Life and OG

Life and the Oneness of God

By John Taylor; 27 February, 2006

My daughter Silvie for a while went around the house confronting all
who would listen with this little joke across which she came in some
children's publication: "What can an elephant do that no other
creature can do?" Answer: "Make more elephants..." For me this was not
humour so much as food for thought. Indeed, I though, this might be
called the universal uniqueness of each life form. It can be said of
any and all types of living creatures, whales, ants, chickens,
whatever. Even viruses, which are not alive according to most criteria
of a living organism, they can do this as well, as well as a whole
breed of self-replicating computer programs known as trojans, bots or
viruses. It certainly includes humans, and maybe God too, in a certain
sense. Albert Schweitzer, for one, believed that the definition of God
is "reverence for life." In the same way, the Qu'ran declares,

"And the things on this earth which He has multiplied in varying
colours (and qualities): verily in this is a sign for men who
celebrate the praises of God (in gratitude)." (Q16:13, Yusuf)

Each species holds this one ability as totally unique, its ability to
reproduce itself through time, to make more examples of itself, to
evolve, change and improve.

This mysterious reproductive ability is important in all faiths, and
especially tribal and pagan religion. Naturally enough, it has long
been understood as a largely womanly ability. As a result, in simple
traditions God is thought to take on the form of a female. This is a
matriarchic conception of deity. Scholar of religion Karen Armstrong,
referring to an ancient fertility goddess, writes,

"She was called Inana in ancient Sumeria, Ishtar in Babylon, Anat in
Canaan, Isis in Egypt and Aphrodite in Greece, and remarkably similar
stories were devised in all these cultures to express her role in the
spiritual lives of the people." (Armstrong, HistGod, 5)

Judaic faiths emphasize instead the male parent. Yaweh is seen as a
father not a mother. This tradition consummated in the Son of God,
Jesus Christ. Born of a virgin, the story of His conception and birth
could not be more explicitly patriarchic. Consider this:

"No man hath seen God at any time, the only begotten Son, which is in
the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him." (John 1:18)

The term "only begotten Son" has always been mysterious to me. Does it
mean that Jesus has a closer, or even a genetic tie to God that we do
not? If so, surely the mother of goddess religions would have an even
closer connection than a father. What, for that matter, does begotten
mean anyway? I looked it up and the definition of "beget" in my
dictionary is "to procreate as the father, to sire, or to produce,
especially as an effect or outgrowth."

In ancient times the role of men in reproduction must have seemed
tenuous indeed. At least one primitive tribe was discovered in the
last century who were wholly unaware that men have anything at all to
do with the origin of babies. Even now, though we know many more
technical details about the process, sexual reproduction is still an
astounding and mysterious miracle. How do the genes of both mother and
father mix together equally and form a new creature, permanently
separate yet strangely similar to each parent? This is a mystery.

According to the above quote from John, then, the relation between God
and creation is mysterious, but not wholly beyond comprehension. We
are never a "part" of God in the way that the matriarchic idea of a
goddess implies that we are, or were in the womb. A "holy ghost"
fathers our human world entirely separately, through reason, the Word
and the declarations of His "Son." No human ever sees God in the flesh
or deals directly with Him. Only through the Son does He inseminate
creation. Only with the explications of the Master, I think, is this
idea made wholly comprehensible. I will end with this example, which
is a succinct explanation of the Oneness of God taken from a longer
discussion of the Power of the Holy Spirit.

"This quickening spirit emanates spontaneously from the Sun of Truth,
from the reality of Divinity, and is not a revelation or a
manifestation. It is like the rays of the sun. The rays are emanations
from the sun. This does not mean that the sun has become divisible,
that a part of the sun has come out into space. This plant beside me
has risen from the seed; therefore, it is a manifestation and
unfoldment of the seed. The seed, as you can see, has unfolded in
manifestation, and the result is this plant. Every leaf of the plant
is a part of the seed. But the reality of Divinity is indivisible, and
each individual of humankind cannot be a part of it as is often
claimed. Nay, rather, the individual realities of mankind, when
spiritually born, are emanations from the reality of Divinity, just as
the flame, heat and light of the sun are the effulgence of the sun and
not a part of the sun itself. Therefore, a spirit has emanated from
the reality of Divinity, and its effulgences have become visible in
human entities or realities. This ray and this heat are permanent.
There is no cessation in the effulgence. As long as the sun exists,
the heat and light will exist, and inasmuch as eternality is a
property of Divinity, this emanation is everlasting. There is no
cessation in its outpouring. The more the world of humanity develops,
the more the effulgences or emanations of Divinity will become
revealed, just as the stone, when it becomes polished and pure as a
mirror, will reflect in fuller degree the glory and splendor of the
sun." (Promulgation, 59)

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com

Show Me Your Leader

The "Show Me Your Leader" Principle

Oneness of God Series

By John Taylor; 26 February, 2006

Most people are happy showing their face to the world, but most are
not ugly as me. My face is beyond butt ugly, far worse. Long ago I
found by looking in the mirror that my right butt cheek is my
prettiest and most distinctive feature. Okay, pretty is not an apt
descriptor, but it is a far sight more presentable than my face.
Unfortunately, this world is prejudiced against the facially
challenged. We are forbidden to display our best parts in public, and
forced to cover up our best features. Like, when they wanted to take
my photo ID for my driver's license, I naturally pulled down my pants
and put my bottom up to the camera. But the official said new way, no
mooning, you gotta show your face to the camera, it is the law. I
protested that this is rank body part bigotry. Some feel degraded by
an exposed bottom but others like me feel enhanced. Who is to say that
one is better than the other? It is just not fair. In the end I turned
my other cheek and let them shoot my face like anybody else.

How do injustices like this happen?

Why is the face so important that nobody ever questions it? Why do we
show our mug to the camera, and not our middle finger, or our baby
toe? It is because the face covers our brain, and that is where we
think, or think that we think? But they used portraits back when they
thought the seat of the mind was the heart, or the liver, or whatever.
What is it about the face that makes it so privileged?

After my little unpleasantness in the auto licensing office I had to
admit to myself that I may have been a little hypocritical. After all,
even I do not enjoy it when dogs of a certain height greet me by
rubbing their noses into my nether regions. I expect those who address
me, be they canine or human, to address my face, not my bum. However
presentable, my tush is not what turns red when I make a mistake, at
least I do not think it is; I have never actually verified this. My
face does, that I know. Its job is to represent the mind behind it,
such as it is, whether you like it or not.

Physiognomy is an obligatory mind map to inform what is "I". Call it
the "take me to your leader" principle. It was made a spiritual law
when Jesus was asked by some secret agitators a tricky question,

"`Is it lawful for us to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?' But he
perceived their slyness, and said to them, `Why do you test me? Show
me a denarius. Whose image and inscription are on it?' They answered,
`Caesar's.' He said to them, `Then give to Caesar the things that are
Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's.'" (Luke 20:22-25, WEB)

This has a thousand meanings, and here is one possibility. Jesus says
that the Law steps aside and permits automatic duties, transactions
with institutions. Divine law is concerned with the heart, not the
face we see; it does not concern itself directly with how we interact
with the image of Caesar on the denarius but rather with heart to
heart, inner face to face intercourse. The law likes real faces in the
flesh, not symbolic representation. Jesus saying religion and politics
are not the same thing, they are separate. There is a public and a
private sphere, and each tends to reflect the other. But He is not
proposing a permanent, absolute divorce. God, after all, made the face
of Caesar in a form that reflect Him every bit as much as any other
face, not more, not less.

I heard a televised TVO lecture yesterday by a Muslim intellectual
from Switzerland who drew this connection beautifully. He pointed out
that Muslims can contribute one idea to the general community, the
Qu'ranic teaching that all kinds of diversity are a good thing,
divine, created allowed of God,

"And if Allah had pleased He would surely have made them a single
community, but He makes whom He pleases enter into His mercy, and the
unjust it is that shall have no guardian or helper." (Q42:8, Shakir)

This means, he said, that we need not stop at mere tolerance of
diversity, grudging acceptance of differences and other religions as a
bad thing. The difference is created of God, and therefore we should
celebrate it. What unites the public and private sphere, he further
pointed out, is the principle of consistency. We all have our faith in
private, we do not intrude our beliefs on others or try to force the
broader community to believe and talk about what we think. However,
when we enter public life we have to be consistent with what we
believe privately. Otherwise, Machiavellianism would hold sway, we
could be pious at home but lie, cheat and steal in public.

Consistency demands just what the Qu'ran stipulates above, justice is
the criterion. If a non-Muslim candidate is fair and qualified and a
Muslim is not, vote for her and not the Muslim. Justice is
consistency, and consistency means not favoring what is yours just
because it is yours. On the other hand, it also means that we offer
respect to one another first, that we try to get to know about one
another's diversities. Respect means expecting others to make this
effort to understand you. Respect and knowledge must come first, and
only later can you start talking about loving your neighbor.

Clearly, this is entirely consistent with what Jesus taught. One thing
made Jesus meek and mild into a furious terror, that was hypocrisy,
two-facedness, acting out an imagined role instead of a sincere,
consistent reality. He railed against religious hypocrites who
pretended to be pious but acted unfairly, as if there were total
separation between their face and the face of Caesar, as if they were
from different species. He lost it completely and threw the
moneychangers out of the temple, because they were conducting business
in a place reserved for prayer. Similarly, Baha'u'llah in the Aqdas
forbids mixing mumbled prayers in public, He says to take it to a
private place or a building devoted to the purpose.

This divine principle of consistency leads to a natural law of
protocol that even seems to work in science fiction fantasies. Natural
laws dictate that a space alien acting as an ambassador to earth would
not want to be presented to bottom dwellers of humanity like myself,
they would ask to see the face printed on our coins, our leader and
representative. To see that one face is to deal with all. Even
mathematics revolves around this, in the form of the transitive law:
if A bears a relation to B and B bears it to C, then A bears it to C.
The principle of oneness of God is a transitive law: to see a human
face is to see a reflection of God. You also see yourself in that
face, since you reflect God too. Transitivity and consistency are
principles of justice, following through on your vision of the Face
behind the face you see.

