Transcript:Ruhiyyih Khanum/Address to the 6th Annual Conference
| Transcript of: Address to the 6th Annual Association for Bahá’í Studies Conference, Canada (1981) by |
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[0:00] [Introduction by Doug ?] I want to extend a very warm welcome to Counselor Lloyd Gardner who's with us, and I think there are at least two other members of that institution, two board members, Stephen[Steven?] Aider I know I see and Sam McClelland is someplace in the back of the back here in the United States. I don't know if there are any of the other board members present, but you're very welcome indeed, and particularly so at this session which is to be addressed by Amatu'l-Bahá, a member of that same institution. The institution incidentally that has been designated as that of the learned in the Baháʼí writings. One of the greatest literary treasures I think that the Baháʼí community has is that extraordinary book entitled "The Priceless Pearl", just how great a literary treasure it is, how great a historical treasure only future generations will appreciate when we move some distance further from the age that the Guardian lived in and begin to appreciate more appropriately the magnitude of his station and of the work that he accomplished. But for any of us who are familiar at all with the job, the work of trying to write biography or write history, this book is a masterpiece. The task of seizing up a massive material on that scale and organizing it into a graceful and coherent and just whole would simply stagger I think most scholars. To do that when you are dealing with the life and work of a figure who combined, among other things in his life, a dozen or more careers that would have satisfied and established the reputation of a score of great figures, really must have made the job extremely daunting. And to have the whole thing waited as well with those extra imperatives that most scholars don't have of the authority that must inevitably attach to that kind of memoir by someone so intimately uniquely associated with the Guardian of the Baháʼí faith. Well, I can't conceive what went on in Rúhíyyih Khánum's mind when she attempted to cope with the job that she found herself addressing herself to. And I'm sure that, as I say, it's only as we move further in history from the figure of Shoghi Effendi that we will begin to appreciate the kind of scholarship, the Baháʼí scholarship that this work represents.
[2:49] I don't say anything about her other works: "Prescription for a Living", "The Manual for Pioneers". I will take a chance since I'm the chairman, I have a firm hold at the moment of the microphone of telling her openly how absolutely delighted I am with the particular piece of writing that she did and that's that beautiful memoir of Horace Holly. That is one of the most beautifully crafted pieces of biographical writing I think I have ever read. You should read it and read it and read it again, read between the lines. I know something about the writing of biography, I know how tremendously difficult it is to say things and say them appropriately with a life like that, and she did a really magnificent job. That's the side of Rúhíyyih Khánum as a scholar. There are other sides which we're all very much familiar with, and I wouldn't attempt to speak of those on this occasion, except to tell her that we love her very much, and we're very grateful for her. Amatu'l-Bahá Rúhíyyih Khánum. [Applause]
[4:09] [Khánum] Doug gave a very loving and warm introduction and it reminded me of the story of the little tailor. I don't know what people in this room were brought up on, but I was brought up, I think to my great spiritual advantage, and I mean spiritual on the old fairy tales. And you remember the story of the little tailor, the valiant little tailor, seven at a blow, and how high he went in society? I forget, I think he became the confidant of the king or the king himself or something because he made a great capital out of the fact of seven at one blow. But what he neglected to say was it was seven flies on a piece of jam bread. It wasn't seven giants he'd killed. It was just seven flies that he had swatted. So perhaps the introduction of my abilities is a little like that. [Audience laughter]. Doug tried hard 3 or 4 times up here, behind the screen of that thing to get out of me what was going to be my topic. [Laughter]. And I said that I didn't know, but that I was going to speak on what was dearest to my heart. And of course, then that made him all the more curious. He wanted to know what was dearest to my heart, and that is what I want to really talk about. And then later on if I'm still alive and up here we can have some questions.
[5:50] You know I have, and I'm very, very glad that I can voice these thoughts to what I would call a valuable audience. I think that this Baháʼí studies business, where is our name? [Laughter] I always forget it, I think this Association of Baháʼí Studies is really a very, very wonderful thing. And I think that the most wonderful part of it is that it is enabling the Baháʼís to tap different reservoirs of thought and get the Faith in front of people that normally we haven't been able to reach. And I think also undoubtedly, perhaps particularly amongst the youth, it is cultivating an ability on their part to study more deeply the teachings, to evaluate them and I hope digest and assimilate them into their personal lives. And I think all of that is wonderful. And we know that the House of Justice has been very happy over this thing that the Canadian National Assembly has started and has met with such a nice warm response from the Baháʼís in Canada. And judging by the audience, many from the United States too.
