Transcript:William Hatcher/Moral and Spiritual Development

Transcript of: Moral and Spiritual Development by William S. Hatcher

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Being in this lower position here because of my foot, but it's easier than hopping while I'm talking. I wanted to say that last year I had the privilege in the summertime of hearing Dr. Hatcher in [?] speak about moral development, and the subject of these two days is moral and social development. And he was part of an institute in St Petersburg that was working on this whole issue, and a number of very talented people were working with him on it. And he had shared some of that information at the course that I was at. I was really, really excited by a lot of the concepts, and I actually, over the past year, tried to put several of them to test and really thinking, trying to think deeply and apply them to situations. And they certainly [?] to be true and I was excited by the results of that. And the [?] Baháʼí Institute invited Will to come here and take part in a week-long school, which we're now having at this time, and I would say that there's the subject– I think what is fascinating is that the subject that we're going to deal with is one that is, of course, affecting the whole world. And many of you heard that the United Nations had done this study. They tried to determine why so much was spent on aid and so little had been accomplished, and the committee at the end of their investigation had concluded that what was really missing was there was a lack of moral leadership. So the whole issue of moral leadership and social development has become a really fundamental issue and there are people working on it really all over the planet. And I think the Baháʼís are really trying to contribute to that whole area. And I know that that's been a focus for Dr. Hatcher's work up to now.

For those of you who don't know Dr. Hatcher, he was at Lovell University as a mathematics professor in Quebec City, and he retired from that and has been pioneering in Russia now for a number of years and is serving on the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baháʼís of Russia, which we have a really wonderful little picture of here for those of you who would like to see it. And he's also had invited professor working with a Steklov Institute of Mathematics, and especially it’s in the research area so that's where his work is taking him now. And he’s still developing and working very hard on this whole issue of moral and social development so I'm really excited that he could be here, and I think that we'll find this a very stimulating occasion. So please welcome Will Hatcher. [applause]

Well, I appreciate Gordon's introduction. I appreciate the invitation. I'm just as happy to find anybody who's willing to listen to me [soft laughter] as I am to be listened to. I hope that we can address some substantial issues and not remain on the surface. And I would like to start by putting what I see is the following fundamental paradox of Baháʼí experience, which is the following facts. We know from the writings of the Faith that the Baháʼí Faith is the most powerful force that has ever come into human affairs. I can elaborate on that in a few minutes if we want. I'm presuming that you've all read these passages from The Dispensation of Bahá’u’lláh where Shoghi Effendi tells us, for example, that the Baháʼí revelation is the greatest revelation, single revelation that will ever come to this planet. It is greater than all past revelations, because it is the transition from childhood to adulthood in the life of humanity. And it is likewise has, he says, greater than all nor will future ages see it's equivalent, because once you've achieved the transition to maturity, then you don't need as much energy to maintain it. In other words, it's the transition from one phase of a system to another phase of the system that takes the energy. Once you've reached a kind of a plateau on another level, then it takes less energy to maintain this level, just as it took less energy to maintain the lower levels before the transition. And if we compare– well, let's just take the statement that if knowledge is 24 letters that all of the revelations from Adam through Muhammad revealed the two of these letters and the Báb revealed the other 22 letters. And the Báb in the beyond says that the revelation of Bahá’u’lláh that is Him whom God shall make Manifest is infinitely greater than His revelation, and His revelation represents 20 to 24th. Okay, 11/12th of the sum of all human knowledge. And Bahá’u’lláh’s revelation is infinitely greater than that.

Or look at the time span involved. Jesus’ ministry lasted for three years. We have only fragmentary accounts of 18 days of his life. The Koran of Muhammad, which as Shoghi Effendi says is the only surely authenticated holy book. He doesn't say that the Bible is not authenticated. He says it is not surely authenticated, which is simply reflecting the known scholarship on the issue, whereas the Koran is surely authenticated. We know that it's authentic. Other parts of the Bible may or may not be authentic. We don't know because there've been so much interpolation, copying, and so on - all of the problems with ancient manuscripts. Well, the Koran of Muhammad, as we know, is a very dense, a very powerful, very complex book, and Muhammad’s ministry lasted 40 years. And the Koran was revealed over the period of this 40 year ministry, but if we look at the volume of the Koran, it is not even as big as, say, the Bayán-i-Farsí of the Báb and that's only one of the Báb’s books. But to give some idea of the quantity of revelation, there is currently over 2000 pages of writings of Bahá’u’lláh published in English, and there exists in the archives in Haifi, 40,000 manuscript pages of the writings of Bahá’u’lláh that have yet to be published in any language. Forty thousand manuscript pages. So it is literally, as Bahá’u’lláh characterized it, an ocean of revelation, a continual outpouring. If we look at the length of the Ministry, we can say that the revelation began with the declaration of the Báb in 1844 and was closed with the death of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in 1921. So again, we have a ministry that endured, what, about 80 years combined ministry of the Báb, Bahá’u’lláh, and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. So these are a few of the indications of the relative power of the Baháʼí revelation; it is literally not in any metaphoric or symbolic, since it is literally the most powerful thing that has ever existed on this planet.

Now, I spoke in the beginning of a paradox, and the paradox is this: how could such a powerful thing exist and go unnoticed by the majority of mankind? How could such a powerful thing exist and even most of us Baháʼís do not feel this power or recognize its power? How is such a thing possible? How is it possible that this thing is so powerful and yet so few Baháʼís have been able to transform their lives significantly? All of the problems we know we have in the Baháʼí community-- I won't give you the litany of the things that different problems we discuss about the divorce rate in the Baháʼí community and everything. The fact is that Baháʼís clearly suffer all of the ills - I mean, in various degrees, all of the ills that afflict the whole of mankind afflict also the Baháʼís, not necessarily to the same degree or whatever. But in other words, we can't claim or we do not observe that the Baháʼí communities are in any way sort of magically protected from all of these mental, social, psychological, physical ills, moral ills that afflict the majority of mankind. We have no special status on the score. So how is it then that such a powerful thing can exist and be completely ignored by the vast majority of mankind and be, so little understood or so little used by even the Baháʼís, even those who have recognized that this power exists? So this is what I call the central paradox of Baháʼí experience.

And I think that if we do not reflect on this paradox, if we do not find the answer to it, then our faith is going to be extremely weak because at some point we're going to say, “Well, it's all a dream.” Another word that at some point we will say, “Well, you know, maybe it wasn't all this powerful thing. I mean, maybe it's just a bunch of writings by this guy in the Middle East 100 years ago.” And, “Fine, okay, there's 40,000 manuscript pages and everything, but, you know, where is all this power? He talks about the power, but where is it?” You know? So in other words, unless we understand very deeply what is going on here, it's quite possible that our faith can be severely challenged because we can lose faith if you will lose confidence in the existence of this power. In other words, one can simply come to the apparently logical conclusion if this power is so little apparent, then maybe it doesn't exist. Maybe it's just an imagined thing. Maybe it doesn't really exist objectively, this power, or whatever. Well, of course, the logical answer to the paradox is the fact that, yes, this power does exist. It is the most powerful thing, but the deployment of this power, the actualization of this power, has been made conditional by God on certain actions, certain attitudes for our own good, in fact, because it is so powerful. Because it is, in fact, so incredibly powerful this unimaginable power that if we had easy access to this power, we would misuse it. Even the best of us would misuse it, as some of the best of us have misused it. I'm speaking, of course, of Covenant Breakers, for example.

As you know, if you've read Taherzadeh’s book on the Covenant that some of the leading Baháʼís from the very beginning, the close associates of Bahá’u’lláh. I'm not speaking just about the family of Bahá’u’lláh, but some of the, really, lions in the Faith. The man, I forgot his name, who was chained to Bahá’u’lláh in the Síyáh-Chál became one. Mírzá Áqá Ján, who’s amanuensis for 40 years became a Covenant-breaker, and so on and so on. So we see that the possibility of the misuse of this power is not a hypothetical possibility. It is something which has occurred and which is occurring and which undoubtedly will occur in the future. So that's one part of the answer. That's one part of the answer. Namely, that if we had easy access, if we had casual access to this power, if we could just turn it on and off like you turn on and off the faucet, then we would in the first place not respect. We would not realize how great the power is. Another it would become a common thing, just like we know when we think about it that well, yes, radio and TV are very impressive things, but I mean they’ve become very every day when you could just turn a knob and get a perfect picture of something that's half a world away and all of this, you know, from all different angles, you know? Then pretty soon you stop to think, “Isn't this really incredible that I can sit here in my living room and, you know, get a perfect, absolutely perfect picture of something that's going on half, you know, halfway around the world?” I mean, it's incredible. And that such a thing didn't even exist 100 years ago, and in fact didn't exist during all the 6000 years of the [?] cycle and then all of a sudden– and the principles on which a television work have always existed so nothing has changed. It's simply that we have recently discovered how to relate to these laws in a certain way that allows us to use them.

So this powerful thing, which is the transmission of physical images over unlimited distances - I mean, after all get them from space, we get them from the moon, from Mars and everything else, right? So this powerful thing, which is the instantaneous transmission of physical images over vast distances, that's a very powerful thing, right? An extraordinarily powerful thing. It has always existed. That power has always been there, you know. So if you wanted to use the historical arguments and say, “Well, look. For 6000 years, we didn't have this thing, so we're certainly not gonna have it tomorrow.” Right? But in fact, there was a day when you did have it tomorrow, literally historically speaking it was from one day to the next that this technology became known and exploited. And yet nothing in reality changed. Nothing in objective reality changed. The principles upon which a television worked, an internal combustion engine works or whatever always existed as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá said. Man brings them from the invisible world to the visible world, but they always existed objectively in the invisible world. So it's the same thing with the Faith. The Faith exists as an entity. It has objective existence. This power exists objectively. It is not a subjective thing. It’s not an imagined thing. Its existence is in no ways contingent on our knowledge of its existence. I mean, even if not one single person on Earth ever recognized Bahá’u’lláh, the Faith would still be just us powerful as it is. Okay? This power is an objective thing. It is not subjective. It is not subjective. This is something we can discuss philosophically later on if you’re interested in it. Some Baháʼís have seized on the subjectivism that is currently raging in circles of fault as kind of an opening to the Baháʼí Faith, but this, in my view, is an entirely wrong direction. And I'm a thoroughgoing Platonist, and as a matter of fact, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, as we can discover if we read the Tablet of the Universe and a few other things, was himself a thoroughgoing Platonist. But of course, Bahá’u’lláh tells us that Plato got his ideas from the prophets of God that had come before.

So the Baha'i Faith then is this powerful thing, this power exists subjectively, but access to this power is conditional. We only have access to this power if we fulfill certain conditions. And so learning how to be a Baháʼí, learning how to act morally, learning how to be moral, learning how to spiritualize our life, making spiritual progress. Call it whatever you want; it's all of these things. It really comes back to the same thing. spiritual goal, spiritual development, spiritualisation, deepening, spiritual progress, moral development, intellectual development, social development, integration, harmony, unity, love, justice: all of these things are conditional on the fulfillment of certain conditions, so it depend on the fulfillment of certain conditions - so it's not any condition, any condition - depend on the fulfillment of certain conditions. It is conditional access. And so spiritual development then means learning how to gain access to this power. That's what it means. It means nothing less than that. It means learning how to gain access to this power. So the process is that first you have to know that the power there, I mean, so you have to go through the process of finding the Manifestation, believing in the Manifestation, implementing His laws and so on as it says in the first paragraph of the Kitáb-i-Aqdas. But we want to understand more deeply about what this process is. Now, what we will find is that not only, it is not just that we Baháʼís don't understand the Baháʼí faith; it is that mankind in general does not understand religion because mankind has made religion into something other than it intrinsically is. And so we participate in this misunderstanding in the way we relate to the Baháʼí faith. And so therefore we do not succeed in fulfilling these conditions. In order to fulfill these conditions that gives us access to this power, we have to first know what the conditions are. We have to first understand. I mean, we may have another process once we understanding of fulfilling, striving to fulfill them, but we have to at least understand them in the first place what these conditions are.

Well, so what is religion? What is religion? Well, I imagine that most of us would say that well, religion is a set of beliefs about God or a set of moral principles based on beliefs about God or whatever. This is the conception of religion as an ideology. There is also the conception of religion as a society, as a social entity. Look at it– hi, how are you? Look at it. Let's think about the discourse of teaching the Faith. We Baháʼís know that our first duty as Baháʼís is to teach the Faith, and the first duty of the teacher is to teach his own self. So let's look at our discourse about teaching the Faith because this will reflect what our conception of religion is. Well in North America, when we talk about teaching the Faith, what do we talk about? We talk about methods of teaching. We talk about closing the deal. The Faith is viewed essentially as a product which we are selling. The language of teaching the Faith is the language of salesmanship, and we concentrate as salesmen do. I mean, the product is already defined. The product is the Faith, whatever that is, all right? And we're trying to sell the product. We're trying to close the deal, and so we have contract cards that we, you know, give out to people and so on. And we try to get them to sign the contract and to buy the product, so to speak, and so on.

In fact, some of you may very well remember that Hand of the Cause John Robarts was professionally an insurance salesman and he used to very effectively talk about teaching the Faith using very deliberately the language of salesmanship. He used to use examples from selling insurance in terms of teaching the Faith. Of course, John Robarts did other things like pioneering to Africa under very difficult conditions, and saying the long, obligatory prayer and did a lot of other things which may have had something to do with who [?] other than the fact that he was a seller of insurance. You can look at all the insurance, the successful insurance salesmen who are not very good Baháʼís, and so one can understand that maybe it wasn't the fact that he sold insurance that made John Robarts a Hand of the Cause. Nonetheless, he used this language of salesmanship as a vehicle to express spiritual ideas. But perhaps some of us have taken the language and not gotten the underlying spiritual idea involved, but of course I'm not attributing this only to John Robarts. The language of salesmanship is the language of life, of culture in North America, the whole of North America is one vast bazaar, right? One vast– what? [audience speaking] Either way, either way you want, either way you want. Both ways. So I mean, every day we are told that this is a capitalistic society, free market, a market economy in which the value of everything depends on selling it, getting somebody to buy it. So this is de facto. I mean, I'm not trying to ascribe to you any beliefs that you don't have. I'm just saying I'm looking at the behaviour, okay? I'm just looking at the behaviour and I'm saying the de facto way we articulate teaching the Faith is the language of salesmanship. And this is bound to reflect to some extent, the way we look at the Faith as an entity, as a social entity which we are contracted to.

In Europe, the Faith is viewed primarily as an ideology in which you believe. In other words, Europeans are used to ideologies. The great ideologies of the last 500 years have all been developed in Western Europe. Protestantism, Marxism, and so on and so on. Fascism, all the -isms, all the great ideologies of the modern world were originated in Western Europe, which inherited this dialectical philosophical tradition from the Greeks. It also took the form without the substance from this heritage, and therefore, when you cut this ideology loose from its spiritual moorings that you find and say the works of Aristotle or Plato or Socrates, then what you get is hegelianism or Nietzsche or any of these destructive philosophies which can in fact justify anything, literally anything. So, anti-semitism as an ideology, not as an attitude but as an ideology, was originated in Europe,and so on and so on. Racism is a European ideology– not the ideology. The theory, if you will, that some races are superior to others was originated very explicitly by several European philosophers in the 18th-19th century of which one, unfortunately, was the guy– who is the guy? Gobineau. Gobineau who wrote first about the Bábi Faith in his book Les religions et les philosophies dans l’Asie Centrale which E.G. Browne says was his spur to studying the Bábi, Baháʼí Faith. Gobineau was a racist. He propounded this theory of the superiority of the white race and so on. Now, so, but this was not you know, you can't transfer this to the modern context. This was not intellectually disreputable at that time. I mean, this was not, you know. People have been shocked, well, sure. Yeah, no, this makes sense. I mean, look what we have civilization here and look what's going on in Africa and so on, so it was a very natural idea.

Now, what is an ideology? What do I mean by an ideology? Well, maybe I'll even write this on the board. An ideology– not that I write terribly well on the board. An ideology is any philosophy which holds that certain ideas are superior to human beings. Any ideas, I don't care what the ideas are. So that's my definition, if you will, of an ideology. An ideology is the belief that certain ideas are superior to human beings. Now, we can all agree that there are good ideas and bad ideas. There are true ideas and false ideas. There are helpful ideas and hurtful ideas. There are pernicious ideas and dynamic progressive ideas, but here, I'm not talking about the value of the ideas. I'm talking about the [?] belief. I'm talking about beliefs about ideas, not the ideas themselves. Ideas are beliefs about reality. I'm talking about a second order belief. I'm talking about a belief about beliefs. I'm talking about the belief or the concept that some set of ideas is superior to human beings. Now, once you exceed to such a philosophy, it therefore becomes permissible to sacrifice human beings for the propagation of those ideas. And that is exactly contrary to true religion, because true religion is not an ideology, as we will see. Religion is not an ideology. If we treat it as an ideology, then we have made it into something that it isn't. The Baháʼí Faith is not an ideology. Now, let me make it clear. I'm not saying that true religion does not have ideas or ideals. Clearly, the Baháʼí faith does. I mean we have the ideal of the oneness of mankind, quality of men and women, and so on. I'm not saying their religion doesn't have ideals, ideas - a philosophy, if you will - but I'm saying that religion does not hold any of these ideals or ideas as superior to the human being.

Well, what is true religion? Well, Bahá’u’lláh tells us it's in the Gleanings. He says that the highest thing in creation is the human being. He gives, Bahá’u’lláh gives a strict order of creation and in a tablet which is not yet published but which I have a copy and I've given a copy to Gordon and so on, and he may have shared it with others [?], which is fine. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá elaborates this much further. There is a hierarchy of values in reality. There's a hierarchy of values. The highest thing in existence is, of course, God, the essence of God. It is the one uncalled thing, and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá tells us that the first thing created by God is the primal will, or the Holy Spirit, if you will. And it’s this primal will that becomes incarnate in the Manifestations, and the Manifestations are, of course, human beings. They are special human beings. They are perfect human beings, but they are human beings. And everything proceeds from there. [?] I have to continue that here. There is a hierarchy. There is a structure. But in the gleanings, Bahá’u’lláh says, first you recall He says that God created all things. He rescued from the abyss of ultimate extinction all things. Nothing less than His power and might could have possibly accomplished this, and so on. And then He says that everything in creation reflects some attributes of God. Everything in creation, He says, reflects some attributes of God. But He said, the human reality, the reality of the human soul is that it has the capacity to reflect all of the attributes of God. And then He says, “Alone [of] all created things man hath been singled out for so great a favor, so enduring a bounty.” You know this passage. Okay? “Alone [of] all created things man hath been singled out for so great [a favor, so enduring] a bounty.” So this is a logical definition of the human reality. In other words, suppose we eventually did actually meet creatures from another planet who physically were completely different from us, but suppose they were obviously intelligent, we could communicate with them and whatever else [?] all these human beings are not. Well, I mean, we have here in the writings of the Baháʼí Faith a definition of the human reality which is totally independent of the physical world. He says the reality of the human soul, the human reality is that unique reality which has the capacity to reflect all of the attributes of God. Nothing else in creation. Nothing else in creation has all of this. So you can see that any idea or any collection of ideas can only reflect some of the attributes of God, so clearly any human being who has the potential of reflecting all the attributes of God is going to be superior to any idea or any collection of ideas.

Now, I'm not talking about here the idea of the human in the mind of God. I'm not talking about the human being as he exists potentially as conceived in the essence of God. You see, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá explains to us that there is no differentiation on the level of the essence of God. There is no differentiation on the level of the essence of God. So if like, if you will, that God is like the sun, [writing on board] God is like the sun, and the different attributes of God are like the rays of the sun, and if we follow the race back to their point of origin, they become one. They become indistinguishable. We meet at the point of origin. So at the point of origin, which is the essence of God, there is no differentiation. Truth, beauty, goodness are identical, are identically the same thing. Or another way you can look at it is that the sun generates a pure white light. Now the pure white light, the pure white light contains all of the spectrum of colors, so I'm comparing the spectrum of colors to the various differentiated attributes of God - goodness, justice, love, mercy, so on. Okay? So you cannot tell that all of these differentiated colors are part of the white light that comes from the sun until this light becomes incident on some lore reality. If I shine a white light on itself, what will I get? What will I get? White light! White on white is white. So if I shine the pure white light of the attributes of God on the attributes of God, this is the love of God for himself that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá talks about - Paris talks when he talks about the four kinds of love -, the love of God for his own essence, so this is the shining of this white light on itself. This is a dynamic process, but which is wholly internal to the essence of God. So, there is no differentiation on the level of the light itself. In other words, intrinsically the light is one. There is no differentiation within the light it fell. The differentiation only appears when the light becomes incident on a lower reality, such as on a physical prism, in which case the prism reflects the spectrum of attributes.

So we see that every individual created thing absorbs some light and reflects others. Why does this appear to be blue? Well, you all know that. Why does this appear to be blue? Because the pigment, which is a physical substance in this cloth, absorbs all the colors of the spectrum except the blue part, and it reflects the blue back. And therefore you see only the blue when you see this. So the blueness comes from two things. It comes from the fact that the light is white, that it contains all the colors of the spectrum, and that this physical substance absorbs all of the spectrum except the blue. Okay? This is the physics of color. So this is like Bahá’u’lláh saying that every created thing reflects a specific attribute of God. This reflects the blueness, and her shirt reflects the pinkness, and so on and so on. But the human being alone in all created things has the capacity to reflect all of the attributes of God. So the human reality is like what? Well, the image that Bahá’u’lláh uses again and again, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá uses, is the mirror. A mirror is - a perfect mirror - is a physical substance which absorbs no light. In other words, if it's a perfect mirror-- which of course physically doesn't exist, an absolutely perfect mirror, but we can construct approximations to it. But an ideal mirror reflects all of the light [?], right? It doesn't absorb any of it. When you look into a mirror, you see whatever goes into the mirror is reflected in the mirror. So white light goes in, white light comes out. There's no differentiation. So that is like the soul of the human being. Not a perfect mirror, of course. The perfect mirror would be the soul of the Manifestation, which is the first creative thing of God after the primal will, the soul of the Manifestation. And Bahá’u’lláh and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá tell us that everything else in creation was created through and by the Manifestations of God. So the Manifestations actually are the instruments of creation, for the rest of creation. Now, now, exactly how this process goes on is something which will obviously take years and years of study. I'm simply quoting from the writings where it is said that it is by and through the Manifestations that God creates the lower levels of humanity, of existence including ordinary human beings.

Okay, so the human reality then, has this capacity. This is the essential human [?] with this potentiality, because we have these imperfect mirrors, as we know, but we all have the capacity to reflect all of the attributes of God. Or let's put it this way. Sometimes, I put it this way. The soul, there are two ways in which human beings are the same and one way in which they're different. The first way in which human beings is the same is that all human souls are created from the same substance. Nobody’s soul is made out of better stuff than anybody else's. Now, it is not logically necessary that this be the case. In other words, this is God's intention, right? If God had wanted to create some souls out of a different substance than other souls, He could certainly do this. God is all powerful. I mean, we can't say, “Well, He did it because there was no other way to do it.” I mean, it's just not the case, all right? He chose to do it this way. Well, as a matter of fact, the souls of the Manifestations are created out of other substance. This we are told. Okay, because they have capacities which our souls don't have. So He could have done it. It is the essential essence, the essential reality of the Manifestation is that He reflects perfectly the attributes of God. This is not our essential reality. It is our potential reality. And therefore our souls are created out of other substance than the Manifestations, but it's still pretty good stuff, okay? It's still pretty good stuff. And all the souls– of course, you know The Hidden Word: “Know ye not why We created you all from the same [dust]? That no [one should] exalt himself [over the other].” And so on, okay? So this is the first point of unity.

The second point of unity is that every individual human soul has this capacity to reflect all of the attributes of God. Again, it could have been otherwise. Know that God could very well have created people in such a way that, you know, you are capable of reflecting certain attributes of God, but not others. And I am capable of reflecting other attributes of God, but not certain that you can. Well, that’s quite possible, but that's not the case. Over and over again, in the writings, we are told that every individual human soul has this capacity. This is it's essential reality. This is the definition even of what the human being is, is to reflect all of the attributes of God. But then there is a third respect, a third way in which human souls are different, and that is in the proportion in which they reflect these attributes of God. This is the individuality. This is the uniqueness. As ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says in Some Answered Questions, all men have intelligence and will, but men differ in their intellectual and willing and other capacities, and so on. So we can think of the individual soul as a prism. Each prism reflects all of the spectrum of colors, right? From the red to the blue end of the spectrum. But each prism has its individuality. It will give more emphasis to certain part of the spectrum than the other. So you might look at light reflected in one prism and see that the red part of the spectrum is enlarged and the blue is condensed. It will all be there, but in different proportions in the same way another prism might give emphasis to the blue and not the red. So this is the individuality which as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says is as intrinsic as it is inherent in our nature, our spiritual nature. It has nothing to do with heredity, with physical handicaps or mental handicaps or any such thing as that. These are all physical. We know this from the writings. The soul of man, recall, is exalted above and independent of all infirmities of body or mind. Or as Shoghi Effendi said, writing to a mentally-ill Baháʼí said, “You should know that these mental illnesses have nothing to do with our spirit or in our relationship with God.” But of course now, science is now proving this. We're discovering the physical basis of mental illness, which is primarily certain stress produced metabolic imbalances in the chemistry of the nervous endocrine system. Okay? So a mental illness is no more spiritual than Gordon's sprained ankle. Okay? So this is the human reality.

Now Bahá’u’lláh says then that this reality is exalted above the whole rest of creation. So in particular, as quoted in the peace statement of the House of Justice, you all know the statement of Shoghi Effendi where he says that ideas, laws, and principles are to serve the human being and not the human being to be crucified for the preservation of some doctrine or another. Right? He says– it's been quoted in the peace statement, you know, so I'm sure we've all used this in teaching the Faith, where he says, if certain creed, certain principles are outworn if they have ceased to serve the interests of mankind, then let them be relegated to the limbo of forgotten doctrines. Right? With a wave of the hand. For it is the purpose of such principles, laws and ideas to serve the human being and not the human being to be crucified for the preservation of an ideology. So sometimes, in order to make the point as brutally as I can, in Russia in particular, where the public scene is very grim, I say, take your most cherished ideal, okay? And then go to the Metro and find the most degraded looking human being you can find, some drunk sleeping man. It’s always littered, full of them, any metro stop in Moscow or St. Petersburg, it’s full of these people. And I say, you know, find this person who’s stinking, lying in his own urine and his own excrement, you know, hardly above the level of a poorly kept animal, and your most cherished ideal is not as valuable as that human being. Okay.

Now this concept it’s not original with the Baha'i faith and it’s not original with me. The 19th century Russian writers knew this very well. This is the whole theme of Dostoevsky's works, of Tolstoy's works. It’s the whole theme of Ibsen’s works. The writers of the 19th century knew this. They knew that ideology dehumanizes because you can justify anything. I mean, let's take quickly the most blatant example: the Inquisition in which people Christians were killed by fellow Christians in the name of Jesus. Now, look, I'm sure you've all read the New Testament. Go back and read the New Testament. Read the gospel of John, but what do you see at every page?. Love, love, love. Turn the other cheek, right? Pray for your enemies. Do good to those who hate you. All right? The greatest of man is he who will sacrifice his life for another, and so on and so on. Sacrifice, humility, meekness, love, mercy, compassion. Is there one single word of the New Testament that would give any possible sanction to the act of killing another human being? I mean, absolutely not. How much less to killing a fellow believer? Why are we killing these fellow believers? Why? Tell me, why were people killed in the Inquisition? For the preservation of certain doctrines which were held to be sacrosanct. In other words, people were killed in the name of an ideology. So here's a religion whom everybody agrees, Christians and non-Christians all agree, that the essence of Jesus’ message was love. I mean, when you think of Islam, you think of submission to the will of God. When you think of Buddha, you think of renunciation. When you think of Moses, you think of the law and so on. When you think of Jesus, you think of love, right? This is it. Everybody acknowledges. Love is the meaning, the essence of the Christian revelation. And yet you see the very believers, followers of Jesus, not only killing, I mean, we can talk about the Crusades and all of this sort of stuff, the inter-religious wars, but even then you could, you know, maybe justify this to some extent by saying, “Well, these were nonbelievers.” But here you have with the Inquisition, you have Christians killing fellow Christians in the name of a religion whose meaning is love. Now that's a contradiction. Will you agree that that is a contradiction? That's a pretty big contradiction. So I submit very simply the following thing: that if you can kill in the name of the religion of Jesus Christ, then you can kill in the name of anything. In other words, if there is a social process by which the religion of Jesus Christ could be taken to justify the deliberate killing of another human being, you know, not in the context of war or anything, but just the deliberate killing in the name of ideology of another human being, then you can justify anything, okay?

[man speaking] What about the concept of justice?

Well, I'm going to get to that. I'm simply trying to point out, as I said, the most blatant contradiction. Okay? Certainly, no question of justice is involved in killing people simply because they differed slightly on some obscure doctrine or another. Okay, so that's my only point here. Yes. So we're going to talk about the whole relationship between love, power and justice, but I'm simply trying now to point out the contradiction. Okay, well, so what is religion? I've said what it isn't, that it's not an [?]. What is it? Well, let's say what religion is. I'm going to use my words again, since it isn’t an ideology but of course one of the many cogs, religion. True religion, let’s say true religion, since there's so many of the other kind. True religion is a relationship. Well, let's– well, so that's the logical definition. Let's expand it. True religion is the establishment– this is the one word answer if you want to say religion is not a product, it is not a social contract, it is not an ideology, then what is it in one word? It's a relationship. Okay, the establishment of a certain kind of relationship between God and us, and between ourselves based on the relationship with God. I'm sorry, but I'm running out of–. Okay, so I'm saying true religion is a relationship. More particularly, it means the establishment of a certain kind of relationship between God and us, and between ourselves based on the relationship with God. Now, for various reasons, pedagogical reasons, I have chosen to call this relationship, authenticity. So true religion is the establishment of authentic relationships. That's what it is. You have succeeded you are religious person if you are capable of maintaining authentic relationships and you are no religious person if you can't. It has nothing to do with what you believe or don't believe. It has nothing to do with your ideology or anything else. Either you can do it or you can't. And the prophets come to tell us how to do it. Okay?

What is the first law of the Kitáb-i-Aqdas? The first law is prayer. The very first law in the Kitáb-i-Aqdas is prayer. Bahá’u’lláh goes on and on about prayer. What is he telling us? He's telling us that the most fundamental relationship in our existence is the relationship with God, and that prayer is the prime means of retaining this relationship. The next most important relationship is the marriage relationship, because it's this relationship from which society comes for. So Bahá’u’lláh takes a lot of times about the parameters of the marriage relationship. It tells us that marriage has to be based on two fundamental pillars, which is reciprocity and fidelity. And he gives us the premises of these. You may say, well, fidelity, Chastity, all of this, this is really tough. It’s true, it is. But what Bahá’u’lláh’s saying, “Look, if you want authentic relationships, this is how you get them.” If you don't want it, don’t use it. Okay? You don't want it, don't do it. It's not gonna hurt God. It's not gonna hurt me. Think ye that God is in need of your worship? Know that God is independent of all His creatures. Your allegiance cannot help Him, nor does your perversity harm Him. It’s all, He’s doing it, the Big Guy's doing it all for us. Okay? All for us.

So, to bring this to a kind of summing up, I maintain that true religion is a relationship. True religion, the purpose of religion is the establishment of authentic relationships between and among human beings and the basis of this is a certain relationship with God. Now there is in the absence of this relationship with God, you cannot establish authentic relationships between human beings. Now, when we teach the Faith and we teach progressive Revelation, we say all the religions are from God, but the religions strayed from the path eventually, right? They eventually strayed from the path. And therefore, religion has to be renewed. God sends other prophets because people eventually lost their way. But have we ever thought exactly how it is that previous religions lost their way? Well, the Baháʼí writings tell us how they did. They lost their way by transforming themselves into an ideology. As soon as Christianity became an ideology, it ceased to be a religion. Remember what Bahá’u’lláh says about religion? He says true religion is the cause of what? Of love, of amity. And he says anything which is not productive of love and unity is not religion, no matter what it calls itself. Right? We know - I mean, I'm paraphrasing, but you know this passage from Bahá’u’lláh. We quote this often, right? So here Bahá’u’lláh gives a pragmatic criterion for religion. Religion is that which causes love and unity. Okay? This is the essence of religion.

