Silent Meetings A footnote, I

Silent Meetings; A footnote

By John Taylor; 26 October, 2005

Explanation of Selections from Silent Road by Wellesley Tudor Pole

Friends, today's contribution (sent separately) is a selection from a
book, The Silent Road, written at the end of his life by one Wellesley
Tudor Pole, a personal friend of Abdu'l-Baha. The Master stayed as his
and his wife's guest at their -- I guess today you would call it a
"bed and breakfast" near Brighton, England. Tudor Pole is also
directly responsible for saving the Master's life at the close of
World War Two, when the order had been given by the Turks to have Him
hanged. In the following passage you will see the full story of what
happened not long before Tudor Pole led the van and liberated Haifa
and saved the Master.

I came across this book several months ago on the Baha'i Academic's
Library website but I quailed when I saw how atrociously it had been
scanned. You can barely make out what is being said in the etext. I
knew it would take a lot of bull work to make it readable. I was
right. I just spent the whole morning going through it substituting in
the place of its ~'s the real letter; since there was a tilde every
tenth letter, this took a long time. I think the slogging probably was
worth it though, because this is such an important footnote to the
biography of the Master. I have confirmed through other sources on the
internet the veracity of the story, this story about the origin of the
minute for remembrance is in fact commonly attributed to him. In this
book Tudor Pole himself is mostly concerned with listing his own
mystical experiences one after the next, and those involving the
Master are only some among many others. But in view of what does
transpire here, now when we tell the story of `Abdu'l-Baha's life can
say something along the lines of the following, something I had not
realized till I came across this text:

The Master and Minutes of Silence

The Master in London talked about silent meetings, meetings where not
a word was said, but which had great effect in ancient times (Paris
Talks, 173). We need to come together and reflect, not jawbone. This
is because in any creatively demanding situation words fail us, they
push us away from the truth as much as they bridge hearts and minds.
The spirit must descend freely, unbound by words and hackneyed ideas,
if it is to have full effect in a large and diverse meeting. I think
the silent meetings He proposed in London are the hope of the world,
the direction that democracy is going to turn towards in the future.
They are the only way to de-politicize public life.

Anyway, one of `Abdu'l-Baha's listeners in that London talk probably
was a seer and psychic by the name of Tudor Pole. Later as a soldier
in the midst of the fighting of World War One, Tudor Pole had a
conversation with a soldier who knew he was about to die the next day.
This soldier begged Tudor Pole to convey a message to the world: take
a minute of silence and listen to the millions of souls whose lives
were cut off by this hellish war. Later, King George V instituted just
that, a two minute silence at the 11th minute of the 11th hour of the
11th day, Remembrance Day.

Not long before World War flared up again in the even deadlier
conflict we now call World War II, Tudor Pole remembered what that
soon to be dead soldier had asked him to do. He initiated the Big Ben
Council to re-institute a daily two minute of silent reflection at
nine o'clock PM in a daily BBC radio broadcast featuring Big Ben
tolling the hour. This daily event for reflection on how to avoid more
wars had been dropped in favor of the Greenwich beep signal. Tudor
Pole campaigned vigorously for reflective silence for peace to be
reinstituted, and finally he caught the ear of Winston Churchill. When
Churchill rose to power he saw that the custom of daily, united
reflection started again. It was a beacon of hope throughout the war
for BBC listeners everywhere, especially those isolated and caught in
the grip of tyranny. This daily custom continued until the 1960's. In
many places, including England, the shock of 911's act of terrorism
started the custom going again.

Still, if you read the Master's original London talk, the time of
silence is not meant to be a new thing decreed from above; it is an
ancient technique dating back thousands of years. With all due respect
to that unnamed, dying soldier, it is not conceived as a knee-jerk
reaction to avoid repeating past mistakes, not merely listening to
dead war victims' cries of agony, though no doubt that is part of it.
For the Master silent reflection meetings are a creative problem
solving methodology. You name a particular problem and come together,
reflect, and go home with the answer, and your role of instituting it,
sitting delicately in your head. You do not do it for a minute or two,
which is hardly enough silence to clear out the cobwebs, you do it for
hours on end. I suppose the meetings of the illuminati lasted just as
long as it took for a solution to crowd out the words, the hackneyed
ideas, the imitations and shibboleths that keep us far from a common
solution. Only when such impurities and distractions are forgotten in
silence does Spirit gently take a seat inside peoples' skulls.

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com