Author: Firoozeh

Meeting the Holy Manifestations of God

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Meeting the Holy Manifestations of God

John Hatcher  •     •   

As a liberal arts student at an excellent university, I tried to learn the best that human beings had thought and wrought, whether in art, in architecture, in literature, in philosophy, in history, in religion, or in science. But while the courses were taught as discrete arenas of learning, the Baha’i Faith increasingly enabled me to see in every one of these fields an encompassing and logical relationship.

While it would be impossible and, for the present purposes, entirely unnecessary to catalogue the critical links and vistas of insights this new balance of those subjects unveiled before me, a few of them immediately transformed the drudgery of classes into a personal adventure in which everything in creation revealed some relevance and connection to everything else in creation.

Perhaps the and most exciting way in which my study of the Baha’i Faith enhanced and coordinated my understanding of all I learned in these diverse courses in these ostensibly unrelated fields was my progressively more acute appreciation of the theory that underlying the evolution of all human advancement and knowledge was a single motive force—the advent from the realm of the spirit of divine prophets and messengers, who Baha’is allude to as “manifestations” of God:

The holy Manifestations of God were sent down to make visible the oneness of humanity. For this did They endure unnumbered ills and tribulations, that a community from amongst mankind’s divergent peoples could gather within the shadow of the Word of God and live as one, and could, with delight and grace, demonstrate on earth the unity of humankind. – Abdu’l-Baha, Selections from the Writings of Abdu’l-Baha, p. 278.

According to the Baha’i theory of human history, all advancement of society and learning proceeds or emanates from the successive periodic appearances of these divinely-ordained teachers. They appear approximately every five hundred to a thousand years at various places on the planet, bringing new religious dispensations designed to educate and spiritualize humanity.

As I attempted to apply this over-arching theoretical paradigm to world history, as well as to what had occurred in literature and philosophy and social and political movements throughout that history, I began to discern this divine organizing force at work. Suddenly, all my studies began to make sense in terms of this larger expression of human purpose.

I came to theorize that the emergence of classical Greek philosophy ultimately may have had its beginning in the influence of Jewish thinkers. I came to examine how the Roman Empire rode the crest of the wave of emerging Christianity. I came to perceive how the Renaissance in Western Christendom may have actually emanated from the influence of the Islamic dispensation. I came to see in particular how the advent of the Baha’i Era was the primal motive force behind the Industrial Revolution and behind all the astounding transformation in global society that has taken place in the short span of little more than one and half centuries.

My understanding of this integrative force in human advancement hardly confined itself to the more recent influence of the Abrahamic religions. I could discern the same process at work under Hinduism in the Indian sub-continent, with Buddhism in the great Chinese dynasties, with Zoroastrianism and the eminence of the Persian Empire, with someone like Akhenaton and the Egyptian Empire, as well as the influence of Quetzalcoatl in Central and South America. The same process happened among even more ancient messengers whose names are forever lost to the memory of man, though remnants of their influence linger in Africa, in the Australian Continent, and among the peoples of the South Pacific Island nations. Baha’is believe that no place on Earth has gone without the influx of this divine guidance.

I don’t mean to imply that I had researched all this or that I had achieved some breakthrough in anthropology in conjunction with the Baha’i theory of “progressive revelation.” I simply mean that I experienced the foundational beginnings in my personal world view of infinite possibilities of the applicability of this concept to all my studies. This new vista of learning, this integrating principle, excited me as nothing had before, because it demonstrated to me that nothing I studied was isolated from anything else I studied, that every field of learning was really a single vector of insight that, when assembled with other such vectors, could implicate an image about the whole of reality itself.

Before this, I had proceeded in all these discrete areas of learning like the blindfolded men in the proverbial story who examine various parts of an elephant and argue about the validity of their individual perceptions: it is skinny like a whip, says the tailist; it is thick, round, and straight like a tree trunk, says the leggist; it is flat and thick like a blanket, says the earist. It is possible that over time these experts in their separate fields of study might cease contending, might consult, collaborate, and assemble their findings to emerge with some consensus about the reality of the elephant. But how much more rapid their progress would be were one to appear among them who had already seen the entire elephant, who knew how all the pieces of the elephant fit together, and, most important of all, who would gladly share with them this integrating vision of reality as a whole.

This was precisely what I began to believe Baha’u’llah and all the prophets before him had done: to appear among us to remove our blindfolds, so that all who sincerely desired to know the truth about reality could see the “wholeness” of it for themselves.

The opinions and views expressed in this article are those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of BahaiTeachings.org or any institution of the Baha’i Faith.

WRITTEN BY

John S. Hatcher holds a B.A. and M.A. in English literature from Vanderbilt University, a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Georgia, and is Professor Emeritus of English literature at the University of South Florida

How Do You Define Evil?

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How Do You Define Evil?

Marco Oliveira  •     •   

…lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. – the Lord’s Prayer.

Every Christian knows this famous phrase. Raised as a Christian, I became very familiar with these words. But in the Baha’i writings I found its meaning.

To find that meaning, first one needs to realize that suffering in this physical world has two origins: natural causes and human causes. The first occurs as a result of natural laws–we will call it simply suffering—and the latter results from the free will of human beings. Human-caused suffering we will call evil.

So, according to the Baha’i teachings, what makes something evil? The Baha’i writings answer this tough question in two ways. In the book Some Answered Questions, Abdu’l-Baha addresses the complex topic of evil, beginning by warning that the explanation of the subject is difficult. Then He describes evil as an absence rather than a presence:

Briefly, the intellectual realities, such as all the qualities and admirable perfections of man, are purely good, and exist. Evil is simply their nonexistence… In the same way, the sensible realities are absolutely good, and evil is due to their nonexistence—that is to say, blindness is the want of sight, deafness is the want of hearing, poverty is the want of wealth… – Some Answered Questions, p. 263.

