Tube Transit

Capsulated Tube Transit
(Chapter for "Open World" book in progress)

By John Taylor; 9 October, 2005

Buckminster Fuller proposed eliminating the need for most roads by the
use of "ducted-fan air cars that can go on roads or rise vertically on
jets of air." This, he said, would extend the reach of personal
transportation to just about anywhere. For other transportation needs
he put forward a unique integration of personal transport with mass
transit.

"...we need to develop personal, modular transportation pods which
could go on roads, be hooked together in groups, be loaded onto
trucks, trains and boats, or put into airplanes for transport
anywhere, with the whole global system scheduled by computer."

I think that this latter proposal rather than personal flying machines
will be remembered by future historians as Fuller's great contribution
to transportation theory. His comprehensive, personalized transit
system followed upon the dream of integrated tube transit of 19th
Century science fiction writers like Jules Verne and Edward Bellamy.
These visionaries imagined the ultimate in mass transit, hidden
encapsulated, pneumatic tubes built into streets and buildings,
carrying people directly to their destination by the quickest and most
direct means possible. Fuller pictured a network of "horizontal
elevators," whose capital costs would be built into standing
infrastructure so that, just as for elevators in high rise buildings,
one could even ride gratis, without paying for travel.

This was a good idea that unfortunately was swept away by the stigma
of mass transit, which was found to have many drawbacks. Fuller grew
up in an age of understandable disillusionment with mass transit, a
disillusionment that gave rise to the surprise success of the
automobile. Although mass transit at its best was fast, efficient, and
what we now call environmentally friendly, at its worst it remained
expensive, arduous and not much faster than before. In retrospect, the
automobile was an great improvement, the first completely personal,
privately owned mode of transport. With Henry Ford's perfection of the
assembly line, automobiles became available to rich and poor.

Until that time nothing could compare with the private automobile's
freedom from rigid schedules and the sardine-can conditions of trains
and buses. Even when the traveler did make his connection at the end
of one leg of a journey, often he had to make his way across town to a
rival company's terminal and hope that the next train or ship would
not be long in coming. Long delays and misadventure seemed inevitable
to travel in an age of disconnected rail, sail and steam lines.

Roads and automobiles afforded, at least for shorter journeys, what in
our present-day Internet jargon is being called "on-demand"
flexibility. A motorist who needed to drive to the general store to
pick up an extra bottle of milk no longer had to consult a bus or
train schedule, he just hopped in the car and went. In contrast to the
alternatives available to the average traveler of the age, this
"on-demand" form of travel gave an indelible impression of
never-before-imagined freedom and independence from what even then was
contemptuously called "the system."

Of course, on demand travel was a characteristic of the car's
predecessor the horse and carriage, though horses were more expensive,
slower and impractical except over short distances. Still, the
motorist who feels such freedom in driving at any time to the corner
store to pick up a bottle of milk forgets that earlier generations had
fresh bottles of milk delivered right to the door every morning. The
elite of centuries before delegated purchases to a retinue of personal
servants and maids. Most work places were close to or completely
integrated with residential districts in order to avoid unnecessary
travel. Most travel today is unnecessary and could be avoided by
proper planning, efficient services and an infrastructure that would
permit low cost, on-demand delivery of small packages.

A forgotten advantage of the horse came in wintertime. In the 19th
Century terrific snowstorms barely rated a mention in Toronto
newspapers, since deep snow actually improved the transportation
system by enabling horses to switch over from wheeled carriages
bouncing over poor roads to pulling sleighs on a perfectly smooth
surface. Now of course, automobile traffic is badly snarled by snow
and bad weather and billions of dollars are wasted every year in
Northern regions plowing every road after each snow flurry.

Buckminster Fuller suggested the best of both worlds, a combination of
the efficiency of mass transit with the privacy and convenience of
personal transport. Standard passenger compartments would be built in
as component parts of automobiles and driven, as now, on local roads.
For longer trips, the passenger compartment would be separated from
the car and loaded into any combination of trucks, trains, ships or
airplanes. In a winter snowstorm, rather than undergoing the huge
expense of plowing the road system, snowmobiles might pull trains of
linked passenger pods fitted onto runners sliding over the snow. In
urban areas the pods would be integrated with the elevators and
"horizontal elevators" to allow door-to-door travel even to the
tallest skyscraper. Such a "podcast" transit system would integrate
smoothely the public and the private sector, maximizing the efficiency
of mass transit with the the "on-demand" flexibility and convenience
of the personal automobile.

Travel pods or modules might be of several standard sizes, some of one
seat and other containing several at once, like the passenger
compartment of a family minivan or small bus. Travel pods like this
might be privately owned or leased, but all would have standard
fittings to allow being loaded into any train, airplane or other
medium. On any given trip a traveller might enter a car, or buses,
tubes, ships, airplanes or any combination thereof without leaving the
module or being aware of the changeovers. Travelers would punch their
proposed itinerary into a terminal, and computers would consult
schedules, calculate the fastest or cheapest route, and print out the
ticket and debit the travelers' bank accounts. If the system were
integrated with extremely high speed evacuated tubes, every point on
earth would be only a few hours from any other. This means that would
be no need for external facilities outside the pods, such as terminals
or baggage handling facilities, thus eliminating many of the
complications and expenses that present day travel involves.

Considering the primitive state of computer science in the 1960's when
he suggested this combination of personal pods with mass transit by
means of computers, Buckminster Fuller was amazingly prescient. Even
today it is wonderful to imagine, say, a rural passenger near a small
town in New York State leaving for Hong Kong by driving from into the
nearest large city, their automobile's passenger compartment then
being switched over to a compartment on a train, which then would
proceed to a New York airport where the compartment would be
automatically loaded into an airplane, or perhaps an intercontinental
underground, underwater tube. This traveler need only punch in the
destination upon entering the travel "pod," and arrive in Hong Kong
without ever having lifted her eyes from a book during the journey.

Over the last decades of the twentieth century the international
transport system slowly and reluctantly learned to follow the spirit
of Fuller's plan, except that it restricted itself only to packages,
cargo, and non-human transport. The accepted term for this became
"containerization," a strategy that brought about enormous savings as
soon as international cargo handlers bit the bullet and accepted only
standard crates of given sizes, which allowed computerized tracking
early on. Further gains came when this was combined with mixed mode or
inter-modal transport, that is, moving packages freely among trains,
trucks and airplanes. Now large container packages, often in turn
holding many smaller packages inside, travel freely around the world
using the most direct route, regardless of whether the carrier is a
truck, a ship, train or airplane.

Fuller's complete idea, of course, poses a greater challenge -- taking
containerized, inter-modal transport further to include handling
people in standard travel pods as well as cargo in containers.
Needless to say, humans tend to be less tolerant of long delays, of
their containers being accidentally dropped or crushed, or ending up
at the wrong destination. In the case of evacuated and pneumatic
tubes, which would often run underground --pneumatic tube travel,
propulsion by pumps and air pressure, has long been known to be the
most efficient form of transport for trips of less than 400 kilometers
-- the prospect of being stuck helplessly underground in the event of
a system failure is frightening even for those not prone to
claustrophobia.

Daunting as the initial technical obstacles to such reform may seem at
first, it is the moral and legal barriers that have been the show
stoppers. In the Twentieth Century, especially its last decades, even
simple and minor adjustments to the transportation system were
consistently ignored and neglected by policy makers. It takes very
little investment to accommodate bicycle racks on trains and buses,
but even this basic inter-modal transport was rarely permitted, in
spite of the fact that a bicycle on hand would vastly extend every
traveler's local range of operation on reaching their destination.

Behind this imbalance is a general feeling that money is better spent
on communications than travel and housing infrastructure, no doubt
because the former is of more immediate value for the military. While
the communications industry has been subject to thirty years of
judicious deregulation, transportation red tape remains sacrosanct.
Anyone who dares compete with unionized bus or train routes, or start
up a new commuter service to an un-serviced town, or initiate a
cheroot operation of shared taxis, or even pool rides on small trucks
and buses, risks a jail term. Opening up competition in the
communications industry has stimulated innovation and lowered costs
for everybody while lack of competition in transportation is literally
choking our planet to death.

Computer networking is now exponentially faster; integrated ticket
handling from departure to destination has become routine. It is no
longer such an adventure to make your way around the world, though
unfortunately delays caused by the factors mentioned above still keep
the word "travel" close to its root, "travail," extremely laborious,
arduous work. Every day former advantages of personal transit by
automobile are reversing themselves into liabilities. Entire cities
and suburban neighborhoods are designed around complete dependence
upon the automobile; roads are clogged with traffic, air is smoggy and
rates of obesity and heart disease continue to skyrocket with no end
in sight.