[7:13] But what I think about it is that it's an opportunity to evaluate all kinds of things in relationship to us Baháʼís and humanity because we are supposed, very unworthily, to be the bridge between the message of Bahá’u’lláh and the human race. Whoever is added on to us, they have the same privileges we have of teaching the Cause of God and of sharing the message of Bahá’u’lláh with other people. And because of that I think that certain thoughts, if you agree with them, if I can put them over in other words, might be of value, particularly in a body of this kind where we have many people who are on National Assemblies, Local Assemblies, Counselors, Board members, people who are interested in teaching the Faith, people who have been and will be pioneers and so on. And this is the subject that is dearest to my heart, which is teaching the Faith to the people of the world. You see we people in this room, and I am one of you in the sense that I'm half-American, I'm half-Canadian, I'm a child of the city, I have lived my entire life in the midst of Western culture and Western materialism and in cities. And we are inclined―and I can assure you that on some subjects I really do know what I'm talking about, and this is one of them. [Some laughter in the audience] That... [Rúḥíyyih Khánum reacts to the audience response] oh, no when I don't I say "Well, I'm not sure. It's my own personal opinion." But if I really know what I'm talking about well then I assert myself, and in this I do assert that we, without realizing it, as I see over and over again now in my travels because, as you know, I travel very extensively and the country that we came from last time, Jamaica, was my 135th country, and many of those have been more than one visit. Well that's quite a lot. And you get a purview of developments and of people's thinking and of the Baháʼís that you would not get just from your own community or one or two places. And I'm very sorry to say that everywhere I go I find this debate going on: what kind of Baháʼís are those? In other words, the illiterates, the villagers, the people who are enrolled quickly. They're called paper Baháʼís. They're called paper Spiritual Assemblies... [Some adjustment of the mic, comments about that, and audience laughter. Continues in the next paragraph in reference to the mic:]
[10:20] There's a dead point here, what am I supposed to do, bite it or something? [Laughter]. No I'm perfectly serious. The other day a young Baháʼí was singing a Baháʼí song in front of the mic and he practically bit it. And I said, "What's the matter with you?" He said, "I'm a professional and in my profession they teach you to bite the mic." So I don't know why this thing seems to have dead ends hanging around different parts. But can everybody hear clearly? Is it all right? All right.
[10:51] Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that there is a very marked debate going on in the Baháʼí faith between those who believe that people that are enrolled quickly are Baháʼís, and those who believe that literates, and people like ourselves in this room, the more degrees the better, the more education the better, that these are in some way or other, the elite. And that it's the elite that are the chosen. It's the elite that are the important. Well, that's not born out by Bahá’u’lláh. Bahá’u’lláh's doctrines are extremely interesting. I'm not talking about the wealth of detail of teachings we have and this and that, but I'm talking about his doctrines. One of his doctrines is that, He says "...all turned away from Him, except them whom God was pleased to guide." In other words, God is pleased to guide certain people to His Faith. He accepts certain people. Certain people are acceptable. Not everybody is either capable of recognizing Bahá’u’lláh, accepting Him or being acceptable to Bahá’u’lláh. And that is something that has nothing to do with your station or your race or education or anything else. It's something evidently that is a very subtle thing between the soul of a man and His creator. So how can anybody presume in any station of life to say who God pleased to guide to His Faith? In other words, who is to do the judging of another person and say whether they are a Baháʼí or not? Who is to sit and say, "This man. What does he know about the Baháʼí faith? He can't possibly be a Baháʼí with that much knowledge. Look at how much I know about it." You see. And you weigh him in your evaluation, usually of yourself and usually a very conceited evaluation, and you find him wanting because he is not according to your concept of what a Baháʼí should be, and what a Baháʼí should know to accept Him. But it doesn't seem to be Bahá’u’lláh's concept. Because His concept is that everybody in the whole world, at least reasonably and politely, should be informed of the existence of His faith, and then they should be given the opportunity to accept it, which is dependent on two things: acceptability in the eyes of God, and a capacity in that person to respond, which I suppose is fundamentally the same thing.
[14:08] This is a Xerox and it's not very clear. I'm sorry, I'll have to decipher. In fact there are going to be a lot of hiatuses, so you'll have to be patient. He says, "Our mission is to seize and possess the hearts of men. Upon them, the eyes of Bahá are fixed." Very extraordinary, you know He doesn't say a thing about the heads of men. He says, Our mission is to seize the hearts of men. Upon them, the eyes of Bahá are fixed. Well that includes the whole human race. There you get into just a quite a different category because everybody has this heart faculty. Of course we also all have an intellectual faculty, too. But evidently it's not the heads of mankind that he wishes to conquer. It's the hearts of mankind that he wishes to conquer. Having conquered the hearts, all right, then of course he wants to educate the heads. But it's a secondary thing. You see, the primary thing is to conquer the heart of the individual. Now that is something that has nothing whatsoever to do with education. I have had some experiences, which I think perhaps some of you have already heard, and at the risk of being boring for a few I'll tell the others these experiences because I think that they're very indicative of what I am talking about.
[15:44] We have in this century, at the end of it, developed one of the most horrible and unjust prejudices that the world has ever seen. And I'm quite convinced of what I am saying. We have racial prejudices, Bahá’u’lláh pointed these out to us after, all His revelation is over 100 years old, religious prejudices, class prejudices, national prejudices. But he didn't mention educational prejudices because they state of learning in His days had not reached the point that it has now. But I can assure you that probably, in my estimation, the cruelest prejudice, much worse than class, race, religion, even although we're being killed in Persia, and political and so on, the cruelest prejudice in the world today and the most widely spread amongst people like yourselves, is the prejudice of the educated against the uneducated.
