Whenever I ask in my prayers for someone to teach the Faith to that day, I always find opportunities. However, I no longer try to go through the process of trying to guide them into the Faith because there is not the infrastructure to receive new believers or the understanding needed to nurture someone into full participation. I am tired of seeing new Baha’is with open arms and lights in their eyes enthusiastically jump up, wanting to DO something positive and supportive, only to see it gradually fade and die when exposed to business-as-usual community life. Every person who becomes a Baha’i has a period where they explore their relationship to a community, where they fit and then make a determination about how they will act and what they will do. If they don’t fit into the community they leave. And plenty of people are leaving.

I just want to explore my relationship with the Beloved now. I have worked to my utmost to build community and raise my child to be a Baha’i. I don’t think I did such a good job but I tried, given my circumstances. i am not concerned very much anymore with whether the Baha’i community grows or not.

I am very clear that I no longer want to participate in any administrative consultation of any kind unless I see there is genuine openness and love. I am tired of never knowing what comes of any of it. i never know if a problem or project is being considered or what comes out of any consultative process. I do think that the administration should heed the Writings that talk about engendering the trust and support of the members of their community. As far as I am concerned they don’t because they think they have ever right to be autonomous and that their word has the final say. So they just don’t even think about going back to anyone in their community to let them know that things are being worked on.

Consultation at Feast is a joke. Were I to ask the LSA how a certain problem was being addressed I would just be told I am overstepping the bounds of the LSA confidentiality. I am tired of LSAs and the NSA expecting me to devote my entire life to making communities grow and develop without accountability from their end, interactive support and the loving nourishment of encouragement with a sense of truly being heard.

So this Convention, though I am helping with the program, I am not going to be present for the consultation portion unless it has a pure, loving and open atmosphere and I know that what people say there is really being heard. I am ready for a change. If I can’t find my place and good guidance in the Bah’ai community outwardly, I will learn to trust and act on my own interior truth that tells me when things are spiritually right and when they are off. God knows my longing.

Chris Bauman

1st if your worried about spelling, just compose your comment in Word then select all, then copy, then come back here and paste your comment in the block, OK

Next, a letters and communication in the faith will always sound rosey.
I’ve been a Baha’i for 40 years, noting changed there.
Teaching is your obligation and right, do it your way (read the 2nd hidden word arabic)

Enjoy the faith of Baha’u'llah, your enjoyment doesn’t depend on anyone but you, but it’s nice when you can share.

The faith is going through a tough time now but again it’s the administative Order not the people.
They’re repeting the mistakes all the other religions have made.

Your faily safe at this blog, so express yourself and screan if need be.

With Hope for a time past and a time to come

Fritz Gormann

I am a very successful Bah’ai teacher. I have brought people in and sometimes I have watched them go out. Sometimes my spiitual children have been my teachers and supporters when I real;y needed it So I am very grateful. In the past couple of years that has been all that has kept me going. Recently I just found a group I feel inspired and soulful in besides my very small community of 5 people who I love and sing with. Sadly I am waiting for turn in the current climate so I can resume my love for the mystical magic that happens when the souls transfomr into Bah’ais. I have never recieved much support for it. I I definately have not recieved acknowledgement or real help for a very long long time. I didn’t mind as long as I had hope that the force of teaching could overcome the forces of fear. In fact I can say that the incredible pressure to stop teaching came from my own community because they didn’t understand how to do it themselves. It made them uncomfortable to have someone so dedicated. i am not sure what to do. I am vey very sad about it.

I don’t want to quit being a Baha’i. I have been a Baha’i 34 years. When I have been active and teaching as I have in at least 20 different commuinties in many counties there is an incredible spiritual power that accompanies me. it is amazing. The other side has let me know in no uncertain terms that I should do that. The spiritual force is amazing.

