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A Planning God, II

By John Taylor; 2008 Jan 08, 09 Sharaf, 164 BE

Yesterday I was on the way down to the garage for my daily table tennis practice session when Dale, a Baha'i friend from Smithville, knocked on the door. He was loaded to bear so we had some real pingpong games. Last time we played, over a year ago, I was a relative beginner and he beat me 12 games to 2. This time it could not have been closer, but in the end the balance tipped my way and I won 6 to 5 games. It was a titanic struggle and now my body is aching. I would blast over my best shots and to my amazement they would come back at me like lightning bolts. I am definitely not used to that. I have not had so much competition since, well, the last time he came.

Anyway, I noticed that whenever I tried to think about the game on a conscious level by planning and calculating what to do next, I would mess up and lose the point. The ball comes over much too fast to let the left brain have anything to do with it. It is a total right brain activity. Winning only comes when you let the training kick in automatically while conscious thinking processes go out the window. It was a real Zen experience. In my everyday life most activities do not require the intense concentration on exclusively spatial relations that a game of pingpong does, which is probably why such activities have been found to improve the health of both body and mind. They improve the spirit too, as I hope to show.

Since I am absorbed in the proofs of deity, I could not help but relate my "Zen of table tennis" mental mode to the existence of God. Could it be that being made in the image of God means that brain bicameralism is a reflection of Him in us? Just as our brain has a right (holistic, spatial) side and a left (linear, verbal) side, does religion have a right and left side? If so, how does it express itself? Here is my answer, qua Baha'i, to these questions. Needless to say, it is a personal interpretation.

 Religions before the Bab were part of what we term the Adamic or Prophetic Cycle, meaning that they were intentionally left incomplete. Instead of initiating conscious planning they left it to a future time when God Himself would step in and take the wheel, so to speak. This was prophesy, or to use the five dollar word, eschatology. Because of this, the main emphasis of religion, especially Christianity, was not on following a plan but on unconscious, right brain preparation by means of personal salvation. As Christ's prayer says, "Thy Kingdom come," it is not here or now, it is coming.

 Thus, older faiths even in the West are exclusively concerned with what I just called a "Zen" or right brain experience. Rationality, on the whole, does not enter in. God is in me and when I believe I put my brain on autopilot. I am not calling anybody stupid or irrational, I am just saying that faith was like when I "caught" my right brain and won a point in my Ping Pong games yesterday. This "letting go, letting God" was the mark of valid religious experience. This is not a criticism of other religions, it is just a consequence of the fact that they grew up in a pre-scientific age.

 Today one side of the brain is not enough, we need both sides. Personal salvation cannot save us from global warming, it cannot teach us how to work together scientifically, or even answer the pitifully weak objections of agnostics and atheists.

 The Baha'i Cycle, we believe, marks an entirely new thing in religion, the coming of the Kingdom of God on earth. What does that mean? It means an age when God moves over into the left or conscious side of our brains. God hands us His Plan, but not only that, he trains us to consult together to make up our own plans, and these then become epicycles in His collective planning process. A planning God rules the Kingdom of God on earth. In sum, this God of the Plan is deeply concerned about the plans we make in disposing of both ourselves and our beautiful planet.

 When we engage in proving the existence of God, it is a Planning God that Baha'is set out to prove, which is why we are largely on the sidelines of the present debate between Christians and atheists. We can only prove the existence of this kind of God by following Baha'u'llah's Plan and pointing out the results to those who choose to listen.

 Baha'is say to the world: look at us, look at all the varied groups who have entered Noah's Kingdom and live in the Ark of God's covenant.

 The Jubilee Celebration of the Centenary of Baha'u'llah's Ascension that took place in New York City in the early 90's was just that: unlike other meetings where a few experts hand out data, it was the audience who were on display. They paraded down the aisle and across the stage in their native costumes, a perfect demonstration of how the Planning God includes all cultures and peoples. Baha'is sincerely believe that the more people follow this example of unity in diversity the better our chances of getting over the environmental and other crises threatening our survival. We believe that ultimately this is the example of God, Who is all loving, all-creating, and cares whether we make it or not. We believe that this is in the spirit of the God of Moses Who said, "Choose life."