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com

Love's Honour

Oneness of God, Love's Honour and the Honour of Love

By John Taylor; 25 February, 2006

In the Republic, Plato's Socrates is asked whether one is a
philosopher who has a taste for knowledge; is it enough that they are
curious and never satisfied with what they know? Socrates answers that
inquisitiveness does not suffice at all. There are any number of
dilettantes, tourists, amateurs and fans of obscure, abstruse
knowledge; these trivial specialists flit like intellectual
butterflies from flower to flower and never come away with anything
substantial from their whimsical quest. A true philosopher, he says,
is not an imitator but a true "lover of the vision of truth."
(Republic, Book 5, pp. 200-1) A lover loves the entire beloved, not a
part of her. The real lover marries a whole person and lives and
suffers together with her as one, throughout time and eternity; the
imitator of love is like a foot fetishist who gets a momentary rush
from contacting a token, a body part. Similarly, a lover of money
wants all wealth, not merely to hold a coin in his hand and savor it.
Love is never satisfied with anything less than the whole.

In more theoretical terms, love is holistic. It sees the world in
terms of virtue, breaking everything down into opposites, good and
evil, just and unjust, beautiful and ugly. There is good and its lack,
justice and its absence, beauty and its lesser forms. But these
opposites constitute two, not one. Love cannot be satisfied with two;
two is, in the mathematics of love, less than one. A lover of wisdom
looks beyond twos to the whole of love, to all truth. Nor are there
many ones, the good, the just, the beautiful. There is a One behind
all other ones giving them life, God that is. The true lover leaves
off the many for the One, saying in the words of the knight to his
lady, leaving on his quest for the Holy Grail,

"I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more."

Honor is our wintry month of Sharaf, the virtue for the time of
leaving, of goodbyes, of old age, of tragedy rather than comedy,
ultimately of death. Love is power, power over death and separation.

Every Friday night Stu and I play table tennis in the Youth Center and
there in the middle of everything, children running around her, balls
bouncing off her from time to time, sits Mrs. Richardson (I think her
name is), one of the most amazingly decrepit oldsters I have ever
seen. Every time she faithfully, precariously makes her way to the
center alone on her walker, defying ice and snow, the wheels of the
walker veering ominously toward the curb. Last night we met her on the
way, Silvie and Thomas playing racing games with each other that
suddenly seemed life-threatening to her, like pretty much everything
else in the world. Seeing the walker's desire to plummet her into the
road, I offered to pull it straight for her but, having no teeth, she
gummed something like, "Mmmm, mmum, grrble, mummurereble, mufflgum..."
Her manner seemed to indicate that she could handle it herself, so I
let her be and stood watch for plummeting kids until she reached the
insecurity of the Youth Center.

Last night Mrs. Richardson sat even more in the middle of it than
usual, right between where Stu and I were playing ping pong and where
Tomaso and nine-year-old Aron were playing a strange combination of
sports, a kind of floor hockey using whiffle paddles, a table tennis
ball and boots for goal posts. Later Aron's father, Bruce, challenged
Stu to a game and I had a rare moment in the youth center to sit in
idle repose and look at what was going on around me. I began once more
reflecting upon my longstanding question, why the heck does this poor
old babushka come here? Why take the risk? Everything here is a
standing peril, a clear and present danger to life and limb. This is
the last place she should be.

Then I put myself in her shoes, and I thought, this is exactly the
place I would be. It is the only place. What is the alternative?
Vegetating in front of a television? Gumming at people who do not
understand a word of what you are saying, and when they do, replying
in an inaudible voice? Sitting in secure silence, contemplating my
pains and disabilities? Do that and you are already dead. She is
clearly drawing life energy out of this frenetic youthful agitation,
even when looking down, seemingly lost in her knitting. And did not
Baha'u'llah tell the monks: "He that secludeth himself in his house is
indeed as one dead. It behoveth man to show forth that which will
benefit mankind." (Summons 1:136) I do not know how she is benefiting
others but she is certainly getting something out of this vibrant
atmosphere. I took out Silvie's little digicam and took a snapshot of
her there.

Then I thought how ironic it is that I, who believe so strongly that
there should be diversity of ages in every group, should have such a
sharply drawn example mounted right here before me. It is a picture I
could never make up; if you put it in a novel that a writer about age
diversity should spend his time here, it would not be credible. But
then I thought again. Mrs. Richardson has been coming here for quite a
while. For Christmas I remember that she covered a table tennis table
with her own gift for all, a selection of various dollar store
trinkets and baubles, take whatever you please. I began to think, is
this a strange irony or did her presence here give me this idea in the
first place? I honestly could not remember. Is this age diversity idea
my unconscious tribute to her, or is it her gift to me? Is this a
fruit of her desire to benefit mankind, not to sit as one dead
confined safe and secure in a moldering shell of a body idle in her
room? Hers is the honor that abides in wisdom, a wisdom above wisdom,
divine, the sort that the oneness of God "makes pure in the fire of
wisdom," as spoken of in the Bhagavad Gita (4:10),

"Many there be who come! from fear set free,
From anger, from desire; keeping their hearts
Fixed upon me -- my Faithful – purified
By sacred flame of Knowledge. Such as these
Mix with my being."

This Baha'u'llah, in the guise of the Great Being, said in the Lawh-i-Maqsud,

"The Tongue of Wisdom proclaimeth: He that hath Me not is bereft of
all things. Turn ye away from all that is on earth and seek none else
but Me. I am the Sun of Wisdom and the Ocean of Knowledge. I cheer the
faint and revive the dead. I am the guiding Light that illumineth the
way. I am the royal Falcon on the arm of the Almighty. I unfold the
drooping wings of every broken bird and start it on its flight."
(Tablets, 169)

May the Falcon start Mrs. Richardson and honorable lovers like her off
on their flight.

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com

Ayyam-i-Ha Interlude

Ayyam-i-Ha Interlude

By John Taylor; 24 February, 2006



It is migraine weather, hooray! So let us kick our feet off and take a break from the essential reality for a day or two and speak together of ephemeral illusions.


My friend Stu is a retired public school teacher who for decades coached his school's chess team. When I met him and heard that he was still teaching a combined introductory course and ongoing chess club for children at the Welland Public Library, I wanted to have one here in hopes that Thomas and Silvie might become involved. Unexpectedly, the powers that be in our library picked up on the idea and this winter Stu is teaching his second course in the Garfield Disher Room every Wednesday.


This time around several experienced adult players wandered in along with the dozen odd boys -- so far not one girl or woman has turned out-- and now there is talk of starting a permanent chess club in Dunnville. The most enthusiastic new player is Gord. This week Gord staged a simultaneous match against the entire club. He took white for every game and walked around the room playing about fourteen games in succession. He drew his game with me and won every other, including his confrontations with six-year-old Thomas and his grandfather, my father.

To nobody's surprise, the oldest member, my father lost in a few minutes but to the surprise of all concerned, Thomas refused to resign and was the last player left. Many older boys had lost interest long ago and forfeited their games in order to leave or play games with one another but as I pointed out to all who were gathered around, our Taylor motto is "A Taylor Never Quits," and Thomas lived up to the family name. Nor did he cry afterwards or make a fuss for losing a hopeless king versus rook and king endgame; he was looking forward too avidly to the trans-fatty acid-packed treat his grandfather always buys for him at Tim Horton's on the way home after the chess club. Still, Thomas's interest in chess is growing fast; it is even beginning to compete with Pokemon and Yugi-oh, which is saying a lot. I am glad because chess helps spatial reasoning abilities and fends off dementia, which admittedly will not be a problem for him for a while yet.


I had played Gord once the week before and beat him handily, but it was his first game for many years and he seems to be a strong but very rusty player. We exchanged reminiscences during spare moments the evening of his simultaneous exhibition about our early chess playing years and it turned out that we were both on the Hamilton Chess Club back in the Seventies; it is a very large club and we do not recall ever meeting personally, though it turned out that we were both involved in a simultaneous match of about thirty members with the Canadian champion at the time, Lawrence Day. I recorded my game and I recall that he beat me in 17 moves, which is, for those who do not play, lickedy-split. He lost his game on that day with Day as well.


In my time I only had the gumption to enter two chess tournaments -- stress does not help migraines -- but Gord told a story about one of his games in a tournament in Toronto that tops anything that ever happened to me. It seems that in an early round of this event he was matched against a player whose position fell apart quickly and when he became agitated and went to extend his arm. Gord thought he was about to resign and naturally he extended his hand to shake hands with the fellow, as is traditionally done. Instead the guy was actually winding up; he took a swing at Gord and the sucker punch laid him out on the ground and gave him a shiner for a week afterwards. "I was stunned, both literally and figuratively." The pugilistic chess player was escorted from the venue and not allowed to participate for two years. It seems that chess is like hockey, you can commit assault and break the law all you want as long as it is part of a legitimate sporting contest.


My main enthusiasm now is not chess but table tennis. I am very fortunate to have Stu to go up against twice a week. As a left hander, he is much more difficult than your usual player. His forehand is on my right instead of my left, so everything I do has to be the opposite. When I play a right hander I always lose several games until I get back in the habit of serving to my right instead of the left side of the table. The challenge of Stu keeps up my interest in exercising like nothing else can; I train all week in hopes that I will figure out some new serve, shot or other technique to crush him. He is not a hard hitter on the ping pong field of battle but he is extremely wily. He is the smartest opponent I have met. It does not take him very long at all to find a way around my best-laid traps.


Take this week. I had developed five or ten completely new shots. When I applied them in game conditions only about three worked, the others Stu easily figured out. Three successful shots, including an improved rocket serve were still enough to win the first three games quite handily. But then I tired; my rocket serve went erratic and he beat me four times in a row, winning the match by a hair. It was down to the last serve, and, as he would put it, his Karma favored him. You may say, all you have to do now John is practice your rocket serves until every smash is a winner and even do that when you are in a state of collapse due to fatigue. Simple enough. Sure, but you forget, the fast starts next week. Since we play in the late afternoon I will be lucky to get through without fainting and smashing my head on the table, going down to a defeat that is stunning, both literally and metaphorically.


Your usual writer delves into a subject and makes a contribution to knowledge, but an essayist, at least this essayist, delves into his own ignorance and comes away with a sick, confused feeling of utter inadequacy. I dread even looking at the pile research tatters I have amassed for each and all of the Baha'i principles. There is more there than one person could ever do justice to. I dread most of all the time after I die when somebody will have to throw all of these filing cabinets out.

I will be in a better place and may not care then, but now I care. I read with clammy hands how Jules Verne spent his life carefully filling in little three by five cards with research information and then after he died his son junked that huge database, much to the chagrin of every Jules Verne scholar to this day. The horror! For doing that his son gained the eternal opprobrium of Verne scholars, caused them endless cursing and gnashing of teeth. I do not flatter myself that I will be famous like Verne, but I know that these principles must take on increasing importance in coming years, and I would like my life's work in some way to contribute to the advance of what may come to be known as "principle studies." But mostly, I do not want anybody cursing my heirs.