I cannot understand the current trends, how to work in the administration to bring people in and why it even has to be organized this way. I do not understand the overemphasis on LSA autonomy. Without the balance of some tranparency in decisions where the LSA communicates back to the individuals and or the community the community members, especially those involved in a particular problem, never know the ourcome or whether a situation has been addressed. So it is with the NSA over these last many yeas. The NSA and the LSA members ae volunteers who take time out to serve. They do have the Faith’s best interests at heart but ae clueless about empowering individuals under their ranks. I could tell you stories about my own personal diffculites. However I recognize that they are trying thei hardest to fifue it out.

We live in a society that is very very very fast paced and media driven. It is all about the person and getting what they want. IT is cynical and time and task oriented. How can the Bah’ais swim up stream in this huge river? You can’t. so many Baha’i have now created a hybid Ameican-Baha’i culture that is gross, course and without a spirit context. I say this with experience of being a BAh’ai communiities that are heart centered.

I did serve on a LSA that was very successful. They dissolved committees, told people to come to them with any teaching project and they would support it no matter how much it cost or how our there it was as long as it didn’t create a bad name in the community. WE were so united that the solution to a problem came to us all at once without one of us suggesting it. We just all knew. All of this is really about letting God speak through us, giving us a taste of the Divine elixir that ocmes from letting go into the huge force of God. Sadly, I have not had that experience again. It is because the lSA saw itself as the servant of the community and supporter of teachers in a way that LSA are not being taught to do now. They are afraid of dissidence and rebelliion and do not know how to yield to the Spirit moving through their members. There is a HUGE seperation between LSAs, Auxillary Boards and members of the community who are now drifting away in droves.

I do think Ruhi is good because part of the problem I see is a void in leadership. We make it what it is. Who the tutor is makes a huge difference because if it is just about sitting and doing boring readings vs. making a living breathing reality of love and transformation out of it. Love is the key, creative endeavor the vehicle and the Word the rocket fuel.

Unless Ruhit rully makes people realize that they are living a hybid existence of American materialism/Baha’i mechanistic culture combo, there will be very little change in action. I still have hope that when our AMerican culture hits bottom whichit will, there will be a dramatic change in the Bah’ai culture also. I will probably be gone by then.

Sorry about the typing mistakes. Chris

I can not even imagine what soldiers go through as a consequence of their military involvement and the loss of human life. I know only of some reports from people who have had NDEs that were soldiers and had killed people that they experience the emotional consequence of the pain and suffering and disappointment of the ones they killed and of all those who were close to them. I have only one friend who has been a combat soldier and he suffers even today 40 years later.

What you say about the systems of Divination are true, but I feel that they must be rediscovered in the language of this present age of science. They are obviously the remnants of a very old and mostly forgotten science. True science places the data it produces in a cosmic perspective. Our current level of science is fragmented in its underlying paradigms, each branch having its own cosmology as it were. When science acheieves a unity of paradigm and adjusts the theories in each branch to be coherent with this universal paradigm then we will truly see something to behold.

Please do not dispair over the current state of affairs as you perceive it in our beloved Faith. The battle of ideas is far from over and for the time being consolidation of the growth process is necessary as it is in any organic entity. Just keep you mystic powder dry for as you say “the cycles they do return”.

It would be nice if those Bahais who are of a mystical inclination had a place to meet online or elsewhere, maybe like the Blackmens gathering, and discuss their Faith in the context of their mystical frameworks. I havent seen anything like that anywhere have you?

Thank you for your very thoughtful post. I apologize for not being able to reply until now. Your reference to Dane Rudyar is quite timely. As anyone will tell you who is skilled in those arts (and I know many Baha’is from the great spiritual searches of the 1960’s and 1970’s who still very quietly are) , there is a sea change coming starting in 2008. A lot of currently “in vogue” spiritual archetypes are going to take the fall big time across the entire world. It is coming across the entire world.

It will certainly effect the present version of the Baha’i Faith in
the same tide as it will everything else. A person could make a very good case based on these insights that a lot of people currently calling the shots at the top of many of the systems on Earth corrupted by gamed electoral processes over the last 20 years are all going to have to be buried in un-marked graves. The wrath of the rank and file in many systems of the world will come as more and more people become aware of the true extent they have been betrayed by their leaderships.

