Grover wrote :

« The difficulty in accepting a bet like that is how do you define failure or success and in what context? It seems to me the criteria for success get redefined every few years. Back in the 90′s it was “entry by troops”, now its “a significant advance in the process of entry by troops”.

Grover, entry by troops does not mean troops signing declaration cards and going home. It implies forming “human resources” of devoted servants with skills aimed serving their neighbour, moving from a consumer society to a society of service.

The Institute Process means moving from individual tutoring to classroom teaching. It can be compared to adding to the kitchen gardening, an enterprise of industrial farming. You cannot replace the one by the other, but you estimate the success in the enterprise by counting tractors, barns, bags of seeds, harvesters and grain storage facilities before you can estimate your harvest. We can see the advance of the Institute Process by counting devotionals, children’s classes, study circles, commemorative meetings, volunteers visiting the sick, ailing, isolated or new believers, the number of believers having completed books and those having become facilitators or tutors. We are instating a _structure_ for teaching not the personal teaching work that has to continue at the same time.

Of course during this time, we are distracting people out of the kitchen gardens and the product of kitchen gardening might temporarily decline until the time when the whole structure will become functional and productive.

The statistics are available from year to year and I can find them for you although collecting figures are boring to me. I have enough of them in surveying infections in our hospital so as to reduce infectious complications in the patients we operate.

As a doctor I could also compare this Institute enterprise to social or community medicine as compared to private practice. The one and the other are complementary and both are essential. The Chinese bare-foot doctor’s experience was a significant one. They saved millions of lives building latrines and teaching hygiene to fellow peasants; they were highly commended by the WHO at the Alma Alta conference, but the system at one point went out of control; the bare-foot doctors one day realised that they had saved more lives at grass roots than professors in the universities, although their impact was only visible on large scale statistics on the number of vaccinations accomplished, latrines built, water adduction accomplished or hygiene courses dispensed, and not on spectacular saving of individual lives.

Accusing these « bourgeois » counter-revolutionary doctors of doing luxury medicine in the universities, the apparatchiks actually asked the professors to come and work with them in the fields. Some actually did, but in the end, the bare-foot doctors were led to sitting exams to become doctors or medical assistants and the experience ended in the 1980’s, state structures taking up community medicine and many other countries adopting community and preventive medicine.

The Institute Process is the brightest spiritual production of human minds, unique in religious history, producing rank by rank a spiritual « army of life and light », mobilised by divine love. To me it can only have been divinely inspired. The degree of advancement is in counting the legions being constituted.

[quote comment="50415"]We can see the advance of the Institute Process by counting devotionals, children’s classes, study circles, commemorative meetings, volunteers visiting the sick, ailing, isolated or new believers, the number of believers having completed books and those having become facilitators or tutors.[/quote]

Interesting discussion. Of course success and failure have different definitions for different people. But from looking at the data, things don’t look that great. I do wish there was more to go by than the glowing anecdotes one usually finds through the official Baha’i news channels. But I’ve long gone given up on finding any objectivity there.

[quote comment="50246"]

Carmen wrote:

I am sure that if you and I sat down and had a chat about your experiences and perspectives while we might not agree on many or most points the discussion would probably be very cordial and even warm.

Carmen[/quote]

Carmen, thank you for your very kind and thoughtful post to me on the 13th. I could not reply until now.

I do not want to misrepresent myself as I have stated in other posts here before. In my military service as a 1st Lieutenant from 1969-1971 I was not a combat soldier. I took my chances like everyone else. I was trained for it. But I was very lucky. In my duty assignments I never had to take a human life or send anyone to their death. But I know many other human beings who did. I have tried to help them shoulder their burden. I have written about many of these things in the archives here and in the archives of unenrolled Baha’is. I joined the Baha’i Faith six months after I got out of the service because I thought this beautiful message was the answer. I served it with everything I had for 32 straight years. Now for 4 years I have been stunned. I have had to rethink everything for the reasons I have set out here.

There are many fine people in the Baha’i Faith. I served in it every day for 32 years. Most everyone here on Baquia’s Blog comes across as very fine people. So I agree that we must keep this perspective in all things in spirit. We are all flesh and blood. I wish you well. Your posts are thoughtful and well expressed and your POV is certainly a valid one.

I know I need to take Frank’s advise and tone down. It is good advice. I need to get my Buddhist and Sufi books out and muse on them.

I hope that the Baha’i Faith will eventually be run in a thoughtful and prosperous future by NINE RUMI’S and *NOT* NINE POL POT’S. This is the issue for me as it is for many here. I think the counter balancing effect of the Internet WILL effect the Institutions of the Baha’i Faith just as it is now effecting ALL INSTITUTIONS ON EARTH in every land and every system of thought and consciousness. There will be PLANETARY checks and balances on everyone and everything on Earth through this medium as it’s explosive reach continues to unfold.

We shall see.

