Master's Cat

Abdul Law's Cat

By John Taylor; 2007 June 16

I have spent the last two days transcribing a talk by Bill Sears and "translating" his graphics into PowerPoint; now I find that other matters held in abeyance, including reader feedback, are piling up above my head. Today I will try to catch up. Reader Charles, responding to our recent discussion of scientific findings about how apparently casual exposure to the media degrades the brain, writes:

"Another wonderful essay. Thank you. The day is coming when people will look back at our era incredulous that we were so blind to issues such as this. One reference that comes to mind is the Master asking, (I'm paraphrasing) 'Gracious God, can any good come from gazing upon a revolting pile of excrement?' Those of us immersed in the media of our time are in an excellent position, alas, to answer that rhetorical question. Please keep up the good work."

Charles is referring to the following words of the Master, from a Tablet:

"It is certain that in this wonderful new age the development of medical science will lead to the doctors' healing their patients with foods. For the sense of sight, the sense of hearing, of taste, of smell, of touch -- all these are discriminative faculties, their purpose being to separate the beneficial from whatever causeth harm. Now, is it possible that man's sense of smell, the sense that differentiates odours, should find some odour repugnant, and that odour be beneficial to the human body? Absurd! Impossible! In the same way, could the human body, through the faculty of sight -- the differentiator among things visible -- benefit from gazing upon a revolting mass of excrement? Never! Again, if the sense of taste, likewise a faculty that selecteth and rejecteth, be offended by something, that thing is certainly not beneficial; and if, at the outset, it may yield some advantage, in the long run its harmfulness will be established." (Abdu'l-Baha, Selections, 155)

The Master could have had in mind the common belief, still around in my youth, I recall, that the worse smelling, the more foul tasting a medicine is the better it must be for you. I still remember the spoonful of castor oil, and of cod liver oil. Now, at least, they put these yucky things safely behind capsule coatings.

Or, He may have been dissenting with the opinion of French poet Charles-Pierre Baudelaire, who decades earlier had devoted an artistic career to demonstrating the counterintuitive possibility of finding beauty in ugly objects and repulsive conditions. If there ever was any doubt that the Master was right and Baudelaire was wrong, very recent scientific studies testing what people find to be the ugliest of a wide selection of possibilities -- pictures, sounds, smells -- have confirmed Him, not him. Invariably people find anything associated with high bacteria counts to be the most repulsive. For example, with sight, cesspools and sewage were deemed most ugly; as for sounds, I read how some researchers recorded one experimenter making retching sounds, after which another assistant emptied out a vat of brown beans into a large, empty plastic pail. This, because it resembled vomiting -- that veritable shower of dangerous viruses and bacteria -- was universally judged to be the most rebarbative of all possible noises.

On an apparently unrelated note (you will soon see the connection), last night I was surprised to learn from Nate Rutstein's biography of Curtis Kelly that Abdu'l-Baha had a cat. I figured out a way to introduce this fact to the kids. Kids are such animal lovers that they should know that the Master was one too. Anyway, I have transcribed this passage out of the book. As you will see, it ends up surprisingly philosophical.

"Often only Curtis and Fujita would be together at the table and they had their favorite games. One involved the Master's brown cat. Fujita, who took care of the cat for Abdul-Baha, would always lock the cat in the kitchen. He did that just to hear the master say, `Let the cat out,' which of course Fujita would do. As soon as the kitchen door was opened the cat would dart to the feet of Abdu'l-Baha, who would stroke her and feed her. After gobbling the food, the cat would brush against the master's feet and purr loudly. Everyone knew it was a joke, but it was fun for all. It was amazing to Curtis that the mystery of God would derive such pleasure from such simple things. On the one hand He was so human, in the best sense of the term, and yet Curtis knew from personal experience that Abdu'l-Baha possessed powers no one else had. What made the master so appealing was His naturalness, His openness, His genuine concern for you. (Nathan Rutstein, He Loved and Served; The Story of Curtis Kelsey, George Ronald, Oxford, 1983, pp. 73-74)

The way I introduced this passage to the kids was strange. I lately broke out my old dictation program, Dragon Naturally Speaking, which I had not used for a long time. It still makes annoying mistakes and is virtually useless for what I wanted to use it for. But the misunderstandings that it makes became a delightful surprise for Tommy, and especially Silvie, obsessed as she is with Mad Libs, and other word games of spoonerisms and non-sequitors. For example, in the above I had to dictate the word "Abdu'l-Baha" exactly right, or it became "Abdul law," or any of a dozen other strange possibilities.

Thomas's high-pitched seven year old boy's voice was particularly incomprehensible to the machine. This did not discourage him, though. He invented a sort of recursive game where he would say something, it would mishear completely, and type it out. Then he would read what it had just transcribed, it would mishear that in turn even worse, until he had a full paragraph of crazy talk, nonsense upon nonsense. He invented a game of telephone gossip that you can play with yourself. Naturally, both kids laughed and laughed to see these whacky results.

Still I want them to hear as well as understand this passage about the Master's cat. I am confident that if I read it aloud in a meeting sometime later they may remember it all the more for the unusual way that they first came across it. Anyway, here is some more from Rutstein's biography about the Master's cat.

"One afternoon, after the cat had been patted and fed by the Master, Curtis asked what the difference was between the life of a cat and a human being. Abdu'l-Baha's response was difficult to comprehend. He gave a discourse on the ingestion and digestion of what we eat, being extremely detailed in explaining the various processes involved, and pointing out that what is of value nourishes the body and what is not is eliminated as waste. Then He arose, walking across the floor. As His foot struck a loose tile, He stopped, looked at it and exclaimed, `It is progressing, and it is possible for it to reach the state of a mirror.' Years later, after deepening in the teachings, Curtis gained some insight into the Master's explanation when he read in the writings, `We have placed mankind in the alembic, and after due refining processes, the believers are the fragrant extracts thereof.'" (Nathan Rutstein, He Loved and Served; The Story of Curtis Kelsey, George Ronald, Oxford, 1983, p. 74)

This last quote is apparently an old translation, or perhaps from a Tablet not incorporated into the modern canon, for I had no luck finding anything like it in Ocean. The closest I came was the following:

"Many were the counsels of this kind that were uttered by that Dayspring of Divine wisdom, and souls who have become characterized with such attributes of holiness are the distilled essence of creation and the sources of true civilization." (Abdu'l-Baha, The Secret of Divine Civilization, p. 82)

In any case, this Q&A experience of Curtis Kelsey about cats may be what prompted him to publish, decades later, an illustrated pamphlet containing a Tablet of the Master on this subject, along with an illustration drawn by Lua Getsinger. You can find it on the Baha'i Academic's Library, the largest source of digital material on the Web. In this Tablet we can see the Master's ideas about repulsiveness as a natural indicator of un-healthfulness laid out in detail, as part of a comprehensive philosophical system. I am trying to grasp what the chart is saying; maybe it will help if I project it on a wall, since the small computer screen is manifestly inadequate.