[16:52] I see it as I travel in all the Baháʼí communities, not so much to be fair on the members of the National Assemblies. Very, very seldom a breath of it amongst the Counselors. But I find it in many of the pioneers, and I find it in many members of the community, a definite prejudice against the illiterates, prejudice against people who have not had the advantages of not only going through high school and probably university and maybe more than one degree, haven't got air-conditioning in their homes, don't live on main street, haven't got an air-conditioned car, are not in the financial bracket of the person that has the prejudice. Well I'd like to know where any human being can find this in the Baháʼí faith. It's so outrageous that it doesn't bear thinking about and yet, consciously or unconsciously, to be fair to the Baháʼís, I think it's mostly unconsciously, this is a prejudice that is not only rampant in the world but is also prevalent amongst a great many Baháʼís. And I'm sorry friends, you can have it right in the teeth, it's just as strong with the Persians as it is with the non-Persians. It's just as strong in one part of the world as it is in another. It is the prejudice of the educated, the intellectual, what they consider upper class against the uneducated masses of the people of the world. Well it's not only not Baháʼí, but it isn't born out by facts because it's a false evaluation of other people.
[18:45] I remember once in a news conference in the Ivory Coast, a very intelligent young group of journalists were questioning me and badgering me. And then finally one of them said, "How does one become a Baháʼí?" Well, I said "People like yourself, you become Baháʼís through asking questions and reading books, evaluating it in your mind, because this is the method that you have been trained through your educational background to do, to use." But I said, "The villager, where we go out and teach a great deal of the time, has no possibility of evaluating it on that basis. He evaluates it intuitively in his heart. And it's often an instantaneous sense of that 'this is right or this is wrong', you see." Now unless the Baháʼís will accept that, they're never going to be able, I believe, to serve the Cause of God the way they should. And I don't care whether you're all people in this very valuable kind of a gathering that we have here today, or whether you're people about pioneering or who you are. To me, it's a fact and you have to recognize this fact.
[20:10] You go back and look at the Baháʼís, as I am perhaps uniquely able to do from the extraordinary amount of traveling I've done during the last few years, you see how out of the intellectual class, from the beginning of the Faith in Persia and in the Western world, Europe and North America and so on, we have raised up very, very distinguished Baháʼís. We need them. We want them. They are very valuable. We can never have too many of them. If all the intellectuals so-called in the world accepted Bahá’u’lláh tomorrow, it would still be too little because we can use them. We want them, they need the Cause. And we want them to have the glory of having accepted Bahá’u’lláh. But that doesn't solve the problem of all the other people that are not of that particular background. They need to be taught and they should have the Cause offered to them. Now, what kind of people are they?
[21:14] Recently, Mr. Oule, as you may know one of the Counselors for Africa, been a Counselor for a long time, a villager who I don't know whether he went through eighth grade, had a very, very trivial position as a clerk in some little, little bit bigger than a village in Uganda up in the Teso area, and he became a Baháʼí as you know many, many years ago. And then he was made a Counselor. Well Oule came on the pilgrimage, he had managed, which is little short of miraculous as a Uganda farmer, to save enough money to buy himself a ticket and come to the Holy Land and come on the pilgrimage. And he was there last year. And as I looked at him, I know him very well and I love him very much. I said, "Here is a spiritual giant." Every time I looked at him, I saw him in giant proportions because that is what Oule has become. He has become a spiritual giant and we have others that have become spiritual giants from the same background. He raised the whole quality of the group of pilgrims that were there, his fellow pilgrims at that time in Haifa because of his tremendous spirituality, his profound grasp of the teachings, his love of the teachings, his wisdom. Well, if somebody hadn't gone 200 miles from Kampala and taught a bunch of farmers in Mr. Olinga's hometown which happened to be a village, we wouldn't have these giants in the Cause today. But these are not people that have any education. You see this is what I'm getting it: that we don't seem to remember that people who don't have the kind of background that the people in this room have may far surpass us at some point in serving the Cause of God, you see.
[23:26] Now if people like you well accept humbly that this exists and is a fact, then think how much good you can do. You can educate other Baháʼís to understand it. You can find all kinds of substantiation for what I'm saying in the writings of Bahá’u’lláh, the Master, Shoghi Effendi, the House of Justice. Over and over Shoghi Effendi has pointed out that from the humblest people, sometimes... I don't know whether I've got that quotation here or not, but I probably haven't because you never have the quotation you want when you want it, but Shoghi Effendi points out that even an illiterate can contribute so much to a discussion, say, on a Spiritual Assembly. But I'm sorry to say that even the best of Baháʼís are getting away from these thoughts because they're becoming snobs. "I'm educated. Oh well we couldn't have an illiterate board member. Good God forbid." And of course, thank heaven they cannot affect the voting because this is entirely non-political method of elections, so they can't prevent them from getting elected by a block of villagers onto National Assemblies. Last time at the convention in Haifa present, I don't know what the status was of people who were not present, present we had two totally illiterate Baháʼís. One was a Bush-Negro from Suriname, a perfectly exquisite person. He's in The Green Light Expedition. And the other was a villager from Gemeto in Ethiopia. One of their outstanding Baháʼí teachers, a member of the Ethiopian National Spiritual Assembly.
[25:20] Well, if I go around the world talking to people of distinction and education and tell them, "Oh you know we had a convention in Haifa. Oh, we're so important. We actually have an international body. We elected it. We had about 700 delegates in Haifa." So what? What about all the other conventions in the world and international bodies and delegates, and electing their supreme bodies? We act as if we were the only people that had anything similar in mechanism to what we have in the Baháʼí administrations. There is a lot of it all over the world. That doesn't strike people. But when I told them that two of them were totally illiterate villagers and voted by proxy for our supreme body in person in Haifa, then they were impressed. Because other organizations may talk about it, but they don't do it. They don't put it into practice. But we do. This is our glory. This is the way we demonstrate that we are the followers of a Manifestation of God and not some kind of, I don't know what, political or social or scientific or some kind of a thing organization. This is a distinction in the Baháʼí Faith.