Although many of the current “Baha’is” might say otherwise, the Baha’i Writings do very solidly support the deeper implications of the esoteric arts we are discussing here under the surface. The Universe IS a system of Divine Geometry where planes of the vast and limitless Cosmos interact. Star clocks and systems of esoteric insight are very useful in discerning the spiritual weather. There is really nothing new under the Sun. We have been here before as passengers in the huge spiritual vortexes of World Ages.

The 1982 film “The Dark Crystal” will start to kick in big time in 2008. Too bad the leadership of the Baha’i Faith of the last 25 years did not do their home work starting back then to prepare for the Day of Reckoning. It is not going to be pretty. And, yes, with the US NSA Ridvan 2007 Convention Report IT HAS ALREADY STARTED right on time! Didn’t someone once say “The Universe is a system of perfect justice did ye but know” or something to that extent?

I do not really despair. I am just tired. I am getting old. I just
had hoped to experience something far better in life before I die than the dreary amateur hour production that the Baha’i
Administrative Order turned out to be. I had hoped for a class of more spiritually enlightened people to emerge at some point. I now see the current impasse as the Will of God. It was a fetus that did not form properly and it has not attracted enough life force to go to term, take a breath, and be born. But the life that was supposed to become manifest WILL be born into the Universe somewhere else. To me, this is the essential theme of this New World Age - the human race is going to experience the incredible birthing power of the
Cosmos. Baha’u'llah was a true original Gnostic thinker and He
conveyed this message brilliantly. That system of mystical insight is now forbidden amid the people that are called by His name in their tiny micro-managed work-book Faith. So it will go to others. The Greater Covenant continues to move at light speed. Witness the incredible power of the science and technology of the Internet. Wonder of wonders. The Intel x86 instruction set is at least one of the true Holy Writs of the New World Age. When it seems nobody else on the planet these days is doing their job to advance the energies Baha’u'llah opened the creative scientists and design engineers are.

As to my military service as a 1st Lieutenant from 1969-1971 I did not have to take a life or send anyone to their death. In this I was very fortunate in the fortunes of war. But I know many who did. And it is a burden in their dark nights of the soul for many almost forty years later. The psychological and devastating spiritual carnage of Iraq will be with us for a long time to come. The Baha’is, of course, in their top down micro managed completely inward cult bubble will address nothing of this in the real world and will, once again, miss
an opportunity to truly help other human souls with the Message. But I will be involved. That is my place. I wish my religion would have lived up to it’s mission, but it didn’t. It turned inward and moribund. The means to an end became the end in itself. The same old, same old in human spiritual history.

The Baha’i Faith is now a kind of spiritual communism that if you read books and have knowledge of many different ideas from history and bring anything up other than the party line you will be singled out as the ENEMY OF GOD! If you can think for yourself and initiate your own creative teaching projects you will be branded a traitor to the system and eventually tarred as “weak in the Covenant” and marched out into the jungle to start over at YEAR ZERO. But the unforeseen spectacular rise of the Internet is going to change all this starting in the events of 2008 as the hands turn on the star
clocks and other planes of the human soul kick in across the world.

Any religion taught the way the current version of the Baha’i Faith is or any system of thought in the individual empowering New World Age will eventually have the same fate as communism as an ideology. You take all creative thought out of the rank and file of the Baha’i Faith worldwide and you will create failed forced spiritual collective farms and eventually a moribund energy draining spiritual gulag. And that is exactly what is happening. Again, the same old, same old in human history. The means to an end became the end itself.

But there is a sea change coming starting in 2008. And it is not
going to be pretty.

Thanks for your post. It had many good insights. I still feel,
however, that war is NOT God’s work. The price is too great as a path to enlightenment. It is not necessary if every person on Earth just took personal responsibility for the fate of each other’s sons and daughters.

