I believe in God. All else is phenomena.

MORE PAGES on My Belief:

What is Faith

Journeys of Faith

Freedom to Believe

Baha’i Youth Program

History

Baha’i Study

Boundary Conditions are a part of existence. A reflective person will very easily realise the very tight boundary conditions of their own mind. They are the limitations imposed by our personality, our education and socialisation, and the access to tools that might stretch our reach. Regardless of these limitations, we are able to extrapolate from our condition, against the condition of our ancestors, and recognise that boundary conditions can be pushed back. When we push back the boundary conditions we find new knowlegde of existence. I believe that we can push back boundary conditions for an eternity. I believe that even as we push back boundary conditions for another 1, 2 or 100 million years, we will not come to the end of knowledge of existence. From this I recognise a truth in Baha’u'llah’s Hidden Words, ” O SON OF MAN! wert thou to speed through the immensity of space and traverse the expanse of heaven, yet thou wouldst find no rest save in submission to Our command and humbleness before Our Face.” For we will ever be reminded that from within existence we will not be able to reach out of the one permanent boundary condition, the reason for the existence of existence. And this reason is my definition of God.

I believe that God is and will always be the most alien notion as it lies, forever, outside of all possible experiences. I believe that the our infinite contingent existence must be at least an association of the whole reason (God) and in that way we are made in the image of God. I believe that within our existence we can constantly search for the best associations of the reason or what we otherwise might call the best reflections of God. I believe the Great Educators of the world from Adam to Baha’u'llah are the best reflections of God that we have had access to as evolving humans. I believe that their knowledge is the guidance to our better knowledge for pushing back the boundary conditions for eternity. I believe that as we push back those boundary conditions, every millenia or so, an especially best reflection of the reason will be able to manifest for our further guidance. Using the former best to work our way to the future best is the life of a human being.

The best reflection of the reason for existence that the human being can comprehend is the image of God that we can visit for ourselves. This image is an ideal us who Baha’u'llah calls upon “O SON OF SPIRIT! I created thee rich, why dost thou bring thyself down to poverty? Noble I made thee, wherewith dost thou abase thyself? Out of the essence of knowledge I gave thee being, why seekest thou enlightenment from anyone beside Me? Out of the clay of love I molded thee, how dost thou busy thyself with another? Turn thy sight unto thyself, that thou mayest find Me standing within thee, mighty, powerful and self-subsisting.”

Prayer means retreating from the cognitive attempt to reach beyond the boundary conditions, acquiescing to a submissive state, trusting in God (the reason and the image) for all of our known conditions.

I was an ardent believer in Christ up until my mid teens, I eventually couldn’t believe that Jesus meant anything. It has only been through Baha’u’llah’s writings that I have come to an understanding that Christ, like all the Great Educators of Humanity, did not teach a doctrine of physicality or material. Chief among the evidence is Jesus responses to the temptation from the devil which tell a lot about Jesus mission and His being and the relevance of physicality and material to Him. The circumstances of his being seen as the Messiah and the rejection of this by the Judaic priests point to Jesus’ subversion of the philosophy of physicality and material.

It is difficult to see Jesus as a threat to the status quo of the time. He refused material kingship. He was simply a threat to the ideology of the time. His death was a cup he had to bear for the mission of God that he carried. It was not for an immediate material outcome but for a longer term outcome. Jesus lived on because he died. The Jews don’t belive in an afterlife that was at the heart of Jesus teachings. Jesus had not offered to protect Peter his ‘rock’ in the material world, probably a place in heaven by His side as he offered the dying criminal. Peter may have recanted out of fear that that was no afterlife to die for. A complete loss of faith.

We know from the gospel that no-one saw anything to do directly with the resurrection of a physical Jesus. They knew where Jesus had been interred. They also knew His body went missing. In some gospels he was later seen and unrecognised, in others he was seen and he recognised and then he encouraged disciples to spread His teachings. When they all came to recognise him they became committed to spreading His Word.

Jesus teachings and sacrifice have the same meaning prior to this recognition by His disciples. His physical presence would have meant that he did not die on the cross. His spiritual presence would mean that they realised that he physically died by spiritually lived. Only Baha’u’llah’s teachings helped me understand the fullness of the life, teaching, and mission of Jesus, and that through this mission and the perfect outcome of that mission that I came to recognise Jesus station. Then I knew that Jesus was the messenger, the prophet, the son and the God. And even if some archeologist finds the remains of Jesus in an earthquake-ridden cave one day, the presence of His remains in this world will not change for me one iota my certitude in His station, my love for His Being and Holiness. Jesus, for me, is indeed resurrected.