The most dark and depressing section of this database by far is the place where I store my own essays. Masses of diamonds in the rough, but if you try to pick one out you discover that its beauty was mostly in its setting, how it related to my life at the time. But then as soon as you decide to leave it where it was it ceases to be about the principle in question and you come away with empty hands. Is it all a mirage? Then as the years mount up the utter mass of the material grows to the point where by pure inertia it drags me into despair. I see immediately how going over it will take longer and burn more emotional energy in lost turns and abortive brainstorms written at incompatible stages of my life, in varying styles, than my constitution will take. Just reading it would take longer than my feeble attention span will endure.


The only exception to this rule was the eleventh principle, the oneness of God. This was pristine, fresh, unencumbered, mostly because -- I now realize -- I had long ago teased out several separate topic categories like "Nature of the Manifestation," Progressive Revelation," "Progress and Evolution," and "Role of the Learned;" these sucked away most of the material that would otherwise have come in here. Now that I have spent almost a month writing about the oneness of God I can say with pride that already I am starting to get that sick, confused feeling as I look over this string of essays. But the feeling of being overwhelmed is not yet total, so there has to be much more to come, perhaps another complete month, or at least through the fast into Naw Ruz.


Now that I think of it, Ayyam-i-Ha is the only religious holiday I know of that is dedicated exclusively to the Godhead, so for me to be writing about the Oneness of God around now is as seasonal for a Baha'i as it would for a Christian to be writing about the birth of Jesus at Christmas-time. So my friends, happy Ayyam-i-Ha, and may your fast be fast – no, I do not mean quick, I mean may its spiritual benefit stick fast. That is what I mean, really. May you learn steadfastness, get grit from your fast, for grit will be your only grits for quite a while.

John Taylor
badijet@gmail.com

Kingdom Concept

Discussion of `Abdu'l-Baha's Kingdom Concept

By John Taylor; 22 February, 2006

Yesterday I read aloud, recorded and shared the text of a talk on
Oneness of God that the Master gave in New Jersey (Promulgation,
113-116). Here, in capsule summary, are the first two main points He
made:

- It is axiomatic that the phenomenal cannot grasp the "ancient and
essential Reality"
- Any difference in degree means that the higher comprehends the lower
but the lower cannot understand what is above it. This is true not
only for God over creation, but within creation itself, going upward
from mineral to plant, animal, and finally to the human kingdom.

These three kingdoms are like ghosts walking among each other, made up
of one another yet divided by an infinite gap that is inherent to the
height of their respective stations. I am made up of minerals, plant
and animal matter, but they do not understand me any more than I
understand what is above me. Higher things take in what is below, but
are in their turn taken in by even higher entities.

In the midst of making this point, the Master probably hesitated.
Then, seeing a rose nearby, He pointed it out and remarked that no
matter how perfect this flower may progress in the plant kingdom, it
will never reach the point where it will see or hear. The even higher
realms of the human and divine are "to it as infinite." Try counting
up to infinity some time; yet without the idea of infinity, higher
mathematics would grind to a halt. That is what I learned in Grade Ten
math class; anyway, I think that is what I learned before I dropped
off.

When I think of all the public talks I have attended, well, there
seems to be an unwritten rule that there be a large flower arrangement
decorating the table. The most beautiful member of the plant kingdom
is always sitting right there before the speaker ready and waiting for
this lovely lesson to be drawn from it. Yet you never see this idea
cropping up, especially among non-Baha'is. Are they afraid of
insulting the flowers? In fact, now that I think of it, this "kingdom
thesis" is given surprisingly little attention in the history of
philosophy as well. How so? Is it that a negative thesis is so hard to
make that we must ignore it completely?

Let there be no mistake. A negative proof is very hard to make indeed.
I remember back in the Eighties reading Daniel Boorstin's, "The
Discoverers," which tells the long and tedious story of the legend of
a southern continent. It took many disastrous attempts and wasted
careers until Captain Cook finally proved by his long voyages of
exploration that there was no habitable land mass in the southern
extremities of our planet. It was tough to do, but somebody had to do
it. Otherwise, like lemmings, sailors would have continued to follow
one another to their doom in fruitless quest of what was not there.

Even then, the idea of a lost continent like Atlantis did not die.
Jules Verne in Voyage to the Center of the Earth speculated that the
lost continent might be hidden away in the depths of the earth under a
volcano in Iceland, complete with mastodons and dinosaurs. The other
day my wife Marie bought an old comic book version of this novel and
tried to persuade eleven year old Silvie to check it out. The story
thrilled us in our youth but Silvie was skeptical. "That is
ridiculous; there cannot be a lost continent with dinosaurs living in
it!" I pointed out that this is not so obvious. Michael Creighton, for
instance, wrote the Jurassic Park series speculating how such a thing
may possibly come about using the latest cloning technology. Creighton
openly acknowledged his debt in this thesis to early scientific
novelists, like H. G. Wells and Jules Verne. Without saying anything,
I also recalled Abdu'l-Baha's comment to the northern explorer Peary
that it was wonderful that he had proven that nothing is to be found
at in the boreal regions. He may not have been as facetious as some
took him to be. It is a difficult and important thing to make a
negative discovery. Nonetheless, the advance of science is so rapid
that it is very hard to say with absolute certainty that anything is
impossible. This did not persuade Silvie, who is already more rock
hard in her world view that any senior snit I have ever seen.

Let there not be another mistake. There are a great many people out
there who hold to science as their religion. This antinomian religion
has no name, some call it humanism or scientism. Another moniker might
be "the religion with no name" or the non-faith. I like scientism, so
let us call it that here. By some counts scientism is the second or
third largest religion in the United States. In most Western countries
the proportions are probably similar. Scientism has been the ruin of
many a poor soul, and God, I know I was one. At least until I was
seventeen years old. You may think that the Master was talking to
Christians most of the time in His addresses in the West, but I know
better. He was talking to us atheists.

Anyway, the Unfaith feeds on uncertainties like the legend of the lost
continent. You never can tell. Or the possibility that computers will
be built that are smarter than us, and will take over the world and
exterminate us. Who knows? Or that science will one day find a "cure"
for death. You never know. When I came across the Master's philosophy
at age 17, this was the astonishing beauty of his contribution. He
established limits. No, not just limits, he explained with rational
arguments why there are inherent limitations. Death? There will be no
"cure" for it, it will always here and it is part of the design of the
universe. Can you believe what a comfort this is to a paid in full
member of the Church of Science? There is constant anxiety, the
constant question running through your mind: will I die too soon,
before the cure for death is found? Will my existence be snuffed out
the day before the headlines announce: "Cure for Death Found; If You
are Already Dead, You Are Out of Luck."

You cannot believe what a relief it was for me when the Master
decisively finalized with his negative proofs so many puzzling
uncertainties about the nature of life and everything. And among the
greatest of these negative proofs was the one under consideration in
this talk, that there is no way for the lower to understand the
higher. Of course this is part and parcel of several other negative
proofs, including the proposition that there is a God in the first
place. But once you accept that He Himself is permanently beyond
comprehension -- and that anyone who claims to know is committing
blasphemy, or at least idolatry, then it follows that the universe is
permanently unable to do certain things, that there is such a thing as
a station, degree or kingdom.

I am being called away, so I will have to continue this tomorrow.

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com

Oneness of God talk

`Abdu'l-Baha Discusses the Oneness of God

By John Taylor; 22 February, 2006

Here is the Master's 12 May, 1912 address to the Unity Church at
Montclair, New Jersey. It is the first talk in North America devoted
exclusively to the principle under consideration on this Badi' list,
the Oneness of God. I read it aloud and recorded it in MP3 format but
when I tried to include it as an enclosure with this mail-out, it
failed. So the Badi' list is silent, until I find a better way. Note
that the last paragraph of this talk is a prayer that you can say
separately if, like me, this principle boggles your mind.

Soon the high technology industry will have electronic books available
and you will be able to read a book in a way that is not possible now,
the ideal way. When you get tired or distracted you will be able to
just push a button and listen to the text spoken aloud, or hit another
key and hear it in another language, and especially (for translations)
you could hear what it sounds like in the original language, in this
case, Persian or Arabic. Sony just came out with such an electronic
book and player with a beautiful printed page-like display.
Unfortunately it is over 400 dollars in price and is crippled by the
usual proprietary money grab.

All we really need to get such a marvelous electronic book is for
parts makers to agree upon a standard interface and received
formatting conventions. As soon as that came to pass, the price of
such readers would surely drop down to the sweet spot where they would
catch on very quickly. But that is not going to happen as long as the
fat cats have any say in it; after all, cameras have been around over
a century and there is still no standard camera with interchangeable
lenses, bodies, and microchips. Needless to say, you could switch
standardized six-gun components back in the 1900's but living-ry is
not essential like weaponry, is it?

But I still love to dream of a reader like that, one that would even
allow you to switch to the movie version of the book you are reading
(Moby Dick, say) or at least see a slide show or "skins" as you read,
if you get tired of watching the text scroll by. How I would love to
read the following talk and be able to click on a word and see and
hear pronounced the original Persian word that the Master used. How I
would love to push another button and hear the background music of my
choice along with the reader's voice. How I would love to check out
how it looks and sounds in another language, French, Esperanto, Czech,
whatever. I am sure that I would have learned the languages that I
have half-learned much quicker and more painlessly if I had had such a
device in hand.

If any of my readers are of a technical and entrepreneurial bent, that
is how you could make your fortune, just devise the standards for such
a device and let the world beat a path to your doorstep.

`Abdu'l-Baha's Talk on Oneness of God, from Promulgation, 113-116

I wish to speak upon the subject of divine unity, the oneness of God,
before this revered assemblage.

It is a self-evident fact that phenomenal existence can never grasp
nor comprehend the ancient and essential Reality. Utter weakness
cannot understand absolute strength. When we view the world of
creation, we discover differences in degree which make it impossible
for the lower to comprehend the higher. For example, the mineral
kingdom, no matter how much it may advance, can never comprehend the
phenomena of the vegetable kingdom. Whatever development the vegetable
may attain, it can have no message from nor come in touch with the
kingdom of the animal. However perfect may be the growth of a tree, it
cannot realize the sensation of sight, hearing, smell, taste and
touch; these are beyond its limitation. Although it is the possessor
of existence in the world of creation, a tree, nevertheless, has no
knowledge of the superior degree of the animal kingdom. Likewise, no
matter how great the advancement of the animal, it can have no idea of
the human plane, no knowledge of intellect and spirit. Difference in
degree is an obstacle to this comprehension. A lower degree cannot
comprehend a higher although all are in the same world of creation --
whether mineral, vegetable or animal. Degree is the barrier and
limitation. In the human plane of existence we can say we have
knowledge of a vegetable, its qualities and product; but the vegetable
has no knowledge or comprehension whatever of us. No matter how near
perfection this rose may advance in its own sphere, it can never
possess hearing and sight. Inasmuch as in the creational world, which
is phenomenal, difference of degree is an obstacle or hindrance to
comprehension, how can the human being, which is a created exigency,
comprehend the ancient divine Reality, which is essential? This is
impossible because the reality of Divinity is sanctified beyond the
comprehension of the created being, man.