Now, let's make it even clearer. My brother may have been the first to articulate clearly, at least in the framework of the Baháʼí dialogue, the notion that the physical world is a vast classroom for learning spiritual principles. Well, let's apply a little of this. As we understand the physical world, presently, there are four fundamental forces in physical earth: gravity, electromagnetism, the weak nuclear force, and the strong nuclear force. Now, some of these forces, like the weak nuclear force, are repulsive forces. That is, the weak nuclear force has no attractive form. A weak nuclear force pushes things apart. Certain forces, like electromagnetic force, have both a repulsive and unattractive form. This is positively and negatively-charged particles. You know that like-charged particles repel each other, and oppositely-charged particles attract each other. So electromagnetism has both a positive and a negative form. Gravity and the strong nuclear force, as far as that goes, are examples of purely attractive forces. In other words, gravity, in its essence, is an attractive force. Now what does this tell me? This tells me that if I observe in the physical world two things that are being pushed apart, I may not know why they're being pushed apart but I already know one thing: it isnt gravity that's pushing them apart, because gravity in its essence is an attractive force. I mean, it is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the centers of the two object and directly proportional to their mass. So gravity is an attractive force in its essence. The nature of gravity is to attract. In the same way, Bahá’u’lláh says the essence of religion is that it is an attractive force. Religion only creates love and unity. Therefore, whenever we see the opposite of love and unity, we know one thing for sure. We may not know what it is, what is causing this disunity. We may not know. It may take us years of research to find out what, in certain instances, is causing this antipathy between the husband and wife or in the family. The dynamics could be extremely subtle and so on. We may not know, but we already know one thing: it isn't religion that's doing it, because religion can't do it any more than gravity can push two things apart.

Let me just read you this passage, which you all know, which is ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s statement about love:

“Know thou of a certainty that Love is the secret of God’s holy Dispensation, the manifestation of the All-Merciful, the fountain of spiritual outpourings. Love is heaven’s kindly light, the Holy Spirit’s eternal breath that vivifieth the human soul. Love is the cause of God’s revelation unto man, the vital bond inherent, in accordance with the divine creation, in the realities of things. Love is the one means that ensureth true felicity both in this world and the next. Love is the light that guideth in darkness, the living link that uniteth God with man, that assureth the progress of every illumined soul. Love is the most great law that ruleth this mighty and heavenly cycle, the unique power that bindeth together the divers elements of this material world, the supreme magnetic force that directeth the movements of the spheres in the celestial realms. Love revealeth with unfailing and limitless power the mysteries latent in the universe. Love is the spirit of life unto the adorned body of mankind, the establisher of true civilization in this mortal world, and the shedder of imperishable glory upon every high-aiming race and nation.”

Well, that's just one of the passages where Bahá’u’lláh speaks about love. So true religion is love. God is love, as Jesus already said. Okay? God is love. The essence of God is love. Of course, it's also truth. It's also justice, because on the level of God, these are all the same thing. There's no differentiation on the level of the essence of God. So this authentic relationship that we established that God is based on love. I mean, that's what it is. It’s based on love.

Now, in the next session, we'll talk about establishing love, how we establish authentic relationship. But I want to finish up with this, just the basic notions themselves before we get into more practical things, if you will. So true religion is the means of establishing true love, or what I call authentic relationships. And the essence of love is that it is an attractive force. Another way of defining love is the following: love is the only relationship which is experienced positively by both participants in the relationship under all circumstances. In other words, love is experienced positively by both the lover and the beloved. In other words, we like to love and we like to receive love. Both giving of love and the receiving of love are a positive experience. In other words, love is unfailingly produces happiness, all right? You cannot love and be unhappy at the same time, and you cannot receive genuine love and be unhappy at the same time. So love produces happiness both in the giver of love and the receiver of love, so it is a mutually positive experience, love. It is therefore, based on a certain kind of symmetry, or reciprocity between lover and beloved. We'll talk more about that later on, and we'll talk about justice when we get to that. That's in the [?] again. Okay, so love is an attractive force, and it's a happy thing. It creates unity, and it creates happiness. In fact, I can't think of anything else but love that does create happiness, at least unfailingly. And happiness on everybody's part. So if, for example, I triumph over you, I may feel good about this. This may make me happy, but it's awfully liable to make you unhappy, right? So competition-striving, dominant-seeking may produce a temporary happiness on the part of the winner, but even this is a very unstable kind of happiness because even when you succeed in a competitive environment. You always have the fear that you're gonna lose it, and you know just how many people are out there ready to take advantage of any weakness that you show, and so on and so on. So even in the winners, the degree of happiness is quite unstable, and on the part of the losers, it's even more unhappy. Soul-striving competition. In other words, as we will see the pursuit of power produces ultimately unhappiness. In other words, when it comes down to it, love is the only thing, and it is the thing which makes us happy. Nothing else but love makes us happy.

So when we say that true religion, the purpose of true religion is not to promote an ideology, but to establish authentic relationships. That’s another way of saying that true religion’s purpose, true religion, is to make us happy, to teach us how to be happy. All right? It's just that simple. Just to teach how to be happy. If you want to be happy, here’s the way to be happy. You don't want to do it? Okay, don’t do it? Fine, okay. Don't do it! Okay? You say sexual discipline is too hard? Okay, don't do it. Fine, go out. Do whatever you want. I'm just telling you, if you want to be happy, that's the way to do it. Okay. You want to have a happy marriage? Here’s the way to have a happy marriage. Don't want to do it? Don't do it. Fine. Just get off my back. All right? Okay. So what I'm saying, then, is that this is the essence of morality, both individual and collective. The nature of morality is the establishment of these authentic relationships, and the establishment within oneself of the capacity to maintain and establish authentic relationships. This is what spiritual development is, what self-development is. It is developing your capacity to maintain, initiate, and maintain authentic relationships with other human beings. And the proof is very simple. If you are successfully maintaining authentic relationships, then you can do it. And if you aren't, you haven't. So you don't have to worry, you know, go through all sorts of contortions, you know. “Am I doing it or not?” Just look around and see how the quality of your relationships with people if you’re, you know. It's a very tough task, but that's it. I mean, if you're unhappy and other people are unhappy because of your relationship with them, you haven't learned how to do it. That’s the proof. You’re not doing it. It's just that simple. Okay?

Now, I'm not saying that this is easy to do. Nothing, as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says, worthwhile is easy. But this is the condition of access to this power. It is knowing how to maintain authentic relationships. This is the prime condition that gives us access to this power that I was talking about earlier. Now, one final thing to relate it more to society, our talks somewhat more on the individual level in this first session, I mentioned that this was the theme of the 19th century writers, released in Russia and Europe and in North America. It's the theme of the main American novels, like, say, The Scarlet Letter, or Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn. You know, the heart of Huckleberry Finn, for example, is this relationship which Huckleberry Finn establishes with this black slave, this Negro slave who has escaped, and he feels guilty about this because, according to the culture, this is an immoral relationship. I mean, you're not supposed to have a relationship or friendship between a black and a white person and so on, and at one point, Huckleberry Finn says, “Well, okay, I'll go to hell, anyway. Maybe I'll go to hell for helping this black man escape.” But now this Huckleberry Finn relates authentically to this black man. He relates authentically to his soul, to his spiritual potential as a human being, and he knows– whatever else he knows, he knows that this is authentic and that it's certainly not authentic for such a human being to be held in involuntary servitude. And so he draws the conclusion: “My moral duty is to help this person.” And so at one point there’s this soliloquy when Huckleberry Finn talks to himself about well, you know, he internalizes this whole dialogue of this society, that you know this is wrong thing to do, that slaves are the legal property of their masters, and that to help them is illegalm and so on and so on and therefore immoral. And he thinks about all the condemnation that his act would bring upon him if it were known by others. And he says, maybe he'll even go to hell, but then he says, “Well, I'll just have to go to help. And if that's the consequence [?], I can't do anything else.” Well, this is a perfect example of a human being establishing authentic relationship independently of the parameters of the society. Okay?

Well, Dostoevsky was brilliant in portraying this. This is the theme of Dostoevsky's novel. But the conclusion of all of these writers and philosophers who were essentially humanists was the following: the only thing worth having in life is authentic relationships. But man cannot, on his own, establish authentic relationships. You can't do it. Therefore, the human being is condemned to seek that which he cannot have. This is the human condition. So this is the tragic dark aspect, the conclusion to which the great existentialist philosophers of the 19th century came to. This is Dostoevsky to a tee, this is Kierkegaard, and so on. In other words, nothing else but authenticity is worth having. Everything else is a sham. But there is some point in which every human being will betray, okay? In other words, this is what Dostoevsky does rather than focusing on one character like Huckleberry Finn. He has a whole panoply of characters, right, from the most idealistic to the most cruel and sadistic, and they have all in this pot of all of these characters, they're all interacting. You have Alyosha who visits the prostitute and so on, and he doesn't have sexual relationships with her. He tries to establish a philosophical discourse, whether and so on of this, and she says, you know, “Aren't you attracted to me?” And so on. So she feels dehumanized or devalued in her value system because she feels that she's not sexually attractive to this man who wants to talk philosophy with her, and so on and so on. So you have all of these, but the point is that ultimately everyone betrays. In other words, if you look at Dostoevsky, now, ultimately at some point everybody betrays. And therefore, man craves in his essence, authentic relationships when he cannot sustain them because he's imperfect. And this is the human condition, and this gives rise in the Russian version to this fatalism, which has been noticed and remarked upon so often in the Russian character that the essential meaning of life is to endure this condition with dignity. In other words, you can't change it. Man is imperfect and man craves authenticity. These are unchangeable things. You can't change either one of those. Man cannot renounce his thirst for authenticity, nor can he achieve it because he's imperfect and therefore he can only resign himself to enduring this incredible tension with the greatest possible dignity.

So that was one cultural solution to this dilemma. The other cultural solution is the one we chose in North America, and that is the solution that says, “Okay, you can't have authentic relationships. So what are you gonna do?” You're going to create the best possible substitute. Virtual reality. And so this is what our culture is. It is a vast machine for producing illusions that are substitutes for authentic relationships. That's exactly what our society is. And if you're going to get through the next four years as Baháʼís, you better start right now thinking about the ways in which you are personally influenced by this society because, believe me, you are, whether you think you are or not, or whether you like it or not. Okay? So another is what has the United States engendered? Well it has engendered the movie industry. You know, it has engendered the illusion of unlimited growth and development through this profligate wasting and spending of natural resources. As soon as any new technology comes along, it is pushed to its ultimate. And we have computers, and now we have the World Wide Web and all of this, and we're now people– I mean, already, for the last 20 years, the whole young generation has been raised by TV sets. I mean, they don't have parents anymore. They’re raised by the TV set, right? Just go in to any home and look at the kid there. Okay? And now they're being raised by computers. And so people no longer relate to each other, and so their inner lives are totally empty. I mean, they have totally lost the capacity for authentic relationship to such an extent that the only thing that they can do is to give importance to the trivial. In other words, since there is no authenticity, anyway, there's no hint of authenticity, then what you try to do is, since you're living totally immersed in the banal, then you have to somehow give importance to the banal. And how do you do this? Well, just turn on any TV talk show and you'll see people discoursing infinitely about their totally empty, meaningless lives.

Utterly useless to teach courses and morality, that, you know, give rules and principles for ethical conduct, whatever, in which take no account of this relationship with God. It is only in relationship to God that one can achieve authenticity. If you exclude this relationship with God, then you have no hope of doing it. And either you will fall into hypocrisy - in other words, you will fake it. You will pretend that you're doing it and don't do it, or else you will become discouraged. Okay, so I'll stop there. And maybe we can have some discussions and questions for a few minutes. And then–. Okay?

[woman speaking] The most recent question is how do you rationalize the [?] necessity of having a relationship with God. I can feel it so I can [?] because it feels right. [?]

Well, ultimately, it's only through the Manifestation. I mean, we use our rational minds to observe reality, to convince ourselves to find the truth of the Manifestation, who is an empirical part of reality. I mean, Bahá’u’lláh lived in history. I mean, this is the whole point of progressive revelation of the fact. You see, it's not the existentialist view of religion that we're talking about here.

[woman speaking] But let’s say the world is coming from that, and that what you’re presenting is, forgive me, presented as an ideology or perceived as an ideology. [?]

In any case, let's separate the reality from the articulation of reality. Let's don't mix up the question of– first for us, we need to understand what the reality is. How we articulate the reality to others which avoids their misperceptions is a pedagogical question. This is a question where methods of teaching is legitimate. Okay? Methods of teaching is methods of pedagogy. It is learning how to articulate or talk about the reality of religion in a way which avoids this perception, but first, we have to understand what it is, okay, that is not ideology. And we have to understand not only what it is not, but what it is. Then we have to use creative means of finding a discourse that avoids this misperception. But I mean, in some instances, you can't because we know there are all sorts of people that are so turned of about religion that they're going to misperceive it no matter what you say. I mean, if they've been done over by the Catholic Church, they may have such a thing about authority that you know, if you talk to them about any, is there a community? Is there, you know– you’re obedient to the Local Assembly? I mean, that's enough. I mean, that's true. I mean, we are obedient to the Local Assembly. I mean, certain people aren’t that. I mean, it's just too much, okay? I mean, that's it. Well, you can't do anything about that. I mean, that's part of the conditionality of access to this power. Well, we can talk more about this, about this whole process, but, I mean, why God has done this and why this process is going on, but I mean–. You see, that's the point in teaching the faith. It’s not up to us to persuade the other person. Teaching the Faith is not persuading the person to convert to an ideology. Teaching the Faith is presenting him with the truest possible picture of what the Faith is, that when we do that, we've done our job. Now, we do our best. We can pedagogically as teachers of the Faith, as pedagogues, we do the best we can to remove self-generated impediments from this process, but there are limits to what we can do in doing that. I mean, if a person, you know, has a certain set, you know, about authority or about morality or whatever, then maybe nothing in this short mind you can do about. You know that's just the way it is.

But ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, if you look, He tells us how to do it, all right? You know, when ‘Abdu’l-Bahá talks about, you know, each soul teaching another soul about the Faith every year, He goes through, you know, he divided up into four periods or three months. You know this. He says the first three months, you look around in your environment and you observe carefully and you find the person who appears to be most receptive. That’s the first three months. The next three months, you spend on showering kindness and service on this person so you establish a relationship, a sincere friendship. I mean, of course, if you're doing this just to teach him the Faith, so to speak, then it's a self-contradiction. I mean, that's just hypocrisy. All right? But, so this means that you have the capacity to shower love and kindness on somebody. All right? It means you've already taught yourself. You've already developed spiritually to the point where you have the capacity to serve other people where you have the capacity to get your little ego out of the way to the extent that you can actually do kindness to somebody, all right? And with Bahá’u’lláh’s help, we can. All right? And then, the third quarter ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says we listen to the person. We let him empty himself. So the first act of teaching the faith is to show love and kindness. The second is to listen. Why is this? Because life is a dialogue between us and God. In every history is a history of the dialogue between God and the given person or the given culture. So when you listen to somebody, you are allowing God to tell you how to teach him the Faith. That's what you're doing. You're saying, “Okay, God, this is one of your children. He is telling me his history of dialogue with you.” And so you’re allowing God to– by listening to this history, you're not only giving value to the person, saying his history is a sacred history or this is important history, but you're also learning how to teach this person the Faith. And then ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says in the last three months, then you teach him the Faith actively and He will accept it, if you’ve gone through these other processes. So that's the way ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says to overcome these kinds of resistance in individual teaching.

[woman speaking] Where’s it from? These four steps?

First up the four steps I'd only had verbally. I was told this by several Hands of the Cause when I was on pilgrimage. I'm sure it's written down somewhere because it's the same version every time I hear it, but I honestly don't know where. I do know who knows, though. What's his name? It was an international counselor who lives out in Vancouver. [audience guessing] No, no, he's not a counselor now. Yazdi. Mr. Yazdi? He mentioned this. He knows this, so he probably knows the origin of it. Okay? So is this useful? Not useful. What? The back?

[man speaking] To me, it's very exciting, because what it is, it’s very purifying. And it takes things back to a fundamental basis.

Russia does that to, you know?

[man speaking] Yes! [laughter] And I just think– I mean, as you were talking about an actual fact when the Guardian says in one of his writings that we must act. We must believe that everyone needs to accept the Faith. This puts a really sound context, put it in context.

Sure, because everyone needs to establish this authentic relationship with God. So when you're teaching the Faith, all you're doing is making friends for God, so to speak. You're helping the person establish this authentic relationship, which he needs, which is the most fundamental need that he has. All right?

[man speaking] But the messed up relationships, it’s not very nice.

Well, try it. Well, try it.

[woman speaking] When you talked about an ideology is any philosophy which holds certain ideas as superior to human beings, how does one explain the martyrdom? All martyrs?

Well, it depends on which martyrs you’re talking about. If you’re talking about Baháʼí martyrs, these are people who have established an authentic relationship with God and who refused to compromise this relationship by committing a gnarly unacceptable act that people are trying to force them to emit, like denying their Faith or something else.

[woman speaking] So it's not to uphold an ideology?

Well, in the minds of some of them it may be, but it is primarily to uphold the authentic relationship with God, right? I mean, if it was just to uphold an ideology, then why could they not, for example, do all the things that other ideologues have done, for example, to simulate their faith in order to come back another day and and argue more forcefully or say, “Okay if I want to preserve this ideology, then the best way to do it is to preserve my life so that I can go on agitating for this ideology.” So but I mean, there are certainly martyrs to ideology. But you see, in martyrdom, it's not me that's killing myself. It’s somebody else is killing me, so he's sacrificing me for the preservation of his ideology. All right? He's the ideologue. I'm not the ideologue. Why do I accept to die? It’s because this is the only way I can maintain this authentic relationship. Otherwise, I will have to deny the very essence of my being. I will have to say, “No, I do not recognize Bahá’u’lláh. I renounce this authentic relationship.” Which I have come to understand is the very purpose of my existence. For what else? Since this is the highest thing, for what else would I sacrifice it?

[woman speaking] Okay, I was having trouble with the whole idea of ideology. And what I'm thinking is that this authentic relationship, by authentic, you mean real, right?

Well, yes. I mean real and I mean real in terms as defined by Bahá’u’lláh. And this means essentially true love when ‘Abdu’l-Bahá talks about the four kinds of love. So I use authenticity instead of love simply because love is so overused and so on and so on. It has so many contexts, and because we think of love in so many different ways. But you could just say true love. Yeah, you can.

[woman speaking] So true love can also be an ideology?

No, love is not an idea. An ideology is a philosophy. A philosophy is a certain set of ideas, of beliefs. Love is not a belief. Love is a force.

[woman speaking] Yeah, when you read that, that helped. So I kept thinking, is love an ideology? Then you read ‘Abdu’l-Bahá.

No, an ideology is a belief. It is a set of subjective ideas. It's a sort of idea. Love isn't an idea. Love is a force. It’s an objectively existing force, like gravity.

[woman speaking] Grasping reality so–.

Well, we have to distinguish in all cases. I mean this just goes back to Philosophy 101, right? I mean , you know better than that, the difference between a thing and the idea of the thing and so on, okay? And you have ideas of ideas and ideas, you can. This is abstraction. I mean, so it’s certainly right. I mean, love is not an idea, right? Love is not a subjective idea. Love is an objectively existing force, like gravity, which is experienced subjectively, just as ideas are experienced objectively. So love is a different thing from our ideas about love, just like gravity is different from my ideas about gravity. I mean, Newton's law of gravity is not gravity. Newton's law of gravity is a human articulation of the objectively existing law of gravity. If Newton had never existed, gravity would still exist in the same way, right? So love exists and it is what it is, regardless of whether we have the right idea or the wrong idea about it. So love doesn't depend on our ideas about love. Now, our access to the power of love may be dependent on our ideas. And I'm saying the most pernicious idea is the idea that some set of ideas is more important than love itself. Okay? So I’ll sum this up by saying all ideologies are false because an ideology holds– this doesn't say that all ideas are false. An ideology is a certain kind of idea that I've just defined. It is an idea about ideas. Okay, an ideology is the idea that some set of ideas is more important than human beings. Okay, so an ideology is an idea about ideas. It's a second order idea. We have ideas about objective thing, but I can have ideas about ideas like one idea is better than another idea. That's an idea about ideas, right? So I'm saying that this idea, okay, this idea that there are some sets of ideas which are superior to human being, the idea that any set of ideas is superior to human beings is a false idea. Such an idea is called an ideology. Therefore, all ideologies are false.

Now, notice. I haven't talked about the content, whether these ideas are good or bad, they may be very good ideas. Look, let me give you two examples. Let me give you two examples. One part of Baháʼí belief is that God exists, and that we should believe in God, right? So we will agree, it is a good thing for people to believe in God. Sincerely, God. I'm not playing games, all right? Certainly we agree to this. That's a good idea. So any Baháʼí would be willing to ascend to the [?] position. It would be a good thing for everybody on Earth to believe in God. Now, let's make this into an ideology. Let's say that the idea that people should believe in God is more important than human beings. Then I'll give you the easiest way to accomplish this ideology. Kill everybody who doesn't believe in God, right? The people left will be the believers in God. Okay? I will have achieved my goal. Everybody on Earth believe in God. Even if I'd have to kill them down to the last 10 people, then everybody on earth will, I will have accomplished my goal. And that's in fact, the quickest way to do it. That's the quickest way to do it. On the other hand, what does religion say? What does religion say? Why is this not an ideology? Because what religion says is that the important thing is to love other people. And if you love other people, they will believe in God because they will experience true love. And the experience of true love is that which makes people most inclined to believe that there is a source of true love and, therefore, to believe in God. So believing in God has much more to do with the establishment of authentic relationships than it does belief in an abstract idea. Okay? So that's an example of what we have: a perfectly good idea, a certain idea which we agree is very good, but by adding the meta belief that this, the propagation of this idea is superior to any human being, then we come to the conclusion that it’s permissible to sacrifice human beings to propagate this idea. We can kill all the human beings that aren’t believers, which is exactly what the Muslim fanatics are doing, what the Born Again Christians are doing, and so on and so on. So this is not an abstract debate we got. This is exactly what people do.

[woman speaking] What if we considered ideology in this kind of semantic, a study of ideas? [?] study or something.

Well, that’s something else.

[woman speaking] [?] I’m wondering, and so I need to get you a dictionary at lunch time to understand the word ideology, to ensure that [?].

Well, this is my definition. You won't necessarily find that idea. You see, this is ideology gives a certain value to the ideas. You can't. It's not a study that can be objective. So an ideology is not studying ideas. An ideology comes from the marriage of ideas with a certain value system, and it is the value system that says these ideas are more valuable than human beings. So unless you make value judgments, you never get an ideology. An ideology is not an abstract consideration of ideas, however ideal or abstract.

[woman speaking] It’s a process then.

It's a process of valuing ideas. It's a judgment. It becomes a process, but it is. It could be a static thing as well. It can be simply– it is a value judgment about ideas, knowing that they're superior to human beings. Well, it could be simpler. So an ideology is a certain kind of value judgment. It's a value judgment, which gives greater value to certain ideas than it does to human beings. What could be simpler than that? Okay, please. Okay.

[emcee] –lunch. And we're going to have session two of Dr. William Hatcher on the subject of moral and social development. Obviously, we found this morning very stimulating because I could hear during the lunchtime intense discussions going on about authentic relationships and other things. And so I'm sure that this afternoon will be very exciting. So, please welcome Dr. Hatcher. [applause]

Okay, so this morning, we saw that true religion is not a social contract, nor is it an ideology, but it is the establishment of authentic relationships, that is a certain kind of relationship, first, between each individual and God. And then based on this, between and among individuals, in various community configurations and so on. So true religion is a relationship, a quality of relationship, a certain kind of relationship, and everything else is subservient to this - ideas, beliefs, social processes, interactions of various sorts, laws, principles: all serve the goal. They are not the end in themselves, but they are the means by which we attain this goal, and the goal is the establishment of this quality relationship between God and ourselves. Let's read where Shoghi Effendi speaks of this. This is taken from page 136 of the Law of Love Enshrined. So I'm sorry that you don't have your copies, but I will just read. This is in one of the compilations. I think it's the one on, what is it? On a talk about meditation and spiritual attitude, something like that. What is it?

[man speaking] Prayer, meditation, and spiritual attitude.

Is that what it’s called? I think it’s in that one. In any case, Shoghi Effendi says:

“Indeed the chief reason for the evils now rampant in society is the lack of spirituality-” so this is the first thing. Spirituality, the lack of spirituality is the chief reason for all of the evils. “The materialistic civilization of our age has so much absorbed the energy and interest of mankind that people in general do no longer feel the necessity of raising themselves above the forces and conditions of their daily material existence. There is not sufficient demand for things that we call spiritual to differentiate them from the needs and requirements of our physical existence. “The universal crisis affecting mankind is, therefore, essentially spiritual in its causes… For the core of religious faith is that mystic feeling which unites Man with God-” All right? So here we see again a definition of religion, right? The core of religious faith - what is religious faith? Is it believing in a set of propositions? He says no. “For the core of religious faith is that mystic feeling which unites Man with God. This state of spiritual communion–” so it's a kind of a relationship. This is a relationship of dialogue. “This state of spiritual communion can be brought about and maintained by means of meditation and prayer. And this is the reason why Bahá’u’lláh has so much stressed the importance of worship… The Baháʼí faith, like all other Divine Religions–” so now we're talking about not just the Baháʼí faith, but all religion – “is thus fundamentally mystic in character.” It's not me. It's Shoghi Effendi. “Its chief goal is the development of the individual and society, through the acquisition of spiritual virtues and powers. It is the soul of man which has first to be fed. And this spiritual nourishment prayer can best provide.”

Okay? So there it is. I mean, nowhere do we see that the core of religious faith is believing in this or that or the other thing or whatever. It is a quality of relationship. It is a mystic feeling which unites man with God. All the divine religions are fundamentally [?] character. The chief goal of religion is the development of the individual in society through the acquisition of spiritual virtues and powers. It is the soul of man which has first to be fed. And this spiritual nourishment prayer can best provide.

So another way of saying this notion that true religion is establishing authentic relationships, that’s to say that the meaning of life is a dialogue. Life is an ongoing dialogue between God and ourselves, and between ourselves and others based on our dialogue with God. If we don't have the dialogue between God and ourselves, then we have very little to say to other people. In other words, so again, I stress the fact that the successful dialogue with other human beings depends on and grows out of our inner dialogue with God. If we don't have this inner dialogue, we do not have inner development, and so we have nothing of significance to say to other people. And if other people say significant things to us, we won't understand them. They will not be interesting to us if we have not developed the capacity to understand them. Or if people talk about their pain, then we will become frightened and we will back away from the relationship because it will put a stress on us that we can't bear because pain is very authentic. Pain is one of the most authentic experiences that we have, and as Khalil Gibran put it in The Prophet that we cannot know joy unless we know pain. The deeper our pain, the deeper our joy. You can't have one without the other. You can't have one without the other. So if you're willing to experience pain, then you will be incapable of experiencing joy. It's just that simple. If you refuse the experience of pain, then you are by that very choice, cutting yourself off from the experience of joy. You simply cannot experience joy.

Let me digress slightly on that point because that brings out another cultural difference between North American culture and the Russian culture that I have become involved in for the last three years. As I say I have actually been involved with Russia for five years, although I've only lived there for the last three. Let me give you a few facts, just observations, which will then lead to a comment. The first comment is this: I have never, ever seen a Russian child misbehave in public. I have never, ever seen a Russian child scream or cry or have a tantrum in public. Never. I have seen Russian children, seven-year-old children sit through a four-hour opera performance and enjoy it and not move from their chair. Okay? First observation. Second observation is suffering for suffering, I think none of us would doubt that the Russian people have had a lot of suffering in their lives, right? A lot of suffering. Certainly, we can say that we've had a lot of advantages, material advantages, certainly in North America that the Russian people have not had, and we can certainly appreciate the fact that the Russian people have had tremendous sufferings that we have not had. Think of the siege of Leningrad, which is the city I live in. In 100 days, there were over a million people who died of starvation. I had several Baháʼís in the Baháʼí community in Leningrad actually lived through the siege of Leningrad as children. One of them calmly told me that one of the greatest moral dilemmas they had during the siege of Leningrad when Leningrad was totally encircled by the Nazis– if you don't know the history, nothing could come in and out of Leningrad. The Nazis never took Leningrad. They never took Leningrad, but they completely cut it off and they tried to starve it to death, and they succeeded in starving a million people to death. So this Baháʼí calmly told me that one of the greatest moral dilemmas that the inhabitants of Leningrad faced was whether or not to eat a dead member of the family when they die. In other words, if their sister died, should they eat them or not? Because if they didn't eat them, then they might very well die. They didn't kill them, so should they eat the flesh of their dead sister or brother or not?

Now, undoubtedly, the Bábis at Shaykh Ṭabarsí were faced with the same dilemma, although it's not recorded in any book I know. Quite clearly they were also being starved, and it is said in Nabil that they ate shoe leather and they ate the flesh of their dead horses when they were, you know, when they were struck down, when their horses were killed, they ate the flesh of the horses and so on. So again, I don't– not interested in getting into the question of under what circumstances might it be morally acceptable to eat the flesh of another human being or not, or whatever. The point is that you will agree that this is a genuine moral dilemma. This is not a question of whether or not you should take a social drink. Or whether or not you should tell your kids about Santa Claus or whether or not you should celebrate Christmas as a Baháʼí, okay? This is a real moral dilemma, all right?

And also, it is known that Stalin, in what is known as the Terror, killed over 30 milion of his fellow countrymen in the persecution. Besides the 20 million that were killed by the Nazis in the war, there were another 30 million Russians who were killed by their own leaders in all of the gulag and all of the camps. So there is [?], I dare say that one does not even have to relativize it. There is certainly no family in the whole of Russia that has not been touched by this persecution, who has not had a brother, sister, aunt, or uncle, some close family member who has been in prison or killed or suffered from this persecution. And, of course, the conditions under which the prosecution happened was one in which people were denouncing each other to the KGB, husbands were spying on wives, and so on and so on, so this reached down into the very family unit. For example, in the schools in Russia, they would start out telling the children in kindergarten and grade one, they would say things like there is a mental disease that's called believing in God. And if you know of anybody who has this disease, you should tell us about it because you certainly love your parents. And if they're sick, you want them to be helped, and we can help them. So in this way they would induce children to spy on their parents, so there could not even be honesty within the family unit. The parents dare not tell the truth to their children. And even then, the husband and wife couldn't discuss the truth openly among themselves because one of them might be arrested and tortured and forced to denounce the other. So the result was that the family unit was totally destroyed in Russia.

Well, these was few observations to give you an idea of the scale of the thing. Well, I have never, ever heard a Russian say, “Why did this happen to me? Why did this suffering happen to happen?” You know, if somebody's kid gets run over and killed by a car, the Russians will grieve. All of his friends will come and grieve with him, and they will cry and they will lament, and then they'll get on with their lives. And if somebody were to say, “Why did this happen to me?” They’ll say, “Why not? It happens to everybody.” Everybody suffers. This is the human condition. We all suffer disease, accidents. This is the human condition. “Why should it not happen to me? I'm nobody special.” Okay? So, I've never yet - I mean, I'm not saying it won't happen, but I have never heard a Russian say, “Why would this happen to me?” It would never occur to a Russian to say, “Why did this accident, or this unhappiness, or this affliction happen to me?” It is assumed that this is the human condition, at least in this mortal world that is a place of afflictions, of tests, of suffering. And this is the human condition, and so we must help each other. We must grieve over each other. But the minute you ask for special treatment, your friends will withdraw. In other words, they will give you all the consolation in the world, but they will not give you special treatment because everybody has their problems. And you're [?] in life is to bear your problem. We will help you, but don't ask for the special treatment.

So what we see in North America now is what I call victimization through minorization. You see everybody becomes a victim by virtue of becoming part of some minority. Okay? And this allows, this victimization, allows him to blame the troubles in his life, whatever they are, on somebody else. It’s somebody else's fault, anybody else's fault but my fault. So now children no longer raised by their parents, they’re victimized by their parents. And wives don't live with their husbands, they’re victimized by their husbands, and husbands by their wives, and so on, and so on it goes. Everybody's a victim. Homosexuals by heterosexuals, whatever you want, but in order to be considered a victim in North America, you have to be part of a recognizable minority group. Otherwise, you can't be a victim. Okay? In Russia, the view of life is that everybody's a victim. And therefore nobody deserves special treatment. So you're a victim? Sure. So what? So what's new? We're all victims. So sure, yeah, you're right, but this is unjust, this happened. That’s right, it's unjust, man. It’s really unjust. I mean, that’s right. So it's unjust, so you have to deal with it. That’s right, it’s unjust. It's real stuff, okay? They don't expect life to be just. Well, I'm not saying that this is a perfect world view. It leads to the kind of fatalism that we also associate with the Russian mentality. That's undoubtedly one of the reasons why they haven't had a capitalistic economy developed the way the pragmatic North American economy does. All I'm saying is that other views of life are possible. All I'm saying is that it is not a genetic inevitability that our kids are so generally ill-behaved, and that we all consider ourselves unfair victims of circumstances of life which are beyond our control and which entitle us to complain eternally about our condition rather than getting on with the process of spiritual development that we talked about this morning.

