The Essay After the Essay that Would not Die

The Essay after the Essay that Would Not Die


Part III of a series


By John Taylor; 17 May, 2004



The problem with getting healthy is that in my short respite from migraine attacks I start foolishly trying do justice to the wonderful material I write about, the Revelation of Baha'u'llah. And that only leads back into further failure, tension, and more seizures. So when I say my health has been better lately, really I mean to say that I have been more hectic, frazzled, frantic. I have been trying agonizingly over the past days to do justice to a question only half formed, writing backwards and downward, failing to find the problem, much less the answer, digging my own grave.

Yesterday I finished the essay that would not die. As fate would have it, it was the first essay posted on my new web log called the Badi Blog on the famous site that started the whole blogging movement, blogger.com, at:


http://badiblog.blogspot.com/


By refusing to die, yesterday's essay found itself in a sort of resurrection from the old Badi mailing list to a new life in a new medium, the web log, or blog.

For those who do not follow technology news, Blogger.com was the original web log site. It was purchased lately by Google, who have gone to a great deal of effort to make it even easier for the most brain dead to set up a blog. So simple did it become that I, even I, overcame my fears and tried it out. So far this most brain dead of them all is having no trouble with the blog. In fact, it looks like Assembly members could use blogs to do their own business, since that was the purpose of the first blog, to help along the internal information flow of a high tech company. Setting my blog going, I listed "Baha'i" as an interest; blogger linked me to the only other blogger with that interest, a fellow LSA member and disabled person living in Florida. You can check out his blog too there, if you want.

In the first essay of this series, now called the "Essay Before the Essay that Would Not Die," I imagined a future statesperson's dash, cockpit or HUD layout as featuring three main dials, one each for "justice," "trustworthiness," and "mercy." These three virtues were emphasized in the Writings of Baha'u'llah. I supposed then that these three capsulate the entire political spectrum, from left to center to right.

As it is now leaders and their platforms tend to swing entirely one way or the other, right or left, and stay there. The center cannot hold them. But when Baha'u'llah wrote Queen Victoria -- we often notice that she was the only woman but not so often that she was a constitutional monarch, the head of a democracy -- he gave the following advice to parliamentarians and legislators, both those under her sway and "in every land,"


"Take ye counsel together, and let your concern be only for that which profiteth mankind and bettereth the condition thereof, if ye be of them that scan heedfully." (Summons, 1,174, p. 90)


Note the "scan heedfully" part. The technology that culminates in the cockpit display, is that not just a hopped up tool for scanning the situation? That is what a leader is there to do, after all, scan a complex world and pick out what needs to be changed and what can be left aside. Baha'u'llah goes on, seeming to suggest the image to scan, not of a bird with two wings but a holistic human body.


"Regard the world as the human body which, though at its creation whole and perfect, hath been afflicted, through various causes, with grave disorders and maladies. Not for one day did it gain ease, nay its sickness waxed more severe, as it fell under the treatment of ignorant physicians, who gave full rein to their personal desires and have erred grievously. And if, at one time, through the care of an able physician, a member of that body was healed, the rest remained afflicted as before. Thus informeth you the All-Knowing, the All-Wise." (Id.)


This simple dictum has profound implications. It means that as a leader you are treating one patient, there is only one world, one humanity. So you cannot possibly apply a remedy to a leg or an arm, to a France or a Russia or a Canada, you are always dealing with one entity with one cure. There are no half measures, there are no big and important leaders and small and insignificant ones, we are all either leaders applying the remedy or we are, well, ignorant physicians clamoring for this or that harebrained scheme. You are either a doctor or you are not; you are either a Baha'i or you are not. Here, there is no middle ground, no right or left, here, you are either curing the patient or you are part of the problem.

A leader who leans right or left is restricting herself. I believe that one day everyone will be trained from an early age to avoid extremes, to be wise and moderate. Holding back is a sign of the strength of the center. Without restraint, the political fact becomes fractious and immature. Rather than picking sides, leadership will be seen as the art of making friends, of loving all in one, One in all. Left and right will be understood to be inside each of us, like the chirality of left and right brain in the body, like its symmetrical pair limbs on each side of the body.

If we show forth disunity, we prove how far we are from the One True God. Jalalu'Din Rumi wrote against our annoying tendencies towards duality, bifurcation, dichotomizing, lobotomizing,


"The attribute of man is to manifest God's signs.
Whatever is seen in man is the reflection of God,
Even as the reflection of the moon in water.
Say not two, know not two, call not on two!
Know the slave is obliterated in his lord!
So the lord is obliterated in God that created him."
(Mathnavi of Rumi, E.H. Whinfield tr., Vol 6)


A balance between left and right then would be an outer sign of successful application of the most basic spiritual principle, even as Jesus said, "the Kingdom of God is within (or among) you." Divine Oneness manifests itself in the unity we show within and among us. That is the sum and the worth of our faith and all our precious opinions.