However with respect to your comments about the change in direction of things within the Faith it seems to be a pattern that is also extant in the general society worldwide with many religious movements experiencing a shift to the conservative and fundamentalist ideologies with those types of mentalities becoming prominent. This as you know is evident all over the world and this polarization and idealisation of the past among competing religious and political groups is the cause of most of the current conflicts that we are becoming embroiled in as an increasingly interconnected world community.

This desperate alignment with fanatical conservatism among seemingly all the nations was most distressing to me until I read something that made it all sensible. It was some comments of Dane Rudyar written some years ago predicting that these cycles would occur, but pass into something more comfortable after about 20 years.

The good news is that we are almost through it. In many countries the conservative ideologies that have been perpetrated on the masses of people by whatever expedient means available are running out of steam and being shown for their moribund nature. In their place are emerging more responsive and realistic leadership groups that are favorable to progressive ideals and responsible stewardship. This is evident in the US policital scene with the imminent demise of the white elephant party on the immediate horizon. Also the broad shift in Latin America away from policies of macro economics and centralized control to more community centered programs and policies is already well underway. I think this will occur also in the administration of our faith as the old generation currently in positions of leadership fades away and is replaced by new fresh faces who are fully infused with the spirit of this new cycle of life expression. I see signs of this thaw already as in the letter from the US NSA reporting on the ineffectiveness of certain aspects of the current program.

The theme of your generation, according to what I had read is freedom, the theme of your parents, the WWII generation, was the projection of new power structures, and the theme of the current generation X is conformity.

My counsel to you friend is to have patience and to not be perturbed by the “changes and chances of the world” even when they occur within your own faith. It may seem like all is lost, but as you so insightfully point out the Greater Covenant is intact and every knows that the lesser covenant is but its shadow. We can take comfort in that observation of Max Planck “Science progresses funeral by funeral.” So too I think does every other theatre of human endevour.

With respect to the idea that war is Gods work I think it bears out with some historical proof. It seems that large social forces and movements often contend and destroy each other and what remains is the plunder for the survivors. This was certainly true with the conflict with Nazism and communism, the demise of the former in conflict with the latter setting the stage for the demise of the latter in contention with Capitalism which in turn set the stage, through Reagans support of the Taliban, for the conflict with Islam which is now playing out. Always the pendulem swings back and forth until all the polarties are resolved. So in this manner I think that war is Gods work of leveling the unbalanced societies into peaceful and constructive ones. None of the militaristic regimes survive very long anyway as history bears out, particulalry in the modern world.

None of this is meant in anyway to diminish the experience that you have had with war which must have been absolutely terrifying.

Again, thank you for your reply. I am 60 years old (but people say I look 45 when I am in a thin cycle. Right now I am definitely not in a thin cycle!) But my genes are holding up pretty good.

I have been a Baha’i for 36 years. I declared in 1971 after getting books in London and reading them in Paris. I was studying Sufism at the time after I survived being in the Armed Forces of the United States. I saw no hope for the human race. I was once in the chain of command of nuclear weapons and it scared the living s**t out of me. These weapons are fearsome. If you lived through the Cuban Missle Crisis in those days you see the world completely different then people who did not experience that time. Especially if you ever actually served in the military. You know this could all be gone by 12 Noon tomorrow on any given day. That stays with you your entire life. I perceive you are young. I suggest renting the fine film “13 Days” to know what that event was like. When I read the Kitab-I-Iqan in 1971 I was completely astounded. I thought this was a profound mystical Sufi path for practical and effective living. I joined the Faith within two months and was very devoted.

I served in many steadfast capacities in the Baha’i Faith over these many long decades and years. DTC Secretary, NTR Rep, Assembly Trainer, External Public Affairs Rep. Special Projects Person. I did many special projects for the nearest LSA over the decades. The last one was in 2000 for the local major billboard project. I produced the design and placed them for the greater community. Shortly thereafter I got very upset when I read Glenford Mitchells speech
after 9/11 about war being “God’s work”. I am a fair person. I never said a thing about the Ruhi courses one way or another until I took Ruhi Book One myself. Over six weeks it was one of the worst spiritual experiences of my entire life. Just terrible. If I had to do all of them I would have to go on medication. Just an atrocity of the free human spirit.