Improvements in networking have taken cargo handling far beyond its
early baby steps of containerization and inter-modal transport. The
recent development of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) devices
allows cheap cameras and sensors to be implanted anywhere, from city
stock yards to orchards to the depths of the rain forest. This real
time tracking is being called "ubiquitous computing." Transport,
delivery and cargo companies and their clients keep close track every
item being shipped. Exactly where a package or item of clothing on the
way to and from retail outlets is mapped out for customers in real
time on the Internet. Dispatchers can see whether a load of gravel in
a dump truck on the road is full or running at less than full
capacity. Controversially, Wal-Mart track inventory before it enters
stores as well as after has been purchased. Farmers detect how much
fertilizer is required by every stalk of wheat in a field, or how many
worms are attacking each apple in an orchard.

Every day the gap between transportation and communications widens. In
spite of the Internet and computerized handling everywhere,
increasingly travelers suffer delays and motorists sit in incessant
gridlock. Computer networking and sensor technology, having both legal
and financial support, make huge, disproportionate leaps forward while
human transport languishes and our atmosphere is filled with a
chemical soup of pollutants.

For such reasons I do not think that in the long term capsulated tube
transit will stay forgotten for long. Evidence is mounting that bad as
automobiles are for the environment, rockets and jet airplanes are
worse. Startlingly high levels of rocket fuel are showing up in
mother's milk and evidence is collecting that the contrails of jet
airplanes are a significant factor in accelerating the greenhouse
effect. Worse, pollution from a jet engine is floating closer to the
ozone layer and it stands to reason that it will do proportionately
more damage than air pollution originating on the ground.

If it turns out that journeys to space and intercontinental air travel
are endangering the long term habitability of our planet, the only
alternative to eliminating space travel completely would be the
so-called "space elevator." This would use electric elevators running
up and down a long tether into low earth orbit, held taught by a
pendulum effect, thus eliminating any need for rockets. For
intercontinental jet travel, long evacuated tubes running under
mountains and under the surface of the ocean would have to be adopted,
whatever the expense. Using either traditional electric locomotives or
Japan's newly perfected magnetic levitation technology, trains could
run at ten thousand kilometers an hour, or more, in such the
frictionless medium of a vacuum.

Fortunately, the extremely strong materials that such transportation
mega-projects would demand have been invented and are entering mass
production as I write. Appropriately named "woven Bucky-tubes," after
Buckminster Fuller's best known invention, the Geodesic Dome resembles
closely the naturally found carbon Buckyballs found under microscopes
in the 1980's. The discovery of Buckyballs inspired in turn
construction of artificial Buckytubes and, now, woven, factory
produced Buckytubes.

At the same time, the latest General Motors' concept cars for hydrogen
vehicles are in important respects eerily similar to the automobiles
accepting passenger pods advocated by Buckminster Fuller. Because a
hydrogen motor and fuel assembly can be built into a flat,
half-meter-thick chassis and wheel assembly, GM designed passenger
compartments over which are fitted several alternative, customized
body styles. Thus a car might be a minivan one day with one body cover
fitted over it, and on other days it would be an SUV or a pickup
truck. Needless to say, there is no mention of standard sizes or
inter-modal travel, or of passenger compartments that would be built
independently of the rest of the vehicle and be easily detachable.
Needless to say, a future designed by an automobile company will keep
the money-making potential of large manufacturers before the overall
transportation needs of the human totality.

The genius of Buckminster Fuller was his insight that transport is
analogous to evolution's first and most fundamental step to biological
complexity, the leap from unicellular to multi-cellular life. No
matter how complex the form an organism evolves into, nature has
discovered nothing more efficient than tube transport. Seen from above
a modern city with its arteries choked by automobiles resembles a vast
amoeba, paramecium, or other primitive unicellular organism found in
dirty swamp water. A tube transit system would take human
infrastructure to the next level of complexity, that of multi-cellular
organisms that judiciously hide all "transport" mechanisms inside.
Veins and arteries carry in the liquid medium of blood or protoplasm
many semi-independent "capsules" of chemicals, oxygen, antibodies, and
so forth, all hidden away, running secure and direct among internal
organs, limbs and other specialized structures.

The difference between a cell that interacts with its surroundings
independently and one that does so as a part of a greater organic
whole may seem minor at a superficial glance but from a genetic point
of view the differences are huge. Similarly, if human organization is
to take us from two dimensions to tube transit's third dimension, more
than technology will need to change the preconditions in our thinking,
our ways of owning things and interacting with other human beings;
that means living under new laws with more integral moral values.

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com

Open World chapter 1

Chapter from "Open World" Book

By John Taylor; 1 October, 2005

Readers who may be interested in the story in Macleans of Shane
Baghai, a Persian-Canadian Baha'i who actually is building new
neighborhoods, might want to check out this site:

<http://www.macleans.ca/topstories/business/article.jsp?content=20050627_108015_108015>

He mentions several innovative ideas he is working on, such as a
so-called "green roof." When I get my quickie book out, maybe I'll
send him a copy. I do not know Shane personally, though it seems to me
that there are several members of the Baghai family in this region;
the name is not unfamiliar.

The following is a draft of an early chapter of my book in progress
whose working title is "Open World." Since I am not in a position to
hire copy editors, I would appreciate any feedback you can give me,
especially critiques pointing out errors of structure, such as
repetition and poor diction.

Mound Architecture in an Open World

By John Taylor; 30 September, 2005

The hurricane season of September 2005 made it impossible to ignore
the urgency for radical reform of our built environment. Our buildings
from the tallest skyscraper down to the smallest cottage are
vulnerable to even the slightest nudge from nature. Politicians have
had to recognize that natural disasters like these hurricanes are not
a distraction from the greater threat of terrorism but are rather a
wakeup call, a warning that present evacuation plans and emergency
measures are inadequate. If emergency response can collapse under the
threat of the relatively foreseeable Hurricane Katrina, what would
happens if the completely unpredictable struck, such as the detonation
by terrorists of a suitcase thermonuclear device in a major city?

This is a proposal for an alternative form of construction with a
rounded outer form to avoid damage from hurricanes, and an inner
structure to take the full force of an earthquake without collapse
that I call "mound architecture." The object of earthen mound
construction would be to come as close as humanly possible to
disaster-proof architecture, designed from the ground up to permit the
quickest, most flexible response to threats from both nature and
terrorism. Although such construction has been a dream for centuries
of science fiction writers, only now with computers, the Internet and
open systems is such a thing a practical possibility.

Rather than independent buildings, a locality built upon mound
architecture would have sunken dwelling space in a series of large
furrows or berms of built up earth. Today's city tenements,
skyscrapers and other block buildings are supported by girders and
concrete. Being structurally artificial, they are subject to collapse.
However, the "girders" of these long mounds would be earth and stone
formed in elongated furrows. All living space would be protected
inside, underground, at least most of the time. Seen from a distance
in an airplane these earthworks laid out in rows would be
indistinguishable from a series of ridges or gently rolling hills.

What could be safer than a hill? After all, hills for millions of
years have undergone fires, floods, hurricanes, tornados, tsunamis,
whatever nature can thrown at them, without falling over or
collapsing. Without any protruding angles, wind and rain blow over and
around without effect. Even the highest mountains erode into hills
over billions of years. Mountain chains like the Rocky Mountains are
sharp and rocky because they are so young; older mountain systems like
the Laurentians and the Alleghenies on the east coast of North America
are much more ancient. Their jutting, jagged edges long ago were worn
down into gently rolling hills covered over by a layer of forest. With
time, geological ages turn all things with sharp endings and
protuberances into hillsides. Why not, then, start out rounded? Why
not build our cities, towns and villages in the form that is literally
as "old as the hills?"

Only dome construction rivals artificial hills for efficiency,
strength and security. A dome was the only building left standing
after the Hiroshima nuclear attack, and in the recent emergencies in
the American Gulf region, many residents found their only safe refuge
from the wrath of Katrina and Rita under the local sports dome. The
problem with domes, though, is that they enclose a single space, which
tends to confine them to one purpose at any single time. Residents of
dome homes soon discover that domed space radiates not only heat right
back to them, but also sound. As the number of residents under a dome
increase, noise and lack of privacy become problems.

Hillside architecture, on the other hand, allows for quiet nooks and
layered privacy within a family and the larger community. It is ideal
for high density and multi-purpose city planning. It would not only
maximize security but also minimize the ecological footprint of
cities, towns and even rural areas. A mound row can be built into,
under or over the roads that crisscross the land, both urban and
rural. Supported of course by judicious legislators using tax
incentives, this design would reduce the need for freehold dwellings,
and therefore suburbs, sprawling segregated subdivisions and other
unsustainable environmental abuses. As high density, high efficiency
housing, mounds would take advantage of the economies of scale brought
about by many people coming together in a small area. High density
housing affords large, central support facilities including sewage and
transport networks, large recreational facilities and the
psychological support of a vital, vibrant community.