Furthermore, that which man can grasp is finite to man, and man to it
is as infinite. Is it possible then for the reality of Divinity to be
finite and the human creature infinite? On the contrary, the reverse
is true; the human is finite while the essence of Divinity is
infinite. Whatever comes within the sphere of human comprehension must
be limited and finite. As the essence of Divinity transcends the
comprehension of man, therefore God brings forth certain
Manifestations of the divine Reality upon Whom He bestows heavenly
effulgences in order that They may be intermediaries between humanity
and Himself. These holy Manifestations or Prophets of God are as
mirrors which have acquired illumination from the Sun of Truth, but
the Sun does not descend from its high zenith and does not effect
entrance within the mirror. In truth, this mirror has attained
complete polish and purity until the utmost capacity of reflection has
been developed in it; therefore, the Sun of Reality with its fullest
effulgence and splendor is revealed therein. These mirrors are
earthly, whereas the reality of Divinity is in its highest apogee.
Although its lights are shining and its heat is manifest in them,
although these mirrors are telling their story of its effulgence, the
Sun, nevertheless, remains in its own lofty station; it does not
descend; it does not effect entrance, because it is holy and
sanctified.

The Sun of Divinity and of Reality has revealed itself in various
mirrors. Though these mirrors are many, yet the Sun is one. The
bestowals of God are one; the reality of the divine religion is one.
Consider how one and the same light has reflected itself in the
different mirrors or manifestations of it. There are certain souls who
are lovers of the Sun; they perceive the effulgence of the Sun from
every mirror. They are not fettered or attached to the mirrors; they
are attached to the Sun itself and adore it, no matter from what point
it may shine. But those who adore the mirror and are attached to it
become deprived of witnessing the light of the Sun when it shines
forth from another mirror. For instance, the Sun of Reality revealed
itself from the Mosaic mirror. The people who were sincere accepted
and believed in it. When the same Sun shone from the Messianic mirror,
the Jews who were not lovers of the Sun and who were fettered by their
adoration of the mirror of Moses did not perceive the lights and
effulgences of the Sun of Reality resplendent in Jesus; therefore,
they were deprived of its bestowals. Yet the Sun of Reality, the Word
of God, shone from the Messianic mirror through the wonderful channel
of Jesus Christ more fully and more wonderfully. Its effulgences were
manifestly radiant, but even to this day the Jews are holding to the
Mosaic mirror. Therefore, they are bereft of witnessing the lights of
eternity in Jesus.

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.

As this is the radiant century, it is my hope that the Sun of Truth
may illumine all humanity. May the eyes be opened and the ears become
attentive; may souls become resuscitated and consort together in the
utmost harmony as recipients of the same light. Perchance, God will
remove this strife and warfare of thousands of years. May this
bloodshed pass away, this tyranny and oppression cease, this warfare
be ended. May the light of love shine forth and illumine hearts, and
may human lives be cemented and connected until all of us may find
agreement and tranquillity beneath the same tabernacle and with the
standard of the Most Great Peace above us move steadily onward.

O Thou kind Lord! O Thou Who art generous and merciful! We are the
servants of Thy threshold and are gathered beneath the sheltering
shadow of Thy divine unity. The sun of Thy mercy is shining upon all,
and the clouds of Thy bounty shower upon all. Thy gifts encompass all,
Thy loving providence sustains all, Thy protection overshadows all,
and the glances of Thy favor are cast upon all. O Lord! Grant Thine
infinite bestowals, and let the light of Thy guidance shine. Illumine
the eyes, gladden the hearts with abiding joy. Confer a new spirit
upon all people and bestow upon them eternal life. Unlock the gates of
true understanding and let the light of faith shine resplendent.
Gather all people beneath the shadow of Thy bounty and cause them to
unite in harmony, so that they may become as the rays of one sun, as
the waves of one ocean, and as the fruit of one tree. May they drink
from the same fountain. May they be refreshed by the same breeze. May
they receive illumination from the same source of light. Thou art the
Giver, the Merciful, the Omnipotent."

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com

Master and Oneness

More on the Master and His principle of Oneness of God

Series on the Oneness of God

By John Taylor; 20 February, 2006

Dear reader, what can we say about how the Master presented this
principle of One God? I have already gone over his "obvious" points
about the necessity of Deity being One with Its light, plus our need
for a collective center to unite human differences. Important as these
are, they are abstruse and not easily summed up in a few sentences, as
are most other Baha'i principles. Did the Master ever capsulate this
principle? Let us look into that next.

Unfortunately, in the bare principle listings in `Abdu'l-Baha's many
talks and letters about principle there is no mention of Oneness of
God as a principle, though there are several invocations of its sister
spiritual principle, the Power of the Holy Spirit. That is not to say
that He thought the Oneness of God was unimportant. Quite the reverse!
As far as I can see, this only implies that He did not consider
Oneness of God to be distinctly Baha'i. A single God is, after all,
central to virtually every other world religion. Or perhaps, to use
the Master's own analogy, the social principles are variations or
colors of a single spectrum of light. According to this, the Oneness
of God would be white light, containing and uniting every other color
possible. He said, early on in His talks in America,

"The light of truth has heretofore been seen dimly through variegated
glasses, but now the splendors of Divinity shall be visible through
the translucent mirrors of pure hearts and spirits. The light of truth
is the divine teaching, heavenly instruction, merciful principles and
spiritual civilization." (Promulgation, 11)

The Oneness of God then is not only an intellectual concept, it is
something we witness in pure hearts, among pure hearts consulting
together. Just as the human being unites all lower kingdoms, the
mineral, plant and animal, so when humans unite under the tutelage of
a higher Will, the laws and teachings of God. To witness this unity in
faith is to see all things, the divine at work.

Another possible explanation as to why the Master did not list Oneness
of God along with the other Baha'i principles may be that unlike the
principles that derive from it, the reasoned basis of One God is
entirely negative. We know only that we do not know God. In a talk He
gave in April, 1912 in a hotel on Broadway in New York He offers a
critique of all four foundations of human knowledge, sense, reason,
tradition and inspiration. His critique of reason does not mention the
Liar's Paradox itself, only its effect, the permanent inability of our
best reasoners ever to meet on purely reasoned grounds. The fact that
they disagree "so completely" proves that "human reason is not to be
relied upon as an infallible criterion." (Promulgation, 21) Reason is,

"by its very nature finite and faulty in conclusions. It cannot
surround the Reality Itself, the Infinite Word. Inasmuch as the source
of traditions and interpretations is human reason, and human reason is
faulty, how can we depend upon its findings for real knowledge?" (Ib,
22)

When He made this pronouncement it was too early for His listeners to
appreciate how shockingly accurate 20th Century science would prove
Him to be. Various incompleteness proofs have shown that nobody will
ever make up a mathematical formula to solve the nature of the
universe. There is not and never can be a theory of everything. When
He said that, virtually every scientist was convinced that one day we
would know everything important about the universe. Today, every
scientist familiar with mathematics and logic knows with equal
certainty that we never will. All we can hope for are tentative
stances, never positive final certainty. When the Master said,

"Mathematicians, astronomers, chemical scientists continually disprove
and reject the conclusions of the ancients; nothing is fixed, nothing
final; everything is continually changing because human reason is
progressing along new roads of investigation and arriving at new
conclusions every day. In the future much that is announced and
accepted as true now will be rejected and disproved. And so it will
continue ad infinitum." (Promulgation, 21)

There must have been much tuttuting and muttered nay saying among
logicians and scientists in His audience, but today this would pass
with enthusiastic approval. There is hardly a working researcher who
does not accept such limits to their reach and the inevitability of
turnover in theory, now known as scientific revolutions or paradigm
shifts. This change and renewal is, in the Master's philosophy, a
central proof of God and His Oneness.

Next time we will continue tracing the outlines this principle in the
philosophy of the Master as expounded in His talks in North America.
In the meantime, as a separate mail-out I will include a complete talk
He gave about One God in a New Jersey venue called, appropriately
enough, Unity Church.

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com

Two Obvious Truths

Reconciling the Two Obvious Truths

By John Taylor; 19 February, 2006

Yesterday we ended with two truths about God held by Abdu'l-Baha to be
self-evident, or at least that He described as "obvious." The first
was that if we were to believe that creation is an accident "we would
be forced to admit that the Creator is accidental ... No cessation is
possible to the divine bounty, just as no cessation is possible to the
rays of the sun." (Promulgation, 463) The other obvious thing was that
since humans are at such tremendous variance, with many tastes,
thoughts, native lands, races and languages, that we need a
"collective center" to "counterbalance" and unify them. Outer,
material things do not suffice, only a spiritual power; as Jesus said,
with man it is impossible, but with God all things are easy.

"It is possible, however, for all to become unified through one
spirit, just as all may receive light from one sun. Therefore,
assisted by the collective and divine center which is the law of God
and the reality of His Manifestation, we can overcome these conditions
until they pass away entirely and the races advance." (Promulgation,
164)

`Abdu'l-Baha chooses the expression "pass away" to describe how the
"collective center" makes bad and harmful difference into something
good and beautiful. It is easy, natural, like old skin falling off a
lizard's back. Nothing need be violent, forced or arbitrary. Progress
follows smoothly from the spread of education, especially spiritual
sophistication. Here the two "obvious truths" meet, for it is of the
nature of creation to reflect God; this is necessary and not a matter
of choice or free will. Unification must come, it is an absolute
necessity arising from the Oneness of God.

How is absolute necessity reconciled in His philosophy with human
freedom? In other words, how is it that "all abide by His bidding,"
when so many willfully do their best to thwart the call of God?
`Abdu'l-Baha does this by distinguishing between two kinds of faith,
subjective and objective. Here is His exposition on that subject.