 I admit that there are problems even with the idea of right and left brains; you can read about these in the Wiki article, "Lateralization of brain function." In reality, both sides are not as specialized as we tend to stereotype them as being. And certainly the Baha'i Faith does not ignore or even downplay the personal experience of God. It is just that, as Baha'u'llah said, the East and the West must embrace as lovers, and the personal and the social need to fall in love and get married too; remember, one of the big differences between a love affair and a marriage is that a married couple openly plan their lives together, as a unit. Same way, we need to consciously plan our world, and see that as sacred. That will be to reflect a Planning God.

 Again, let me refer all this back to my personal experiences, as I always am tempted to do.

 Lately one of my chess buddies, Gord, showed me his horses and their hobby farm. He has a fifty acre lot that includes fields and a wood lot. He is the most conscientious and knowledgeable land owner I have ever seen. He taught me more about trees in our visit than I had learned in a lifetime. Many of the little trees planted all over his land are endangered species, varieties that I had never even heard the names of (I may not be able to tell the difference between a spruce and an alder, but at least I have heard the names). I was against private ownership before, but if every owner was as responsible as Gord I would have no problems with our proprietary order. For example, since he and his wife have not been blessed with issue, they put it in their will that the land would be made into a permanent nature preserve when they pass on. God bless them.

Anyhoo, he told me of the precautions he has to take to protect the more sensitive parts of the forest. If he does not put large stumps around the little swamps, containing salamanders and other species rare around here, the four wheeler ATV's will soon turn it into a mud hole for their personal amusement. When he first got the land he handed out big bucks and had fifty trees planted in order to enlarge the woodlot. In the dead of winter snowmobiler thought it would be fun to cross over. They crushed almost all of the baby trees. Then they turned around and to get home again they crossed back over in their old tracks. This crushed the few saplings that had survived the first crossing. Gord is taking measures to protect the land now, but what about public land, and all the forests with owners who are less on top of things?

 Gord is not the only one with this problem. This morning's New York Times features an article called, "Nature Overrun; Owners of off-road vehicles are transforming some of America's most sensitive public lands into their personal playgrounds." <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/08/opinion/08tue1.html?th&emc=th> Notice that the subtitle mentions the environment second, after the "owners."

 Even mentioning the word "environment" is a no-no according to the never-publicized Fatwa handed out to news media by the corporate owners of "our" media. Instead they emphasize freedom and the conflict of human rights. Why not stir up the pot? It sells more newspapers.

 Now my question is, where is the Planning God when we need Him?

 This is not a hard problem to solve in principle. All you would have to do is to tell a few companies not to advertise these machines and build something else; and show a few sports enthusiasts how to find other amusements than one that involve destroying billion-year-old ecosystems. In other words, a little planning.

 Again, look at the title of the NY Times article: the owners of these vehicles are emphasized. Human rights. ATV manufacturers, and their political clout, do not come into the picture. For heaven sakes, most of these ATV vehicles did not exist twenty years ago, it was only an organized, planned advertising campaign on the part of industry that put the machines into the hands of these owners. Nor were ATVs a new invention, they have been around since Henry Ford's day. The difference now is not a technological advance, it is just political corruption.

 But the media are determined to frame the world in their terms. It is not planning, or lack thereof, that is at issue, it is the conflict of humans asserting their right to recreation and on the other side, if mentioned at all, nature. It is not planning a healthy life, it is smoker's rights. It is not planning a violence free world, it is gun owners rights versus victim's rights. It is not planning an efficient transportation system, it is car owner's rights versus the air we breathe.

If our God had a left as well as a right brain, such problems would never come up. Believe me. Believe Him.