I would never bring a human being created in the image and likeness of God into this now fundamentalist cult group think. In my life I knew many people who lived under Nazi Germany from when I lived in Europe. I will never be part of anything that requires people to turn their souls over to an organization. I believe in individual conscience. I thought Abdu’l-Baha did too. This is no longer the religion I joined in 1971 and faithfully served all these years.

If I was now a current member of the Universal House of Justice or the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of the United States I would look at my life, put a loaded gun to my head, and pull the trigger. Some heavy duty Divne Judgement awaits these people on the other side. How much has been lost in the Baha’i Faith is now completely incalcuable.

I hope this answered your question.

I do wish you well on your life’s path. I hope you have a prosperous and effective life.

In my opinion, the Lessor Covenant has utterly failed. But the Greater Covenant has attracted a better class of brighter people and will definitely prevail in the long run. Despite the present situation, I remain hopeful. Just look at the incredible beauty of the mathematics in those links.

And, yes, don’t even get me started on Peter Khan.

I will be interested to read your further comments on the relationship s between modern physics and the Bahai Revelation.

If you dont mind a personal question in response to your emphatic comments about certain aspects of the Bahai society in general and Ruhi in particular. Have you come to these feelings and opinions and feelings from your own experience or from what you have heard and read of others experiences?

It will indeed be an interesting time when the particulars of religious administration coincide with the principles of physics. Perhaps it would a question to put to Dr. Khan?

Thank you for your thoughtful post.

Before I continue on with the very slow analysis over time in installments on BR of what has happened in the Baha’i Faith in terms of C.G. Jung’s writings that say that all schisms in history are caused by the conflict between the mental orientations of introverts and extroverts, I wish to mention a few other things. There will be plenty of time to go over this conflict in this instance very slowly. The Baha’i Faith is going to be in free fall for a very long time to come. The only thing absolutely certain in all this is that no one at any level will deal with anything ever. Period.

The bottom line right now is that you have an organization of incredibly life time “introverted” people trying to be paint-by-numbers “manufactured extroverts” in a huge psychological projection from the bubble introverts at the top. These are people so introverted that they can only relate to other human beings through a
completely “psychologically safe” and “non-threatening” top down mico managed organizational structure. That is the ultimate psychological stop before institutional melt down and total dysfunctional oblivion.

If it wasn’t so painful to watch and the consequences so catastrophic for the future relief of the suffering of the world and so dishonorable to the sacrifice and lifelong hopes of so many long serving Baha’is for generations it would be almost comical. The Baha’i Faith with the current Ruhi Double Down at Vegas Gambit and Hyper Core Activities Olympian Treadmill is trying to make incredibly introverted people into socially gregarious live on stage spandex clad massively
talented rock guitarists by psychologically controlled fill in the blanks manufactured social bonding.

We are basically now after ten years of mind numbing psychological cognitive dissonance at the Sorority Sisters Party scene in “Revenge of the Nerds”. There are going to more and more interventions by the Dean to get everyone to interact at the punch bowl. But this dog ain’t going to hunt. Why? Because contrary to what anyone says, it not spiritual at all. It is not of the spiritual processes of the Cosmos at all. I feel it is one of the most materialistic ways ever devised
by anyone short of the Jehovah’s Witnesses to try to convey a spiritual message.

No “system of organization” teaches the Word of God. The Spirit of God does. Period. The Spirit of God can be amplified by artists, deep thinkers, idiot savants, innocent children, and in everyone’s free form dreams at night in bed. But it can’t by professional accountants and Power Point addicts.

Here is an example:

Baha’u'llah wrote in the Lawh-i-Hikmat:

“That which hath been in existence had existed before, but not in the form thou seest today. The world of existence came into being through the heat generated from the interaction between the active force and that which is its recipient. These two are the same, yet they are different.”

