The mentality set forth by this person is why the current version of the Baha’i Faith is falling breathtakingly further and further behind across the entire world S-P-I-R-I-T-U-A-L-L-Y. Everybody else on Earth is running with the Teachings of Baha’u'llah except the “official” incredibly materialistic current Baha’i control freak organization. This person’s mentality of “Once you find Baha’u'llah your search is over” is utter rubbish and will be proved so by history. The people who expoused this belief at the top of the Faith will eventually be seen as completely unspiritual dolts who ran everything they touched completely into the ground.

This way of thinking is at the very root of the incredible blocking forces in the Faith that have led to mind numbing stagnation and very low growth. As Dr. Ruhe (a very fine man) had to shockingly remind the “faithful” at the New York Conference in 1992 whose IQ’s were and still are going down every minute “We must always remember that this is all ultimately about God.”

I second that. And “God” is something very big. Much bigger than any one “religion”. “God” is Profound Cosmic Power and how it is revealed into each person’s soul journey.

Independent investigation of truth is the marching orders of this New World Age. For eveyone on Earth it is lead, follow, or get out of the way. The people that want to limit that will have a very special hell waiting for them in the next life whether they called themselves “Baha’is” or not or whether they served on the UHJ or not.

There are many spiritual books on Amazon that are far more in tune with what Baha’u'llah brought to humanity than any of the the “official” books and publications of the Baha’i Faith.

People of this mentality of stopping all searching and critical thought when you join the Faith do not realize that the Baha’is are not the only people who know about God on this planet and it is gpoing to take many systems of thought and conception working together and communicating to achieve anything of value for the future.

One of the ways the middle ground between what either pov fail to adhere to (just questioning and just answering) as hinted above is that the voyage is eternal – both questions and answers become refined. Lording one over the other, well that just fails to get the point. Another part of this is there is a lot in the Writings which claim something is true but lack entirely the detail of how it is true – or even provide reasons we can never know it is true or not. We have to make the answers our own – for our time and place. That is one reason the Faith has a central role for mysticism I think and has in this Day incorporated it, mysticism, into the body of the religion – rather than leaving it to muddle around the edges of legitimacy as in Islam and Christianity and so on. Moojan Momen’s essay in the latest World Order magazine (37.4) is about “how the Baha’i Faith has redefined mysticism and designed a religious community that puts mysticism at its center. And the editorial challenges us to consider the root meaning of civility and the implied commitment to being part of and making better the entirety of the commonweal” (paraphrased from Mr. Stockman.) Should those that “get it” be less patient with those that “don’t” than the Central Figures?

I once knew someone who asked questions and rejected any answer as belonging to the establishment (not Baha’i – in general). He dressed shabbily, unkempt of hair and dress. He was rebellious in all things. I offered that he had chained himself to the establishment – what it was and wasn’t – by deciding to go against the establishment in everything he did – that the only rule in his life was the establishment whether by those he felt obeyed it and those who rebelled against it. He got this shocked look on his face and I didn’t see him for some weeks. When next I saw him he had gotten a haircut and dressed well enough for social convention – and he gave me a wink. He shoes were still in tatters – he liked them that way. He also later bought a good looking very comfortable car – one that was also something of a status symbol. I haven’t seen him in years. I hope he gets a hybrid car now.

Hi Steven,

Thank you for your very articulate post. Your points are all very well taken.

What I am saying is that a religion is about states of consciousness. The Baha’i Faith is about Baha’u'llah’s mystical state of consciousness. It is not about Shoghi Effendi’s non-mystical state of non-consciousness. It is not about any particular member of the Universal House of Justice’s non-mystical state of non-consciousness.

It is about the inner mystical horizon of a person’s individual soul. It is profoundly sacred. For any person in the Baha’i Faith to say to any other soul “once you have found Baha’u'llah your search is over” is to assert a viewpoint that is profoundly materialistic and Earth bound. It is a statement that is profoundly unspiritual.

