elements, which in
> Buddhism is sometimes described in terms of the 5 Skandhas,81 which
> are constantly changing. At death, they will disperse and exist no more.
> This is similar to the Baha'i view. 'Abdu'1-Bahá states that, "The animal
> spirit is the power of all the senses, which is realised from the
> composition and mingling of elements; when this composition
> decomposes, the power also perishes and becomes annihilated".82 The
> 
> The Gospel of Buddha, p. 4.
> this term is used to denote the constituents of personality: (1) form=body, (2)
> feelings, (3) perceptions, (4) volitional impulses, (5) consciousness, Buddhist Scriptures,
> E.Conze, p. 248.
> 'Abdu'1-Bahá, Some Answered Questions, Chap. 55, p. 208.
> Body, Mind, Soul and Spirit                               161
> 
> Buddha states, "All compound things are transitory: they grow and
> decay. All compound things are subject to pain: they will be separated
> from what they love and be joined to what they abhor. All compound
> things lack a self, an atman, an ego".83
> 
> In the famous "Questions of King Malinda", the Buddhist monk
> Nagasena likens the self to be a chariot. The designation of "chariot"
> only refers to a combination of component parts such as the pole, axle,
> wheels, framework, flagstaff, yoke etc, and declares that the same
> principle applies to the self. He states that the self is a "conceptual term,
> a current appellation and a mere name. In ultimate reality, however, this
> person cannot be apprehended".84 But this is quite different to the
> "incomposite soul" described by Socrates85 or the immortal soul
> described in the Baha'i writings, or indeed, the eternal atman (soul) of
> Hinduism. Indeed, one of the arguments for the immortality of the soul
> presented in the Baha'i writings is that it is unitary, that it is not made up
> from a combination of elements and therefore cannot die.86
> 
> The other point to remember is that "consciousness" in Buddhism also
> applies to animals, so when consciousness appears as one of the
> Skandas, or elements that make up human nature, it is not necessarily the
> type of consciousness which is related to the rational or spiritual faculties
> of human beings, and may in fact be the kind of consciousness that
> human beings share with animals. If it perishes with death then this is not
> "consciousness of Truth". The word "soul" is confusing in modern
> Buddhism. There are indications that it was always a source of
> controversy even at the time of Buddha, and that Buddha himself had to
> clarify it. He stated that if the soul is identified with "self, then he
> rejected its immortality, but on the other hand, if it is identified with that
> part of the mind which perceives the Truth, it is immortal. In the
> following citation the Buddha makes this point clear when responding to
> questions asked from an officer,87
> 
> The Gospel of Buddha, p. 158.
> E. Conze, Buddhist Scriptures, 'Questions of King Malinda', pp. 146-148.
> Phaedo 77c-78d, The Last Days of Socrates, p. 129.
> ' Abdu'1-Bahá, Promulgation of Universal Peace, p. 306.
> The Gospel of Buddha, p. 151.
> 162            THE SINGAPORE BAHAT STUDIES REVIEW
> 
> "The Tathagata teaches that there is no self. He who says that the soul is
> his self and that the self is the thinker of our thoughts and the actor of our
> deeds, teaches a wrong doctrine which leads to confusion and darkness.
> On the other hand, the Tathagata teaches that there is mind. He who
> understands by soul mind, and says that mind exists, teaches the truth
> which leads to clearness and enlightenment". The officer who was
> posing questions to the Buddha then went to ask, "Does, then, the
> Tathagata maintain that two things exist? That which we perceive with
> our senses and that which is mental?". In response to this apparent
> dualism, the Buddha replied, "Verily, I say unto thee, thy mind is
> spiritual, but neither is the sense-perceived void of spirituality. The bodhi
> is eternal and it dominates all existence as the good law guiding all
> beings in their search for truth. It changes brute nature into mind, and
> there is no being that cannot be transformed into a vessel of truth".
> 
> The power of the Truth to transform "brute nature" into "mind" is of
> course very similar to the process of the Christian Holy Spirit
> transforming a man's animal nature into an angelic one.
> 
> Buddhism believes both that the self is perishable and that it endures
> after death. This is not a contradiction. It is the moral part of the self
> which passes into an afterlife, taking with it the fruit of good actions. On
> the other hand, human beings are evolving and have not reached a
> changeless state of perfection, so they are not "undying" in a spiritual
> sense. The confusion here is caused by some former Hindu doctrines
> which implied that souls had reached perfection and were identical to the
> Atman or Spirit of God. But Buddha rejects these notions. The soul in
> comparison to the Truth or Tathagata is limited, contingent and
> dependent. Instead, the Buddha emphasises the spiritual evolution of the
> soul and its dependence on the Truth,
> 
> "Some say that the self endures after death, some say it perishes. Both
> are wrong and their error is most grievous. For if they say the self is
> perishable, the fruit they strive for will perish too, and at some time there
> will be no hereafter. Good and evil would be indifferent. This salvation
> from selfishness is without merit. When some, on the other hand, say the
> self will not perish, then in the midst of all life and death there is but one
> identity unborn and undying. If such is their self, then it is perfect and
> Body, Mind, Soul and Spirit                      163
> 
> cannot be perfected by deeds. The lasting, imperishable self could never
> be changed. The self would be lord and master, and there would be no
> use in perfecting the perfect, moral aims and salvation would be
> unnecessary...Now attend and listen: The senses meet the object and
> from their contact sensation is born. Thence results recollection. Thus, as
> the sun's power through a burning-glass causes fire to appear, so through
> the cognizance born of sense and object, the mind originates and with it
> the ego, the thought of self, whom some Brahman teachers call the lord.