So the point is, then, that here in North America, we have come to considered suffering as abnormal. Now, you see, clearly suffering is unpleasant. Nobody denies that. The Russians, I mean, you torture a Russian, it hurts him just as much if you torture a Canadian, alright? If a Russian child is killed in an accident, he suffers just as much. He loves the child just as much as a Canadian parent would if his child was run over by a car. I mean, this is universal, all right? This is universal, but the attitude toward this is different, okay? It hurts just as much, but the attitude is different because the North American will tend to say, “This is unfair. This is abnormal.” But the Russian won't say that it's abnormal. He’ll say, “Yes, it's very painful. It's bloody painful, but it's not abnormal. It's not something that you shouldn't expect that could ever happen.” So, but there are consequences to world views, you see. There are consequences, positive and negative consequences. One of the negative consequences of the Russian worldview is this fatalism that I was talking about, but one of the negative consequences of the North American ultra-pragmatic worldview [?] that everything can be overcome if you just throw enough money at it, right? And others, if you just have another money for AIDS research, you know, eventually, this will be solved, and so on and so on. And if you just have put enough money into pollution control, this will solve it without our having to change our behavior and other. It's never us that has to change. We can change the environment to suit ourselves. So this is the pragmatic point of view of North America: that any problem can be overcome. Now, this lead us to put a man on the moon before the Russians did, okay? In other words, this has positive consequences. This pragmatism, this we-can-do-anything sort of thing it has led, it has very positive consequences, but it also has negative consequences.

[audience question] It is false self-concept. We each have a false self-concept and that's what the vain imagining is. You see, let's talk about– I was gonna talk about this later on, but I can talk about it now. I can sort of inverse the order, because I was definitely going to talk about this. You see, the human being has three basic capacities, which is the knowledge or understanding capacity, the heart or feeling capacity, and will. And the achievement of this consciousness of communing with God, there's a process in which we activate our capacities for knowing, for feeling, and for willing in such a way that we increase them. We become more knowledgeable, more loving, and more autonomous. In other words, your overall direction of spiritual progress is increasing well-being and increasing autonomy. Increasing well-being and increasing autonomy. Now, past moral educational systems and past religions put the emphasis on the increasing well-being, which is just a fancy name for happiness. Okay, you get happier, you feel better and better. So in the past, in the past dispensations, the emphasis was almost wholly on the first goal of increasing happiness. So you do this by avoiding eternal damnation, by being saved, by being one of the believers who is happy because he has accepted the truth and so on and so on.

Although the past prophets clearly had a belief in the autonomy of the individual, the educational systems, the ideological systems that grew up on the basis of these teachings, the systems that were contrived by the leaders of religion denied this autonomy. They tried to suppress this autonomy. This is the cataclysm in the Catholic Church. This is all of the fatwās and the mullahs and all of this stuff. In other words, the idea was that your goal is to be happy and you are happy by following exactly all these rules that we have for you to follow. Okay? And the worst thing you can do is to start thinking about these rules and especially questioning them, okay? So the Baháʼí system of moral education puts an equal weight on autonomy as well as increase in well-being because it sees this as a process, a process of increasing your autonomy. What this means is simply that learning is going on on two levels: you are learning new things and you're learning how to learn new things. In other words, you're learning how to learn as you learn. The learning how to learn is a second order kind of learning. And that's what I call autonomy, increasing autonomy. In other words, as you go through this cycle, you not only increase your virtues and powers, as Shoghi Effendi says, but you increase your ability to get more virtues and power. As you learn, you learn how to learn. As you make progress, you learn how to make more progress. So Bahá’u’lláh has now taken the veil away from this process, and He has showed us what the ultimate goal is, which is an increase not only in our happiness, but in our autonomy, and the two are linked. The two are linked.

Now, each one of us. As we grow up, we construct an inner model of reality. We construct an inner model of reality. So here we are, [writing on blackboard] here, each human being is. Okay? And there's the world outside of himself [writing on blackboard]. And he interacts with the world outside of himself. It acts on him. He reacts to it. He also initiates actions, and so on. So this process of education or spiritual development or moral development is a process of interaction. Now I assume that there is a basic unit of interaction which I call an instantiation. Okay? But be that as it may, in other words, an instantiation is an interaction that is localized in time. There are two kinds of localization: you can localize in space or you can localize in time. Okay? Localizing in space gives you a position, a point. Localizing in time gives you an instant. Okay? So you can think of your life as a series of instances. Okay? You have one now, and then the next one, and then the next one, and so on and so on. Okay, now, in fact, it is now known that physiological perception is a series of cliches exactly like this. There are waves that are emitted by the thalamus that sweep over the entire brain about 1000 times a second regularly, and the information of perception - you’re looking at me, the blueness of my shirt, my shape, which like a Monty Python’s dinosaur, is thin at one end, fat in the middle and fat at the other end, [laughter] and so on; all of this data is stored in your brain in different locations. It is not physically located in your brain. It is dispersed in the brain physically, but you don't have the impression of having disparate perceptions of me. It's all one thing, and that's because at regular intervals, this wave emitted by the thalamus sweeps over their brain and discharges this data in each of these receptors, just like an instant photograph, like a cliche, like a cinema. And this goes on 1000 times a second. So it is now known for sure that physiological perception is a cinema. It is a series of cliches. In other words, there is an irreducible unit of perception in time. Well, so undoubtedly, the interactions of the soul are continuous. They are not discreet.

However, we can assume for purposes of understanding the process of spiritual growth, that they are discreet, and in this life they are physiologically discreet. And since we operate through our bodies in this life, it is a reasonable assumption to make. So think of your life as a series of interaction. So what do you do? You start out what? You start out totally unconscious. So notice that the path of development for every human being is the same. It is this parabola, this arc. Okay? We emerged from unconsciousness. We develop physically to a highest point, and then we decline and die. This is the physical development. Okay? This is the physical development. We emerge from unconsciousness. We emerge from unconsciousness, so we construct through these interactions an inner model of reality. So let's think of the newborn baby. What is the model of reality he’s making under normal circumstances? Well, he feels hungry. He cries, and then somebody picks him up and a warm breast is put in his mouth. And it's nourished and he feels warm and he feels love, and so on and so on. And then this process is repeated. A couple of hours, he gets hungry again and so on. So already he’s learning two things. He's learning life is a place where you have needs, and that can be bad because when you have a need like you're hungry, you don't feel good, but it's a place where your needs can be satisfied. So, in other words, the human condition is that we are needful creatures. We're needful creatures, and so we strive to fulfill our needs. And Bahá’u’lláh explains to us that God has provided a legitimate way of satisfying all of our needs so we can already say that what unspiritual behavior is is either the lack of satisfaction of our legitimate needs or else the false satisfaction that is the illegitimate attempt to satisfy needs and somewhat, such as taking drugs to feel good about yourself or something like that. Okay? You're trying to satisfy a need which may be legitimate, but you're doing it in an illegitimate way.

Now, of course, that would be a perfect definition of hell, right? If God had wanted to torture us, he certainly could have done it. Namely, all he has to do is produce in us needs that are incapable of satisfaction, right? Can you think of a better definition of hell than that? To live eternally with some need that you can never satisfy? Right? So we are needful creatures. God loves us infinitely. Therefore, he has provided for the legitimate satisfaction of all I need, but we have to learn. We are not born with the knowledge of how to satisfy these needs legitimately. We have to learn how to do it. Well, so we make a model of reality. We make a model of reality, an inner model of reality in our heads here, but this model of reality in the first place, it is bound to be based on partial information because we are not God. We're finite human beings. We only have a finite, limited amount of information about anything, right? So the best we can do is generalize on the basis of the information we have. So if our parents were kind and loving to us, we may presume that all parents are kind and loving, and later on you may discover that there are parents who are abusive and hateful and cruel or whatever. Okay? Or if we happen to be, unfortunately, those who are born to parents who are hateful and cruel, unloving, we may presume that all parents are like that or all adults are like that unless and until we are fortunate to find out that this isn't the case. All right, whatever. But so our model is bound to be distorted and limited because it is based on partial information, so we're continually correcting this model. We're continually getting new information incorrect in this model. Okay?

But that's not all. Because we have needs, because we face this problem of building a model of reality on the basis of our needs, we are not disinterested spectators. We need to know how to fulfill our need. Therefore, we are going to do what psychologists call “project”. We are going to project on reality on the basis of our needs. That is, we are going to distort the information we have from reality. This is what I call need-generated distortion. In other words, this need-generated distortion can take roughly one of two forms. We can either deny the existence, we can blot out the existence of certain unpleasant things that are there but we don't want them to be there. So we try not to see them and we repress them or we avoid them or we deny their existence. Or else we see things that aren't there. In other words, we interpret things in such a way that, you know, creates unrealistic expectations about reality that things are always gonna be a certain way because it’s always been that way or whatever. So these need-generated distortions of reality are the vain imaginings. They're vain because they're generated by our ego, by our selfish needs, and they’re imaginings these because they're in our head. They are not the reality, but they are distortions of reality. But the point is this: we act not on the basis of the reality, but on the basis of our inner model of reality because we can't act on anything else. That's the way you see reality. You see? You can’t say– think of this: you can't look at reality and say, “I see this wall is blue, but I know it’s really red.” You see, you can't possibly say that, because if the wall really was red, all right, and you knew that it was red, then you couldn't perceive it as blue. Okay? You couldn't perceive it as blue. So that's the problem with these vain imaginings, is that we take them to be reality because to us, they are reality. That's the way we see reality. But, so the process of purification is the process by which we come to perceive the dissonance between reality and our inner model of reality. And this permits us to discard the vain hallucining and replace the faulty part of our picture with the true part of our picture. This is making sense? Okay?

Now, you see, the vain part of it has to do with the fact that not only are we making an inner model of the world out there, we’re also making an inner model of ourselves, of our own reality. And this is what we call self-concept. In other words, we have a concept not only of human beings in general, in the world in general and the way it works, if it's pleasant or unpleasant or good or evil or whatever and whatever. You know, are people generally friendly or trustworthy? Or you know, are people generally untrustworthy and aggressive or whatever? So if people tend to think that everybody is untrustworthy and aggressive, we say, well, he's a paranoid person, or whatever, okay. And if the person tends to think that everybody is trustworthy and nice and we say he's naive or whatever, and so on, Okay, so we have these things, but we also have the concept about ourselves and in particular, about our value or worth, self-worth or value. Now this is so important because the concept of what we are and what we’re worth is largely derived from other people's view of what we are, right? In other words, and especially like when you're young, you know, what your parents and the people you interacted with thought of you and later on other people. Now, so, let's imagine, say, a young child who loves two sing spontaneously, and her mother, for whatever reason, let’s say, irritates the mother. The mother says, “Why do you always make those grotesque sounds? Can't you just shut up and leave me in peace or whatever?” So the child may very well internalize the notion, “Well, I have an unpleasant voice, and I shouldn't sing.” That may objectively be the case, that the child has a very pleasant voice, even maybe has a talent for singing. But the child will have to unlearn this negative self-concept that has been generated by this other person's evaluation. You see? So the point is, the drama is, that the most important part of our inner model is our self-concept, and this is the part of our inner model which is most susceptible to distorted information from other people and is most dependent on the approval of other people.

[man speaking] That’s unfortunate.

Well, it’s unfortunate unless we use it in the way God intended to be used. Why is it that the child needs the approval of his parents? Well, in the first place, because his day-to-day survival depends on the approval of the parents. If the parents disapprove of him sufficiently, maybe they’ll abandon him. So the child knows this. So that's the first rule of dealing with a young child. If given a choice between the approval of his parents and anything else, the child will choose the approval of his parents, okay, because he knows that his survival depends on the approval of his parents. Well, but you see, this is a feature that was given by God in order for us to train children in the love and fear of God. In other words, what we should do is use this to show the child that we ourselves as parents are subject to a higher law, that we seek the approval of God, and that we should all seek the approval of God. So we should in effect say to the child, “It is not my approval that you need but the approval of God. And here is what I've discovered about how to obtain the approval of God. I will share this with you and I will help you, but I am subject to this higher law just as much as you are. I can do nothing but explain this law to you. I didn't create it.” And so on. The problem comes, the power struggle comes when the parents substitute their will and desires for the law of God. Then it becomes a power struggle. Then it becomes authoritarian and so on. You see, that's different.

Okay, so you, see, again, you can deplore these features. And of course, we've all suffered from them because none of us were raised by perfect parents. We've all suffered from them, but these are features which God has built into the system because they have the greatest potential for the good, because when properly used, they will produce what Bahá’u’lláh has talked about, young children and babies who know more than the greatest scholars and so on and so on. In other words, when these are used in the correct way, they will produce an immense amount of progress in a short period of time. So, this notion of self-worth, now what I have come to believe - and Gordon referred to this this morning and I'll just maybe end up with a few statements about this. What time are we going?

[man speaking] There’s a break now until 4:30 or 4:45.

Okay. Okay, well, let me just get in one or two more ideas before the break, and then we'll take a break and so on. You see, now, I believed up until a few years ago that we derived most of our notion of self-worth from our relationship with our parents, which is sort of the Freudian view, or the psychoanalytic view. And this, of course, as [?] is somewhat frightening, right? It's sort of frightening because it seemed so arbitrary. I mean, people can be so different, so this means, like, everybody is totally subject to their parents [?]. I've come to believe that this is not the case, that there are certain very general pervasive features of our society, which largely determine our notion of self-worth which are transmitted by the parents but which have very little to do with the idiosyncrasies of the parents, whether the parents are one way or the other. And so I just want to throw out these ideas and then we'll take our break.

One is the collectivist notion, the collectivist notion, which is that the individual has no intrinsic value. He has value only in so far as he plays some role in society, that he gets all of his value from the society. Now what collectivism leads to is the pursuit of power. You have to pursue power. You have to pursue power because that's the only way you can compel somebody to recognize your word. Nobody can accept that he's worth nothing. I mean, if you really accept in your deepest soul that you're worth nothing, then you commit suicide. I mean, you know. So you can't accept that you're worth nothing, but since the only way you can get a value, if you subscribe to the collectivist view, unconsciously or not, is that you get it from society. And the only way you can get it from society is by compelling, having a status in society, which enables you to compel others to recognize your value. And so this leads to the pursuit of power. The other extreme is individualism, which says that people have value, people can have individual value, but only to the extent that they exhibit special competency in some respect. So individualism leads to competition. Now, of course, unfortunately, nothing prevents the marriage of both of these, so you could very well have a society which we do, which has features both of the pursuit of power and competition, which is the worst of all possible [?], so to speak. So these are tendencies. So collectivism is, of course, the social tendencies, say, in Russia and the pursuit of power is absolutely the leitmotif, was the leitmotif of Soviet society, pursuing of power in every respect. And North American society tends to be more individualistic, and what we see is competition. Now what is spiritually instructive about competition is the following thing. You see, competition is the way you demonstrate special confidence. In other words, how can I prove that I can play the violin better than you? Well, you play the violin and I play the violin. All the people observe and they say, you know, we see who can outperform the other. We observe, you know. So competition means we strive to outperform each other. All right?

Now, this competition is often pervade under the name of the pursuit of excellence, but in fact, it has nothing to do whatsoever with the pursuit of excellence. The pursuit of excellence is, if you will, comparison between my performance at two different times, right? In other words, if I can play the violin better tomorrow than I did today, that's pursuit of excellence. Whether I can play the violin better than you may not say anything about excellence, but depending on our relative abilities about playing the violin. I mean, maybe you're no good at all, in which case, the fact I can play better than you has no meaning whatsoever. Or maybe you are a world class violinist, in which case the fact that you can play the violin much better than me again says nothing about me, about my pursuit of excellence. So pursuit of excellence is the vertical pursuit. It is the comparison of different performances by the same individual at different times. Competition is the horizontal comparison of performances of different individuals at the same time. Okay? So you can see, competition is the comparison of different performances at the same time. Pursuit of excellence is the comparison of different performances by the same individual at different times. So these are perpendicular to each other. They are not the same thing at all. Now, people say well, does not competition stimulate the pursuit of excellence? Well, let's look at it. Suppose you and I are both driving to play the violin. Now, we may very well compare our performances as we pursue excellence. But if I am only interested in playing the violin better than you, then I have two strategies. One strategy is the pursuit of excellence. I can say, “Well, I'll improve my performance and therefore I'll play better than you.” But on the other hand, you can also pursue excellence, in which case I have no guarantee that even if I pursue and, improve my performance substantially, you go also improve your performance substantially, so I have no guarantee that I will play better than you. Now, of course, if we're just pursuing excellence, that won't matter. The world is much better off with two good violin players than one good one and one bad one, right? So if we're all pursuing excellence, there's no problem. But if - I say if - we are in competition, if it is dominance that we are seeking and not just pursuit of excellence, then improving my performance is not the best strategy. What is the best strategy? You know what it is? It's sabotage. The best strategy is for me to sabotage your performance. That's a sure way of being sure that I will play better than you. So competition produces sabotage, produces disunity, to use a Baháʼí word. The competitive society generates disunity because it puts everybody in a competitive instead of a cooperative relationship. Okay? And that's what our society does.

Now, competition also, as I say, values only the exceptional. The ordinary is not valued. You see? So in order to achieve a value, you have to excel at something in our society. If you don't excel, if you’re ordinary, I mean, that's the worst thing, right, in our society? To be considered [whispering] ordinary. I mean, no, seriously, can you think of anything worse than being considered [whispering] ordinary, and that’s about it. He's just an “ordinary” person. You know, contempt for ordinariness, right? It’s much better to be the king of the Mafia than an ordinary person, right? Okay. So we pay millions of dollars to gorillas who knock little rubber pucks and nets, [laughter] okay, because this is excellence. All right? Or we pay millions of dollars to Madonna because she can take her clothes of in public better than anybody else, right? But we don't pay too much attention to ordinary things like motherhood. Now think about this. What could be more ordinary than motherhood? Right? I mean, anybody of the female sex can become a mother, right? It's very easy to be a mother. In fact, in our society, the greatest preoccupation today is how to avoid becoming a mother. Okay? So becoming a mother is an ordinary thing. Nothing extraordinary about that. Nobody's gonna give you any points for being a mother. It's very ordinary.

Now, look. Observe the interaction between mothers and their children. From the time a child is born until the child has become independent, the mother, at every instant of her life, will give priority to the needs of that child over her own needs. Observe any ordinary mother, I'm talking about the most ordinary mother you can find. Okay? Would you look at the interaction between the mother and her child? And you will see that instantly, instantaneously as soon as the mother perceives the child has a need, she will forget her own need and attend to the need of the child, for 10-15 years. Maybe for a whole life, I mean. Okay? That's a pretty extraordinary thing, isn't it? Now, not only is it extraordinary, it’s the future of the whole human race! I mean, all it would take would be for one generation of mothers to refuse to do that, and that would be the end of the human race, huh? We could do a long time without Madonna and hockey stars, right? But we couldn't do very long without mothers. And yet our society gives immense value to hockey stars. Why? Because it's special, because it's out of the ordinary. You see, it devalues the ordinary and supervalues the extraordinary. This is the distortion that is written by a competitive society. The result is a pervasive sense of negative self-worth. In other words, do mothers feel appreciated for the sacrifices they make day after day? No. Are they appreciated? No, they aren't appreciated. Okay? No wonder they don't feel appreciated; they aren’t appreciated, all right? They're taken for granted. Not only are they taken for granted, they’re criticized and blamed for every little blip in the behavior of their kids. All right? So you see, we have to get some hole on the degree of distortion. How pathological this is, you see. How totally pathological it is! It's utterly pathologic. Reread the Kitáb-i-Aqdas in the light of this discussion, you will see that the marriage relationship, the family, the wife is the heart of the thing. Bahá’u’lláh recreates the whole society as an extended family. Motherhood is the most important function. Okay? The education of children is the most important. Okay?

So this again then goes back to the vain imaginings. The vain imaginings or all of these false self-concept that you have that in order to get worth, you have to be extraordinary, that you have to excel in some area of endeavor and so on instead of cooperating and helping serve other people and so on. Okay? That's false. That's vain imaginings, you see. Okay, let it go with that.

[man speaking] We still have 15 minutes.

–in the language of the holy book, and by using this knowledge to avail ourselves of the special conditions of this material world, we can progress spiritually. So you see, when Shoghi Effendi says that this world is a womb for the next world, he's speaking with exact scientific precision. This is not a loose analogy. Exactly it functions in exactly the same way. The counterpart of the genetic code is the teachings of the Manifestation which are encoded in the holy books and passed down from generation to generation, and the conditions of this world - mainly, the suffering that results from the tension of opposites - provides the resistance, the special conditions which enable us to develop spiritually at a very fast rate, if we avail ourselves of this condition. [audience question] You know, I think you did, actually.

[woman speaking] But my question [inaudible].

Not only am I glad that he said it, but I’m glad that it doesn’t exist. [inaudible audience question] Well, you see, one has to distinguish between what the truth is and how you persuade somebody of what the truth is. My experience with people who believe in reincarnation is that it's very difficult to dissuade them of this, so I have to confess that I now very rarely try. Okay? So I simply say to them, “Here is what we Baháʼís believe: that we come to this life only once.” And so I simply use this. You see, we make this once more. Bahá’u’lláh says, well, science tells us that the human physical body is the most highly ordered, the most complex physical structure that exists. I mean, we know this. The writings go one step more. That’s science. That's bottom up. We observe. We observe. Look. Look at everything there is. The most complex thing is the human body. Nobody argues with this. Everybody knows it's true. Within revelation, which is top down and something, it tells us not only is the human body the most complex structure that exists, it is the most complex structure that could exist in the material world because it is the temple of the soul. So it is only fitting that the human body is the most complex, the most subtle entity that is possible to make with material elements. So this is also a sort of consolation, right? It doesn't get any cruder than this in this world. There's no world below this one, you know, so the human physical body is the apogee of material creation, so it rests at this topmost point of an ascending arc. The soul of man is the lowest thing in the spiritual world, because the manifestation and God are higher than the soul of man, and the soul of man comes from God. It is created by God and it comes from God. And it begins its ascending arc from the lowest point in the spiritual world. In fact, what could be lower than total unconsciousness, which is the state we all start out in, right? I mean, you were not aware immediately after you existed. Your self-awareness, your awareness of your being only came about after several years of life experience. So this is, this is the human reality. It is the highest. It is the intersection. It is the touch point of the highest point of physical creation and the lowest point of spiritual creation.

So you see, this completes, this completes the creation. Completeness is one of the several principles by which God creates. One is a kind of an optimization principle, but another is a completeness principle which answers, incidentally, the question that so many people ask about. “Well, if God really created all this, why did He create flies and mosquitoes and all of this stuff?” And so on, and so on. Well, one of the purposes of God in creating is to say, is to show, why did He create dinosaurs which then become extinct, and so on? One thing is that He created to show what it is possible to do with material elements, to show the whole range of possible forms of creation. So, completeness is one of the principles of divine creation. It's not the only one, but it's one of the principles. So the human being then, the reality of the human being is that he is at the juncture, sure of the highest point of the material world and the lowest point of the spiritual world, but he doesn't stay here. When he sheds his material body, which then returns and so on, he then goes on and evolves toward this highest point in the created spiritual world, which is the Manifestation of God is then created. So the Manifestation represents the highest point in the created spiritual world, in the created spiritual world. Alternatively, if you don't like my little symbols, I’ll leave this as an exercise for tomorrow. Translate this into the ringstone symbol. This is just a ringstone symbol. Okay? So all of this, so this is crude compared– actually, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá presented the ringstone symbol, has summed all of this up in the ringstone symbol. So I'll talk about that tomorrow.

So then this is the condition. This is the purpose of our spiritual development. And we will go into more tomorrow. We will dwell more on this question of how it is that we bring in this relationship to God in teaching moral development, how it is that moral development is seen in relationship to this fundamental relationship between ourselves and God. And that's when we'll talk more about questions of love and power and justice that I didn't get to today because I inversed the order. But I think without any real harm to the moral development. Okay. [applause]

Well, again, I would like to thank Gordon for organizing this and also, as I say, thank you for listening to me and I say that very sincerely. I have a lot of faith in the potential as well as the actual of Canadian Baháʼís, and I think that in these next four years, Canada can play a pivotal role in the development of the Faith. And I think in particular, this is true because of the capacity of Canadians to endure and to be steadfast in the Faith. We will talk about this more when we talk about power and the pursuit of power, because I don't want to focus on the negative but these issues are coming to the forefront in the world and in the Baháʼí world and there are going to be great tests that are coming forth in the next four years. As I say, I have a lot of faith in Canadians. And of course, I can say this with a certain detachment because I'm American by birth, and so I chose to become a Canadian. And so, one cannot accuse me of speaking simply out of some Canadian chauvinism. And so I think that, as I say, I'm very happy to have people who are willing to talk about these things and who are interested in deepening on these things, and not everybody is interested in doing this, so I think I'm very gratified to have this opportunity.

So let's take off a bit from where we left off yesterday, which will be also a way of summing up some of the main ideas that we had. We saw that religion is an undertaking. Religion is a process. It is an undertaking. It is an enterprise, and it is an enterprise of the pursuit and establishment of authentic relationships. So religion, true religion, if you want to say, of course, one could simply deny the word religion to everything, which isn't this, but since there's so many things that go under the name of religion just like there's so many things that go under the name of love, then we should say that what we're talking about is true religion. True religion is the enterprise or the pursuit of authentic relationships. That's the goal of religion. So religion again is not a product. It is not a social contract. It is not an ideology. It is the enterprise of pursuing and establishing authentic relationships, since religion does involve ideas, since it does involve a community. In other words, this is the definition of religion in its essence since religion does involve other things. In other words, this pursuit of authentic relationships involves the establishment of a community of believers and all of these processes that we know - consultation and so on and so on, administration - since it involves the understanding and acceptance and belief and principles and laws and theological propositions and so on and so on. It involves ideas. It involves the community.

One could very easily take one or another of these realities as being the essence of religion and say, “Well, religion is just a community.” This is the way a sociologist would look at religion. I mean, he would say: “Sure, the Baháʼí Faith is a great thing, and these people are a bit naive, but they are dedicated to a good idea of being cooperative and working together to facilitate the unity of mankind. And so this is a very good thing. These people get a sense of self-worth out of working together and belonging to a group. We all need to belong to a group which validates our role in society and so on.” So you can, you know, this sort of sociological analysis of religion. And so this is really what the Baháʼí faith is, you know. And again, as I say, an ideologue would say: “Well, the Baháʼí Faith is built around certain theological ideas - the oneness of God, the oneness of mankind, progressive revelation. These are somewhat novel ideas. These are extensions of ideas that were developed by Islamic philosophers and so on and so on. And so these ideas are very attractive, and so this forms a very attractive ideology. So people are attracted to this ideology, and they're dedicated to the propagation of this ideology, and they go around teaching the Faith in order to propagate these ideas.” And so on and so on. And what I'm saying is that this is all true as far as it goes, we do want to propagate these ideas. We do have a community. The community hopefully does give value to each of its members by accepting them and so on. So I'm not, you know, speaking condescendingly of these things. All I'm saying is that none of these things are the whole reality, that the essential reality is that we're engaged in the pursuit of authentic relationships and that if we simply have a community, even a good community, even a nice community that works very well and if we actually accept all of these beliefs and propositions and even understand them, we have nonetheless, if we do not, if we're not deliberately consciously pursuing authentic relationships, then we are missing the point. And eventually we will be quite severely tested in one way or another.

I don't know how widespread in Canada are copies or tapes of the talk which Peter Khan gave at the House of Worship in Wilmette about four months ago. Do you know about this talk?

[man speaking] Yes. We’ve transcribed it.

Right, so he talks about tests, about mental tests, and so on and so on, and he gives a quote from the Guardian which was new to me, which I had never seen before. And I can't quote it exactly, but the paraphrase goes something like this. He says that Baháʼís should deepen in the Covenants of the Báb, Bahá’u’lláh, and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, and it is deepening in the Covenants of the Báb, Bahá’u’lláh, and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá which will protect the Baháʼís from the attacks of the enemies from outside the Faith and the much more dangerous and insidious inside enemies of the Faith. And then the Guardian goes on to identify who these inside enemies are. He said these are the inside enemies of the Faith: are those who uphold the intellectual principles of the Faith without upholding its spiritual basis. So the Guardian is saying several things. He is saying first that it is possible to uphold, in other words, to believe in, all of the intellectual principles of the Faith by which one means anything that one can articulate rationally - you know that there’s one God, that there's one mankind, that religion is progressive and so on and so on - without upholding the spiritual foundation upon which these principles rest. What is the spiritual foundation upon which principles rest? Well, it's the quote that we read yesterday. It is that mystic feeling which unites God with man.

Let's read that again, even though we read it even at least twice yesterday, but not just as a gesture to the people who are new, but for ourselves. It's worth reading once more. It's on page 136 of the book, and he says:

“The universal crisis affecting mankind is, therefore, essentially spiritual in its causes… [For] the core of religious faith is that mystic feeling which unites Man with God. This state of spiritual communion can be brought about and maintained by means of meditation and prayer. And this is the reason why Bahá’u’lláh has so much stressed the importance of worship… The Bahá’í Faith, like all other Divine Religions, is thus fundamentally mystic in character. Its chief goal is the development of the individual and society–” there’s the theme of our conference today. “Its chief goal is the development of the individual and society, through the acquisition of spiritual virtues and powers. It is the soul of man which has first to be fed–” there's the spiritual foundation– ”And this spiritual nourishment prayer can best provide.”

And then again, the quote, it's on page 137, the short in-text quote: “We must become entirely selfless and devoted to God so that every day and every moment we seek to do only what God would have us do and in the way He would have us do it.” So it's quite possible that a person could participate joyously and cooperatively in the Baháʼí community on and so on and so on, and be on the assemblies or be a board member or a counselor or a member of an NSA, and so on and so on, and could believe and even be very eloquent in his articulation of all the Baháʼí principles, even be a great teacher of the Faith, at least be perceived as a charismatic teacher of the Faith, let's say, and still, and still not become entirely selfless and devoted to God, so that every day and every moment he seeks to do only what God would have him do in the way He would have him do it. This is the spiritual foundation. This is the nature of the authentic relationship between us and God. So either one relentlessly pursues this relationship or you don't. And if you don't relentlessly pursue this relationship, then you're not going to get it, because it's the sort of thing that doesn't happen casually. It happens only when it is deliberately pursued.

Now, one of the things that we're going to talk about is how to pursue it, but for the moment, I simply want to make the point that this is the fundamental thing. Of course, authentic relationships again, they are the vertical relationship between us and God and the horizontal relationship between human beings. And so when we pursue authentic relationships with other human beings through loving them, serving them, sharing their pain, being open to share their pain, forgiving them for the things they do that hurt us, forgiving the injustices that they do to us - real injustice, not explaining them away and say, “Well, he didn't really mean to do it.” I mean, suppose he does something deliberately, suppose in anger or what else, he really does do an injustice to you. Well, you have a choice, you know. Suppose he doesn't apologize to you. Suppose he doesn't even recognize it. Suppose you say, “Well, that's just too much. I'm going to confront him with this.” And say, “You know, you realize you didn't know.” “I didn't realize I did that.” “I don't see why I did that.” “I didn't do nothing wrong.” Okay, suppose he’s your husband or your wife or your child or whatever, okay? So is your forgiveness going to be conditional on the fact that he recognizes it? Suppose he never recognizes it. So are you gonna bear the burden of your desire for revenge for the whole of eternity? Or are you going to forgive him? I mean, that's the only choice you have. You don't have any other choice, you know. Otherwise, you make your spiritual development conditional on his spiritual development. Okay? If he has been unjust to you, and you say, “I'm not going to forgive him unless he recognizes that it's injustice.” Well, then you're making your spiritual development conditional on his spiritual development. You're giving up the power over your own life. You're putting it into the hands of other people. So we have to relentlessly pursue these authentic relationships. We have to relentlessly pursue these authentic relationships. It's not going to happen automatically. And this is the real essence of religion.

Now, a relationship involves three things. It involves two people. It involves a subject and an object. In other words, a relator and a related, a relatee. So if we speak of it from the point of view of an individual, it involves me, the subject, and the object, let's say just to distinguish the other subject, and it involves the relation between these two. So it involves three things: it involves a subject A, a subject B, and an interaction or a transaction between A and B. Now, let's look at this in terms of the structure of reality that we examined yesterday. This is really the ringstone symbol which I have produced in some fashion up here, so let's see what the ringstone symbol says. It says first that the highest thing is God, that the highest thing is God in the spiritual world, and that the lowest thing in the spiritual world is man. But man is created in the image of God, so the symbol for God and the symbol for man are the same thing. The soul of each human being is a reflection of the essence of God, in a certain sense. Okay, just us we say that, so yesterday the soul of man is indivisible. It is a unified essence. It has no parts. It is not composite, in the same way the essence of God is indivisible. Of course, there is differentiation on the level of the human soul. There is no differentiation on the level of the essence of God, but, I mean, the essence of God is unique. There's nothing else like it, you see. That's another thing. We can talk about this later on. There's a number of meanings to the oneness of God, of the uniqueness of God. And as we will see, everything that God has created, He has created an infinite number. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says this. So there's an infinity of Manifestation. There's an infinity of universes. There's an infinity of worlds. And there's an infinity of human beings and so on. There's only one thing which has no equal, and that is the essence of God. And there is only one copy of the essence of God. There are not several essences of God. So the essence of God is the only thing that is absolutely unique.