[26:39] But to me we have the obligation of teaching rapidly, and I've said this a hundred times, and that's why I wouldn't tell Doug what I was going to say for fear he'd say you've said it all before. We have the opportunity now of teaching these kind of people of Baháʼí faith all over the world. You have quite a lot of them right here in Canada. You have Eskimo Baháʼís, some of them highly educated and I suppose some of them not, Indian Baháʼís. You have minorities that have come from different parts of Europe, political refugees, not only Baháʼís that are refugees but a lot of other kinds of refugees. Well, all right. Many of those people are almost illiterate perhaps, at least particularly illiterate I should say in our language. Well, all right, look at these fields for service. Look at what we can do by going out and mingling with these people and offering, for instance, to hold a literacy class. That would be very welcome amongst Asiatic or Polish or whatever it might be, anything that came from another part of the world that doesn't yet know English and wants to become assimilated into the culture of Canada, or the United States, or wherever it may be. All of these ways of serving our fellow men might be means of attracting them to the Cause of God without our necessarily pioneering out to the jungles of different parts of the world.
[28:14] But I think that the Baháʼís, really once and for all, have got to get this through their heads that although we want rulers to become Baháʼís, refer to Bahá’u’lláh's words, we want men of distinction and capacity and position and wealth to accept the faith, refer to the Guardian's words and the House of Justice's words, and so on. That has still nothing to do with the fact that we want the human race to accept Bahá’u’lláh. And that we have to offer these teachings to the human race without daring to be presumptuous and feeling that they don't have as much capacity as we have. As I say it, at the risk of being repetitious, I had an experience, you see if these trips of mine do any good, it's incomparable compared to what they do for me. Who do you suppose learns the most when I go on one of these trips? I learn. It is my education. I'm the person that has all these marvelous experiences. I'm the one that has a better understanding and has my vision you know, extended through these marvelous, marvelous experiences I have with other people.
[29:33] And I remember once sitting in a village way, way up in Otavalo, above Otavalo in Ecuador and we were outside in front of an Indian, Achuar speaking Ecuadorian Baháʼí, in front of his house, way off the other end of nowhere. And he was making a speech of welcome. So somebody was translating for me, and he went on, "We poor, ignorant Indians." And then he said something welcoming me. And then the next sentence began, "We poor, ignorant Indians." And then again the next sentence, the same way. And I said, "Wait a moment. Don't say anything more. Is that your house?" He said yes. I said, "Is that rosy-cheeked, healthy child running around over there your child?" He said yes. I said, "Are those fields your fields?" He said yes. Then I said, "Stop saying poor. Shall I take you to the slums of Chicago? The slums up my part of the world? Do you want to really see poverty? A poverty that is so horrible that you can't even conceive of it?" So shut up. I didn't say "shut up" actually. So don't talk to me about poor. Now, I said, "Ignorant. You mean you can't read and write, don't you?" He said yes, but I said, "For thousands of years, your people have managed their civil affairs, run their villages, rotated their crops, had a very good system of government. After all, it was the tail-end of the Inca empire as big as the Roman Empire, which we forget, if anything perhaps a little better. And you had all of these things in your background. So if you mean you haven't got book learning, that's all right. But when you say ignorant, you can't mean that you don't know anything. You have a great deal of knowledge and a great deal of wisdom." Well, all of these little Indians were sitting around like this on benches, and when I said this, they went like that. And I'm perfectly serious, they squared their shoulders. And that was one of the great moments of my lifetime because I realized what a beautiful, beautiful honey of inferiority complex our lovely, educated race is giving the rest of humanity, where they're all just hunched over like that because they're so insignificant they can't even sit up. But when I said that, they sat up.
[32:07] And then at the end of the meeting I admired a mountain in the distance. I said, "That's a nice mountain you have over there." And they told a very old beautiful Indian legend in connection with this mountain. And Raúl Pavón, as you know, comes from that area, He's a wonderful person, one of the Counselors, speaks [?] and others who were there, pioneers. They'd never heard it in their whole lives because the Indians don't talk about these things because they are beaten down with inferiority into the very dust. Well do you consider that that is a spirit in which we should meet our fellow men as Baháʼís? "I am holier than thou. I can read and write. I've got a degree. I've got five degrees. I'm a grand mogul of some form or other. Look at my turban. Look at my shoes. Look at my rings. Look at me, how important I am." I don't say that this is the way the Baháʼís go amongst their fellow Baháʼís because it isn't. Often, it's with great humility. But often, 99% of the time, well maybe that's a little unfair, 90% of the time, they are patronizing. You can hear it in the terms of their voice. You can see it in the way they conduct themselves in village meetings. And I think it's absolutely outrageous because I can't picture our Exemplar ‘Abdu’l-Bahá ever being patronizing.