Baha’u'llah proves by His life and teachings, to be the one whose advent was foretold by His Holiness Christ. Baha’u'llah’s teachings on religion takes us from the esoteric to the real by providing consistent relationships between the spiritual and the experienced world. His direction to the spiritual world is enough to provide for a higher source and purpose for life than a limited material existence. Yet his behavioural and social teachings recognise contextual processes rather than ideological ones. The Baha’i Faith is therefore an organisation with a clear framework of purpose and endeavour that has the flexibility of a learning culture and the vision of long term stages of progress for humanity. The Baha’i Faith will come unto its own in a future era when there is elimination of prejudice, equality of men and women, universal education, peace, global systems of justice and security.

In contemplating the commentary of Mark Coleridge and PP McGuiness on Richard Dawkin’s book, the God Delusion, it occurs to me that this necessity of religion to move human thought onto a level of transcendence while maintaining its touch with the human reality is absolutely important for the survival and growth of human society. Rather than there being a tendency for humans to be religious, there is a tendency for us to come ideological. And falling into an obsession around an ideology is crippling to the individual and dangerous for the society. Baha’u’llah’s teachings provide clear lessons for avoiding the trap of ideology, superstition, and harmful behaviours from individual to governmental relationships.

At an organisational level, the Baha’i Faith has provided a number of documents that are aimed at encouraging societies and governments to move towards a peaceful and spiritual mode. The latest of these is called, “One Common Faith“.

Diaspora has provided the modern west with some excellent advantages to make a break with ideology because we have had to work with people from unrelated or antipathetic groups. We have coped with this and developed workable democracies but we are at a inter-personal and small groups disadvantage because we may not be as well ‘habitualised’ to matters of the heart as people who maintain 1000 generations long relationships. This points to one of the reasons we need Baha’u’llah’s religion for this time: we don’t know how to love well, and Baha’u'llah makes it our ‘job’ to work out how to do it better. And love is a many splendoured thing. For our local youth group I have begun using LOVE as an acronym to mean: Language Of Virtues Everywhere. And I think everyone could think of other aspects of love that we need to improve to make our communities and the world work better. I have not met anyone who loves so well that they are now exempt from trying. Yet to move this forward it is better to try to find practical solutions for showing friendship among the people in any group, than trying to change people. In fact trying to change people is a form of ideology which relies on the sub-text that “my personality, social approach, and view of the world is perfect and other people’s aren’t”. I’ll talk about the delusions of homo s sapien another time, but as we say in Oz, ‘that’s a hiding to nowhere”.

On the Soul. See the Baha’i Youth page for lessons from Baha’u’llah on this issue and a game I designed to provide an analogy of the mind-soul relationship but which also acts as an experiment for friendships and teamwork. My impression is that Baha’u’llah is at pains to dissuade us from prolonged and useless discussions around the issue of the soul because as individuals we do not have any direct personal experience, nor can have any direct personal experience of the soul and the afterlife. However, Baha’u’llah is also at pains to point out to us that this thing we call ‘reality’ which includes our brain and mind has very little substance. It’s purpose is to act as a training camp for the ‘embryonic’ soul. When the ties have been separated in death, then what our soul has achieved in its development, is its ‘baby’ form for the worlds that it will move through from there on.

Reincarnation is an issue that occupies the spiritual journey of many people. My understanding is that the final goal of reincarnation is to become of a higher order and not to be reincarnated. Well, that seems like a reasonable spiritual aim and why would a religion have any lesser aim? Reincarnation as a social educational philosophy has something to recommend it. After all who would want to be born back to the planet as a smelly beetle. On the other hand, the beetle won’t know anything about the bad things it did when a human, and when the human is eventually reborn as a human, doesn’t remember any of the reincarnated experiences, so there is little direct educational experience gained from the process. In other words it is as if reincarnation didn’t occur. Occasionally people claim to remember past human lives. I think this might be evidence of the eternal soul than evidence of the reincarnated soul. The eternal soul is a being that resides outside of time and space. It has association with our mind and therefore a communication can pass between the time-bound and the timeless. The Great Educators suggest that prayer and meditation helps this communication the best. Some people may have capabilities for special but still very limited access to communications of the soul. The soul, being unconstrained by story of the past or the future could communicate aspects from anywhere along our timeline. Communication can only take the form of the maps that the human brain already holds eg speech, visuals, know objects, as anything else would be gobbledy-gook.