And so we have the world of God, the world of man, so this is the subject A and the subject B. And then we have the relationship between them or the link between them, and what is that? Well, that is the Manifestation, and the Manifestation is the link between God and man in two ways. First, horizontally the Manifestation is the level of being intermediate between God and man. [on the blackboard] So here’s the world of God. Here's the world of the human soul. And here is the Manifestation, which is the intermediate level between the two, the intermediate level between the two. So the Manifestation is literally the relationship between God and man, the nexus, the link between God and man, but He's not only the level that is intermediate. He's not only that which is between God and man; He is also the link, the vertical link. In other words, the symbol for the Holy Spirit is the same as the symbol for the Manifestation. He is also the link which comes from God through the intermediate level, which is the Manifestation and connects God with man, that mystic feeling which unites God with man. So, we must be careful when we say that there is no direct connection between God and man. I mean, Bahá’u’lláh says this in the Kitáb-i-Íqán, but we have to understand what He means by that. He doesn't mean that there's no direct communion between us and God. It's not what He means. That's the way many Baháʼís have interpreted it. And as a matter of fact, this was a cause of immense difficulty when this very superficial teaching were given to the Russians who are mystics. And when they were told there's no mysticism. It’s just a fairy tale. There's no direct connection between God and man, and the only connection is through the Manifestation. So you connect with God by believing in Bahá’u’lláh, and so there were a number of Russian who became Baháʼís anyway. They believed in Bahá’u’lláh, but I said, you know, this isn't right.

I mean, you know, I myself had had a interconnection with God all my life, and I've always prayed, you know. Now you're telling me that there is no direct connection between me and God? Well, you see, what Bahá’u’lláh is saying is that this direct connection between us and God, this mystic feeling which unites - I mean, it's not my words, it’s the Guardians - which unites God and man comes through the Manifestation, so it is not direct in the sense that it is indirect. That is, it is through the Manifestation. The Manifestation is an intermediate level between God and man. In other words, as we see here, we have God, then the manifestation, then the human being. But to say that it is not direct is not to say that it is not a connection and that it’s not a connection between God and man, an immediate connection, if you will. It is a connection which is indirect in the sense that is mediated by the Manifestation. And it is literally mediated by the Manifestation because the Manifestation is the incarnation - the words of the Guardian, not mine - of the attributes of God. He is the incarnation, not of the essence of God, but of the attributes of God. The Manifestation is the incarnation of every attribute of God. So the Manifestation is the connection. So in other words, if you take out the Manifestation, what you have is God - absolute, unchanging, eternal and so on and so on. The only manifestation of the essence of God is that essence.

You see, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá explains that Manifestation is the appearance of a thing in several different forms. Okay, so for example, all material things are different Manifestations of energy, right? In other words, this table is a certain locally stable form of energy. So is this piece of chalk, so is your body, and so on and so on. So we can say that the whole material world is just different Manifestations of energy, physical energy. So that's manifestation. Well, Bahá’u’lláh and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá explained the only manifestation of the essence of God is that essence. Now, there’s the essence of God cannot appear in any other form than what it is, and this is why in the prayers, in the writings continually, it is said God is God. He is God. There is no other God but God. This is the only thing you can say about the essence of God. It is that it is the essence of God. You see, this is very important and this is the source of so much confusion. It's just unbelievable. You see, why can we not predicate the attributes of the essence of God? Now, so if I say this chalk is white. Whiteness is an attribute of this chalk. Now what this means, this presupposes that there is a category of existence called whiteness. There was a pre-existing quality of whiteness into which this chalk enters. Okay, therefore if I say that God is good, for example, if I say that God is good, then this thing that presupposes that there is some notion of goodness into which God has to enter. In other words, that there is some pre-existing notion of goodness that God enters into. But God is the uncaused. He is the cause of all causes. Therefore, to say that God is good is simply to say that God is God because what is good is determined by God. It is not goodness that determines what God is. It is God that determines what constitutes goodness. All categories, all attributes are generated by the essence of God, not the other way around. There is no attribute which conditions the essence of God. It is the unconditioned, you see. Therefore, when the prayer– this is not hyperbole. This is not just repetition. When the prayers have a, say, “God is God. He is God. There is no other God but God. Verily, God is God. He's drilling us into this, that there is nothing above and beyond the essence of God. There is no precondition. He is the cause of all causes.

Well, let let's read the opening paragraph of the Gleanings:

“Lauded and glorified art Thou, O Lord, my God! How can I make mention of Thee, assured as I am that no tongue, however deep its wisdom, can befittingly magnify Thy name, nor can the bird of the human heart, however great its longing, ever hope to ascend into the heaven of Thy majesty and knowledge.

If I describe Thee, O my God, as Him Who is the All-Perceiving–” the All-Knowing– “I find myself compelled to admit that They Who are the highest Embodiments of perception–” the Manifestations– “ have been created by virtue of Thy behest. And if I extol Thee as Him Who is the All-Wise, I, likewise, am forced to recognize that the Well Springs of wisdom–” the Manifestations– “have themselves been generated through the operation of Thy Will. And if I proclaim Thee as the Incomparable One, –” unique– “I soon discover that they Who are the inmost essence of oneness have been sent down by Thee and are but the evidences of Thine handiwork. And if I acclaim Thee as the Knower of all things, I must confess that they Who are the Quintessence of knowledge are but the creation and instruments of Thy Purpose.

Exalted, immeasurably exalted, art Thou above the strivings of mortal man to unravel Thy mystery, to describe Thy glory, [or] even to hint at the nature of Thine Essence. For whatever such strivings may accomplish, they never can hope to transcend the limitations imposed upon Thy creatures, inasmuch as these efforts are actuated by Thy decree,–” in other words, our very capacity to seek out God has come from God– “and are begotten of Thine invention. The loftiest sentiments which the holiest of saints–” And so on and so on. You know this passage.

“Far, far from Thy glory be what mortal man can affirm of Thee, or attribute unto Thee, or the praise with which he can glorify Thee! Whatever duty Thou hast prescribed unto Thy servants of extolling to the utmost Thy majesty and glory is but a token of Thy grace unto them, –” again, He’s doing it all for us, not for Him– “that they may be enabled to ascend unto the station conferred upon their own inmost being, the station of the knowledge of their own selves.” In other words, establishment of self-authenticity. “No one else besides Thee hath, at any time, been able to fathom Thy mystery–” and so on. So the only absolutely true statement that we can make about God is that God is God. In other words,, you know, we can say God is good, God is just, God is All-Knowing, God is All-Wise, and these are true in a relative sense. These are true in a metaphorical sense. Okay, for example, what do we mean when we say that God is good? What do we mean when we say that God is good? What we mean roughly is the following: that God, everything God does, He does for our benefit. It could have been possible, otherwise, you know. If we say that “God is good” means that we don't suffer, we know that that's not true, right? If we say that to be a good God means that to create a world where there's no pain and there's no suffering, well, boy, He didn't do that, so he's not a good God. Well, this is exactly the argument that a lot of atheists make. They say how could there be a good God if there's all this suffering and pain in the world? If there's all these wars and sexual abuse of children and all of this other stuff? You know, look at all the pain, the suffering, the injustice, the evil in the world. How could there be an All-Powerful good God that would create such a world? Right. This is called the problem of evil, and it has been the stumbling block for 4000 years of the history of mankind. Thousands, if not millions of people have become atheists because of this.

Read the account of survivors of Auschwitz. Many Jews lost their faith in God because of what they experienced in these horrible camps and so on and so on. I mean, Elie Wiesel talks about this in one of his books, you know, about when he was a boy in Auschwitz and so on and how he lost his faith in God, you know, saying how is it possible that there could be a God who would allow this to happen? Well, you see, this is a perfect example of what results from this inversion of saying that there is some pre-existing notion of good into which God must fit. So if you say that these things are evil and a good God would therefore not allow them to happen, therefore, God isn't good if He exists. Either He doesn't exist or He exists, He's an evil god. Well, whereas Baháʼís turn it around and say God does exist. He is good. And what does that mean that He is good? It means that there is a divine purpose for our ultimate benefit in every condition of existence. Now, how is it that such suffering and pain as we know in this world is part of a beneficent, divine purpose? Well, this is one of the things that we have to understand. This is one of the things that should spur every human being to think deeply about life and the meaning of life. So you see, but we can say that God is good. I mean, we do say that God is good, but we have to know what we mean when we say that. And what we mean is that everything God does, He does for our benefit, not for His benefit. There is no self-interest on the part of God. That's the point, you see.

Now let me say a word about this and this is very important. Why is it that this relationship with God is the foundation of all of our relationships? Why is God absolutely necessary to the establishment of authenticity? If we could understand this point clearly, this would be worth the whole thing because this is really crucial. You see, as we said yesterday, the human being by his very nature, God created nature, is a needful being. All right, we all know this. I mean, if there's anything we know, we know that we have needs. I mean, it's all we talk about, is we need this and we need that, so certainly we know that. So the human being is not God. God has no needs. Human beings do. Not only are we not all-powerful or self-sufficient. We are not self-sufficient. To say that we are needful is to say that we are not self-sufficient. To say that God has no needs is to say that God is self-sufficient, which again is one of the ways which Bahá’u’lláh described God. He is the self-sufficing, the self-sufficing. Okay. But not only are we not self-sufficient, we are not infinitely flexible beings. We are not infinitely flexible beings. What does this mean? This means that not only do we have needs, but we cannot indefinitely defer the fulfillment of the need. We don’t have to fulfill them all immediately, and this goes back to the whole question of instant gratification which psychologists talked about a lot. You know, the society of instant gratification, as somebody put it. The only problem with instant gratification is it’s not quick enough. [laughter] But so, maturity, psychological and spiritual maturity means the capacity to defer gratification. But this is a relative thing. We cannot indefinitely defer gratification of our fundamental needs, whether they are material or spirits. Okay? We can't, because then that would be God-like again. Okay, that would be infinite. So we have needs, and we cannot indefinitely defer their satisfaction.

Now, let’s just look for a moment. Suppose we could. Suppose that we were needful creatures. This is a technique which I often use, which you may or may not find useful, a pedagogical technique of examining alternatives to the actual configuration in order to understand the actual configuration better, and as to see what would happen if we negate it. So suppose we were needful creatures, but we could choose when we satisfy our needs. In other words, we had the control to say, “Okay, I will ultimately have to satisfy this need, but I can choose when I want to satisfy it.” Well, then the optimal strategy of life would be to defer action as long as possible, because, you see, because our minds are finite, because our knowledge is limited, we always act on partial information, right? I mean, we're always in the position, this is the existential position of the human being. We are always in the position of acting on partial information. This is why action takes courage, because we're always acting towards the unknown. Now, therefore, there's always a risk in action. There's always a risk in action. Of course, there's a risk in inaction because inaction is a form of action. It's a choice of not acting. There's risk in that. I mean, the unknown is always there, whether we act in a certain way towards it or not, but the point is that nonetheless, if we set out deliberately to plot a course of action we are. We gather information. We try to reduce the unknown and thus the potential threat as much as possible, but nonetheless, we can't eliminate it entirely. There's always a risk in action, and this is why it takes faith to act. This is why faith is necessary. Faith is the courage to act in the face of partial information, that's what faith is.

So if we– the perfect example of a person who has no faith is the catatonic schizophrenic, right? In other words, he is frozen into total inaction because he has no faith in any action that he can take. Okay, so a total loss of faith would result in a total paralysis of action. However, the fact is that for most people, the courage to act is based simply on familiarity. In other words, the sun rises every day, so we assume that it’s going to keep rising every day. All right, now these regularities reduce the sense of threat. Every time we flip the light switch, the light comes on until the bulb burns out and so on and so on. And we know what to do when the bulb burns out and so on and so on. So it's these regularities, habituated regularities, which give us a false sense of security. That's why materialism is so enervating to the spiritual process because it gives us a false sense of security. The only real sense of security derived from this relationship with God. [audio cuts off]

Just to finish up with some of the ideas I was discussing at the end of the last session. You see, the question becomes, how do you avoid these two poles of collectivism and individualism, because the only remedy for individualism seems to be collectivism and the only remedy for collectivism seems to be individualism. But again, this is sort of like on a horizontal sliding scale. Every society can be situated somewhere between the poles of pure collectivism and pure individualism. So again, the answer, I believe, lies in the notion of intrinsic value. In other words, you have to realize that we don't have to seek our value because we already have it. It comes from God. In other words, [on blackboard] this is the material world and the spiritual world. Now, just to say a few words about this, the Baháʼí writings tell us that the principle of existence in the material world is one of composition. All material entities are composed of elements or parts. Then, the principle of existence in the spiritual world is that entities exist as undivided holes, so the soul of man exists as an undivided soul. It has no parts to it. So the profile existence in the material world is that entities have a finite beginning and a finite end. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá expresses this. This is from this article, The Causality Principle in the World of Being on that the quotations are mostly from Paris Talks and from Some Answered Questions. So this is on page 115 people have asked me to mention the page that I'm quoting from.

[man speaking] They will be due this evening.

Good, good. The books.

“The whole physical creation is perishable. These material bodies are composed of atoms; when these atoms begin to separate decomposition sets in, then comes what we call death. This composition of atoms, which constitutes the body or mortal element of any created being, is temporary. When the power of attraction, which holds these atoms together, is withdrawn, the body, as such, ceases to exist.”

“Absolute repose does not exist in nature. All things either make progress or lose ground. Everything moves forward or backward, nothing is without motion. From his birth, a man progresses physically–” I’m talking about the physical reality – “until he reaches maturity, then, having arrived at the prime of his life, he begins to decline, the strength and powers of his body decrease, and he gradually arrives at the [hour] of death… All material things progress to a certain point, then begin to decline.”

So this is the pattern of all things material. They have a finite beginning and a finite end. Material entities exist when the particular configuration which constitutes them, comes into being. And it endures for a certain time, and then when decomposition occurs, as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says, then the body no longer exists. The entity no longer exists. And of course, during this time it goes to a certain evolution. Again, I draw this parabola, this inverted parabola that is this arc of ascending and descending that characterizes everything physical. Spiritual entities exist as undivided holes. And since, as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says, death, what we call death is decomposition, then spiritual entities cannot die. They are immortal. In particular, the soul of man cannot die. However, it did not always exist. So the soul, in particular, of the human being, has a beginning but no end. We are told in the writings that the soul of man is created at the moment of physical conception. The House of Justice has said that we don't know exactly what is the moment of physical conception. Whether this is the moment that the sperm penetrates the egg or whatever, we don't know, but whenever this moment is the moment that the soul is created.

And then we have the world of God, which has neither beginning nor end. Now, of course, the world of man can be subdivided into two sub-worlds or two levels, which is the Manifestations who are created in a state of perfection and ordinary human beings who are created in an imperfect state but with the potential for perfection. So God is eternally unchanged - unchanged in the beginning, unchanged in the end. Already Plato gave a two sentence logical proof that God is unchanging. He said God is perfect. Any change from a perfect state must be towards a less perfect state. Since God is perfect, He cannot change. End of argument. [audience comment] A change means a change from one state to another state. If God is in a perfect state, then if He changes from a perfect state, it must be to a different state, which must therefore be imperfect. Since He is in a perfect state. Therefore, God does not change since He is always perfect. Okay? ‘Abdu’l-Bahá gives the same argument, but Plato already gave it 2000 years ago. So God is absolutely forever unchangeable. Physical entities have a finite beginning and a finite end.

The souls of the Manifestations are not eternally pre-existent. They are created at a certain point. However, they pre-exist their spiritual lots. This we're told in the writings. What? [audience question?] Yes. The soul of the Manifestation pre-exists in the spiritual world. In fact, the other levels of reality below the Manifestation are created through the Manifestations, and there are an infinite number of Manifestations. Each manifestation is a perfect representative of God. In other words, to know any Manifestation is to know God, so the Manifestation is created in a perfect state of being, so He also does not change. perfect on his level. Now, remember, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá explains that something can be perfect on its level of being, but imperfect with respect to another level of being. So the Manifestation does not share in God's eternal pre-existence. God has always existed. A given Manifestation has not always existed. There was a time when Bahá’u’lláh did not exist. There was a time when Jesus Christ did not exist. But at some point, God created the soul of Bahá’u’lláh, and as with all Manifestations, the soul was created in a state of perfection like a pure and perfect mirror which instantly and completely reflects God. And so this, of course, goes on in the spiritual world.

Now, the body of man, the human body is a physical entity composed of elements, and so it has the typical profile of a material entity. That is, it has a finite beginning and a finite end. The soul of ordinary humans, our souls are spiritual entities, and so they are part of the spiritual world. This is an absolute line here. There is no, they're as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says, the soul of man is completely out of the order of the physical world. So we can’t, we should not think of the soul as something like energy or pure energy or something like this because Einstein's equation says there's inter-controvertability between matter and energy, so the purest energy, physical entity, you can think of is still just another form of matter. It's still the material world. So the soul is above all of that. It is, as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says, entirely out of order of the physical creation. It is not a physical entity. It is created, it comes from God, and from the moment of its creation, it begins to evolve and it evolves towards the state of perfection in which the Manifestation is created. So these are the four levels of creation that are mentioned in the Baháʼí writings.

These are the four what we would call in philosophy ontological levels. That is, there are distinctions of kind and there are distinctions of degree. There are two kinds of distinctions, so the difference between a wild dog and a domesticated, say, seeing eye dog is a difference of, degree or kind, which? Degree! They're both dogs. They're both on the same level of being, but what an immense difference of degree. Okay, one dog is a helper of humanity, the other is a wild beast, but they’re still beasts, they’re still animals so that's a difference of degree. Though the difference between a human being and the dog is a degree or kind. No dog, however domesticated, can ever be a human being and so on. [audience comment] Right, right. But, well, in any case. So, these are the four levels. In other words, God is alone on His level of existence. The Manifestation is on a level of existence that is distinct. All Manifestations are on the same level of existence, all the Manifestations. And the human being constitutes a level of existence intermediary below the Manifestation, but his soul is totally outside the material world. So these are the four levels. Now, there are differences of degree in each of these levels. Okay, in other words, in the material world, there are differences in degree, like the dogs. I was just talking about, or like when ‘Abdu’l-Bahá gives the example of the mineral spirit, the vegetable spirit, the animal spirit. These are different degrees of existence in the material world, but they still are part of the material world. They're on the same ontological level.

Now, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá explains that there is no progression in the material world. There is no progression that is not followed ultimate by retrogression. There is no absolute progress in the material world. The whole of the material world represents periodic motion, that is, constant motion within fixed limits. So this is just like this parabola if you put a bunch of them together. If you have a number of these cycles going on together, what you get is this [on blackboard], okay? So you have your body now, but within 100 years, let's make it easy, it will not be here. It will be dispersed, but maybe the atoms in your body now will be part of somebody else's body, you know, and so on, and so on. And so this configuration that is you will go through cycles and so on, but there is no progression in the material that is not followed by retrogression. That is, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says, the material world does not have in itself the capacity of progress. All things that we call progress is an expression of spirit in the material world. The very notion of matter, the measure of matter, is mass. What is mass? Mass is defined as inertia, as resistance to change. So, matter is a resistance against which or upon which spirit acts, so matter in itself has no capacity for progress or change. Matter is, in its very– the essence of matter is to resist change. The more matter you have, you cannot produce change by increasing matter, because if you increase matter or mass, you increase the resistance to change. So this is one reason why we should not amass riches, because if we amass riches, we are literally increasing our resistance to spiritual transformation. That's literally what we're doing. We're creating a greater resistance against which we have to struggle. Now, of course, when we have financial difficulties, we may think that that would be preferable. But nonetheless, this is what we're told in the writings.

So the point is that these fluctuations in the material world are due to the tension of opposites. And this tension of opposites is the result of the action of the spiritual world on the material world. So in the spiritual world, there is no tension of opposites. In the spiritual world, the only movement is towards God. There are no opposing forces. Let me read you this, where this is quite clear from the writings. There are numerous statements which make this quite clear:

“In the world of spirit there is no retrogression.” This is ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Page 119. “The world of mortality is a world of contradictions, of opposites; motion being compulsory everything must either go forward or retreat. In the realm of spirit there is no retreat possible, all movement is bound to be towards a perfect state. ‘Progress’ is the expression of spirit in the world of matter. The intelligence of man, his reasoning powers, his knowledge, his scientific achievements, all these being Manifestations of the spirit, partake of the inevitable law of spiritual progress and are, therefore, of necessity, immortal.”

Now let us consider the soul we have seen. That movement is essential to existence. Nothing that has life is without motion. All creation, whether mineral, vegetable, or animal is compelled to obey the law of motion. It must either ascend or descend. But with the human soul, there is no decline. Its only movement is towards perfection. Growth and progress alone constitute the motion of the soul. Divine perfection is infinite; therefore, the progress of the soul is also infinite. Now, of course, this means after the soul is released from the body, as is clear from the context. Okay? In other words, in this life, if we do not make sufficient spiritual progress, we can retrogress, in this life. This is quite clear from the writings and the example of Covenant-breakers and so on makes it quite clear. In fact, Shoghi Effendi, in one place, says life is a constant struggle not only against the forces of life, but against our own egos. And if we cease, he says, it's like rowing upstream, and if we cease for even a moment to make an effort, we will soon see that we’re carried downstream by these forces. So as I say these material forces are like the resistance, but if you don't struggle against this resistance, then these forces can build up against the spiritual forces, which we are deploying inadequately, and we can retrogress in this life. Yes?

[woman speaking] But here it’s said that you can’t, spiritually, you can’t [inaudible].

As I say from the context, that's quite clear that it’s referring to once the soul is released from the body. You see, in the first passage– one has to put these in context. Otherwise you just go around in circles. In the world of spirit, there is no retrogression. The world of mortality is a world of contradictions, of opposites. Motion being compulsory, everything must go forward or retreat. In the realm of spirit, there is no retreat possible. In the realm of spirit. As long as we have bodies attached to our souls, we are not in the realm of spirit. Our souls are in the room of spirit, but ourselves have this bodily aspect which is also in the material world, and therefore, as long as we're down to the material world, we’re subject to the laws of the material world and the law of progression and retrogression. Okay?

[man speaking] You said, just before you put that quote, you’ve said that the world of mortality [inaudible].

Yes, it says the world of mortality is a world of contradictions, of opposites. Motion being compulsory, everything must go forward or retreat. Progress of the expression of spirit in the world of matter.

[man speaking] It’s off the [?]. Whenever you look at writings, you’ll always look and see the paradoxes, the opposites, and in some ways, in our limited ways of understanding, we sometimes wonder, how could you put together a complete [?], a complete frankness. And there’s always millions of examples of it, and that's interesting to me that our world that we live in is a world of contradictions and opposites. And the spiritual world is not. There’s only a progression in the process.

That’s right. And you see, what we have, what has come out of modern science is also the following thing, you see, that there can be no– we know this for a fact. There’s various incompleteness principles like Heisenberg incompleteness or Gödel incompleteness in mathematics. There can be no exact, rational description of the totality of reality. That we know for a fact, now. Science has proved this. There does not exist any finite, let's say, rational exact description of the whole of reality. So this is why the language of Revelation is a poetic language, or a majestic language, because the purpose of the language of science is to give an exact description of a part of reality and the purpose of language of revelation is to give a description of the whole of reality. And since there is no rational, exact description of the whole of reality, then the prophet uses poetic language, a majestic language with tensions of opposites and contradictory images, which we take them out of context, you know, we get confused and so on and so on because he is giving a language which has the capacity to describe the whole of reality. And what does this mean practically? This means that whatever problem you can encounter, whatever problem it is possible for any human being to encounter, is answered in the writings somewhere. You can't say that for any scientific theory. Okay? Even the best scientific theory. You can say this theory tells us exactly what is gonna happen in a certain circumstances, but if you say, does this theory, you have an answer for every problem that will ever come up? Well, absolutely not, because the theory you see is an exact description of a certain part of reality. And scientists, I mean, now, scientists talk, joking about the theory of everything, you know. They sort of make fun of this notion. And when scientists come up with very speculative theories, they're made fun of as trying to make a theory of everything, because scientists now know, I mean, we know from these undesirable principles like Heisenberg's and Gödel's and so on, that this is impossible, I mean, even in principle.

So science is bottom up. Science is bottom up. It starts by observation, and it goes up towards an abstract description of a larger and larger portions of reality. And religion is top down. It starts with the global description of the whole of reality, and it comes down. So that's why you need both religion and science. You can't do it just once. And incidentally, that's a very important point. It’s that, the Baháʼí point of view, science is just as important for the spiritual development of the human being as his religion. So some Baháʼís seem to feel that religion alone is sufficient. But this isn't what the Baháʼí Faith teaches. So the unity of religion and science as taught in the Baháʼí faith is not just the notion that religion doesn't contradict science, but that science is from God. Science is, if you will, one of the two God-ordained sources of true knowledge of reality. Well, let me read to you the way ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says it:

“Know then that those mathematical questions which have stood the test of scrutiny and about the soundness of which there is no doubt are those that are supported by incontrovertible and logically binding proofs and by the rules of geometry as applied to astronomy.”

So that's one place where it’s absolutely clear, He says these are questions about which there is no doubt. Infallible, if you want to say. Well again, we've known this in mathematics for about the last 100 years. Again, this is a development since Bahá’u’lláh’s comment has [?] enough. This is the whole basis of computers, that mathematical knowledge is so absolute that we can even program a mechanical device to grind it out. An unthinking, unfeeling device can do it, because mathematical knowledge is very certain knowledge, but about a very limited part of reality. So science alone– one could turn it around and say, “Well, why do we need religion if science actually gives us infallible knowledge? Why isn't that good enough? Well, the point is that it gives us infallible knowledge, but not adequate knowledge. It doesn't give us knowledge that we need to satisfy our needs to make spiritual progress to satisfy the purpose of our existence. So science alone is not enough, either. But religion alone is not enough, either, because God has ordained it that way. I mean, if God had wanted us to be able to heal ourselves of our diseases by prayer, He could have done that. But He didn't. He ordained medical science, and He has all sorts of spiritual reasons for this. This creates certain kinds of length between human beings. It means that he wants us all to have the experience of being vulnerable and dependent on other people, as well as being in a position to serve and to help others who are weaker rather than seeking to dominate them. So He has all sorts of purposes in having divided up knowledge into science and religion. He could have made it either way. He could have made it either way. So in fact, there's only knowledge. There's only truth in this reality, in this knowledge of reality.

So what you call science and what you call religion is really to a certain extent arbitrary, but the processes are different. One is the process of a bottom-up process, of building models based on our perceptions of reality and carefully testing the models in the whole [?], and the other is revelation. There's a top-down process in which the language of the prophet gives, as I say, a complete description of reality. And I'm not making this up. Shoghi Effendi said the writings contain an answer to every human problem, and if the Baháʼís have not found the answer to a given problem, it is only because they have not been able to ask the right questions and found the part of the writings which contains this answer. He also said that the Faith is perfect, so the Baháʼí Faith is perfect and that any imperfection that we think we see in the Faith comes from ourselves and not from the Faith itself. Just us I said this morning that love, like gravity, is the source of attraction. Love is the source of happiness, so if we are unhappy, it's not because we love. We may be unhappy in spite of the fact that we love to some extent, but love itself can’t be the source of unhappiness because the nature of love is to produce happiness. So what we have is one reality. We have two God-ordained forces of trustworthy knowledge of this reality. One is science and the other is religion. Science gives us exact knowledge of portions of reality. Religion gives us a comprehensive knowledge of all of reality, and it is by putting these two together that we can get exact knowledge of any given portion of reality. In other words, by a scientific study of the writings, we can, therefore, evolve an exact answer to any given problem. But of course we will never have the God's eye view of the whole thing, because only God has that.

So, I offer these symbols. This is a symbolic way that I represent just in my own mind the four levels of existence, if you will. Well, there's two ways. [drawing on blackboard] You can use the double arrow here, the constant single arrow, the evolving arrow, and these are– I do this to remind myself of the dynamics of the material world, it’s continual movement within fixed limits. You see, this is the universal law of material world, this periodic motion, constant motion within fixed limits. It's the beating of your heart, the waves of your brain I talked about this morning, the motion of the planets around the sun - the whole of reality is waves, is periodic motion, wave-like motion. This is the only way, and a very clever way that God had found to unite two things together, namely, dynamism that has change, constant change and stability. You see, change without stability gives you an exponential catastrophe. Stability without change is just a good definition of death, right? So the only way you can have both dynamism and stability is periodic motion, and that's what every material thing does. You see, so, for example, as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says, the health of your body depends on the exact proportion of the various elements that constitute your body. Disease supervenes as he says, when there is a disturbance in this proportion, when there's an excess or deficiency of a certain element. But even though the levels of these elements in your body may be constant, there's actually a dynamic process going on in which they're being converted into each other continually. So this is a dynamic process but one which is stable, like the earth turning on its axis, you see?

He says– the Muslim philosophers puzzled over the Quranic statement that the sun moves constantly in a fixed place. How could it move in a fixed place? If it's moving, it’s not fixed. If it's fixed, it's not moving. Well, it turns on its axis because it has perfect symmetry. You see, there, the sphere, our circle has this symmetry. You see, a circle could turn infinitely on itself without leaving its boundaries. If a circle was turning on itself, you couldn't tell that it was turning. It would be fixed in the same position. So this is why the circle has always been a symbol of infinity. The other symbol of infinity, of course, is a line, but the circle is like a complete symbol of infinity because it's like the line that closes on itself. So in the same way in three dimensions, the sphere is perfect. It has this perfect symmetry. It can turn on its axis. It can turn on itself and stay in the same place at the same time, just like a circle. And then when Bahá’u’lláh talks about the soul, he says, it is still and yet it moves. It is still and yet it moves. Well, it's the same thing, you see. It is dynamic, even though it may stay in the same place. So this is the law of the material world, is continual motion within fixed limit.

So the writings tell us then that the only thing in creation that progresses is the soul of the human being. The only thing in creation that has irreversible progress is the human being. God does not progress because He doesn't change. He doesn't have to progress. The Manifestation is perfect on His level of existence. The Manifestation does not progress either, because the Manifestation is created in a perfect state of existence. The human world does not. The material world does not progress because every progression is followed by retrogression, because the law of the material world is continuing motion within fixed limits, periodic motion. But with the human soul, there is irreversible progress. There is irreversible progress. So we just read, once the soul leaves the body, there is no retreat. It progresses from whatever condition it enters the spiritual well and it’s progress is towards God. Now there's two things to say about this. First, this progression is not automatic. And second, the rate of progression depends on the spiritual maturity of the individual. And so, and as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says, even though you cannot retrogress absolutely, if others are progressing faster than you, then relative to them, you are retrogressing. So, in this relative, the experience of retrogression is still possible in the next life, except that there is no absolute retrogression. You cannot retrogress in the way that you can in this life.

Now what this means, of course, is that this world is a special environment in which we learn, and the condition of this environment is what I talked about this morning: suffering. You see, this condition does not exist in the next life. So in the next life, as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá has explicitly said, the tests and sufferings do not exist in the next life. The spiritual world, as He says, can give only happiness. All unhappiness comes from one form or another of attachment to the material world. The spiritual world cannot give unhappiness. But there's a trade off. The trade off is that you don't progress this fast in the next life.You don't progress as fast. You don't have the test, but you don't have the opportunities either. So rather than being looked at as a veil of tears, which it undoubtedly is, this life could also be seen and more directly seen as a unique opportunity. It's an opportunity to get a jump start on eternity. That's what it is. It's a jump start to eternity because it enables us, by struggling against this resistance which is the material world, we can make immense amounts of spiritual progress in a very short period of time. And that's the purpose of this life. This life is the womb for the next life, as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says.

Now, the womb, in nine months, the individual recapitulates 500,000 years– I'm sorry, 500 million years, a half a billion years of evolution, from one cell organism to a complete human being. Outside the womb of the mother, this process took 500 million years. Inside with the special conditions of the womb of the mother, it takes only nine months, so the special conditions of the womb of the mother enable 500 million years of evolution to take place in nine months. In the same way, we can say that the special conditions of this material world enable us to compress an immense quantum of spiritual progress in the short span of a physical human lifetime, so that is the great opportunity of this life. But there is a difference, namely, that the progress in the womb of the mother is automatic, whereas our spiritual progress depends on the efforts that we make. So there is a similarity, but there is a difference. There’s this one little difference. Now, of course, even though the process of development in the womb of the mother is unconscious, that is, it’s not through the effort of the baby of the fetus that it grows. It’s unconscious. Nonetheless, it needs knowledge of how to use the special conditions of the womb. If you don't believe it, put a rock or something else in the womb of the mother and see if it develops in nine months into a mature human being. It doesn't. Or put a fertilized pig embryo or something in the womb of the mother and see if it develops into a mature human being. It doesn't.

So what is this knowledge that the fetus has? Where does it get this knowledge? Well, this is what we call the DNA, right? That is the experience of 500 million years of evolution. The knowledge of how to accomplish this evolution is encoded in the DNA, and this manual tells the cell how they use the special conditions in the womb of the mother in order to recapitulate this evolution in nine months. Now, what is the spiritual counterpart to the genetic code? What is it? The teachings of the Manifestations. The reality of how to progress spiritually is encoded in the language of the holy books, and by using this knowledge to avail ourselves of the special conditions of this material world, we can progress spiritually. So you see, when Shoghi Effendi says that this world is a womb for the next world, he's speaking with exact scientific precision. This is not a loose analogy.