This is because to my mind Baha’u'llah is not a person like someone’s needy parental projection. Baha’u'llah should not be made into anyone’s need for an authority figure from unhappy and unstable childhoods. Baha’u'llah is not a person for someone who has identified the message on the deepest spiritual plane. Baha’u'llah is a state of consciousness. As was Jesus a state of consciousness. A spiritual state of consciouness on comprehending the powers of the Cosmos for a new World Age cycle in human growth and evolution toward the Divine.

A spiritual person would say “Once you have found Baha’u'llah’s state of consciousness your search for truth has just begun on a new plane of insight. You are now seeing with a new eye and hearing with a new ear. You are now free to fully investigate and explore the Cosmos as you see fit from this new persepective.”

But religions are always hi-jacked by spiritual archetypes who will not allow or permit that. Always. Look at the sorry, sorry histories of all the Abrahamic religions. And this is why the power of the Baha’i Faith is now passing to other people and other movements who will be the real spiritual Baha’is doing the work of the World Age.

I wish it would be otherwise. But I fear this is what has happened.

The difference of perspective between people who see Baha’u'llah as a person to be worshipped as an idol of their own psychological making and people who see Baha’u'llah as a state of spiritual consciousness to be explored with the vast powers of your own God given heart and mind is as vast a scope of being in the Cosmos as that between heaven and hell.

There are no illumined poets left in the Baha’i Faith now. Only dreary apparatchiks with their regimented “spiritual” comic book level of insight into the Universe. The results of this are catastrophic for the “Lesser Covenant”. But not for the “Greater Covenant.” The spiritual souls of the much bigger world will carry on with or without the so called formal “Baha’i Faith”.

The Teachings of Baha’u'llah are flowering everywhere among spiritual people of insight but, unfortunately, not among the people called by His Name at the present time.

I pale beside “Shoghi Effendi’s non-mystical state of non-consciousness.” And let’s not lift ourselves up next to “It is not about any particular member of the Universal House of Justice’s non-mystical state of non-consciousness.” How much of our own spirituality is just non-consciousness!

I suggest you review more carefully that Abrahamic history. We are from any semblance of Christianity’s drift from it’s source or example, and survived as best we could the failures of Islam in the same regard. If you presumably accept ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s verdict note then He establishes the Christian Lesser Covenant was secured past 600AD (even to 800AD perhaps). Notwithstanding that Christianity’s excesses over the next 1200 years have given us big problems to solve, it took far longer for such excesses to strike at the root of the Tree of the Religion of God.

If anything we are far closer to the period of Arius – someone who explained answers to people that were wrong. See this article on Baha’i Library (half way down the page)

Markers of that period include many diverse, conflicted, misleading understandings of the Religion of God in it’s day – before it’s emancipation. People making up answers to questions that require “getting it” but which are not themselves actually written out and as a result drift even further from the truth. People taking up sections of the Scripture as it was available and ignoring other whole sections….. There is a continued independent search for truth because one needs to keep learning for oneself. But one need not keep doubting. By way of analogy, an axiom may make some things obvious, but there are implications undreamt of.

I would say “once you have found Baha’u’llah your search is over” is as true as “once you have found Baha’u’llah your search has just begun”. It’s like the corner stone of the Temple. Note the corner stone itself was actually unfit for construction. But it was honored never the less and marked the beginning. But aren’t beginnings and endings united? A paradigm shift results. The same questions don’t have as much meaning as they used to and become actually trivial. When the ultraviolet catastrophe was explained by quantum mechanics it became the phenomena basis for photo-electric power generation.

Hi Steven,

Thanks for that link.

It looks very good.

I am very busy in my work right now writing some pretty tricky Java objects that essentially not only make the lady and the tiger dsappear, but the stage, the audience, the city, the continent, and the hemisphere too and then make them re-appear essentially on another planet in space-time metaphorically speaking. So my mental energy is being pretty much used up every day by the time I get home. So it will take me a few days to read those essays. But I will and post back here some thoughts.

