I saw two promising “mass teaching” projects fail, one in the 80s, one in the 90s. I was involved on the periphery of the biggest bahai mass conversion project in USA, South Carolina in the 70s, and knew a controversial bahai leader that was directly involved.

The failures follow a predictable pattern caused by dysfunctional bahai culture, dysfunctional psychological archetypes, and dysfunctional bahai administration.

SED/Ruhi were attempts to reverse that, but did not work because the “solution” lacked depth, truth and authenticity, and could not match the problem.

Core bahai beliefs are simply not good enough to solve real problems of human behavior and organization.

I also saw one attempt to organize a completely bottom-up grass roots mysticism movement destroyed by bahai administration, and knew people involved in a similar, independent grass roots movement involving some of the ideas in the human potential movement (transformative practice) in the 80s snuffed out by bahai leadership elites who felt threatened by the competition.

What is wrong with bahai is far deeper than growth patterns, and has existed for far longer than Ruhi.

Ruhi does little to address the deep problems, and thus will also ultimately fail.

(ex-bahai, 30+ years)

at one of the Bosch talisman mysticism conferences (late 1990s?) where Terry Culhane talked about the divine feminine, there was also a group of SED practitioners holding meetings about the early implementation of Ruhi. I overheard a conversation between some people that had been very involved in SED work that was “parasitized” to form part of the basis of Ruhi. they were going on and on and on about how the BWC wasn't “really” limiting what kinds of “community building” were “allowed”, Ruhi was just the “preferred” path out of various “diverse” possibilities. These people were obviously the working visionaries doing the dirty work, whose real accomplishments were never recognized by the inept bureaucrats that took all the credit.

The SED practitioners seemed to be resigned to the fact that bahai administration,like all dysfunctional bureaucracies, rarely “does the right thing”, rather, it operates out of a broken incentive system that primarily serves to perpetuate the bureaucracy, rather than actually accomplish the lofty goals used to “sucker in” converts.

I can't confirm it on a factual basis, but there is a long pattern of bureaucratic reinvention in bahai administration that strongly predicts it.

What that means is that one unreasonable top-down plan is born, is hyped, eventually is noticed to have accomplishes little, is “deemphasized” (along with huge lies/distortions about the extent of accomplishments), then another plan is announced, and the cycle continues.

There is little or no “real” accountability, or soul-searching, as to why the bureaucrats accomplish little or nothing with their plans (or other forms of top-down groupthink).

Jurgen Habermas (postmodern philosopher) refers to this as “colonization of lifeworld by systems”. Bureaucracy = systems.

Colonization of course is not “spiritual” in the usual sense because it violates ethical frameworks in the modern world that prohibit exclusion, oppression, enslavement, etc. (where such prohibition enacts enlightenment, compassion and altruism at a new “level” of social evolution).

Ultimately the pattern of bureaucratic lies deepens and turns to disillusion, and then the people that dare to state the truth are attacked for being “non-conformists”, or “dissidents”, or “critics”. (they become scapegoats in a “shadow dance” of psychological projection/transference.)

Eventually the whole mess becomes deeply dehumanizing, which of course doesn't phase the true bureaucrat-to-the-bitter-end (who most likely has sociopathic tendencies) in the least.

The need to “convert” people plays a specific role by perpetuating the myth that something is being accomplished (transformation).

There is a vast absence of “authenticity” to the phenomena, it is psychologically and spiritually “empty” (devoid of the usual, natural human tenency to self-organize in small groups to create “meaning”).

As Bernie Neville (Latrobe Univ.) says, Hermes was both the god of transformation, and the god of lies and deception.

Its ironic that the greek “pagan” philosophers 3,000 years ago could so clearly see things about human nature that “infallible” bahai bureaucrats can not see now.

adios muchacho!