As a rule mound-rows would run in an east-west direction to catch the
maximum sunlight on the southern side. This sunny slope would be
covered with ornamental gardens, parkland, agriculture and solar
collectors. The shady northern side would be steeper and consist of
high density housing and other construction running down a steeper
incline. Many floors of layered, compartments in niches down the
hillside would hold factories, commercial structures, schools and
apartments, with noisy industrial activity carried on inside. This
mixed usage would shift according to dynamically negotiated criteria
that I will spend the balance of this book explaining. Inside support
structures of the mound would all be hidden away and designed
exclusively for hosting the outer, moveable, standard-sized building
units.

Imagine a mound design for a small town like where I dwell, Dunnville.
Instead of our present small-town sprawl slowly crushing out all
surrounding fields, woods and other natural areas, mindlessly paving
over dozens of square kilometers, a mound built Dunnville would
consist of four or five long berms or hills extending in parallel
lines along the two kilometers on the left bank of the Grand River.
The exposed south sides are a gradual slope to catch the maximum
sunlight, threaded with walkways, parkland, ornamental gardens,
greenhouses and solar panels. The northern slope is the utilitarian
side, steeper, sprinkled with modular buildings, similar to cliff
dwellings except that the incline is less severe.

At suppertime you can get an idea of how mound rows in a larger city
might look by dragging a fork in a spiral motion around a helping of
mashed potatoes to model the rough outline of mound neighborhoods in
an urban setting, one large hill with terra-formed striations running
around and up towards the peak. The fork's tilling marks represent the
mounded street-rows coming together into a central nucleus or city
square, which could itself be domed over.

Thus a vulnerable city like New Orleans designed with mound
architecture would start at the lowest level, that of the levees and
proceed uphill. The endangered lower mounds going around the city
limits would be devoted largely to warehouses and parkland, using
flood tolerant plants and buildings. As the mounds gradually work
uphill, they would become inhabited. The housing units would be built
to roll up automatically and rapidly to higher ground in the event of
a storm surge. Evacuation measures would be computerized and
responsive.

Mound making, transforming an entire city, would not be the problem it
may seem at first blush. How do you make artificial hills and
mountains? To start with, all you would need is a bulldozer. With
modern heavy equipment it is not difficult to move around massive
amounts of material. Companies like those in Alberta performing
prodigious earth moving processes and then converting tar sands into
usable petroleum could easily converted to mound construction
enterprises. Mobile, on-site factories would follow around the heavy
earth movers, separating out the constituent elements of soil, rock
and stone and producing filler foams of any required density.

Like any technique mound architecture would start off simple and
become more sophisticated with experience. The basic structure would
be a piled up mound of earth, and along country roads and in small
villages the mounds would remain that way indefinitely. The advantages
of having massive amounts of unused housing capacity in the
countryside are obvious to disaster planners. In the event of an
evacuation order, New York City and all its industries and commercial
enterprises could be moved out intact into the mounded roads of New
York state and back again with minimal environmental damage, human
dislocation or even economic loss.

Using mounds, the more evacuations take place the easier and cheaper
they would become. Such an action is not unprecedented in modern
times. The Russians performed this feat, evacuating Moscow and all of
its industries, all the while actually increasing war output, when
attacked by Hitler in the Second World War. Mound construction is
designed to allow such a massive response by a democratic government
and a free enterprise economy.

As mounds increase in capacity in urban and suburban areas, their
design would begin to resemble the compartments of a large ship.
Sections of hard packed earth would give the hills their structural
strength while in between would be stretches of softer earth and foam
material designed to be easily dug out and modified as needed. Urban
mounds would have very thin structural sections and the space between
might be roofed over and not filled in. Window slots running along the
sunny side between the terraced gardens and greenhouses would allow
light to enter the inner space. Leaving the mound empty this way would
allow for the maximum space and flexibility of motion. Filling them in
with insulating foam, on the other hand, would decrease heating costs
and increase structural integrity in the event of earthquakes or other
stressors.

Inside mounds of any capacity, rural and urban, all wiring, tunnels,
roads, railways, encapsulated tubes and other support facilities would
be invisible, buried underneath the outer, visible features. They
would have triple redundancy and difficult for saboteurs to access;
being surrounded by earth and foam the effects of an explosion would
be minimized, if, for example, a terrorist were to flush a bomb down a
toilet.

The defining feature of mound architecture is modularity and
containerization. All features of these artificial hills would be
designed to accommodate mobile, modular, containerized building units.
Factory built home units and even the larger buildings inside the
mound would all be of standard sizes, semi-independent and
containerized. The only complete permanence in a mound would be in its
public areas, which would stay relatively stable and static. The
public thing is the fulcrum around which everything else moves. All
units, private, public and commercial would be built according to
strict standards, enabling each to fit into a standard docking place
in any mound, anywhere in the world. Where any given individual lives
in the mound would be negotiated by open computer processing,
according to criteria that we will discuss later in this book.

Standard building compartments would be transported to new locations
regularly, cheaply in and out of mounds by means of trains or trucks
-- for longer trips they would travel inter-modally using other means
of transport, such as shipping and air transport. Each mound would
afford access from any point to any other by means of internal
railways and roads running underneath or on the upper surface the
mound. As visionaries like Buckminster Fuller have suggested, many if
not most of these independent transport and living containers would be
rented. Where they are owned no proprietor would not have the
controlling share of ownership in order to assure that every unit is
always up to standard and regularly updated and renovated according to
the latest advances in science and technology.

As mentioned, each personal module or unit would be semi-independent
and set into a temporary parking spot somewhere inside the mound. At
night and during wintertime everything would be sunk safe inside the
insulated hillside, so that there would be little need to insulate or
otherwise bolster housing units against the elements. During the day,
weather permitting, apartments would slide outside for light and fresh
air positioned somewhere (not always the same place) along the steep
outside of the northern slope of the artificial hill. The common space
between mounds might be tented over in winter or whenever a need for
larger public shelters arises. This would be especially true in
residential areas, though the spirit of this style of architecture is
to mix residential with commercial and industrial space whenever
possible.

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com

Mashiyyat

Mashiyyat, Or, Education in the Fear Factor

By John Taylor; 27 September, 2005

Tonight is the Feast of Mashiyyat, Will, so let us talk about will and
free will, what they are, how they work. When the Master was in
America He was asked how this universal peace that He was always
talking about was supposed to come about. He answered that, "Its
realization is through the attraction and support of world public
opinion. Today universal peace is the panacea for all human life."
(Mahmud, 35) In others words, we get utopia if we will it; as a
society we must want peace. We forge a paradise together with common
will focused upon the right way to peace. Such a united public opinion
is the only realistic hope for peace.

Surely among the greatest contributions of the Master to the history
of ideas was His teaching that the only way to true progress is
through education. This may seem obvious today but the societies He
visited in both East and West were steeped in the bigoted belief that
I am good because I come from this culture or this class or that
nation. We are good, they are bad, and not because we humbly learned
truth in the school of reality but just because we are inherently
better. A truly evil question was never far from people's minds:
wouldn't we all be better off if we just got rid of the inferior
elements of society?

The Master refuted this presumption by pointing out that all are
equally in need of education, all depend just the same on God's mercy
so the only conceivable solution is education; and not the education
of some but of all, universal education. So in terms of this month's
virtue, the Master might have said that will is only good when it is
universally educated; the only truly free will is one that submits to
the universal Reality. Otherwise wills inevitably clash with other
wills and the faculty of will becomes our downfall.

But the question is, how do you educate the will? What is the
difference between a rude, naked, recalcitrant will and an educated
will? A hint is to be found in the order of the autumn months in our
Badi' calendar. Just as autumn in nature is a harvest of the bounteous
fruits of summer in preparation for winter's deprivation so in the
human world autumn is a golden age when the aged reap the fruits of
their middle age and prepare for passage into the next life. Part of
this involves passing the torch from a personal career to broader
concerns of the social fact. This is the broadest fruit of an educated
life

To accomplish this education every learner follows a series of
progressive steps in the order of the fall Badi' months, from Izzat to
Mashiyyat to Ilm and finally Qudrat; that is, from Might to Will to
Knowledge and finally to Power. The virtues of fall direct personal
might ('Izzat) onto free will (Mashiyyat) whose harvest is submission
to higher things. Then one procedes to spiritual knowledge ('Ilm),
knowing the spirit intimately. Complete identification with 'Ilm leads
to what the Writings term "arising," moving the will in the attainment
of true human power, Qudrat. Qudrat is the ability of all to act as
one, in concert, without a hint of disharmony. Power is educated
action of all for all, in all. On the other hand might is direct,
naked action by the individual. Education is the link, it makes both
personal and social into divine, holy reflections of God.

The ideal is a society where every will is so educated and in such
total common agreement with all other wills that there is no need even
to imagine opposition or disagreement. Nobody has to be forced to obey
the law because acceptance of law is the highest desire of each and
all. There would be tremendous advantages to such a state of affairs.
Think of the prodigious expense that friction and disagreement cause
in our free will but divergent-will-obsessed world. Michael Creighton
makes an interesting observation in his latest novel about
environmental conflicts. He points out that if you calculate the
billions of dollars wasted in court challenges and counter-challenges
over whether to exploit a natural resource, even one of the more minor
disputes burns up enough money to pay for an end to poverty among the
poorest thirty or forty nations of the world. Truly, harmony and
agreement without squabbling would be of infinite value, worth not
only the trillions of dollars saved annually, but also priceless
psychologically, reduction of the stress caused by billions of people
being threatened by imminent homelessness, disease and starvation.