> The shoot springs from the seed; the seed is not the shoot; both are not
> one and the same, but successive phases in a continuous growth. Such is
> the birth of animated life"88.
> 
> The spiritual growth of the soul as described by Buddha here is very
> similar to the Baha'i concept of the soul forever progressing. Moreover,
> the rays of the sun, in the above analogy, are obviously closely akin to
> the Spirit of God in the Semitic religions. To speak of the existence of
> self in Buddhism is similar to putting oneself before God in the Semitic
> religions. When compared to God, we barely exist, likewise in
> Buddhism, when compared to the Truth or Nirvana, human beings are
> constantly changing and have no permanence.
> 
> Some commentators on Buddhism have also pointed out that it does not
> reject the existence of the soul, but instead, only states that it cannot be
> apprehended. For instance, Edward Conze quotes a Buddhist text in
> support of the existence of a true self, "Self-luminous through and
> through is thought, but usually it is defiled by adventitious taints which
> come from without"89. Early Buddhist writings particularly carry this
> implication. In many instances, the Buddha discourages discussions on
> the nature of the soul in order to emphasise its inherent mystery. The
> Buddha concentrates on acquiring spiritual qualities as opposed to
> engaging in intellectual speculations. He states for instance, "There are
> some scholars who speculate that the soul is perfectly happy after death.
> But when I asked them if people in this world are perfectly happy they
> answered, No. And when I asked if they had been perfectly happy even
> for half a day they said, No. And when I asked if they knew a method for
> realizing a perfectly happy state they said, No. So the talk of these
> 
> The Gospel of Buddha, p. 66.
> Buddhism, Its Essence and Development, p. 162.
> 164               THE SINGAPORE BAHAT STUDIES REVIEW
> 
> scholars is groundless".90 Here the Buddha is rejecting the authority of
> these "scholars" to talk about the soul, since they themselves have not
> experienced true happiness. He is not rejecting the existence of the soul,
> but rejecting the authority of certain "scholars" to talk about it.
> 
> In another passage the Buddha states that "scholars speak in sixteen
> ways of the state of the soul after death... the Buddha knows that these
> are speculations and what the result will be... these things are profound
> and difficult, not to be grasped by mere logic. The Buddha has realised
> this and set it forth, and those who would rightly praise him should speak
> of this".91 There are many valuable insights here. The Buddha refers to
> the theories of these scholars as "speculations", and implies that their
> result is not a spiritually useful one. On the other hand, he states that
> "these things are profound and difficult, not to be grasped by mere
> logic", suggesting that the best way to approach the mysteries of the soul
> is to follow his teachings, rather than engage in logic. The main point is
> that Buddhism does not reject the existence of an individual immortal
> soul, but it distnlsts intellectual speculations about it. The implication is
> that the soul is better understood in terms of acquiring spiritual qualities.
> This is very similar to the view of the soul as expressed in Baha'i
> • •    92
> writings.
> The terminology that the Buddha prefers to use for the soul is the
> "mind". The "immortal soul" of other religions has its counterpart in
> Buddhism with the "immortal mind", as made clear in the following
> passage,
> 
> "Bodies fall to dust, but the truths of the mind will not be destroyed.
> Truth knows neither birth nor death; it has no beginning and no end.
> Welcome the truth. The truth is the immortal part of the mind. Establish
> the truth in your mind, for the truth is the image of the eternal; it portrays
> the immutable; it reveals the everlasting the truth gives unto mortals the
> boon of immortality"93. Once the interaction of self, mind and Truth has
> 
> The Wisdom of the Early Buddhists, p. 47.
> The Wisdom of the Early Buddhists, p. 32.
> "The comprehension of that other life depends on our spiritual birth!", Paris Talks,
> p. 94.
> The Gospel of Buddha, p. 3.
> Body, Mind, Soul and Spirit                        165
> 
> been understood in Buddhism, a similar tripartite picture of human
> nature to that existing in other spiritual traditions emerges.
> 
> If attachment to the world of the body is denoted by "death" in
> Christianity, in Buddhism, almost exactly the same terminology is used
> for attachment to a "separate self,
> 
> "Verily I say unto thee: The Blessed One has not come to teach death,
> but to teach life, and thou discemest not the nature of living and dying.
> This body will be dissolved and no amount of sacrifice will save it.