…all that God created He created good. This evil is nothingness; so death is the absence of life… all evils return to nonexistence. Good exists; evil is nonexistent. –ibid, p. 263.

evil-shadowAbdu’l-Baha presents several analogies to explain the non-existence of evil. He says that blindness exists due to the lack of sight; likewise, evil exists because it represents the absence of good; and the existence of evil is ephemeral, confined to the material world.

Does this mean that evil does not exist? No–it means evil has no existence of its own.

Confused? Let’s try another analogy.

Consider the shadow of an object. That shadow only comes into being in the area where the object obscures light. The shadow has no existence of its own, for without the object there would be no shadow. Therefore we can say that the shadow is non-existent, when compared to the object; however, we cannot deny the existence of the shadow.

On other occasions, Abdu’l-Baha presented answers with a more empirical and symbolic perspective:

Evil is imperfection. Sin is the state of man in the world of the baser nature, for in nature exist defects such as injustice, tyranny, hatred, hostility, strife… Through education we must free ourselves from these imperfections. – Paris Talks, p. 177.

The reality underlying this question is that the evil spirit, Satan or whatever is interpreted as evil, refers to the lower nature in man. This baser nature is symbolized in various ways… God has never created an evil spirit; all such ideas and nomenclature are symbols expressing the mere human or earthly nature of man. It is an essential condition of the soil of earth that thorns, weeds and fruitless trees may grow from it. Relatively speaking, this is evil; it is simply the lower state and baser product of nature. – The Promulgation of Universal Peace, p. 293.

One of the Baha’i definitions of evil has a complex, metaphysical approach; the other gives us a simpler and more empirical framework. These complementary answers allowed me to better understand the phrase from the Lord’s Prayer: “…lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

The Baha’i approach taught me a new way to think about the problem of evil. Christ admonished his followers to ask God not to let them fall into the temptation of reducing themselves to their lower nature. If we understand evil as our lower nature—revenge, violence, hatred and the like—then we know those characteristics could eventually reduce us to nothingness.

The opinions and views expressed in this article are those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of BahaiTeachings.org or any institution of the Baha’i Faith.
BahaiTeachings.org

Love Is Always The Answer

Love Is Always The Answer

ARCHANGEL MICHAEL – FINAL PHASE of HUMAN 5-D ASCENSION! – via MICHAEL LOVE – 8-26-16

Courtesy of   https://www.projectfreedomearth.com/archangel-michael-final-phase-human-ascension/

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ARCHANGEL MICHAEL   –   FINAL PHASE of HUMAN 5-D ASCENSION!   –   via  MICHAEL LOVE – 8-26-16

A Rabbi’s Perspective on the Oneness of Religion

A Rabbi’s Perspective on the Oneness of Religion

  Mordecai Schreiber  •     •
RELIGION

For the past ten years I have been studying the prayers and meditations of the world’s major religions.

David Star

I have also traveled during that time, as a cruise ship clergyperson, to over 100 countries and islands. In all my travels I have been fascinated by the fervor of people everywhere whom I saw praying and meditating either alone, or in small groups, as well as in very large numbers. I have learned some important lessons about the power of prayer and its universality. In countries like Russia and China, where religion was suppressed for decades, I found large numbers of people attending Russian Orthodox churches and Buddhist temples, respectively. It became clear to me that human spiritual needs run much deeper than political ideologies. Most importantly, I became aware of the commonality of all forms of spiritual experience and devotion. While outwardly it seems that religions differ greatly from one another, in reality the differences come more from form than from substance.

My entire life has been a spiritual quest. I was born to secular Jewish parents in the seaport city of Haifa under the British Mandate for Palestine. Yet from a very young age I was fascinated by all the Abrahamic religions which dwelled side by side in my native town. Interestingly, I grew up across the street from the Baha’i temple and gardens in Haifa, and I learned at a young age that the Baha’i Faith embraced all religions.

Sharing-the-Sacred--My-Pilgrimage-to-the-Baha'i-Shrines-in-Israel

Now, years later, I have come to fully appreciate the Baha’i belief in the oneness of religion and the progressive nature of revelation. For years, I have been troubled by the rivalry and exclusivism which characterized the way Judaism, Christianity, and Islam approached one another. When I decided to become a rabbi, I chose a progressive branch of Judaism, and after I was ordained I pursued interfaith studies and activities.

The post-Cold War world has now entered a new phase, which some refer to as a cultural and religious “clash of civilizations.” There seems to be a greater need today than ever before to initiate a world dialogue among all religions to harness the universal power of prayer and faith for the common good, rather than continue to work at cross-purposes, which can only exacerbate conflicts around the globe.

In my new book, Why People Pray: The Universal Power of Prayer, I make a case for a new language of prayer which can bring all people together across ideological divides. I point out that the Baha’i teachings are perfectly suited for starting a new phase in the history of human faith, in which the common good of all humanity is recognized as the highest value to be pursued by all cultures and creeds:

This is a new cycle of human power. All the horizons of the world are luminous, and the world will become indeed as a garden and a paradise. It is the hour of unity of the sons of men and of the drawing together of all races and all classes. You are loosed from ancient superstitions which have kept men ignorant, destroying the foundation of true humanity.

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

In the final analysis, we all live on a planet that keeps getting smaller and ever more interdependent, and the good of one is the good of all.

The opinions and views expressed in this article are those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of BahaiTeachings.org or any institution of the Baha’i Faith.

WRITTEN BY

Born and raised in Haifa, Israel, Mordecai Schreiber spent six years in Latin America and is equally at home in Hebrew, Spanish, and English. He has served congregations in the U.S. and Central America