[audio cuts off] –distinguish between what the truth is and how you persuade somebody of what the truth is. My experience with people who believe in reincarnation is that it's very difficult to dissuade them of this, so I have to confess that I now very rarely try. Okay? So I simply say to them, “Here is what we Baháʼís believe: that we come to this life only once.” And so I simply use this. You see, we make this once more. Bahá’u’lláh says, well, science tells us that the human physical body is the most highly ordered, the most complex physical structure that exists. I mean, we know this. The writings go one step more. That’s science. That's bottom up. We observe. We observe. Look. Look at everything there is. The most complex thing is the human body. Nobody argues with this. Everybody knows it's true. Within revelation, which is top down and something, it tells us not only is the human body the most complex structure that exists, it is the most complex structure that could exist in the material world because it is the temple of the soul. So it is only fitting that the human body is the most complex, the most subtle entity that is possible to make with material elements. So this is also a sort of consolation, right? It doesn't get any cruder than this in this world. There's no world below this one, you know, so the human physical body is the apogee of material creation, so it rests at this topmost point of an ascending arc. The soul of man is the lowest thing in the spiritual world, because the manifestation and God are higher than the soul of man, and the soul of man comes from God. It is created by God and it comes from God. And it begins its ascending arc from the lowest point in the spiritual world. In fact, what could be lower than total unconsciousness, which is the state we all start out in, right? I mean, you were not aware immediately after you existed. Your self-awareness, your awareness of your being only came about after several years of life experience. So this is, this is the human reality. It is the highest. It is the intersection. It is the touch point of the highest point of physical creation and the lowest point of spiritual creation.

So you see, this completes, this completes the creation. Completeness is one of the several principles by which God creates. One is a kind of an optimization principle, but another is a completeness principle which answers, incidentally, the question that so many people ask about. “Well, if God really created all this, why did He create flies and mosquitoes and all of this stuff?” And so on, and so on. Well, one of the purposes of God in creating is to say, is to show, why did He create dinosaurs which then become extinct, and so on? One thing is that He created to show what it is possible to do with material elements, to show the whole range of possible forms of creation. So, completeness is one of the principles of divine creation. It's not the only one, but it's one of the principles. So the human being then, the reality of the human being is that he is at the juncture, sure of the highest point of the material world and the lowest point of the spiritual world, but he doesn't stay here. When he sheds his material body, which then returns and so on, he then goes on and evolves toward this highest point in the created spiritual world, which is the Manifestation of God is then created. So the Manifestation represents the highest point in the created spiritual world, in the created spiritual world. Alternatively, if you don't like my little symbols, I’ll leave this as an exercise for tomorrow. Translate this into the ringstone symbol. This is just a ringstone symbol. Okay? So all of this, so this is crude compared– actually, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá presented the ringstone symbol, has summed all of this up in the ringstone symbol. So I'll talk about that tomorrow.

So then this is the condition. This is the purpose of our spiritual development. And we will go into more tomorrow. We will dwell more on this question of how it is that we bring in this relationship to God in teaching moral development, how it is that moral development is seen in relationship to this fundamental relationship between ourselves and God. And that's when we'll talk more about questions of love and power and justice that I didn't get to today because I inversed the order. But I think without any real harm to the moral development. Okay. [applause]

Well, again, I would like to thank Gordon for organizing this and also, as I say, thank you for listening to me and I say that very sincerely. I have a lot of faith in the potential as well as the actual of Canadian Baháʼís, and I think that in these next four years, Canada can play a pivotal role in the development of the Faith. And I think in particular, this is true because of the capacity of Canadians to endure and to be steadfast in the Faith. We will talk about this more when we talk about power and the pursuit of power, because I don't want to focus on the negative but these issues are coming to the forefront in the world and in the Baháʼí world and there are going to be great tests that are coming forth in the next four years. As I say, I have a lot of faith in Canadians. And of course, I can say this with a certain detachment because I'm American by birth, and so I chose to become a Canadian. And so, one cannot accuse me of speaking simply out of some Canadian chauvinism. And so I think that, as I say, I'm very happy to have people who are willing to talk about these things and who are interested in deepening on these things, and not everybody is interested in doing this, so I think I'm very gratified to have this opportunity.

So let's take off a bit from where we left off yesterday, which will be also a way of summing up some of the main ideas that we had. We saw that religion is an undertaking. Religion is a process. It is an undertaking. It is an enterprise, and it is an enterprise of the pursuit and establishment of authentic relationships. So religion, true religion, if you want to say, of course, one could simply deny the word religion to everything, which isn't this, but since there's so many things that go under the name of religion just like there's so many things that go under the name of love, then we should say that what we're talking about is true religion. True religion is the enterprise or the pursuit of authentic relationships. That's the goal of religion. So religion again is not a product. It is not a social contract. It is not an ideology. It is the enterprise of pursuing and establishing authentic relationships, since religion does involve ideas, since it does involve a community. In other words, this is the definition of religion in its essence since religion does involve other things. In other words, this pursuit of authentic relationships involves the establishment of a community of believers and all of these processes that we know - consultation and so on and so on, administration - since it involves the understanding and acceptance and belief and principles and laws and theological propositions and so on and so on. It involves ideas. It involves the community.

One could very easily take one or another of these realities as being the essence of religion and say, “Well, religion is just a community.” This is the way a sociologist would look at religion. I mean, he would say: “Sure, the Baháʼí Faith is a great thing, and these people are a bit naive, but they are dedicated to a good idea of being cooperative and working together to facilitate the unity of mankind. And so this is a very good thing. These people get a sense of self-worth out of working together and belonging to a group. We all need to belong to a group which validates our role in society and so on.” So you can, you know, this sort of sociological analysis of religion. And so this is really what the Baháʼí faith is, you know. And again, as I say, an ideologue would say: “Well, the Baháʼí Faith is built around certain theological ideas - the oneness of God, the oneness of mankind, progressive revelation. These are somewhat novel ideas. These are extensions of ideas that were developed by Islamic philosophers and so on and so on. And so these ideas are very attractive, and so this forms a very attractive ideology. So people are attracted to this ideology, and they're dedicated to the propagation of this ideology, and they go around teaching the Faith in order to propagate these ideas.” And so on and so on. And what I'm saying is that this is all true as far as it goes, we do want to propagate these ideas. We do have a community. The community hopefully does give value to each of its members by accepting them and so on. So I'm not, you know, speaking condescendingly of these things. All I'm saying is that none of these things are the whole reality, that the essential reality is that we're engaged in the pursuit of authentic relationships and that if we simply have a community, even a good community, even a nice community that works very well and if we actually accept all of these beliefs and propositions and even understand them, we have nonetheless, if we do not, if we're not deliberately consciously pursuing authentic relationships, then we are missing the point. And eventually we will be quite severely tested in one way or another.

I don't know how widespread in Canada are copies or tapes of the talk which Peter Khan gave at the House of Worship in Wilmette about four months ago. Do you know about this talk?

[man speaking] Yes. We’ve transcribed it.

Right, so he talks about tests, about mental tests, and so on and so on, and he gives a quote from the Guardian which was new to me, which I had never seen before. And I can't quote it exactly, but the paraphrase goes something like this. He says that Baháʼís should deepen in the Covenants of the Báb, Bahá’u’lláh, and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, and it is deepening in the Covenants of the Báb, Bahá’u’lláh, and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá which will protect the Baháʼís from the attacks of the enemies from outside the Faith and the much more dangerous and insidious inside enemies of the Faith. And then the Guardian goes on to identify who these inside enemies are. He said these are the inside enemies of the Faith: are those who uphold the intellectual principles of the Faith without upholding its spiritual basis. So the Guardian is saying several things. He is saying first that it is possible to uphold, in other words, to believe in, all of the intellectual principles of the Faith by which one means anything that one can articulate rationally - you know that there’s one God, that there's one mankind, that religion is progressive and so on and so on - without upholding the spiritual foundation upon which these principles rest. What is the spiritual foundation upon which principles rest? Well, it's the quote that we read yesterday. It is that mystic feeling which unites God with man.

Let's read that again, even though we read it even at least twice yesterday, but not just as a gesture to the people who are new, but for ourselves. It's worth reading once more. It's on page 136 of the book, and he says:

“The universal crisis affecting mankind is, therefore, essentially spiritual in its causes… [For] the core of religious faith is that mystic feeling which unites Man with God. This state of spiritual communion can be brought about and maintained by means of meditation and prayer. And this is the reason why Bahá’u’lláh has so much stressed the importance of worship… The Bahá’í Faith, like all other Divine Religions, is thus fundamentally mystic in character. Its chief goal is the development of the individual and society–” there’s the theme of our conference today. “Its chief goal is the development of the individual and society, through the acquisition of spiritual virtues and powers. It is the soul of man which has first to be fed–” there's the spiritual foundation– ”And this spiritual nourishment prayer can best provide.”

And then again, the quote, it's on page 137, the short in-text quote: “We must become entirely selfless and devoted to God so that every day and every moment we seek to do only what God would have us do and in the way He would have us do it.” So it's quite possible that a person could participate joyously and cooperatively in the Baháʼí community on and so on and so on, and be on the assemblies or be a board member or a counselor or a member of an NSA, and so on and so on, and could believe and even be very eloquent in his articulation of all the Baháʼí principles, even be a great teacher of the Faith, at least be perceived as a charismatic teacher of the Faith, let's say, and still, and still not become entirely selfless and devoted to God, so that every day and every moment he seeks to do only what God would have him do in the way He would have him do it. This is the spiritual foundation. This is the nature of the authentic relationship between us and God. So either one relentlessly pursues this relationship or you don't. And if you don't relentlessly pursue this relationship, then you're not going to get it, because it's the sort of thing that doesn't happen casually. It happens only when it is deliberately pursued.

Now, one of the things that we're going to talk about is how to pursue it, but for the moment, I simply want to make the point that this is the fundamental thing. Of course, authentic relationships again, they are the vertical relationship between us and God and the horizontal relationship between human beings. And so when we pursue authentic relationships with other human beings through loving them, serving them, sharing their pain, being open to share their pain, forgiving them for the things they do that hurt us, forgiving the injustices that they do to us - real injustice, not explaining them away and say, “Well, he didn't really mean to do it.” I mean, suppose he does something deliberately, suppose in anger or what else, he really does do an injustice to you. Well, you have a choice, you know. Suppose he doesn't apologize to you. Suppose he doesn't even recognize it. Suppose you say, “Well, that's just too much. I'm going to confront him with this.” And say, “You know, you realize you didn't know.” “I didn't realize I did that.” “I don't see why I did that.” “I didn't do nothing wrong.” Okay, suppose he’s your husband or your wife or your child or whatever, okay? So is your forgiveness going to be conditional on the fact that he recognizes it? Suppose he never recognizes it. So are you gonna bear the burden of your desire for revenge for the whole of eternity? Or are you going to forgive him? I mean, that's the only choice you have. You don't have any other choice, you know. Otherwise, you make your spiritual development conditional on his spiritual development. Okay? If he has been unjust to you, and you say, “I'm not going to forgive him unless he recognizes that it's injustice.” Well, then you're making your spiritual development conditional on his spiritual development. You're giving up the power over your own life. You're putting it into the hands of other people. So we have to relentlessly pursue these authentic relationships. We have to relentlessly pursue these authentic relationships. It's not going to happen automatically. And this is the real essence of religion.

Now, a relationship involves three things. It involves two people. It involves a subject and an object. In other words, a relator and a related, a relatee. So if we speak of it from the point of view of an individual, it involves me, the subject, and the object, let's say just to distinguish the other subject, and it involves the relation between these two. So it involves three things: it involves a subject A, a subject B, and an interaction or a transaction between A and B. Now, let's look at this in terms of the structure of reality that we examined yesterday. This is really the ringstone symbol which I have produced in some fashion up here, so let's see what the ringstone symbol says. It says first that the highest thing is God, that the highest thing is God in the spiritual world, and that the lowest thing in the spiritual world is man. But man is created in the image of God, so the symbol for God and the symbol for man are the same thing. The soul of each human being is a reflection of the essence of God, in a certain sense. Okay, just us we say that, so yesterday the soul of man is indivisible. It is a unified essence. It has no parts. It is not composite, in the same way the essence of God is indivisible. Of course, there is differentiation on the level of the human soul. There is no differentiation on the level of the essence of God, but, I mean, the essence of God is unique. There's nothing else like it, you see. That's another thing. We can talk about this later on. There's a number of meanings to the oneness of God, of the uniqueness of God. And as we will see, everything that God has created, He has created an infinite number. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says this. So there's an infinity of Manifestation. There's an infinity of universes. There's an infinity of worlds. And there's an infinity of human beings and so on. There's only one thing which has no equal, and that is the essence of God. And there is only one copy of the essence of God. There are not several essences of God. So the essence of God is the only thing that is absolutely unique.

And so we have the world of God, the world of man, so this is the subject A and the subject B. And then we have the relationship between them or the link between them, and what is that? Well, that is the Manifestation, and the Manifestation is the link between God and man in two ways. First, horizontally the Manifestation is the level of being intermediate between God and man. [on the blackboard] So here’s the world of God. Here's the world of the human soul. And here is the Manifestation, which is the intermediate level between the two, the intermediate level between the two. So the Manifestation is literally the relationship between God and man, the nexus, the link between God and man, but He's not only the level that is intermediate. He's not only that which is between God and man; He is also the link, the vertical link. In other words, the symbol for the Holy Spirit is the same as the symbol for the Manifestation. He is also the link which comes from God through the intermediate level, which is the Manifestation and connects God with man, that mystic feeling which unites God with man. So, we must be careful when we say that there is no direct connection between God and man. I mean, Bahá’u’lláh says this in the Kitáb-i-Íqán, but we have to understand what He means by that. He doesn't mean that there's no direct communion between us and God. It's not what He means. That's the way many Baháʼís have interpreted it. And as a matter of fact, this was a cause of immense difficulty when this very superficial teaching were given to the Russians who are mystics. And when they were told there's no mysticism. It’s just a fairy tale. There's no direct connection between God and man, and the only connection is through the Manifestation. So you connect with God by believing in Bahá’u’lláh, and so there were a number of Russian who became Baháʼís anyway. They believed in Bahá’u’lláh, but I said, you know, this isn't right.

I mean, you know, I myself had had a interconnection with God all my life, and I've always prayed, you know. Now you're telling me that there is no direct connection between me and God? Well, you see, what Bahá’u’lláh is saying is that this direct connection between us and God, this mystic feeling which unites - I mean, it's not my words, it’s the Guardians - which unites God and man comes through the Manifestation, so it is not direct in the sense that it is indirect. That is, it is through the Manifestation. The Manifestation is an intermediate level between God and man. In other words, as we see here, we have God, then the manifestation, then the human being. But to say that it is not direct is not to say that it is not a connection and that it’s not a connection between God and man, an immediate connection, if you will. It is a connection which is indirect in the sense that is mediated by the Manifestation. And it is literally mediated by the Manifestation because the Manifestation is the incarnation - the words of the Guardian, not mine - of the attributes of God. He is the incarnation, not of the essence of God, but of the attributes of God. The Manifestation is the incarnation of every attribute of God. So the Manifestation is the connection. So in other words, if you take out the Manifestation, what you have is God - absolute, unchanging, eternal and so on and so on. The only manifestation of the essence of God is that essence.

You see, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá explains that Manifestation is the appearance of a thing in several different forms. Okay, so for example, all material things are different Manifestations of energy, right? In other words, this table is a certain locally stable form of energy. So is this piece of chalk, so is your body, and so on and so on. So we can say that the whole material world is just different Manifestations of energy, physical energy. So that's manifestation. Well, Bahá’u’lláh and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá explained the only manifestation of the essence of God is that essence. Now, there’s the essence of God cannot appear in any other form than what it is, and this is why in the prayers, in the writings continually, it is said God is God. He is God. There is no other God but God. This is the only thing you can say about the essence of God. It is that it is the essence of God. You see, this is very important and this is the source of so much confusion. It's just unbelievable. You see, why can we not predicate the attributes of the essence of God? Now, so if I say this chalk is white. Whiteness is an attribute of this chalk. Now what this means, this presupposes that there is a category of existence called whiteness. There was a pre-existing quality of whiteness into which this chalk enters. Okay, therefore if I say that God is good, for example, if I say that God is good, then this thing that presupposes that there is some notion of goodness into which God has to enter. In other words, that there is some pre-existing notion of goodness that God enters into. But God is the uncaused. He is the cause of all causes. Therefore, to say that God is good is simply to say that God is God because what is good is determined by God. It is not goodness that determines what God is. It is God that determines what constitutes goodness. All categories, all attributes are generated by the essence of God, not the other way around. There is no attribute which conditions the essence of God. It is the unconditioned, you see. Therefore, when the prayer– this is not hyperbole. This is not just repetition. When the prayers have a, say, “God is God. He is God. There is no other God but God. Verily, God is God. He's drilling us into this, that there is nothing above and beyond the essence of God. There is no precondition. He is the cause of all causes.

Well, let let's read the opening paragraph of the Gleanings:

“Lauded and glorified art Thou, O Lord, my God! How can I make mention of Thee, assured as I am that no tongue, however deep its wisdom, can befittingly magnify Thy name, nor can the bird of the human heart, however great its longing, ever hope to ascend into the heaven of Thy majesty and knowledge.

If I describe Thee, O my God, as Him Who is the All-Perceiving–” the All-Knowing– “I find myself compelled to admit that They Who are the highest Embodiments of perception–” the Manifestations– “ have been created by virtue of Thy behest. And if I extol Thee as Him Who is the All-Wise, I, likewise, am forced to recognize that the Well Springs of wisdom–” the Manifestations– “have themselves been generated through the operation of Thy Will. And if I proclaim Thee as the Incomparable One, –” unique– “I soon discover that they Who are the inmost essence of oneness have been sent down by Thee and are but the evidences of Thine handiwork. And if I acclaim Thee as the Knower of all things, I must confess that they Who are the Quintessence of knowledge are but the creation and instruments of Thy Purpose.

Exalted, immeasurably exalted, art Thou above the strivings of mortal man to unravel Thy mystery, to describe Thy glory, [or] even to hint at the nature of Thine Essence. For whatever such strivings may accomplish, they never can hope to transcend the limitations imposed upon Thy creatures, inasmuch as these efforts are actuated by Thy decree,–” in other words, our very capacity to seek out God has come from God– “and are begotten of Thine invention. The loftiest sentiments which the holiest of saints–” And so on and so on. You know this passage.

“Far, far from Thy glory be what mortal man can affirm of Thee, or attribute unto Thee, or the praise with which he can glorify Thee! Whatever duty Thou hast prescribed unto Thy servants of extolling to the utmost Thy majesty and glory is but a token of Thy grace unto them, –” again, He’s doing it all for us, not for Him– “that they may be enabled to ascend unto the station conferred upon their own inmost being, the station of the knowledge of their own selves.” In other words, establishment of self-authenticity. “No one else besides Thee hath, at any time, been able to fathom Thy mystery–” and so on. So the only absolutely true statement that we can make about God is that God is God. In other words,, you know, we can say God is good, God is just, God is All-Knowing, God is All-Wise, and these are true in a relative sense. These are true in a metaphorical sense. Okay, for example, what do we mean when we say that God is good? What do we mean when we say that God is good? What we mean roughly is the following: that God, everything God does, He does for our benefit. It could have been possible, otherwise, you know. If we say that “God is good” means that we don't suffer, we know that that's not true, right? If we say that to be a good God means that to create a world where there's no pain and there's no suffering, well, boy, He didn't do that, so he's not a good God. Well, this is exactly the argument that a lot of atheists make. They say how could there be a good God if there's all this suffering and pain in the world? If there's all these wars and sexual abuse of children and all of this other stuff? You know, look at all the pain, the suffering, the injustice, the evil in the world. How could there be an All-Powerful good God that would create such a world? Right. This is called the problem of evil, and it has been the stumbling block for 4000 years of the history of mankind. Thousands, if not millions of people have become atheists because of this.

Read the account of survivors of Auschwitz. Many Jews lost their faith in God because of what they experienced in these horrible camps and so on and so on. I mean, Elie Wiesel talks about this in one of his books, you know, about when he was a boy in Auschwitz and so on and how he lost his faith in God, you know, saying how is it possible that there could be a God who would allow this to happen? Well, you see, this is a perfect example of what results from this inversion of saying that there is some pre-existing notion of good into which God must fit. So if you say that these things are evil and a good God would therefore not allow them to happen, therefore, God isn't good if He exists. Either He doesn't exist or He exists, He's an evil god. Well, whereas Baháʼís turn it around and say God does exist. He is good. And what does that mean that He is good? It means that there is a divine purpose for our ultimate benefit in every condition of existence. Now, how is it that such suffering and pain as we know in this world is part of a beneficent, divine purpose? Well, this is one of the things that we have to understand. This is one of the things that should spur every human being to think deeply about life and the meaning of life. So you see, but we can say that God is good. I mean, we do say that God is good, but we have to know what we mean when we say that. And what we mean is that everything God does, He does for our benefit, not for His benefit. There is no self-interest on the part of God. That's the point, you see.

Now let me say a word about this and this is very important. Why is it that this relationship with God is the foundation of all of our relationships? Why is God absolutely necessary to the establishment of authenticity? If we could understand this point clearly, this would be worth the whole thing because this is really crucial. You see, as we said yesterday, the human being by his very nature, God created nature, is a needful being. All right, we all know this. I mean, if there's anything we know, we know that we have needs. I mean, it's all we talk about, is we need this and we need that, so certainly we know that. So the human being is not God. God has no needs. Human beings do. Not only are we not all-powerful or self-sufficient. We are not self-sufficient. To say that we are needful is to say that we are not self-sufficient. To say that God has no needs is to say that God is self-sufficient, which again is one of the ways which Bahá’u’lláh described God. He is the self-sufficing, the self-sufficing. Okay. But not only are we not self-sufficient, we are not infinitely flexible beings. We are not infinitely flexible beings. What does this mean? This means that not only do we have needs, but we cannot indefinitely defer the fulfillment of the need. We don’t have to fulfill them all immediately, and this goes back to the whole question of instant gratification which psychologists talked about a lot. You know, the society of instant gratification, as somebody put it. The only problem with instant gratification is it’s not quick enough. [laughter] But so, maturity, psychological and spiritual maturity means the capacity to defer gratification. But this is a relative thing. We cannot indefinitely defer gratification of our fundamental needs, whether they are material or spirits. Okay? We can't, because then that would be God-like again. Okay, that would be infinite. So we have needs, and we cannot indefinitely defer their satisfaction.

Now, let’s just look for a moment. Suppose we could. Suppose that we were needful creatures. This is a technique which I often use, which you may or may not find useful, a pedagogical technique of examining alternatives to the actual configuration in order to understand the actual configuration better, and as to see what would happen if we negate it. So suppose we were needful creatures, but we could choose when we satisfy our needs. In other words, we had the control to say, “Okay, I will ultimately have to satisfy this need, but I can choose when I want to satisfy it.” Well, then the optimal strategy of life would be to defer action as long as possible, because, you see, because our minds are finite, because our knowledge is limited, we always act on partial information, right? I mean, we're always in the position, this is the existential position of the human being. We are always in the position of acting on partial information. This is why action takes courage, because we're always acting towards the unknown. Now, therefore, there's always a risk in action. There's always a risk in action. Of course, there's a risk in inaction because inaction is a form of action. It's a choice of not acting. There's risk in that. I mean, the unknown is always there, whether we act in a certain way towards it or not, but the point is that nonetheless, if we set out deliberately to plot a course of action we are. We gather information. We try to reduce the unknown and thus the potential threat as much as possible, but nonetheless, we can't eliminate it entirely. There's always a risk in action, and this is why it takes faith to act. This is why faith is necessary. Faith is the courage to act in the face of partial information, that's what faith is.

So if we– the perfect example of a person who has no faith is the catatonic schizophrenic, right? In other words, he is frozen into total inaction because he has no faith in any action that he can take. Okay, so a total loss of faith would result in a total paralysis of action. However, the fact is that for most people, the courage to act is based simply on familiarity. In other words, the sun rises every day, so we assume that it’s going to keep rising every day. All right, now these regularities reduce the sense of threat. Every time we flip the light switch, the light comes on until the bulb burns out and so on and so on. And we know what to do when the bulb burns out and so on and so on. So it's these regularities, habituated regularities, which give us a false sense of security. That's why materialism is so enervating to the spiritual process because it gives us a false sense of security. The only real sense of security derived from this relationship with God, because God is the only one who is in control of the whole thing. He's the only one who can eliminate whatever the real threat is out there. We may not even know what the real threat is. Okay, remember the prayer of the Báb. It's in the new prayer book. You know, protect me from what lies about my head and below my feet and on one side and the other side and from every other side to which we are exposed, all the ways we were exposed that we don't even know we were exposed because how can we know? We have very partial information about what's going on.

So, if we were needful creatures but could indefinitely defer the satisfaction of that needs, then the optimal life strategy would be to act only when absolutely necessary to defer to the ultimate moment. Even if I'm 99% certain, why would I take even a 1% chance if I don't have to? If I can still wait? So you see, God has deliberately contrived the existential situation such that because of our needs, we are forced to act. We are forced to act. And we are forced to act on partial information and therefore we need faith. We have to have the courage to act in the face of the unknown. Now, this doesn't mean that we should make an attempt to reduce the unknown. I mean, that's again knowledge, all right. But the point of the fact is that no matter how much knowledge we have, and in fact, in a certain sense, as science has shown, the more we know, the more we become aware of the vastness of the unknown. So knowledge of the known also increases the realization of awareness or knowledge, if you will, of the unknown. Of course, it's a logical paradox if you put it like that. To know the unknown is obviously contradiction, but awareness of the vastness of the unknown. So knowledge of the known increases our knowledge, i.e. awareness of the unknown. So just getting more knowledge, even though it does in fact reduce the unknown that which was previously unknown becomes known, nevertheless, it doesn't really remove the need for faith. In other words, the degree of knowledge is never going to remove the need for faith. And if you look, those who are intellectuals, those who pass their life dedicated to generating knowledge are quite frequently those who are the least inclined to act and the least courageous to act. And we were always very pleased when a great intellectual takes the stand in defense of somebody or something like that. I mean, intellectuals are afraid to risk their reputation by taking a stand in favor of something or somebody or some calls, and so on, and so on. So those people, if we take God out of the picture, in other words, those people who are the most knowledgeable are generally speaking those who are the least inclined to act and to act courageously. So amassing knowledge, even spiritual knowledge, will never become a substitute for faith. Faith is the courage to act in the face of the unknown.

So where does faith come from? What does this courage come from? It comes from this authentic relationship with God. It comes from this authentic relationship with God, because God is the one who is in control of the whole thing. So if I have this relationship with God, then I know two things: that God will protect me from that which is not for my benefit, and that those painful things and surprising things and upsetting things that happened to me are the will of God and therefore for my benefit. So when they happen, I don't question, I don't start this cycle of saying, “Why did this happen to me?” You know, why did– I say, okay, you have sent this to me, it is for my benefit. I have to understand how it is for my benefit. So I don't go to the useless cycle of all these. I don't put into question the whole relationship with God. That's the fundamental of the whole thing. I simply take this as a test to understand what is the nature of the will of God in this particular instance. I have a very [?]. I'm not a dream type person. As you can tell, although I have a respectable intuition, I am, as you can tell– well, let me say this. In the tablet which ‘Abdu’l-Bahá wrote when He was 16 years old, which is a commentary on “I was a Hidden Treasure. This was in the Baghdad period and a learned man. He wasn't a mullah, but he was a learned man, came to Bahá’u’lláh, and he said, “Would you please explain, elucidate the statement, the tradition of Muhammad says, ‘In the name of God, I was a hidden treasure and desire to be known. And hence I created thee.’” And Bahá’u’lláh immediately turned and said, “The Master will answer that.”

‘Abdu’l-Bahá was 16 years old, whereupon He wrote. This is the earliest known tablet of the Master. So He immediately wrote this tablet, which is in a very philosophical style in which He explains this, and He explains this whole thing of the essence of God, everything I've just said in the last almost hour was said. I mean, all about there's no differentiation on the level of essence of God, all this is in this tablet. And in this, He says, He speaks about how the human being has endowed with this capacity to reflect all the attributes of God. And then He says, however, God hath ordained that every human soul has a dominant attribute. So, He said, He has caused one of His names, one of His attributes to be dominant in each human being. So you see, whereas the other levels of existence are determined by one attribute of God. In other words, the pinkness of this cover is the only attribute it has in a certain sense. In other words, it's a pink thing, and that's what you can say about it from that point of view. As He says He has caused everything to reflect one of His attributes. Here, He says on page 65 of the Gleanings, upon the inmost reality of each and every created thing, He has shed the light of one of His names and made it a recipient of the glory of one of His attributes. Upon the reality of man, however, He hath focused the radiance of all of His names and attributes and made it a mirror of His own self. So, there it is, a mirror of His own self. Alone of all created things, man hath been singled out for so great a favor, so enduring a bounty. So again, we saw this. This is a logical definition of the human being. The human being is that unique thing in creation, which has the capacity to reflect all the attributes of God. And as He says each and every other created thing except man, He has shed the light of one of His names and made it a recipient of the glory of one of His attributes.

However, in this tablet, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says that even though each human being does reflect all the attributes of God, these are in different proportions, as we saw yesterday. And He goes even further and He says that He has caused one of His names to be dominant in each human soul. Yes?

[man speaking] Yesterday, we also touched on this, I think if [?] correctly, that Bahá’u’lláh also said that there is an appointed time for the fruition of certain bounties of individuals. So does that mean, could you assume that the fruition of establishing a genuine authentic relationship with God or with others is based on the full growth and maturity of manifesting according to one’s own capacity the attributes of God?

Well, we'll talk more about this. This is the sort of, is a question that involves everything, so we will get into this. I will defer talking about this for the moment. What I'm still trying to do is establish the ultimate parameters of this thing, that which is universal. So anyway, what I wanted to say was that quite clearly my dominant attributes could be said to be logic or something along that line. I mean, I've spent my whole life pursuing logic, but I do have an intuition of some level. As I said, I'm not a dream person, but my father died about 15 years ago. He was not a Baháʼí when he died. I mean, he was not consciously a believer, but in any case, I'm convinced that he is a believer in the next life. And so a few months ago, I had a dream of my father and he was extremely powerful in the dream. He was recognizable as my father, but he was totally transformed. I mean, he was very powerful. And I say this because my father was an extremely gentle man, not weak, but gentle. He was extraordinarily gentle person, and so power, in other words, is not– gentleness and kindness are attributes that everyone would have attributed to my father, but power - you wouldn't have thought of, “You know, this is a powerful man.” But in this dream, he was very powerful. So I said so I asked him I said, “What is going to happen to me?” And he said, “I can't tell you what is going to happen to you.” And the sense of it was “not that I don't know, but that I'm not permitted to tell you”. He says, “I can't tell you what's going to happen to you, but I can assure you that everything that happens to you is the will of God.” Shortly thereafter, I had the greatest test of the last 10 years of my existence. And I mean, it was very difficult, but I was able to pass through it because precisely, I recall this dream. So my father had on behalf of Bahá’u’lláh and [?], giving me just this knowledge. It was necessary to reassure me that, okay, this is the will of God and so it was much easier. In other words, I said okay, this is the will of God. My father told me so [?], and so I was able to get through this test reasonably. I mean, I'm still recovering from it, but I was able to get through it.

And so you see, this is the nature of the dialogue with God. In other words, how there's no knowledge, no rational knowledge that one could have that would have prepared me for this, I mean, because it was totally out of the blue. It was totally unexpected. There's no rational way. There was no information that I possessed that could have possibly, you know, prepared me for this. I mean, there’s absolutely no way. Okay, I could have been the most intelligent, the most sensitive, the most far-seeing person in the world, I simply did not have the information that would allow me to know that this thing is gonna happen. There was no way I could prepare for this, you see. So this is just a little example, but, you see, this is the important thing: we cannot be successful without establishing this relationship with God, because only God has the knowledge. Only God can protect us from these things. Only God can guide us through these things. We simply can't do it. We'll destroy ourselves if we try to do these things without this relationship with God, you know. You’ll simply destroy yourself. You can't do it. So, I hope that I have convinced you that the whole basis of moral and spiritual development is establishing this authentic relationship with God. There is no other way. This is the meaning of religion. And if we don't do this, we simply miss the meaning of the whole thing. I mean, we will stay on a certain level and so on and so on, but you will never really get the fruit of what it's all about.

So, as I say, we can say that God is good, that God is All-Wise, that God is All-Powerful and this is true. These are all true things, but these are metaphorical truths. In other words, to say that God is good means that the best idea of goodness that we can have is some kind of approximation to what God is. The greatest conception of what knowledge is is something like what Got is. But the only thing we can say that is not a metaphor but it is literally scientifically true just to say that God is God. I am that I am, as it says in the Moses in the Old Testament. God is God. I mean, this is the only absolutely true proposition or statement about God. God's essence is God's essence. There's nothing else like it. You see, when we use metaphor, what we use is comparison, right? This beautiful girl is like a lovely flower. Okay? We’re not saying that the girl is a flower. We're using a comparison of beauty, perfume, and [salon?]. All of these revoking these comparisons, you see. And so there are many ways in which a beautiful woman can be legitimately compared to a beautiful flower, okay, and so on and so on. But there is nothing to which God can be legitimately compared because God is the incomparable. He cannot be compared with anything else.