A complete melding of wills into one has been understood to be the
ideal form of government from the very beginning. And by beginning I
mean of course Plato's Republic, the work that launched philosophy on
the course that it still follows. Plato holds up here a society of
philosophers led by a philosopher king, all of whom agree
wholeheartedly to submit their will into a single force of
enlightenment, that of education. The leadership of a philosopher king
never need force compliance because all agree with and consciously
assert their wills in whatever he seeks. For Baha'is, that philosopher
king is the Manifestation of God. The Bab was One such King, and He
wrote in the Persian Bayan (V, 19) that,

"There is no paradise, in the estimation of the believers in the
Divine Unity, more exalted than to obey God's commandments, and there
is no fire in the eyes of those who have known God and His signs,
fiercer than to transgress His laws and to oppress another soul, even
to the extent of a mustard seed. On the Day of Resurrection God will,
in truth, judge all men, and we all verily plead for His grace." (The
Bab, Selections, 79)

So if you believe in the unity of God, the Bab asserts, your will must
uphold His law; that is your heaven and the slightest injustice is
your hell. To believe is to buy into a single social consensus, a
wholeness and oneness of will upholding the philosopher king.

Now many moderns whose belief in God and whose understanding of His
theocracy is atrophied, have failed to understand what Plato and
admirers of the Republic like Rousseau were getting at by proposing
this system of government. The republic is a democracy of wills united
in one, submitting so utterly and completely that they regard their
highest desire as the single law of a benign Educator. These false
philosophers unjustly accuse Plato and Rousseau of being
proto-fascists, of supporting what inevitably leads to absolutism and
totalitarian government. Quite the reverse, this is the only
conceivable free democracy of the will.

I say to them: government by philosopher king is our best and only
hope, so make an effort to understand what it is and what it is not.
For one thing, take what the Bab says at the end of the above
quotation: that all plead for God's grace and all must submit to His
judgment. That means all wills freely and by nature recognize their
dependence upon what is Above. The philosopher king does not instill
fear, the truth in all its awesome glory inspires the fear. And what
recognition is behind that attitude to truth? Fear. Fear of God. Fear
of God is the Most Great Fear Factor. How so? Let me tell you an
anecdote explaining the shocking way that I learned this truth.

Lately I was accosted by a reader of the Badi' list who could not
contain her enthusiasm for the "fear factor" birthday party that I and
the kids attended lately and which I laid out in a recent essay. Let
us call her B--. B-- said that we should have fear factor Holy Days,
fear factor firesides, fear factor everything. I was quite surprised
by this. What is your reasoning for this startling conclusion?, I
asked. Well, said B--, Baha'u'llah Himself said that,

"The fear of God hath ever been the prime factor in the education of
His creatures. Well is it with them that have attained thereunto!"
(Epistle, 27)

So therefore, B-- concluded, we should do all we can to stir up the
fear of God among all we meet. The fear factor is the prime factor, so
we have to start by understanding what we fear so we can work the fear
factor for common education. I still have not figured out if B-- was
serious about this or not. Now I do not want to give away more
personal details about B-- than I have to, lest anybody guess her
identity, but let me say that B-- is a writer like myself. You may
think it is a big coincidence that such a small community should hold
two writers, but actually until a year or two ago there was a third
Baha'i writer, Jay Howden, in Haldimand. By all reports he is very
successful, writing the speeches for the Governor General of Canada,
the latest news being that he had supper with the Premier of China. I
happened to run across Jay's website, so for those who want to learn
more about him, go to:

<http://www.howdenmovement.com/>

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com

Diehards in an Open World

Inoculation, Mounds and Diehards in an Open World

By John Taylor; 25 September, 2005

My neurons are a weird pain weather vane and although since I have
changed my diet and increased exercise the migraines are fewer, a
major weather event like Hurricane Katrina invisibly blows me away,
even from such a distance and with its force blown. A week after
Katrina died out a friend pointed out that its backwash in Ontario was
all that rain, the flooding of her basement, etc...

"Ah," thought I, "that must be why I was suffering that slow burning
migraine just around then!"

Thus I learned that even with somewhat improved health that I still
must watch carefully the weather reports, even if it means breaking my
no network television rule. And now it is Rita educating me in
vulnerability. I must say, for me Rita is no slow burn like Katrina,
she is scraping out my skull with a razor edged scoop. Hard as this
is, my prime thoughts and prayers go for those in the front line of
this weather battle, especially the residents of Houston and New
Orleans. God save us, our only salvation. Baha'u'llah wrote in a
prayer:

"The winds of tests are powerless to hold back them that enjoy near
access to Thee from setting their faces towards the horizon of Thy
glory, and the tempests of trials must fail to draw away and hinder
such as are wholly devoted to Thy will from approaching Thy court."

My plan for this month has been to write a quickie book on how to
speed our response to disasters like the Southeast Asian tsunami of
Boxing Day, and now these last two hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico. I
still might fulfill the goal, given a miracle. Preparing this project,
I've gone over my "open year" essays, a tedious task that I normally
avoid because it feels so wrong, narcissistic, autophagic, whatever.
My reluctance to read my own writing is bred in the bone -- to produce
new material I must live a myth that all my past writing was garbage;
only today's essay matters. Reading over the open year essays for that
reason is humbling and discouraging, the output of that year -- from
the summer of 2003 to the summer of 2004 -- was prolific and
impressive, my hour of creative glory. Unfortunately for me it was
like fireworks, temporary, spreading in all directions and flaring
out. It was not planned, directed or focused. Due to constant
migraines, the writing was perforce scattered, personal, all over the
place. But for all that, it was my one Annus Mirabilis. I know in my
heart that I will probably never do better. I laid then the
philosophical groundwork for what I hope will be my first finished
book, working title: Open World.

Thinking over what I was trying to get at I realize now that I left
out the core idea. Only now is an unearthly apparition taking
corporeal form. The distinctive mark of the plan of Open World has to
be "mound architecture," elongated earthworks or berms with buildings
dug into the side. That is what I am working out now, and it is not
easy or quick, especially with Rita working me over. I am reading
Jared Diamond's Collapse, and trying to get a hold of a new book
called "Wisdom of Crowds," which I think will be important for
understanding the consultative challenges involved in this initiative.

An interesting sidelight to the present emergencies is a phenomenon I
wrote about in the open year, one that the House in the early 1980's
called "inoculation." In spite of modern communications and sometimes
well organized emergency response mechanisms, at first many lives in
New Orleans were needlessly lost because of inoculation, what you
could call the "boy who called wolf" syndrome. People hear a warning
repeatedly -- be it words like "God" or "Baha'i," or in this case
emergency evacuation orders -- and conclude that since the hubbub came
to nothing so often before there is no threat.

"I know this danger well and I can safely ignore what I am being told.
I will stay put."

This strange diehard response was reduced in Houston threatened by
Rita for several reasons, one being simply because people had just
seen what happened to New Orleans diehards under Katrina. This is not
an issue only for specialists in governance and public health, it is a
general problem of communications, which depend upon love. Suicidal
refusals are a spiritual issue as much as a practical one. Taken all
in all, loss of life from both terror and disaster is not primarily a
result of breakdowns of support or communication so much as lack of
trust between individual and society, and ultimately between humans
and God. Pump up the love and the trust, and the system responds
robustly.

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com

Tramp in the Garden

The Tramp in the Garden

By John Taylor; 20 September, 2005

Our animator missed our Ruhi session last night, having a birthday
celebration to attend (his own). I temporarily took over his job but
messed up terribly. What happened was that we going over the story
describing Baha'u'llah's period of two years of self-imposed exile in
the mountains, as described in Lesson 22 of Ruhi Book 5, "Teaching
Children's Classes, Grade 2," and I got the date of the time in the
mountains of Kurdistan wrong. Worse, I criticized the Ruhi text
unfairly. Seeking a proper combination of comfort and admonition, I
found it in the first few verses of Alexander Pope's "Essay on
Criticism,"

"'Tis hard to say, if greater Want of Skill
Appear in Writing or in Judging ill,
But, of the two, less dang'rous is th' Offence,
To tire our Patience, than mis-lead our Sense:
Some few in that, but Numbers err in this,
Ten Censure wrong for one who Writes amiss..."