> Therefore, seek thou the life that is of the mind. Where self is, truth
> cannot be; yet when truth comes, self will disappear. Therefore, let thy
> mind rest in the truth; propagate the truth, put thy whole will in it, and let
> it spread. In the truth thou shalt live forever. Self is death and truth is
> life. The cleaving to self is a perpetual dying, while moving in the truth
> is partaking of Nirvana which is life everlasting".94
> 
> "There is self and there is truth. Where self is, truth is not. Where truth
> is, self is not. Self is the fleeting error of samara; it is individual
> separateness and that egotism which begets envy and hatred. Self is the
> yearning for pleasure and the lust after vanity. Truth is the correct
> comprehension of things; it is permanent and everlasting, the real in all
> existence, the bliss of righteousness. The existence of self is an illusion,
> and there is no wrong in this world, no vice, no evil, except what flows
> from the assertion of self \ 95
> 
> The annihilation of self has of course many parallels with various
> mystical traditions. In Baha'u'Uah's "Seven Valleys", as already
> mentioned, a similar theme is developed: the aim of the spiritual journey
> is to attain the condition of the valley of "True Poverty and Absolute
> Nothingness". The conception of people being separate selves,
> independent of moral and spiritual truths, is arguably a collective modern
> myth.
> 
> Nirvana is related to the Truth, Buddha, or Tathagata in much the same
> way as being "born again" is related to the Holy Spirit in Christianity. A
> 
> The Gospel of Buddha, p. 153.
> The Gospel of Buddha, p. 41.
> 166               THE SINGAPORE BAHAT STUDIES REVIEW
> 
> Brahmin wanted to enquire into the location of Nirvana, and asked the
> Buddha, "Do I understand thee right aright, that Nirvana is not a place,
> and being nowhere it is without reality?", the Buddha in reply likened
> Nirvana to the wind, which although difficult to locate, made its
> presence felt, "As a great and mighty wind which passeth over the world
> in the heat of the day, so the Tathagata comes to blow over the minds of
> mankind with the breath of his love, so cool, so sweet, so calm, so
> delicate; and those tormented by fever assuage their suffering and rejoice
> at the refreshing breeze".96 This is very similar to the way Christ
> describes the action of the Holy Spirit and how people must be "born
> again" in order to see the Kingdom of God, "Do not be surprised because
> I tell you that you must all be born again. The wind blows wherever it
> wishes; you hear the sound it makes, but you do not know where it
> comes from or where it is going. It is like that with everyone who is born
> of the Spirit" (John 3:7-8).
> 
> Nirvana is the spiritual condition that Tathagata or Truth brings, and is
> roughly equivalent to the influence of the Holy Spirit. In imagery that is
> strikingly similar to the landscape/seed analogy of the Baha'i Faith, or
> the seed/rain metaphor used for resurrection in Islam, the Buddhist
> writings state that
> 
> "Nirvana comes to thee... when thou understandest thoroughly, and
> when thou livest according to thy understanding, that all things are of
> one essence and there is but one law. Hence, there is but one Nirvana as
> there is one truth, not two or three. The Tathagata recreates the whole
> world like a cloud shedding its waters without distinction. He has the
> same sentiments for the high as for the low, for the wise as for the
> ignorant, for the noble-minded as for the immoral. The great cloud full of
> rain comes up in this wide universe covering all countries and oceans to
> pour down its rain everywhere, over all grasses, shrubs, herbs, trees of
> various species, families of plants of different names growing on the
> earth, on the hills, on the mountains, or in the valleys... the grasses,
> shrubs, herbs, and wild trees suck the water emitted from that great cloud
> which is all of one essence and has been abundantly poured down; and
> they will, according to their nature, acquire a proportionate development,
> shooting up and producing blossoms and their fruits in season. Rooted in
> 
> The Gospel of Buddha, p. 154.
> Body, Mind, Soul and Spirit                      167
> 
> one and the same soil, all those families of plants and germs are
> quickened by water of the same essence. The Tathagata... knows the law
> whose essence is salvation, and whose end is the peace of Nirvana. He is
> the same to all, and yet knowing the requirements of every single being,
> he does not reveal himself to all alike. He does not impart to them at
> once the fullness of omniscience, but pays attention to the disposition of
> various beings".97
> 
> This passage illustrates the oneness of all things and their dependence on
> a single "Truth". It is sometimes referred to as a principle of "spiritual
> monism" and is usually contrasted with various forms of dualism. But
> from the forgoing discussion, it is clear they do not necessarily conflict,
> and that this kind of unifying element actually exists in other religions in
> much the same way as it does in Buddhism. Even the very same
> metaphors are used for it.
> 
> Another point of similarity is the "sun" metaphor. As already quoted, the
> world of the spirit in Baha'i writings is likened to the rays of the "Sun of
> Truth" (God and His Manifestations) which gives understanding to
> human minds and provides spiritual life to their souls. This analogy of
> the sun has also close parallels to the "form of the good" mentioned by
> Plato. In Buddhism, the Tathagata is described in the following way,
> "The wisdom of the Tathagata is the sun of the mind. His radiancy is
> glorious by day and night, and he whose faith is strong will not lack light
> on the path to Nirvana where he will inherit bliss everlasting".98 The
> Tathagata may be taken here to refer to Buddha himself as well as his
> teachings and also has many obvious similarities to Christ or Krishna
> describing themselves in terms of the "Light of the world": "I am the
> light of the world, whoever follows me will have the light of life and will
> never walk in darkness", (John 8: 12), and "But those whose unwisdom
> is made pure by the wisdom of their inner Spirit, their wisdom is unto
> them a sun and its radiance they see the Supreme", (Gita 5:16).
