Mashiyyat

Mashiyyat, Or, Education in the Fear Factor

By John Taylor; 27 September, 2005

Tonight is the Feast of Mashiyyat, Will, so let us talk about will and
free will, what they are, how they work. When the Master was in
America He was asked how this universal peace that He was always
talking about was supposed to come about. He answered that, "Its
realization is through the attraction and support of world public
opinion. Today universal peace is the panacea for all human life."
(Mahmud, 35) In others words, we get utopia if we will it; as a
society we must want peace. We forge a paradise together with common
will focused upon the right way to peace. Such a united public opinion
is the only realistic hope for peace.

Surely among the greatest contributions of the Master to the history
of ideas was His teaching that the only way to true progress is
through education. This may seem obvious today but the societies He
visited in both East and West were steeped in the bigoted belief that
I am good because I come from this culture or this class or that
nation. We are good, they are bad, and not because we humbly learned
truth in the school of reality but just because we are inherently
better. A truly evil question was never far from people's minds:
wouldn't we all be better off if we just got rid of the inferior
elements of society?

The Master refuted this presumption by pointing out that all are
equally in need of education, all depend just the same on God's mercy
so the only conceivable solution is education; and not the education
of some but of all, universal education. So in terms of this month's
virtue, the Master might have said that will is only good when it is
universally educated; the only truly free will is one that submits to
the universal Reality. Otherwise wills inevitably clash with other
wills and the faculty of will becomes our downfall.

But the question is, how do you educate the will? What is the
difference between a rude, naked, recalcitrant will and an educated
will? A hint is to be found in the order of the autumn months in our
Badi' calendar. Just as autumn in nature is a harvest of the bounteous
fruits of summer in preparation for winter's deprivation so in the
human world autumn is a golden age when the aged reap the fruits of
their middle age and prepare for passage into the next life. Part of
this involves passing the torch from a personal career to broader
concerns of the social fact. This is the broadest fruit of an educated
life

To accomplish this education every learner follows a series of
progressive steps in the order of the fall Badi' months, from Izzat to
Mashiyyat to Ilm and finally Qudrat; that is, from Might to Will to
Knowledge and finally to Power. The virtues of fall direct personal
might ('Izzat) onto free will (Mashiyyat) whose harvest is submission
to higher things. Then one procedes to spiritual knowledge ('Ilm),
knowing the spirit intimately. Complete identification with 'Ilm leads
to what the Writings term "arising," moving the will in the attainment
of true human power, Qudrat. Qudrat is the ability of all to act as
one, in concert, without a hint of disharmony. Power is educated
action of all for all, in all. On the other hand might is direct,
naked action by the individual. Education is the link, it makes both
personal and social into divine, holy reflections of God.

The ideal is a society where every will is so educated and in such
total common agreement with all other wills that there is no need even
to imagine opposition or disagreement. Nobody has to be forced to obey
the law because acceptance of law is the highest desire of each and
all. There would be tremendous advantages to such a state of affairs.
Think of the prodigious expense that friction and disagreement cause
in our free will but divergent-will-obsessed world. Michael Creighton
makes an interesting observation in his latest novel about
environmental conflicts. He points out that if you calculate the
billions of dollars wasted in court challenges and counter-challenges
over whether to exploit a natural resource, even one of the more minor
disputes burns up enough money to pay for an end to poverty among the
poorest thirty or forty nations of the world. Truly, harmony and
agreement without squabbling would be of infinite value, worth not
only the trillions of dollars saved annually, but also priceless
psychologically, reduction of the stress caused by billions of people
being threatened by imminent homelessness, disease and starvation.

A complete melding of wills into one has been understood to be the
ideal form of government from the very beginning. And by beginning I
mean of course Plato's Republic, the work that launched philosophy on
the course that it still follows. Plato holds up here a society of
philosophers led by a philosopher king, all of whom agree
wholeheartedly to submit their will into a single force of
enlightenment, that of education. The leadership of a philosopher king
never need force compliance because all agree with and consciously
assert their wills in whatever he seeks. For Baha'is, that philosopher
king is the Manifestation of God. The Bab was One such King, and He
wrote in the Persian Bayan (V, 19) that,

"There is no paradise, in the estimation of the believers in the
Divine Unity, more exalted than to obey God's commandments, and there
is no fire in the eyes of those who have known God and His signs,
fiercer than to transgress His laws and to oppress another soul, even
to the extent of a mustard seed. On the Day of Resurrection God will,
in truth, judge all men, and we all verily plead for His grace." (The
Bab, Selections, 79)

So if you believe in the unity of God, the Bab asserts, your will must
uphold His law; that is your heaven and the slightest injustice is
your hell. To believe is to buy into a single social consensus, a
wholeness and oneness of will upholding the philosopher king.

Now many moderns whose belief in God and whose understanding of His
theocracy is atrophied, have failed to understand what Plato and
admirers of the Republic like Rousseau were getting at by proposing
this system of government. The republic is a democracy of wills united
in one, submitting so utterly and completely that they regard their
highest desire as the single law of a benign Educator. These false
philosophers unjustly accuse Plato and Rousseau of being
proto-fascists, of supporting what inevitably leads to absolutism and
totalitarian government. Quite the reverse, this is the only
conceivable free democracy of the will.

I say to them: government by philosopher king is our best and only
hope, so make an effort to understand what it is and what it is not.
For one thing, take what the Bab says at the end of the above
quotation: that all plead for God's grace and all must submit to His
judgment. That means all wills freely and by nature recognize their
dependence upon what is Above. The philosopher king does not instill
fear, the truth in all its awesome glory inspires the fear. And what
recognition is behind that attitude to truth? Fear. Fear of God. Fear
of God is the Most Great Fear Factor. How so? Let me tell you an
anecdote explaining the shocking way that I learned this truth.

Lately I was accosted by a reader of the Badi' list who could not
contain her enthusiasm for the "fear factor" birthday party that I and
the kids attended lately and which I laid out in a recent essay. Let
us call her B--. B-- said that we should have fear factor Holy Days,
fear factor firesides, fear factor everything. I was quite surprised
by this. What is your reasoning for this startling conclusion?, I
asked. Well, said B--, Baha'u'llah Himself said that,

"The fear of God hath ever been the prime factor in the education of
His creatures. Well is it with them that have attained thereunto!"
(Epistle, 27)

So therefore, B-- concluded, we should do all we can to stir up the
fear of God among all we meet. The fear factor is the prime factor, so
we have to start by understanding what we fear so we can work the fear
factor for common education. I still have not figured out if B-- was
serious about this or not. Now I do not want to give away more
personal details about B-- than I have to, lest anybody guess her
identity, but let me say that B-- is a writer like myself. You may
think it is a big coincidence that such a small community should hold
two writers, but actually until a year or two ago there was a third
Baha'i writer, Jay Howden, in Haldimand. By all reports he is very
successful, writing the speeches for the Governor General of Canada,
the latest news being that he had supper with the Premier of China. I
happened to run across Jay's website, so for those who want to learn
more about him, go to:

<http://www.howdenmovement.com/>

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com