Still, I cannot help myself, there is something about Ruhi that brings
out the critic in me. There seems to be an unspoken rule that if
material is for kids it must be dumbed down. Only the very best
children's literature manages to be simple without being simplistic,
fun without being childish. Unfortunately the Ruhi courses tip towards
the patronizing even when dealing with adults, so it is to be expected
that it will be worse with children's lessons. But even so, I do not
know how even the least patronizing historian could tell the story of
Baha'u'llah's exile to the mountains without speculating upon His
motives for doing so. It was a voluntary exile, so He had to have a
reason. Unfortunately, there is little or no first hand or for that
matter second hand material to explain the specific problems that made
Him take that dire course. We have only the testimony of the Master,
His sister, and Baha'u'llah Himself, told much later, to go by;
nothing as far as historical data. Peter Smith in his article in the
Baha'i Encyclopedia does the only thing possible; he admits the lack
of raw material:

"Accompanied by his family ... Baha'u'llah made the difficult winter
journey over the mountains to Ottoman Iraq, arriving in BAGHDAD on 8
April 1853. Here they were later joined by Azal, who had gone into
hiding following the attempt on the life of the shah. What happened
next is difficult to establish in detail, and is coloured by the later
partisan accounts of Baha'is and AZALlS, but in essence it would seem
that Baha'u'llah began to eclipse Azal as a leader (e.g. see Tablet of
'ALL FOOD'), a development increasingly resented by the latter, who
yet insisted on maintaining a hidden existence from most of the Babis
for his own protection. The tensions were such that Baha'u'llah
finally decided to abandon the city to pursue the life of a solitary
mystic in the mountains of Kurdistan, leaving his family in the care
of Mirza Musa. He left Baghdad on 10 April 1854, accompanied by a
single servant, later writing that his 'withdrawal contemplated no
return' (KI 160). Initially living as a hermit in a cave in the
mountains at Sar Galli, he 'communed with [his] spirit' oblivious of
the world." (Smith, Baha'i Encyclopedia, "Baha'u'llah," p. 74)

The Guardian, in answer to a query by a British believer, also admits
the impossibility of saying for sure what the Ruhi author is very sure
of, the exact motives of Baha'u'llah in withdrawing, to the extent
that he goes on and on endlessly about it.

"We cannot, not knowing the factors Baha'u'llah weighed in His own
mind, judge of the wisdom of His withdrawal to Kurdistan. But,
studying His life and teachings, we should see in it an act of wisdom,
and not superficially measure Him by our standards." (Shoghi Effendi,
Unfolding Destiny, p. 406)

In spite of this quibble, I see the curriculum laid out and the pious
stories told in this book as a very good thing. I would love to turn
all the lessons here into illustrated PowerPoint presentations; this
would if nothing else benefit our children, whose education is far too
material right now. The only thing that holds me back is the question
of whether I should start writing for profit instead of pure love, now
that my health is starting to improve.

I started off this month dead set determined, thinking and planning to
write a quicky exploitation book about how to solve the vulnerability
of our built environment to tsunamis and hurricanes, cashing in on the
New Orleans disaster. No mention of Baha'i, no long delay for review,
just a plan, short and simple. Maybe that would gain me something like
financial independence if people interested by these fiascos took
interest in and bought such a book. But for the life of me I just
cannot get away from the Faith no matter how hard I try. I feel like
this:

Back when my father and I lived in a shack on the corner of Mohawk and
Upper Paradise, we never bothered cut our lawn. Sometimes when I rose
in the morning of a Sunday I would notice that one or more drunks had
flopped out in the high grass behind our house. I would wander into
the kitchen, bang a few pots and make my breakfast before calling the
police. But when I looked out the window to see if the bum was still
there, he would always be gone.

Now that I look over my life, I realize that I am just such a tramp. I
do not study the life of Baha'u'llah for legitimate reasons, for
career or academic advance or whatever, I do it on my own and then
leave without a trace. Think of that beautiful passage in the Writings
where Baha'u'llah talks about the Cause as a rose garden where some
come to sniff the flowers but others stay permanently to tend the
garden; but He does not mention the bum who wanders in at night when
nobody is around, roots around, and then leaves as soon as the legit
owners and visitors show their faces. That person not mentioned is the
likes of me.

If anyone is interested in May Maxwell's pilgrim's notes, they are
available online at:

http://bahai-library.com/books/pilgrimage.maxwell.html

Ella Goodall's Daily Lessons I was about to scan in when I noticed
that it is already available at:

http://bahai-library.com/?file=goodall_cooper_daily_lessons

I have also been reading Tarazullah Samandari's inspiring account of
his pilgrimage to Baha'u'llah in Akka and Bahji, called "Moments with
Baha'u'llah." This is not available online (Kalimat Press does not
seem to be as liberal sharing copyright as George Ronald) so I will
see if I have time to scan that in for you, dear reader. I would also
like to share his astonishing talk at the world congress, 1963, and I
will as soon as I get a hold of it.

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com

Maiden Speech; Gabby and Bea Save Puppy

The Master's Maiden Speech, Part II; Gabby and Bea Save a Puppy

By John Taylor; 20 September, 2005

An anonymous writer defined religion this way: "Nobody is anything
except as he joins himself to something. You cannot be a whole unless
you join the whole. This I believe is religion." I agree with this
wholeheartedly, and for that reason I almost burst when people claim
to adhere to spirituality but not organized religion. If the spirit
cannot organize, what good is it? What kind of a whole can move one
heart all alone but not build from that group structures, social good?
Such a whole would be impotent, a mere superstition, an illusion not
worth the time it takes to picture it.

The true whole is the unifying factor, One holism that is not to be
confused with "everything." When May Maxwell went on pilgrimage she
dragged along her cynical atheist husband, W. Sutherland. The Master
asked W. what God is, and he said, "God is everything, everywhere, I
suppose." Wrong, the Master told him, if you say that something is
everything, that is the same as saying it is nothing; if you say
something is everywhere, that is the same as saying that it is
nowhere. To join yourself to everything is really to join with
nothing. The One stands behind everything seen and it is One, a
unifying whole. If that is not so, then there is no God. If there is a
Singularity behind all things, then there is a God. Sutherland thought
long and hard about what he had been told and eventually saw that He
was right. He eventually converted to belief in God, the One behind
the whole, and became an exemplary Baha'i.

A couple of years later, `Abdu'l-Baha in His first public address in
London's City Temple, laid out the other two Oneness that proceed
directly from the primary oneness, the Oneness of God.

"The gift of God to this enlightened age is the knowledge of the
oneness of mankind and of the fundamental oneness of religion. War
shall cease between nations, and by the will of God the Most Great
Peace shall come; the world will be seen as a new world, and all men
will live as brothers." (`Abdul-Baha in London, pp. 19-20)

Peace then, and the principles of peace, are the result of joining One
God to the other two Onenesses, One religion, a single underlying
Divine Teaching, and one human race to learn from It. Peace cannot be
bound and confined to one heart, that would be just one more division
among the billions of divisions already conflicting our world. Only
tension and war come of everyone turning to everything. The only
reality is the One in its three expressions of wholeness, working
Itself out as a harmonious One, in other words, peace.

Peace is the thesis of our time, its antithesis ignorance, imitation,
division, conflict. They clash in apocalyptic battle. The Master
warned us to strengthen our spiritual consensus, form a common
synthesis based upon One. This only should be our focus, it is our
only way to defeat the error and wrong threatening us.

"You are loosed from ancient superstitions which have kept men
ignorant, destroying the foundation of true humanity... In the days of
old an instinct for warfare was developed in the struggle with wild
animals; this is no longer necessary; nay, rather, co-operation and
mutual understanding are seen to produce the greatest welfare of
mankind." (Id.)

This is a startlingly brilliant historical thesis, one of those simple
ideas that seems obvious as soon as you grasp it. Civilization started
with the invention of agriculture a few thousand years ago, but before
that for thousands and millions of years humans in small groups must
have been in perpetual struggle with large beasts of prey. Now we can
bring down a bear or a lion with a single bullet and we pity the poor,
helpless beasts, threatened as they are with imminent extinction. It
is easy to forget that they threatened us for so long. Killing them
easily was an impossible dream. Fighting them took all the courage,
physical prowess and usually the coordinated efforts of an entire
village to kill, dress and consume an animal like the mammoth.

Solitary travelers through the ages until very recently were in
constant danger of being killed and eaten by large predators. Even
when the threat of cruel beasts receded, savage tribes imitated their
predatory ways by raiding, conquering, and otherwise preying upon
undefended villages and towns. Aggression brought great booty, and
aggressive thoughts and words were valued above gentle ones. With such
standing threats hanging above our heads it would be surprising if
society had not come to admire and value the opponent, the militant
and the ruthless more than the gentle, the cooperative and the kind.

Next time we will consider the Master's following, perhaps even more
startling statement: "Enmity is now the result of prejudice only."

Gabby, Bea and the De-population of New Guinea

In Michael Creighton's latest novel I read that in certain parts of
the world crocodiles have learned a new way to get a free lunch. That
called for a Gabby and Bea story.