> 
> The metaphor of the sun is also used in Buddhism to illustrate spiritual
> blindness. This is of course not unique to Buddhism, but the following
> Buddhist parable is particularly relevant to the modern world. It is an
> 
> The Gospel of Buddha, pp. 164-5.
> The Gospel of Buddha, p. 188.
> 168               THE SINGAPORE BAHAT STUDIES REVIEW
> 
> ancient poetic refutation of modern empiricism: that is, it rejects all
> efforts which seek to reduce the soul to measurable object terms,
> 
> "There was a man born blind, and he said: "I do not believe in the world
> of light and appearance. There are no colors, bright or sombre. There is
> no sun, no moon, no stars. No one has witnessed these things." His
> friends remonstrated with him, but he clung to his opinion: "What you
> say that you see," he objected, "are illusions. If colours existed I should
> be able to touch them. They have no substance and are not real.
> Everything real has weight, but I feel no weight where you see colours."
> In those days there was a physician who was called to see the blind man.
> He mixed four simples, and when he applied them to the cataract of the
> blind man the grey film melted, and his eyes acquired the faculty of
> sight. The Tathagata is the physician, the cataract is the illusion of the
> thought "I am", and the four simples are the four noble truths".99
> 
> The world of the soul or spirit like colours, cannot be weighed or
> touched, but they can nevertheless be seen in their own terms. Although
> in this parable, the Buddha and his message is the cure for spiritual
> blindness, a similar message exists in other religious traditions. Indeed,
> the founder of each religion is often likened to a physician.100 The
> important lesson here for the modern world is that our physical world,
> like the grey world of the blind man, may not be the only world that
> there is. Just as it is closed minded of the blind man to dismiss the
> existence of a world of colours because it is invisible to him, so too, is it
> closed minded to reject the existence of the soul or spirit on the grounds
> that they resist scientific quantification.
> 
> In Hinduism, the tripartite character of human nature is expressed in
> several different ways. In the Upanishads, just as in Buddhism or in the
> philosophy of Plato, the chariot is used as a metaphor for human nature,
> 
> "Know the Atman as Lord of a chariot; and the body as the chariot itself.
> Know that reason is the charioteer; and the mind indeed is the reins. The
> horses, they say, are the senses; and their paths are the objects of sense.
> When the soul becomes one with the mind and the senses he is called
> 
> The Gospel of the Buddha, p. 181.
> Baha'ullah as Divine Physician, Christ as a Healer.
> Body, Mind, Soul and Spirit                               169
> 
> 'one who has joys and sorrows'. He who has not right understanding and
> whose mind is never steady is not the ruler of his life, like a bad driver
> with wild horses. But he who has right understanding and whose mind is
> ever steady is the ruler of his life, like a good driver with well-trained
> horses. He who has not right understanding, is careless and never pure,
> reaches not the End of the journey; but wanders on from death to death.
> But he who has understanding, is careful and ever pure, reaches the End
> of the journey, from which he never returns".101
> 
> This elaborate analogy clearly can be interpreted in a tripartite way. The
> body is the chariot, while reason, represented by the charioteer, roughly
> corresponds to the soul of the Semitic religions. The Atman, that is the
> "Lord of the chariot", who is seated in the chariot, parallels the Holy
> Spirit. This Hindu chariot analogy corresponds particularly well to the
> Baha'i metaphor of the soul being on a journey. The Lord of the chariot,
> that is the Atman, sets the direction for the charioteer of reason. The
> Atman is a guide for human reason, just as the Holy Spirit is the guide
> for the individual soul in Christianity. On the other hand, the mind,
> represented by the reins, is an intermediary between reason (the
> charioteer) and the body (the chariot). This is quite close to the Baha'i
> description of the mind being the intermediary between the soul and
> body.
> 
> Reason in the Upanishads also plays a similar role to the "intellect" in
> the philosophy of Aristotle, in that it is referred to as the immortal part of
> human nature which survives death.102 In the Upanishads, reason is the
> central quality of the individual soul, just as it is in the philosophy of
> Plato or Aristotle and the above quoted passage in Katha Upanishad goes
> on to state, "The man whose chariot is driven by reason, who watches
> and holds the reins of his mind, reaches the End of the journey, the
> supreme everlasting Spirit." But beyond reason, is the Atman, sometimes
> referred to as Spirit, and other times referred to as the Self. The same
> passage goes to state, "Beyond the senses are their objects, and beyond
> the objects is the mind. Beyond the mind is pure reason, and beyond
> reason is the Spirit in man... The light of the Atman, the Spirit, is
> 
> Katha Upanishad, Part 3, p. 60, The Upanishads, Penguin.
> see Active/Passive Intellect distinction in De Anima, III.5, see also Nicomachean
> Ethics X.7.1177b26 as found on p. 139, Aristotle the Philosopher.
> 170               THE SINGAPORE BAHAT STUDIES REVIEW
> 
> invisible, concealed in all beings. It is seen by the seers of the subtle,
> when their vision is keen and is clear. The wise should surrender speech
> in mind, mind in the knowing self, the knowing self in the Spirit of the
> universe".
