Finding Pearls

Nov 23, 7:31AM

From Huston Smith’s Beyond the Post-Modern Mind, I came away with the importance of escaping the spell of postmodernism in order to affirm the possibility of the development of higher capacity in human spirituality. While acknowledging the benefits from the scientific age, Smith asserts that scientism veils humans from understanding our divine inheritance because foundational to the domineering mindset imposed by science/postmodernism is the pervasive premise that humans advance from lesser forms rather than from greater. When in the spell of postmodernism, humans are blocked from realizing ourselves as created in the image of God. In postmodernism, we may say the words while denied the infusion of spirit. And in the thrall of material mindset following religious prescriptions risks separation from divine guidance. Postmodernism gives highest values to quantification as evident in the materialism that ever seeks more money, status, sex, and other things. Postmodernism leaves us bereft of the sense of quality.

     A resource for breaking this spell of postmodernism, then, may be found through investing in quality rather than quantity. One view of qualities comes in the Names of God, as expressed in the Islamic tradition. Perhaps the most compelling of these qualities that calls to me is Beauty. As a follow-up to Beyond the Post-Modern Mind (in addition to beginning Smith’s earlier Forgotten Truth), I’m finding myself drawn to Titus Burckhardt’s Sacred Art in East and West. An antidote to the toxicity of materialism comes in the unveiling of the divine in everyday living. Burckhardt explores an aspect or quality of this in the sacred art of “the five great traditions”: “Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Taoism.” For example:

“That which the Christian view of things grasps by means of a sort of loving concentration on the Word incarnate in Jesus Christ, is transposed in the Islamic view into the universal and the impersonal. In Islam the Divine Art—and according to the Koran God is ‘artist’ (musawwir)—is in the first place the manifestation of the Divine Unity in the beauty and regularity of the Cosmos. Unity is reflected in the harmony of the multiple, in order and equilibrium; beauty has all these aspects within itself. To start from the beauty of the world and arrive at Unity—that is wisdom. For this reason Islamic thought necessarily attaches art to wisdom; in the eyes of a Muslim, art is essentially founded on wisdom, or on science, the function of science being the formulation of wisdom in temporal terms. The purpose of art is to enable the human environment, the world so far as it is moulded by man, to participate in the order that manifests most directly the Divine Unity. Art clarifies the world; it helps the spirit to detach itself from the disturbing multitude of things so that it may climb again towards the Infinite Unity.” (pp.16-17)

Most everyday, my spirit finds refreshment by expecting to see beauty in nature. 

Nov 19, 7:11AM

Sometimes the harmony of color and line is increasingly revealed by editing photographs. For example, by adding contrast or by moving the center point, the otherwise hidden beauty emerges more clearly. Looking expectantly, loving the variation of light over shadow, and playing with images all guide the discovery into subtle manifestations of the quality of beauty.

Nov 19, 8:46A harvesting the fallen tree

Nov 21, 4:45P river birch planted this year

     It’s interesting that the same day I’m drafting the above a Facebook friend posted from the fiftieth discourse of Rumi’s Fihi ma fihi:

“The sciences and crafts are like measuring the sea in cupfuls; the way to finding pearls is something else. Many a person is adorned with every accomplishment and possessed of wealth and beauty but has nothing of this intrinsic meaning in him; and many a person is a wreck on the outside, with no fairness of feature, elegance or eloquence, but within is found the intrinsic meaning that abides forever. It is that which enables and distinguishes humanity.” (p. 195, Signs of the Unseen, translation by Thackston)

A year ago today, Nov 24, 2018