It happened during their world tour that Gabby and Bea stopped in for
a visit to the island nation of New Guinea. They swam ashore and
walked into a village smiling at the people, who were even more
overjoyed to meet the famous pair. They called them and said, "Please
help us save our puppy." The wolf and fox agreed and were shown a
little puppy in an open field, held back by a heavy chain. Gabby and
Bea touched noses with the puppy and asked what was wrong with it. The
puppy looked just fine. Nothing, they answered, only he is the last
dog left in our village. He is in great danger. The crocodiles have
learned to make a sound that sounds like the barking of a dog. When a
dog hears it he goes to investigate and is eaten. The more dogs
disappeared the more lonely our dogs became until now this puppy is
our last one. He is extremely lonely now, he longs to see one of his
own kind. And do you hear the barking down by the river? Bea said yes,
she understood what the barking meant in dog language, albeit
imitation dog language, the barks were saying,

"Help me. I have fallen in the water. I want to be your friend but
first you have to save me here."

Just then the puppy escaped from his collar and ran hell bent for
leather down towards the river. Nobody noticed. Gabby did not notice.
Gabby objected that he was a native speaker of dog language and what
business did Bea, a fox, claim that she understood dog language when
there was an expert standing right here.

It was then that my audience took the story into its own power. A
giant hand burst through the paper and as it were grabbed me by the
throat, reminding me forcefully that if I did not save that puppy
right away there would be shouts, tears and protests to Mama -- more
than enough annoyances to counterbalance the pleasure I had been
hoping to gain from a description of an ingenious croc's honest,
hard-won meal.

Suddenly a child villager noticed that the puppy was missing. Gabby
knew where the puppy must have gone and as Bea leaped on his back, he
flew after the puppy at top speed. Speaking perfect dog language,
Gabby and Bea explained the ruse to the puppy, who stopped just in
time to see the croc leap out and snap at the air where it had been
about to move.

Gabby and Bea saw that the only way for the little puppy to be
completely safe would be to leave the island completely. But it
transpired that he was the last dog in New Guinea and the people loved
their dogs; what would they do? Silvie would entertain only one
possibility, they had to leave New Guinea en masse and stay with the
puppy. I protested, "Would that not mean that the crocodiles will have
won out?" She agreed but did not care, the land had to be depopulated
and left to nature. There was nothing more to be said, so that is
where I ended it. And that was the end of the story...

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com

Men in the House

Men in the House, Revisited

By John Taylor; 19 September, 2005

In the course of this summer ending now my thoughts have revolved
around the question of why, why are only men allowed on the Universal
House of Justice? Why, why, are only men obliged to go on pilgrimage
in the Baha'i Faith? What is the wisdom of this apparent skew towards
the male element?

A climax of sorts to my ruminations came in August when I read an
article in Time Magazine about a Christian minister in the States who
has taken upon himself a personal "mission to the men." He pointed out
that over sixty percent of the membership rolls of Protestant
churches, and something like eighty or ninety percent of their active
membership, are female. In those conservative sects where women clergy
were suddenly allowed, the number of female leaders shot up from zero
to, again, ninety percent or more in only a few years. He said that
male church members who do turn up complain about the artsy-fartsy
services, full of singing, dancing and lovey-dovey sentiment.
Damnation and brimstone are a thing of the past. To my surprise, he
negatively compared his female dominated Christianity to Islam, the
world's fastest growing religion, which gives a bigger place -- to say
the least --to men.

I cannot say that I found this man of God's approach to attracting
males to religion all that interesting. Taken to an extreme, he would
be hiring wrestling announcers as preachers and staging mini-football
games behind the pulpit to keep the interest of male congregants from
flagging. But nonetheless, he has a point about men in religion
generally, one that is driven home to me every time I attend Feast
here in Haldimand. While we have one or two others who turn up
sporadically (depending, I suppose, upon the NHL hockey schedule),
usually in a roomful of women the only males are myself, Ron, and my
six-year old son, Tomaso. This imbalance is not obvious in communities
with a Persian element, since they resemble Muslims in that men tend
to be more active than women. This problem is characteristically
Western.

So to me, in setting up ground rules for male involvement in religion
Baha'u'llah was not trying to maintain the last bastions of a rotten,
patriarchic, male dominated old order. Rather He was looking to the
new Order, pointing a divine finger at the face of men Eastern and
Western, saying: do your duty to God. You have a responsibility in
this age of broader freedoms not to enjoy wine, women and sports but
to work, not to blow your energy indulging yourselves but to take a
positive role in society, and particularly in family life. Yours must
be a partnership role but also a leadership role in the family. That
is why you are the nominal head, so that you will keep that family
name going through the generations, at whatever cost to you
personally. Men are selfish and altruism is harder for you. You must
fight your inclination in family life not because you are forced to do
so or as a way to work personal power or will (quite the reverse) but
because restrained, consultative initiatives are best for all. Male
involvement is the best impetus for spiritual progress and, yes, the
virility of family as an institution, and hence politics and democracy
generally.

And what exemplar do you have, men? Well, there is the Master for one.
One novel thing for me came of reading Myron Phelp's book, the first
ever written in English about `Abdu'l-Baha, called The Master in Akka.
It has a mini-history of the Faith not in `Abdu'l-Baha's words but in
His sister's words, from Bahiyyih Khanum's female perspective. Men
especially should read her eyewitness account in its entirety (I would
like to make a video of it, with my daughter Silvie as narrator) but
here is what she says about `Abdu'l-Baha as paterfamilias in capsule
format:

For one thing, His initiatives in giving prodigious amounts of money
to the poor and indigent at times when the family was by no means
prosperous did not go unnoticed in family circles, especially by
mother, daughters and sisters. I had imagined this might be so, but it
was the first time I had heard it mentioned. What does this mean? Our
Exemplar was unstinting, even at the price of family prosperity, on
behalf of the poor. His leadership was unrelenting, tough, but not --
God forbid! -- in the sense of male oppression. Quite the reverse,
this was the hard path of relieving the world of poverty and
oppression. Men, if you want to do your duty, turn all your money and
energy to ending poverty and indigence locally and in the world. Turn
off the Stupid Bowl and the Sadley Cup for a while, and act, plan, for
an end to oppression and tyranny. When they are stamped out, then you
can think about a pick up game, but not before. I will return to this
presently, it has big consequences; it is the theme behind the themes
of most of my essays recently and in the near future.

Bahiyyih Khanum also tells the story of the Master as father. Like
most parents in an age before antibiotics, He and the Holy Mother
Munirih Khanum underwent the unimaginable trauma of losing five of
nine children, most at a young age. Only four offspring survived, all
girls. Long story short, tremendous pressure by the believers was
brought to bear upon Father and Son to bear a male heir. The Covenant,
the Prophetic succession, the future of the Faith itself seemed to
hang upon primogeniture, the eldest boy taking over leadership. And
only girls were making it through childhood.

Surprisingly for many (for me, at least), Baha'u'llah did not stand in
the way of a second spouse for His Son; that would have meant more
chances for a male heir, and the Kitab-i-Aqdas did allow a second
wife. But according to Bahiyyih Khanum, Baha'u'llah stood back. He
intentionally did not forbid `Abdu'l-Baha from marrying again, saying
in effect, "If He wishes to do so, He may. Nothing stands in His way."
The Master, having the decision left to Himself alone, interpreted the
clause in the Aqdas allowing two wives max as effectively enjoining
monogamy since it said that the second marriage was conditional upon
peace and harmony.

Why all this sidestepping? Why was polygamy not just directly
forbidden in the Book? Clearly, there is a lesson, one especially
aimed at men, at men as fathers and heads of families. Our exemplar
had His chance, a decision was laid on His shoulders alone, and He
made it. He could have taken a second spouse legally and answered
expediency with a chance at a male heir. He freely elected not to and
was no doubt upbraided by some of those concerned.

So, now that the legal system in the West has swung around to give men
a similar choice, we all know for most men most of the time this is
not a real choice at all. Pick the ball and chain behind curtain
number one, or free sex without a hint of moral strings behind curtain
number two. Given that freedom, who can be surprised when pews empty
out and bleachers and porn sites are packed to the brim? Not
surprising that indicators of men shirking all unpleasant duties are
everywhere, top to bottom. One example on top is especially hard to
ignore, how a certain leader started his administration paying lip
service to a "culture of responsibility" (several decades after Shoghi
Effendi called this the "age of responsibility"), yet ignored cheap
and simple preventive measures that would have averted the flooding of
New Orleans. A city poor and largely Black, an unpleasant burden
ignored by the slacker father of the world's wealthiest nation, the
reverse of the virility and manliness shown by the Exemplar.

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com

Crime of Millennium

Solving the Crime of the Millennium

By John Taylor; 18 September, 2005

In the slightly more than three decades since I became a Baha'i in the
spring of 1973 the crime of the millennium took place. We have all
read the shocking statistics. We hear them over and over. For example,
the difference between the lowest to the highest paid worker in the
average American corporation went from a ratio of about thirty to one
to hundreds to one, and now it must be over a thousand to one. Nobody
literally put a gun to anyone else's head or even broke any laws but
this transferal of wealth surely dwarfs all violent crimes by all
criminals for all time.