> 
> Here, reason is also called the "knowing self, and the Atman is referred
> to as Spirit. This terminology is consistent with the Semitic religions and
> Greek philosophy. The tripartite approach to human nature in the
> Upanishads therefore consists of a body, a knowing self, and Spirit. The
> Spirit or Atman is the unifying element which links together mind,
> intellect and body, "There is something beyond our mind which abides in
> silence within our mind. It is the supreme mystery beyond thought. Let
> one's mind and one's subtle body rest upon that and not rest on anything
> else".103
> 
> The soul, according to the Upanishads exists in three states of
> consciousness: consciousness of this world, consciousness of the next
> world, and the state of dreaming which is a twilight zone between the
> two,
> 
> "Abiding among the senses there is a 'person' who consists of
> understanding, a light within the heart: this is he. Remaining ever the
> same, he skirts both worlds, seemingly thinking, seemingly moving. For,
> having fallen asleep, he transcends this world - the forms of death. This
> 'person', on being born and on being embodied, is conjoined with evil
> things. When he departs and dies he leaves evil things behind. This
> 'person' has two states of consciousness, that of this world and that of
> the other world. There is a third twilight state of consciousness, - that of
> sleep. Standing in this twilight state, he sees the other two, that of this
> world and that of the other world. Now, however, when he approaches
> the state of consciousness of the other world, he fares forth towards it
> and describes both evil and joyful things. When he falls asleep, he takes
> with him all the materials of this all-embracing world. Himself, he
> destroys them and himself builds them up again; and he dreams in a
> world lighted by his own brilliance, by his own light. Then is this
> 'person' light by his own light" (4: 3: 7- Brhadaranyaka Upanishad).104
> 
> Maitri Upanishad, p. 102, The Upanishads.
> Hindu Scriptures, edited by D. Goodall, p. 88.
> Body, Mind, Soul and Spirit                           171
> 
> In the Baha'i Faith also, dreams are a sign of a life beyond this world.
> Baha'u'llah states that during the state of sleep, the soul is "made to
> traverse a realm which lieth hidden in the innermost reality of this
> world". Prayer also in the Baha'i Faith occupies a state of straddling
> our present world and the next. 'Abdu'l-Bahá writes, "Those who have
> ascended have different attributes from those who are still on earth, yet
> there is no real separation. In prayer there is a mingling of station, a
> mingling of condition. Pray for them as they pray for you!".106 In fact,
> the spiritually aware already traverse a heavenly realm even while their
> "bodies linger on earth", 'Abdu'1-Bahá" states, "those souls that, in this
> day, enter the divine Kingdom and attain everlasting life, although
> materially dwelling on earth, yet in reality soar in the realm of heaven.
> Their bodies may linger on earth, but their spirits travel in the immensity
> of space. For as thoughts widen and become illumined, they acquire the
> power of flight and transport man into the Kingdom of God".107
> 
> In the Upanishads, alongside statements of the individual "person"
> becoming aware of the afterlife, there are other passages that seem to
> negate them. Take for instance the following passage which seems to
> imply there will be no individual consciousness after death:
> 
> "'As a lump of salt dropped into water dissolves in it and cannot be
> picked out again, yet from whatever part of the water you draw, there is
> still salt there, so too, I say, is this great Being - infinite, boundless, a
> mass of understanding. Out of these elements do all contingent beings
> arise and along with them are they destroyed. After death there is no
> consciousness: this is what I say'. Thus spake Yajnavalkya. But Maitreyi
> said: 'In this, good sir, you have thrown me into confusion in that you
> say that after death there is no consciousness.' And Yajnavalkya said:
> 'There is nothing confusing in what I say. This is surely as much as you
> can understand now. For where there is any semblance of duality, then
> does one smell another, then does one see another, then does one hear
> another, then does one speak to another, then does one think of another,
> then does one understand another. But when all has become one's very
> Self, then with what should one smell whom? With what should one see
> 
> Baha'u'llah, Gleanings, p. 152.
> 'Abdu 'l-Bahá in London, p. 96.
> ' Abdu'1-Bahá, Selections from the Writings of 'Abdu 'l-Bahá, p. 202.
> 172                THE SINGAPORE BAHAT STUDIES REVIEW
> 
> whom? With what should one hear whom? With what should one speak
> to whom? With what should one think of whom? With what should one
> understand whom? With what should one understand Him by whom one
> understands this whole universe? With what indeed should one
> understand the Understander?'"
> (2:4: 12-14 Brhadaranyaka Upanishad).108
> 
> But when examined a little further, the above passage does not contradict
> the Hindu belief in consciousness of the soul in the afterlife. When
> compared to the Spirit, or Atman, individual human consciousness is
> almost non-existent. In the Semitic line of religions, man in relation to
> God, is a mere shadow. The emphasis of all monist statements in
> Hinduism, as in the above passage, is to focus on the Spirit. In relation to
> the Spirit, all else is contingent and relative. The Spirit, or Self gives the
> very power for the mind to understand, so how can the mind ever
> understand that which makes its thinking possible in the first place?