[33:41] I remember a man, I've learned some wonderful lessons in my life which I'm very happy to share with you, I remember a pilgrim, Knight of Bahá’u’lláh from England, who came on the pilgrimage, and he was due, we had a rough idea that he'd be turning up one of these evenings. And before dinner, very shortly before dinner when the Guardian would come over to the Pilgrim House to have his meals, the doorbell of the Pilgrim House rang and Mr. Ioas who was handy went and opened the door. And he told me and his wife, and Ethel and Jessie Revell, and Lotfullah and so on when we were alone next time what had happened. And he said he looked out and here was this little shrimp of a man with um, very funny-looking fellow and a big turtleneck sweater. He looked like a Navi[?]. He'd had as a matter of fact, his profession had been a cook in a ship's galley and it was a very small ship you can be sure. And he was going to tell him to go about his business. He thought literally that he was just the bum that had rung the bell to get a tip or something or other. And then he looked at him and he said, "I'm so and so." And to his astonishment he realized this was the pilgrim we were waiting for. So of course they naturally took him in and showed him his room. His room was ready. And told him the Guardian was just coming over to dinner. And at the table, because of my Western ideas as hostess, I had put some ladies who had arrived, which was logical, they came before he did and they were sitting here. Shoghi Effendi always sat there. And I sat next to him and his other secretaries like this so that he could have all his guests where he could see them without having to turn from left to right all the time. So these people who came before this fellow, I had put them up here. And elderly respectable American pilgrims, and the Guardian came in with his usual swish and elegance and greeted this man very warmly. And then he made a royal gesture. He said, "Your place is here. You are a Knight of Bahá’u’lláh." So of course all the ladies immediately like mice ran down the other side of the table and made room for him. And he sat at the head of the table. And Shoghi Effendi sat here. And as I sat there after this happening, I thought, "Now look, isn't that just typical?" You had the standard of the world. You went according to your culture and your background, they were ladies, they got here before. So he was going to come third because he got here later and he was a man and so on. But Shoghi Effendi said, "You are a Knight of Bahá’u’lláh, your place is here." And he shoved all the ladies down the table, and this man sat there. And I marveled. I said, "This is the way it ought to be. This is the standard of God, instead of the standard of the world."
[36:58] Well anyway, this man was a very, very homely man. He looked remarkably like, what is it Sinbad the sailor? Popeye! Popeye the sailor. [Laughter] He did! Put a pipe in his mouth, he would have looked like Popeye. He had a mug in other words. And he didn't have much money, so he was very, not exactly shabbily dressed but we bought him a sweater while he was there because we didn't think he was warmly enough dressed. And he sat at the top of the table and Shoghi Effendi sat there. And he would put his arms on the table like this and lean over and look at the Guardian. It was just such fascinating and then he said, "Guardian, didn't you say? Guardian, didn't you say?" And his thing it would be that far from the end of Shoghi Effendi's nose. [Laughter] Well of course, I had never seen that before and Shoghi Effendi had his arms on the table too, which I also hadn't seen before. And he was leaning over towards this man beaming, absolutely beaming, enthralled. And laughing and smiling and talking to him and joking with him. And there was really a might say a love affair. I remember we had some soup, I think he must have been left-handed because I can remember to this day, and this was 35 years ago, so the soup spoon and we had soup and he had this soup spoon like this, and he was looking at Shoghi Effendi and he got it almost up to his ear. I thought, "In one more minute, he's going to pour this soup in his ear." And I sat there, "Oh God, oh God, oh God!" You see. And finally he looked at this soup spoon with very great surprise and put it in his mouth so that catastrophe was averted.
[39:08] Now, the interesting thing is that every night when Shoghi Effendi and I went back to his house, which is across the street, the Master's house, he said every single time, "Oh, I like that man so much. He's such a fine man. I like him so much." He very seldom said that, I assure you, couldn't squeeze anything out of the Guardian he didn't want to say. Absolutely impossible. I can remember his showering, like this case, an extraordinary amount of praise on this particular Knight of Bahá’u’lláh. And another pair of Knights of Bahá’u’lláh, and even though one of the council members said, hoping to get a remark out of the Guardian that you know they're Knights of Bahá’u’lláh, Shoghi Effendi silence. And he was very fond of that couple but he just didn't feel like emphasizing that they were Knights of Bahá’u’lláh. Maybe they didn't need it. But the point is that this was the way Shoghi Effendi saw things. He saw in the value of reality, and no other value had any meaning for him.
[40:22] I can remember many times in my life Shoghi Effendi saying that he hated ambition. And there are some words of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá saying ambition is an abomination before the Lord. Well that's pretty strong language. Now I don't think that this meant ambition in the sense of a normal desire to do your work properly, to carry on your affairs as you should in service to the Cause of God. I don't think it meant anything like that, to excel for instance in whatever your profession was or your specialty was. I don't think it was in that sense of ambition, but ambition which we all know has a very unpleasant connotation. You know, "get out of my way, I'm headed for the top" sort of thing, or "Who are you?" or "I'm the one that's important". In this sense of ambition, Shoghi Effendi literally hated it and he couldn't stand ambitious people. And if somebody turned up that had this characteristic, it was with difficulty that he could control his aversion to it. It was so strong in the Guardian. He considered it a perfectly horrible human characteristic. And I don't know why we shouldn't know that. It happens to be true you see. And no reason why we should be blind to such things.
