What is Enlightenment? Part III
By John Taylor; 2006 June 10
Our family were the only Dunvillians at Monday's Nur Feast in Caledonia; I was called upon by the chair to give a report upon the Inter-institutional conference and upon a children's classes curriculum that I heard about from Jim Millington called "Unite the Hearts," an item of great interest here, since so many of us in this community are teachers or retired teachers. I had not prepared myself to give a talk on this and was desperately trying to remember details.
Then I happened to glance over at 11 year old Silvie. She had been mirroring my every hand motion during the talk, carrying a strange, beatific smile on her face. Worse, she was in full view of the audience, who were smiling at this monkey see monkey do performance. I had not realized I was moving my hands like that and instantly recalled that studies have linked such movements to memory recall; for some reason hand wiggling jogs the memory, especially for the spatially-oriented male brain. I had been pausing a great deal as it was and seeing what was happening brought me to a complete halt. My thoughts mirrored the mirror and not what I was saying, bouncing from the subject matter to my own gesticulations to Silvie's imitated gesticulations to the audience's appreciation of her mimicry rather than what I was saying. Only a supreme effort got me back to what I was trying to say, and I wrapped it up quickly. Clearly, when I mocked the keynote speaker of the Inter-institutional Conference in my notorious review, I angered the gods of public speaking. I may never again talk in public without something weird happening. And while we are on that topic, here is some reconstructed dialog that came up not long after my notorious review radiated throughout the world. We were interrupted from our evening prayers and recital of the Writings by a phone call. The next day:
Marie: What was all that laughter when you were talking to (our LSA secretary) last night?
JET: Oh, it seems that somebody we do not know objected to what I said about a speaker at the conference last week. Wanted to know who I am; he or she was so offended that they had reported my offensive act to the NSA and wanted our LSA to do something about it too. I have heard of suicide by police but now I realize there is such a thing as assault by institution as well.
Marie: If people do not like what you say why do they not just ignore it? Nobody is forcing them to read it. I have been on the Karel Gott fan internet discussion group and there are these people who go on and on about how they hate him. If they do not like him what are they doing in a fan discussion group?
JET: Actually I can understand why a Czech might get tired of Karel Gott, you cannot avoid him, he is on the airwaves, in the gossip tabloids, in your face everywhere.
Marie: Yes, but if you take the trouble to go to a den of Gott fans like that and dis him there you have to be looking for trouble. Why cannot people just ignore?
JET: Well anyway, what we found funny was this. Here is a fellow who professes to be concerned about the feelings of that speaker lest my words ever get to him, but doing what he did made it certain that they will. Which shows how easily anger trumps love and make it into hypocrisy.
This incident in my personal life, along with the arrests of terrorists infesting the Muslim community in Toronto last week, have pushed me ever deeper into that fateful question, "What is enlightenment?" No matter how much I wave my hands about, I cannot remember the answer to that question. I have read Kant's essay by that name twice but a clear image fails to come together. Questions keep breaking it up, questions like, "How much backbiting and lying did it take for these young Canadian kids to set out to, among other things, behead the Prime Minister?"
One newspaper quoted an Islamic legal scholar who claimed that after years of research he had never once come across a reference to beheading in Shari'ah law. What hypocrisy that is! It may not be written down in law texts but the practice was ubiquitous, as anybody who has read anything about Babi' history will attest. Nor was the practice restricted to the Middle East, since the so-called Enlightenment was crowned with the Terror, an orgy of beheading that rivaled the Babi' persecutions in number of beheadings. No, the question "What is Enlightenment?" has to be asked everywhere, in the most advanced and developed lands most of all. Every time we condemn, criticize, or otherwise attack a person verbally, we may not think so but in reality we are laying the groundwork for an atrocity like the beheading that these young persons were planning. And as the Master -- I think I recall -- once pointed out, to attack an individual is bad but it is far worse to attack an institution, since that is composed of many individuals who represent even more souls.
Right now throughout the Middle East, hatred fed by half truths against the West are rampant, and not only among the religiously inclined. I happened across one half truth made into a lie lately. An Iranian on a website complained that the Persian railway concession was forced upon poor old Iran by the evil British just after the first world war. British delegations and military transports got free passage on the railway whenever they pleased, not to mention raking in a king's ransom in profits. I just happen to be familiar with the details of how that discriminatory deal was "forced" upon the Persian negotiator (it is documented in one of Marzieh Gail's books; her father was an eyewitness). He signed the deal, probably among the worst sellouts by an official of his country in history, and went home with a suitcase full of cash. It was a great deal for the British, albeit dishonest. But today is that official hated by the average Iranian? Is his name a synonym for betrayal? No way, he was one of us, it feels much better to put all the blame on the British, the foreigners. Nations rise and fall by the uprightness and honesty of their own citizens, always have, always will. So the first thing Iranians should do if they want to get ahead is read Secret of Divine Civilization and follow it. The Persian government at the time was doing the reverse of what the Master prescribes in this book. Every member of that delegation was there on his own funds, including Marzieh Gail's father. Their government paid them nothing but promises. Is it any wonder that its chief representative sold their country out big time? Her father resented that sellout to his dying day, but he could do nothing to stop it. And now his countrymen see fit to ignore the truth and bathe in convenient lies that soothe the ego but deny the truth.
This tissue of lies is clear to me, an outsider, but no doubt our society has its own comfy lies wrapping us up in illusion too. If it were not so, the air we breathe would be clean and pure. In the famous first paragraph to his essay on enlightenment, Kant wrote,
"Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! `Have courage to use your own reason!'- that is the motto of enlightenment."
Is courage enough? Does an act of will suffice to overcome the lies and deceptions that stand in the way of peace? Is that enough to counteract a culture of lies? It could be, if Sapere Aude is a first step to seeking out truth. Ultimately, the cure for lack of enlightenment is Covenant and its main weapon, prayer, as a couple of recent Badi' list essays have already explored. Prayer eliminates the anger and the verbal grounds of violence by establishing in mind and heart a direct line to the Healer, Baha'u'llah. We have to know we are in darkness to want the light. To be cured, we have to know we are sick and that there is a cure. Here is the Master's description of how spiritual healing works between a patient with a physical illness and a doctor (spiritual ills are not so limited).
"...the complete and perfect connection between the spiritual doctor and the sick person -- that is, a connection of such a kind that the spiritual doctor entirely concentrates himself, and all the attention of the sick person is given to the spiritual doctor from whom he expects to realize health -- causes an excitement of the nerves, and health is produced. But all this has effect only to a certain extent, and that not always. For if someone is afflicted with a very violent disease, or is wounded, these means will not remove the disease nor close and heal the wound -- that is to say, these means have no power in severe maladies, unless the constitution helps, because a strong constitution often overcomes disease. This is the third kind of healing." (Abdu'l-Baha, Some Answered Questions, 255-256)
John Taylor
badijet@gmail.com
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