> Hinduism poipts to the limitations of human consciousness: there are
> spiritual states that transcend human thought. This is of course, similar to
> many other religions. It is ironic that Buddhism is often understood to
> have rejected the Hindu concept of personal immortality when many
> passages within Hindu scriptures themselves also parallel the Buddhist
> approach. Rather than there being a contradiction between Buddhism and
> Hinduism, there is a striking similarity between them. In Buddhism,
> human nature derives its spiritual life from the Tathagata or Truth. The
> self of human beings is non-existent in comparison to the Truth. In
> Hinduism, it is the "Atman", or "God's Spirit in man" that transcends
> the human mind. In the Semitic religions the same message is conveyed
> by comparing man's finite knowledge with God's infinite wisdom.
> 
> It should be noted that even within the Upanishads the terminology for
> the individual "knowing self varies significantly from passage to
> passage and from translation to translation. At times, it is referred to as a
> "soul", "The soul dwells within us, a flame the size of a thumb, when it
> is known as the Lord of the past and future, then ceases all fear".109 In
> another translation it is referred to as "person (prusha)".110 Although
> 
> Hindu Scriptures, edited by D. Goodall, p. 66.
> Katha Upanishad, The Upanishads, p. 63.
> Sacred books of the East, vol. 15, p. 16.
> Body, Mind, Soul and Spirit                         173
> 
> there is imprecision in the terminology for the soul, the tripartite picture
> of human nature is however, fairly straightforward to identify.
> 
> In the Bhagavad Gita, there is greater precision and consistency with
> respect to references to the body, soul and Spirit. In fact, they are
> virtually identical to the Semitic religions. The goal of human life is
> depicted in terms of an individual soul being filled with the Spirit:
> 
> "And he reaches the heights of Yoga when he surrenders his earthly will:
> when he is not bound by the work of his senses, and he is not bound by
> his earthly works. Arise therefore! And with the help of thy Spirit lift up
> thy soul: allow not thy soul to fall. For thy soul can be thy friend, and thy
> soul can be thy enemy. The soul of man is his friend when by the Spirit
> he has conquered his soul; but when a man is not lord of his soul then his
> soul then this becomes his own enemy.... Day after day, let the Yogi
> practise the harmony of soul: in a secret place, in deep solitude, master
> of his mind, hoping for nothing, desiring nothing. Let him find a place
> that is pure and a seat that is restful... On that seat let him rest and
> practise Yoga for the purification of the soul: with the life of his body
> and mind in peace; his soul in silence before the One" (Gita 6: 4-12).
> 
> Clearly, the "peace" and harmony of body and soul is dependent upon
> the Spirit, which emanates from the One (God). Elsewhere in the
> Bhagavad Gita, it states that "Brahman is the Supreme, the Eternal.
> Atman is his Spirit in man" (Gita 8:3). These passages suggest that the
> Bhagavad Gita also uses the tripartite approach to human nature, where
> Spirit is the unifying element between body and soul.
> 
> Death in Hinduism is symbolised by the human mind perceiving
> diversity, whereas unity signifies life, "Who sees the many and not the
> ONE, wanders on from death to death. Even by the mind this truth is to
> be learned: there are not many but only ONE. Who sees variety and not
> the unity wanders on from death to death" (Katha Upanishad, 4:10-15).
> Death here is used in the sense of spiritual death, and parallels a similar
> usage as "living in sin" does for Christianity or "attachment to a separate
> self does for Buddhism. The search to acquire spiritual unity means that
> Hinduism, like Buddhism, is often type-cast as a form of spiritual
> monism. However, as the foregoing discussion demonstrates, Hinduism,
> like the Semitic religions, has a tripartite approach to human nature
> 174               THE SINGAPORE BAHAT STUDIES REVIEW
> 
> where the unifying element between body and soul is an underlying
> Spirit.
> 
> 9. Plato's Inner Sun
> 
> The Baha'i tripartite approach to human nature has similarities to Plato's
> philosophy. For Plato, the uniting link between soul and body is the
> realm of the Forms, which is illumined by an inner invisible sun. His
> conviction that this physical world is only a shadowy reflection of a real
> world is an obvious point of agreement with the Baha'i approach.
> 
> In Plato's book, the Republic (514-518), the world of the Forms is
> described as a perfect world, an eternal world. In comparison, the world
> perceived by our senses is a world of fleeting shadows. The physical
> world was believed by Plato to be an imperfect copy of the Forms. In the
> simile of the cave, the position of human beings in this life is compared
> to the predicament of prisoners in a cave, who are only able to look in
> one direction because they are bound by chains. They have a fire behind
> them and a wall in front. The fire projects shadows of both the prisoners
> and objects immediately behind them - shadows which they inevitably
> regard as real since they have no direct way of observing the objects
> which cause the shadows. Then finally, a man is able to break the chains
> that bind him and exits from the cave where he discovers the light of the
> sun. He is able to recognise the real nature of the world and understands
> that he had hitherto been deceived by the shadows in the cave. He will
> then return to the cave, and inform the other prisoners about the sunlight.