Now, so the existential situation is that we have to act and we have to act in the face of uncertainty, and therefore, we need faith to act, which is just courage. And the only source of this courage is God - the fear of God, if you will. In other words, if we fear God, that recognizes that God has power over us. If we fear God, then we lose our fear of all these other things because we realize they can't hurt us, but God can. Okay, God can if He wants to. Why would He hurt us? He would hurt us for our benefit, I mean, cause us pain for our benefit. That's what we call a test. But we have this. Now, if we think about from the moment, horizontal relationships. I forgot what time are we going to–

[man speaking] 11:00.

11:00, okay. If you think about horizontal relationships, horizontal relationships - I'm sorry - between human beings are relationships between needful creatures. In other words, if we have here A who is human and B who is also human, then this is a relationship between two needful creatures. So, every human relationship involves a certain amount of self-interest. Every human relationship involves a certain degree of self-interest because we are needful creatures. So every human love, no human love is absolutely pure. Now, there are relative degrees of purity, and the difference between these relative degrees is very great, obviously. The difference between a psychopath who does nothing but manipulate people and a self-sacrificing servant of the [servant?] is immense. Nonetheless, even the most perfect of human beings has a certain ego, a certain degree of self-interest, and the love that he has. This is the human condition. Okay, so we're used to this fact. In other words, we’re used to the fact that there’s a certain degree of self-interest in human relationship.

Now, how does this influence our relationships with one another? Well, the point is this. We are each, to some extent, manipulating others in order to satisfy needs. I mean, maybe it's just something as simple as we would like the approval of somebody else like them to say we did a good job or whatever. It can be something very simple, very trivial, not, you know, some goes evil. Or we’re trying to manipulate them to give us all their money or something like that. But nonetheless, we want things from other people, and we manipulate them in subtle ways to get these things, and they're doing the same thing to us. So this manipulation, this element of manipulation is in all human relationships. And so this leads us to act in certain ways with each other. An authentic relationship - let me see, the relationship is authentic to the degree that this manipulation is absent. In other words, the pursuit of authentic relationships between human beings means progressively eliminating this manipulative aspect. In other words, we satisfy our needs legitimately in our relationship with God and to the degree that we satisfy our needs legitimately. We don't have to satisfy our needs through other people, and therefore we have love to give them. We can love them and serve them rather than trying to take from them by manipulating. Okay, so this is the way that it's supposed to go. This is what the pursuit of authenticity is.

So now we get to the point is that the importance of our relationship with God lies in the fact that this is the only relationship we have with another subject who has no needs and therefore whom we cannot manipulate. How do I manipulate you? Well, it's an implicit bargain, right? I will satisfy certain of your needs if you will satisfy certain of my needs. How does a child– look, a child is weak and vulnerable. He has no physical power over the parents. I mean, the parents can abuse, kill the child if they want. Right? Yet we see all the time that children manipulate parents, but how did they do this? Well, by threatening to withhold their approval of the parents, for example. The parents love the children, but they also want the return of love. You know, sharper than a serpent's tooth is an ungrateful child, right? I mean, we spoke yesterday of all the sacrifices that the mother makes for the child. So obviously, in a certain sense, the parent is in the position of giving and the child is in the position of receiving, but the parent nonetheless needs the fact that the child does in fact receive this love. If the child rejects this love, for example, doesn't receive it, is in no wise grateful for it, this hurts the parent. So even though, you see, even though the parents have the power and the child does not, the child nevertheless can manipulate the parent. Why? Because the parent has needs! Because the parent has needs. So our needs are handles that other people can use to manipulate us. And we do the same thing with them. We use their needs. We sort of say, you know, what does this person want from me? And if I give him that, then you know it's this kind of bargain. But you can't do that with God because God doesn't have any needs. God is the All-Sufficing. You see, this is the proof that God's love for us is absolutely pure. This is why we know that everything that God does is for our benefit, because he has no self-interest. He has no benefit to get out of it. Remember, Bahá’u’lláh says, “Do you think that your perversity can harm Him? Or that He has need of your worship?” You know, only for the sake - only for your sake do we call you. Okay, it is all for our sake. All of these laws and principles and the Kitáb-i-Aqdas, everything else, it is for us. It is not for God. He doesn't need any of this.

So God is without needs. But this is, the fact that God is without need is the assurance that God's love for us is absolutely pure. There is no self-interest on the part of God, so that, of course, is the good news. But if you will, the bad news or the thing which we perceive negatively is that we cannot in anywise manipulate. We cannot manipulate God. We can threaten to, you know, withhold our approval from God or whatever. We can do all of the manipulative acts towards God, but they will not manipulate God because God is the unmanipulatable. And so we mean that this again is why it is impossible to have a truly authentic relationship between two human beings without each of these human beings having an authentic relationship with God, because this is the only relationship we have that– our relationship with God is unique among all the relationships we have because it is the only relationship we have in which manipulation is totally absent. Okay? God is not manipulating us. He's totally honest with us. He tells us what he wants with us. You want to know what God wants? Read the Kitáb-i-Aqdas, you know. Do this, don't do that. He's telling you right away. He's not, you know, saying “I'm gonna play around with you”, you know, “here are the consequences”, you know. “You want to commit adultery, commit adultery. There is a humiliating torment in the next life. Okay? I'm telling you, there's a humiliating torment in the next life.” You know? Of course, there's a fine that you have to pay, but after all, most people don't commit adultery in the street. You know, if one takes a few precautions, one could presumably get away with adultery without being discovered. Right? So you know, if one would say the only punishment or negative consequence of adultery would be if you're found out and have to pay this fine, well, you know, you could sort of make a calculation about that and say, “Well, okay, you know, I can get away with this.” Or have a reason that “I'm willing to take the risk.” You know? But there it is. He’s saying, “And by the way, you know, whether or not you're discovered, whether or not, you know, there's a humiliating torment in the next life.” So God isn't manipulative. He's just telling you, lays it out. There it is, you know. Yes?

[man speaking] I was wondering if you'd be able to [?] and elaborate on the things [?].

Well, that's exactly what we are talking about. That’s the whole thing is we have to have an authentic relationship with God. A relationship is a Covenant. It goes both ways. If we don't love God - you know, God can love us all he wants, but if we don't love Him back then there's no relationship. So that Him [?] “Love me that I may love thee” is exactly that. He’s saying you have to establish the authentic relationship. Let's see what Shoghi Effendi says about our response. You see, this is the whole point. You see, the Christian notion of salvation– just open the TV set and listen to any one of these preachers and he'll tell you, right? The Christian notion of salvation is that salvation is a unidirectional gift from God to man, right? In other words, you are center. You are in degradation. Jesus died for your sins. You accept Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior and you are saved. So this is a unidirectional gift. I mean, that's one of the terms they use. This is a gift from God. You can't earn it. You are corrupt, you cannot possibly earn it, and so on and so on. Now, so let's see what Bahá’u’lláh says. What Bahá’u’lláh says is that salvation is not a unidirectional gift, but a relationship which is conditioned on an adequate response on our part. Okay? And without that adequate response, there is no authentic relationship. Well, let's read a couple of passages here. Let's talk about this. [ruffling through papers] I have to find it. I’ll find it in a second. Okay, it starts on page 205 and 206. It's under the essay. That's the concept of spirituality. Well, let me start by reading the strongest statement of it, and then I'll read other statements.

“Personal effort–” this page 206. This is from the Guardian. “Personal effort is indeed a vital prerequisite to the recognition and acceptance of the Cause of God. No matter how strong the measure of Divine grace, unless supplemented by personal, sustained and intelligent effort it cannot become fully effective and be of any real and abiding advantage.”

So he says, no matter how great the grace. Now what the Christians talk about the grace, amazing grace that has saved a wretch like me, right? You know this? [singing] Amazing grace. You know that? [laughter] Okay, so saved by grace. I mean, this is the whole theme of Christian, right? Christian salvation is, it is by the grace of God that you’re saved. Well, of course, that's true, as far as it goes, but the relationship as it is pictured, is one like an adult to a child, that the adult gives and the child simply receives and that's it. But what Bahá’u’lláh wants is mature partners and dialogue with God. Okay? This is the age of the maturity of human being, so God is no longer treating us as children who simply have to receive the gifts. Well, let's read it again. “Personal effort is indeed a vital prerequisite to the recognition and acceptance of the Cause of God. No matter how strong the measure of Divine grace–” So it doesn't matter how great God is. God is the All-Loving. He’s the All-Gracious. He's infinitely, absolutely loving, but no matter how loving God is, “unless supplemented by personal” - that means you have to do it. You can't depend on somebody else. “...sustained…”. This means one romantic burst of effort will not do it. It has to be sustained. “...and intelligent effort…” This means that just– you know this thing about heart Baháʼís and head Baháʼís. You know, just being a heart Baháʼí and saying, “Okay, I'm going to instead of thinking about these things because it's so terribly difficult to think about them. I will just substitute thought with my devotion to the Faith.” Well, that's not going to do it. It has to be personal, sustained, and intelligent effort. It cannot become fully effective and be of any, any, real and abiding, lasting advantage. So this is again– life is a dialogue with God. This authentic relationship with God is a relationship. We are created to be partners in dialogue with God, you see. And this is the purpose of not only our existence but the whole of creation.

“Having created the world and all that liveth and moveth therein, He, through the direct operation of His unconstrained and sovereign Will, chose–” He didn't have to do it. He “chose to confer upon man the unique distinction and capacity - ” sorry “- to know Him and to love Him…” Now, listen to this: “a capacity that must needs be regarded as the generating impulse and the primary purpose underlying the whole of creation….” So pursuing this authentic relationship is not just the purpose of our lives. It's the purpose of the whole thing. Remember, we saw yesterday that the human soul is the only thing that progresses. God and the Manifestations don't progress because they don't have to, and the material world doesn't progress because the material world is simply constant motion within fixed limits. It never progresses. But so, the whole of creation, the purpose of the whole thing from beginning to end, all the levels, the infinity of worlds, the infinity of manifestation, the whole purpose of it is to allow to create our arena, to create the proper conditions under which the human soul can progress. And how does the human soul progress? It progresses in dialogue with God. So it takes an active response on our part. Not a passive response, an active, sustained personal and intelligent. Okay. [applause]

So I wanted to just make a couple of comments to tie up a few of the loose ends of what I said, and then I'm going to start in a somewhat different direction. You know, Shoghi Effendi has said that there are two kinds of Baháʼís. He said there are those whose religion is Baháʼí and those who live for the Faith. In a sense, of course, if we can be the second kind, it is much more meritorious in the sight of God. I say this in respect to the implicit question of why it is that so many Baháʼís, so many of us do not, or have not concede to the Faith as this pursuit of this authentic relationship with God, the relentless pursuit of this authentic relationship with God. Remember again the quote that we read again this morning where Shoghi Effendi says we should become entirely the selfless and devoted to God so that every day and at every moment, we seek to do only what God would have us do and in the way He would have us do it. Well, the simple fact is this: if we relentlessly pursue the will of God, then we will find the will of God. But maybe the will of God is not what we want, you know. So in other words, Bahá’u’lláh has given us this promise that God will never allow any sincere seeker to go astray, that God in His justice and His love and His mercy will not allow that anyone who sincerely seeks will be kept back from finding the truth. Because again, God is all powerful. He could do this.

I mean, if God wanted to veil the truth from us in such a way that we could never find it no matter how hard we seek, He could certainly do that. He could certainly do that. And sometimes people become discouraged, and they think– well, God has, of course, slightly veiled the truth from us. I mean, He has required that we do have to make this effort that we talked about and we do have to seek. We do have to be active in our response. We don't have immediate access to it. He has given us immediate access to material reality. We don't have to go to school in order to see the sun and the earth and so on, so he's given us immediate access to the least important dimension of reality. He's given us immediate access to material reality. He has not given us immediate access to spiritual reality, or I should say that's not really true but he has not given us immediate access to an understanding of spiritual reality and others. We can understand certain things about material reality just by common sense observation without any significant effort, but we can't understand spiritual reality in this way. We have to make a more deliberate effort to understand spiritual reality, so it is slightly veiled from us. So sometimes, of course, when we're in the depths of despair or suffering, things are very difficult. It seems to us that spiritual reality is very veiled. Sometimes we have this sense of how thick the veil is and how hard it is to find it, but other times, of course, we feel very close to God, and it seems very easy and very obvious.

But, overall, in other words, the most objective thing we can say is that God has deliberately veiled spirituality to some extent, to an extent that means that we have to seek for it. We have to have an active response to tell us what he wants is our active participation in this relationship. In other words, we are created, as I said this morning, to be partners in dialogue with God, not just passive recipients of God's grace and not just automatons, but we are created to be active partners in dialogue with God. This is, of course, a dialogue that is initiated by God. It is God who determines the parameters of it, so it's not a dialogue that we initiate. We don't initiate the dialogue, but it can't become a dialogue until we respond, until we respond adequately, so spiritual growth, if you want to say spiritual development, moral development, just means learning how to respond appropriately to God's initiative. I mean, this is another way of defining spiritual development. It is just learning how. We are not born with the knowledge. We don't have the spontaneous knowledge of how to respond adequately to God. We have to learn how, and that's what spiritual development is. It’s just learning how to respond adequately. But the point is that God will help us do this. In other words, He wants this. He desires this. And so He has not made it difficult just to torment us. He's made it just difficult enough that we actually have to make an effort. But once we make the effort, then He smooths the path for us, and He opens the way and He makes it accessible.

But what this means is– and this is what I'm going to talk about primarily for the rest of this session. What this means, though, is that we have to give up the illusion of control of our lives. Now, I say the illusion of control because in fact we have no control whatsoever over our life, but in the materialistic civilization that we have generated, we have generated the illusion of control. We have generated the illusion of possession. We have generated the illusion of possession. You see, we can possess nothing. So to see this, let's ask the following question. This is an exercise I do. This is a pedagogical exercise I do when I give these lectures, I mean, to nonBaháʼís. I say, you know, make a list of all the things that you possess. Make a list of all the things that you would like to possess. And now go over them one by one and say, “Which one of these things could not be taken away from me by circumstances beyond my control?” And you will come out with nothing. So we are secure in our possession of nothing. Okay? You're proud of your physical beauty. Well, I mean, a disease or an accident can destroy that in one minute to the next. You have no control over it, okay? You could get a disfiguring disease tomorrow. You're proud of your sexual powers? A slight hormonal imbalance in your system can destroy your sexual power. You are proud of your mind and your intellect? Just a slight perturbation of your nervous system is sufficient to render your mind in this world dysfunctional. You're proud of your eloquence? Or whatever? Anything that you think you possess, material or spiritual, all comes from God. Everything comes.

Now, you see, the point is that this has always been the case. In other words, religion has sometimes been described, or spiritual progress is sometimes being described as learning to depend on God or becoming dependent on God. In fact, every human being, everything in creation is totally dependent on God. At every minute, we can’t increase our dependence on God. We're absolutely dependent. The only thing we can change is our degree of awareness of this dependency. So this is my definition of Faith. Faith is our awareness of our dependency on God. So you see the materialist, the materialist says faith and religion are for weak people. They're for people who can't stand on their own, who need help so they have to believe in these fairy stories about God and prophets and spirits and help from the other world and all this stuff. This is just magic. This is superstition. The realist knows that he can only depend on himself and so on and so on. As it says in the Old Testament, the foolish has set in his heart there is no God, or equivalently “I have no need of God”. Well, the point is, you see, that everything that this person thinks he possesses - his mind, his intellect, all of his capacities - come from God. God can take them away from him at any time, but he is simply unaware of this fact. He’s simply unaware of this fact. He has chosen to be unaware of it, to remain unaware of it.

So you see, religion is truth. Religion is not this relationship with God. This authentic relationship is based on objective laws and principles. It is not a subjective thing. I mean, it is subjective in the sense that it's a relationship between subjects, but the principles upon which this relationship between– the relationship is objective. The subjects are subjects, but the relationship is objective. It is based on objective laws and principles. So to pursue this authentic relationship with God means to destroy certain illusions which we have generated not just individually but collectively as a society. And one of these illusions is the illusion of possession, the illusion of control, that we possess and control certain things, whether physical, social, material, or spiritual. We possess nothing. We are possessed by God. We swim in the ocean of God. You know this statement of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá that He asked someone who was asking about spirituality. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá said how can a basket, a straw basket, be full of water? The person said a straw basket can't hold water so no matter how much water you pour in it, it will go out. A straw basket can't be full of water. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says, “Suppose you immerse it in the ocean. Then it is always full of water.” So you see, we don't perceive ourselves with the straw basket. We perceive ourselves as something which can contain, possess, you see, that we could be filled up, and we are proud in our sense of being full and possessing and having control. But in fact we’re like the straw basket, which can't possess anything. But we can immerse ourselves in the ocean and therefore be continually full. But the condition of being continually full is to give up this illusion of control, which is just another way of saying of having a true picture, a scientific picture of what you really are, what the human condition is.

But the point is that you may initially think as you start out on this path, that because, well, as we said yesterday, as we said yesterday, the path of spiritual growth is a path of increasing happiness or well-being and increasing autonomy. As we develop spiritually, we become happier. We become more fulfilled. We become happier. Our well-being increases. Because God loves us, He wants us to be happy. He wants us to be happy so much that He's taken the trouble of sending Bahá’u’lláh to tell us how to be happy. You want to be happy? Read the Kitáb-i-Aqdas. He tells you what to do. Say your prayers. You know, do these things. Don't get divorces. Don't screw around. Don't take drugs. I mean He tells you what to do. If you want to be happy, do it. Don't want to do it? Don’t do it! Okay? If you want to be happy, that's the way to be happy. All right now. And because God wants our participation, also our autonomy increases. Now what does autonomy mean? It means our capacity to choose what we want to choose. Let me write that down. Autonomy means the capacity, or let's say, ability because it means the actualization. An ability is an actualized capacity. The ability to choose what we want to choose. Now, you may say, “Well, this is the most redundant, meaningless definition I've ever seen in my life.” Certainly if we have a free will, then we're free to choose what we want to choose. All we have to do is choose it. That's not true. That’s not true.

Let me give you a simple example, and I think you will see immediately what I'm talking about. Suppose you have a relationship. Well, let's say we could make it husband and wife. Or let's say, mother-daughter. Okay, you have a relationship with your mother. This relationship has a history, a long history. Your mother carried you in your womb and so on, developed, nurtured you. Now you are a grown adult, let's say. And suppose that there are attentions and difficulties in your relationship with your mother. Suppose that there's a lot of anger and vindictiveness and manipulation in your relationship between you and your mother, and you suffer from this but you don't know what to do. You don't know how to overcome this. I mean, you think about it. You pray about it, but every time you come into this relationship again, all of this comes up and there’s tensions and it's unpleasant. And you don't like that. Now, you have a choice. Of course, you could walk away from the relationship because well, you know, one way to avoid the tension is just avoid the relationship. You know, I don’t have a relationship, I don’t have the tension. That's true. That is a choice you have, but that's not the choice you want. You know, you don't want to walk away from this relationship. That's not what you want to choose. What you would like to choose is to get rid of the tension, but you don't know how. You don't know how. “How do I do it? I don’t know how! You know, it comes up. It's stronger than I am. These feelings come up and I can't control them, and my mother is the same way.” So you're not autonomous in your relationship with your mother. You have not achieved autonomy because you do not have the ability to choose what you want to choose. You would like to choose to have a harmonious relationship. That's what your desire is. But you don't. You are unable to make that choice because you're not autonomous.

So autonomy is the ability to choose what we want to choose. Now, of course, one can be autonomous and choose wrongly, but the consequences of wrong choice are that you decrease your autonomy. And so if the autonomous person evaluates the consequences of his choices, so an autonomous person or morally autonomous person can make wrong choices. In fact, we all will make wrong choices, no matter how developed spiritually we are. But there's no danger in making wrong choices because wrong choices can give us just as much information about ourselves and about our spiritual development as correct choice. In fact, sometimes wrong choices can give us more information, because it's much easier to know why we [?] up, why we made a mistake, than it is to know why we succeeded, okay? When we succeeded, maybe because somebody prayed for us at that moment, all right, that we don't even know about. We may not ever know why we succeeded, but if we fail, we're much more liable to know why it is we failed. All right, so it is– part of the whole process is that we will make wrong choices. Now that again does not mean that we should deliberately make wrong choices. What I'm saying is that we will make wrong choices even when we deploy all of our knowledge and our love and our desire, and our will to make the best possible choice. We will still make mistakes, but these mistakes will simply be stepping stones to more autonomy if we evaluate, find out why we made the mistake and correct the thing. So this is all part of the process, a healthy growth process.

So you see, the Baháʼí morality is a dynamic morality. It is a morality of growth and development. So, really, if I expanded the definition of faith, I would say faith is our degree of awareness of our dependency on God and that makes faith into a process, increasing our faith. Remember, Bahá’u’lláh says, we should increase our faith each day over the previous day. Increasing our faith means increasing our awareness of our dependency on God because everything that touches the human condition is relative. Anyway, whenever we're talking about a human thing, we're talking about a process, okay? I mean, everything is process that has to do with us because we never achieve a static state. So the process of spiritual development, then, is a process which leads to an increase in our well-being and increase in our autonomy, and there may be temporary reversals. In other words, we may decrease our autonomy by making wrong choices, but then we can evaluate and remove the cause of the wrong choice and therefore become even more autonomous than we were before. And of course, another consequence of making wrong choices is that we would be temporarily unhappy. All right, we will have [?] up, and we will feel bad about ourselves. And maybe other people will feel bad about us and will let us know about that and so on and so on. But again, by evaluating the thing and so on, we can ultimately increase our overall happiness to an even greater degree. So it's not, if you will– [on the blackboard] we should make this arrow something like this, okay? You know, the overall direction is towards an increase, but there are ups and downs and so on. It is a process. Okay? In this world, in this world. In this world, it is a process of ups and downs, and so on, of learning how to increase our happiness and autonomy.

So the opposite– so this is the process of spiritual development, of increasing our happiness and autonomy. So we could take this as an overall spiritual motto. I mean, we can deduce virtually all the Baháʼí laws from this saying that is good, which increases our well-being and our autonomy or that of other people. I mean, we're not the only people involved. So that let's put it in general, in personal terms, that which increases well-being and autonomy is good. That which inhibits or decreases well-being and autonomy is bad. So that presumes that we know what will increase our well-being and autonomy and what wouldn’t. And this knowledge comes partly from science, as we saw yesterday and partly from religion. Ultimately, it all comes from God. Ultimately, this knowledge all comes from God, but we get this knowledge partly through the process of observation, trial and error scientific method, and partly from revelation or more precisely from our pursuit of authentic relationship based on our knowledge of the revelation. So recall the statement of Shoghi Effendi where he said the grace or the sustaining grace of Bahá’u’lláh will be totally withdrawn from the Baháʼí who does not in the long-run arise. The sustaining grace of Bahá’u’lláh will be totally withdrawn from the Baháʼí who does not in the long-run arise. So there again, we've seen this fact that an appropriate response is absolutely necessary.

Now, as I say, this leads to an increase in our well-being and autonomy. It leads to an increase in our awareness of our dependency on God and therefore an increased submission to the will of God. So why is it that more of us do not pursue this process? Well, I think part of the answer lies in the fact that when we begin to discover the will of God in our lives, we don't necessarily like it. And so we cut short this process and we prefer to be a Baháʼí whose religion is Baháʼí, as Shoghi Effendi says, rather than a Baháʼí who lives for the Faith. So this is a choice that we have. This is a choice that we have. In other words, we can be a Baháʼí whose religion is Baháʼí, so we go through the motions of being a Baháʼí but we don't pursue this process of authentic relationship. I mean, to put it very clearly, suppose you say, “Okay, I'm going to seek the will of God.” And suppose it becomes quite clear that the will of God is for you to pioneer to Antarctica. And you know, you don't want to pioneer to Antarctica. Well, you know, there it is. Okay. You know, God will say, “Well, you wanted to know what my will is, and that's it.” You know? Read, you know as Shoghi Effendi told us we should, read again and again the life of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. I'm sure you know this. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá used to say to people, the first thing ‘Abdu’l-Bahá tells you is the best thing, because many times people would say, “‘Abdu’l-Bahá, what should I do?” And He would tell them. And then they would become utterly distraught because they didn't like what He told. And so then He would say, “Okay, well, then do such and such a thing.” But He would say, the first thing ‘Abdu’l-Bahá tells you is the best thing.

Read the diary of Julia Thompson, which is not so, in my view, not so interesting from what it reveals about Julia Thompson, but for what it reveals about ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and how He dealt with the foibles of human nature. One of the things is that Julia Thompson was in love with this Dr. Grant and she was, she wanted this relationship to work out. And ‘Abdu’l-Bahá kept telling her first in very clear terms, and then when she couldn't take that, in more veiled terms that this was not meant to be and that this was not a healthy relationship, but always respecting her freedom. At one point, He told her, “Look, either marry the man or cut off your relationship with him completely, rather than staying in this sort of limbo, you know. It’ s very unhealthy for you.” So He says either marry the man, resolve the question one way or the other. Either marry him and say okay, that's what you want to do or cut off your relationship entirely with him. And so ultimately, of course, He led her to have experiences in which she saw and finally accepted that this was not, you know, for her. But the point again is that this is why we have to have this vision of what true moral and spiritual development is, because it's only this vision that will carry us through this shock, the initial shock of abandoning these illusions that we cherish, these illusions of possession, these illusions of control. You see, why would we be shocked? But why would I be shocked at discovering that the will of God for me is to pioneer to Antarctica if I am utterly convinced that God loves me infinitely and that the will of God for me is the best thing for me? Okay? That this will lead to an increase in my well-being and my autonomy? If I'm really convinced of this, why would I resist this in any way? Well, I resisted only because I'm attached to other things, because I'm attached to the comforts of life here or whatever. Or I'm attached to my status in the Baháʼí community here or whatever or anything else, you know. And I don't want to go off to Antarctica where I'm gonna be teaching the penguins. You know, I prefer to be here, a counselor, an NSA member, or whatever or whatever. Right, you know? So I mean, I could be attached to my service here, to my status in the community or anything else.

Now, I'm not saying that it’s the will of God for everybody to go off pioneering to Antarctica. All I'm saying is, I'm just simply giving an example of the sort of thing that's going to happen. When you really ask for the will of God and you want it, then He's going to show you because that's the contract. That's the Covenant. That's the Covenant. If you really want to know, He will tell you. But then once you know, then you then have the responsibility of acting on it, okay? And of course He's not going to destroy you if you don't act on it. He's not going to say, “Okay, I told you to go to Antarctica. You didn't go., so now I'm going to send a thousand plagues.” And so on and kill your eldest child. I mean, He's not gonna do that, but simply there will be a decrease in your autonomy and your well-being. You will simply stagnate, if you will, in your spiritual gulf. So the only one that will suffer is you. He will find somebody else to go to Antarctica, if that's the need, you know. So, the Faith doesn't need you. God doesn't need you. Bahá’u’lláh doesn't need you. It's for your benefit that you go pioneering to Antarctica if that's the will of God, because everything that is the will of God for us is for our benefit alone. So, you know, we have to give up the illusion that we are in some sense necessary to the progress of the Faith, of the growth of the Faith, that God needs us.

I'll tell you a secret that I have discovered partly as a result of serving on national assemblies. Namely, that the whole administrative order from top to bottom is an immense training exercise. God runs the whole faith, okay? The whole faith is run by Bahá’u’lláh. We don't control anything in the faith. He's just giving us experience and learning how to consult and live together. All of the really important things, He just does it, but He does it in such a way that we have the illusion. He permits us to have the illusion that we have somehow contributed to it., but He's really doing the whole thing, okay? So you don't want to go through this training exercise? You find it too difficult to learn how to consult, to suppress your own opinions and so on and so on in favor of the needs of the faith? Well, you know, don't don't do it, but it's for your benefit and for all of our benefit. It's not because God needs it. It's not because God needs it. We need it. It's for ourselves that we do this.

Now so, I think this is one of the reasons why this process is not pursued. Remember the first day yesterday, I put what I call the fundamental paradox of Baháʼí experience. Namely, that the Faith is such a powerful thing, and that so few people on Earth, Baháʼís or not, recognize this power. And how could this be that such a powerful thing exists and yet the existence of this powerful thing could be so unnoticed and so unexploited? And the answer that we came up with was that access to this power is conditioned, that it is predicated on certain conditions, and the conditions are that we give a certain appropriate response in our dialogue with God. In other words, that we have to learn how to use the power before God is going to give us access to it. Otherwise we will misuse it. It will simply destroy us. It will not be for our benefit. It's not because He's afraid to share this power. He's sent Bahá’u’lláh and given this power in order that it be used, but we have to learn how to use it. Otherwise we'll use it for our destruction and the whole history of Covenant-breaking, which you can read in Taherzadeh’s book about the covenant. It shows you, gives you a history of those who have misused it in various ways or tempted to misuse it.

So, as I say, I'm suggesting that the reason why more people, more of us, have not pursued this process is not because the process is inherently difficult. Again, I want to, I'm warning against this notion that spiritual development is some exotic thing reserved for a few saints, a few specially endowed people. This is not the case. It is accessible to every living human being on Earth. And I'm suggesting that the only reason why it is not pursued is because we cling to these illusions of possession, of power, of control. And therefore, we are reluctant to pursue this process, and we are initially shocked by the response that happens when we do pursue it, when we begin to pursue it. And God shows us certain things about ourselves that we were unaware of, then we become frightened. We become frightened, that’s it. We become frightened, and then we draw back. Remember what it says in the Fire Tablet? When the shafts fly, what does He say? What do you do when the shafts fly? You press onward, you don't withdraw. So if the shafts begin to fly, well, that's the proof that you're going forward. And so then you have to press onward more. If you withdraw when the shafts fly, then, you may protect yourself from the shaft, but then you will be stagnated at that thing, you know. So that again is the courage to suffer that I talked about yesterday, which again I hate to repeat myself, but I just, I know these traps because I’ve been through all of this in my own life and so on. This does not mean that we seek suffering. It means we have to be willing to suffer for a higher goal, not that we seek suffering.

Okay, now I want to put all of this, I want to take the remainder of this session to put all of this in some kind of historical context. So we want to look at the history of the human race. And what is the nature of history? We want to know why it is that in history, this process has not been pursued to greater [?]. And the first observation is with human history. It’s a history of injustice. We inherit history of injustice. The most pervasive feature of human history is the pervasiveness of injustice. What is injustice? Injustice is the existence of asymmetrical relationships, relationships of dominance. The most obvious and easily explainable example is slavery, where one segment of a population systematically– this is a structural thing, okay? Slavery. It's systematically deprived of its freedom and made to produce more than it consumes, and the overproduction of the slaves is consumed by the masters. This is a logical definition of slavery, which covers all forms that this can take. So slavery is a social structure in which some segment from an identifiable segment of society is systematically deprived of its freedom or its freedom is systematically limited and in which the second society is forced to produce more than it consumes. If it only produces what it consumes, then what's the point? It is forced to produce more than it consumes, and the overproduction is consumed by those who have the power to maintain this structural relationship. In other words, to force these people to deprive him of their freedom and to force them to do this. Well, this is slavery, which has taken many forms: Industrial slavery, chattel slavery.

Now, just to remind ourselves of the pervasiveness of slavery. Let's simply observe this. Slavery has been the basis of every civilization from the dawn of time until the 19th century. When was slavery abolished in North America? 1863. Okay, when was serfdom abolished in Russia? [audience guessing] No, that's–

[man speaking] 1860.

That's right. That's right. Alexander II, wasn't it? Yeah, that's right. In 1868, the serfdom was abolished in Russia. Now, think of this: at the point that serfdom was abolished, 90% of the total population of Russia was in serfdom. Now at its highest point, black slavery in the United States involved only 25% of the total population. I'm not saying that this is nothing, okay? All I'm saying is that 25% as opposed to 90% is quite a bit of difference. All right? Furthermore, the conditions of serfdom or slavery in Russia were every bit as inhuman as black slavery in the United States. Every bit as inhumane. The serf was a chattel of his master. He had no right. He could be killed with impunity. His wife could be raped, or taken away with impunity. He had no recourse in law or justice to anything that was done. He was absolutely bound to his master, and this was 90% of the population. [audio cuts off]

–He gave these broad moral principles, such as: you should not kill; you should love your God with all your mind, your heart and your soul; you should not commit adultery, and so on; and you should stop work every seven days. Now, the ruling class didn't have to stop work every seven days. They didn't work anyway, right? So in this way, he gave at least 1/7 freedom to the slaves, you know? Now, if Moses had said, “Well, it would be a good idea if from time to time you stop work.” Well, how long would that have lasted, you know? But He made them the Sabbath, stopping work every seven days, complete cessation of work, a fundamental one of the 10 Commandments, one of the fundamental commandments of His moral system. And there is in the Bible, the story of the fact that two men, both the Sabbath, and they were brought before Moses, and they said we found these men working on the Sabbath. So he said, “What should we do with them?” So Moses said, “Stone them to death.” Then they were taken out and they were stoned to death. They didn’t break the Sabbath after that, okay? But He made it clear, this is a moral principle just as important as these other moral principles.