How could such an injustice happen? How did we go from inequity that
is merely obscene to injustice that is truly exponential, astronomic,
out of the realm of conception? How did it come about so quickly, in
less than a single generation, and so easily, without a sign of
struggle or violent upheaval? And most of all, how could this economic
humping occur in an age when legal and moral equality were the
universal concern? The word "equality" was on everybody's lips, it was
laid out on every op-ed page in every newspaper ever since I can
remember. There was endless discussion of equality between men and
women, between the races, between this and that, but all the while in
economics equality squirted up like an ornamental fountain. Real
wealth and power bled out of the middle, out of the bottom, up, up and
away, and now literally billions of people are dirt poor, so indigent
that they must leave their babies to die off by the dozens every
second from easily preventable diseases while a tiny few swim in
funds, pulling the strings of more concentrated wealth than past
generations could have imagined existing even in their wildest dreams.
How did this happen?

I think that the solution to the crime of the millennium is right
before our eyes. It is to be found in the very nature of equality
itself. The quack cure prescribed in our time is not a cure, it is the
disease itself. The fundamental contagion of equality is the balance
of nature. How is nature the problem? Well, John Lock, among others,
held that it is man's nature to desire equality as our natural state.
We all want one equal right with all other human beings -- the right
to be left alone. He said that equality is for one and all,

"a state of perfect freedom to order their actions ... without asking
leave or depending upon the will of any other man." (Locke, Second
Treatise, p. 4)

What is wrong with that, you ask? Does not Baha'u'llah define justice
as seeing with your own eyes, knowing with your own knowledge? Is not
equality and independence from others a big part of the Baha'i
principle of search for truth?

Actually, there is a crucial difference here.

Lock's equality is one of action, Baha'u'llah's equality is of
thought. `Abdu'l-Baha taught that the reality (not the nature but the
reality) of man is his thought. It is not outer actions that matter
but the inner life, the heart. As long as we confine equality to the
freedom to order thoughts, not outer actions but invisible, spiritual
desires and thoughts -- then not having to "ask leave or depend upon
the will of any other man" will be a very good thing, our salvation,
complete paradise.

But think about it. What happens when equality extends outwards, into
action? What if everybody left everybody else alone, as natural,
Lockean equality dictates? What happens when one stops "asking leave
or depending upon the will of any other man?" Why, death, sudden
collapse. Unlike animals, humans depend wholly upon one another for
all of our goods and benefits. This is obvious.

While the generality sink in the mud of their own equality, a few are
propelled upwards to extreme profit. Without consciously planning it,
a policy of divide and rule comes into being, created by our concern
for equal rights itself. The Master pictured the result:

"A financier with colossal wealth should not exist whilst near him is
a poor man in dire necessity. When we see poverty allowed to reach a
condition of starvation it is a sure sign that somewhere we shall find
tyranny." (Abdu'l-Baha, Paris Talks, 153)

Again, compare Baha'u'llah's words: "The heaven of divine wisdom is
illumined by the twin luminaries of consultation and compassion," with
Lock's definition: "perfect freedom to order their actions ... without
asking leave [consultation] or depending upon the will [compassion, or
feeling as one] of any other man." Here is where the theft, the crime
of the millennium, was conceived and nurtured. Equality was carried to
its natural consequences in outward things, inner energy and vitality
evaporated and wealth, the sign among us of God's ability to serve,
act and benefit creation, dissipated, squirted upwards and away.
Hearts and thoughts concerned only with material equality grabbed at
the forbidden fruit but held only powerlessness. We were cast out of
the garden.

The Master, like Sherlock Holmes, uncovered the perpetrator of the
crime of the millenium in 1913, while it was in its early stages. He
prescribed a perfect structural solution, one both personal and
scientific, one born of both luminaries of wisdom, consultation and
compassion. The few must feel compassion and act for true, inner
equality by coming together to consult and find permanent ways of
ending structural economic injustice. The Master said in Paris:

"Men must bestir themselves in this matter, and no longer delay in
altering conditions which bring the misery of grinding poverty to a
very large number of the people. The rich must give of their
abundance, they must soften their hearts and cultivate a compassionate
intelligence, taking thought for those sad ones who are suffering from
lack of the very necessities of life." (Abdu'l-Baha, Paris Talks, 153)

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com

Fear Factor

Bailey, Coincidence and Fear Factor

By John Taylor; 17 September, 2005

The Master said that we should be ready to begin our education again
at the drop of a hat, and I try to abide by that. Sometimes it seems
very hard to be so open minded when you are tripped up so often in
basic worldviews. For instance, I just read Michael Creighton's
potboiler -- his are the kind of novels that are ideal for me; they
could be summed up as "Plato's Socrates meets James Bond." It trashes
a number of the most cherished presuppositions held by
environmentalists, and by just about anybody else who opens their
mouth about environmental issues.

According to Creighton, and he documents his points with ample
scientific studies, there is little reason to accept the received idea
that global warming is fast upon us. In fact, the scientific evidence
is pretty strong that the world's climate is getting cooler. Be that
as it may, Creighton's main point is one that I agree with heartily,
that we have a long way to go before we could call this a scientific
society.

Our science is badly corrupted, and to purify it we must take radical
measures so that scientific funding will be "double blind," in the
same way that scientific experiments are only considered valid when
they are controlled and blind. That is, scientists should not be aware
of who is paying for their studies. As soon as you know who is paying
the piper, it biases your vision and skews your results. We all want
to be responsible in managing our environment but we have a huge leap
to arrive anywhere near true integrity, both on the part of
specialists and by the general public.

What is happening instead of genuine inquiry is fear mongering on a
huge scale. While it is obvious that we need restraint and wisdom in
dealing with the natural world, too often environmental advocates rely
upon faulty evidence, "projections" of current trends that are,
objectively speaking, ridiculously unreliable. This does not help
their argument; it only weakens their own side and intensifies an
already badly politicized arena of discussion. Of course, Creighton
himself could be accused of fear mongering, since his previous novel
was full of dire warnings about the potential dangers of
nano-engineering. I guess, like Socrates, his service is to act as a
goad or gad-fly, a bug that challenges our imitation and vain
illusions; he pushes out of stale presuppositions and prompts us to
rethink things, to investigate reality with new eyes.

Another upset and change of thinking for me came with something
new-for-me that the Master said about the nature of coincidence and
chance occurrences. It is in an early Baha'i book that I had not until
now read from cover to cover, though parts are often cited in
secondary sources. This is "Daily Lessons" by Helen Goodall. I'll cite
the passage that threw me for a loop in full at the end of this essay,
so that you can judge for yourself. It is "pilgrim's notes" rather
than scriptural but seems to jibe with other things He said. It is
challenging to my day to day presuppositions, more perhaps than what
Creighton says in his novel.

I read this passage for the first time last night, not long after
taking the kids to the Youth Center for an evening's entertainment.
The Center had advertised a "fear factor" birthday party on their
window, and though our attendance has been irregular of late, both
Silvie (11) and Thomas (6) were interested in trying out this novel
kind of celebration. I had forgotten to bring my camera and stood
around without much to do as the large bunch of children and three or
four youths went through the trials.

First Bruce, the coordinator, broke them up into four teams and set
the four trials. The first went like this: each team threw two dice
twice, the first determined the number of gummy bears and the second
the number of gummy worms. The second throw decided which of the four
sauces would go with their repast: ketchup, vinegar or mustard. One
team representative had to eat what was on their team's plate, hands
behind the back. Silvie and Thomas stood well in back and were not
chosen.

The second trial was for a girl team member to reach into a can of dew
worms and pull one out and put it on the table tennis table, the
longest worm being the winner. Silvie still hung back, and Thomas was
nowhere to be seen. Part two of this was for another member to hold a
worm on their nose, the one whose worm stays there the longest being
the winner. To my surprise, Silvie took the worm on her nose for this,
and kept it there until it was clear that hers and one other boy's
worm was there for the long term, so it was declared a tie between
them. Her comment was, "Well, it was better than having to eat the
worm."

Fear factor challenge number three was to eat soggy, water soaked
white bread. I personally find this act so disgusting that I did not
even want to watch what was going on. So I sat down by the big pool
table to rest my tired legs. A player there challenged me to a game of
billiards, but I said I do not play. Then a chatty 17 year old girl in
a wheelchair by the name of Bailey started a conversation with me.

"How many days do you get the kids this weekend?" she asked.

"Um, I get them every day, I am not divorced."
Lucky me. Bailey then shared the fact that she had been trying to get
a hold of her boyfriend on her cell all evening, leaving 17 messages
for him.

"Somebody might think that I am obsessed."

