With Fire We Test the Gold II

A year ago I wrote a piece with the same title. Recently, a comment came to that piece that suggested this follow-up. The premise I was exploring is whether our own skills, the modern gold, become also our test. If we classify economic classes by: poverty is below basic need; lower class is basic needs but nil excess; Middle class is small to moderate excess to needs; and upper class is vast excess to needs, then we can apply such definition to our own skills. Many people, for example, have skill in excess to the job they perform. Many middle class people have excess hours. Is the spiritual test about what we are doing with our excess abilities and resources? Do we continue to add financially rewarding work to our time? Or do we spend that time in pursuits that build community and nation? What if the financially rewarding pursuits are also overtly valuable in building community or nation? Might it not be important to do other things, for their spiritual worth? I am not suggesting a clear cut answer. Honest exploration of the dilemma must be part of the spirtitual enterprise. The question then arises, how do we engage that honest exploration, with our family, friends, business and professional colleagues? What do we do when we see another person moving laterally in life, reducing their financially rewarding activities for human development activities? Do we discourage? Do we encourage? Do we leave to themselves? Do we use the opportunity to learn more about them and ourselves? Aren’t our responses to others also key to our spiritual development?
And I wonder, whether, if we are honest with our engagement, even if we can’t always get the practical answers to our liking, we find pathways and solutions that we never thought we would, and gradually engender a whole new economic system.
Which suggests in full circle, that our inability to view our trade, resources, skill, savings, from the spiritual perspectives, is potentially damaging to the development of trade, resources, skills, and wealth building.

Does God want our happiness?

It is often asked, “If there is a God, why would (He) allow such terrible afflictions on humans?” Even Sir David Attenborough  caught my attention in an interview conducted by Andrew Denton on ABC TV in Australia. He asked, “Did God invent that parasitic worm that only lives in the eyeball and makes the host blind?” What such questions are really conveying is that, if I , an individual person, had the choice, I would not construct the world like this. Even the banal movie, ‘Bruce Almighty’ was able to conclude that an ad hoc approach by any God-like power would create more damage than otherwise. But God is not God-like. We are God-like. The Creator is another  level of concept altogether. Perhaps thus our real discomfort. It is easier for some to become obsessively logical in an argument to ignore the meaning of God in human society. For believers it is easier to bring that God into a controlled environment in which rewards are meted to the pious and punishments to the conflicted. Yet, an honest recognition of the possibility of God would have to conclude that God indeed created the parasite to harm the human, the earthquake to rend buildings and limbs, the asteroid to obliterate the greater part of life on the planet. So, given that God has created a terrifying, destructive environment for consciousness to arise, for eternal soul to develop, does God want our happiness? I suggest that, on one level, this is again one of those illogical questions. What is human happiness to such a magnitude of power? On another level, it is learning essential happiness that is the goal for the development of the human soul. As far as we humans are concerned this is the purpose of religion, the purpose of the Great Educators of humanity, the Manifestations of God. Perhaps from another viewpoint it is only one purpose of God for this Universe, and one small purpose among all purposes for all existence beyond this universe. In otherwords the development of human happiness is one purpose among an infinite set of purposes that can be attributed to the creation of existence. For existence is not a place of the static. There is no place of happiness, love, mercy, justice. There is a state of better happiness, worse happiness; better justice, worse justice; more pain, less pain. Some eras will be worse than a previous, some better. Overall, the true religion is creating overall advancement, and that advancement can continue as long as the human being exists in the universe. For us, though, here and now, consider whether the presentation of Baha’u'llah’s teachings by His son, Abdu’l-Baha, an the achievement of happiness doesn’t provide adequate guidance to a happier future.

“Consider carefully: all these highly varied phenomena, these concepts, this knowledge, these technical procedures and philosophical systems, these sciences, arts, industries and inventions — all are emanations of the human mind. Whatever people has ventured deeper into this shoreless sea, has come to excel the rest. The happiness and pride of a nation consist in this, that it should shine out like the sun in the high heaven of knowledge. “Shall they who have knowledge and they who have it not, be treated alike?”[1] And the honor and distinction of the individual consist in this, that he among all the world’s multitudes should become a source of social good. Is any larger bounty  conceivable than this, that an individual, looking within himself, should find that by the confirming grace of God he has become the cause of peace and well-being, of happiness and advantage to his fellow men? No, by the one true God, there is no greater bliss, no more complete delight.
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We should continually be establishing new bases for human happiness and creating and promoting new instrumentalities toward  this end. How excellent, how honorable is man if he arises to fulfil his responsibilities; how wretched and contemptible, if he shuts his eyes to the welfare of society and wastes his precious life in pursuing his own selfish interests and personal advantages. Supreme happiness is man’s, and he beholds the signs of God in the world and in the human soul, if he urges on the steed of high endeavor in the arena of civilization and justice. “We will surely show them Our signs in the world and within themselves.”
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We must now highly resolve to arise and lay hold of all those instrumentalities that promote the peace and well-being and happiness, the knowledge, culture and industry, the dignity, value and station, of the entire human race.
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leaders of the people:.. have not properly understood that man’s supreme honor and real happiness lie in self-respect, in high resolves and noble purposes, in integrity and moral quality, in immaculacy of mind.
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The purpose of the foregoing statements is to demonstrate at least this, that the happiness and greatness, the rank and station, the pleasure and peace, of an individual have never consisted in his personal wealth, but rather in his excellent character, his high resolve, the breadth of his learning, and his ability to solve difficult   problems.”