So, but Moses did not did not abolish slavery. Now, this is a subject of debate, and I'm certainly not going to get into it but you can think about it yourself. I mean, one can debate: would it have been possible to abolish slavery or was slavery was a necessary component to the rise of higher forms of civilization? In other words, in the transition from tribal societies which were based on purely local reciprocal relationships to the city states and the higher societies, was the creation of slavery or the implementation of slavery essential? This is a philosophical question that one could debate. I have my own opinions about it, which is that it wasn't. But the fact is that it was the means. It was the means that mankind effectively employed and it is also a fact that none of the prophets ever abolished it. Neither did Jesus. I mean, we know the letter of Philemon where Paul sends Onesimus, an escaped Christian slave back to his Christian master. He says, “You should accept him as a brother.” But this brotherhood was a spiritual brotherhood. It was absolutely clear that he was going back as a slave, Christian slave to his Christian master. So Christian Brotherhood was a spiritual relationship which did not imply any change in social status.

And, you know, there's also the statement of Paul where he says that if one should maintain one's condition, that becoming a believer in Jesus did not change one condition. If one was a slave, one should remain a slave. If one was a master, one should remain a master and so on and so on. So it's quite clear that the Christian notion of brotherhood, as understood in any case by the followers of Jesus, did not imply any change in social conditions. So I don't want to go on about this, but the point is that slavery is pervasive. It pervades our history, and it certain there could be no greater evident example of injustice than slavery. Okay, why should this segment have to limit its freedom and so on in favor of this other segment of society? There’s absolutely no justice in this. So it is unjust and it is provided. But of course, that's only the beginning of the story. I mean, every conceivable type of human relationship is impregnated with injustice. The relationship between man and woman, right? Man is more powerful than woman, so he dominated woman. End of story. I mean, that's what ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says, and that's what we see. He could do it, so he did it. And all the other stories of conquest and dominance, racial prejudices, religious prejudice, believer against unbeliever, and so on and so on and so on. So, our history is a history of injustice.

Now, the next question is what is the source of this injustice? Why is our history a history of injustice? Because if we want our future to be different from the past, if we want to establish justice, then we will have to change something, right? I mean, nothing is surer than the fact that if we behave in the future the way we've behaved in the past, our future will be like our past. That's logic, okay? Everybody agrees with that? If we behave in the future, the way we behaved in our path, if we don't change our behavior, then our future will be like our past. And our past has been a history of pervasive, all-impregnating injustice. [to emcee] Five minutes? Well, you'll have to make another because we're going to one, right?

[emcee] We’re going 12:30, but we can go–

Oh, I didn't know that. I'm sorry, I thought it was 1:00. Okay. What time did we start? 11:30. Okay, we're just doing the one hour thing. Okay. [man speaking] Well, maybe people are tired. I don’t know. [audience discussing] [woman speaking] We’ll have to finish this subject because without this part, we won’t know how to carry on.

[laughs] You won’t know how it ends. [more audience discussion]

Okay, we’ll evaluate in a quarter to, alright? We can see.

Okay, so our history is a history of injustice. The question is, as I say, what is the cause of this injustice? We have to identify that because if we don't identify the cause and remove the cause, then our future is going to be like our past. Now, Bahá’u’lláh says– what is the central institution of the Baháʼí Faith? The House of Justice! Bahá’u’lláh says that He's come to establish justice to bring about justice in the world, so the very purpose of the Baháʼí revelation is to change this history, to change the whole of history. So we had bloody well begin to figure out what it is that has caused this injustice. If we're going to go around, especially, if we claim to be the instruments of Bahá’u’lláh to remove it, then we better find out what it is that has caused it so we can be sure that we're not causing further injustice, right? Well, Bahá’u’lláh gives us the answer, the root cause of injustice. It’s the pursuit of power. Not the exercise of power, the pursuit of power. Not the holding of power, but the attempt to increase one’s power. It is the pursuit of power that is the cause of injustice. Well, let's read one passage where Bahá’u’lláh says this. There’s many actually where He says this, but let's read one of them. I have to think where this is, but I will get it fairly quickly. It's in two places. Here it is on page 239 which is a concept of spirituality, but it's also in the causality principle essay. Later on, after lunch, I will take a few minutes and explain to you about the structure of the book so you can understand where to find certain ideas. You know that this is quoted in one of the compilations. It is from Bahá’u’lláh. He says:

“And amongst the realms of unity is the unity of rank and station. It redoundeth to the exaltation of the Cause, glorifying it among all peoples.” Now, listen to this. “Ever since the seeking of preference and distinction came into play, the world hath been laid waste. It hath become desolate.” That pretty well describes Bosnia, doesn't it? And Northern Ireland and the Middle East and every place else, right? “Those who have quaffed from the ocean of divine utterance and fixed their gaze upon the Realm of Glory should regard themselves as being on the same level as the others and in the same station. Were this matter to be definitely established and conclusively demonstrated through the power and might of God, the world would become as the Abhá Paradise.” Well, the Abhá paradise is certainly a place where justice prevails and where injustice is eliminated. So the source of the elimination of injustice is the renunciation of the pursuit of power.

“Indeed, man is noble, inasmuch as each one is a repository of the sign of God.” So Bahá’u’lláh knows this. We are all different. Each of us has a different dominant attribute. Each of us has different capacities. “Nevertheless, to regard oneself as superior in knowledge, learning or virtue, or to exalt oneself or seek preference, is a grievous transgression. Great is the blessedness of those who are adorned with the ornament of this unity and have been graciously confirmed by God.”

Pretty clear, alright? And there are other passages, but that will do for the moment. So the Baháʼí writings tell us that the root cause of injustice is the pursuit of power. We pursue power. Now why do we pursue power? Well, because we start out life as weak and vulnerable creatures, in which other people, our parents, have power over us, virtually absolute power. They have power of life and death over us when we were children. And so, as we grow and develop, we become more autonomous. We have more power. And so we see that when we have power, we can force people to do things. We can control our environment to some extent as we have power, or at least we have the illusion of being able to control it. Well, we really can control our immediate environment. So we say, “Okay, the more I can control my immediate environment, the more power I have, the less vulnerable I am, the less threatened I am, and the happier I will therefore be.” So, the man loves his wife but he regards his wife as his possession. And so, since he's physically stronger than his wife, since he can, since he does in fact have the power to limit his wife's freedom, he does so because this, he thinks, increases his happiness because it assures him that this possession which is his wife will remain in his possession and that she won't sleep with somebody else or she will not fall in love with somebody else or she won't leave him or whatever, whatever.

Remember that the man has the threat of physical dominance over the woman, but the woman carries the even greater threat of the rejection of the man, which is the one thing that no man can tolerate: to be rejected by a woman. This is the ultimate disaster for any man, to be rejected by a woman whose approval he truly desires because it recalls this possibility of rejection by the mother, I mean, which is his death, literally. I mean, the child is rejected by his mother, then he dies. I mean, that's it. This is life and death. So the greatest visceral fear, the ultimate fear of any man is rejection by the mother and by any mother substitute. So this is the power game that has gone on for all of history between the man and woman. The man who tries to use his physical power to make it impossible for the woman to reject him. If she doesn't move in society, if she stays in the home, if she's constantly pregnant, if she's constantly involved with the children and so on serving the man, then she has no possibility of rejecting him. How can she reject him? She can't go off. There's no place to go to and so on and so on and so on. So the man is creating conditions which make it impossible for the wife to reject him - if she would choose to do something. Doesn't mean that she will.

So why is Baháʼí marriage having such a problem? Well, because now that we're trying to establish a reciprocal relationship between man and woman, then this gives both partners choices that they didn't have before. And they can misuse this freedom. And so now women can reject men and so they do so. I mean, a lot of them do, and so men now have the experience of enduring this rejection and having to deal with it. Now, some of us who are men may say, “Well, this is unfair. I mean, the woman shouldn't reject.” Well, you know, they try to. We inherit a history of injustice. What does that mean that we inherited a history of injustice? It means we've learned how to be unjust, okay? We have the knowledge of how to be unjust and we don't know how to be just. We haven't learned how yet. That's what we're doing. That's what the Baháʼí Faith is doing. So it's only a hundred years since Bahá’u’lláh has come that we have begun the process of learning how to be just with each other. So is it any wonder that as soon as we get the freedom to choose that we choose wrongly in lots of cases? You know, so the men are whining, “Look, we are being treated unjustly.” That's right, you're being treated unjustly. That's what it feels like. Now, you understand. That's right. That's what it means to be treated unjustly. Now, you got it. Now, we can begin to work on the problem. Okay? I'm not saying you know that I'm not giving any license to women to treat their husbands unjustly. If you treat somebody unjustly, you will suffer. You will suffer the spiritual damage of doing this.

Okay, so the root cause of injustice is the pursuit of power. Now, power is an illusion. Power is an illusion. Why is power an illusion? Because we just said that power does give you the ability to control your immediate environment. Power is an illusion because the one thing that power cannot control is love. You see, power controls by inflicting pain and suffering by giving negative consequences to certain acts. There's a story of one of the Russian czars who told his minister, “Go out and make the people love me.” You see? That's the one thing you can't do. Now, the writings tell us that love is the only source of happiness. When we read this yesterday, this is the little opening quote in our book, right?

“Know thou of a certainty that Love is the secret of God’s holy Dispensation, the manifestation of the All-Merciful… Love is heaven’s kindly light… Love is the cause of God’s revelation… Love is the one means - ” the only means “ - that ensureth true felicity - “ true happiness - “both in this world and the next.”

So everybody wants to be happy, but the only way to be happy is by giving and receiving love. This is the only thing that makes us happy. Nothing else will make us happy. Love is the one means– this is [?] words, not me. It’s the only means “that ensureth true felicity both in this world and the next”. It's the only way to be happy, is in the giving and receiving authentic love. Now, power then cannot produce love. Power can potentially produce anything. It can produce knowledge, science, everything else, but it cannot produce love. Love cannot be commanded. You see, this is– think of the person that you find the most unlovable and will yourself to love them. You see that you can't do it. You can't make yourself love anybody. Love cannot be commanded for power is powerless over love. So what does this tell us? That love is the most powerful thing that exists because it is the only thing that pure power cannot obtain. Since love is the one means of achieving happiness, then what we should be pursuing is love. So what man has, in fact done, is make power an end. He has pursued power which has created injustice, [writing]and cruelty or hatred, and generated cruelty and hatred, because the result of injustice is that we don't like people who perpetrate injustice. You know, we resent it. So the pursuit of power leads to injustice, the opposite of justice and hatred.

Now what is justice? Well, we can define justice in all sorts of ways, but here is my favorite definition of justice. Justice is simply the essential condition for the flourishing of love. The purpose of justice is not an end in itself either. The end is love. Justice is the means to attaining love. So man through history has pursued power. When you pursue an end, you use a means, right? In order to get something, you have to sacrifice something. This is the law of the world. So what do you sacrifice to get power? You sacrifice justice and you sacrifice what? What does the North American businessman sacrifice to get success? He sacrifices his family and his kids and everything else if he has to, to get success. Ask the average North American what is the purpose of life? What will most people say? To be successful. Right? I mean, success is. What is the most important thing in your life? Well, it's to be successful. Or the worst thing in North America is to be considered not a success, right? To be not successful. Ask a Russian what is the most important thing in his life, and he will say love, human relations. You ask a Russian, what about success? He will immediately say, “What do you mean by success? What is success?” Ask a North American, “You say success is the most important thing in life. What is success? You don't know what success is?” He takes it for granted. It is obvious with success. Success is dying with the most money. Success is being considered a success by whatever criterion is currently the criteria, right? That's what it is. Being considered a success is having status in terms of whatever are the criteria of success in your reference group. That's being a world class mathematician if you're a mathematician or whatever, whatever you want. But being a success means being considered a success by other people. So in pursuing success, one pursues power. In pursuing power, one sacrifices justice. How do you obtain power? Well, by being willing to compromise your principles if you have to, by sabotaging the performance of other people with whom you're in competition, okay? And what does this do? Well, injustice creates hatred. It creates resentment. I mean, take the most successful people in any area of endeavor, are they the most loved people? Very rarely, right? Very rarely, because they climbed over a lot of bodies to get to the pinnacle of success.

So what Bahá’u’lláh is telling us that we have to reverse this. We have to reverse this pyramid and we have to pursue love. We pursue love by using our power to create justice. Justice is the conditions under which love can flourish. So you see, the fault in the thinking of the pacifist is that we renounce power. Baháʼís do not renounce power. What is more powerful and authoritative than the Universal House of Justice? Infallible. Obedience to them is obedience to God. I mean, that's power. Okay? We don't renounce power, but we do not pursue power. We use power to establish justice. And what is justice? Justice is a reciprocal relationship of giving and receiving which allows love to be born and flourish. So in other words, power cannot command love. You cannot move from power to love. Love has to be invited. Love comes. Love is a gift. Love is grace. There you talk about grace. Okay, I got it. Love comes from God. Love is God. Love is God. All love comes from God. It is that mystic feeling which unites God with man, all love comes from God. We cannot create love. We cannot generate love. We're like that basket immersed in the ocean. But we can use the power we have, the degree of autonomy developed, to create justice. That we can do. And once we create justice, then God gives us the gift of love because we have created the conditions under which love can be born or flourish.

So this is what we're about. We're about reversing 6000 years of history. We are reversing this unhealthy process and where we pursue power and sacrifice, justice and love in the pursuit of power and we're turning it around. And we're going to pursue love by using power, not pursuing power, but using power, remember as to the Baháʼí Faith has the most powerful thing in the world. But we have access to this power only on certain conditions. So inasmuch as we fulfill these conditions, we will be given this power. We’ll use this power to establish justice and the result is that love is born and flourishes and as love is born and flourishes, we are happy. I mean, it's just, we're happy. Everybody's happy because it is happiness to love and it is happiness to be loved, both of them. So let me conclude them by saying this: in other words, in order to achieve authenticity, we must deliberately consciously renounce the pursuit of power in all of our relationships. We must renounce the pursuit of power After lunch, I'll talk about this in relation to the Baháʼí institutions. We look at our National Assembly as powerful people elected like politicians who are pursuing power and therefore we don't love them. We say, “You've already got the power. You won't love as well. You won't respect.” It's easy to love somebody who's down, right? It's easy to love somebody who is sick and so on. Can you love a member of the House of Justice? Can you love a counselor who has a higher rank than you do? Do you think of his higher rank as meaning that he has power over you? That he has pursued power? Or does it mean rather that he is serving, and therefore you should love him or her and be thankful for his service? You see, that's the test of renouncing pursuit of power.

As ‘Abdu’l-Bahá Himself has said, Jesus already said it 2000 years ago, anybody can love a lovable person. Even the pagans do that, Jesus said. Even the Mafia. I mean, you take the worst person on earth. He will love a lovable person. A lovable person evokes love. There's no virtue in loving the lovable. The virtue is in loving the unlovable, and the virtue is in loving those whom we perceive as having power over us, because we renounce the pursuit of power. We have to renounce the pursuit of power. So again, the choice is yours. You say, “I don't like this, actually.” You know, I think, you know, these people, the NSA members and so on, sometimes they act just like politicians or whatever, and so I'm not going to love them, you know, well, fine, don't. Don't. It's only going to hurt yourself because you have not learned to renounce pursuit of power. You're in a power struggle with these people, okay? Believe me, I've seen it all over the world. This is what's going on everywhere. Power struggle in the faith. Okay, so the only way out is we have to renounce the pursuit of power. That's what it's all about.

–take a few minutes since the number you have this book just to indicate some of the sort of the structure of the book. Maybe we can look at the table of contents on page VII. The earliest essay that is in there is the last one, The Concept of Spirituality, which is an integral reprint of a short monograph that appeared about 10 or so years ago with the Association for Baháʼí Studies. Some of you may have seen that little maroon-colored monograph called The Concept of Spirituality. It was also reprinted integrally in the Baháʼí world, in one edition of the Baháʼí world and it's reprinted here. There are no changes in any of these reprints. They're all identically the same. This has many of the ideas that I've talked about and some that I'm going to talk about further today about the development of spiritual capacity, knowledge, love, and will, and so on. It's sort of on a more practical level, if you might say. The essay that represents more recent thinking or understanding is the one called The Kitáb-i-Aqdas: The Causality Principle in the World of Being, which is on page 113. This was written about a year ago. It's a study of the Kitáb-i-Aqdas that I undertook at the behest of the House of Justice, and it was first published in the most recent addition of the Baháʼí world, except probably the most recent addition is coming out. The one that was published a year ago in May, okay? Which I think is still the last one out but there will be another one out soon, if it's not already out. So, and they just reprinted them here integrally, and this contains a number of further reflections that are not in “The Concept of Spirituality” that I've talked about, things about power and justice and love and so on.

Then, there was a series of three essays, none of which I've talked about here called “Prologue on Proving God”, “Causality, Composition, and the Origin of Existence” and “A Scientific Proof of the Existence of God”. The “Prologue on Proving God” was written for this book, so it has not previously appeared. The “Causality, Composition, and the Origin of Existence” is published here for the first time. It was not newly written. It was not written expressly for this book. I wrote it two or three years ago. In fact, that was the basis of a presentation I made a few years ago in a conference on science and theology at the Vatican. And I have actually been looking for an outlet for this because it was rejected in several places that I submitted it for publication for various reasons, so I was happy to have the opportunity to publish it. For those of you who may have read another work that I published a few years ago called Logic and Logos, which was published by George Ronald, there's an article in there about Avicenna's proof of the existence of God. This “Causality, Composition, and the Origin of Existence” is a sequel to that. It's essentially a sequel to that, but it is entirely self-contained. And then “A Scientific Proof of the Existence of God” was first published in the Journal of Baháʼí Studies a couple of years ago, and there are still exchanges going on. There's still a series of reader commentaries and author responses going on in the current issues of the Journal of Baháʼí Studies over this. So every aspect of this scientific proof has been scrutinized and criticized by various people, which is fine. That's why we publish them.

You will notice if you look at the blurb on the back, we have two pre-publication blurbs. One from James F. Strange, professor of religious studies at the University of South Florida. This man is a Baptist theologian. He is not a Baháʼí. He is, in fact, a Baptist theologian, and so, you know, he's a colleague of my brother, who is professor at the University of South Florida. So we were fishing around for a pre-publication blurb from somebody, so my brother gave him the manuscript of all the essays and so, sort of thinking, “Well, maybe, you know, he will be moved to write something.” And so it turns out he passed it around to all of his colleagues and everything, and he says, “This is really new stuff.” And in particular he was impressed. He says, you see, perhaps the most startling gem is a manifestation of the thesis of the book, in this case a profound and rigorous scientific proof of the existence of God. This is essential reading for those standing at the interface of science and religion, or for those who would stand there in peace. So this is a validation from a nonBaháʼí source, one which would normally be inclined to be critical of Baháʼí sources because he is a committed Baptist theologian. But he told me, he said, “I don't think this stuff has been done before.”

And then the other blurb was written by an author and lawyer, William See Lane, a very brilliant man whom I met in St Petersburg, who’s in America, who's writing a book which I hope he will finish. He's writing a book called “The Case for God”. He's a lawyer, remember? [laughter]. But he has [?] The Case for God. But the guy's very knowledgeable. He writes extremely well, and so I was immediately extremely impressed with what this guy was doing. He doesn't call himself a believer in God, much less a Baháʼí, but he rides extremely well, and it is extremely perceptive. And so I sort of became the editor of his stuff. I mean, we hit it off and so I started editing his stuff, but this relationship was interrupted when he went back to the States. But, so I shot him the manuscript of this stuff and said would he make a comment, and he did. He made a very nice comment, but also he said, he read the “Logic and Logos” and his specialty, sort of, is the whole thing of science and religion. And he said, “Stuff that you did 30 years ago is only now beginning to be done.” He said, “I know the literature in this area and what you were doing 30 years ago, nobody was doing.” Of course I knew that, but what was always disappointing is that nobody else knew it, because either nobody read it or nobody seemed to understand it or whatever. So who knows? Maybe it will be recognized as whatever. It’s God's will course.

But I mentioned this only to point out that, you know, whatever we do for the faith, we do for the intrinsic integrity of it, not for the reaction that it produces immediately. I mean, it's a gift that we give to, our service is a gift that we give to Bahá’u’lláh, and He does with it what He wills. And so, you know, one cannot know whether or not or to what extent something that we do will ultimately have an impact. Interestingly enough, all of the criticisms of the scientific proof of the existence of God, which you can read - I'll let you read that - have come from Baháʼís, all the negative criticisms. I have gotten no negative criticism from scientists. I presented this proof to the full Academy of Sciences in Käzan. I presented at the University of Moscow. I presented it at the University of St. Petersburg. I presented it in all sorts of international forum. I never had a scientist criticize it, but I've had hundreds of Baháʼís criticize it. So. that's why I wrote the “Prologue on Proving God” in order– I wrote that primarily for Baháʼís to show them that it is in fact legitimate for Baháʼís to prove the existence of God, because it seems that many Baháʼís feel that this is not legitimate, that this is somehow a sign of a lack of faith that we should prove that God exists.

What it actually says, just let me say this, that if we look at the quotes from ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, we see that there's a three-stage process. Let's just look at this briefly. You see, He says on page two:

“Day and night you must strive that you [may] attain to the significances of the heavenly Kingdom, perceive the signs of Divinity, acquire certainty of knowledge and realize that this world has a Creator, a Vivifier, a Provider, an Architect—knowing this through proofs and evidences and not through susceptibilities…” What's a susceptibility? It's an emotional feeling, right? It's an emotional feeling. “...nay, rather, through decisive arguments and real vision—that is to say, visualizing it as clearly as the outer eye beholds the sun. In this way may you behold the presence of God and attain to the knowledge of the holy, divine Manifestations.”

Well, this is quite far from warm, fuzzy feelings, right? I mean, decisive arguments, real vision. Clearly, you know, this is not, you know, [gee, that good?], you know? And then He says:

“If thou wishest the divine knowledge and recognition - “ Now this, if you want to know God, right? We're talking about pursuing an authentic relationship with God. Well, the first thing you have to do is know that there is a God before you can establish a relationship with Him. "If thou wishest the divine knowledge and recognition, purify thy heart from all beside God, be wholly attracted to the ideal, beloved One…” So first, “purify thy heart”. Search for and choose Him and apply thyself to rational and authoritative arguments, for arguments are a guide to the path, and by this the heart will be turned to the sun of truth. And third stage, when the heart is turned into the sun of truth, then the eye will be open and will recognize the sun through the sun itself. That's a relationship, direct relationship with God. Then man will be in no need of arguments or proofs, for the sun is altogether independent and absolute independence is in need of nothing. And proof are one of the things of which absolute independence has no need. Now I'm sure you all know this passage. It's very widely quoted. [audio cuts off]

–to just do the last thing. Oh, well, when I know God directly, when I know the sun directly, then I have no need of proof. So since I already believe in God, I’m a Baháʼí, I don't have any need for proof. But notice that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá gives a three-stage process, so I'm just, since I took time to write this, I'm just reading from myself here on page three.

“These councils of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá are representative of the harmony between mind and heart that is found throughout the Baháʼí writings. They described a process that begins with the purification of the heart, proceeds to rational and authoritative arguments, and then results in a heartfelt conviction, coupled with an objective knowledge and perception of the truth.”

Why one might well ask, should one purify the heart before undertaking the search for rational arguments? Well, I'll let you read the answer to that. As I say it recalls very much the Tablet of the True Seeker. Remember in the Kitáb-i-Íqán when Bahá’u’lláh says, “O My brother! When a true seeker determineth to take the step of search in the path leading [unto] the knowledge of the Ancient of Days, he must, before all else, cleanse - “ purify “ - his heart.” And then, so on. So the same three-part process is first, you purify your heart. Second, you apply yourself to rational and authoritative arguments. And this, as He says, will turn the heart towards the sun. And then, the eye will be open and we recognize the sun to itself, and we become independent of the need for arguments, and so on. So this is when we have established this authentic relationship with God. I mean, once you've established this authentic relationship, you don't need to go back and prove it over and over again. I mean, you've already been through that, but the point is, this relationship is a result of having gone through the process. I mean, He tells you how to do it, but I think often Baháʼís sort of look and say, “Oh well, you know, as I say, I'm a believer. I already know that God exists. And so why should I worry about proofs of God's existence?” And then maybe something happens later on, and they have tests and they lose their faith, or they leave the faith of whatever.

And so maybe when we see this process going on as we see it going on, people losing their faith or leaving the faith or having doubts, we should wonder, well, did they really understand who God was and that He exists? Not through susceptibilities, but objectively independently? Because, in other words, if I know objectively independently, in other words, I'm not suddenly going to deny my belief in the law of gravity, right? In other words, I may not like the law of gravity, but I know by God that gravity works. And no matter what happens to me, right, no matter what tests I have in life, once I know how the law of gravity works, I'm never going to, it would never occur to me to deny the law of gravity, right? I mean, that would just be stupid. It’s not going to get me anywhere, you know? So, in the same way, if I know that God exists and that the nature of God, which can also be proved - I gave proofs of the nature of God, in fact, proofs that God is infinitely loving and infinitely kind and so on. So if I know that God exists and loves us with the same degree of objectivity that I know the law of gravity functions, then no matter what happens to me, I'm never going to deny that. I mean, it's not an option. It’s not a [?] because it's not that I believe that God exists, I know that God exists. And this is one thing I suggest in this essay, as you'll read, that we should change the language of religion from a language of belief to a language of knowledge. You see, religion is knowledge.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá says that religion is that essential connection which emanates from the realities of things. Then, later on, He defined science, He says science is that essential connection which emanates from the realities of things. So He gives in different places the same definition for science that He gives for religion. Well, let's read that. This is in the Causality Principle. He says on page 122, I'm reading first to put in the context for myself: “Thus, in the Baháʼí conception, religion, like science, is most correctly viewed as a knowledge-generating enterprise rather than a belief-affirming or rule-making enterprise.” So, again, you have to think, to what extent do you unconsciously perhaps think of religion of the Baháʼí faith as a belief-affirming or a rule-generating enterprise? But it's not. It is a knowledge-generating enterprise. It generates real knowledge, I mean, about how the world really functions - plain old, practical knowledge. And so then, I quote from ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, “...religion is the essential connection which proceeds from the realities of things.” It is the necessary connection which emanates from the reality of things. Now, actually go back and read Plato and Aristotle and Descartes and [?], you will see that this is the same definition that all the classic philosophers gave of truth. You know what is truth? They said truth is that essential connection which is inherent in the nature of things. That's what truth is. So religion is truth. That's all. Science is truth. I mean religion and science are just two names we give for two different processes of attaining truth, and truth is one.

So then, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says: “Briefly, the supreme Manifestations of God are aware of the reality of the mysteries of beings. Therefore, They establish laws which are suitable and adapted to the state of the world of man.” The supreme Manifestations of God are aware of the reality of the mysteries of beings. Therefore, they understand this essential connection emanating from the reality of things and by this knowledge, establish the law of God. So you see, for the first time in the Baháʼí Faith, we also have an adequate understanding of the nature of revelation itself. You see, the Christian paradigm of revelation was, of course, that God, the eternal, pre-existent essence, become holy incarnate in the person of a physical human being, which is Jesus Christ. Spiritual world, material world. And the Guardian in the dispensation qualifies this doctrine of incarnation as fantastic and crude. He says this crude and fantastic doctrine of the incarnation. The Muslims, on the other hand, view the prophet as an ordinary man who is the vehicle of revelation, whereas the Christians believed in the pre-existence of Jesus. In other words, Jesus is identified with the essence of God who’s eternally pre-existent. And so, they come to the what's known as Christology that is a theology about the nature of Christ - namely, that Christ is the pre-existent God Himself, the Catholic notion of the Trinity. What the Muslims say is that the Koran was eternally pre-existent, that the Koran is directly from God. And so God was here and the Koran always existed as the word of God. All right, so this was the Koran if you will, which was generated by the word of God but which was eternally pre-existent, and this Koran was transmitted through the vehicle of Muhammad. But Muhammad was just an ordinary man who was chosen to be a vehicle of revelation.

Well, maybe this is some of your conception of the revelation of Bahá’u’lláh, you see, because some people think, some people misunderstand the station of distinction of the Manifestation, thinking that this means that He has a weak human nature and also this revelation, and so that sometimes we're interacting with His weak human nature, and sometimes we're interacting with His nature– but in my brother's essays, in particular, his long essay on the doctrine of the Most Great Infallibility, utterly refutes this notion. It's very clear from the writings, as I've already said yesterday, in my discussion of the levels of reality, that the Manifestation is created in a state of absolute perfection. So the manifestation, like God, has all knowledge. So every famed ignorance of the Manifestation is simply a pedagogical device that He uses to teach us. In other words, by identifying Himself sometimes with weak and sinful humanity, He speaks with our voice, and he uses this as a pedagogical device. So some of us have misunderstood that and think that that means that the Manifestation shares this sinful or weak nature but that's not the case. That's not the case. The Manifestation is perfect at all times. He has all knowledge.

And so here we see that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says this, that further on, He says, knowledge is of two kinds. One is subjective and the other objective. That is to say, an intuitive knowledge and a knowledge derived from perception. The knowledge of things which men universally have is gained by reflection and evidence. So this is scientific knowledge. This is the bottom-up process I described yesterday. The circle of this knowledge is very limited. As I said yesterday, science gives you an exact description, exact knowledge but of a limited portion of reality. But the second sort of knowledge, which is the knowledge of being, is intuitive. It is like the cognizance and consciousness that man has of himself. In other words, it's like self-awareness. So you don't have to go to school. You don't have to make an effort to know that you exist. So this is the nature of consciousness. Consciousness is a primary intuition of being. Now, since everything else we know is mediated to us through our consciousness, then consciousness is the most fundamental characteristic of the human being. In other words, what distinguishes us most from animals or any other form of existence is that we are self-aware or that we have consciousness. And what is consciousness? Consciousness is the most primary thing there is. Consciousness cannot be analyzed in terms of anything else, because consciousness is a primary intuition of being itself. It is the immediate perception of existence and in particular of your existence.

Now, historically, the first person to realize fully the primacy of consciousness in this way was Descartes, at least the first that I know of. Okay, and he’s a brilliant thing. I mean, he’s the one who said “I think, therefore, I am” which you could interpret or you could say what he really means is “I am aware that I exist; therefore, I exist” which was an absolutely brilliant move in which I use in the Prologue on proof of the existence of God. Well, this was stunningly brilliant on Descartes’ part. I mean, it’s absolutely brilliant, you know? So he starts out with complete doubt. He says let's doubt everything because this is the old solipsism argument. Well, everything is relative. Everything is mediated through human subjectivity. So how do I know that anything exists? Maybe everything is an illusion. Maybe everything is an illusion. So, Descartes addresses this so-called solipsis fallacy by saying, okay, suppose everything is an illusion, then I am aware that these illusions, I have these illusions. There must be then, since I'm conscious of these illusions, then I must exist because something has to exist to have consciousness of these illusions. So everything is an illusion. So I am aware of all these illusions and therefore I exist. So he gave this fundamental argument then that awareness of existence implies existence. We could exist without being aware of it, but we can't be aware that we exist without existing.

So this is what ‘Abdu’l-Bahá is saying. The second sort of knowledge is intuitive, like the cognizant and consciousness that man has himself. This knowledge is not the outcome of effort and study. It is an existing thing, an absolute gift. That's why I say that consciousness is primary. It cannot be resolved into anything else. It is an absolute gift. In other words, it doesn't depend or derive from anything else. Now, He says, “Since the Sanctified Realities, the supreme Manifestations of God, surround the essence and qualities of the creatures, transcend and contain existing realities and understand all things, therefore, Their knowledge is divine knowledge, and not acquired—that is to say, it is a holy bounty; it is a divine revelation.” In other words, continuing in my own words, in other words, in the same way that ordinary human beings have the spontaneous knowledge of their own being in existence, the Manifestations of God are endowed with this spontaneous knowledge of the laws of all being. So just as you have the spontaneous knowledge of your existence, the fact of your existence, Bahá’u’lláh, the Manifestations had this same kind of spontaneous knowledge of everything, of all of the laws of reality, of the laws of all being, of all existence. So the Manifestation is not like a helpless channel who just transmits this stuff.

Now, such a thing is possible, and we have experience of this. you know, there's a story, for example, in the memoirs of Salmání, the Barber, that, you know, he had served Bahá’u’lláh. And at one point Bahá’u’lláh asked Him, we give you leave to ask a favor of us, you know. So Salmání, the Barber, says, “Yeah, I can ask a favor.” He said, “Yes, any favor you want, we will grant you.” So he says, well, he said, “I've always wanted to be a poet.” Okay, this is in the memoir. You can read it. It’s published by Kalimat Press a few years ago. So, he says, “I would like to be a poet.” And so Bahá’u’lláh said, “Okay, your wish is granted.” And so in the next days he began to compose this marvelous poetry. And he described, Salmání, the Barber, described, he said, “I didn't even know. I didn't even understand what I was writing, but I could do this.” So this is an example of that kind of inspirational revelation, if you will - in other words, where a person is a vehicle. It’s coming through him, but, you know, it's not in any sense from him. But this is not the revelation that the Manifestations have. They have the knowledge. They have it. Well, I invite you to read my brother's essay on the Doctrine of the Most Great Infallibility. He gives numerous quotes, and you will see that this was quite clear from the writing, that the Manifestation then has this knowledge. He's not just a helpless, passive human vehicle of revelation, which, as I say, tends to be the Muslim view of revelation. Okay?