I feel you are a young man. The irony here I think is that I was once you. But I have been a Bahai’s for 36 years now. I have seen too much staggering loss that can never be regained, recovered, or put back in any way. The system was a mystery and a cypher. And it still is to me. The depth psychologies involved are immense. Really archetypal and, therfore, of Cosmic proportions.

But I still feel that in the next 300-500 years there still could be a sea change in fortune on this planet as more and more people in all the electorates on Earth (including the Baha’i electorate) understand depth psychology in power seekers, narcissists, passive-aggressive personalities, and obsessive-compulsive personalities before they go into a voting booth or vote in a Baha’i election.

That level of psychological insight will eventually come for every man, woman, and child on this planet. And when it does only highly limited power will be given to very spiritually advanced adepts in life for very short highly fixed periods of time. And people will sense people’s true motives with greater and greater acumen everywhere in the world. I think the Writings of Baha’u'llah clearly foretell this level of development appearing in human beings.

You write:

I would say “once you have found Baha’u’llah your search is over” is as true as “once you have found Baha’u’llah your search has just begun”.

Hummm.

I will have to think about this.

Best regards,

Craig

I’m 44 and been a Baha’i for 20 years. Played some roles in the admin order and outside it. Seen some arguments come and go, and some people to.

To me it’s a matter of the Valleys – back to the question of the right/duty of independent search – Search/Love/Knowledge…. at first questions are all that matter and answers kind of don’t; then *the* answer matters and the questions are meaningless; then questions and answers mutually evolve…. “and enter The Valley of Knowledge and come out of doubt into certitude….” If they now come out of doubt and into certitude they must have had doubts before. Searched but were impatient, loved but felt forgetfulness more than pain….

It’s also described in the Valley of Unity –

“In sum, the differences in objects have now been made plain. Thus when the wayfarer gazeth only upon the place of appearance—that is, when he seeth only the many-colored globes—he beholdeth yellow and red and white; hence it is that conflict hath prevailed among the creatures, and a darksome dust from limited souls hath hid the world. And some do gaze upon the effulgence of the light; and some have drunk of the wine of oneness and these see nothing but the sun itself.

Thus, for that they move on these three differing planes, the understanding and the words of the wayfarers have differed; and hence the sign of conflict doth continually appear on earth. For some there are who dwell upon the plane of oneness and speak of that world, and some inhabit the realms of limitation, and some the grades of self, while others are completely veiled. Thus do the ignorant people of the day, who have no portion of the radiance of Divine Beauty, make certain claims, and in every age and cycle inflict on the people of the sea of oneness what they themselves deserve. “Should God punish men for their perverse doings, He would not leave on earth a moving thing! But to an appointed term doth He respite them….” ”

I see no reason the Baha’i Faith would be exempt from this analysis. We are far form the Most Great Peace when something huge has to change. But we make that group effort with steps forward and back, dealing with where people are at and pushing onward.

Thank you Baquia for posting this link.

Does anyone have the answer to why there requires an AO?

How about where Baha’u'llah wrote something to the effect, “My people shall call themselves Bahai”?

Does anyone know why the actual writings are not published in originals, you know actual photo copies?

BooC, the Baha’i administration was put in place by Baha’u'llah, and refined by Abdu’l-Baha and Shoghi Effendi. It serves a purposes, although not what most Baha’is think it to be.

I’m not sure what you mean by “originals”. Revelation writing was illegible squiggles to all but Baha’u'llah’s amanuensis. And even he couldn’t read it sometimes!

We do have originals written by the Bab’s own hand and Baha’u'llah also (as well as the Master). They are on display in the Archives and in a secure bunker-like archive underground underneath.

In any case, only those who read Arabic and Farsi could read the originals. Is this what you were asking? because I’m not sure.

TY Baquia I really enjoyed the links to the squiggles. I think my quest is to see where it has been interprted by a non-vested party. But is was quite lovely viewing the site.

You are an abundant resource.

Most sincerely