"Thou hast written of a verse in the Gospels, asking if at the time of
Christ all souls did hear His call. Know that faith is of two kinds.
The first is objective faith that is expressed by the outer man,
obedience of the limbs and senses. The other faith is subjective, and
unconscious obedience to the will of God. There is no doubt that, in
the day of a Manifestation such as Christ, all contingent beings
possessed subjective faith and had unconscious obedience to His
Holiness Christ.
"For all parts of the creational world are of one whole. Christ the
Manifestor reflecting the divine Sun represented the whole. All the
parts are subordinate and obedient to the whole. The contingent beings
are the branches of the tree of life while the Messenger of God is the
root of that tree. The branches, leaves and fruit are dependent for
their existence upon the root of the tree of life. This condition of
unconscious obedience constitutes subjective faith. But the discerning
faith that consists of true knowledge of God and the comprehension of
divine words, of such faith there is very little in any age. That is
why His Holiness Christ said to His followers, "Many are called but
few are chosen." (`Abdu'l-Baha, Baha'i World Faith, 364)

This comparison of truth in the universe with a tree whose roots go
deep underground into spirit reconciles Eastern and Western
philosophies. The tree beyond which lies only God is at the center of
Judaism (the burning bush), of Christianity (the Kingdom as a tiny
mustard seed that grows into the largest tree), of Islam (the Sadrat
of the boundary), and of course the Bodhi tree is a preoccupation in
Buddhism.

In my recent superficial foray into Eastern philosophy I was
interested to learn not just that Eastern thought pictures knowledge
and reality as a huge tree, which is common enough. Rather to my
surprise the image of this tree is utterly different from the way we
see a tree. Often the tree is pictured upside down with its roots
going upward. Even more disturbingly, the tree of knowledge is
imagined from the inside, as it were; it seems to extend into four,
five, or even more dimensions. You take a mental step and end up
inside a branch, another step and you meld into a twig or a leaf.

It takes strenuous mental gymnastics to get the brain around this
concept. I think though that it has gotten easier with the invention
of the Internet. I remember a journalist last year complaining that
before you could make reliable assumptions about people. You had a
good idea of what they thought and believed if you knew their
background or ethnicity. Now your neighbor can become a terrorist or a
pacifist without warning. The person in the next cubicle can shift
from a rightist or to a leftist, a saint to a sinner, and back again,
just by taking some wrong turn on the Net, by loading the wrong or the
right website.

I suppose what the Master is teaching is that this chaotic randomness
of our age will only be a temporary phase. We all have faith, be it
subjective or objective, and since there is only one truth, truth will
out, it will gradually unite and a new order will be restored. "The
contingent beings are the branches of the tree of life while the
Messenger of God is the root of that tree. The branches, leaves and
fruit are dependent for their existence upon the root of the tree of
life." (`Abdu'l-Baha, Baha'i World Faith, 364) Because the twigs and
leaves and branches of this tree permeate the universe, the agitation
of our mental atoms will stop shaking and rustling, they will begin to
orient around the invisible limbs of a tree that holds up the
universe. Here is peace, and this, `Abdu'l-Baha teaches, comes
straight out of the nature of things.

When I became a Baha'i, this was one of the unexpected fruits of the
invisible tree that I had learned to cling to. I could meet a person
from anywhere in the world, a person of any ethnic background, and the
fact that we were both Baha'is united us in every essential. It was as
if we shared the same spiritual DNA, as if the branch of the tree of
truth were growing inside us as well as outside. The Writings and
service to the Cause made us one, in a profound way that would be
inconceivable even with people of the exact same background or
ethnicity. And the tree is growing, that is the wonder of it all.

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com

One Suffices

One Suffices; 'Abdu'l-Baha and the Principle of Sufficient Reason
Oneness of God series, Part VII

By John Taylor;

We have been discussing the principle of the Oneness of God as
expounded by the Bab and Baha'u'llah. Today I will concentrate upon
the Master's views of the principle, which tend to take in natural as
well as divine philosophy. The following comes from an interview with
`Abdu'l-Baha that we regard today as a mere pilgrim's note but in its
time it was among one of the first eyewitness glimpses into the
Master's pure philosophy in a time when Baha'is had virtually no
access to the Writings, even in translation.

from: Daily Lessons Received at Akka, January 1908, by Helen S.
Goodall and Ella Goodall Cooper Wilmette, IL: Baha'i Publishing Trust,
1979, pp. 21-22, text available at:
<http://bahai-library.com/?file=goodall_cooper_daily_lessons>

Question: Are there accidental happenings, or do all events occur
according to Divine plan?

Answer: "God's creation is perfect. Every part of the universe has its
connection with every other part, according to a Divine system. We
compare the body of the universe with the body of man. The members of
the body of man are closely connected; so, also, are the parts of the
great universe. The great events which happen are due to this
connection. There is day, there is night; sometimes there are
eclipses, etc.--all according to the requirements of this Divine
system. All the created beings are connected with each other, and all
occurrences and events are indicative of the requirements of this
connection and interrelation.

"In the body of man, all the members and parts are interdependent; for
example, the heart feels the things seen by the eye; the ear hears,
and the soul is thereby moved; the nostrils inhale a sweet odor, and
the whole body is delighted. This is a proof that all the parts of the
body of man are interrelated. This is according to a Divine plan, and
it is also evident that there is a great wisdom therein. Even
unpleasant things, such as chill in the feet which is felt in the
head, a disagreeable odor which affects the whole system, or trifles
(which are endless, and seem to be accidental) such as a small hair
appearing in an unusual place on a man's face, should also be
considered as having a place or part in this general system.
Therefore, what we call an accident is the effect of the connection of
all the parts, and no events transpire in vain."

`Abdu'l-Baha asked that we observe the unity of the universe in the
microcosm of the body -- the concept of a body politic is among the
most ancient and is still the most useful paradigm. We feel the
integrity of our body and conclude that there is oneness in
everything. That is not to say that we can understand everything in
the universe, any more than we understand all the mysterious
operations of our body, however intimately we may feel its presence.
But still the fact that it all works together proves that there is a
single spirit behind it. One philosopher who explored this in science
and mathematics was Gottfried W. Leibniz. I believe that the Master
was talking about Leibniz in the following, from the amazing proof of
deity that he presented in his Chicago hotel on 2 May, 1912.

"When we carefully investigate the kingdoms of existence and observe
the phenomena of the universe about us, we discover the absolute order
and perfection of creation. The dull minerals in their affinities,
plants and vegetables with power of growth, animals in their instinct,
man with conscious intellect and the heavenly orbs moving obediently
through limitless space are all found subject to universal law, most
complete, most perfect. That is why a wise philosopher has said,
"There is no greater or more perfect system of creation than that
which already exists." (Promulgation, 79-80, talk given at Hotel
Plaza, Chicago)

Leibniz worked out the principle of sufficient reason, a major pillor
of science as well as religion, from his idea that this is the best
universe possible. For a believer this may seem obvious, that God
would not bother to create a second rate, or third rate creation, but
it is still surprising how much science depends upon the idea that
there is a good reason, if not the best reason, behind everything.
Here is what my encyclopedia has to say about the "best of all
possible worlds" proposition.

"Among all possible worlds that God could have created, his actual
choice of one over the others required a sufficient reason, which, for
Leibniz, was the fact that this world was the best -- despite the
existence of evident evils; for any other possible world would have
had evils of its own sort of even greater magnitude. Had it lacked a
sufficient reason to explain its existence (and implicitly its
contingency), the world for Leibniz would have existed of necessity.
Voltaire's Candide (1759) was a satirical rejection of Leibniz'
optimistic view of the world." (Encyclopedia Britannica. 2006.
Encyclopedia Britannica 2006 Ultimate Reference Suite DVD 18 Feb.
2006)

Leibnitz built an early calculator and invented the binary system, the
basis of the modern computer. His motto was: "Omnibus ex nihil
ducendis sufficit unum," (one suffices to derive all out of nothing),
and indeed without a one and a zero, one and nothing, computers could
not take a mental step. Leibniz hoped to derive a universal language
out of symbolic logic, which he single-handedly invented. He also laid
the groundwork for quantum physics with his idea of monads, basic
"atoms" of the logical universe, some truths of which he considered to
be necessary -- that is, their non-existence involves a contradiction
-- and some were truths of fact, which are contingent, dependent upon
more basic grounds. His principle of sufficient reason accounts for
the existence of the latter by asserting that,

"there is an adequate reason to account for the existence and nature
of everything that could conceivably not exist. In each such case, the
ultimate sufficient reason is the free choice of God." ("sufficient
reason" Britannica, id.)

Yesterday I told of our kid's bedtime reaction to the article about
the omega number written by Gregory Chaitin, the inventor of
algorithmic information theory. This is yet another science that,
Chaitin says, was anticipated in most important ways by Liebniz.
Chaitin write that evidence is not enough for mathematicians, they
require proof, which is part of the principle of sufficient reason.
Yet there is complexity and randomness.

"If Leibniz had put all this together he might have questioned one of
the key pillars of philosophy, namely, the principle of sufficient
reason -- that everything happens for a reason. Furthermore, if
something is true, it must be true for a reason. That may be hard to
believe sometimes, in the confusion and chaos of daily life, in the
contingent ebb and flow of human history. But even if we cannot always
see a reason (perhaps because the chain of reasoning is long and
subtle), Leibniz asserted, God can see the reason. It is there! In
that, he agreed with the Ancient Greeks, who originated the idea."
(Scientific American, March 2006, p. 77)

The reason that Leibniz did not question it was because of the "G"
word. His central point was that God understands, not that we can
understand or ever hope to do so in the future. The incompleteness
proofs based upon the liar's paradox only apply to us, not to God, Who
alone unifies opposites without contradiction. Needless to say, the
Master gives this issue a great deal of attention in all His Writings.

I have picked out two examples based upon a whim that inspired me as I
was researching this essay in my sleep. I had been remembering how my
daughter told a story about an "obviously bird," a bird who obviously
got up one obvious morning and saw that it was obviously going to be
an obvious day, and so on. To my amusement I found out that she had no
idea what "obvious" means, she only found it an interesting game to
use it as a universal modifier. This reminded me of a brief visit I
once had to a logician's home. The logician happened to be watching
the news on television. Every time a speaker used the word "obviously"
he would repeat it, to the great annoyance of his wife, who
continually asked him to stop that, she wanted to hear what they were
saying. Myself, I was amazed at how often people in "man in the
street" interviews really do use that word. He was repeating that
word, "obviously," every few seconds. He turned to me and said, quite
logically I thought, "If something is obvious, you do not have to say
it. Why are people constantly saying things that they recognize
themselves do not need to be said? Why don't they just shut up?"
Amusingly, this infuriated his longsuffering spouse. I concluded that
logicians do not make good marital material.

