Monday, March 06, 2006

GR and OG part II

The Golden Rule and the Oneness of God (second part)

By John Taylor; 6 March, 2006

My first essay about One God and the Golden Rule tried to connect sex
and family with the rule of love, the Golden Rule, and I was not
entirely successful. I remember my old writing teacher, Homer Hogan,
criticizing one of my shiny but flawed efforts by comparing me to a
juggler who keeps tossing more and more objects into the air. The
reader knows that they are all going to come down on my head, the only
question is, "When will the crash come?" Probably I worked out the
short essay as my medium of choice because I can shut the stage
curtains just before everything comes down on my head, thus saving me
a great deal of pain and embarrassment. That Golden Rule essay was an
example of a performance where the curtain closed too late and the
deluge of floating themes and ideas fell down on my head; and then the
fast started...

I was saddened having to stop fasting due to health and it was not
until last night that my sleep normalized and I recovered to some
extent from the nagging migraine monkey on my back. But then I had a
dream that in a strange way consoled and inspired, wherein I attended
a talk given by my spiritual sister, AP. What she said and the way she
said it was different from any speaker I had ever heard. I was lost in
admiration at that strange, ineffable spiritual quality about her.
Afterwards I said to her, "It is as if you have limned an entirely new
dimension onto your character." Later, I was napping in a Mount Hope
airport lounge's couch and she saw me and fell on my sleeping form and
began hugging me tight, with all her might. I began to wonder, did she
gain her charisma and insight from some great joy, or perhaps some
terrible tragedy? The dream did not answer that and I awoke. Maybe
this was the dream that Stu predicted would answer why I am afflicted
with migraines, that would give an understanding that consoles and
cures.

The question remains, how to connect the disparate ideas, sex for
consistency and justice, for adaptation to change, family, reciprocity
and ultimately the Oneness of God? Jesus' parable of the wedding feast
(Matt 22:1-14, WEB) is probably the ticket. It describes how the
Kingdom of God calls many, but few are chosen, just as love is
universal and it is also personal, that is, eros and familial in
nature. Let us go through it in detail.

A harsh king, an absolute monarch with an imperious, arbitrary temper
(ie, not to be confused with a God of love) invites certain nobles to
be his honored guests at the wedding feast of his son; he follows
normal protocol in inviting his guests but they in return slight his
authority. Needless to say, in a monarchy the wedding feast of the
firstborn son has immense political implications. It is how
governmental power will be extended into the future. To ignore this
event is to challenge present as well as future authority.

"But they made light of it, and went their ways, one to his own farm,
another to his merchandise, and the rest grabbed his servants, and
treated them shamefully, and killed them."

Worse than begging off an invitation, they offer a direct,
contemptuous insult. The ability to run a farm and engage in trade is
a result of peace, which in turn results from the power of government
to maintain order and keep out invaders. Finally, the scum take the
offensive by torturing and murdering his representatives. In this
version of the story the king immediately responds in kind, burning
their cities to the ground.

He sends the king's servants to stand at the crossroads and invite all
comers. The lowborn, the poor and other stragglers freeload at the
wedding feast but are expected to treat the host with due gratitude
and respect. One of them turns up at this formal occasion in street
cloths. Why do you not have wedding clothing? the king asks, and the
man has nothing to say. He orders that he be thrown into the outer
darkness "where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth." (22:14)

Such protocol is seen in holy scripture. Baha'is talk of the three
onenesses, the Oneness of God, Oneness of His Manifestations and
oneness of humanity. According to this order, Baha'u'llah began His
mission in Sulaymaniyyih (Solomon's mountains) addressing Sufis and
mystics (specialists in Spirit and the Godhead), then went on to the
priests (guardians of divine law) and ended by addressing the kings
(outer power) in His Proclamation. Again, Baha'u'llah began His
Mission alone, as a dervish in the Sulaymaniyyih mountains, finally
befriending and addressing certain high Sufi mystics inhabiting that
center of Islamic mysticism. This brought about His early works such
as the Four Valleys and the Ode of the Dove. This connects the need to
hold to One God, which means "He doeth what He willeth," one boss, one
absolute authority. Anything less is a slight, and no love or
compassion comes through. Witness these parallel passages, the first
from Jesus, the second from the Hidden Words.

"No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one, and
love the other; or else he will hold to one, and despise the other.
You cannot serve both God and Mammon." (Matt 6:24, WEB)
"Ponder awhile. Hast thou ever heard that friend and foe should abide
in one heart? Cast out then the stranger, that the Friend may enter
His home." (PHW61)

The farm, or mammon, is growth, the mindless lust for expansion that
permeates those with the power to decide, who are literally choking
the life out of our planet. Next in doctrinal works like the
Javahiru'l-Asrar and the Kitab-i-Iqan, He addressed the substance or
propaganda of the Mullahs and priests, the merchant in the parable of
the Wedding Feast. Finally He invited the leaders of the world to the
feast in His Proclamation to the Kings, and they killed the messenger.
The poor are allowed into the feast but at least one is wholly unaware
of the gravity of the occasion and is tossed down, down to the most
un-toothsome of locations, hell.

The point is that this king seems so arbitrary and angry because of
our own insolence not out His love for us, which is infinite. We are
in utter need of help, but our only hope is to deal with a Being Who
is wholly other, whose knowledge is inherently beyond us. To do that,
you must treat Him as such. As Baha'u'llah writes in the Four Valleys,

"Were all the denizens of earth and heaven to unravel this shining
allusion, this darksome riddle, until the Day when the Trumpet
soundeth, yet would they fail to comprehend even a letter thereof, for
this is the station of God's immutable decree, His foreordained
mystery. Hence, when searchers inquired of this, He made reply, "This
is a bottomless sea which none shall ever fathom."(Ali) And they asked
again, and He answered, "It is the blackest of nights through which
none can find his way." (SVFV, 57-8)

Stu passed to me a book beautifully titled "Survival of the Wisest" by
Nobel Prize winner Jonas Salk. Unfortunately his turgid style obscures
what he says, but I flipped to this passage, which inadvertently
illuminates this point about the Oneness of God, sex, Golden Rules,
and the wedding feast.

"Since many of the problems for which Man seeks solutions are an
inherent part of the process of human development itself, and since he
is both a contributing cause as well as a sufferer, his position as
both patient and physician is a difficult one. And yet he must be
both." (Salk, Survival of the Wisest, Harper and Row, New York, 1973,
p. 118)

A person who acts as his own lawyer has, as the saying goes, a fool
for a lawyer, and it is illegal for a physician to prescribe his own
cure or to treat a member of his own family. This is because one has
not the objectivity, even if the knowledge is there. In the same way
humanity cannot cure itself, it needs a separate, a divinely inspired
physician to offer an assured, safe, sanctioned cure. The gulf between
us and divine perfection is offers that objectivity. That in essence
is why the principle of the Oneness of God starts, in every nook and
cranny of religious history, with the Golden Rule, and why the Rule is
always applied according to the judgment of His few, chosen,
authorized Representatives.

"In brief, the sun is one sun, the light is one light which shines
upon all phenomenal beings. Every creature has a portion thereof, but
the pure mirror can reveal the story of its bounty more fully and
completely. Therefore, we must adore the light of the Sun, no matter
through what mirror it may be revealed. We must not entertain
prejudice, for prejudice is an obstacle to realization. Inasmuch as
the effulgence is one effulgence, the human realities must all become
recipients of the same light, recognizing in it the compelling force
that unites them in its illumination." (Promulgation, 115)

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com

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