Inversions

Love Inversions, and other things
By John Taylor; 2007 Nov 20, 17 Qudrat, 164 BE

Time is limited today, so let us do a roundup of loose ends.
One song I always liked is "Spirit in the Sky," since it combines a stirring guitar riff combined with a Christian message; and so a couple of weeks ago I found it on Youtube and put it onto the old Ipod. One verse of it goes, "I am not a sinner, I have never sinned. I have a friend in Jesus." This sentiment grated on me, contradicting as it does the central Biblical teaching that "all have sinned and fallen short of the Glory of the Lord." After several more listenings I started to think maybe this is acceptable, since the guy is persuaded that Jesus has washed away his sins and all that. Then I ran across this, which asserts that even if He has made you clean, you have no right to go around boasting about it.
"If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us." (John 1:8, WEB)
My output has been cut back for the past couple of months because of the return of rainy weather, but also partly because I have been trying to rearrange my study. Books I need at hand are packed away in a box somewhere and I am discombobulated half the time. Now I find that even the improvements I made are not good enough, I should have chosen a desk at which one can work both standing and sitting, but mostly standing. That is because of this study:
"Sitting may increase risk of disease."
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-11/uom-msf111907.php
They found that "sitting had negative effects on fat and cholesterol metabolism," and that "physical inactivity throughout the day stimulated disease-promoting processes, and that exercising, even for an hour a day, was not sufficient to reverse the effect." My favorite site of late, Lifehacker, staged a contest to address the need exposed by this study for an adjustable desk at which you can stand at as well as sit, and this was the winner:
http://lifehacker.com/software/coolest-workspace-contest/coolest-workspace-contest--the-adjustable-desk-170289.php
Here an example of Confucius's wisdom, a quote I refer back to often,
"It is Man who is capable of broadening the Way. It is not the Way that is capable of broadening Man." (Analects 15:25)
That is true, but if you think about it, a sedentary lifestyle certainly is a way that is capable of broadening man, and burying him. On the other hand, the good news is that if you manage to take sitting for long periods out of your lifestyle, it is easy to improve health. Another way to reduce idleness I tried was to get rid of our living room couch. I tried it and it worked for a while, but the pressure of other members of the household forced me to backslide.
Sitting on the couch last night, Thomas insisted on watching a couple of old Bugs Bunny cartoons. One of them, made during the rationing and travel restrictions of World War II, ended with Bugs jumping off a train saying, "Of course I had to get off, there should be no unnecessary civilian travel." The kids were silent and uncomprehending, and it was with a chill that I realized that that joke should still work; what with global warming and the need to reduce our carbon footprint, there should be a huge campaign for every individual to avoid unnecessary jet travel. George Monbiot makes this point in his book "Heat." He points out that especially jet air travel should be discouraged, at least until technology makes it less harmful to the biosphere. But sadly there is no such consciousness, no publicity aimed to reduce unnecessary travel. Most are unaware of this easy way to help the environment. And of course, the moneyed interests that run the media are not going to bend over backwards to lose money. It would take a war to get people going on such basic economy measures to slow climate change. Bugs Bunny's last joke should still go over, but sadly it does not.
Put these two topics together and you realize that both are forms of mollycoddling. We spoil ourselves by sitting on the couch or the office chair too long, and we mollycoddle the wet-nurses of society, corporate oil interests, by encouraging jet travel rather than banning it, but these are really aspects of the same problem, a problem the Master called "love inversion." We are all familiar with temperature inversions, when weather traps the heat of a city and it chokes and slow-cooks the inhabitants below. The result is what is popularly called a heat wave, and it is well known that far more people are killed every year by heat waves than by all other weather related deaths, including hurricanes and tornadoes. You would never know it from the headlines, but it is a fact.
But even worse are love inversions.
We flatter ourselves and think that love is always good, but it is not. A love inversion in some form or other is the root reason we cannot summon up the discipline to address clear and urgent survival needs, such as reducing carbon emissions. All this explains why the following passage of the Master should be better known than it is, for what He says goes beyond what it ostensibly discusses, the mollycoddling of a particular mother. Hate does terrible harm but it is harder to defend against excessive, ignorant, smothering love. Too much love causes, in the Master’s phrase, an inversion or bear hug that smothers the victim to death as effectively as a heat wave a city. Our defenses to this are weakest early in life, during our formative years. I warn our kids, the greatest danger you will face in life is not assaults from without but temptations from within. Only tough love for self can withstand it. Society does not think of permissive parents as child abusers but the harm they do is far worse and longer lasting than the violent variety of abuser. This is especially true in wealthy areas of the world.

Love Inversion (Abdu'l-Baha, cited in Sohrab's Diary)
The fathers, and especially the mothers, must always think how they can best educate their children; not how to fondle and embrace them and thus spoil them. By every means at their disposal they must inculcate in their growing bodies, souls, minds and spirits the principles of sincerity, love, trustfulness obedience, true democracy and kindness toward all the races; thus hereafter the world civilization may flow in one mighty current and the children of the next generation may make secure the foundations of human solidarity and good will. From the tenderest childhood the children must be taught by their mothers the love of God and the love of humanity; not the love of the humanity of Asia, or the humanity of Europe, or the humanity of America, but the humanity of humankind. There are some mothers who have a strange, inexplicable love for their children.
One may call it the inversion of love, or as we call it in Persia "bearish love."
This kind of love does more injury to the child than good. When I was in Acca, during the life of Baha'u'llah, I entrusted the son of one of the believers to a German carpenter. After a month, his mother went to Baha'u'llah and lamented and bemoaned, "I want my son, because he is unhappy with this carpenter, who curses his religion. Baha'u'llah told her to "go to Abba (the Master) and whatever he says, act accordingly."
She came to me, and after she had told her side of the story I told her: "The Germans never curse anyone. They are not accustomed to it," She went away, and after another month she came again to Baha'u'llah with another complaint that this carpenter had forced her son to carry on his back a load of wheat. Again I told her that if he had done so it was for discipline. I quieted her, but she was murmuring inwardly. A few months rolled by, and she returned with another set of complaints, frankly confessing that she did not want her son to be away from her, that he was the apple of her eye.
Realizing how selfish her love was for her son I told her at last that I would not take him away; that he must stay with the carpenter for eight years until his apprenticeship was over. Well, she yielded to the inexorable situation. After eight years of study he left his master, and his mother was very proud of him, everywhere praising his industry because his work was demanded on every hand. In short, the mothers must not think of themselves but of the progress of their children, because upon the children of today whether boys or girls depends the molding the civilization of tomorrow." (Star of the West, Vol. VII, No. 15, p. 143