Baha’u'llah was the first human soul to go through the Cosmic Portal to the New World Age of human power and capacity. That is what the Manifestation is in every World Age from cycle to cycle. He is the vortex first born person. He is the first human personality to see the new astonishing vista that is going to then be opened up to everyone in the unfolding of the New World Age Cycle. The Old Testament story of the Exodus is the esoteric encoded Inner Spiritual Laws of the Exodus into a New Promised Land of a New World Age. The Manifestation is something that occurs in nature. The Manifestation may not actually be the best pure writer, thinker, and film director in human terms in all that follows the event. But everyone else who is comes from His burst of opening. He opens the channel.

Since this is a religion whose name means “Light” I think it would greatly behoove the people supposedly leading it to start to study the principles of light in the Universe for insight as we learn about them.

To my mind the Manifestation is the Higgs Boson as a Human Temple of a New World Age to the human soul. His evelatory consciousness and the resulting thoughts (not his mere physical person) from the Pristine Cosmic Source of the Uncreated are the clustering mass givers to each of us as elementary points in the overall mind of mankind. His received consciousness becomes the massive scalar elementary particle for that Cycle of Space-Time on the human evolutionary consciousness thought plane. Baha’u'llah’s Writings as a Sufi Mystic are going to hold up very well with what pure science discovers. The next two years will be intense study of the reverse of E=mc2. It is now about energy creating a new particle via Mc2=E in the LHC experiments at CERN.

Since I believe the Higgs Boson is going to be found this year or next as the LHC (Large Hydron Collider) is turned on at CERN, it might behoove the powers that be at the top of the Baha’i Faith to actually start to consult the PAGES OF THE BOOK OF THE UNIVERSE for practical cosmic guidance rather then the latest “educational theories” from the grim and somber breathless think tank lifetime employment apparatchiks at the International Teaching Center inside that now grid locked “Inner Theorist Beltway” that we all helped pay for. Every other spiritual movement out there will be doing this and running with it for improving everyday life.

I also believe the Higgs Boson is going to be found to have a dual nature in seemingly different functions at the extreme micro and extreme macro levels of the Universe as Baha’u'llah seems to allude to here in this statement.

So everyone can start here with these below links. Start to work on understanding the Schrödinger equation because that will tell you exactly how to teach the Baha’i Faith (or even better still and more accurately in importance teach the New World Age) across the planet via spiritual means. Start thinking about Schrödinger’s cat instead of taking a Ruhi Book five times over and over with the exact same people with no new seekers as people have been reported to have done. (The ultimate introvert paradise - totally inward going nowhere Ruhi cycles on the same book repeated over and over forever!)

Rather then “building dams”, I feel it would be much more instructive for the powers that be to understand HOW the actual matter of the concrete of the dam exists in the Time-Space continuum.

This is eveyone’s homework assignment on BR before we move on to discussing C.G. Jung’s analysis of the psychological conflict between Tertullian and Origen in the Early Church in terms of introverts and extroverts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mechanics

Schroedinger Equation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger_equation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger_equation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat

BTW SF, there is not necessarily a clean correspondence between
exoteric (outward form meaning) religion and esoteric (inner concealed meaning) religion and “extroversion” and “introversion” as psychological type.

Massive introverts in their grievously fearful social mal adjustment misuse BOTH as they do everything in their micro managed lemming like rush to introvert lowest common denominator psychological bubble hell.

Next time we go to the well of particle physics from time to time in the discussion we are going to discuss the famous “slit experiment”. That really will tell you how the Universe works in teaching anything.

The plus side is that everyone else on Earth is running with Baha’u'llah’s free and unfettered energizing Revelation in every walk of life except the community that claims to be His followers. Go figure?

So the question is no longer what is the “wave state” of the Lessor Covenant where the cat may very well be dead but what is the “wave state” of the Greater Covenant where the cat may very well be alive and doing great. Even purring.

Enquiring minds just might want to know!

Best regards,

Craig