Meanwhile, I believe the Spirit of the World Age vortex cannot be held back or stopped by anyone. If the Baha’is cannot do the job, I believe other people will fully arise who will.

http://www.global-commons.org

Again, I thank you for your very kind post to me. I am going to try to take a break from these passions and try to get a better perspective.

Best wishes to everyone.

Have a nice weekend.

Carmen, thank you for your very kind and thoughtful post to me on the 13th. I could not reply until now.

I do not want to misrepresent myself as I have stated in other posts here before. In my military service as a 1st Lieutenant from 1969-1971 I was not a combat soldier. I took my chances like everyone else. I was trained for it. But I was very lucky. In my duty assignments I never had to take a human life or send anyone to their death. But I know many other human beings who did. I have tried to help them shoulder their burden. I have written about many of these things in the archives here and in the archives of unenrolled Baha’is. I joined the Baha’i Faith six months after I got out of the service because I thought this beautiful message was the answer. I served it with everything I had for 32 straight years. Now for 4 years I have been stunned. I have had to rethink everything for the reasons I have set out here.

There are many fine people in the Baha’i Faith. I served in it every day for 32 years. Most everyone here on Baquia’s Blog comes across as very fine people. So I agree that we must keep this perspective in all things in spirit. We are all flesh and blood. I wish you well. Your posts are thoughtful and well expressed and your POV is certainly a valid one.

I know I need to take Frank’s advise and tone down. It is good advice. I need to get my Buddhist and Sufi books out and muse on them.

I hope that the Baha’i Faith will eventually be run in a thoughtful and prosperous future by NINE RUMI’S and *NOT* NINE POL POT’S. This is the issue for me as it is for many here. I think the counter balancing effect of the Internet WILL effect the Institutions of the Baha’i Faith just as it is now effecting ALL INSTITUTIONS ON EARTH in every land and every system of thought and consciousness. There will be PLANETARY checks and balances on everyone and everything on Earth through this medium as it’s explosive reach continues to unfold.

We shall see.

Meanwhile, I believe the Spirit of the World Age vortex cannot be held back or stopped by anyone. If the Baha’is cannot do the job, I believe other people will fully arise who will.

http://www.global-commons.org

Again, I thank you for your very kind post to me. I am going to try to take a break from these passions and try to get a better perspective.

Best wishes to everyone.

Have a nice weekend.[/quote]
[quote comment="49951"]Farhan Wrote:

[quote comment=""]Dear Frank,
Of course it is, and of course we know, but that kingdom of God within us is the reflection of the one brought by Divine Manifestations, when and if we turn to God, and that kingdom of God within us should now come IN EARTH, as it is in the heaven of our ideals, and as the Lord promised.[/quote]

Dear Farhan,

I agree except I believe the Kingdom is here and now; within us here and now. Don’t look for it in the future or in the Holy Land or anywhere else. Look within yourself. In fact it was always within people. We can have heaven — or hell — on earth if we want it. That is the teaching of Buddha and Christ. I’m not so sure about Baha’ullah — I think he got confused toward the end of his life and focused on fear and the future.

Peace (of mind),
Frank[/quote]

If you have in your heart recognized Bahá’u'lláh as the Messenger of God then all is resolved. Every letter is right, every space between. If not then you have an endless critical eye which people are entitled to. People come to the recognition of the Manifestations of God individually deep inside at best. Some are floating more on the surface and feel the outward things mainly. The world and our programming from schooling, the media, military and all forms of superficial ideas invented by a myriad of practitioners is a forest of cognitive dissonance. In the end you choose your ultimate guide and savior of all mankind. No matter how developed I become I am like everyone else, born into this darkness and willing myself to turn or return to the light. That light comes like the sun rising. Otherwise I live in a box of my own construction. No Manifestation of God in the histories I have read came from darkness to the light. They appear amongst mankind in human form and the spiritual sun rises. We learn from others, but how utterly apart are these Beings. Sure we gain by our own personal development. But not one of us is going to individually save this human species over a long period. That is why the movement of an omnipotent Being is growing midst an accumulating global crisis that is unfolding before our eyes 24/7. Who’s the real leader of the world? Who, as Tolstoy pointed out has “the secret”? Rather than going after the details of any one temporal study system or annual statement start at the very Source. The droplets spraying out from the fountainhead, to offer another metaphor, can be distracting. Go directly to the Source and accept or deny. Is this the Wellspring of Guidance or the impostor of all time? 40 years of hardship, exile and imprisonment when totally comfortable alternatives in Russia were at hand indicates something. But we have to forget about it and just seek out the new Messenger from God. I did so at 19 because I knew for sure that God would not leave us alone like this. Are they the Words of God or not? That is the question. If we do not respond as such then anyone is free to turn away. That’s what it’s all about, and all the rest follows. There will be new plans, new phases, new messages from the World Center. Change is going to happen. People are going to be people with imperfections and egos anywhere. And consultation is king. But the core is the Manifestation of God and we all have our private mountain top on which to think about it. The authenticity is at the core because, from moment-to-moment, the intellect wanders and questions. And the heart can be weak.