Anyway, with that in mind I wondered how often `Abdu'l-Baha used a
word that the translator decided meant "obviously." It turned out that
he only said it three times in all his talks in Canada and the United
States. Here is one of the three, from a talk He gave to the
Theosophists:

"To be brief: Our purpose is to show that the divine sovereignty, the
Kingdom of God, is an ancient sovereignty, that it is not an
accidental sovereignty, just as a kingdom presupposes the existence of
subjects, of an army, of a country; for otherwise the state of
dominion, authority and kingdom cannot be conceived of. Therefore, if
we should imagine that the creation is accidental, we would be forced
to admit that the Creator is accidental, whereas the divine bounty is
ever flowing, and the rays of the Sun of Truth are continuously
shining. No cessation is possible to the divine bounty, just as no
cessation is possible to the rays of the sun. This is clear and
obvious." (Abdu'l-Baha, Promulgation, 463)

I will only afflict you with one more of the three obviously quotes,
from a talk given in New York at the Church of the Ascension,

"It is self-evident that humanity is at variance. Human tastes differ;
thoughts, native lands, races and tongues are many. The need of a
collective center by which these differences may be counterbalanced
and the people of the world be unified is obvious. Consider how
nothing but a spiritual power can bring about this unification, for
material conditions and mental aspects are so widely different that
agreement and unity are not possible through outer means. It is
possible, however, for all to become unified through one spirit, just
as all may receive light from one sun. Therefore, assisted by the
collective and divine center which is the law of God and the reality
of His Manifestation, we can overcome these conditions until they pass
away entirely and the races advance." (Abdu'l-Baha, Promulgation, 164)

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com

Middle of Nowhere

Life in the Middle of Nowhere

Oneness of God series, Part VI

By John Taylor; 17 February, 2006

At the 7 February Feast Thomas nudged me after a prayer was read about
the omnipresence of God and whispered: "You said before that God is
everywhere but I know a place where He is not." Where might that be?
"Nowhere." My question is, where do kids get these ideas? I know,
nowhere.

The wife, concerned that the kids not lose their Czech language
heritage, has shut me out of the bedtime story biz of late. But the
other night something came up, I think her sister called, and I was
suddenly plunked in the bedside hot seat with nothing better to read
than the latest March 2006 edition of Scientific American. I turned to
an article called "The Limits of Reason" by Gregory Chaitin on page 75
and showed them an impressive illustration of a classical building
being demolished by a wrecking ball with the Greek letter Omega
printed on it. I told the frightening story of how this terrible Omega
number had utterly destroyed the entire edifice of mathematics in one
fell blow. Watch out for the Omega wrecking ball!

Thomas was suitably impressed with this picture but unfortunately he
confused this mathematical omega with the omega 3 eggs that I have
been eating two of each day -- it seems that if you stuff chickens
with flax seed feed, they produce eggs crammed with omega 3 fatty
acids, which reduce cholesterol rather than raising it as ordinary
eggs do. Anyway, I was taken aback and had to say that as far as I
know, omega fatty acids in food have nothing to do with the omega
number. The article's caption explains that omega is "a specific,
well-defined number that cannot be calculated by any computer program
(It) smashes hopes for a complete mathematics in which every true fact
is true for a reason." It seems that Kurt Godel used an early version
of the omega number to destroy David Hilbert's theory of everything.
To my surprise and delight I learned that Godel's incompleteness
refutation is based on two ways of expressing the liar's paradox that
have so preoccupied this Badi List over the past few months. Godel's
paradoxes are:

"This statement is false."
"This statement is unprovable."

I used most of the time taken up by Marie's telephone conversation
explaining laboriously what the liar's paradox is and how it makes the
true statement false and at the same time the false statement true. To
my astonishment Silvie called out confidently from the upper bunk that
she could easily solve that problem. How so? It has defeated every
thinker in history, thought I, what makes you an eleven year old
non-prodigy think that you can solve it?

Her brainstorm was this: you just apply Solomon's Choice to the
problem. You remember, in a child custody dispute Solomon threatened
to cut the baby in half. The prospect of cruel and summary execution
immediately exposed the real mother who was the only party willing to
give up her claim on the child in order to save it. Now I suppose in a
sense what Chaitin and other mathematicians do with the liar's paradox
is just that. Since Godel's incompleteness proof they have given up
their claim on quandaries like the Liar's Paradox and the omega number
as axioms, as unexamined givens. As Chaitin says, there are just
rather more axioms than anyone expected. Or perhaps this is not
Solomon's Choice but Abraham's choice, when He decided He was willing
to sacrifice His long awaited first born son as soon as Yahweh ordered
him to do so. God did not allow him to actually follow through, the
readiness was all. There was a second, though, when the lineage of the
divine covenant was about to be snuffed out and it was renegotiated
with a view to mercy. Consider this, from another document in the
history of science that we have been highlighting:

"Political revolutions aim to change political institutions in ways
that those institutions themselves prohibit. Their success therefore
necessitates the partial relinquishment of one set of institutions in
favour of another, and in the interim, society is not fully governed
by institutions at all." (Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions, University of Chicago Press, 1962, Ch. 9)

As Chaitin points out, the fact that basic foundations of logic,
mathematics and science are incomplete and are easily toppled is not
bad but good news. It means we have creative freedom, that autocratic
tyranny is banished; we will always have to tear things down and
rebuild them again. This has political consequences, and they
ultimately are reflections of the underlying spiritual reality.

Abraham's progeny were not snuffed out by that baby sacrifice, they
went on from victory to victory, eventually to Baha'u'llah Himself,
Who of course was descended from that holy genealogy. The great change
in governance in this age is a switchover from arbitrary power to
justice based upon universal recognition of fundamental limitations, a
more autonomous, provisional, tentative, creative, flexible style of
leadership and authority. Right now we are in the crossover time, the
period of chaos when every established convention and institution
contradicts all others. In other words, as Thomas pointed out to me at
the Feast, we are at the place where God cannot be, in the middle of
nowhere.

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com

Proof, the Great Being and the Baha'i Principles

Proof, the Great Being and the Baha'i Principles
Oneness of God series, Part V

By John Taylor; 22 February, 2006

Yesterday we cited in their full context and in the order in which
they appear every quote preceded by the "Great Being saith" in
Baha'u'llah's late, great Tablet, the Lawh-i-Maqsud. Today, at the end
of this essay, I have arranged the same "Great Being" selections in a
different order; I placed them under the headings of sixteen of the
Baha'i principles later popularized by Abdu'l-Baha. In some cases the
quotes are slightly pared down from their context in the Tablet. To my
surprise I was able to categorize them under these headings with
relatively little stretching. True, there is no specific mention here
of several principles exactly as the Master phrased them, such as
elimination of prejudice, a universal language and equality of the
sexes. However, the Great Being selections that I placed under these
headings do not seem entirely disharmonious with the spirit of what
the Master was after.

For purposes of memorization -- should there be anyone out there who
agrees with me that this may be partly why Baha'u'llah flagged these
passages -- I think that placing the quotes under the principles,
which many of us have already memorized, may make it easier to summon
and put them to use in conversation. If I have the chance, I would
like to expand upon my own thoughts about these "Great Being" synopses
of principle in an essay or series of essays.

However, for the balance of today, I will look further into the
concept of proof in the Bab's Writings, and His Book, Baha'u'llah in
the Tablet of Ahmad says, constitutes the "Mother Book, did ye but
know." By the way, what did Baha'u'llah mean by this strange turn of
phrase: "did ye but know"? Is He saying that our ideas and
understanding, like a child running to its mother, should spend a long
period visiting Mom and being nurtured there, or else, "did ye but
know," we will think we know but really will not. Certainly over the
past few months my little essays have been enriched immensely by the
Bab's Writing, as I hope you have noticed. Without really planning it
my toddler's understanding teeters its way again and again back into
mother's arms, to the Bab's Mom Book.

Here, from the Persian Bayan, is what she lately spooned into my open
mouth about proof and evidence:

"Should a person lay claim to a cause and produce his proofs, then
those who seek to repudiate him are required to produce proofs like
unto his. If they succeed in doing so, his words will prove vain and
they will prevail; otherwise neither his words will cease nor the
proofs he hath set forth will become void. I admonish you, O ye who
are invested with the Bayan, if ye would fain assert your ascendancy,
confront not any soul unless ye give proofs similar to that which he
hath adduced; for Truth shall be firmly established, while aught else
besides it is sure to perish." (Selections, 131)

It seems to me that the Bab is not only talking to His followers in
the upcoming period between Manifestations. He is looking ultimately
toward a "religious method," like the scientific method. He predicts a
drastic reduction in the number of causes and movements, since each
will have to justify itself according to fair criteria, beyond simply
gulling the innocent.

As more people learn and apply His established standards for proof and
argument, there will be less conflict, more agreement. People will
learn to seek only what is appropriate to whatever kind of knowledge
they seek, and will not be afraid to reject what is not. Once that
happens the myriad leaders and diverse organizations that stake their
claims on our attention will cease to proliferate. Abdu'l-Baha was
perhaps close to quoting the last sentence in the above (we know that
in His youth He memorized long passages from the Bab) when He said, in
explicating the principle of search for truth,

"As reality is one and cannot admit of multiplicity, therefore
different opinions must ultimately become fused into one."
(Selections, 298)

This fusion, this e pluribus unum, is a characteristic of religious
truth, as opposed to science. Faith is ruled by One God, but science
will have to restrict itself to tentative stances as long as
materiality remains in flux. In science, theories or paradigms clash
but only for for those with their noses close enough to the grindstone
to feel its revolutions. Thomas Kuhn wrote:

"Scientific revolutions ... need seem revolutionary only to those
whose paradigms are affected by them. To outsiders they may, like the
Balkan revolutions of the early twentieth century, seem normal parts
of the developmental process. Astronomers, for example, could accept
X-rays as a mere addition to knowledge, for their paradigms were
unaffected by the existence of the new radiation. But for men like
Kelvin, Crookes, and Roentgen, whose research dealt with radiation
theory or with cathode ray tubes, the emergence of X-rays necessarily
violated one paradigm as it created another. That is why these rays
could be discovered only through something's first going wrong with
normal research." (Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions, University of Chicago Press, 1962, Ch. 9)

In science the lay person can afford to sit back and let the debates
and paradigm shifts go on unattended. Nobody has time to read the
latest developments in every science, much less follow the discussions
and speculations of specialized researchers. But in religion, we all
have a stake, for we all have an eternal soul. The Bab is expecting a
much higher level of sophistication in matters of faith. My 11
year-old daughter Silvie shared this anecdote from her GEMS Christian
girls' class. The instructor told them that many people pass by God,
but, she asked them, what is the result in their lives? One girl in
the class volunteered this: "Um, he will come back and haunt you?" A
good answer, for if we do not live up to the demands of His Oneness or
meet the proofs on their own level, we will be haunted by regrets and
"might-have-beens" for the rest of our existence.

