p01og Introduction to Search

Abdu'l-Baha's Advice on How to Introduce Investigation

By John Taylor; 2007 Nov 29, 2007, 07 Qawl, 164 BE

Regarding an Address of Abdu'l-Baha given 20 September 1912; Promulgation, 325-329

Day after day I have been going over with a fine toothed comb the above talk the Master gave in Minneapolis on search for truth. At least that is what I thought it was about when I started out. Now though if pressed I would categorize it under proofs of deity. Certainly His thesis is that if you want to seek truth, start with the existence of God. As often happens with the lesser talks in Promulgation, the material looks good from afar but falls apart in your hand when you try to pick it up.

The address was, I think, interpreted rather than translated, for the wording is confusing and the terminology inconsistent. Words that make sense on a quick first reading become obscure on closer examination. For example, on this occasion the interpreter evidently decided to translate the Master's word for "science" with what was an old fashioned term even then, "natural philosophy." This I deduced after hours of puzzlement. Other passages I still have not got a handle on, and maybe never will. Some of the Master's talks in America and Canada were re-translated in the new edition of Mahmud's Diary. That offers a second shot at His meaning, but no dice on this talk. Mahmud only briefly mentions one that may be this talk, which is probably an indication that he was not the appointed translator on this occasion. Too bad, because he was one of the competent of the Master's secretaries.

I was on the point of giving up my arduous and unrewarding study of this garbled talk when I realized that perhaps I was drawn to it for good reason. Being forced to paraphrase it in order to make it more comprehensible may be a good thing. Working it over makes it my own. I can make it into a sort of template for an introductory essay or talk of my own on search. At the very least I can now see why He says that search must begin with the question of the existence of God.

Abdu'l-Baha was speaking to a group probably made up mostly of Baha'is in the private home of Albert Hall, a lawyer and prominent believer in the twin cities. Judging by what is said, I think it is fair to speculate that He was not trying to prove his points there and then (as He did before large audiences at Columbia and Stanford Universities), but rather He was aiming to show us believers how we can appropriately approach the question of search for truth, what to deal with in the minds of the general public.

In this talk the Master suggests that we explain search for truth by starting with the thesis that humankind has progressed materially but neglected its moral advance. This was essentially what Lester B. Pearson said in his 1956 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech forty years later, and you could probably say it today before any audience and it would seem new. Sad but true, the thesis is not outdated and all too few of us realize it. We studiously neglect the inner side of our reality and fret over every wrinkle that appears on our body. Most of us do not realize that we even have a spiritual side, much less pray in the words of the Psalm,

"Examine me, Yahweh, and prove me. Try my heart and my mind. For your loving-kindness is before my eyes. I have walked in Thy truth." (Ps 26:2-3, WEB)

The Master's thesis that progress has become disjointed would be an excellent starting point for any discussion today. It is undeniable that if we are ever going to stop global warming we will have to do just what He says here, readjust our priorities and changed and educate hearts as well as bodies.

So without further introduction, here is a paraphrase of the Master's talk in Albert Hall's digs.

Act One of the Disquisition

Scene one starts off, as experts on rhetoric recommend, by orienting the audience, reminding them of who they are and why they are here. He declares that unlike other meetings this one is special, it is held by seekers and for the sake of spirit.

"Praise be to God! This is a beautiful and radiant assemblage. ...our spirit and motive are solely for the manifestation of divine bestowals."

As always, He sees the highest motives possible in everybody He meets. I just read something Goethe said that perfectly describes the psychological method of the Master: "If I accept you as you are, I will make you worse; however if I treat you as though you are what you are capable of becoming, I help you become that." But at the same time, even if Abdu'l-Baha was speaking to a confluence of angels, their challenge is the same: the people we Baha'is meet in a worldly setting are not in anything like a spiritual mind set. So, by starting off with this praise He seems to imply that if we want to do what He praises us for, to manifest divine bestowals, we will need to learn how to bring these bestowals about first in ourselves, and then in others. Like fire starting, we first learn to light one and then teach others how to produce it with us.

But how to do this? First we have to understand that we have a choice to show one of two kinds of virtue: material or ideal. This is a reflection of the fact that we possess both inner and outer faculties; our spirit (the text avoids the word "soul") has its inward senses and the body has its outer senses. He cites the following examples of inner and outer faculties of human perception:

Example one: sight is a material sense but insight is spiritual

Example two: hearing is a physical endowment but memory is ideal

Example three: cogitation ("ideation") is material, love is spiritual

He mentions several more ideal virtues, evidently without physical counterparts; these are intuition, the emotions and our power to apprehend God. Our very ability to acquire the reality of phenomena (consciousness, presumably) is an "ideal virtue." Then there is morality; the "realization of moral standards and the world of discovery involve virtues essentially ideal." The Master was describing a bias that may have been hard to make out then but it has grown since 1912 into a grotesque distortion. Now the very word "moral" has systematically been wiped from the public slate.

We now go on to Scene Three, the unbalancing point where the speaker describes the need or lack to be addressed. The Master's analysis of the problem is that material virtues have outstripped ideal ones. Our material virtues have attained great development, but our ideal virtues are left far behind. This general imbalance in the history of Western civilization is an indicator of how we are doing within; as individuals we are overdeveloping outer virtues at the expense of inner ones.

This takes us to scene four where the speaker seeks to rebalance the tension created in scene three, to look at the desired future and ask: what do we want to see happen? Abdu'l-Baha says that what we need to do is to renew and reform human morals that are undeveloped and neglected.

"It is now the time in the history of the world for us to strive and give an impetus to the advancement and development of inner forces -- that is to say, we must arise to service in the world of morality, for human morals are in need of readjustment."

So, to shift development toward inner powers we advance the world of morality. We strengthen our powers of perception and the world of the mind, and as our powers of reasoning grow we will shine forth the ideal virtues in the social realm that are so sorely lacking.

Needless to say, it is no easy job to make such an extreme about-face.

The final scene of Act One is scene five. This is all we have time for today. Here the speaker asks, "How do we get there from here?" The audience asks, "What solution does the speaker recommend?" Here Abdu'l-Baha plays the "God card." He says that discovery and the realization of moral standards requires ideal virtues and they are all but invisible to most people today. Therefore, to play catch-up with ideal virtues, we will have to set up reasonable proofs of everything that pertains to deity. So, begin by removing each of three possible objections, one, does God really exist? Two, so what if He exists? and three, what do I have to do with Him? So, to start off we prove the existence of God.

"Before a step is taken in this direction we must be able to prove Divinity from the standpoint of reason so that no doubt or objection may remain for the rationalist."

This of course is the principle of the Oneness of God. But we cannot stop with that, or else all we would have on our hands would be lukewarm deists. Our next step is to establish the potency of God, the principle the Master called elsewhere the Power of the Holy Spirit. We prove that by demonstrating that His bounty encompasses humanity and transcends all we can see or touch. Finally we prove that the soul is immortal, and that it is the true but invisible font of all virtues, even material ones.

So, the fulcrum of the final scene that will inform the entire Second Act is this proposition: our age demands that we shift away from materialism and serve morality. We do that by putting God, and our power of knowing God, first. This is what is required of believers at this point in world history.