Three Cultures

There are three forms of culture: worldly culture, the mere acquisition of information; religious culture, following rules; elite culture, self-development.

     [Ali Hujwiri, Revelation of the Veiled]

I’ve used this quote as an epigram before; I saw it many, many years ago, used for the same purpose in Idries Shah’s, The Sufis, and it made an impression on me even then—pre-Information Age and all of that—because it refers to information and, in part, inverts the order of layers within a culture. In the modern view “self actualization,” as the last level is called in modernese (by Abraham Maslow discussing hierarchies of needs), is till at the top, but religious culture is viewed as something we’ve progressed beyond to reach the current pinnacle of secular civilization.

Hujwiri, a Sufi teacher, lived a long time ago—990-1077—and clearly had a very sophisticated view of culture, as expressed when he described the basic level as engaged in seeking information. That’s all that’s really possible—at the worldly level. What comes above it transcends “the world” as we usually understand it.

Got to thinking about this today as I was pondering Yeat’s poem, The Second Coming, in which appear those famous words, “the center cannot hold.” Yeats (1865-1939) belongs to elite culture if anybody does; and beyond most poets he was interested in matters mystical. And he saw the problem, to be sure. Worldly culture, even when he wrote that poem, in 1920, was already overwhelming the second layer for many people: religious culture. Yeats saw that as a great disaster because he saw no hope. The Second Coming he darkly foresaw was that of something beastly:

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

Well, perhaps he failed to look far enough ahead—or his mysticism wasn’t deep enough. What he describes slouching towards Bethlehem to be born was modernity itself, not that which will follow its falling apart.

All this then led to another thought. If we look at Hujwiri’s categories, what seems to be clear is that the bottom and the top layers are always present—unless some plague or atomic war sends us back to hunting and gathering again; even that would leave one in place. Organized societies are a kind of necessary foundation for anything higher—except the elite culture at the very top. The elite culture is also always there; it springs from individual endowments. On this view, anyway, the middle layer, religious culture, is the most important. It provides social cohesion and is the vehicle by which masses of people can raise themselves, with the help of teachings and obedience (a despised word in this day) to realize transcendence—which is Job 1 in Sufi thought.

Souls Sort Themselves

There are three forms of culture: worldly culture, the mere acquisition of information; religious culture, following rules; elite culture, self-development. [Hujwiri, Revelation of the Veiled]

Suppose that we are guided by our own intuition. That this is so follows as the consequence of two facts. One is that the physical world is harsh. If we violate its rules we will be punished. In that dimension guidance is simply feedback. The second fact, as I’ve endeavored to show in the last post, is that intellectual arguments concerning higher matters, the metaphysical, are never compelling in and of themselves because they can’t be proved—as physical facts can be. But to orient ourselves, we must rely on something. That something concerning matters that can’t be proved (and are not harshly enforced by nature), is our own judgment. And our judgment is guided by a feeling from within: this sounds true; or, this sounds phony.

Let me be precise. Intuition, as the word itself implies (“tuition,” “tutoring” from “within”) is not something we do. It is something we experience. After an intuition is received, something else must follow. It is our agreement or disagreement. In other words, we can act contrary to our intuitions too. When the matter is in the area of knowledge, we can deny the knowledge or act contrary to it. When the intuition is the judgment of an action, thus in the moral sphere, we can override it. Hence “conscience,” in the sense that Catholicism uses that word, is intuition in one of its modes. The presumption here is, one, that we are guided; and, two, that this guidance isn’t our own or, if it is, it emanates from a higher aspect of ourselves.

This suggests that if we correctly understood and invariably followed our intuitions, the world would be paradise. What makes life “interesting”—in the sense of the Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times!”—is that our condition, the Church Militant of which are now members, is developmental in character. We’re moving up a spiral or, refusing to do so, sliding into an abyss. The downward movement is not interesting but must be acknowledged to exist. We live side by side with others. Most are moving up, some are willfully sliding down. The intuitive “hearing” of individuals varies; some are more and some less sensitive to this inflow; sensitivities, furthermore, can be enhanced by effort or dulled by ignoring the guidance. Intuition is not only accepted or ignored; its strength and effect are also influenced by innate intellectual and physical characteristics which appear to be randomly distributed. The intuition is there, but it may be more dimly or powerfully felt; it may be understood swiftly by some, slowly by others. Whatever the innate disposition, the will still plays a crucial role. The super-bright, for instance, may understand the intuition immediately, but if they don’t want to follow it, they will be very clever in rationalizing it away. Therefore the strength of the intuition is not as important as the direction the person has chosen to follow. It’s a free universe. The soul is sovereign however it may be enabled or delimited by the characteristics of its vehicle.

This then sets the stage for the suggestion that souls sort themselves out by using intuition and will. It is this sorting which produces the three cultural forms that Hujwiri uses to show the hierarchical arrangement of humanity in this realm. The foundational level is physical—where straightforward understanding of the ordinary world suffices; the religious sphere is on a higher level, but behavior is guided by semi-mechanical arrangements, rules. Here a higher dimension is already intuited, but conformity to it is expressed in the language of law, motivated in terms of reward and punishment, and expressed in ritual forms. The highest level is also the most free. Here the intuition is very strong and willingly followed. People at various levels of development find comfort in the culture that feels best. Not surprisingly, those on the lower levels cannot understand and therefore disparage the practices at the levels above. The highest level, however, is marked by understanding of the lower. It’s a good self-test to examine one’s own views, say, of religion, science, or mysticism. You’re certainly not a member of the spiritual elite if you bad-mouth legitimate science or ridicule the true believers.

The sorting process no doubt continues after death. And concepts like hell, purgatory, and heaven are mere labels, very roughly hewn, of other clustering of souls on the other side of the border zone. The sorting over there follows the inclinations of the soul. A way to illustrate that is to say that those who, in this realm, are seeking the depths will feel much more comfortable in hell than anywhere else…

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Ali Hujwiri (990-1077) was a Persian Sufi, teacher, and writer. He was born in what is today Afghanistan. He wrote Revelation of the Veiled, also rendered as Unveiling the Veiled, in Persian. The quotation cited, which I took from Idries Shah’s The Sufis, should be rightly understood. Hujwiri, like all Sufis, believed that the highly developed individual will not only understand but also practice the wisdom available at all three levels of culture.