All right. Now, we talked about abandoning or renouncing the search for power, the pursuit of power, and replacing it by the pursuit of love. And we said that the means of pursuing love is to use power to establish justice. We cannot move - I mean, this is something which many philosophers have realized for years. The existentialists realized it very clearly. It's very clear in the writings of Kierkegaard, for example. You cannot move from power to love without passing through justice. I mean, you can't do it. Okay, so justice is like the key to love. You can't change from a power orientation to a love orientation without going through justice, because justice is the means of establishing love and this authentic relationship. So we have to reverse the paradigm. In other words, the goal is now to achieve authentic relationships with God and with others. What this means is increasing your capacity to love genuinely and to receive love, to give and receive love. We have to remember that both of these are part of exactly the same process. A person who cannot receive love cannot give love either, for receiving love is just as important as giving love, but they're really the same thing. I mean, there's no difference, which is not to say that receiving love is the same thing as being the object of love. Receiving is an active thing. Okay, so one could be the object of love without receiving the love. “Love me that I may love thee. If thou lovest Me not, My love can in no wise reach thee.” So we're all the object of the love of God, but we do not all receive the love of God. okay?

Now, so we pursue authentic relationships which as we've seen is the very purpose of our existence and is the very purpose of religion. And since that is now the goal, we need means to attain the goal. And what are the means? The means are developing our powers, our capacities, particularly of knowledge, love, and will in the process of achieving well-being, and autonomy. So in other words, we actualize these capacities of knowing the truth, of loving the beautiful, and willing the just or the good by increasing our well-being and autonomy. So as our powers increase, we deploy these powers to establish justice. And as I say, when we establish justice, when we do this– well, I started to say that love is a gift from God, but justice is also a gift from God so we can't even say that we establish justice. But if we make a sincere effort to use our powers to establish justice, then if we are sincere, God accepts the sincerity of our effort and establishes justice for us. Okay, that's what really happened. All right, remember, powerfulness is an illusion. We don't really have any power. Okay? We don't have any power. But when we sincerely strive, when we sincerely strive to deploy our God-given capacities for the establishment of justice, if we are sincere, God will accept the sincerity and will help us establish justice. And then from the establishment of justice, there flows love, the capacity to love, the capacity to love with our mind and with our heart and our actions completely.

And so we can make a simple equation. Unity, which, as we all know is the goal of the Baháʼí Faith, is love plus justice. I mean, that's what unity is. You see, why isn't unity just justice? It's not just justice because justice alone would be simply a formal relationship with no dynamics, you know, which is sort of comparable to, say, the sector or legal system in which you try to have laws and you really want the justice but the human dimension is absent so we see that all sorts of hurts are done to people in the name of justice even though people are sincerely trying to establish justice because the secular law is such a blunt instrument. I mean there's just no way of doing this justice without love and mercy. And so that's why in the Baháʼí system of law, for example, we have this principle that every case is dealt with on its own merits. For example, which means that, yes, the local assembly can remove your voting rights because you got married without parents’ permission, and it cannot remove the voting rights of Jane or John who did the same thing because it judges that there are other circumstances involved in Jane or John's case that don't apply to your case. So in secular law, this would be impossible. If you have two identical infractions, then you have to apply the same identical punishment. But in Baháʼí law, you don't because the assembly is free to make this determination, this judgment, which may be wrong, of course, but it could be appealed to the House of Justice. But the House of Justice, let's say [?] that., can make the determination that: in case (A), yes, this infraction occurred in fact, but we apply no sanction; in case (B) the same infraction occurred and we apply a sanction. And this is absolute justice because it comes from the House of Justice, which is infallible. It comes from God.

So, just justice is not unity, and just love is not unity either, because there could be the giving of love - a president can be a loving person, but if this love is not reciprocated, then there is not necessarily justice. Love can exist in an asymmetrical relationship, but justice implies a symmetry in the relationship. So, for example, I mean, let's make it very clear, I can love a dog. Presumably, Barbara loves her dog. I like dogs, but I don't think a dog is my equal. Okay, so love, genuine love does not imply a reciprocal relationship, an equal relationship, but between mature human beings, love and respect does imply a completely reciprocal relationship. So laws can exist in the absence of justice. It cannot flourish in the absence of justice. If justice is not established, this love will eventually be killed. So let's give an example of that, a very simple example. John and Jane fall madly in love with each other, and they get married. And they’re genuinely in love with each other, and you know how it is when you're in love. All you think about is satisfying the other person's needs. All you think about is getting their approval by making them happy. So you each think of making the other happy. You think of all the little ways that you can get that smile of approval and happiness on the other person's lips. But over time, injustice creeped into this relationship. Love is a matter of giving and receiving, but it may happen in this relationship that it evolved in such a way that one person does more of the giving and the other does more of the receiving. So let's say after 10 years that this has happened to John and Jane. Let's say that it has come in the position where Jane is still constantly thinking of satisfying John's needs that John has become absorbed in satisfying his own needs, and he doesn't think very much about satisfying James’ needs. So what will happen? Well, this is an asymmetrical relationship. All the giving is going one way. Jane is giving to John, but John isn't giving back to Jane, so that's unjust. It’s not lack of love, okay? It's not lack of love, but it's unjust.

So what's gonna happen? Well, you know what's gonna happen. We see it every day. Jane is going to start feeling resentments. At first, she's going to suppress these resentments. She's going to say, “Well, do I love John? Sure, I love John. I mean, look, my whole life is built around this man. I love him. So why should I feel these resentments? Why should I feel this anger? Why should I feel hate for somebody I love?” So she's saying, “Well, it's just my weakness.” And so on, and she's going to suppress this, but it's gonna grow and grow and grow. And so finally, it's going to grow to a point where she sits down one day and says, “We can't go on like this anymore. We have to talk about this.” John is going to say, “Well, I thought everything was, you know, I thought everything was fine.” Okay? Well, sure. He thought everything was fine. He was getting all the love and he was giving nothing in return. Everything was great as far as he was concerned

So then you know, “Well, you never said anything before about this. Why all of a sudden now?”

“Well, no matter why I didn't say anything before. I’m now saying it. And we've got a problem, and we’ve gotta deal with it.”

Well, so you know what will happen. Either they will deal with it. They will get counseling. And what will they do to heal the relationship? John will have to learn how not to take Jane for granted. He will have to learn how to sacrifice some of his needs for her need. In other words, they will have to put justice in the relationship. And if they succeed in putting justice back in the relationship, then love will be reborn and flourish. This is what God always does. If we sincerely establish justice, he will give us the gift of love. This is the promise. It is there. Again, we do not have the power in and of ourselves to love. Again, if you don't believe this, make yourself love where you don't love. Choose anything that you don't love and will yourself to love it, and you'll see that you do not have the power to love and will. You simply do not have this power? You cannot make yourself love where you don't love by a sheer act of will. Okay?

[woman speaking] What about, I’m thinking of Brilliant Star, a little magazine for kids and it's got a love plan in it And it helps kids and it helps adults as well to take the object of hatred and by going through a cognitive process of six steps, to reframe and to think differently about this object to develop love. Much like, really, I think ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s ammunition to stop a thought of hate with a thought of love.

Yes, sounds good.

[woman speaking]So how does that fit in with the “we cannot will ourselves”?

Well, well, there you’re establishing a process of establishing justice, of thinking about this object in a more complete and a just way, so you are teaching the child how to establish justice, how to use his powers of thought to establish justice, and therefore to change the way he feels. So that's not willing himself to love, you know? Yes, do you understand?

[woman speaking] No, I was just thinking about the writing of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. “Love the creatures for the sake of God, not for themselves.” And I was thinking that willing yourself to love with the help of God [inaudible].

Yeah. No, when I said you can't will yourself to love, that doesn't mean that you can't sincerely desire to love and to initiate a process. That's what I'm saying. You use your powers, you deploy your powers of will and of heart and of mind to establish justice, which, and then God, as I say, gives us the gift of love when we do that. So sure, in order to pursue that, we have to want it. Of course. You can say, “It would be great if I could love.” No, you have to pursue it. I mean, with a lot of energy, sure. [audience comment] That's right. Nothing on its own can. It’s an integrated process. And you can see this. I talked about this, and let's point this out in the book. In the concept of spirituality, this little feedback loop here that exists on page 227, Of Knowledge, Love, Faith, Intentionality, Action, Reaction. So there I talk about knowledge, love, and will, and I explained that this is certainly an integrated process. Sure, nothing on its own, just the knowledge on its own won't do it either. Or just the attraction to it, the love before the goal will not do it either. It's an integrated process. Sure, absolutely. Okay, so this is what we have to do. The question is what is going to motivate us to do this? What is going to allow us to renounce power? So far, we have described what it is that we have to do. We have to renounce the pursuit of power. But how do we do this? Well, this is what we will talk about after the break. Okay.

Okay, so we understand that reversing this whole process, reversing this pyramid, renouncing the pursuit of power and replacing it by the pursuit of love or what I call, which is the same thing, the pursuit of authentic relationships is what this is all about. Now, the question comes then, why have we pursued power? Why do we pursue power? And the basic answer is because we do not understand what we are. We do not have a concept of our intrinsic value. You see, if we go back– this is why I went through the thought of metaphysical stuff yesterday. What is the human being? They say each human being, there's a soul that is created by God with capacities given by God. [paper ruffling]This must be my copy. Now, you all know these statements, but let's just read these over. These are from the Gleanings in various places. This is on page 205 of the pink book: “The incomparable Creator hath created all men from one same substance, and hath exalted their reality above the rest of His creatures.” Again, man is the highest thing in creation. [audio cuts off]

–says is the result of 500 years of, 500 million years of random evolution. So what you are is just the product of a thermal dynamical system. You’re just an accident of heredity. And so there you are, this little pitiable creature, the accident of heredity. And so, for better or worse, you struggle through life with your various interactions. If you happen to have good parents who give you love and so on, then that's great, but if you happen to have other things, then you've had it and so on and so on. So some people are favorable, but most people aren't. And so life is a pretty dreary affair, but it's the only one we have. And so we have to make the best of it. And so we have to have lots of sporting events and TV and beer and everything to make everybody happy. While the few of us who have real talent go around doing the really significant things, while the masses of ordinary people just slug it out. [audio cuts off]

That's more or less the view of human and– well, this is it. I mean, this is it. And this is what is conveyed to your kids in the schools, all right? I mean, it's not said like that, but this is exactly what is taught. These are the values that are taught. Now, no wonder that everybody has an inferiority complex, right? I mean, no wonder that everybody has a very weak, insecure image of what he is. I mean, who will have an insecure image if one is taught, if one accepts, if one actually believes such a negative picture of oneself? Well, the Baháʼí writings tell us that there's a third aspect, which is the capacities of the soul. In other words, there are three aspects to the human personality, not two. There is heredity, which is truly physical. Now we can say that the heredity is also from God, but it is from God indirectly. In other words, what God does, He created, if you will, a machine that produces life. He created this process of evolution which produces life. So in a certain sense, physically speaking, we are the result of a random process, but it's a random process that has been devised by God. All right, so ultimately it is due to God, but indirectly. So even our heredity comes from God. I mean, everything comes from God. Even heredity, physical heredity comes from God, but it comes from God indirectly by this process. It comes immediately from our parents and particularly from the particular sperm and the particular egg which have determined our heredity.

And then we have the second thing, which is the soul's capacities, the soul’s capacities. And then the third determinant of human nature is education, considered broadly as the sum of all interactions between this initial configuration of environment. Notice that the heredity of the individual is determined once a given sperm fertilizes a given egg, because as soon as the sperm penetrates the egg, a hard shell forms over the surface of the egg, which prevents its penetration by another sperm. So once this act takes place, once this transaction takes place, the heredity of that individual is irreversibly determined. Now this heredity determines that this individual have certain capacities and certain limitations. Some of these capacities will be, and limitations will be, generic for the whole race. In other words, no human being can fly, for example. It is not the nature of the human being to fly. It is the nature of human beings to run, but some human beings will be able to run faster than other human beings. So some of the limitations and capacities will be generic. They will be characteristics of the race. Some will be individual. They will apply to some people and not to others.

The same is true of the soul. At the moment the soul is created– that's what we just read. At the moment the soul is created, according to this preordained measure of God, its capacities are eternally fixed. Nothing can add to them. Nothing can subtract to them. Nothing could add to them. Nothing can subtract from them. Now, this means that the soul has certain capacities and certain limitations. Again, it’s the exact analogy with physical heredity. An analogy, not an identity. Some of these capacities and limitations are generic, some are individual. Thus, all men have capacities. Well, let's read what ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says about this. Let's read what He says about it. This is on page 193. It’s from Some Answered Questions.

“[He] has the innate character, the inherited character, and the acquired character which is gained by education.” So these are the three determinants of the human. “With regard to the innate character - “ this is what I put number two, the innate characters, the capacities of the soul “ - although the divine creation is purely good, yet the varieties of natural qualities in man come from the difference of degree; all are excellent, but they are more or less so, according to the degree. So all mankind possess intelligence and capacities, but the intelligence, the capacity and the worthiness of men differ.” [audio cuts off]

–everybody he is capable of fault. Everybody is capable of feeling. Everybody's capable of will and so on. But then the proportion of these is different for every human being, and as I said earlier there's many more things, I mean, we could say about this. There is an attribute which is dominant in every person. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá tells us that God has caused one attribute of God, one capacity to be dominant, so we can have fun trying to figure out what is our dominant capacity, if it's useful. And then He says, “The variety of inherited qualities comes from strength and weakness of constitution—that is to say, when the two parents are weak, the children will be weak; if they are strong, the children will be robust.” So this is purely physical. If you look up the word constitution in the dictionary, you'll see that it means physical. Okay, so heredity is purely physical, and it is therefore temporary because, as we saw yesterday, everything physical is temporary. That's the nature of the physical world. Every material entity is temporary, so this heredity, once determined, is irreversible, but it's temporary, So the body is this temporary vehicle which comes into existence, which is joined with the soul but which declines and eventually goes out of existence. So the potential that is created by heredity may or may not be fulfilled. In other words, if the needs, the physical needs of the person are not adequately met, then maybe the genetic potential that is there in the beginning will never be fulfilled. I mean, the very obvious example is suppose a person dies. It’s a child, I mean, then obviously his genetic potential will never be fulfilled. So he might have been a potential genius and something or whatever, but that will never be fulfilled. So we have no guarantee that this potential of the physical heredity will be fulfilled.

However, we do have the guarantee that this spiritual potential will eventually be fulfilled because that's the whole purpose of our lives. And the process of fulfilling the spiritual potential is sufficiently complex that it will take all eternity. We won't get bored with it doing all eternity. So, in other words ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says, I mean, I don't have time to identify every quote, but He says point blank, He says, God has an infinity of attributes. And remember that the human being has the capacity of reflecting all the attributes of God, and therefore we have a capacity of reflecting to some degree an infinity of attributes of God. What is the limit to the degree? Well, there's no limit to the degree. There are different degrees, but there's no limit to it, and so we can go on developing our capacity to reflect these attributes of God through all eternity. So this is the potential that is created by each soul, that is potential created by itself. Now this is a value. We don't possess it. We are it. So let's say this. Our intrinsic value, because this is the key notion, our intrinsic value lies in what we are, not in what we possess or how we are perceived by others.

Now you see, there are similarities between the body and the soul, between the spiritual, the physical development that starts with heredity, and the spiritual development. But there are also differences, and here's the difference. Remember, we saw yesterday that the principle of existence in the material world was a composite principle. Now, so any physical entity is a system. It is a system. Your body is a system. Now what does that mean? Besides just being words? It means the following thing. A system is composed of parts. Some of the parts of the system can be alienated from the system without destroying the system. Okay, so, for example, if you lose a leg, you can lose a leg without dying, right? So you have altered the system. If you lose your leg, you have lost the capacity of ambulation that was represented by that leg so you have diminished your physical capacity. That's true. I mean there's no doubt about that. But the system still exists. The system has not been destroyed. So that is the nature of a composite system, that the system can be altered without being destroyed. Okay, the system can be altered without being destroyed. That's part of God's design with the physical creation.

However, we know that the soul and its capacities are, as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says, holy outside of the physical world, and that the soul is not composed of elements. It is of one unified substance, like the essence of God, in that respect, like the essence of God. In other respects, not like the essence of God. Not pre-existent, for example. But it is of one unified substance. Therefore, there are no parts to the soul. There are no components to the soul, and therefore no part of the soul can be alienated from the soul. So you can't alienate your mind or your heart or your will from your soul, and you can't diminish these capacities of the soul. In fact, as we know, the soul is, in its nature, immortal, so this is an intrinsic value. This is what ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says is the image of God within us. The image of God within us is the capacities of our souls. And this is what He means, it would seem, when He says that we must love the creatures for the sake of God and not for their own sake. In other words, we cannot love the creatures for the way we perceive them, but for what they really are, which is their capacities, which come from God. How can you not love what comes from God? Remember that ultimately truth, beauty, and goodness are the same thing. The Blessed Beauty is one of the names of Bahá’u’lláh, the Ancient Beauty. So beauty and truth are really the same thing. There's no difference. Ultimately, there's no difference. So to know the potential of a soul is to love that soul. You cannot not love it because that potential is from God. It is from God. How can you not love something that is from God?

Now, of course, you can't love ugly actions and cruel actions, but those don't come from God. They come from us. As Bahá’u’lláh says in the Gleanings, every evil thing is from yourselves, and every good thing is from God. All right, so we can't love the creatures for themselves, for what they do with this potential, or how they misuse it, but we can love the potential because that is supremely beautiful. It comes from God. So this intrinsic value is the only real value we have because we've already seen that we don't possess anything, that possession is an illusion. So the only value we have is this, but that's pretty good, because that comes from God. That means that what you are, all of your capacities and your limitations come from God, and they're part of God's purpose. And they make of you a unique human being. You see, some people say, “Well, isn't it unjust that there are innate differences between human beings? That some people are more intelligent than others, let’s say? Well, suppose that the world was made of 5 billion copies of you, then you would be perfectly useless to the world. If the world has 5 billion copies of you, then we could kill you and nobody would know it because there’s 4 billion 999 and so on other copies of you left, right? So the fact that there is individuality, the fact that each human soul– how many human souls are there? ‘Abdu’l-Bahá tells us in the Tablet of the Universe, an infinity, not a big, finite number, an infinity of human souls, and every one of them is unique. Every one of them is unique. It represents a slightly or greatly different spectrum of divine capacities. So rather than seeing this as an injustice, we should be grateful. This is what makes us useful to the universe. This gives us a little place in the universe, something that we can be that nobody else can be. You are the only perfect you that exists. There's one thing that you can do that nobody else, even God Himself, can't do, and that is be you. Right? You are the most perfect you that will ever exist in all the worlds of God. And therefore, then, anybody else who tries to be you is bound to failure. If a person envies what you are and tries to imitate it and tries to appropriate it to himself, he is doomed to failure. He is doomed to frustration because he can't, because you are the only you that God has created.

So this is the individuality. This is the intrinsic value. See, intrinsic is important. It doesn't come from outside. Since it doesn't come from outside, nothing outside can alter this value. Now we can begin to see the illusion of, say, materialism, of amassing material things. Why do people amass material things? Because they have the illusion that they are augmenting their self by possessing more material things. In other words, the businessman looks in the mirror in the morning. He doesn't say, “I am the slightly balding, paunchy man with bad breath who is unfaithful to his wife and is irritable with his kids.” He says, “I am a successful businessman who owns a car and a big house and has the respect of everybody.” And so on and so on. And he therefore thinks that in some sense he is a different person, but he's not because his only value is what he is, not how he's perceived by other people or how he perceives himself. That again is the vain imaginings. We’re talking about vain imaginings, that's it. It is the illusion that we add to ourselves or we can add to what we are by possessing. And therefore we set out to possess. And how do you possess? By pursuing power. Because the more power you have, the more ability you have to compel other people to give you what you want. So there it is. The pursuit of power has its roots in the sense of valuelessness, the sense that we have no value and that we must seek our value. The pursuit of power is the pursuit of self-worth. That's what it is. The pursuit of power is a disguised pursuit of self-worth.

And no wonder that we pursue power in order to have self worth, because, as we said yesterday, it's intolerable for anybody to think of himself as worthless. I mean, this is spirituals suicide, a psychological suicide to say “I have no value whatsoever”. So this sense of worthlessness is intolerable, and therefore we must acquire worth. Or we pursue power through competition with others. We demonstrate that we have special abilities, as I said yesterday, special confidence, and therefore that we have value. But everybody has some special competence. So again it’s only others’ perception of other people that determines that such and such a special competence gives a special value. In other words, ask, I don't know, the Africans if they think that a hockey player is a very special person and they will probably tell you, “Well, I don't know, I mean, can he run fast? Can he hunt? [laughing] Can he do it?” No but he can knock this little thing and that, you know. It's really good. So I mean, clearly, we're dealing with cultural relativity here.

So, it is the awareness of intrinsic value. In order to renounce the pursuit of power, we must know, not believe, but know that we have this intrinsic value. We must become aware of it. This is the knowledge of self that Bahá’u’lláh says is equivalent to the knowledge of God. Remember? He says that knowledge of the self is equivalent to the knowledge of God. The true knowledge of self is equivalent to the knowledge of God. When we know that we have this intrinsic value is to know that what we are comes from God and that this is the only value we have, but it's plenty. So once we really realize this, we don't need anything from other people. We know that the approval of other people cannot add to what we are, and their disapproval cannot subtract from what we are because our soul is not a composite. Nothing can be alienated from our soul. Our soul is not a system. It is an entity.

So to sum up then, I am suggesting that the key to the renunciation of the pursuit of power lies in true knowledge of the self, namely the recognition of intrinsic value, the recognition of the intrinsic value of ourselves, which implies that we recognize the intrinsic value of other people. Just a minute, I don't want to [?]. See, now, here we get into something which is very, very important. How did we get into this notion? How did we get into this notion that in order to have value, we must have some special competency? Well, I feel that we got into this notion by critically transferring or reasoning about material values to spiritual values. Now let me say a word about this. What is the basic principle of economics? Go into any economics course in the world. Economics 101, go into it. Listen to the first lecture. Everybody will say the first principle of economics is rarity, right? That competition for rarity, right? That which is rare is dear. The rarer, the dearer. So the basis of material values is that, that which is most valuable is that which is most unique, most rare. Okay, and this is the whole basis of economics, right? This is the whole basis. I mean, all of economic theory follows from this - competition for rarity. Okay?

Now, this is true. Why is it true? It is true because a material thing is diminished when it is shared. If I have an apple and I share it with you, then we each have half an apple, right? And if I share it with 10 people, then we each have one-tenth of an apple. So, a material thing is diminished by being shared. And that is why the rarer a material thing is, the more valuable it is because the less of it there is to go around, the harder it is to share it because there's less of it to go around. And therefore it becomes more valuable for everybody. And therefore there is competition to possess or control this rare thing. However, with spiritual values, it's exactly the opposite. The spiritual, the most valuable things spiritually are those which are the most universal, not the most rare. What is the most valuable thing? We just spent two days talking about the most valuable thing. The most valuable thing is love. That's what ‘Abdu’l-Bahá said and we've read it twice, right? Love is the most valuable thing, and it is also the most universal thing. Okay? Now, how is love the most universal thing? Because an increase in love is a positive value under all circumstances. There is no conceivable circumstances in which an increase in love is detrimental. Now, it is also a value, for example, that we should eat good and nourishing food, but that's not a universal value. Why? Because it's not true under all circumstances. If, for example, to use ‘Abdu’l-Bahá as an example, if I am ill in such a way that my system cannot tolerate normally nourishing food, then it could even be detrimental for me to take in nourishing food. So I can't say that it’s a universal value that I should always eat good and nourishing food. There are times when it's even better not to eat anything at all. We have a fast in the Baháʼí faith, and so on.

So there are relative values and there are absolute values. There are local values and there are universal values. These are all values and they’re all important, but we have to realize those which are local and limited and those which are universal. And ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says to us that the most universal value of all, in fact the only truly universal value, is love, because love, an increase in love is positive under all circumstances. So when we come to spiritual values then, the more universal, the more valuable. Why? Because a spiritual value is multiplied when it is shared, not diminished. If I have loved and I share it with you, does that diminish the love? No! Love calls forth love. If I share love, then this creates more love. So a spiritual value, like love, is multiplied by being shared. If I have a good idea and I share it with you, then we both have a good idea. And if you share it with other people, then lots of people have a good idea. Does that diminish the good idea? No! That multiplies the good idea. So you see, material things are diminished by being shared. Spiritual things, spiritual values are multiplied by being shared.

So all through history, we have pursued power because we have unconsciously, uncritically transferred our principle which is true about the material world, namely, that the most valuable things are the most rare things and we must compete for them. And in order to compete successfully, you need power, and we seek power and so on, the whole thing. Okay, the competitive struggle for existence, as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá called it. Whereas in fact, there is a complete inversion of values when we come to the spiritual, because spiritual entities and values are multiplied when they’re shared, not diminished. And therefore we pursue spiritual values by sharing them with others, rather than hoarding them, so to speak. Rather than by cooperation, we are living in competition. So in order then to change our mindset, we have to really realize this. In other words, it's one thing to talk about this on the intellectual level, but it has to come down to the gut level where every time we make a decision, where every time we interact with another human being, we have at the forefront of the fact that what we're doing is pursuing universal spiritual values and not competing for material values.

So you go to the bank, you do a transaction at the teller's window. So that's the material purpose of your going there, but the spiritual purpose is to see if there's some way that you can uplift this person. Okay, that's what ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says. Right? He says a true Baháʼí is one who uplifts in some manner every single human being with whom He comes in, that sort of Baháʼí, a simple definition of a Baháʼí. He says we must uplift in some way every human being we encounter. That's teaching the Faith. Okay, that's teaching the Faith. It’s seeking to uplift in some way. How do you uplift another human being? Well, encourage them. Praise them. Say, you know, “I really appreciated your service. Thank you. You know, I've been in here several times and you do a really good job here at the bank.” I mean, how many times has a teller heard that? How many times do you think a teller has heard that? Probably never. Right. But they sure hear about it if they make a mistake, if they make a miscalculation or it takes too long or whatever, right? And of course, they're trained, and we have a social norm that says you have to be polite. So they say, [smiling] “What would you like today, Mr. Hatcher? What would you like today? Let me serve you.” And so on, you know, because they're going to lose their job if they don't do this, but it's up to us to cut through this hypocrisy and to relate authentically to the real person that is there. So we encourage them. We pray for them.

Why not pray for them while you're doing your transaction? Okay. Well, if we did that, I bet pretty soon people would start acting, asking, saying, “What is it about you that's different from other people?” Right? We could tell them about the faith pretty naturally. You say, “Well, there's not much different about me than other people, except that I happened to have become aware of intrinsic value, and therefore I'm trying my best to relate authentically to people. And I have become aware of intrinsic value because I'm a Baháʼí.” You know? So, in other words, it is not teaching methods or techniques that produces results; it is the reality that produces results. It is what we are. That's the only value we have. If we are nothing, we have nothing. It's what we are. It's the reality. That's what produces results, nothing else. So this is the way that I suggest that we can renounce the pursuit of power by the recognition of intrinsic value. First, of course, knowledge is first. First, we have to know, be aware of this intrinsic value in ourselves and others. This cuts us free from competition, from the pursuit of power, from the need for others’ approval, the fear of their disapproval and so on. It cuts us free from that anxiety. You think, “What does he really think of me?” Or “Is he trying to manipulate me?” Of course, he’s trying to manipulate you. So what, you know? “If he's trying to manipulate me, then too bad for him. The poor guy is caught in one of these cycles that we all get caught in.” So it cuts us free from this, and it enables us to begin to relate authentically to other people. [audio cuts off]

–system. Call the world order, the Covenant which utterly defeats the pursuit of power. In the system of Bahá’u’lláh, it is absolutely impossible to be successful in pursuing power. That doesn't mean you can't try, but you cannot succeed. What it ultimately comes down to is the infallibility of the House of Justice. In other words, what is the guarantee that a sufficiently clever and sufficiently pathological individual could not subvert the whole Baháʼí community by perniciously pursuing power and various devious ways over a period of time? You know? I mean, he could fool counselors and Hands of the Cause and everything else, but he can't fool God. Remember? Muhammad put it very well. They plotted and God plotted. And verily, God is the best of plotters. Okay? So you see, it all comes down to the infallibility of the House of the Justice. That is our only guarantee that our future will be different from our past. It is the only guarantee that our collective future will be different from our past, that the pursuit of power will be totally defeated in society collectively, not just for individuals who will benefit from their pursuit of power, just as Christian saints have relinquished the pursuit of power and benefited spiritually from this down through the ages. But collectively, this is never [?]. It is the fact that the House of Justice is infallible and they can therefore infallibly detect and defeat anybody who is going to persist in the pursuit of power.

So, I mean, obviously, the person is persisting in the pursuit of power, there a're going to be signs. There are going to be indications. It's going to be on the local level. It’s going to be, you know, local community, but somebody's [?]. It’s just a conflict of personality between these two people. They're in competition with each other, and then it goes to all the levels and so on, and so on. And you know, so eventually he will learn the lesson or he won’t, but eventually it will be the House of Justice. If this person persists in pursuing power to a point, he would simply be declared a Covenant-breaker. He will be either naturally illuminated. He will have a test which will force him out of the Faith or whatever. Or he will simply lose interest in the faith when he sees that he can’t accomplish his end or whatever. Or else if he persists in staying in the faith and pursuing power instead of pursuing authenticity, they will simply be declared a Covenant-breaker. And God will declare him a Covenant-breaker because the House of Justice is infallible. So I want to close by stressing that in a very real sense, the Baháʼí Faith is the infallibility of the House of Justice. It's not just that we accept the verdict of the House of Justice for the sake of unity. They are infallible. Their decision is the decision of God.

You know, there was a case, for example - some of you may have heard of this - where a group of people in South America were taught the faith by Covenant-breakers. And then when they realize this, they realize that they've been taught the Faith by Covenant-breakers. They said, “Well, we want to be Baháʼís. I mean, we understand now what it is, a Covenant-breaker, and so on, but we want to be Baháʼí.” So the House of Justice sent Hand of the Cause Dr. Furutan to meet with these people and sort of assess their spiritual condition and report back to the House of Justice. So we questioned each one of them and he reported back to the House of Justice the list of names. Then he said, “I have verified, in my opinion, all of these people are sincere in their desire to be Baháʼí. They understand what they have been mistaught.” And so on. And the House of Justice accepted all the names but one. And they said, “Go back and talk to this other person.” And so Furutan went back a second time and talked to this person alone. And he reported back, “In my opinion, this person is utterly sincere.” And the House of Justice says, “Go back and talk to him again.” And they went back and talked to him again, and the guy finally said, “I'm totally faking.” He said, “I wanted to test the House of Justice to see if they could find an insincere person. I have no interest in being a Baháʼí. I think the whole thing is a fairy story, but I was just interested to see if I could pull one over on the House of Justice.” And so, for the House of Justice, this was just a list of names. They had no personal knowledge of any of these people. I mean, that's just one instance. That sort of thing happens 20 times a day in the House of Justice. Okay?

I mean, the House of Justice is infallible, and the infallibility of the House of Justice is the bulwark between us and the injustice of history. So this is why the Baháʼí Faith is perfect and complete because it gives the answer both on the individual level, in the form of this clear understanding of the nature of the human being, and on the collective level, in the form of the Covenant. So that’s all I have to say.

[man speaking] But there’s a difference between– in fact, the writings say very clearly there’s a difference between a philosopher and a prophet. And the prophets also do what they say. Philosophy, we can have lots of ideas.

We talk about it.

[man speaking] We can talk about it. We can generate [?]. I think, what I was thinking about, I wrote down here that to me [?] combines intelligent, disciplined, scholarship and heartfelt spirituality. And I think this is a rare combination. And I know both [?] suffered a great deal of difficulties and sacrifices in Russia, and in many other places, to be quite honest. [?] more than 20 years of service of the National Assembly, and that service [?] family service because knowing what it means to be away from the family and how much weight that puts on the wife or the family or the husband or which one is left. Takes a great deal of sacrifice. And I think that the difference between the kind of scholarship that is offered to us these last few days is that this family actually lives what they’re telling. Thank you very much for being here, and I’m going to give you this little gift of the Kitáb-i-Aqdas [?].

Well, you've already given me much, so [?]. Thank you, thank you. [applause]

–I've been talking with [?] at the breaks, and what I actually hope is that we can develop an ongoing collaborative relationship between our institute in St Petersburg and the institute here and the school. And I've already made some propositions to go on about this, and I'll be talking with Reggie Newkirk [ph] and Anne Wilson [ph] tomorrow. So I think let's not make this a one-time affair. Let's try to develop a collaboration, and I think you know, as I say, it's God that does the whole thing. We just have to make ourselves instruments of God. It doesn't depend on our capacities. And so as I say, this is the thing. It's universally accessible. It's not some special thing, we have to wait for some supremely gifted person to come along. We can do this thing, all of us. We can do this thing. We just do it. We just become instruments of God and He will do it. So I think here we have people who are willing to do it. So let's do it. Thanks again. [applause]