(Abdu’l-Baha, The Secret of Divine Civilization, p. 2,3, 4, 18, 23)

Baha’i view of the cause of the universe

It would not be prudent for me to explain to any reader the following from the founder of the Baha’i Faith c 1870’s, “That which hath been in existence had existed before, but not in the form thou seest today. The world of existence came into being through the heat generated from the interaction between the active force and that which is its recipient. These two are the same, yet they are different. Thus doth the Great Announcement inform thee about this glorious structure. Such as communicate the generating influence and such as receive its impact are indeed created through the irresistible Word of God which is the Cause of the entire creation, while all else besides His Word are but the creatures and the effects thereof. Verily thy Lord is the Expounder, the All-Wise.”
(Baha’u'llah, Tablets of Baha’u'llah, p. 140)

Cape York Critters and Wild Country

Through Phoenix Functions, I have now taken on the job of co-ordinating an educational theatre production for the Australian Wilderness Society, to take into primary schools. The production is an exiting new direction for the The Wilderness Society, in an effort to greatly elevate the awareness of North Queenslanders to the magnificence of Cape York. Cape York is that large part of Australia on the north east of the map, that comes to a point. With a small grant from the Sunshine Foundation, we hope that we will have a trial run of the production before end of school year (December in Australia). The production will exhibit the Crocodile, Spotted Cuscus, Northern Quoll, Golden Shouldered parrot, the Palm Cockatoo, and several special environmental tracts across the Cape.

The Soul is out of time.

”Baha’u'llah, the founder of the Baha’i Faith, teaches that the soul is not an element within the physical frame of the human being. Rather, it is an elemental aspect of our being that has been created in association with our physical conception. Baha’u'llah teaches that this world ” is but a show, vain and empty, a mere nothing, bearing the semblance of reality. The soul “is a Divine Trust, and it must traverse all conditions; for its passage and movement through the conditions of existence will be the means of its acquiring perfections.” The reason for the existence of the universe is for the development of souls. The real world or the greater world is the timeless place of the soul.

The relationship of the physical being with the soul is likened to the mirror reflection of a complete light source. In this sense the soul cannot be anything but a spiritual entity. The purpose of the human being is to continue to polish their mirror to reflect the souls light. Another analogy for the soul and human being is that of the embryo to the womb. We must nurture the soul with the development of virtuous behaviour and spiritual understanding. Both of these analogies direct our attention to the effort that is important in spiritual development. In this spiritual model, it is not important the starting point or innate capacity of the human  being,but the effort given to improving the behaviour.

This is not a one way street. The soul is closely related to our rational faculty and assists in inspiration and motivation. Baha’u'llah teaches that souls that have ‘ascended’ provide the power for the nourishment of arts and sciences in the world. I put ascended in parenthesis because Baha’u'llah makes it clear that the soul is beyond egress and  regress, concepts that can only be attributed to the universe of time and space.

The insights of Baha’u'llah regarding the nature of the soul provides an alternative explanation to those phenomenas of the mind that evoke thoughts of reincarnation. For example, sometimes a person is endowed with the ability to ‘remember’ experiences from an earlier time in history; or a person may have a dream that many years later takes for in real life. These and many other forms of this experience, including my grandmother’s clairvoyance, can be explained by the communications of a soul that is essentially outside of time but could access information across time and space.

It might be asked, if our souls are able to access information along the time and space, why aren’t we all able to see back into history or into the future. The answer to this lies in our physical brain that supports the rational faculty. As everyone’s brain is different in capacity and functional formation, so the ability of the brain to access the information available to the soul can well be only potential in most people. In some few people, though, the capacity seems developed to a degree that they are able to translate odd strands. So what these people may be experienceing, is not their past lives, but may be their soul transmitting information about someone else’s life. Such capacity is also very limited, probably because it depends on a small part of th ebrain that has developed an ability to receive the information. So it is like looking through a telescope, very clearly on a very narrow range of the universe.

However, does it indicate a functional capacity that the human brain might eventually evolve towards. From an evolutionary point of view, that might depend on the value society places on such abilities. Abdu’l-Baha dissuades Baha’is from becoming overly interested with psychic powers because of the tendency for such interest detracting from the main game of developing the soul by applying oneself to the challenges of a wholesome live of relationships and service. However, as human society moves from societies that spend much of their psychological resources coping with conflict and egoism, to a global society that has the freedom to use its enormous psychological and rational resource on relationships, growth of knowledge, and mental abilities, we might automatically see people develop powerful capacities to understand the past and the future, through intuition, visions, advanced analytical skills, and insightfulness.

Ayatollah Montazeri Decrees Baha’is Rightful Citizens of Iran

From the heart of madness comes a courageous voice. While Baha’i school students are being regularly vilified by their teachers, refused entry to school, and the government policy is that Baha’is cannot achieve a university entry level highschool score, no matter how well they do at school, a fatwah has been issued by the Ayatollah Montazeri declaring that Baha’is in Iran deserve full citizenship rights. Here is a site talking about this fatwah. It has the whole of Iran on talkback radio. In his fatwah, Montazeri maintains his right to disagree with the Baha’i Faith, while claiming it is only justice to allow all Iranians full citizenship with the rights that come with such citizenship. I can only hope that this is a sign that Iran has the capacity to pull itself back from the brink of self-immolation.