Out of the Lawh-i-Maqsud; the Great Being lays out Baha'i principles

Oneness of God

"The Great Being saith: The Tongue of Wisdom proclaimeth: He that hath
Me not is bereft of all things. Turn ye away from all that is on earth
and seek none else but Me. I am the Sun of Wisdom and the Ocean of
Knowledge. I cheer the faint and revive the dead. I am the guiding
Light that illumineth the way. I am the royal Falcon on the arm of the
Almighty. I unfold the drooping wings of every broken bird and start
it on its flight." (Tablets, 169)

Power of the Holy Spirit

"O friend of mine! The Word of God is the king of words and its
pervasive influence is incalculable. It hath ever dominated and will
continue to dominate the realm of being. The Great Being saith: The
Word is the master key for the whole world, inasmuch as through its
potency the doors of the hearts of men, which in reality are the doors
of heaven, are unlocked." (Tablets, 173)

Search for Truth

"The Great Being saith: The heaven of statesmanship is made luminous
and resplendent by the brightness of the light of these blessed words
which hath dawned from the dayspring of the Will of God: It behoveth
every ruler to weigh his own being every day in the balance of equity
and justice and then to judge between men and counsel them to do that
which would direct their steps unto the path of wisdom and
understanding. This is the cornerstone of statesmanship and the
essence thereof. ... The secrets of statesmanship and that of which
the people are in need lie enfolded within these words." (Tablets,
166-167)

Oneness of Humanity

"The Great Being saith: O well-beloved ones! The tabernacle of unity
hath been raised; regard ye not one another as strangers. Ye are the
fruits of one tree, and the leaves of one branch." (Tablets, 163)

"That one indeed is a man who, today, dedicateth himself to the
service of the entire human race. The Great Being saith: Blessed and
happy is he that ariseth to promote the best interests of the peoples
and kindreds of the earth. In another passage He hath proclaimed: It
is not for him to pride himself who loveth his own country, but rather
for him who loveth the whole world. The earth is but one country, and
mankind its citizens." (Tablets, 167)

Oneness of Religion

"The Great Being saith: O ye children of men! The fundamental purpose
animating the Faith of God and His Religion is to safeguard the
interests and promote the unity of the human race, and to foster the
spirit of love and fellowship amongst men... Our hope is that the
world's religious leaders and the rulers thereof will unitedly arise
for the reformation of this age and the rehabilitation of its
fortunes. Let them, after meditating on its needs, take counsel
together and, through anxious and full deliberation, administer to a
diseased and sorely-afflicted world the remedy it requireth."
(Tablets, 168)

Science and Religion

"The Great Being saith: The man of consummate learning and the sage
endowed with penetrating wisdom are the two eyes to the body of
mankind. God willing, the earth shall never be deprived of these two
greatest gifts. That which hath been set forth and will be revealed in
the future is but a token of this Servant's ardent desire to dedicate
Himself to the service of all the kindreds of the earth." (Tablets, p.
170)

Elimination of Prejudice

"O my friend! In all circumstances one should seize upon every means
which will promote security and tranquillity among the peoples of the
world. The Great Being saith: In this glorious Day whatever will purge
you from corruption and will lead you towards peace and composure, is
indeed the Straight Path." (Tablets, 171)

Economic Readjustment

"The Great Being saith: The structure of world stability and order
hath been reared upon, and will continue to be sustained by, the twin
pillars of reward and punishment." (Tablets, p. 163)

"The Great Being saith: The learned of the day must direct the people
to acquire those branches of knowledge which are of use, that both the
learned themselves and the generality of mankind may derive benefits
therefrom. Such academic pursuits as begin and end in words alone have
never been and will never be of any worth. The majority of Persia's
learned doctors devote all their lives to the study of a philosophy
the ultimate yield of which is nothing but words." (Baha'u'llah,
Tablets of Baha'u'llah, 169)

Promotion of Education

"The Great Being saith: Regard man as a mine rich in gems of
inestimable value. Education can, alone, cause it to reveal its
treasures, and enable mankind to benefit therefrom." (Tablets, 161)

Universal Language

"The Great Being saith: The heaven of divine wisdom is illumined with
the two luminaries of consultation and compassion. Take ye counsel
together in all matters, inasmuch as consultation is the lamp of
guidance which leadeth the way, and is the bestower of understanding."
(Tablets, 168)

"The Great Being saith: Human utterance is an essence which aspireth
to exert its influence and needeth moderation. As to its influence,
this is conditional upon refinement which in turn is dependent upon
hearts which are detached and pure. As to its moderation, this hath to
be combined with tact and wisdom as prescribed in the Holy Scriptures
and Tablets." (Tablets, 172)

Equality of the Sexes

The Great Being saith: One word may be likened unto fire, another unto
light, and the influence which both exert is manifest in the world.
Therefore an enlightened man of wisdom should primarily speak with
words as mild as milk, that the children of men may be nurtured and
edified thereby and may attain the ultimate goal of human existence
which is the station of true understanding and nobility. (Tablets,
173)

Ethics

"And likewise He saith: The heaven of true understanding shineth
resplendent with the light of two luminaries: tolerance and
righteousness." (Tablets, 169-170)

Universal Peace

"The Great Being, wishing to reveal the prerequisites of the peace and
tranquillity of the world and the advancement of its peoples, hath
written: The time must come when the imperative necessity for the
holding of a vast, an all-embracing assemblage of men will be
universally realized." (Tablets, 165)

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com

Sun and Shield of Wisdom

Maqsud, the Great Being, and the Sun and Shield of Wisdom

Oneness of God series, Part IV

By John Taylor; 21 February, 2006

The Bab at one point named the One "Whom God shall make manifest" the
"Primal Veil" of God. "Above this Veil ye can find nothing other than
God, while beneath it ye can discern all things emanating from God."
(Selections, 131) In the teachings and Person of Baha'u'llah
brilliancy shines through a diaphanous fabric; all things are
purified, all illusion dispelled and whatever is true, right and
natural vivified and illuminated. This was sung of old, "For the Lord
God is a sun and a shield," (Ps 84:1) for He both nurtures and
protects. The "Primal Veil" acts like the earth's atmosphere and the
magnetic Van Allen belt, It absorbs and filters out harmful forms of
radiation in order to protect life, and allows other, beneficial light
to shine through and provide all things with light and energy. In our
mind and heart, this is the greatness of the Great Being. His primal
principle, the Oneness of God, nurtures and protects as sun and
shield.

As mentioned, outside of once in the Tablet to the Son of the Wolf,
the balance of mentions of "Great Being" in Baha'u'llah's so-far
translated Tablets are all to be found in the Lawh-i-Maqsud. The
Guardian picked out the Tablet to Maqsud, along with a handful of
other late Tablets, calling them the "mighty and final effusions of
His indefatigable pen -- (they) must rank among the choicest fruits
which His mind has yielded, and mark the consummation of His
forty-year-long ministry." (God Passes By, 216). By all standards the
Lawh-i-Maqsud is a definitive document, an earth shaking distillation
of Baha'u'llah's Teaching and ideals. Reading it over in preparation
for this essay, I was strangely reminded of Bugs Bunny's portable
hole. Whenever Elmer Fudd got close to catching Bugs, he would drop
the hole behind him and Elmer would plunge in and disappear into the
black void. And so it is with all our quandries and debates, our
ambiguities and hairsplittings, they go away instantly as soon as the
Great Being speaks. Everything that stymied us is gone, suddenly and
finally into a total vacuum. This is the Sun and the Shield at work in
all their splendor.

I surely would disappear too into this mini-Black Hole should I
attempt to do justice to this Tablet in detail. Suffice to say, the
Tablet to Maqsud was written to one Mirza Maqsud, a devoted teacher of
the Faith who was living in Syria at the time. Beyond this I could
find no biographical detail about him, much less examine a copy of the
letters he wrote to Baha'u'llah. The first part of the Tablet to
Maqsud is written to the collectivity of humankind and is phrased in
the most universal terms possible. The second half is more of a
personal letter, written to a breathing, believing human being. It
offers words of encouragement in the face of Maqsud's evident
rejection by Palestinian locals in all his attempts to teach the Cause
there. As well, this second section answers several specific concerns
raised by Maqsud apparently in a letter that arrived later, while the
first half was still being dictated. The direct mentions of "Great
Being" all occur in the first section.

Most distinctively to this Tablet, Baha'u'llah at times takes on the
persona of His secretary, as if the letter were written by Mirza Aqa
Jan instead of Himself. We are assured in a note that every word is
from Him, though, and every word is authentic holy scripture. We are
also informed that this literary device is not uncommon in His
Tablets, and was done in order to assuage the tendency of faithful
adherents to be overawed by the One addressing them. As far as I know,
the Tablet to Maqsud is the only Tablet using this convention that has
been translated into English.

Although there is no reason to doubt the veracity of what the editors
say, reading the Tablet over I find this explanation rather strange.
The mentions of "Great Being" seem to come at almost random intervals,
and in very general contexts. There seems little attempt to pretend
that it was the secretary, Mirza Aqa Jan, who was writing and
periodically citing Baha'u'llah as the "Great Being." Indeed, if this
were so, one would expect the mentions of "Great Being" to be more
frequent in the second, more personal half of the Tablet, but this is
not the case. However I can only refer this question to the
specialists concerned, and to your own judgment, and carry on
regardless. My hunch, be it valid or a vain illusion, is this: the
term "Great Being" is a flag or pointer directing our attention to
something important, perhaps even to openings in the Veil, junctures
where Oneness of God merges into the pure light of praxis, the
specific, social Baha'i principles.

Certainly the overall concern of this first part of the Maqsud is with
the Oneness of God as world principle. The first paragraph is a
succinct summary of the idea of Manifestation as captain, salvation or
cure for the world's ills, all the ideas that we have been discussing
over the last several essays. We can imagine Maqsud reading "his"
Tablet to friends and close contacts. In view of this, the first
paragraph may have acted as a summary and practical demonstration of
how to approach this cornerstone of Baha'i belief. The body of the
section is concerned not so much with principle but the attitude
behind principle. That attitude or "value system" can be summed up in
one word, wisdom. Wisdom is a recurrent theme throughout. So, we visit
the Veil of the Oneness of God and come away changed beings. If you
are a man, you are a wise man, if a woman, you are a wise woman. You
are yourself a sun and a shield, you are tranformed. Significant,
then, that the first section of the Maqsud ends with this:

"Methinks people's sense of taste hath, alas, been sorely affected by
the fever of negligence and folly, for they are found to be wholly
unconscious and deprived of the sweetness of His utterance. How
regrettable indeed that man should debar himself from the fruits of
the tree of wisdom while his days and hours pass swiftly away. Please
God, the hand of divine power may safeguard all mankind and direct
their steps towards the horizon of true understanding." (Tablets, 174)

I will at the end of this include all of the these "fruits of the tree
of wisdom," or at least the ones that mention the "Great Being," in
the order in which they occur in this first section of the Maqsud. But
first a personal note.