[41:57] We have had, over and over again, examples in the Cause of God of how the little people have risen up in the Faith and been a tremendous value in serving. For instance, one of the Baháʼí poets, the Persians here will remember him, Salman, the barber of Bahá’u’lláh who used to carry His letters back and forth on foot. His postman walked four months to Persia and go around delivering the mail and carrying, getting ahold of some more letters addressed to Bahá’u’lláh, walk four months back to the Holy Land and deliver them to Bahá’u’lláh and take the mail back again and so on. You see? And he wrote the most, he was illiterate, but he wrote the most beautiful poems. I see there's some writing of Faizi there. And some of my happiest and dearest recollections in my life in Haifa after the passing of the Guardian, the days of the Hands was sitting on the balcony in the moonlight with Mrs. Collins and Faizi and, I think, Ethel Revell and Alice [?], I remember. Anyway Faizi, who had this beautiful velvety voice, as you know, would chant for us poems and one of them was often one of the poems of Salman. We have so many examples in the Baháʼí faith, you see, of how little people with no social standing, no money, and no education have risen to such tremendous heights. Take for instance the praise of Bahá’u’lláh, the sifter of wheat. What a high station he attained! He was sitting in the market in Isfahan sifting wheat, getting the chaff out of it. Well that's scarcely a very highly educated profession. And then he decided to go and be martyred. So off he went to join the others and got martyred. And as Bahá’u’lláh said, "None of the divines of Isfahan responded to my message but he did." We have one of the descendants of that family. They're very proud of that name: Gandum-Pak-Kun[?], sifters of wheat, they bear the name as a family name, we have one of them serving the House of Justice as one of the secretaries in Haifa right now. You see?
[44:20] So my point is that whatever we do as Baháʼís, whatever line we take in life, let us get our values clearly fixed in our minds. I'm not saying that a professor shouldn't be a professor, but should go out and be a sifter of wheat in a village somewhere. Or that a peasant must come and be elected to a National Spiritual Assembly, or give a talk for instance to some non-Baháʼí institutions or something like that. That's not the point. The point is what goes on in our minds as the kind of Baháʼís we are in this room in relationship to a lot of other Baháʼís of a different category. And I think that we've simply got to understand this. Now, I like to, I'm no mathematician, in fact I'm a congenital idiot mathematically, and it's one reason that I can prove I'm legitimate because my father and my mother, neither of them had any mathematical sense and I have even less. But I do know that if, say, after the lapse of 1,000 years or whatever it's going to be, we have another Manifestation of God in a new dispensation. And this one's already run 138, you tell me how we're going to get the human race into the Cause of God if that's what we're supposed to do? You can't establish the order of Bahá’u’lláh as a working proposition unless you have vast masses of human beings. Because it presupposes vast masses. You simply cannot do it under any other basis because although there are loads of teachings about character in the Faith and individual redemption, it's absolutely useless to think you are going to establish the social teachings of Bahá’u’lláh, which are coming in the fullness of time, build up the Baháʼí administration which is supposed to evolve into the World Order of Bahá’u’lláh without millions and millions of people because it's the only way you can implement it. You can't possibly implement it with a small number of people. As I always say, you can't make bread with a little bit of flour in the palm of your hand, a couple of drops of water, and a pinch of salt. You can't make bread that way. Try it. Every woman knows if you want to make bread, you got to have a big basin of flour, quite a lot of water, and the salt, and then you have to knead it. And you can't knead a small quantity. You can only knead a big quantity, you see? So this is what we're up against with the teachings of Bahá’u’lláh.
[47:21] They're going to save the world. They're going to change the whole planet. They're going to bring in what He said, thy kingdom come, on Earth as it is in heaven and so on. And yet how are you going to do it if you don't have the masses? And how are you going to get the masses into the Faith if you think they've got to have some kind of a college education first or they've got to have some kind of a Baháʼí education first? Where is that in the teachings? The 20,000 Baháʼís that were martyred in Persia, Shoghi Effendi said that we were the children, the spiritual descendants of the Dawn-Breakers. That's in His writing. All right, what were they? They were illiterates. You think they were all Ḥujjat's and Váhid's? Of course not. They were the minority, tiny, tiny bunch of Mullá's up at the top of the ladder. Was the illiterate Persian villager that's our spiritual ancestors, not the educated ones. So that it doesn't hold, you see? We have got to get, I couldn't possibly say it more from my heart, we have got to get our values sorted out. And we've got to get things in focus if we want to establish the Cause of God or even begin to do it. And we're not going to do it unless we think, I think, along these lines. Now, what we do about it is another matter, you see. But at least let's get it sorted out in our heads because a great many Baháʼís either haven't got it sorted out or refuse to sort it out because, frankly, they're too prejudiced. They're too conceited about their Persian ancestors or their degree or whatever it is. And then who are these people? How could they be Baháʼís when I'm a Baháʼí, you see? That's perfectly ridiculous because from these people we're going to get our leaders.