> 
> Plato thought that the sun's light came from the Form of the good, "the
> form of the good; once seen, it is inferred to be responsible for whatever
> is right and valuable in anything, producing in the visible region light
> and the source of light, and being in the intelligible region itself
> controlling source of truth and intelligence"111. This process of finding
> the sunlight, the Form of the good, upon which truth and knowledge
> depend, is obviously similar to finding enlightenment in other spiritual
> traditions. It corresponds for example to "being born again" in
> Christianity, or attaining "Nirvana" in Buddhism.
> 
> Plato, Republic, 517c.
> Body, Mind, Soul and Spirit                       \ 75
> 
> In Plato's simile of the sun, he explicitly refers to the sun and its light as
> a "third element", which is a realm beyond intelligence. At the same time
> it is something upon which the mind depends,
> 
> "the eyes have the power of sight, and its possessor tries to use this
> power, and if objects have colour, yet you know that he will see nothing
> and the colours will remain invisible unless a third element is present
> which is specifically and naturally adapted for the purpose... the sun is
> not identical with sight nor with what we call the eye in which sight
> resides... apply the analogy to the mind. When the mind's eye is fixed
> on objects illuminated by truth and reality, it understands and knows
> them, and its possession of intelligence is evident; but when it is fixed on
> the twilight world of change and decay, it can only form opinions, its
> vision is confused and its opinions shifting, and it seems to lack
> intelligence... Then what gives the objects of knowledge their truth and
> the knower's mind the power of knowing is the form of the good. It is
> the cause of knowledge and truth, and you will be right to think of it as
> being itself known, and yet as being something other than, and even
> more splendid than, knowledge and truth, splendid as they are. And just
> as it was right to think of light and sight as being like the sun itself, so
> here again it is right to think of knowledge and truth as being like the
> good, but wrong to think of either of them as being the good, whose
> position must be ranked still higher".112
> 
> Here Plato refers to the sun, the Form of the good, as something higher
> than knowledge and truth, and something upon which human intelligence
> depends. He describes it as a necessary condition to acquire knowledge
> and truth, and the "sun" of the Form of the good clearly has much in
> common with the Baha'i "Sun of Truth". Like the Baha'i approach to
> human nature, Plato's philosophy of mind is unmistakably tripartite in
> character. Plato's philosophy is often interpreted to mean that he
> advocated a form of soul-body dualism. But such a reading of Plato's
> philosophy misses out the all important Form of the good and its key role
> in illuminating the landscape of human intelligence.
> 
> Plato, Republic, 507e-509a.
> 176               THE SINGAPORE BAHAT STUDIES REVIEW
> 
> 10. Descartes' Bridge between Mind and Body
> 
> Descartes' philosophy of mind can also be read in a tripartite way, as
> opposed to the usual dualist one. The clearest indication that Descartes
> conceived of a third element which transcends the immortal world of the
> soul and the perishable world of the body is the role he assigns to God. It
> is no exaggeration to say that for Descartes, God forms the bridge
> between the soul and the material world. After arriving at the conclusion
> of, "I think, therefore I am", Descartes searches further within himself to
> find another indubitable truth. Although he found that the act of thinking
> was an irrefutable truth, he realised that there is no guarantee that the
> mind's thoughts about the world are valid. In short, in his effort to find
> rock hard truths, Descartes had dug so deep that he was left no ground
> upon which the world of the senses or the material world could be
> trusted. But he finds that the idea of God is a singularly unique thought
> in his mind, and argues for God's existence,
> 
> "But now I have discerned that God exists, and have understood at the
> same time that everything else depends on him, and that he is not
> deceitful; and from this I have gathered that whatever I clearly and
> distinctly perceive is necessarily true."113
> 
> Whether Descartes really believed himself to have proved the existence
> of God is not clear, since elsewhere he states that the existence of God is
> a primary truth, a basic axiom upon which all others are derived.114 But
> the role he assigned God, of using God's good nature to guarantee the
> truth of his "clear and distinct" ideas is unmistakable. The natural
> conclusion to this is that true knowledge depends on God: "Thus I see
> plainly that the certainty and truth of all knowledge depends entirely on
> my awareness of the true God; before knowing him I could have no
> perfect knowledge, of anything. And now it becomes possible for
> countless things to be clearly known and certain to me..."115 Here
> Descartes uses the world of God as a bridge connecting the world of the
> 
> Descartes: Philosophical Writings, Meditations, p. 107.
> "the first and principal intuitive truth ... is that there is a God upon whom all things
> depend, whose perfections are infinite, whose power is immeasurable, whose decrees are
> unfailing", pxxxv, Descartes: Philosophical Writings.
> Descartes: Philosophical Writings, "Meditations", p. 108.
> Body, Mind, Soul and Spirit                                177
> 
> mind to the world of the body. He believed that if he acted in good faith,
> that is, where he strove to arrive at clear and distinct ideas, where he
> recognised limitations to his understanding, and where he wholly trusted
> in God, God would help him acquire true knowledge.116 The role of God
> clearly brings out the tripartite character of Descartes' philosophy of
> mind. He believed that for the mind to reach any valid knowledge about
> the world or itself, it must rely on God. Descartes' philosophy of mind
> only appears to be dualist when the role played by God is omitted, and
> many modern commentaries of Descartes' philosophy do precisely this.
> By doing so, they tacitly reveal their secular bias. The result is that they
> impose a division on Descartes' philosophy that was never there.