Yesterday I viewed a movie that I had bought second hand, a beat-up
VHS video tape called "Jesus," whose jacket boasts that it is the most
translated film in history. Towards the end the kids came home and
gathered around too, pointing out the parts they recognized from their
cartoon versions of the story. The film is taken almost word for word
from the Book of Luke. The producers with marvellous self restraint
force themselves to shut up until Jesus is dead and resurrected before
they start in about how this is the most unique story in history,
uniquer than even the most unique of unique uniquenesses, blah, blah,
blah. Who really crucified Jesus? These blatherers, if you ask me, for
they incessently and obliviously rob him of context, and without
context nothing means nothing. The best part of Jesus is not
necessarily the unique part, it is the part that fits in, that shines
on and shields all of humanity and its struggles.

Anyway, the parable that most impressed me was that of Lazarus and the
rich man, separated in life and in death by a vast gulf of glory. Then
Jesus told his disciples,

"It is impossible that occasions of stumbling should not come, but woe
to him through whom they come! It would be better for him if a
millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were thrown into the sea,
rather than that he should cause one of these little ones to stumble.
Be careful. If your brother sins against you, rebuke him. If he
repents, forgive him." (Luke 17:1-3, WEB)

To me, Jesus is not talking here about sin but as it were "meta-sin."
Meta-sin is not when you do a direct wrong yourself, it is a truculent
better-than-you attitude that causes others to slip into the same
wrong. It is what made the rich man refuse to reserve a scrap from his
table for the starving Lazarus. As Jesus says, coming back from the
dead will not help that, the reading of scripture has to suffice to
change him, for that is what it was written by God to do. Meta-sin is
the reverse of wisdom. It is when even when what you say is dead
right, you are still dead wrong. This is the "edginess" of one's
attitude, a leaning to immoderation that provokes, instigates,
polarizes and politicizes the context in which you happen to be.
Without context, nothing means nothing.

The Great Being, I hope you will agree when you read the following,
provides context, erases meta-sinning attitudes, reverses the rule of
the world into one ruled by sincerity, purity and wisdom.

Portable Black Holes; Mentions of "Great Being" in the Lawh-i-Maqsud,
in the order in which they occur

"Man is the supreme Talisman. Lack of a proper education hath,
however, deprived him of that which he doth inherently possess.
Through a word proceeding out of the mouth of God he was called into
being; by one word more he was guided to recognize the Source of his
education; by yet another word his station and destiny were
safeguarded. The Great Being saith: Regard man as a mine rich in gems
of inestimable value. Education can, alone, cause it to reveal its
treasures, and enable mankind to benefit therefrom. If any man were to
meditate on that which the Scriptures, sent down from the heaven of
God's holy Will, have revealed, he would readily recognize that their
purpose is that all men shall be regarded as one soul, so that the
seal bearing the words 'The Kingdom shall be God's' may be stamped on
every heart, and the light of Divine bounty, of grace, and mercy may
envelop all mankind. The One true God, exalted be His glory, hath
wished nothing for Himself. The allegiance of mankind profiteth Him
not, neither doth its perversity harm Him. The Bird of the Realm of
Utterance voiceth continually this call: 'All things have I willed for
thee, and thee, too, for thine own sake.' If the learned and
worldly-wise men of this age were to allow mankind to inhale the
fragrance of fellowship and love, every understanding heart would
apprehend the meaning of true liberty, and discover the secret of
undisturbed peace and absolute composure. Were the earth to attain
this station and be illumined with its light it could then be truly
said of it: 'Thou shall see in it no hollows or rising hills.' [Qur'an
20:106] (Tablets, p. 161-2)

"The Great Being saith: O well-beloved ones! The tabernacle of unity
hath been raised; regard ye not one another as strangers. Ye are the
fruits of one tree, and the leaves of one branch. We cherish the hope
that the light of justice may shine upon the world and sanctify it
from tyranny. If the rulers and kings of the earth, the symbols of the
power of God, exalted be His glory, arise and resolve to dedicate
themselves to whatever will promote the highest interests of the whole
of humanity, the reign of justice will assuredly be established
amongst the children of men, and the effulgence of its light will
envelop the whole earth. The Great Being saith: The structure of world
stability and order hath been reared upon, and will continue to be
sustained by, the twin pillars of reward and punishment." (Tablets, p.
163)

"The Great Being, wishing to reveal the prerequisites of the peace and
tranquillity of the world and the advancement of its peoples, hath
written: The time must come when the imperative necessity for the
holding of a vast, an all-embracing assemblage of men will be
universally realized." (Tablets, 165)

"The Great Being saith: The heaven of statesmanship is made luminous
and resplendent by the brightness of the light of these blessed words
which hath dawned from the dayspring of the Will of God: It behoveth
every ruler to weigh his own being every day in the balance of equity
and justice and then to judge between men and counsel them to do that
which would direct their steps unto the path of wisdom and
understanding. This is the cornerstone of statesmanship and the
essence thereof. From these words every enlightened man of wisdom will
readily perceive that which will foster such aims as the welfare,
security and protection of mankind and the safety of human lives. Were
men of insight to quaff their fill from the ocean of inner meanings
which lie enshrined in these words and become acquainted therewith,
they would bear witness to the sublimity and the excellence of this
utterance. If this lowly one were to set forth that which he
perceiveth, all would testify unto God's consummate wisdom. The
secrets of statesmanship and that of which the people are in need lie
enfolded within these words. This lowly servant earnestly entreateth
the One true God -- exalted be His glory -- to illumine the eyes of
the people of the world with the splendour of the light of wisdom that
they, one and all, may recognize that which is indispensable in this
day." (Tablets, 166-167)

"That one indeed is a man who, today, dedicateth himself to the
service of the entire human race. The Great Being saith: Blessed and
happy is he that ariseth to promote the best interests of the peoples
and kindreds of the earth. In another passage He hath proclaimed: It
is not for him to pride himself who loveth his own country, but rather
for him who loveth the whole world. The earth is but one country, and
mankind its citizens." (Tablets, 167)

"The Great Being saith: O ye children of men! The fundamental purpose
animating the Faith of God and His Religion is to safeguard the
interests and promote the unity of the human race, and to foster the
spirit of love and fellowship amongst men. Suffer it not to become a
source of dissension and discord, of hate and enmity. This is the
straight Path, the fixed and immovable foundation. Whatsoever is
raised on this foundation, the changes and chances of the world can
never impair its strength, nor will the revolution of countless
centuries undermine its structure. Our hope is that the world's
religious leaders and the rulers thereof will unitedly arise for the
reformation of this age and the rehabilitation of its fortunes. Let
them, after meditating on its needs, take counsel together and,
through anxious and full deliberation, administer to a diseased and
sorely-afflicted world the remedy it requireth." (Tablets, 168)

"The Great Being saith: The heaven of divine wisdom is illumined with
the two luminaries of consultation and compassion. Take ye counsel
together in all matters, inasmuch as consultation is the lamp of
guidance which leadeth the way, and is the bestower of understanding."
(Tablets, 168)

"The Great Being saith: The learned of the day must direct the people
to acquire those branches of knowledge which are of use, that both the
learned themselves and the generality of mankind may derive benefits
therefrom. Such academic pursuits as begin and end in words alone have
never been and will never be of any worth. The majority of Persia's
learned doctors devote all their lives to the study of a philosophy
the ultimate yield of which is nothing but words." (Baha'u'llah,
Tablets of Baha'u'llah, 169)

"The Great Being saith: The Tongue of Wisdom proclaimeth: He that hath
Me not is bereft of all things. Turn ye away from all that is on earth
and seek none else but Me. I am the Sun of Wisdom and the Ocean of
Knowledge. I cheer the faint and revive the dead. I am the guiding
Light that illumineth the way. I am the royal Falcon on the arm of the
Almighty. I unfold the drooping wings of every broken bird and start
it on its flight." (Tablets, 169)

"And likewise He saith: The heaven of true understanding shineth
resplendent with the light of two luminaries: tolerance and
righteousness." (Tablets, 169-170)

"The Great Being saith: The man of consummate learning and the sage
endowed with penetrating wisdom are the two eyes to the body of
mankind. God willing, the earth shall never be deprived of these two
greatest gifts. That which hath been set forth and will be revealed in
the future is but a token of this Servant's ardent desire to dedicate
Himself to the service of all the kindreds of the earth." (Tablets, p.
170)

"O my friend! In all circumstances one should seize upon every means
which will promote security and tranquillity among the peoples of the
world. The Great Being saith: In this glorious Day whatever will purge
you from corruption and will lead you towards peace and composure, is
indeed the Straight Path." (Tablets, 171)

"The Great Being saith: Human utterance is an essence which aspireth
to exert its influence and needeth moderation. As to its influence,
this is conditional upon refinement which in turn is dependent upon
hearts which are detached and pure. As to its moderation, this hath to
be combined with tact and wisdom as prescribed in the Holy Scriptures
and Tablets." (Tablets, 172)

The Great Being saith: One word may be likened unto fire, another unto
light, and the influence which both exert is manifest in the world.
Therefore an enlightened man of wisdom should primarily speak with
words as mild as milk, that the children of men may be nurtured and
edified thereby and may attain the ultimate goal of human existence
which is the station of true understanding and nobility. (Tablets,
173)

"O friend of mine! The Word of God is the king of words and its
pervasive influence is incalculable. It hath ever dominated and will
continue to dominate the realm of being. The Great Being saith: The
Word is the master key for the whole world, inasmuch as through its
potency the doors of the hearts of men, which in reality are the doors
of heaven, are unlocked. No sooner had but a glimmer of its effulgent
splendour shone forth upon the mirror of love than the blessed word 'I
am the Best-Beloved' was reflected therein. It is an ocean
inexhaustible in riches, comprehending all things. Every thing which
can be perceived is but an emanation therefrom. High, immeasurably
high is this sublime station, in whose shadow moveth the essence of
loftiness and splendour, wrapt in praise and adoration." (Tablets,
173)

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com