I really did not want to know but I did anyway. It transpired that
this boyfriend was Steve, a guy in a scooter I have seen around the
Youth Center quite a bit. The difference between a wheelchair and a
scooter seems to be in size and power; both are run by electric
motors. Steve seems more paralyzed than Bailey. He is a born-againer
but Bailey is as yet undecided about what her faith will be. I told
her I am a Baha'i but I had to repeat the word several times over the
noise of a room full of fear factoring kids. As often happens to me,
she did not seem to grasp what I was talking about, whether I was
naming a religion or a kind of disease. Since that was the direction
she wanted to go, I mentioned that I am disabled by migraine.

"Migraine and what else?" she asked.

"It is enough," I replied.

I did not want to get into more detail about my condition, lest I
sound even crazier than I already did. Lately, for example, I have
been staving off migraine attacks by filling my belly with water. Not
that I am complaining, it works, and you cannot say that it is too
expensive a therapy. It is just that it sounds strange if you mention
it to a stranger. A big electric wheelchair is simpler and more
eloquent to the uninitiated.

By then the kids were performing a relay race where they had to push
another team member's shoe across the floor with their nose. That did
not seem so bad to me. I'd do that, no problem. I just cannot abide
soggy bread. Bailey was the opposite, soggy bread she'd do, but none
of the others. She kept repeating, "That is morally wrong." It seemed
to me that the trials were chosen specifically not to be morally wrong
or dangerous, just as tasteless and repulsive; but I did not want to
get into that kind of hairsplitting discussion. I tried to invite her
to our monthly Baha'i meetings at the library, but she did not
understand, or hear, or both. I then said goodbye, rounded up the kids
and went home.

When I read what the Master said about "there are no coincidences," I
wondered about my meeting with Bailey. Was that a coincidence? Was
there a meaning? Would there be consequences from that meeting or was
it just another fruitless meeting and yet another name I will forget
in a week's time? I realized that even if I had the chutzpah to do so,
I could not invite her for a fireside in our home because our house is
not wheelchair accessible. The only way would be to hold a fireside in
the garage; not out of the question, we could have a movie night in
with a video projected on the inside of the garage door.

from: Daily Lessons Received at Akka, January 1908, Helen S. Goodall
and Ella Goodall Cooper, Bahai Publishing Trust, Wilmette, Illinois
60091, Rev. Ed., 1979

p20
ACCIDENTAL HAPPENINGS

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 a chill in the feet which is felt in
the head, a disagreeable odor which affects the whole system, or
trifles (which are endless,

p21

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.

Referring to the Tablet sent to Mr. Dealy previous to the flood and
hurricane at Fair Oaks, Alabama: "Be not grieved if the clouds of the
Violation of the Covenant are condensed in those regions."

Question: Are great calamities like this flood, the San Francisco
earthquake, etc., caused by the wickedness of the people?

Answer: It belongs to the lesson of yesterday.

Events like these happen because of the connection between the parts
of the universe, for every small part has connection with every great
part, and what affects one affects the other or all the others.

On account of this connection, the actions of man have effect.
Whenever a promise is broken, it causes a commotion. For instance,
suppose two nations have a disagreement. It is a difference in ideas
only, and not a physical thing, not anything we can touch or see; yet
this disagreement has a physical effect. It causes war, and thousands
of men are cut in pieces. So, when man breaks his promise to God, in
other words when he "violates the Covenant," the effect is physical,
and calamities appear.

A man may be condemned to death because he is a

p21

murderer, another because he is a thief, another may be punished for
many different kinds of crimes, but Jesus Christ was put to death
because He wished to become a sacrifice, so there are other causes of
calamity.

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com

More on the Master's First Talk

Deeper Meanings Under the Floorboards of the Master's First Talk

By John Taylor; 16 September, 2005

The best public talks I have ever heard have one thing in common, the
speaker seems assiduously to be consulting not mind or memory but
their own spirit during the discussion -- in the same way that another
might look up and down from a page of partially memorized notes. In
the Master's first talk in London He describes what goes on during
such communication:

"The sea of the unity of mankind is lifting up its waves with joy, for
there is real communication between the hearts and minds of men. The
banner of the Holy Spirit is uplifted, and men see it, and are assured
with the knowledge that this is a new day." (ABL, 19)

This assurance of oneness is what you feel when such an inspired
speaker reaches out and touches the heart. This is what the Master did
before all the imitators: He started spirits communicating on a deeper
level than words normally plumb. Older musicians speak of this
happening, rarely, during the most memorable live performances that
took place in the course of their lives. It comes without warning,
they say, in front of an audience that is small and not only
knowledgeable but somehow perfectly receptive to the message in the
music. I had an experience like this a few weeks ago listening to a
taped performance of -- who else? -- Johann Sebastian Bach. I dropped
off into an interstitial state; suddenly the notes seemed to step
aside and there between each of them loomed a universe, an entire
dimension of spiritual potential. I saw what the Master spoke of when
He said:

"This is a new cycle of human power. All the horizons of the world are
luminous, and the world will become indeed as a garden and a
paradise." (Id.)

It is easy to forget the tremendous power that is placed in our hands,
qua human beings. That is, not as individuals, not as groups but as
humans, as mirror images of the One. The power we get in this "cycle
of power" is from the reflection, not from ourselves. Our brilliance
and luminosity comes of God, and the only way that we will turn the
world into a "garden and a paradise" is for the pure and just to
reflect the light direct from the source, the sun.

One of the inspired speeches that I am thinking of when I talk of
spirit speeches is recorded on video by Renee Pasaro. This Californian
woman as an adolescent had a near-death experience while in the early
stages of investigating the Baha'i Faith. Our community showed it for
our monthly public fireside this week and -- following a suggestion
distributed on the Net -- the chair of the meeting invited anyone
interested to Ruhi Book One, which deals with life, death and
afterlife in its third section. We had several Baha'is attend and they
seemed appreciative, though none bit the hook.

Pasaro's experience in the next life included meeting up with a Being
Who called Himself the "Blessed Beauty," who spoke of a people called
"the just," a people who are, He said, the hope of the world. Her
brush with death gave her new values, a holistic perspective on the
meaning of life. Years later on pilgrimage she saw a new building
being erected. This was the very one that she had glimpsed in the next
world, the seat of the Universal House of Justice. Here was where "the
just" were centered.

I was moved to go over Plato's Phaedo once more with the lessons that
Pasaro shares in this video in mind. For example, she testifies that
the means of propulsion, as it were, in the next world is love. If you
do not have love for God in you, you stay still. You are like an
astronaut on an EVA whose jet pack runs out of fuel. If you love God,
you progress, if not you are stranded, crippled, done. Also, she was
told a simple but essential truth: the pain and suffering that seemly
blight our lives is, from the perspective of the next life, to be
regarded as a great opportunity. It is not sad or tragic but cause for
celebration.

This is what enables the eye to see: if all before us were brightness
and light, Pasaro was told, the eye would be blinded. Conversely, if
all were dark and blackness, the eye would, just the same, see
nothing. In order to function the eye needs both. We need bright and
shadow, white and black, to discern all the degrees and colors between
the extremes. In the same way, spiritual vision requires joy and
suffering, right and wrong, both extremes and all the degrees between
in order for truth and reality to be visible to heart and mind. If all
were joy, or all were pain, spiritual faculties would not work. Hence
the Manifestation experiences the greatest suffering --not the least
suffering -- because He is bringing the greatest joy, the light of the
divine. Great light casts the darkest shadows.

Socrates in the Phaedo discusses the consequences of this insight at
length, explaining why he and all philosophers are seeking death all
their lives and yet shy away from suicide or other direct means of
wasting one's life. He accepted death at the hands of the state not as
a shallow political protest but as a spiritual act, a sacrificial
oblation, literally. The hemlock he drank then allowed him to pause on
the way out and give us a message that is essential, even today. It
seems meant by God to ready us for understanding Jesus and the more
abstruse and complex messages of the Manifestations that followed
after.

What was most unique and difficult about Jesus? I lately read that His
method of teaching by means of parables is unique to Him; there is no
record of any rabbi using this teaching method until Jesus neither in
the Torah nor any other commentary. In a parable, the point of the
story is missing. It sacrifices itself by vacating, fleeing. In a
parable the specific moral is gone and the hearer must supply her own
according to her own spirit. In other words, only the just, who sees
with his or her own eyes and thinks with his or her own mind will ever
get it right. It is as if the meaning of Jesus along with His body
were put up on the cross and sacrificed. Only the just, those going in
His direction, can grasp His meaning. `Abdu'l-Baha in the City Temple
continued:

"The gift of God to this enlightened age is the knowledge of the
oneness of mankind and of the fundamental oneness of religion."

One human reality, one faith in that One. So, the only way to be just
is to perceive and act upon this gift and sacrifice self so that all
will reach this goal, as Others did before us. This mutual sacrifice
with its meaning hiding its head in the next world is the basis of the
"real communication" that He talks of.

What the Master lays out in the rest of His maiden speech we will
discuss next time. Blessings and peace be upon you.

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com