> 
> It is interesting to note that there are similar arguments to Descartes'
> "systematic doubt" in the Baha'i writings. 'Abdu'1-Bahá's commentary
> on the fallibility of "criterions of truth" rejects various well-known
> methods of acquiring knowledge. He doubts their ability to provide
> certain knowledge in a manner that is reminiscent of Descartes.117
> 'Abdu'1-Bahá first doubts the validity of empirical knowledge and gave
> reasons that are similar to Descartes'. He cited for instance, the existence
> of optical illusions. He then went on to doubt the validity of knowledge
> derived from reason, such as knowledge uncovered by science,
> philosophy or mathematics: since philosophers invariably disagree with
> one another, and scientific knowledge changes and progresses with time,
> it is not indubitable. Descartes also found that he could doubt various
> scientific truths, including the validity of mathematical theorems.
> 'Abdu'1-Bahá also rejected the validity of tradition as the basis of
> discovering truth. Descartes had vowed not to rely on traditional
> wisdom at the very start of his Meditations. 'Abdu'1-Bahá next rejected
> inspiration as a reliable source of knowledge, arguing that there was no
> way of knowing where such impulses come from: they might equally
> come from selfish desires as well as good ones. Similarly, Descartes
> imagined that there was a malicious demon who might deceive all that he
> imagined, and so only accepted propositions which were beyond the
> demon's power to distort.
> 
> Finally, 'Abdu'1-Bahá concluded that all human avenues to finding
> 
> Descartes: Philosophical Writings, "Meditations", p. 98-9.
> 'Abdu'1-Bahá, Foundations of World Unity, "The Criterions of Truth", p. 45-47.
> 178               THE SINGAPORE BAHAT STUDIES REVIEW
> 
> indubitable truths are faulty. He concluded, just as Descartes had, that for
> human beings to arrive at indubitable truths, they require assistance from
> the world of God. In 'Abdu'1-Bahá's words, "What then remains? How
> shall we attain the reality of knowledge? By the breaths and promptings
> of the Holy Spirit which is light and knowledge itself. Through it the
> human mind is quickened and fortified into true conclusions and perfect
> knowledge... all available human criterions are erroneous and defective,
> but the divine standard of knowledge is infallible. Therefore man is not
> justified in saying, "I know because I perceive through my senses"; or "I
> know because it is proved through my faculty of reason"; or "I know
> because it is according to tradition and interpretation of the holy book";
> or "I know because I am inspired". All human standard of judgement is
> faulty, finite".118 Just as Descartes invoked the help of God to acquire
> truth, 'Abdu'1-Bahá emphasised reliance on the Holy Spirit. Descartes'
> and 'Abdu'1-Bahá's discussions on criteria for truth bear striking
> resemblance to one another, both in terms of their methods and
> conclusions.
> 
> Descartes' philosophy of mind was far from being based upon a "ghost
> in a machine". In fact it would be more accurate to describe it in terms of
> a "god in a machine". Descartes' philosophy is tripartite in character,
> where mind and body find their natural union in the world of God.
> 
> 11. Conclusion
> 
> This paper has argued in favour of the existence of many worlds beyond
> our physical one and has focussed its attention on one such world,
> namely the one that lives within our minds. It has given a variety of
> different reasons why there is in principle no conflict between modern
> science and the belief in an immortal human soul. The paper has
> presented the Baha'i view on the body, soul and spirit, showing that this
> tripartite approach to human nature is consistent with traditional Western
> dualism and Eastern monism. The Baha'i approach is correlated with
> Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as the
> philosophies of Plato and Descartes. Common elements to all these
> traditions are emphasised from the tripartite perspective, where dualism
> 
> 'Abdu'1-Bahá, Foundations of World Unity, p. 47.
> Body, Mind, Soul and Spirit                         179
> 
> is given unity and meaning by the presence of an underlying monism.
> 
> One common theme that emerges from the religions considered in this
> paper is that they all describe the goal of human life in terms of us
> becoming selfless. The Semitic line of religions enjoins their followers to
> be humble before God. Progress involves the sacrifice of an animal self,
> the death of an egotistical self, and the acquisition of a spiritual self, a
> self that is illumined by God's spirit. Jesus instructed his disciples in the
> following way, " If any man will come after me, let him deny himself,
> and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life
> shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.
> For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his
> own soul?" (Matthew 16: 24-26). Likewise in the Quran, it is stated that
> Allah "guideth to Himself those who turn to Him in penitence..." (S
> 13:27). The same is true in Hinduism, where the goal of life is to
> illumine the self by the inner light of the Self (Atman). In Buddhism, the
> spiritual path transforms a perishable self into a mind that reflects the
> eternal Truth (Tathagata). The Baha'i Faith, by explicitly describing a
> triad relationship between body, soul and spirit, helps to show that both
> our Western and Eastern spiritual traditions point towards the same goal,
> that of becoming truly selfless.
> 
> Acknowledgements
> 
> The author dedicates this paper to the memory of his late mother, who
> passed away while it was being written.
> 180             THE SINGAPORE BAHÁ1 STUDIES REVIEW
> 
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> — *Body, Mind, Soul and Spirit (Used by permission of the curator)*