[49:16] I remember Rufino[?], whom I absolutely adore, he also happens to be an Ecuadorian Indian about that high. Some of you met him probably. And, God bless him I don't know how many thousands of people he's brought into the Faith. So last time that I ran across him in Ecuador he'd been on a teaching trip with, maybe other people in that area in the mountains, and they had brought in 2,000 new Baháʼís. And then when they got all of these registrations home, they found, I don't know, a very high percentage was false names. Well, I was appalled you see. My background and my passion for accuracy and facts, you see, and my whole civilization and everything and training, my God this was terrible, I was petrified. Well I said, "What are you going to do? That's terrible, you see?" And of course they're afraid of taxes and afraid of things that are going to happen to them because they're so downtrodden that they think if somebody comes and takes any kind of a census, you see, anything they have to give a correct name they're scared to death. You would be too if you were one of them. So they gave false names. Accepted the Faith, that was fine, they were happy to become Baháʼís, but they wouldn't give their correct name. Well I said "what are you going to do?" He said "we will go back and win their confidence, and then slowly we will change the name on the list so that we get the correct name". Just as cool as a cucumber. Well that to me is the way to teach. That's marvelous.
[50:59] You know in this connection... somebody will have to turn me off because when I get on this subject it's very difficult to shut me up. I think that we greatly underestimate intelligence. And it's not perhaps, you know, subject for this particular moment our conference but I believe that all down the line in nature we greatly underestimate intelligence. I don't mean grey matter because we know all about you know, the weight of the brain and Cro-Magnons, and how we've got a better brain, Homo Sapiens particularly. But whatever it is, we don't realize that intelligence is a profound characteristic of nature, and I believe that even bugs are intelligent. I don't know about amoebas, I won't go that far... maybe the one that's attacking me at the moment is intelligent, too. But the point is that personality and a relative degree of intelligence can go right straight down, even to the level of insects. And I am absolutely sure of it because I'm extremely fond of animals and look at insects with hate and loathing and watch them and study them, and I'm persecuted by them. And I have seen it. If you've ever been exposed enough, you get a mosquito in your room, comes humming around your head. You make a wild swipe at it, miss it, of course, and it goes away and it doesn't come back until perhaps the next night. It's a stupid, cowardly mosquito. You get another mosquito that buzzes around. He's not going to take no for an answer. He will get you. It doesn't make the least bit of difference, and you'll never get him. And you see this kind of intelligence. You can see it in flies. You can see it, naturalists have observed it in ants and so on. We are so conceited as a species, as man, that we not only look down on our fellow men but we also look down on animals as lacking in intelligence when as a matter of fact I think they have a great deal more intelligence than we give them credit for. So why shouldn't we give people that aren't educated the credit for having sometimes an extraordinary amount of intelligence? Which they have.
[53:37] Sometimes I think that a great deal of our thinking is how to complicate the uncomplicated, and I'm perfectly serious. I see it in the administration. I don't know, maybe I'm crazy. I'm not telling you that I'm an example in any way. I'm only talking out loud with you, but I personally have never been able to understand why the Baháʼí administration seems to be so frightfully complicated. You hear Baháʼís on the subject of the administration, you'd believe that we were the whole United Nations and all of its departments, but it doesn't seem to me it's that complicated. Fundamentally it's a beautifully simple thing that Baha'u'llah thought out. Why is everything so complicated? Why do we constantly complicate things? Surely genius is simplification not complication. So if the Baháʼís who have the advantages of an education and higher professions and higher knowledge and everything, if they want to put that to use then why don't they try and see things in a simplified way instead of an even more complicated way than before? One of the things that I think is most... Bahá’u’lláh says, I had a lot of quotations here but as I said the light's very bad, I'm not sure I could make them out. "Thou must show forth that which will ensure the peace and the well-being of the miserable and the down-trodden." He doesn't say the peace and well-being of high government officials and university professors. He says "the peace and well-being of the miserable and the downtrodden".
[55:43] I don't want to take up too much time on this subject. I think that you got whatever point I was trying to convey, I'm sure has been conveyed. I'd like to share one or two thoughts that I have because, as I say, all of you are an active group of people that are teaching and giving talks and attending meetings and on Baháʼí committees and Assemblies and Counselors and Board members and everything else. There's something that bothers me very, very much, and I just would like to call it to your attention. You know the purpose of speech is to be heard. Now if anybody can defeat that argument, I'd like to know how. We developed speech in order to express our thoughts, obviously. But having gotten vocal then surely the whole point of speech is to be heard. But do you realize how little we teach this at any occasion in the Baháʼí Faith? I have heard more abominable presentations of everything in Baháʼí meetings by people who get up and swallow the end of their sentences, mumble in their beards, read a prayer so that I who am sitting here can't hear what this person is reading into their moustache or to into their shirt or whatever it is they're aiming at. But they're certainly not trying to get it over to the people present in the room. Where as the purpose of speech is to be heard. And the purpose of the prayer is that I should be able to enjoy it.
[57:22] There's another thing for what it's worth that I'd like to call attention to. And that is that people are increasingly singing Baháʼí prayers. Well everything sung. You buy a Chevrolet, you buy a hair blower, you buy Mazo Oil, it's all sung. There it is on the TV. "Deet deet, deet deet, deet deet, deet deet." You see? That's the way we market everything in the whole world today, including now, the Baháʼí Faith. All right, I don't mind that. Perhaps this is a period in which we have to do it so let's go ahead and do it with as much grace and dignity as we can. And fundamentally I have no objection to a Baháʼí getting up, for instance, and reciting a prayer and very softly playing a guitar or something underneath it. And I've heard it on a number of occasions recently, and it was really fundamentally dignified and beautiful. So that was all right with me. But do you think I could make out one single word of what they were saying? I mean surely the point of a prayer is that you should address God, not a mumbo jumbo. Then sing to me a recipe for I don't know, muffins or something. It doesn't matter what you sing if I can't understand a word of it anyway, you see. So if you're going to sing a Baháʼí prayer, let's leave the song part out because there's more latitude in that sort of thing. But if you're going to recite to song a Baháʼí prayer, at least make it so that I can understand it because the purpose of the prayer in a meeting is that I should also be able to address God through that prayer. I'm supposed to be creating an atmosphere, a prayer in the room. What do we have the prayers for? Do you think God cares whether we have them or not? They're important for us, their for our well-being. So make our prayers of whatever their nature is reciting them, playing them to music, make it in such a way that the people present can understand.
