Gdday All.
Well I attend the conference the other weekend and as I predicted… I was sorely tempted to walk up to Counseller Hall ( whom I have spoken to a couple of times over the years … mainly when he was NSA sec) and hand him my Baha’i ID card…. to put it bluntly , I will not be told how to think , what to think and when to think it…. i am sorry to say that the apparrent purpose of the 41 conferences are/is little more then one gaint cattle prod to the rump of the Baha’i community at large(imho)…… I am totally amazed by the thought process of Baha’is that I know to be ussually thoughtfull Baha’is , there is a “group think’ going on in the Baha’i Community at large ( at least it appears that way to me).
If you dont think and behave in the Ruhi mindset then your disobediant and unspiritual…..

Cheers.
greg

Thanks for your report greg. As I have said here many times, after decades in the Faith serving on many levls and capacities I was completely shattered emotionally when I took Ruhi Book One back in early 2004. It really threw me. I just could not believe people I had known and liked for many years accepted this utter mind bending rubbish and methodologies as a credible system of thought of any kind! It was shocking and it was a frightening revelation. My once beloved unique individual qualia (Google it) Spirit led bottom up Faith was now firmly on the road to Zombie driven top down totalitarian mind control group-think. I see no other outcome than this all ending in spectacular failure just as all the top down systems that took this road before it. How could such a thing happen? How could this radical new narrative of the Baha'i Faith happen?

Lately I was reading about the work of Laurie Santos (the "Monkey Whisperer" ) in a study of economics among our primate brethren. I think something of this mechanism is at work in the new psychological transactions at work in the machinery of the Faith.

http://discovermagazine.com/2008/nov/13-the-monke…

Have the monkeys surprised you in any other ways?

"We did a similar study in a risky context, where both experimen­ters start out offering three pieces of something. The first experimenter appears to offer three items but each time ultimately gives the monkey two, so the monkey gets a loss, but it’s a safe, consistent loss. The second experimenter starts out offering three but introduces more risk: Sometimes the monkey gets all three, but sometimes it gets only one. We find that the monkeys prefer to go with the second experimenter. They prefer to risk losing more because there is also a chance they will have no loss at all. That is just what humans do."

I think people are bartering for some kind of phantom psychological safety gain in this transaction. They want security. But anyone who has seen much more in life knows that this is fraudulent illusion. As an organization the Baha'i Faith cannot deliver on it's promises. It never has. That does not cause me any grief. The Baha'i Faith as an organization has always been an utter failure from Day One. The sorry record speaks for itself. But when the ability of the Baha'i Writings to inspire individual spiritual progress and individual spiritual action in the many spheres of life beyond trying to convert other people to be Zombies for God too becomes extinguished then i truly grieve. This is what has happened. people have sold their birthright for porridge as the story goes in the Bible. Monkeys cry out for bread (three pieces of apple) and are cheated and given none by the organization controllers. The same old, same old in the history of the Abrahamic religions.