[59:40] And I think also that applies to the majority of the people. Increasingly where I'm traveling around I go to Baháʼí meetings and we have conferences, for instance, and I assure you let's say it's Haiti. National language is French. They can barely understand French anyway, because they speak Creole which is almost unintelligible even if you know French. So anyway they have some prayers and no human being can understand what it is that they are saying. But alright, that's bad enough. But then along comes a prayer in say Czechoslovakian because there's somebody passing through who knows Czechoslovakian, along comes a prayer in Japanese, and along comes a prayer in Chinese, and so on. No one in the room understands it except the person that is reciting it therefore again I am being deprived of this moment of communion with God which is supposed to get me into the mood, supposedly of a relationship to God that will begin my meeting and attract His blessings, you see, and it defeats its own ends. Now, I think that on some occasions it's a marvelous demonstration of the oneness of mankind to have these series of prayers in other languages, particularly if you're putting on a big public event. And I remember once in Seattle they had a beautiful thing, they had the people of different costumes, national costumes and they read the Baháʼí prayer in their language and the audience was tremendously impressed because it was beautifully done. But to go to a Baháʼí meeting and have to listen to five prayers, the one of your own language you can't understand because it's read so badly and the others you can't understand because you don't speak that language. I think it defeats its own ends.
[1:01:29] And I think the same thing is true of publications today. You see, why do we Baháʼís look at the world? Why don't we look at the teachings in our own common sense? You know I have for my age very, very sharp sight. I don't wear glasses. I read hours of paperbacks without glasses and so on, so I have pretty good sight. But I now am constantly subjected to menus in restaurants, Baháʼí pamphlets, programs, any old thing that is published in a print that is almost undecipherable. You see, this is a part of the illness of human minds today. People's minds and souls are sick. This is a reflection of it in our society because defeating its own end. The purpose as I say of the spoken words is to hear it, the purpose of the written word is to see it. And we're constantly putting out material that you can't read. Why? You can go back to the 17th, 18th century and get ahold of one of these tiny little breviaries or something or other that they were reading tiny, tiny black print, dead black against a yellowing page and you can read it by the light of one candle. And you can go out and be handed, as I say, a menu, or a program, or a Baháʼí prayer, or a whole pamphlet, you can't even read it with a magnifying glass, maybe you could decipher the pale pink, the pale orange, the pale lavender, the pail gray. I don't think that's the purpose of it.
[1:03:17] You know, Bahá’u’lláh said something that it seems to me could well apply to all of the things that are going on in the world today. He says, "...heedless that My earth is weary of you and everything within it shunneth you." I wonder how often in our remembrance of the Hidden Words, which I'm sure treasury for all of us, how often we remember those words. "... heedless that My earth is weary of you and everything within it shunneth you." Even the earth beneath our feet hates us these days. And I should say with very, very good grounds considering the way we're treating the earth. Anyway I think I have certainly, my goodness what time is it? I've certainly talked. You wanted me to talk and I've talked. And if you have any questions, I'd be delighted to try and answer them. Oh Wait, I want to add something else. No, no I can read this one, it's in my own handwriting.
[1:04:31] You know, years ago Shoghi Effendi was translating. He had a very precious book about that thick, and about that size, a loose leaf book in which he kept all the most important things that he had found in the Writings. And this was his source for so many quotations that have been published and quoted by the Guardian in different messages and of course obviously that was immediately handed over to the House of Justice. But it's tremendously valuable. And one day when he was translating he would read out loud. He liked to have somebody in the room with him, so I had the bounty all those 20 years of sitting in the room with him whenever he wrote or translated anything in English. And he read me these words that he had come across. "And if the Baháʼís had been occupied with that which we had commanded, now all the world would be clothed in the robe of faith." So I looked at him in astonishment, and I think it was about the time he was writing God Passes By around 1944-45, and I said, "Shoghi Effendi, did Bahá’u’lláh mean it?" "Well," he said, "if he said it, if he wrote it, he must have meant it." But I said, "When did he write it?" He said, "In Baghdad." You know, that's a very terrifying thought to me, and I haven't felt comfortable since, frankly, because I thought that was the most awful thought. "If the Baháʼís had been occupied with that which we had commanded, now the entire world would be clothed in the robe of faith." That is a sort of a universal failure. And if he said that in 18 - what, when was he in Baghdad? 18-?. Yeah, before his declaration around the period, say 1853, around then. Then imagine what he could say today. You see. So I don't think that any of us need feel particularly complacent about our services to the Cause of God because evidently, as a body of followers of Bahá’u’lláh, we just have not met the possibilities and not responded. Neither mankind, as I see it, has responded to Bahá’u’lláh, as it could have and should have, and neither have we. Applies to both them and to us.
